Hotel Slippers

I slip into the hotel robe, feeling the soft material brush against my shoulders, allowing the relaxation to wash over me like a wave. Who says spa days aren’t for men?

The therapist has left the room, leaving me to dress myself. I fumble my feet awkwardly into the oversized slippers and head for the door.

Which way was the pool again? A quick look left and right. A long corridor leads back to the changing rooms and reception where I entered. I head in the other direction, reckoning that as I didn’t see a pool on the way down here, it must be somewhere down here.

I come across a flight of stairs leads upwards at a ninety-degree angle, and, with a quick look backwards, I start up them, feeling somehow naughty, like a schoolboy sneaking around trying to avoid the teachers. This doesn’t feel like the way to the sauna, but curiosity has got the better of me now.

The stairs climb steeply upwards, and end in a metal door with a push-down handle. I realise I’ve made it to the roof of the hotel. I push it open and step outside, feeling the cool air rippling through the robe and against my skin, pulling me out of the lazy lethargy that the hot scented oils and firm hands of the massage therapist had lulled me into. I take off the slippers and wedge them into the space underneath the door to prevent it from swinging shut behind me, and step outside to explore the roof.

If I was expecting one of those fancy hotel roofs like you’d see on social media, I’m bitterly disappointed. There’s no rooftop jacuzzi, no cocktail bar. It’s dull and grey up here, the roof cluttered with all sorts of instruments and wires. A satellite dish towers into the air in front of me, secured against the elements by hundreds of plastic cable ties. A layer of solar panels stretches away into the distance, massive and ugly, not like they appear in the advertisements.

A noise brings me out of my reverie, and my head whips around. Footsteps, coming towards me. I look around, then duck behind the satellite dish, feeling suddenly ridiculous. What the hell am I playing at? A grown man skulking around on the roof of the hotel in a bathrobe like some overgrown child. This is embarrassing.

I peer around the edge of the dish, praying my unwanted companions won’t move towards the door I came through so I can make a break for it, but that’s exactly what they do. What if they close it behind them? Nobody knows where I am. I’ll be stuck out here all night, freezing and exhausted. Not the day of rest and relaxation I was imagining.

I start to stand up, deciding to take the embarrassment of being seen over the possibility of being stuck up here on my own all night, when I catch something the woman says and duck back down behind the dish again.

‘You told nobody you were coming?’

‘Nobody.’ The man’s voice is hoarse, the single word a dry rasp against his throat. I steal a glimpse at his face – he’s been crying recently, his eyes bloodshot, his face haggard. My heart rate quickens, and I move slowly backwards, ensuring my body is completely blocked from view.

‘Good.’ The woman’s back is to me, but I can tell from her body language that she’s the one in charge. She’s taller than he is, curly red hair cascading down her shoulders. Her voice has a funny lilt to it, a familiar accent, but I can’t quite place it. ‘And the money?’

‘Yes, the money. I have it here.’ The man reaches into his jacket pocket and fumbles around, producing a large white envelope and handing it to the woman. She takes it from him and counts it, then gives a quick nod of satisfaction.

‘It’s all there.’

‘Where is she?’ the man croaks. ‘What have you done with her?’

The woman points at the door in front of her, the one I’ve left propped open. I realise I’ve been holding my breath, and let it out, quietly. Something’s not right, here. Every fibre of my being is screaming at me to stay still, not to be discovered.

The man turns his back on the woman and walks over to the door. What happens next happens too quickly for my brain to register it. The woman reaches into her own coat pocket and produces a revolver, the silencer already screwed into place.

Pffft. If I wasn’t crouched ten feet away, I wouldn’t even have heard the shot. The man drops to his knees, his body contorting in pain. The woman moves quickly, striding over to where he lies.

Pffft.  The second bullet, at point blank range, goes through the centre of the man’s forehead. He falls sideways and lies still.

I clasp my hand to my mouth, trying to hold back a cry. I whip my head back behind the dish, fighting back the urge to vomit. My bare feet are trembling against the mesh floor housing the satellite dish, and I’m sure that at any moment, the woman is going to appear in front of me, revolver in hand.

I force myself to count. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. I take a deep breath, and peer around the side of the dish.

The woman – the murderer – is crouched over the dead man’s body, checking for phones, wallets, cash – who knows. She’s turned slightly towards me now, and I get a glimpse of a pinched face, deathly white skin, a narrow mouth set too high up on her face.

