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A car had come up behind the bus at speed and a uniformed police sergeant got out and came running to join them. Had a look of that Welsh movie actor who kept on getting married to Liz Taylor, thought Joe. The voice too.
‘What the hell’s going on here?’ he demanded.
Merv, never one to miss the chance of sending up a copper, said, ‘Could be a millennium bonfire, got the dates wrong.’
The cop ignored him. His face expressed a strange mixture of anger and bafflement. Might look like Richard Burton but he was far from word perfect in his role, which was to take charge of the situation, thought Joe. He punched 999 once more.
Beryl said, ‘Joe, have you forgotten to switch on again?’
Now the cop found his lines.
‘Leave this to me,’ he snapped. ‘And move back, will you? Now!’
He ran back to his car, presumably to call up help.
Joe examined his phone. Beryl was right. Again. He smiled sheepishly at her. He didn’t mind being wrong. You got used to it. And it was nice that now he could relax and enjoy the fire without feeling he had to do anything about it.
Then Beryl screamed, ‘Joe, there’s someone in there!’
And looking up along the line indicated by her pointing finger, Joe saw the black outline of a human figure against the dark-red glow in one of the upstairs windows.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_816e22be-8085-527e-88aa-207ba3e41b70)
If Beryl hadn’t prefaced her cry with Joe! he might not have done it.
And if he’d taken thought, he certainly wouldn’t have done it, not because thought would have brought self-interest into play and there was a presumably fully paid-up public servant in calling distance, but simply because for Joe problem-solving by the cerebral route usually involved a paper and pencil and two pints of Guinness.
But pausing only to thrust the phone into Beryl’s hand, he’d set off running around the back of the house before he’d had time to work out by reason alone that just because the front of the house was an inferno didn’t mean the back was burning fiercely too.
It wasn’t. Not yet. At least not upstairs, though the flicker of the flames was clearly visible through the ground-floor windows. Meaning it was pointless going in at that level.
Against the rear wall stood a lean-to wash house with a sloping roof angling up to a first-floor window. There was a large aluminium water butt under the wash house downspout. With difficulty Joe clambered on it and used it as a step up on to the roof.
Here he paused. Through the chill night air he could feel draughts of heat drifting from the house. Must be hot as hell in there. He looked down into the water butt. From the black mirror of the water’s surface, cold-eyed stars stared back at him.
Again, no thought. Just a deep breath, then he crouched down and slid off the roof.
Spring might be bursting out all over but winter was still lurking here. He shot out like a missile from a nuclear sub and found himself back on top of the lean-to with no recollection of how he’d got there.
Dripping water from every orifice, he knelt on the slates, looking up at the first-floor window. A taller man could easily have reached the sill by stretching out his arm, but Joe wasn’t a taller man. In fact, he was a good inch shorter than Beryl Boddington, and when she wore her nurse’s cap, he felt a good foot shorter. But uniforms generally had that effect on him.
He tried to scramble up the roof. It was like being a squirrel in a wheel. The slates started sliding under his knees so that he had to scramble even faster just to stay on the spot. Much more of this and he was going to be back in the water butt. He flung himself forward, caught at the lip of the sill with the tips of his fingers, and got just enough purchase to draw himself up.
The window was open, which was good. It was also very small, which was bad. For while no man by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature, any man by taking the Great British Breakfast and lunching regularly on cheeseburgers with double chips can add a couple to his girth.
There was a moment when he thought he was stuck and he tried to reconcile himself to the prospect of having his head toasted crisp while his legs kicked wildly in the chilly air. Far from composing himself, the notion made him struggle so violently, he erupted through the window like a cork from a bottle and found himself lying on a rug in a small but nicely furnished bedroom.
He felt beneath the rug. The floorboards felt warm but still well this side of combustion. The closed door was not so promising. It felt definitely hot to the touch and he’d seen enough disaster movies to know that opening it could be like throwing a canful of paraffin on to a bonfire.
But having got so far, he couldn’t just retreat. Could he?
He looked up for inspiration.
And found himself looking at a small trap door in the ceiling.
