The Complete Checking Out Trilogy
T.W.M. Ashford
Copyright © 2019 by Tom Ashford
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Any characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Checking Out cover design by germancreative
Checking Out: Clockwise & Checking Out: Anticlockwise cover design by Tom Ashford
Image: Tithi Luadthong/Shutterstock.com
Also by T.W.M. Ashford
Everything Ends
Blackwater: Vol. One
Checking Out
Mouth of Midnight
Blackwater: Vol. Two
The Portrait Lingers Like a Whisper
Blackwater: Vol. Three
Checking Out: Clockwise
Checking Out: Anticlockwise
For my grandma Mary, and my aunty Gill.
To Ed, who taught me and my friends how to fire a lever-action repeater.
And to everyone who followed the journeys of George, Pierre and the friends of Le Petit Monde: thanks for the support.
Contents
Checking Out
Checking Out: Clockwise
Checking Out: Anticlockwise
Join the T.W.M. Ashford Mailing List
Reviews
About the Author
Also By T.W.M. Ashford
Chapter One
They say there are infinite worlds out there - infinite worlds swimming in infinite universes. Every reality, every possibility, every actuality, played out because it is reality, because it is possible, because it is actually happening, or has happened, or will happen, somewhere. I’m not sure how much of that super-science holds water, but then I’m just a normal guy and the one world has always been enough for me. But if what they say is true - that there are more worlds than man can imagine and they’re all a hair’s breadth from one another - then there must surely be a place where some of them overlap. And if they start to overlap, well… where do we go from there?
Train journeys back from presentations are the worst, in my opinion. At least on the way there you’re distracted by anxiety, by the fear of how badly your meeting with the client might go. There might be relief in the return, granted, but there’s boredom, too. A sense of wasted time, of the seconds draining away as you crawl along the tracks. You’re doing nothing but being shepherded from Point A to Point B, becoming a part of the emptiness in between.
When I pulled into Paddington Station at a half past two on the afternoon of that fateful Wednesday, I was neither coming nor going from a business trip. It was pleasure, and personal, all the way. I’d brought a book with me to lighten the ride - some epic tome about a killer clown lurking in the sewers. I couldn’t put it down, but that didn’t change the fact that I was never going to finish it. Half of a supermarket sandwich and a pocket-squashed Bounty wrestled in my stomach, punching seven shades of crap out of one another and, in good time I was sure, out of me, too. All things considered, I wonder why I hadn’t splashed out on something more appetising.
Old habits die hard - that’s what people say, right?
London was as cold as it always is; the consistent ten degrees above zero that feels a frightful under. I stepped off the carriage’s greasy steps, swapping its warm, regurgitated air for a lungful of the city’s turgid excuse for a counterpart. A small red suitcase lumbered onto the platform behind me, its wheels rumbling along the concrete. A smart, black briefcase swung in my other hand.
There I was, in the navy blazer I wore to appointments, trousers to match and a grey scarf I may as well have borrowed from one of the homeless men huddled in doorways around the corner. Like an idiot I’d left my black and much warmer scarf at home, hanging impotently from a coat hook in the porch. George Webber; forties - alright, you got me, mid-forties; cut a fine figure I do not. Wifeless. Childless. I don’t wish to paint you a pathetic picture… I’m just nothing to write home about, that’s all.
I looked up at the display hanging above my head. Yellow destinations shuffled each other off the side of the screen; towering over them were large blinking strips of light shouting out the time. I had arrived on schedule, much to my surprise. If there was ever a day for something to go wrong - a rail strike, a storm, an invasion by North Korea - that would have been the day for God’s fingers to start poking in my pies. But I guess he wasn’t paying me much attention, which was most certainly fine by me.
So I made my way down the length of the long, long platform and fed my ticket into the machine at the barrier, forgetting for a little too long that they don’t spit them back out. Not single tickets, anyway. A young woman in her twenties with a backpack slung over one shoulder and a piercing in her frowning lip sighed from behind me.
‘Go ride a dick,’ I wanted to say, but of course I didn’t. I hurried out of the way of the queue forming to my rear and loitered around the rows of chairs parallel to a pastry stand, my suitcase coming to an abrupt stop against my heel. The girl continued past me without a second look.
A pigeon with a half-decayed foot pecked at a discarded chip, eyed me with an expression of contempt, then flapped off to irritate its friend atop the iron rafters. It was only then that I noticed what a marvel the station of Paddington is, if you’re into that sort of thing; a simple, soaring expanse. It reminded me of the belly of a great whale, gutted and hollowed aboard a ship snaking its way up the Thames. Its enormous metal ribcage, dripping its precious fat into the channels below. Only right then it wasn’t fat dripping down from the station’s ceiling but the clockwork spitting of dirty London rain.
My suitcase bounced up and down and side to side as if I’d been holding the hand of a child in a sweet shop. It seemed to seek out every crack and bump in the pavement as I made my way towards the main exit, the huge maw yawning out at Praed Street. The smiling man on the weather forecast had predicted heavy rain for early morning.
