HOTEL QUARANTINE

CHAPTER ONE

Douglas looked around the room for something heavy enough to smash through the window. It contained the usual bland hotel furniture you’d expect from a Holiday Inn Express on the outskirts of Heathrow Airport.

The single blonde wood chair under the desk wouldn’t break through double glazed windows. It wasn’t made for that. It was made for sitting in while leafing through the hotel literature, none of which had been relevant to Douglas’s stay under quarantine regulations. What time the gym opened, how to call a taxi, when breakfast and dinner were served.

Douglas’s stomach rumbled again for the umpteenth time. The last thing he’d eaten was a cheese and tomato sandwich and a packet of crisps from the paper bag left outside the door by the security guard. That had been two days ago.

Since then, the hotel had been shrouded in silence. It hadn’t exactly been a hive of activity before, but the twice daily knocks at the door with his meals, and the one hour of exercise in the courtyard each day, had provided some form of routine. There was no explanation for what had happened, but something was seriously wrong. No answer from reception on the landline and the signal on his mobile phone was stone dead. The Wi-Fi wasn’t working and the television wouldn’t switch on at all. Douglas could only speculate as to whether the hotel’s systems had shut down or there was a national news blackout. Either way, he had to get out of this room or he would die of starvation.

The bedside table, also made of wood. Douglas tried moving it to test its weight, letting go when he felt how light it was. It was a modern, cheap version of the one he had at home on Mallorca. The one he so often leaned over to switch on the bedside light at five am, trying not to wake Pilar. She was probably still trying to call him, especially as Douglas had not taken any of her calls since he had landed at Heathrow, and deleted all her messages without reading them. He had left Mallorca in such a hurry that he wasn’t even sure if Spain had gone into full lockdown yet like Britain. Even if he hadn’t been repatriated, he would have left anyway, after that horrible incident with Pilar.

Could the Corby Trouser Press be ripped from the wall and used to break the window? Douglas remembered the last time he had needed to worry about pressing his trousers, the day of his court martial thirty years ago. Since then, he had kept up the appearance of a retired army officer, purely because he didn’t know any other way to dress. He certainly wasn’t worried about his creases today, and the trouser press didn’t look sturdy enough to smash a window. This was also true of the ironing board, though the iron itself was a potential missile. He picked it up and looked at the window, trying to imagine it shattering the glass, but pictured the thing bouncing back and hitting him in the face. Douglas placed the iron back in the wardrobe.

This left the desk, which was too large for him to throw with any force. The television set, that rock singer’s favourite for smashing out of windows, might have worked if it had been one of those bulkier earlier sets, but Douglas couldn’t imagine Keith Moon making much of a statement with this flat-screen plasma affair. Besides, it was bolted to its hinge in the wall.

Then he spotted the minibar. Douglas had not touched a drop of alcohol since his army days. Drinking only brought back as many bad memories as the nightmares. He had not even looked inside the little fridge, fitted inside a wooden casing, during the whole seven days he’d been cooped up in the room. Now Douglas flipped open the wooden door, letting the miniature bottles of wine, whisky and vodka topple to the floor. Once unplugged, the whole unit slid easily out of its casing. It was compact, square and solid and was probably his best shot at smashing the window.

The window was large with a single pane of glass. Douglas was on the ground floor, his room overlooking a bed of flowers bordering the courtyard where they had been taken out for exercise each day. He had seen the six other guests only once, in the minivan from the airport after they had all been processed for admission into the quarantine hotel. Douglas didn’t know their names or anything about them, except one. He had spent an hour watching them all check into the hotel, barely able to hear them speak behind their blue face masks.

There was a middle-aged mother and two teenage children, an Oriental woman of about forty years, a young white woman wearing lots of make up and a pink tracksuit with more luggage than anyone else. And of course Rupert. The camouflage-pattern trousers he had worn on the flight were clearly calculated to annoy Douglas, and they had.

Douglas, with his vantage point on the ground floor, had watched the guests all take their exercise in the courtyard each day, learning very little about them. All except Rupert walked slowly around the courtyard under the watchful eyes of the security guard for the allocated hour. Rupert, predictably, pranced about the courtyard with what looked like made-up tai chi moves, for no other reason than to wind up the security guard. Stupid idiot. After exactly an hour each guest had been escorted back to their room. Douglas didn’t even know which floor any of them was on, or whether he was the only guest on the ground floor.