Fortunately, like most old farmhouses this one had been built for sixteenth-century dwarves, and standing on a chest of drawers elevated him right to the low ceiling.
The trap was a tight fit. As he pushed up with all his strength, it occurred to him that if the flames had got into the attic via the front bedrooms, this too could produce the can of paraffin effect.
Then all at once it gave way and he was standing with his head in the roof space, and it wasn’t being burnt off.
But there was smoke up here. It caught at his throat and made him cough in a manner which would have had Rev. Pot glaring. In the Rev.’s eyes, all ailments which affected the larynx were self-induced and totally undeserving of sympathy.
He ducked his head back into the bedroom, pulled off his sodden jacket and draped it over his head. Then he took a deep breath of air and dragged himself through the narrow gap into the attic.
It was unboarded so he had to lie flat across a couple of beams till his eyesight adjusted. Something scuttled over his outstretched arm. Mouse, or maybe a rat, getting the message there was trouble on the way and looking for an exit. He hoped it made it.
He rose to his feet and tore a couple of slates out of the roof. Air might feed fire but it also fed humans and anyway it was good to take a last look at the starry sky. He edited out last, took a deep breath and started moving forward.
Lack of height was now an advantage. If he’d been built like Arnie Schwarzenegger he’d have been bent double. On the other hand, he guessed the poor devil trapped in the fire would probably have preferred even a contorted Arnie.
Where he was moving to he didn’t know. What he needed was a plan. Break through the ceiling below him was an option. He considered it. Probably go up like a Roman Candle as the fire funnelled through the hole, and in any case it only made sense if he had some idea where the trapped man was situated.
Which, he realized, he might have.
There was a water tank up ahead. Not very big, looked like the header tank for a shower, and the water in it was bubbling like the shower was switched on. Meaning maybe the trapped man had sought refuge here from the flames.
He checked the fall of the pipes. Chances were they went straight down into the shower room. He touched the plasterboard around them. Still cool.
He raised his right foot and stamped. The plasterboard cracked. He stamped again, harder. His left foot slipped off the narrow beam, his whole body hit the floor and he went through the ceiling in an avalanche of dust and plaster. And water.
He landed soft and noisy. The softness was a human body. The noise was the human whose body it was, shrieking.
He’d have felt pleased with himself if there’d been time. It was a shower room and the trapped man had sought refuge here. Only it wasn’t a man. It was a young woman. He knew that because she was naked.
She was in a bad way. She’d probably breathed in too much of the smoke which was gradually filling the cubicle for anything but incoherent shrieks to come out. Her arms were gashed like she’d pushed them through a windowpane, and her face and body were heat-blistered, but worst of all was her left leg which was both burnt and torn. Went through a burning floorboard, he guessed. If she’d headed for the back of the house she might have made it the way he’d come in. Instead she’d headed into the shower, back into the shower most likely, which would explain both why she had no clothes on and why she hadn’t heard any noise as the fire took a hold below.
Shoot, here he was thinking like a detective when what he should be doing was thinking like big Arnie. The heat in here was growing by the second and it couldn’t be long before the flames came licking through and all that the rapidly diminishing flow of water would do was let them boil before they burnt.
He said, ‘We’ve got to get out. Can you move at all?’
Her eyes struggled to focus. They were grey and he could see that her face, even though blistered, was the face of a pretty girl, late teens maybe.
The eyes had got him now. They registered puzzlement for a moment. Couldn’t blame her. Even if he had been Arnie, she’d still have wondered where the shoot he came from.
He said, ‘I’ve come down from the attic. We’ve got to get back up there. Are you ready?’
Stupid question. Her gaze went up to the hole in the ceiling then back to his face. She nodded. He could see that even that movement caused pain. He knew there was worse to come and he guessed she knew it too.
He stood up and pulled her upright with him. She let out what was a shriek in any language but she wasn’t a deadweight, not quite. She was giving what help she could. He looked up at the hole into the attic. Even with munchkin-level ceilings, this was going to be the impossible side of difficult. What he needed was a ladder. He looked down. Best he could find was a low plastic stool, presumably for Arnie-sized showerers to sit on so they didn’t bang their heads. He propped the woman up against the wall, which was getting hotter by the second. Then he squatted down, positioned the stool, thrust his head between her legs from behind, took her weight on his shoulders and stood upright like a weightlifter doing a lift-and-press.
