This week Crime Cymru’s Louise Mumford gives us an extract from her new thriller called The Hotel, out in ebook, paperback and audio 17th August 2023.
My third thriller, The Hotel, is about four eighteen-year-olds led by Bex Harrison who decide to film in the ruins of the supposedly cursed Ravencliffe Hotel. One of them goes missing that night and the film they made becomes such a hit that the film company want them to do a ten-year reunion show back at the hotel. It is up to Bex to work out what really happened that night as new accidents occur and her own life is put in danger…
In this book I got to set everything on the coast of West Wales, just up from Poppit Sands in Cardigan Bay. There is actually a real hotel on the cliff there, called the Cliff Hotel & Spa, but the building in my book (and the curse attached to it) is very different!
Here is an extract from the beginning of The Hotel:
Bex Harrison stood on top of her world and considered shooting the man below her.
Not anywhere vital, of course. No, just a kneecap, or a hand or something, though she wasn’t convinced that her aim was good enough to not hit an artery by mistake. She sighed. It didn’t matter: the gun was fake anyway, bought as a deterrent rather than a weapon. Lowering her binoculars, she wrapped her blanket tighter around her middle and sipped her coffee.
There had been two reasons she had decided to live in this London house all those years ago: the roof and the wall. Built in Georgian times, the place had fancy crenellations at the top like a castle, and a lovely flat roof, perfect for sitting on, hidden from view to spy on the street below.
After all, they had tried to spy on her in that first year after the film came out.
But their spying hadn’t been very successful due to that wall. Bex had thought long and hard about it and had decided that the way to get total privacy was to live right in the middle of a big city. She realised that seemed counterintuitive. Countryside, a secluded valley, the top of a big hill – those were the places people thought would guarantee privacy. But people were wrong. Those places were too easily breached, all that space where intruders could hide and then, when they pounced, no one around to hear you scream.
Bex was literally boxed in. First by the massive stone wall that almost entirely circled her house and second by all the other houses around her, each garden, each wall of their own backing onto hers. No sneaky crawl spaces. Lots of people to hear the screaming.
Because, if the events nearly ten years ago had taught Bex anything, it was that the screaming was never far away.
She raised the rifle and took aim. The man below bothered her. His face was as badly creased as his trousers and he wore one of those utility vests with lots of pockets. His camera was slung around his neck as he munched his way through a never-ending supply of snacks that he conjured out of those pockets, like a shabby magician. Photographers had given up waiting outside her house years ago and she was none too pleased to see one come creeping back.
Through the gun’s sight she chose the kneecap she would aim for, angling the barrel through the gaps in the stone balustrade.
An overfed pigeon she called Bob eyed her from his perch nearby, seed scattered around him, probably too fat to fly off. She wasn’t even sure that was the original Bob, if she was honest, but it didn’t matter – she enjoyed their intellectual exchanges over mixed nuts.
‘Bang,’ she whispered, lowering the gun, blowing away imaginary smoke from the barrel. Even if the weapon had been real, it would have been useless against the kind of things that frightened her.
Of course, she knew why the photographer was there. Ten years, soon. It was an anniversary of sorts. She didn’t know what he was thinking though – that she would appear at her gates dressed in gold lamé and wearing a feather headdress ready to do the can-can to mark the occasion?
And it wasn’t him she had to worry about really.
Something was being planned, she could smell it in the air mixed in with the traffic fumes. Someone had probably been trying to get in touch with her but that would be tricky as she never looked at her email and rarely answered her phone or her door. More coffee, that was what she needed. Taking her mug with her, she hauled herself up from the chair and trudged down the steps that led through the top floor of her house, a ghost of itself draped in dustsheets. She didn’t need those rooms. On the ground floor she walked through a large hallway with chequerboard tiling on which she had set out a chessboard on a little table, two chairs on either side. She stopped and considered the game, then pushed a rook into position. It was a sneaky move. Tomorrow-Her would be angry.
She never played anyone except herself.
As she walked through a doorway the ghost house burst into colour. There was a sleek, modern kitchen somewhere under the mess, she knew because she had had it fitted nine years ago when she had bought the house. Now, however, the room was a cross between a garden centre and a library, except the librarians had gone on strike and the plants were staging a coup.
Bex pushed a pile of magazines from a concrete bench that flanked a dining table built for Vikings and sat on it, moving a plant’s questing tendrils from her face. Pouring more coffee from the cafetière into her mug, she raised it and toasted herself, tapping the edge of the mug four times against a plant’s leaf. Clean-living, book-reading, plant-tending, record-listening, yoga-bending Bex – that was her. There was a danger in letting herself go, in letting things slip or slide because that was when the darkness got in . . . and she’d seen enough of that.
There was a pile of post on the table in front of her. In the early days of the whole Ravencliffe madness she had gathered it together and burnt it in a metal bin in her back garden. Her bills had been paid by direct debit and the house had been bought with a lump sum. There had been nothing she needed to see in those letters. Now she sometimes opened the mail and sometimes didn’t: it depended on her mood.
She eyed the envelopes. Perhaps someone had been trying to get in contact with her.
But she didn’t want to know that either. Whatever people were planning for the ten-year anniversary, she didn’t want to have anything to do with it, no matter if they pleaded, begged, threatened.
She would never go back to that place.
Drumming her fingers on the table, she thought about how there was somewhere she had been planning to go tomorrow, however. She had been before, each year – a punishment of sorts. Her own personal purgatory and a place where she had always hoped she would find answers. If anyone would know what was about to happen, then it would be the people there.
She tapped her fingers four times on the tabletop. Then four again. Then again, each time not quite right, not the correct rhythm to make her feel like she could stop. Four was key – a magic number, a spell that kept her safe. By the time she had tapped out that beat of four in a way that stopped her heart fluttering, there was sweat prickling on her brow.
She sighed. It was nearly time to leave the house.
The Hotel is out 17th August as paperback, ebook and audio. Find Louise at her website louisemumfordauthor.com. Sign up to her newsletter for a free short story and lots of chances to win in giveaways throughout the year.
Twitter: @louise_mumford
Facebook and Instagram: @louisemumfordauthor
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