The Hostess

by L. P. Gibbs

  Samantha drifted gratefully into unconsciousness once more. It was better for her so as not to feel the pain.

  Some time later, her right eye moved spasmodically and the eyelid painfully yet gradually managed to force its way to a half-open position. Her body was being moved. Through the thin mist that blurred her vision she could make out some words above the door that she was being transported through. White lettering on a blue background.

  'Intensive Care Unit'.

  A woman's gentle voice, possibly a nurse, walking beside her was saying something unintelligible to whoever was pushing the trolley she was on from behind, or was it a bed? She couldn't tell. In truth, she didn't really care. The burning pain in the left side of her head, shoulder, chest and arm forced its way to the fore of her perception. Nothing else mattered.

  There was a sudden, slight jolt as the foot of the trolley nudged against the double doors open, allowing them to scrape the side of the trolley as it passed between them. Throughout this hazy and slightly bumpy journey, she was aware of a constant, faint bleeping sound from somewhere above her head accompanied by the occasional 'bing' of yet another monitor that had been placed between her feet. There was a kind of reddish hue to all of her surroundings, as if she were peering through a pink muslin cloth. It was actually the blood that had seeped into her remaining eye.

  They came to an abrupt halt, the trolley turning quickly through ninety degrees and bright, vertically folded blue curtains were swished along each side and across the foot of the bed. More people in coloured uniforms huddled around the bed, busily beavering away at their allotted tasks. Her single working eye and ear took in all this information and yet her brain could not process anything properly. Nothing, …. none of any this seemed to make any sense whatsoever. What on earth had happened to her? Why was she here? She had no recollection of the events that had brought her to this place. She could only faintly recall from the distant recesses of her mind the loud noise that seemed to fill the club's foyer and assault her ears, a bright flash, a distasteful smell of burning flesh and then Alan's beautiful voice whispering to her, nothing more. There was a vague recollection of Lenny Harris being present and being carried outside into the cold night but she thought it may have been nothing more than a dream.

  The kindly face of Doctor Quastel suddenly loomed large over her, leaning across, studying her face. He was shining something like a pencil torch into her right eye and saying something to someone else but she could not make out what it was. The words were just a a jumbled mass of noise. His expression gave nothing away and yet strangely, there was concern there. He straightened up with a frown and made some brief notes on a clip-board before opening the curtains to leave. As he did so, Samantha registered a white clock on the wall opposite her bed. It showed three twenty-five but she had no idea whether it was morning or afternoon. There came a cry from another patient somewhere not too far away and the sound of unfamiliar voices again.

  There was the sound of someone else being brought urgently into the Intensive Care Unit and nursing staff and doctors rushing past Samantha's cubicle. Another casualty of the madness that London had become.

  Then something the equivalent to a nuclear bomb suddenly hit her. An intense wave of the most unbelievable, excruciating pain exploded in the left side of her head where her temple had once been and in an instant, spread right through her entire body. She tried to lift her left hand to the source of the pain but there was no reaction. Her back involuntarily arched in severe, agonising spasms and she opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Tender hands held her right shoulder to steady and comfort her but the pain continued unabated. Her tortured mind wandered yet again.

  She saw glimpses of what she thought had been a pretty good life. She had been involved in several different adventures, loved and been loved, known pleasures and disasters, done a lot more with her life than many of her old schoolfriends could possibly have dreamed of. Then again, they were not laying in a hospital bed with dreadful injuries, were they? More agonising pain!

  At that point the darkness thankfully overcame her once again as more morphine was pumped intravenously into her tortured and ravaged body and the agony stopped registering on her anguished mind. It was now approaching three-thirty in the morning and Samantha had been tended to by the best medical National Health Service teams available for over four hours. They knew they were fighting a losing battle but nevertheless did everything possible to alleviate the terrible pain that their patient was experiencing. None of the Emergency Room staff liked to lose a patient.

  Nothing more could be done for her, they knew. Too much blood, bone and muscle had been lost or destroyed. There was also severe damage to her brain and central nervous system that was way beyond repair. Her left arm hung uselessly to one side. The machine behind her head that was keeping her alive hummed and throbbed rhythmically, emitting an occasional hissing sound.

  Samantha was laying still in the hospital bed, the majority of her body covered with a green sheet, the blue curtains still closed around her. Her eyes began to glaze over and gradually closed.

  The thoughts that were meandering through what was left of Samantha's brain began to fade a little and become more and more obscure. In her mind, all she could see was Alan, slowly drifting away from her. It was as if everything was gradually slipping away from her. She felt herself imagining a floating sensation. There was a bright light somewhere far off in the pitch blackness. It looked very warm, inviting and peaceful. In her mind, she moved towards it.