He presumed she shrieked some more but he couldn’t hear for the sound of the blood drumming in his ears, or maybe it was the fire raging beyond the wall.
‘Try to pull yourself up,’ he yelled.
He didn’t know if she could hear or, if she could, whether she’d have the strength or the will to obey.
But she was brave, braver than he guessed he’d have been in like circumstances. And she had the resilience of youth. He felt her body move, and he stepped up on to the stool and grabbed her thighs in his hands and thrust upwards with all his might.
There was a moment when he thought she was stuck, and all his strength was gone, and there was nothing to do but subside into the cubicle and pray they suffocated before the flames got to them.
Then suddenly she was through, and the weight was off Joe’s shoulders.
‘Don’t come off the beams!’ he yelled, easing her legs through the hole.
Now it was his turn. He reached up, took a strong grip on the beams on either side of the hole, and hoisted himself through with the fluency of an Olympic gymnast on the parallel bars.
Gold medal? he thought. Piece of cake. All you need’s a fire under your bum.
But there was no time for the National Anthem. With a series of cracks like an old sailing ship taking a broadside, the attic floor burst open at half a dozen points and tongues of flame came shooting through to lick greedily at the ancient beams.
Suddenly Joe was back in his childhood schoolroom. If a nine-inch beam burns at one cubic inch every five seconds, how long will it be before the house collapses in on itself? Answer: doesn’t matter ‘cos you’ll have suffocated long before that.
OK, another problem. (Shoot! I must be dying. My life flashing before me, like they say in the books.) If a middle-aged, out-of-condition, overweight PI picks up an eight-stone woman and tries to run along a narrow burning beam in dense smoke which reduces visibility to nil and breathing to less, how does someone explain to his pet cat, Whitey, why he never came home again?
Answer: not applicable. Man would have to be mad to try it. Man would have to be very stupid indeed not to work out that one life was preferable to two deaths and abandon the woman to her fate.
Such was the verdict of rational thought. But Joe was a slow thinker and he’d been up and running before good old rational thought had even got out of its blocks. The woman was in his arms. He hit the slope of the roof at the point where he’d already removed the slates to make a breathing hole, erupted into the cold Welsh night like a comet, went straight over the edge, crash-landed on the lean-to roof, bounced twice, caught the edge of the water butt with his heels, twisted in the air to give the woman the soft landing, and found himself lying on the blessed ground, looking up at a sky so packed with stars, he felt he was trembling on the brink of eternity.
Earth beneath him, water pouring over him, fire behind him, and the bright clear air above. The four first things. It was right they should be the four last things also. He felt his whole being drawn up towards that starry infinity.
Then this peace was disturbed by the arrival of moving shapes and chattering voices, growing ever louder and calling his name, all trying to get him back to the world of here and now. But his wise old body knew that this world was full of pain and tribulation, so it gave commands.
Joe closed his eyes, and light and noise and thought and feeling all died together.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_ebbdb01d-e11c-5bd0-8711-1bfe483db63a)
When he awoke he was still on his back and he still had a naked female body in his arms.
Only now it was Beryl Boddington’s and it smelled of wild strawberries and honey and she was sighing with pleasure, like a cello accompanying a Brahms love song. And, amazingly, he could see this marvellous body, every bit of it, even as his other four senses took their perfect pleasure.
Even their minds seemed twined. He yearned towards her, eager for consummation, and in his head he heard her laugh as she pulled away a little.
‘No need to rush, Joe, boy. Not here, this is for ever, this is the place where you can pick all the flowers along the way, and see them grow again even while you’re drinking in their scent.’