She straightens up, removing a pair of latex gloves and placing them carefully inside her bag, along with the revolver. She starts to turn away, heading back in the direction she came from – I suppose there must be another door on a different section of the roof – when something catches her eye. I see her mouth set in a frown, as her eyes fall upon my oversized fluffy slippers, wedged into the doorway right in front of her. I feel my heart rate quicken again, thumping against my chest so loudly that I’m sure it’s about to give me away. I place a hand against my chest and will myself to stay calm.

The woman looks up, eyes narrowing slightly - or maybe I’m imagining that. I don’t dare to turn away, afraid that any sudden moment will catch her eye, but angle my body to the side so only the side of my head is on show, the rest of my awkward frame hidden behind the satellite dish. The sun has dipped below the horizon now, and night is beginning to fail, casting dark shadows along the rooftop.

Her eyes pass right over me, continuing along the perimeter of the roof. She takes a step forward, then changes her mind and heads quickly back around the corner in the direction she came from.

I sit there, breathing heavily, trying to work up the courage to come out from my hiding place. I take a long look in the direction the woman has disappeared. No movement. I crouch on the balls of my feet, ignoring the searing pain in my legs as I hover uncertainly behind the satellite dish.

Another slow count to ten. Then I bolt, sprinting back towards the door, my bare feet slapping against the ground. I almost run right past the dead man, but at the last moment my conscience gets the better of me, and I slam to a halt.

He’s young, in his mid-thirties I’d guess, built like a rugby player, with black hair cut in a fashionable fade. His eyes are still open, gazing unseeingly up at me. I reach for his wrist and feel around uselessly for a pulse. Nothing. I realise I’ve just left my own fingerprints on the dead man, and hastily rub them away with the sleeve of my robe. Then I run for the door with my tail between my legs, desperate to get away from this insane nightmare.

***

‘And can you describe this woman?’ one of the officers asks.

I’m sitting in the manager’s office on the second floor of the hotel, perched nervously on a leather armchair, across the desk from the two police officers who are taking my statement. I’ve been in here for all of five minutes, and already I can tell that they think I’m a raving lunatic. The senior looking officer, a woman, has already tucked her notebook back into her pocket and is looking at me sternly, like a teacher about to tell a student off for misbehaving.

‘She was tall,’ I say, helplessly. ‘Red hair. She looked nasty, if that makes sense. And her mouth was a bit too high up on her face.’ I gesture uselessly to a spot somewhere above my own mouth, feeling more like an idiot with every word that comes out of my mouth.

The senior officer casts a glance at her partner.

‘Right,’ she says after a moment. ‘That’s a lovely story, Mister, eh…’

‘Kettle. Ryan Kettle.’

‘Kettle? Are you trying to be funny?’

‘I’m not lying!’ I reach into my pocket to fetch my I.D., then realise I’m still wearing the stupid bathrobe from the hotel spa.

‘That’s my name,’ I finish weakly, wondering how on earth this day can have gone so horribly wrong. Suddenly all I want is to be back safe in my own house, away from the hotel and the roof and these two blundering idiots who clearly don’t believe a word that’s coming out of my mouth.

‘Right, Mr Kettle,’ the female officer continues, placing an unnecessarily sarcastic emphasis on my honest-to-God surname. ‘Well, the problem with your story is that we’ve already been up to the roof, about ten minutes after we received a call from the manager of the hotel. There’s no body up there, dead or alive. No blood either. How do you explain that then? I suppose the dead man just got up and walked away?’

Her partner gives a sycophantic harrumph of laughter at that. I have to fight back the urge to lean across the desk and punch him right in his pudgy little nose.

‘I don’t know what happened to him,’ I say slowly, gritting my teeth in frustration. ‘He was definitely dead when I left him. ‘He didn’t have a pulse, so I ran down here and raised the alarm. That’s all I know.’

There’s silence for a moment, as the two officer consider my words. A second glance passes between them. The female officer nods.

‘Right,’ she says, getting to her feet. ‘Well, Mr Kettle, thanks for your time. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else from you.’

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ I say, standing up to, unable to keep the anger out of my voice. ‘There’s a man dead somewhere, murdered by this psychopath, God-knows-why, and you-‘ I draw to a halt, remembering something else. The shock of the past hour is fading, the memories coming back into focus with each passing minute, like fog clearing from the windscreen of a car.

‘There was someone else,’ I say, sinking back down into my seat, talking more to myself than to the two officers. ‘Another woman.’

‘Another woman?’ the male officer echoes, ‘on the roof? And you just forgot to mention that –‘

‘Not on the roof,’ I cut him off, waving a hand impatiently to shut him up. ‘The man. It was after he handed over the money to the red-haired lady. He wanted to know where a girl was. He said…he said…’ I close my eyes, willing the words to come back into focus.

