‘Ha!’ Ellie says, and gives a sort of shoulders-in shudder. ‘Supposed to be a private party at the house for the rellies but I’m going to absent myself; bound to turn into a giant piss-up for Don and the boys and I’ve had enough of those.’ She looks round as we approach Ferg, who’s talking to a girl I half recognise. ‘Might come back here,’ she says. ‘Could even have a drink; leave the car.
‘That might depend on the life expectancy of the “free” component of the phrase “free bar”.’
‘I asked five minutes ago; barely over the halfway point.’
‘Blimey. I can tell Ferg to slow down.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Really, only halfway?’
‘Less than six hundred. People never drink as much as they think they do at these things, even at the Mearnside’s prices. Though Don gets a discount, naturally.’
‘Give it time. Hey, Ferg.’ I hand him his pint; Ellie presents his whisky.
‘Thank you, Stewart. And Ellie. Well, gosh, this is like old times.’
‘And how are you, Ferg?’ Ellie asks.
‘Oh, radiant. You know Alicia?’ Ferg indicates the girl he’s been talking to, a compact lass with a rather round face but fabulous long wavy red hair. Alicia is the daughter of one of the town councillors in attendance. I think Ferg is trying to flirt with her, but he’s just coming across as smarmy.
‘Don’t you have a hair appointment later?’ I ask him.
Ferg looks confused in what I decide is an insolent, What-are-you-talking-about-you-idiot? way, so I choose not to pursue the point. There’s some very so-whattish chat for a couple of minutes, then Ellie says she better be going; a mum to drop at the house.
‘You be here later?’ she says as she passes.
‘Yup.’
I watch for them going and it’s a good ten minutes before she and Mrs M make it to the doors and out, delayed by people wanting to say thanks for the do and how sorry they are.
A couple of minutes after that, as more people come to join us and the talk gets a little louder, I leave my half-finished pint on the window ledge and announce to no one in particular that I’m off for a pee.
There’s something I want to do before I get too pissed. And before Ellie gets back, though my reasons for feeling that way are opaque even to me.
Having already established that the lifts no longer ascend as far as the fifth floor, I take what might look like an honest-mistake-stylee wrong turn out of the loos, check the corridor for emptiness — it is satisfactorily full of it — then barge through double doors and, chortling at my own cleverness, head smartly up a service stairwell to the fifth floor.
Where I encounter a set of locked doors. Extraordinarily, even purposeful shaking doesn’t open them.
I go down to the fourth floor and the main stairs, prepared to be as brazen as you like regarding the dispensation of nods, hellos and so ons, but there’s nobody to be seen. More locked doors at the fifth; the lack of lit stairwell above the fourth floor might well have been a sign.
I head back downstairs a second time, mooch inconspicuously all the way along to the furthest service stairwell, ascend that, only to find more locked doors, then go down to the fourth floor — again; we’re becoming old friends, this fourth-floor corridor and me — take the exterior fire exit (bright outside, sea breeze; air’s bracing) and head up the fire escape towards the fifth, only to be stopped by the locked grille of a door halfway up. I look round, as though appealing to the white scraps that are circling gulls and the wispy remains of clouds.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ I mutter.
I button up my jacket and jump nimbly onto the hand railing, trusting to my childhood superpowers of Having a Head for Heights and Being Quite Good at Climbing.
I ignore the twenty-metre drop to the concrete at the back of the hotel, checking only to make sure there isn’t anybody looking. There isn’t; in the winter you’d be hung out to dry up here, easily visible by anyone watching from the exclusive new development of villas and timeshares that is Mearnside Heights, but, as it’s barely autumn, the gently rustling mass of foliage on the trees, spreading across the slope above the hotel — and Spa, shields me from any prying gaze. Oh, look; there’s the new Spa wing. Uh-huh. Undistinguished, frankly.
I swing round the obstructing wing of metalwork and jump neatly onto the little landing beyond. I shake my head at the lock securing the door. Is it even legal to lock a fire escape, no matter that the floor it serves is never occupied? What if people need to get to the roof? Anyway.
Still no entry to be gained from the exterior fire-escape doors at the end of the fifth-floor corridor. Well, pooh-ee to that.
