I Own You by Dawn McConnell

Author:Dawn McConnell [McConnell, Dawn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Books

Chapter 16

Hotel from Hell

About a month after we got back from the States, Stuart made a new investment in a hotel with Adam, and installed his friend Kevin as the manager. The Cavendish had eighty-two rooms, two bars and two nightclubs on the premises. It had once been a grand Victorian building but, in the last decade, it had been run into the ground. Several previous owners had failed to make the capital investments needed for the upkeep so the place had become an eyesore. Crumbling and much unloved, it was run as a doss house for council tenants. And this, Stuart felt, was a perfect money-spinner.

But almost immediately alarm bells started ringing. For just six weeks after Kevin had been installed as the manager Stuart came to talk to me, needing my help.

‘We’ve got a problem,’ he said grimly. ‘It’s Kevin. I think he’s stealing.’ He wanted me to look at the books.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out what was going on. After spending just one week at The Cavendish, I saw how it all worked. This wasn’t a hotel for tourists, it was more like the hotel from hell – peeling wallpaper, tatty carpets, broken windows and battered furniture. For £20 a night anyone could get a roof over their head – and I mean anyone – so it was here that the very dregs of society washed up. In The Cavendish the council housed its very worst tenants, the people they couldn’t put anywhere else. There were heroin addicts, shoplifters, murderers, rapists and sex offenders. But I wasn’t worried about this – to my mind, people were just people underneath and I had run pubs before where hard Glasgow men drank nightly. I had dealt with flashers and the criminal underworld and I knew I could cope. The council was happy to pay £140 a week for each resident on a bed-and-breakfast basis – though many weren’t up in time for breakfast – as long as the hotel could ensure the residents stayed in one place and didn’t skip town. There was even a weekly register for the council tenants to sign, just to ensure we kept tabs on our guests.

From looking at the books, I saw that Stuart was right: Kevin was stealing on a grand scale and he was doing it so openly, so brazenly, it was shocking. The hotel had its fair share of permanent council residents, which brought in a lot of money, but it also took in business off the street: customers who paid cash. The bars and clubs were also cash businesses. But there was no cash in the safe – no cash anywhere at all! I estimated that in the past few weeks, £40,000 had gone missing from the business. Stuart had installed his pal to run his hotel but Kevin had had his grubby little hands in the till the whole time.

‘Right, he’s out,’ Stuart told me decisively after I went through all the figures with him.

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