Countdown to Terror

Chapter Three

Chapter 3

 

Sporting a little black dress with bare legs ending in fashionable red high-heeled shoes, Jenny Lomas was standing in the queue at reception in the Imperial Hotel, almost glued to Samir, who was not letting her out of his sight for the merest instant, when she heard a voice she knew but could not immediately place.

The urbane gent only feet away was chatting to the assistant manager and confirming that he had travelled down to London from Crewe, in Cheshire. She was now terrified and paranoid about what Samir might be involved in. He seemed to be spending more and more time with his mates from the college, most of who appeared to be Muslim and certainly did not look like accountancy students. Could she just up and run, go to the police, or confide in her mother? A myriad of thoughts passed through her brain in a matter of seconds as she stood trembling and listening to the gent chatting calmly away to the assistant manager.

Ah, golf, she thought. After breaking up with her prospective Conservative candidate boyfriend, who’d gone off with a political researcher three months earlier, she had been down in the dumps and had fallen for the obvious but insincere charms of Samir – well, obvious in her mother’s eyes, anyway. As a way of sparking Jenny back into her old self, her mother had paid for golf lessons at the Forest View Golf Club, where she was a member. Forest View was very friendly, definitely not a stuffy, toffee-nosed, invitation-only kind of place. The golf pro Billy Wills was amusing with an easygoing style, and Jenny made good progress in the beginners group, where surprisingly there were quite a few younger girls learning, ranging from secretaries to an airline pilot.

Carol Jennifer Lomas, known as Jenny to her friends, had chosen Jenny as her preferred mode of address ever since being teased at school that Carol was also a boy’s name.

It came to her in a flash. She had turned up at the tee for a round with Billy to sort out her chipping, and Billy had suggested a lob wedge – whatever that was – but the reception clerk at the club had come running out to advise that Billy Wills’ car had broken down. The gent standing three feet away at the Imperial Hotel reception desk was the Good Samaritan who had been waiting for the next tee time and offered to guide her round if Jenny did not mind. Mind?, It turned out to be excellent: he was a true gentleman and she now knew what a lob wedge was for, even if she could not make it do what it was designed to do.

‘Samir, I have left my mobile in the room!’ Jenny cried as she sprinted away through the lobby to the lift. The journey in the lift was torture and seemed endless. Could Samir check out and get back to their recently vacated room twenty-four before her? Finding her Good Samaritan again was one thing, but what next? It was only a few weeks ago, so surely he would remember her, but how to make contact without Samir noticing? She had overheard he was to visit the British Museum on a guided tour about Ancient Egypt at two thirty in room sixty-four – the very same venue for Samir’s reconnoitre and Islamic study that afternoon. Jenny returned to reception and was mightily relieved to see Samir still settling the bill. The gent was nowhere to be seen.

‘I found it next to the TV remote,’ she stammered, and Samir grunted something in exasperation. She had got away with it!

Standing in the queue waiting to check out, Samir recalled the events of the past few weeks. He was sweating. Could he keep this up? He was sure Jenny suspected he was up to something: the story he had fed her about further research into Islamic history had not sounded at all convincing, even when he explained that he needed to visit the British Museum before April 15th,  which was when the exhibition Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam was due to end.