He weighed the minibar in his hands, trying to calculate whether it would smash through the window. He listened carefully to the silence, considering the consequences if he had got this whole thing wrong. There was still the chance of a knock at the door, a flustered security guard in a face mask apologising for the delay in bringing Douglas his meal bag. How embarrassing it would be, and costly, if he found Douglas standing in front of a shattered window, the minibar lying in the bushes.

The sound of muffled footsteps came from above the ceiling. Another guest or guests pacing about like Douglas, frustrated at being abandoned by the staff and beginning to panic at the lack of food. He wondered whether they, or any of the other five, had considered taking such drastic action as Douglas. But breaking out of a first-floor room was far riskier than from the ground floor. He might be the only one who had this advantage. But Douglas, as a 65-year-old man with a dodgy knee and a weak heart seemed the most unlikely candidate. He may have led battalions of men into battle and survived enemy gunfire, but that had been over 30 years ago. Until the mission that had put a lid on his reputation. The one that had stolen his right to wear his Royal Engineers tie, now handling limply in the wardrobe as a reminder.

Douglas took one more look at that tie and hoisted the minibar on to the bed with renewed energy. He stood in front of the window, hearing the more impatient footsteps on the floor above. The only thing that mattered now was that the other people in this hotel would all be as starving as Douglas, and someone had to help them.

Douglas lifted the minibar off the bed and hurled it at the window.

CHAPTER TWO

Douglas stepped through the large gap the minibar had made in the window, nudging his shoulders past the shards of broken glass in the way. He crunched through the smaller chunks on the flowerbed and stood on the grass in the courtyard. Turning around to face the building, the first thing he saw was three faces glued to the window of the room above his. The mother and her two teenagers. The mother and daughter had their hands over her mouths and the boy, about fifteen years old, was laughing. He looked at Douglas and raised a fist in the air, mouthing a silent whoop behind the double glazing. Further along on the same floor, the Oriental woman’s face appeared at her window. She was trying to say something to Douglas but he couldn’t hear a thing. He noticed how unbelievably silent it was outside, for a hotel situated half a mile from Heathrow Airport on a busy junction leading to London. All he could hear was birdsong in the trees of the courtyard. He’d never heard birds singing so loudly before.

The first thing he had to do was get back into the hotel and try and unlock all the doors to the guests’ rooms. The courtyard connected to the hotel via a locked glass door, but there was a gate leading out of it to the road. Douglas opened the gate and walked along a path that came out at the front of the hotel.

The road should have been full of mid-morning traffic but it was deserted. Two potted palms at the entrance to the hotel, tattered by pollution, swayed in the silent breeze. Douglas felt a shiver run down his back, feeling like the only person alive in the whole world.

He pushed through the revolving doors and looked about the reception area. A lone bottle of hand sanitizer on the desk was the only sign that anyone had been there recently. Douglas remembered how unlike a hotel it had seemed when he checked in seven days ago. Instead of the usual hustle and bustle, there had been a single receptionist in a face mask behind a huge plastic screen at the desk, and a security guard posted at the revolving doors. The furniture had been pushed aside to accommodate newly imposed quarantine rules. The purpose of these rules had been to make everyone feel safe, but the effect they had was to make everyone feel scared. It had felt more like being admitted to a prison than checking into a hotel.

Douglas went behind the desk and began searching for the key cards to the rooms. They had not been given them when they checked in, the security guards controlling when they went in and out of their rooms. He found a pile of them in a box next to the device used to activate each one for a certain room. But that device was powered by the computer, which would not switch on.

He thought of running up to the rooms and knocking on the doors, at least to let the guests know that help was on its way, but that would take time, especially as he didn’t know which rooms they were in, apart from the family above his.

The only alternative was to find a toolbox somewhere and use a crowbar to break into each room, but Douglas noticed his stomach rumbling again and started to panic, knowing that the others would be too. He went through the key cards again and found, at the bottom of the pile, one marked ‘Master Key’. Bingo. He grabbed it and rushed up the stairs to the first floor.