This was beyond anything Rev. Pot had ever promised in his most optimistic sermons. If Joe had known heaven was going to be like this he’d have paid a lot more heed to Aunt Mirabelle and never turned over and gone back to sleep on a Sunday morning. Let word of this get around, and there’d be queues forming at first light outside chapels and churches and mosques and temples and tabernacles and synagogues …
He looked at Beryl’s smiling loving face above his, felt her warm scented breath on his lips. He strained up to press his hungry mouth to hers, got so close that her beloved features blurred. He relaxed and blinked once, twice, and smiled as that lovely, loving, beloved visage slowly came back into focus, till once more he saw clearly those big brown eyes, so full of compassion and concern …
‘Oh shoot!’ said Joe. At least that’s what he tried to say, only his throat was so rough it came out halfway between a cough and a groan.
‘Joe, you’re awake,’ said Merv Golightly.
Joe blinked again, but it was no use. Merv remained. He let his gaze drift slowly round the room. There were half a dozen other beds in it, though no one in them moved. It was either a hospital ward or a mortuary.
He pushed himself up in the bed and groaned again as the movement set off a small symphony of aches and pains. When Merv tried to help him, he shook his head and pointed to a jug of water on the bedside locker. The big man poured him a glassful and he drank it greedily.
Then he tried his voice again and this time got a result, though it sounded like something coming out of an old-fashioned gramophone that needed winding up.
‘Where am I?’ he said,
‘Some place called Caerlindys, think that’s how you say it, but I couldn’t swear. Joe, my friend, it’s really great to have you back. But how come, all these years, and you never told me your big secret?’
‘Eh?’ croaked Joe.
‘Last night, we’d just got you definitely down for dead and long gone, then you come bursting through the roof of that burning building and fly through the air with this rescued lady in your arms, and even twist round so it’s you who hits hard and her who lands soft. Joe, your secret is out. Everyone knows now you’re really Superman!’
‘You’re a real joker, Merv,’ croaked Joe. ‘No wonder folk throw themselves out of your taxi while it’s still moving.’
Merv laughed loud enough to raise a couple of heads off pillows, which was a relief. Then he leaned close and murmured, ‘Seriously, man, though I ain’t putting this in writing, I’m truly proud to know you.’
Embarrassed, Joe downed another half-pint of water and asked, ‘So where’s the others? Where’d you all end up last night?’
Merv put his head on one side and gave a modest shrug.
‘That burning house, just another half-mile on, and there it was. Branddreth College, place where we’re staying. Didn’t I say I had the instinct?’
‘And where’s this place we’re at now, Caerlindys, is it?’
‘Sound like a native, Joe. Twenty miles going on seventy from the college, depending whether you know the lingo. Bad news is the town’s not much bigger than the Hypermart back home, good news is the hospital’s almost as big as the town.’
‘You bring me here, Merv?’
‘No. That cop, never caught his name, conjured up the whole circus, cop cars, ambulance and fire engine turned up. Too late to do any good, mind. House is ashes, which you’d have been too if you hadn’t pulled your Y-fronts over your trousers and done the switch. You’re a hero, Joe, but don’t be surprised if the cops treat you like an idiot or a suspect. Guy in charge is a DI called Ursell, pronounced arsehole from the sound of him. I’ve met some miserable bastards but he beats them all. He’s like Chivers without the charm.’
This was a poor recommendation, Sergeant Chivers of Luton CID being the founder member of the Sixsmith-sucks club.
‘He around, is he?’
‘Oh yes. Asking more questions than Ruby Wax and cheekier with it. He’ll surely want to talk to you, Joe. Numero duo on his list after the woman, and she’s not talking to anyone.’
‘The woman? Oh shoot.’ Joe was racked with guilt he hadn’t thought about the woman till now. ‘How’s she doing, Merv? You’re not saying she’s out of it?’
‘No, still with us, they say, but only just. She looked a real mess last night. Then so did you and look at you now! Hey, here’s something to cheer you up.’
Joe looked towards the door and groaned, but only inwardly. Groaning outwardly at Aunt Mirabelle was never a good idea. In a hospital bed, it could have you on your belly receiving an enema. In her eyes, any treatment that didn’t start with a good clear-out was doomed to failure.
Then his spirits lifted as he spotted Beryl close behind her, talking to a tiny nurse who looked about twelve, with an elfin face and the brightest red hair he’d ever seen, bursting out of the confines of her cap like tongues of fire. Not a comfortable image.