‘Where is she? What have you done with her?’

I feel a cold shiver running down my spine at the memory. Who was she? His wife? His sister? His daughter, maybe? Whoever she is, she’s still out there, and in danger. If the red-headed woman was willing to kill in cold blood after receiving her cash, who’s to say she won’t kill again? Maybe she’s holding this person hostage, and is on her way right now to finish the job, ready to dump the body in a river or in a hole in the woods, where it won’t be found for who knows how long.

I look up, feeling the horror washing over me, just in time to catch a smirk passing between the two officers.

‘Right,’ the stupid, pig-faced junior officer says. ‘Well, it’s a good idea for a crime novel, I suppose. Just do me a favour, will you? Pick a different name for the front cover. Kettle doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes.’ He gives a short, sharp, bark of laughter, and then the two of them are gone, leaving the door swinging open behind them, convinced that I’m nothing more than an attention-seeking time waster in a fluffy hotel bathrobe.

***

I sit in the manager’s office for ten whole minutes after the police officers had left. Part of me is furious, enraged at not being believed. I want to run down the corridor after the two officers, drag them back onto the roof, make them believe me. Another part of me wonders if I actually have gone crazy. Maybe the whole thing was nothing more than a figment of my imagination, a wild dream brought on by the musky, heady aromas of the many oils and lotions being rubbed into my skin by the therapist.

Could I have imagined the whole thing? A hallucination, maybe? It sounds like the kind of story brought on by a bad trip on acid – not that I’d know the first thing about that, or even what acid looks like, for that matter. Maybe there was a mix-up with a delivery, and some drug addict’s stash had gotten mixed up with the oils used in my treatment?

I shake my head. Now I really am starting to sound crazy. And anyway, I know that I didn’t imagine it. The woman was real, the man too. I watched him being shot, first in the back, then through the head. I had seen his dead body, checked for a pulse. How could he have disappeared? The ginger-haired woman must have come back for him. That’s the only thing that makes sense. Either that or she had another person working with her, someone to clean up the mess she’d made.

I shiver as I think how close I came to being caught. I probably would have ended up with a bullet in my head too. I rub at the spot between my two eyes, wondering what it would feel like to have a bullet explode through my forehead like a pen pushing through paper.

The slippers. That’s my proof. If the slippers are there, I’ll know I didn’t dream up the whole thing, that I really did witness a murder. Also, a voice says inside my head, if you leave them up there, they might be traced back to you. You don’t know what kind of technology these people have. Maybe they’ve already traced them back to you, and are on their way to your house right now to finish what they started.

I get to my feet, trembling slightly. There’s only way to solve this.

I’m going back up to the roof.

***

I should have gone home. Why didn’t I go home? I stop, one foot on the bottom step, wondering what on earth has gotten into me. This is crazy, going back to the scene of the crime, to the place where I watched a man being gunned to death, just hours ago.

My foot hovers against the step. I close my eyes. Take a deep breath. Decide.

I reach the top of the staircase quickly, my heart hammering against my chest once more, my breath quickening as my eyes dart from side to side, expecting a masked gunman to step out from the shadows at any moment. Nobody appears. I push open the door, and step back out onto the roof.

Night has fallen, and it takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness. The silhouette of the satellite dish looms up in front of me, the solar panels extending the length of the wall on the opposite side. I cast my eyes around quickly, desperate to get out of here.

There. Beside the first row of solar panels. My slippers.

I dart towards them, feeling a weight lift from my shoulders. I’m not crazy. Or hallucinating. I really did witness a murder. Those stupid officers have probably already gone home for the night, leaving whoever the dead man was looking for in terrible danger. I pick up the slippers and stare out at the night beyond, wondering what my next move should be.

It’s only then that I realise. The slippers. They didn’t move themselves. If they were on the roof when the two officers came to inspect, surely they would have seen them and brought them downstairs, asked me to account for them. Somebody must have taken them, hidden them from view until the officers had left, then put them back up here. Waiting for me to come find them.

I turn slowly, feeling an icy hand gripping the inside of my stomach.

A woman steps out from behind the satellite dish, her face barely visible in the half light, her hair tucked behind the hood of her jacket. I can only stand and watch, eyes wide, transfixed with horror.

She moves silently forward, reaching into the pocket of her jacket as she moves. When her hand comes back out again, it’s holding the same revolver in place, the silencer already screwed into position.

Pffffft.