She looked around. The carpet was scuffed and threadbare, a kind of unpleasant blueish tartan, worn through in patches. The, what she guessed were originally cream skirting boards and paintwork were now an off-yellow.
There was no one around, so leaving her bags behind, something she would never have dreamed of doing in London, she went through into the hall of the hotel in search of staff. Tremayne had warned her about the slow pace of life on the Western Isles, which was sometimes great, but sometimes infuriating, especially to a Londoner. He’d told her the story about the islander who had had the Spanish concept of ‘mañana’ explained. ‘Oh aye,’ he’d said, ‘we have a similar expression, but without the sense of urgency.’ She guessed that what would have been highly unusual in a hotel in London was more acceptable out here.
A staircase led upwards to the rooms and there were three doors: one was to a small bar, empty, the other to a large, bare function room and the third led into a restaurant. Hanlon went in.
It was nearly 3 p.m. now and it had obviously been a busy lunch. The tables were uncleared, dirty, smeared plates and cutlery still on view. Floating on top of the odour of food was cigarette smoke. This was coming from a shaggy-haired man sitting alone at a table near the back of the restaurant looking blearily at Hanlon.
She felt an instinctive surge of irritation at someone flouting the non-smoking regulations. She stood, framed in the doorway, hands on her hips, staring the guy down.
She guessed he was about sixty, his thick hair salt and pepper in colour, and he had a droopy brown moustache. He had been good-looking once, but those days were long gone. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and pale-blue supermarket, dad-style jeans. His build was that of a powerful man gone to seed. The fabric of his shirt that stretched over his belly, which was sizeable, was tight with the strain. His forearms were strong and heavy with faded retro nautical tattoos. He grinned conspiratorially at Hanlon, his cigarette burning between his fingers.
‘Afternoon, lass, can I help you?’ he asked. His smile was one of unadulterated sleaze and he ran his eyes over her body in a deliberate, provocatively evaluating way. She was glad that she was wearing combat trousers and a Gore-tex cagoule. She certainly couldn’t be accused of dressing provocatively.
He obviously wasn’t Scottish. The accent, with its short vowel sound, was, to her ears, generic north of England.
‘My name’s Hanlon. I’ve got a room booked,’ she said. She would have liked to add, unfortunately. Her gaze travelled coldly across the mess in the dining room, lingering on the landlord’s half-drunk pint of lager accompanied by a glass of what she guessed was Scotch.
‘Someone was supposed to have met me at the ferry.’
‘I’m short-staffed at the moment,’ he said by way of excuse. ‘The girl who normally does that died yesterday.’ He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Drowned. They found her body today. Poor lass.’
Hanlon blinked in surprise on two counts: first that it should happen in the hotel that she was staying in; secondly that the landlord would so blithely mention it. It somehow didn’t seem hotel protocol to tell a newly arrived guest that a member of staff had just died. Perhaps the landlord was unusually candid, or perhaps he was just very pissed.
So now the hotel had another death in its history. Maybe the girl would become part of the folklore like the long-dead jilted husband. Another ghost for the psychic tourists to look for.
‘Busy lunch, we had a coach party…’ His voice drifted off; he stared into space as if he had forgotten about her. Then he shook himself awake. ‘If you’d like to come with me…’ he said, hoisting himself upright.
‘Call me Jim, lass, or Big Jim, as the ladies do,’ he said to her, with a suggestive leer. His voice lingered suggestively on the word ‘ladies’. Hanlon stared at him with horrified fascination. She hadn’t met anyone this genuinely repellent in a while. They walked to reception. He was a tall man, a head taller than she was. He unhooked a key from a board, picked up her suitcase with one hand as if it were light as a feather, leaving her the kitbag, and then motioned her to accompany him upstairs.
She followed the broad back and saggy buttocks in their baggy jeans to the first-floor landing, through a fire door and along a corridor. Big Jim puffed in exertion as they walked up the steep stairs but the muscles in his arms were still big and defined, despite his age. He certainly was having no difficulty with her case. He was one of those people with great muscle strength but poor aerobic fitness. Hanlon, a devotee of gyms, was often surprised by discrepancies like that. The most common one was men who exercised their arms with fanatical devotion to the exclusion of everything else, so they ended up with huge biceps and scrawny chicken legs. Big Jim could probably curl thirty kilos with ease but collapse if he did a lap of the car park.
He unlocked one of the rooms and stood partially blocking the door so she would have to squeeze past him. His gut made a formidable obstacle. Their eyes met and he leered at her. Hanlon felt the old, familiar anger rise within herself.
She paused, waiting for him to move aside, which he didn’t. He was obviously hoping that she would make body contact as she passed him,
