'Maybe 1 do. It's been long enough.'
'Has something happened to you? Good news or something?'
'No ... but I'll cook the meals tonight anyway. I feel like it.'
She returned his kiss, then pushed him away with both hands flat against his chest.
'These people will want to check in,' she said.
Amy was downstairs in the reception area before any of the Americans appeared, and had time to compose herself,
making it look as if she had been busy with paperwork for some time. A few seconds later the door from the car park opened and Amy, without looking up, was aware of two figures entering.
'Good afternoon, ma'am,' said a polite American voice.
She stood up and turned to the counter. lt was a man in his middle thirties, and the young woman she had seen from the upstairs window.
'Good afternoon,' she said.
'We'd like to register, if we may?' The rising inflection again.
Amy pushed forward the pad of registration cards.
'If you would fill out four of those, please,' she said. 'And may 1 see your passports?'
'Of course.'
The formalities went ahead without a hitch. The remaining two people came in behind, and took their turn at filling out the cards.
'Your reservation was for four single rooms, each with a double bed?'
'Right. 1
'OK, but we don't have many rooms in the hotel, and so we have had to split you up. There are two rooms next to each other on the first floor, and two more on the floor above. That's what you call the second and third floor, 1 think. Anyway, the rooms are separated only by a staircase.'
They were nodding. Amy spread the electronically coded room keycards across the top of the counter, deliberately making a clattering noise with them. She wondered how the Americans would allocate the rooms: would the women take the two adjacent ones? The two on the top floor, tucked under the eaves of the old roof, were smaller than the others, but they had a distant view of the sea.
'I guess that'll be OK,' said the man who Amy now knew
from his registration card was called Dennis Kravitz. He glanced around at the others. They all nodded or shrugged. one of the women Acie Jensen, according to her card had taken down a handful of leaflets from the tourist noticeboard, and was looking through them.
'Listen, we have a van out there with some expensive equipment,' Kravitz said. 'I noticed you don't have a gate on your parking lot. Is there any way we can secure it at might?'
'There's an intruder light over the yard. If you wish we can put up a parking bar in front of the vehicle to stop someone trying to drive it away.'
Dennis Kravitz frowned.
'It's not the vehicle we're too concerned about,' he said, pronouncing it veehicle. 'But the equipment we've got inside. If the yard isn't gated, how can we be sure no one's going to take a look?'
'I'm sure it'll be all right,' Amy said. 'There isn't much crime in Bulverton.'
'That isn't what we heard,' said Acie Jensen from across the room, not looking up from a leaflet about Bodiam. Castle.
'Not that sort of crime,' Amy said stoutly.
'Suit yourself,' the woman said, losing interest. She crossed the room and spoke quietly to the others. They picked up their key-cards and all went towards the rooms without any further remarks. If they'd asked, Amy could have offered to arrange for Nick to help carry up some of their baggage, but they seemed uninterested in having assistance.
For a while the four Americans moved to and fro in the reception area, picking up suitcases and other baggage from the van in the yard and carrying it in, but before long the hotel had quietened down again.
True to his promise Nick came down not much later,
glanced through some of the paperwork on the desk in the office and then went to the kitchen. Amy stayed on in the reception area, listening to the sounds she could now hear in the building: footsteps on the ancient floors above her head, water moving through the almost equally old plumbing, Nick clattering around in the kitchen. Amy realized that this was the first time the hotel had had more than one or two overnight guests since the few days that followed the massacre. Maybe life in the end really was capable of returning to a semblance of normality.
Half an hour later Teresa Simons came in again from outside through the main door, gave Amy a friendly smile, then headed off upstairs to her room.
CHAPTER 18
Teresa returned to the ExEx building the following morning. She used the two hours of scenario time she had, after all, decided to book, after she had made her timid venture into the shallows of virtual target practice.
She was however still nervous of plunging fully into unknown worlds of virtuality, and once she was inside the simulations suite she asked the technician to help her.
'Are you a new user?' the young man said. His lapel badge identified him as Angus jackson, Customer Liaison.