  And so it was that with tremendous sadness and an unusual tear in his eye at twenty-eight minutes past four in the morning, Doctor Anthony Quastel reluctantly signed Samantha's Death Certificate.

  * * * *

  EPILOGUE

  At the request of her grieving parents, Samantha's body, in its top of the range English oak casket with brass handles was transported by 'The Flying Scotsman' train back to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, the city of her birth. The huge expense of the repatriation and the entire extravagant funeral was paid for by Lenny Harris with the help of Alan Randall. They both travelled North together on another train a few days later to attend the service and the committal. Two of the other club's hostesses, Pepsi and Roseanne accompanied them on the journey on Lenny's instructions. His word was law and no-one ever went against him. Samantha had been hugely popular at Silk's Gentleman's Club with staff as well as customers.

  Following the long, drawn-out religious Catholic service in accordance with her parents' wishes, her body was laid to rest in Elswick Cemetery in a family plot next to the grandparents she had never met and close to the railings surrounding the boundary of the cemetery. It was a heart-rending yet beautiful send-off with scores of bouquets and wreaths placed carefully atop the grave. The specially engraved headstone had been ordered and paid for also by Harris. The traditional wake was held at the Pitt Street Working Men's Club, with Harris leaving a hundred pounds behind the bar to pay for drinks. He had surprised Randall and both the girls with his generosity. He was notoriously frugal with money. Someone once remarked that he would make a drum look loose.

  Over a hundred mourners attended, some of them her old school friends. Sandra Tullen who had accompanied Samantha, then Janet, to London some years previously was one of those present as was Gail Stebbings, both former best friends. Fifteen minutes into the wake and following a tear-jerking speech from the father of the deceased, Sandra approached Randall with a weak smile on her face. He was standing with a drink in his hand, lost in thought.

  “I think you must be Alan?” she enquired. “I'm Sandra. We went to school together and I stayed with her in London for a while. Janet told me all about you. She thought the world of you, you know.”

  “I thought a lot of her too,” he replied, staring into his glass of Jack Daniels. “We had some good times together.”

  “I know; she told me.”

  “Is that right?” Randall asked, his eyebrow raised and senses now on the alert.
“What else did she tell you?”

  “Weell, ….. What she didn't tell me was what she did when she visited me the night my former boyfriend met with an accident,” Sandra said meaningfully, averting her eyes from his and gazing into her drink. It was obvious from her words that this young woman had more than a slight suspicion that Samantha had been involved in the killing of her boyfriend that night.

  “Yes,” he responded, swirling the ice around in his tumbler. “I heard about that. Nasty business, eh? Did the police ever have any ideas of who might have been responsible for killing him?” She looked directly up at him with that half-smile again and slowly shook her head.

  “No,” she replied, taking a tentative a sip of her Martini. “The policeman I spoke with thinks it could have been the the work of the jealous husband of one of his bits on the side. He had lots of those. They never found any clues to a suspect whatsoever. And I think I can safely say that they never will.” From the way she looked at him unwaveringly returning his stare, Randall knew then that she knew it was Samantha, but had no intention of passing that information on to anyone else. Sandra turned and walked casually away from him, turning just once with a smile before she reached the doors. She placed her almost empty glass on to a side table next to the door, gave him a slight nod and left. Randall spent another twenty minutes talking to various friends and relatives of Samantha's before heading outside for a cigarette. Another quarter of an hour passed and he was on to his second cigarette before he was joined by Lenny Harris, tugging his overcoat around his shoulders as he lit a cigar.

  “You ready to go now, my son?” he asked with a comforting hand on Randall's shoulder. Randall sighed and threw the butt of his cigarette in the general direction of the gutter. He buttoned his suit jacket and nodded.

  “Yeah, I suppose so. Where are the other two?” he asked, looking back towards the door to the hall. Just at that moment, the two girls came out with their coats over their arms having followed Harris. Roseanne had spent the entire hour in the hall sitting alone in a corner crying, just as she had done throughout the church service. Pepsi had done her best to console the girl but to no avail.

  “The geezer looking after the cloakroom has phoned for a cab to take us back to the train station,” Harris informed him as he drew deeply on one of his thick Havana cigars. Smoking inside the club's hall was forbidden and both men were grateful to be outside and light up. The blue-grey smoke from Lenny's cigar drifted away on the crisp night air. Randall watched the smoke dissipate as it went higher, his thoughts with the young girl whose cold body now lay in the grave. For some reason that he could not fathom, he was finding it difficult to bring to mind an image of her. All he could think of was holding her close to him in his bed. Unusually for Alan Randall, he felt tears begin to sting his eyes and had to blink several times to prevent them turning into a cascade down his cheeks. That would never do.