His room had been number 12, so he hoped that the numbers ran sequentially along the first floor. But there was no 112, only a continuation of the ground floor numbers. There was nothing to do but knock on every door until someone answered.

From the fourth door he tried came a faint ‘Hello?’. Douglas inserted the card and the little green light came on, clicking open the door. Sitting nervously on the bed was the Oriental woman, her arms clutched protectively around her stomach.

“Madam, do not be alarmed. I am one of the other guests and I broke out of my room. This is the master key and I’m going to let everyone out of their rooms.”

“What’s happened, why didn’t the staff bring us any food?”

“The staff have all disappeared. We seem to be alone in the hotel. I expect you’re hungry, so why don’t you go down to reception and see if you can find any food. I’ll get all the others to meet us in reception when I’ve released them all.”

“Okay… what’s your name, by the way?”

“Douglas, madam. And you are…”

“Linda. Thank you for doing this, Douglas. I don’t know how much longer I could have stood being locked up.”

“Someone had to do something, and I had the slight advantage of being on the ground floor. I’ll meet you in reception shortly. I don’t suppose you know which rooms the other guests are in?”

“No idea. We were all checked in so quickly and you’re the first person I’ve spoken to in a week apart from that security guard. What’s happened to him?”

“I don’t know, Linda. I think we all need to gather together and try and work out what’s happened here. It’s certainly something rather peculiar.”

Douglas walked along the corridor, banging on each door until he got an answer. Four doors along from Linda’s room, a woman’s voice replied, as if she had been standing right behind the door. Douglas unlocked the door and the mother stepped back, spreading her arms to shield the two children standing behind her.

“It’s alright, madam, I’m one of the guests. I broke out of my window…”

The teenage boy raised his fist in the air again. “Way to go, man! We saw you smash the minibar through the window. What an exit!”

“Why thank you, young man.” Douglas turned back to the mother. “I know it’s all a bit shocking, but something has happened to the staff here and there’s no-one here to help us. I suggest we all meet in reception to discuss next steps.”

“Really? Are you sure we’re not in danger? Who are you, anyway?”

“My name is Douglas. Perhaps we should do the introductions later, as I want to get everyone out of their rooms first. I’ve told Linda to wait in reception, so I suggest you join her.”

“Who’s Linda?”

“One of the other guests. Look, I appreciate your anxiety, so if you’d prefer to remain in your room, do as you wish.”

The boy came and stood beside his mother. “No way Jose! If we stay in this stupid room any longer, we’re going to start eating each other. Come on, mum, let’s go and find some grub.”

Douglas felt he had indulged this nervous mother long enough and left them to decide for themselves. He tried all the other doors on the first floor, getting no further replies, and swung up the stairs to the second floor. There he found the young woman whose name turned out to be Kimberley, who couldn’t wait to leave her room and head down to reception.

Up on the third floor, Douglas hesitated before looking for Rupert’s room. He was tempted just to leave him locked in and go and deal with the others, but then he remembered how hungry everyone was. No-one deserved to be locked in a hotel room without any food for this long, not even Rupert. He marched along the corridor, banging on each door in turn until he heard Rupert’s voice.

“Yeah?”

“It’s me, Douglas. Something’s happened in the hotel and I’m letting everyone out. Stand back from the door, I’m coming in.”

Rupert was hovering between the bed and the door, with his familiar expression of studied defiance. “So they called in the A-Team in, did they? How on earth did you get out of your room without a key?”

“I smashed the window with the minibar. Get down to reception, we need to get everyone together and decide what to do next.”

“Wait a minute – what? You smashed your way out with a fucking minibar? Jesus, there’s life in the old dog yet. Was that part of your army training?”

“Never mind that now, Rupert. Just get yourself downstairs and join the others.”

“Yes, sir! Order acknowledged. Have I got time to change my clothes?”

“For god’s sake Rupert! This is an emergency. Are you coming or not?”

They walked along the corridor together in awkward silence. Douglas hadn’t planned to speak to Rupert at all during their two-week quarantine period, even if they’d met in the corridor. This wouldn’t have happened anyway, given how strict the rules were, and Douglas’ initial relief was now shattered. He vowed to speak to Rupert as little as possible, even under these odd new circumstances.