It had arrived mid-afternoon.
The crowds of the station were all snapping open their umbrellas. Black, yellow, pink canopies billowed open all around me as they charged forwards into the sodden April onslaught. A small girl of six, already drenched by an oversized yellow mackintosh, bumped into me as she passed. Her matching, sickly wellington boots made light work of the lakes forming at the bottom of the road.
I looked down at my brogues. I hadn’t even thought to bring an umbrella of my own.
The entrance to the underground was just to my left - an empty frame in the wall which looked remarkably akin to a crack in a cliff face, leading down into a subterranean tomb. I guess there’s little difference, and the thought of cramming myself into one of those stuffy tin tubes even without my suitcase made me feel a little nauseous. People coughing and spluttering on the back of my neck. People billowing open their copies of The Daily Mail, rustling their pages against my face. People.
A sign hanging above the entrance to the underground listed my options. To the left were another two tube lines, apparently - one the same yellow as the little girl’s coat - and as close to a miracle as God saw fit to show me: Taxi Rank.
Following a swarm of fancier suits than my own, I traced the wall of the station, all the while wishing I’d brought a larger coat to keep warm. I shivered as a pleasant female voice boomed out from the speakers up high, announcing that the two-twenty-seven service to Reading had been delayed due to bad weather. The temperature didn’t improve as I r
ode the slow escalator up and out of the station, the wind rushing in for a hug.
God, it’s Scotland all over again, I remember thinking.
Hunching my shoulders, I ran for the overhang round the corner. Rain plummeted down in a great wet wall and even though it took only a couple of seconds I was half-drenched before I reached the shelter. Had I ever seen London this wet? Surely I must have, with the amount of trips I’d made to the capital for work. Like a greedy weed it seemed to need watering every other day. But this hard, this fast, this… vicious, I dare to say? I could barely see ten metres ahead of me. The torrent seemed eternal, pounding every square inch from the towering offices of Kingdom Street before me and the rail tracks behind, to the stations and boroughs beyond. The hum of its attack filled my ears. The sweet aroma as it hit the cobbles reminded me - for some strange, untraceable reason - of a living room’s open fire. Perhaps I just wanted to go home.
There came a rising panic, a hammering heartbeat.
Too late now, Georgie-boy. It’s far too late for that now.
Back when I used to catch taxis more regularly, the ranks and lay-bys would be a blur with commuters climbing in car after car like some sort of macabre assembly line. Climb in, locked shut, sent away. Now it seemed a sad, hollow place. A line of black cab husks, their headlights morose and grills hungry. Hungry for a ride they suspect will never come. I guess everybody gets picked up through their phones these days, which is fine. When the tide of progress comes in the old sand has a choice: get pushed up, or get washed away.
The rain pelted their roofs in the rhythm of a marching band’s snare-drum. I wondered if it was angling for a promotion to hail. There was always something about hail that I liked; it felt like the rain had pulled off its gloves and decided to start fighting with its teeth. I guess we’re lucky in little old England that our storms never get angry enough to hurt us… unless you’re the dear old lady who always seems to get hit by a falling tree.
One of the taxis circled back on itself, surfing through the rising surface runoff and sending miniature waves towards where I stood. An empty packet of cigarettes, crumpled and soaked through, had been trying to escape from the gutter but was instead swept back towards me.
The driver leant over to the passenger side and rolled down his window. A pair of tired blue eyes peered out, shielded by a wrinkled hand speckled with white hairs.
‘Goin’ somewhere, or you settlin’ to stand out there in the rain all day?’ he called out.
He didn’t have to ask me twice. The taxi had pulled in pretty close to the kerb, but my foot still went into the drink and I could feel water slosh around inside of my shoe, soaking deep into my sock. He didn’t offer to put my suitcase in the boot and I didn’t ask him to; neither of us wanted to be out in that weather a second longer than we had to. I scooted across the back seats, leaving rivers of rainwater to run down the leather. I dragged my little suitcase into the footwell beside me.
I slammed the door shut and for a gentle second a peace hung in the car, like the pine tree air freshener which dangled from the rear-view mirror, embraced by the cheap warmth coming from the heater, in silence save for the ratter-tat-tatting upon the roof of the hackney carriage.
‘Where am I takin’ ya?’ said the man up front, turning those cold blue eyes so that they shone back at me through his mirror. His accent had been diluted but it still rang clear - Polish, if my thinking is correct. My knowledge of eastern European geography isn’t great but I’ve had a couple of Polish neighbours in my time. I liked them. If the worst stereotype you can concoct about somebody is that they work harder than you, they must be doing something right.
This man’s face had a great many lines - wrinkles and crow’s feet that ran into one another to form great chasms of age. He’d seen a great many years, but by the looks of things he’d spent them smiling.
‘Le Petit Monde, please. Whitehall Place, just off Northumberland Avenue.’