  “I can't believe that she's brown bread, Al,” Harris said, shaking his head so that the wisps of his thinning grey hair fell and drooped down across his wrinkled forehead. “She was one of the good 'uns an' all.” Coming from Lenny Harris, that was high praise indeed. He usually only saw the girls at his club as a means to making money. Randall simply nodded. The lump in his throat preventing him from speaking without showing his true feelings. After a few minutes of silence he managed to speak.

  “It was the Wheelans, Len,” he said, his face contorted with a burning desire for revenge.

  “The Wheelans? 'Ow d'yer know it was them?”

  “I recognised their car, the big black Humber,” Randall replied, nodding slowly. “They were trying to shoot me for bumping off one of the brothers a while back when their caravan went up in smoke. Remember?” Harris recalled the incident and said so.

  “This means that I'll have to sort them out once and for all, Len. You do know that don't you?”

  “Yeah, I figured you would,” Harris replied. “Anything you want me to do to help out, just let me know. Okay?” Randall said that he would and they both lapsed back into silence again. The taxi arrived within ten minutes and conveyed them through the damp streets to Newcastle Central Station.

  It was a very sombre and quiet journey back to London that evening in the first-class compartment on the train. Randall just sat morosely in silence with his chin resting on the heel of his hand, his elbow on the table as he gazed forlornly through the rain-spattered window at the snow-covered countryside as they rushed through it at over a hundred miles an hour. The worst part for him was knowing that the shot that had killed Samantha was meant for him. Lenny Harris sat opposite him with the table between them and quietly read his copy of Sporting Life, occasionally ordering double scotches from the onboard bar. The other two girls sat in seats behind Harris, Roseanne weeping into her handkerchief for the entire four hour journey.

  Alan Randall's thoughts were back in London, working out his next move. He reckoned he knew who was responsible for the death of Samantha and was trying to devise a plan to take his revenge. He knew it was the Wheelan family. The car used was instantly recognisable to Randall. He had had dealings with them in the past. Randall was actually responsible for the death of one of the brothers and they had vowed to get their revenge. He knew that the gunshot at Silk's was meant for him. The entire four hour journey South was occupied by his mind racing, making plans, assessing possible setbacks and any unforeseen obstacles to the deadly plot that was beginning to formulate in his mind. He would find them, follow them and take those responsible out of the picture, one at a time, as painfully as possible.

  When they finally arrived at Kings Cross Station they got off the train and Randall strode quickly away from the group without a word, heading out towards the taxi rank. Harris tried calling after him but received no response from the rapidly disappearing broad back.

  “Please, let him go, Lenny,” said Pepsi, holding her boss back by the elbow of his overcoat and pulling him back. “He's hurting like mad, isn't he? Let him get this out of his system. You do know that they were very close, don't you, Len?” Harris nodded slowly and stopped himself. He knew she was right. Randall would definitely need some time to himself.

  It was now eight forty-five in the evening and Harris needed to get back to his club. He could never pass up the chance of earning money. On reaching the taxi rank himself, he turned to the two girls who were standing behind him and handed them two twenty pound notes each.

  “Don't bother coming in to work tonight, girls” he instructed them. “You've both had a long, upsetting day so you won't be at your best in the club.” He nodded at the banknotes as he continued. “There's enough there for you both to get a cab home and a bit on top for missing the night. You both alright with that?” he asked. They both nodded, Roseanne still sniffling and dabbing her eyes with her now sodden handkerchief. He climbed into a cab, instructing the driver to take him to Great Windmill Street in Soho. Both girls watched his taxi turn in the circle and drive away then looked at one another, each silently understanding what the other was automatically thinking then, as one, turned and headed for the Underground. It was a far cheaper option than taking a taxi home. More cash for them as they had missed a night's work.

  Two weeks later, the man who had fired the sawn-off shotgun which had killed Samantha was himself shot dead with a single bullet to the chest on the top floor of a multi-storey Council car park in Hackney, East London. Mick Wheelan, the leader of the small gang was also found at the scene with a broken neck at the bottom of a flight of stone steps. Their large, black Humber car was left standing empty on the third floor. An African man, the third member was missing, never to be seen again.

  Alan Randall was never going to let Samantha's death go unavenged.

  * * * *

  THE END.

  If you have enjoyed this book in paperback, please pass it on to someone else who may appreciate it too, or donate it to a charity shop. Many thanks. L.P.G.

  . P. Gibbs, The Hostess