watched the pale square of light float across in front of the reception desk towards a doorway, ‘Over here,’ she heard him say.
She followed him through, up one flight of stairs, through another door, and then they were standing in a corridor.
‘You seem to know your way around this one,’ she said.
‘They’re all very similar. And I use them quite a lot. Right then, first floor rooms. You choose.’
Jenny walked down the corridor, passing a door that was open. Jagged splinters of wood jutting out from the door-frame told her the door had been forced. She didn’t want to sleep in a room that had been picked over by someone. That just somehow felt . . . clammy. The next door along had also been kicked in, and the next. Finally towards the end of the corridor, she found a door that remained intact, locked. ‘I’ll have this one,’ she said.
‘You’re okay being alone? I spotted another locked one on the other side, up the far end. I can take that one.’
Jenny stopped to think about that. She wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to spend the night sleeping in the same room as this guy, but then . . . being alone down one end of the corridor, in a deserted motel.
‘Okay, maybe we should share this one.’
‘I think that makes sense,’ said Paul.
He lifted his organiser up towards the door to read the room number. ‘How does Room 23 sound?’
With one well-aimed kick at the swipe-card door lock, the door swung in and banged off the wall inside; the noise echoed disturbingly down the empty corridor.
Inside, it was how she hoped she’d find it, undisturbed, cleaned, bed made for the next customer. She opened the curtain and the blind behind it, then swung open the window. The room was hot, and a faint breeze wafted in.
In the sky the grey light of dawn was beginning to provide enough natural light for them to find their way around. Paul quickly turned his organiser off and pocketed it.
‘Okay then, sleep,’ said Jenny, sitting down on the bed; a double bed.
Paul pulled open a cabinet door to reveal a drinks fridge. ‘A-hah. We’re in luck.’ Inside he found it decently stocked. ‘There’s several cans of Coke, ginger beer, tonic water, and a pleasing range of mini-liquors: vodka, gin, rum, whisky. Some beer even.’
Jenny smiled in the pale grey gloom of dawn. After the recent hours, the last few days, a single stiff rum and Coke would be absolutely what the doctor ordered, even if it was going to be warm and without ice.
‘I’ll have a rum and Coke, please.’
‘Good choice, Ma’am,’ said Paul. She heard the pop and hiss of the Coke can, the click of a lid being twisted off and the gurgle of the rum being poured.
‘Here.’
The first one was a strong one. The second drink she asked for she wanted weak, but Paul’s definition of ‘weak’ didn’t seem to square with hers.
‘So, you mentioned something a while back,’ said Paul, ‘about your hubby predicting this?’
‘Well, sort of. He wrote a report a while back . . . lemme see, yeah it was back in 1999, because that was the year we did Christmas in New York. It was an academic paper really, he wrote most of it when he was at university in the States, but then when he got commissioned to write it again, he did some new research and updated chunks of it with new data he’d managed to track down.’
‘And it was about this whole thing?’
‘Well, sort of I suppose. Andy was very secretive about it, client confidentiality kind of thing. But I know it had something to with Peak Oil, and our growing reliance on fewer and fewer major oil reserves, and how that made us much more vulnerable to someone needing only to disable a few places around the world to hold us all to ransom. He described how it could be done . . . which were the most vulnerable places . . . that sort of thing.’
And that’s where Andy’s obsession had truly began. Wasn’t it?
The people who’d commissioned his work had paid him good money for that. Very good money - enough that they bought that house of theirs outright, and money left over that they were able to put both kids through fee-paying schools.
‘But after doing that job, you know . . . he started changing. Became I guess . . . edgy, very serious. He spent too much time