‘Oh, I know the place,’ smiled the taxi driver, putting the car into gear and pressing the button to start the fare counter. I felt something inside me twinge as it instantly jumped up three pounds. The car fought its way through the water like a ship being launched for the first time. ‘And a real special place it is too, if you don’t mind me sayin’,’ he added.
I didn’t mind at all. I’d never been poor and for that I’d always been grateful. Never been one to take for granted what luck I’d been given - though I’d not been one to turn the other cheek when it came to bad luck, either. But I’ve never been so wealthy that I could stop worrying, so wealthy that I could go to swanky hotels and not come close to fainting when the bill arrived the next morning. The fact that somebody knew I was staying somewhere nice and had remarked about it, in a sense stamping it with confirmation, well, I didn’t mind that at all.
The driver pulled out into a worm of a road running parallel to the station and its tracks. The taxi’s wipers struggled to clear the windscreen of rain.
‘What’s the occasion, if I’m not being too nosey?’ asked the driver, raising the temperature of the car ever so slightly. ‘It’s just… a place as fine as that almost demands an occasion, you know? Unless you’re super rich, I guess. Anniversary?’
‘Hmm?’ I said, looking back towards him. I’d been watching the skyscrapers crane their necks over the skyline, marvelling at how the rivers of rain on the window made them smudge and bleed.
‘Is it an anniversary?’
‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ I answered, and went back to looking out the window.
‘Lucky lady,’ said the driver, chuckling to himself. The routine tick of the indicator became the only sound between us as he pulled out over a bridge and towards the centre of London. The Shard loomed in the distance. The London Eye turned a little closer.
‘I’m guessin’ you’re not from round here, then,’ the driver asked, doing his best to chip away at the metaphorical ice building up in the taxi. ‘Come far?’
I’d hoped to get a quiet driver, one who could recognise somebody’s need to be left alone. But then I thought: Why not talk? I’d get to the hotel soon enough and then I’d have all the quiet I could ever ask for.
‘Littlewick Green,’ I said, looking into the smiling eyes of the rear-view mirror. ‘Ever heard of it?’
‘Can’t say I have,’ the driver replied. ‘Long way to travel?’
‘Ah, well it’s a lovely place; proper little village. Quaint cottages and roads without lampposts, you know? But not long, no. Just outside of Maidenhead. Got the train from there.’
‘God, I’d love me a little cottage out in the middle of nowhere. Not much in the way to do once you’re there though, am I right? At least you’ve got some views, I guess. I bet you’ll be longin’ for a bit of green by this time tomorrow!’
He laughed at this, until his laugh became a cough and his cough became a choke. He retrieved a handkerchief from the map-pocket of his car door and hacked something rotten into it.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said, looking a little embarrassed. ‘It’s this damn weather. Turns my sinuses to shit.’
And now it was my turn to laugh - a sharp unexpected laugh which came out more like a yap. I covered my mouth with the back of my hand and returned to looking out the window. The approaching marbled arches of Hyde Park were swimming as if in a Salvador Dali painting, and the foliage beyond had become but an emerald smear.
‘I’ve got a friend who’s stayed at Le Petit Monde, actually,’ said the driver, glancing over his shoulder and talking in the hushed tones of someone revealing a great conspiracy. ‘Says it’s haunted. Absolute beauty of a hotel, don’t get me wrong,’ he added, hurriedly, ‘but he’ll swear on the Bible that somethin’ strange must have happened there, once upon a time. Still, he’s probably talkin’ a load of old horsecrap. He’s the type to spin a yarn if he thinks there’s a free pint in it for him.’
‘Yeah, I know the type.’
‘Not that any hotel is without its fair share
of mystery and history, of course. But I’m sure a man like you brushes up on all that before he splashes out with his cash, am I right?’
He wasn’t. Le Petit Monde had simply looked the nicest when I’d browsed the comparison websites.
‘I gave it a quick skim,’ I said.
‘Well my friend likes to talk,’ he said, steering the conversation onto what seemed a very linear set of rails, ‘and he says that its one of the oldest hotels in London. Quite probably the oldest, in fact.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Apparently. Started off with modest beginnings - just an inn or somethin’ - and then built itself up from there. By the early nineteenth century it was hostin’ the finest of royalty from all around the world and by the late, well, it was the grand old lady we see today. The very best in Parisian hospitality, as it were.’
‘Sounds delightful.’
‘You’re telling me; I’d cut off my right arm to spend the night in a place like that, ghosts or no ghosts.’
‘I’m not sure I believe in any of that stuff anyway. Always struck me as just another way for people to cling on to the idea that there’s something after death. As if ghosts would be proof, or whatever.’
‘I guess it gives people comfort, though.’
‘Doesn’t make it true.’
We pulled into a traffic jam. Way ahead of us I could see the red traffic light shine above the crowd of cars, glistening and dividing in the misty windows like the fiery eyes of a spider, blinking into view. I could just make out the glow of signs above other taxis, and their frustrated horns over the persistent hammering of the rain. In the back seats of the car beside us a couple of young boys fought over a comic book, pulling at it until the pages threatened to tear.
Checking Out- The Complete Trilogy Page 1