I took one look at Westy and my mind was already scouting locations of where to bury his body. His wife (Missus Westy) stood over his shoulder. Make that two bodies.
I guess it started when I got that pre-travel fear that most of us get. You know, when you’re packing your socks and a sudden image of a burning plane and a mountain side flashes into your mind. Usually, I’m a good flyer, but for some reason I was apprehensive this time. I even cleaned my apartment and deleted my Internet history as I knew my family would be in rifling through my stuff before the black box was found.
Anyway, back to the murdering bit. So, here I am standing in the brutalist centre of Bristol (sort of like a peak hour Dundalk, but after a large explosion or some sort of catastrophic event) looking up at the B&B that Westy had somehow found lurking about on the Internet. If dereliction was a public holiday, this would be Christmas. The other buildings on this street had long decided to pack their bags and it stood alone. Of course, this was Bristol. And being boarded up or showing signs of police tape on the doors didn’t mean it was closed for business. A sign on the door said ‘for B&B’ (and suspiciously, ‘other services’) ‘call this number’. A number then followed. Call we did and eventually getting through a panting landlord who said in that ‘OO-AR’ accent that he’d be round in a bit. My mind was already wandering to that Marriot we saw on the way into town, and when the landlord stumbled around the corner, it was already unpacking its bags.
Looking somewhere between a Spiders era Bowie and a heroin addicted Joanna Lumley, he wobbled up the street in a pair of hot pants and a fur coat.
“Did we get you out of bed?” Westy ventured
“No, just working around in the Sauna” was the creatures response. (The Village Sauna, as we found out, was just round the corner and proudly had a poster urging people to ‘out’ Homophobes).
We entered the ex-building through a broken fence, and stepping over an old rusty cooker, we were led into the bar. In the darkness, we could see the whites of eyes scurrying into the shadows. Like a great chess player I was two moves ahead, and had already swung a shovel, left the bodies behind and was sitting in the airport bar. But alas, I chickened out of mass murder, paid for my room and resigned myself to a night on the set of Hostel.
It began to amuse me actually, we literally had to climb over a roof to get to the rooms. And even though he said with a mischievous grin that there was ‘no other guests, haven’t been for some time actually’, a barking dog could be heard clearly from one of the other rooms. Still, my room was clean (as in, whoever had last killed there had been meticulous in removing all evidence) and I had planned to be so drunk later as not to notice anyway.
And that was the case. We were in Bristol to see the amazing Twilight Sad, and by god, they saved Westy's life.
That and the fact that murder is bad.
