One book, one pen on a string, a line for every hour of the night shift, signed at handover. About once a month there is an entry between two of mine, in a copperplate hand, reporting the same thing.
I am the night manager of a hundred and four room hotel and I have done the job here for fourteen years.
The log is the thing I want to explain before anything else, because it is not what people imagine.
It is an A3 hardback book on the desk behind reception. Each night is one double page, ruled into hours, and you write a line for every hour whether anything happened or not. Fire panel checked. Corridors walked. Kitchen gas off. Nothing to report.
You write in pen. You do not leave gaps, because a gap in a night log is what a solicitor looks for. If you make a mistake you strike it through once and initial it, you never scribble it out. At the end of the shift you sign the bottom of the page and the day manager counter signs it when they come on at seven.
The reason all that rigour exists is that if there is a fire, or a death, or somebody is assaulted in a corridor, that book is the hotel's account of the night. Ours has been read in a coroner's court once, in 2016, for an entirely ordinary and very sad reason.
There are eleven of us who have written in it since 2012. Five porters, three night managers including me, and three duty managers who cover holidays.
About once a month there is a twelfth hand.
It is always the 04:00 line. Always that hour, never 03:00 or 05:00.
It is copperplate. Properly so: a looped ascender on the h, a long s in the old style where an s comes before another letter, and the capitals have a flourish on them. It is written in the same blue black ink the pen on the string holds, and the pen on the string is a cheap one I buy in boxes.
It is beautiful, and it is nothing like the handwriting of anybody who works here, and I can say that with more confidence than I could say almost anything, because I have fourteen years of all eleven hands in one book.
What it says is always a version of the same sentence.
"Rooms walked. All quiet. The gentleman in 31 is still awake."
Sometimes it is "is awake". Twice it has been "is up". Once, in 2019, it was "is walking", and that is the one I think about at four in the morning when I am the one holding the pen.
The room number is always 31.
There is no room 31.
The hotel is Victorian with a sixties extension and the numbering runs 101 to 148 on the first floor, 201 to 252 on the second and 301 to 304 in the old tower rooms. There has never been a room 31 in my fourteen years and there is not one on the 1974 plans in the office, which is the oldest plan the hotel has.
What there was, until 1974, was a different numbering scheme. I know that because the linen cupboard on the second floor has a painted board in it listing room numbers against bed sizes, and the board goes from 1 to 58, and it is clearly older than the extension.
By that board, 31 is on the second floor, in the old part, and by pacing it out against the modern plan it is somewhere in what is now 214 and 215, which were made from three smaller rooms.
How the entries get there.
The book is on the desk. The desk is staffed all night, because that is the entire point of a night porter, and the one thing about this job that is completely consistent is that somebody is sitting there.
The rooms walk takes eleven minutes and you do it hourly. So the book is unattended for eleven minutes in each hour, and the desk is in an open lobby with a street door that is locked from one until six.
So somebody could do it. A person who knew the hotel, who knew when the walk happens, who could get in and out of a locked lobby, once a month, for fourteen years, to write a beautiful line of copperplate about a room that has not existed since before they were probably born.
I have put that sentence to two general managers. The first one laughed and said it was one of the porters having me on. The second one did not laugh, and said to keep the pages, and I have.
What was checked, properly, in 2018, because the second general manager asked for it.
A handwriting comparison. Not a forensic one. We are a hotel and nobody was going to pay an expert. But she got all eleven of us to write that exact sentence on a sheet of paper, separately, without telling us why, as part of a fire training exercise that she invented for the purpose. I was one of the eleven and I did not know until afterwards.
None of the eleven is close. Nobody here writes copperplate and two of the porters write in capitals.
The CCTV. There is a camera on the lobby pointed at the front door, and it covers the end of the desk but not the book, because the book sits behind the counter on the inside. You can see the desk area and the chair. We pulled the four weeks around one entry in 2018 and watched the empty lobby at four in the morning at eight times speed for eleven minutes in each hour.
Nobody comes in. Nobody goes behind the desk. The porter goes out on his walk at 04:01 and comes back at 04:12 and sits down.
The entry for 04:00 that night is in the copperplate hand, above the porter's own 05:00 line.
I have done one thing I have never written in the book.
In the March, on a night I was on the desk alone, I wrote the 04:00 line myself before I went on the walk, which is against procedure because you write the line for the hour you have just completed. I wrote: Rooms walked, all quiet, no gentleman in 31.
I have never done anything like that in fourteen years and I did it because I had been on nights for eleven days and I was tired and irritable, and it was a stupid thing for a grown man to do.
When I came back from the walk my line had a single neat strike through it and a set of initials beside it that are not mine and are not anybody's.
And underneath it, on the same hour's line, in that hand:
"Rooms walked. All quiet. He is on the stairs now."
I finished the shift. You do.
I counter signed the page at seven with the day manager standing there, and she read it the way they do, which is not at all, and signed under me.
The book is still on the desk and the pen is still on the string and I still do four nights a week, because I am fifty six and it is a good job and I am very good at it.
What I have changed is that on the hourly walk I now go up the back stairs and come down the front, which is the opposite of the way I did it for thirteen years, and the reason is simply that the back stairs do not pass 214 and 215.
It is the same eleven minutes. Nobody has noticed. And the entries still come, about once a month, and it is always the 04:00 line, and he is always still awake.