Warm? Everything else in the hotel was cold and damp. Yeoman pulled, but his hand didn’t come free from the panel and he pulled again, laughing as he thought of Mandeville’s face when he told him that he’d accidentally pushed his fingers through a piece of artwork.
The wood felt tight around his fingertips, still warm, but there were splinters in there as well, sharp and needling. He pulled again and then, when his fingers still were not released, he pulled a last, forceful, time.
Mandeville had gridded and completely mapped the floor in the restaurant and was taking a rest. His eyes ached from trying to plot the precise positions of the missing or replaced tiles, almost two hundred of them, on a copy of Priest’s original plans. It was a job made more difficult because, in the bright sunlight, the pattern, despite its disruptions, seemed to swirl in a constant half-seen movement, black eyes and mouths forming at the corner of his vision and then breaking up again, only to reform moments later.
Something clattered in the foyer.
It was Parry, Mandeville assumed, come to turn the radio on to drown out Yeoman’s whistling, although the architect had actually stopped his tuneless noises several minutes earlier.
He waited for the music or inane DJ chatter to begin, but nothing came except another clatter and then the sound of rapid footsteps. Sighing, he got to his feet and went to the doorway, expecting to find some trick or joke being prepared or having already been enacted; Parry and Yeoman were his friends, and were the best men he had ever worked with, but they wound each other up and let the tension out in bickering and jokes and tricks. Sometimes, it was funny; more often, it was childish and irritating.
The foyer, however, was empty.
Well, not empty. The radio was lying in the middle of the floor, no longer standing but on its back, its power cable tangled into a black knot next to it. The floor around it was covered in footprints, scuffed and indistinct in the old dust.
At first, Mandeville thought that the prints were from Parry or Yeoman, but something about them made him reassess. There were lots, overlaying each other, small and with their edges bleeding into each other, making the floor around the small radio into a manic dance chart.
Small?
The prints were small, and neither Parry nor Yeoman was a small man.
These prints were much smaller than any he or his colleagues would make. They were narrow, short, a different shape to their own footwear.
Experimentally, he placed his foot in an unmarked space and pressed it down hard. When he lifted it, he saw a faint impression of the diamond pattern of his boot sole pressed into the grime. The other footprints were far clearer, as though their makers had trodden in something before walking around the radio.
Mandeville pressed his fingers into one of the prints. His fingers came away smeared with dirt that smelled of something familiar, although he couldn’t remember precisely what.
Some of the prints appeared to trail back towards the staircase and he went to the bottom step, peering up and wondering. If it wasn’t him or Parry or Yeoman, then there was someone, several someones actually, in here with them, and judging by the size of the prints, the someones were probably kids.
Mandeville cursed under his breath. It was to be expected, of course; closed-up buildings like the Ocean Grand attracted different groups of people who wanted to get inside. Aside from historians and urban creepers, kids were the commonest intruders, with drunks and vandals close behind, and they could be a pain. If they had kids breaking in, the likelihood was that they’d damage the place, they’d piss in the corners or set fires, maybe try and steal from the SOS Crew’s equipment or belongings.
They’d have to be found and turfed out, he thought. He’d need to pull Parry and Yeoman back from the jobs they were on and they’d need to do a systematic search of the hotel. Damn, damn,
Before Mandeville could call his colleagues, however, Yeoman appeared from the bar, holding one hand out in front of him. The hand was dripping blood, bright in the musty surroundings, and in a tone that was almost conversational, he said, “The fucking thing bit me!”
Yeoman refused to go to hospital, despite Parry’s insistence that the slash across his fingers needed stitches. Instead, he made Parry bind each of his injured three fingers with gauze from their first aid kit and took painkillers and told Parry to stop nagging him.
The wounds were messy, punctures that had torn sideways, elongating the openings in his flesh into a series of ragged-edged striations between the first and second knuckles of his middle fingers. They bled heavily, slow to clot despite the pressure that Parry put on them, ripping open as soon as Yeoman moved his hand. Fresh blooms of blood soon soaked the bandages covering his fingers and by the time the three men came to eat their evening meal, Yeoman had gone through three sets of dressings.
Food that night was pizza again, collected by Mandeville from one of the seafront takeaways, and over it they assessed their progress.
“There were two sorts of art here,” Parry was saying as they finished their food, “what Gravette called ‘integral’ and ‘peripheral’. The integral stuff is the panels, the floors, the stuff that was built in from the beginning. The peripheral is the other stuff, the things that could be moved or changed, like hanging pictures or chairs or the types of plates used.
“From Gravette’s perspective, the whole place was art, and everything in the building was supposed to add to the feeling of being inside a piece of living, breathing, functional art, from the taps that looked like octopuses or tits, to the colours they used in the original carpet. The peripheral stuff has mostly gone although we have records of some of it from the original design plans and in photographs, so what we’re looking at here is the integral, about fifty per cent of which is still here as far as I can tell.
“The top corridor is the best bet, although a lot of what should be there is hidden at the moment, so tomorrow we’ll take the boards off and see what state it’s in, but the rooms are mostly intact. The bar and sun deck are pretty much in their original state, although some philistine has replaced the pumps in the bar, probably in the sixties.”
“Gravette designed the pumps?” asked Yeoman.
“He designed
“The fittings, the art, the colours, all of them were designed to tell people that they were insignificant when faced with the grandeur of God’s creation. The richest guests had to caress something that might have been an octopus, that might have been a tit, when they wanted to turn the tap on to run a bath or brush their teeth.
“Think of it, all the rich industrialists whose money came from the mechanical and soulless, come to the seaside for bracing fresh air and views of the North Sea having to rub their great callused hands over brass tits every day and then had their bathwater spurt out of something that could well be Gravette’s cock! And when they went into their corridor, they were surrounded by art that only barely hid its message that shagging was the profoundest act a human could engage in behind classical and religious allusions. Even on the sun deck, they were faced with it.”
“With what? You said the sun deck was Manning’s creation.”
“It was, but he couldn’t draw for shit apparently, so he had to ask Gravette and Priest to help him. You can’t see it when you look at the carvings of the waves straight on, but when the shadows are right, you can.”
“See what?”
Instead of replying, Parry got to his feet, lifting the last piece of pizza from one of the boxes. “Come with me,” he said, chewing, and led the other two upstairs.
Mandeville followed because Parry had an artist’s heart and eye and sometimes saw things that he did not. When he put the final report together, containing his recommendations to the new owners, Parry’s suggestions about the art and what could be done with it would be central to the document.
The sun deck was dark and cold, and the sound of the nearby sea was a grey, shifting mass in the night, chilling the air further. “Stand there,” said Parry, pointing to the centre of the deck, “and crouch, so that you’re the
