By the time the crowd had gathered, standing outside with coats over their nightclothes, the fire was burning as high as the two-storey buildings framing it at either edge of the Green, making a giant yellow-red cradle of flame wisping off into the black of the winter’s morning, occasionally split by a gust of wind that revealed a skeleton of rafters with the roof peeling back from them.
The heat kept the crowd swept back in a perfect arc, unable to take another step towards the oven blast that would tighten the skin on their faces like baking apples. They peered over the shoulders of the police patrolling the line and watched the firemen, distant stick figures against the glare.
Mr. McKendrick, persuaded to give up on his relay of buckets and stay out of the firemen’s way, stood on one side of Mrs. Poole with his arm around her shoulders. Malcolm held her other hand and although the crowd kept back from them as much as from the fire, Mrs. Poole could hear the whispers swoop and ripple.
“Murray Poole.”
“Nobody knows for sure.”
“All she said was he wasn’t at home.”
“But nobody knows.”
“Dear God.”
“God in heaven, no.”
The firemen retreated, hacking and steaming, lighting incongruous cigarettes and muttering to each other. A group standing close together bent respectfully and listened to a police sergeant, who looked like a doll beside them. She stretched out her radio hand again and again as she spoke, pointing into the crowd, and each time the firemen’s heads lifted and followed the gesture. Then two of them made their way over to Mrs. Poole and asked her where they could talk.
Just inside the street door, they peeled off their stinking armour and followed Mrs. Poole, Mr. McKendrick, and Malcolm upstairs, with the little policewoman behind them.
Fancy was sitting with Keiko in the kitchen. She had left her house at just the moment she might have if she had been woken by the sirens, and had come straight to the flat to check on Viola, clenching Keiko into a hug, enveloping her into the smell of washed hair and bathed skin.
“I just saw the fire,” she had said. “Is she awake? Is she sleeping through it? Listen, I’ve just been having the most disgusting nightmares I’ve ever had in my life. I must be psychic, eh? Do you hear me? I had a really bad dream. But I don’t ever want to talk about it, right?”
The firemen insisted, with practised rhetoric, that they should stay on washable surfaces, away from fabric, so they all huddled into the kitchen, Malcolm squeezing himself into the window casement to make more room for the others. Keiko and Fancy started making tea.
“And what makes you fear your son might be in there, madam?” asked what Keiko and Mr. McKendrick decided must be a prearranged spokesman, perhaps a trained communicator, whose job it was to liaise with the public in these soothing and confident tones.
As the sky lightened, dimming the fire ahead of its death, the talk in the kitchen circled and thrashed. Keiko put pans of extra water on the cooker to boil and rummaged out spare cups, Malcolm made toast, Fancy ferried trays of tea up and down to the parched throats of the rest of the crew, busy now. Once the fire had had its glory, there were small victories to be won.
Upstairs, the two firemen’s early hunch-that no discarded cigarette butt could do that much, that fast-was strengthening. The building was changing hands? There was some dispute over who was going to buy? So the missing young man might be angry? Mrs. Poole, clouded by lack of sleep, was not pretending as she reached out for what was being suggested here. She grasped at the fantasy that Murray was on the run from a terrible crime, sickened for real at the other story the fireman skirted round: that he had choked in the smoke while the rest of them were sleeping.
“Nobody seems to know what Mr. Byers’s home address might be,” said the policewoman.
“We’ll just wait for him to turn up for work,” said Mr. McKendrick. “See what he has to say.”
“And Forensics will start as soon as they can, Mrs. Poole,” said the fireman. “If your son was in there, and God forbid that he was, we’ll find something, but it’s not going to be much. You should prepare yourself for that, if you can.” He shook his head in practised sorrow, although he’d always found that a loved one gone with only zips and buttons curled into petals behind them wasn’t as hard to face, after months and cards and flowers had gone by, as a good-sized box of remains. He couldn’t say that right now, of course. Right now, the story of an absconding arsonist was still on the table, but he had been in this game too long not to know the feel of a site where souls had got away. He pulled a sigh up from his stockinged feet. “Whoever set that fire knew what he was doing,” he said. “And I’ll bet my pension that somebody set it.”
Fancy, pushing the door open, coming back with a tray of empty cups, caught Malcolm’s eye, and Sergeant Ballam, seeing the flash that passed between them, drooped into her tiredness just a little more. They cared about this biker boy, then, and she had a feeling there were no happy surprises to come; these good people had only pain ahead. She had seen them before, these shifts between despair and relief that were crossing Mrs. Poole’s face, the exhaustion of worry and that strange euphoria that every fire brings with it, and she knew that when you start your grieving bone-tired already from hope, it was a hard haul to the other side.
She and the firemen did not have to speak as they parted out on the street in the grey light. The men headed back to the trucks in the hero swagger of their heat-proof boots. The sergeant spent another while in desultory interviews with witnesses, each one confirming what she already knew, some of them even joking.
“Bloody good thing the fire was tonight and not yesterday, eh? Or Jimmy McKendrick would be cuffed and cautioned for sure.”
She chuckled. Laughing at their jokes was a big part of community policing.
“Aye, if they knew where to look for him,” said someone else. “I heard it wasn’t his own place he came from this morning.”
“Is that a fact?”
“And Malcolm Poole was on the scene pretty quick too.”
“Oh?”
“Oh yes.”
Behind her smile, the sergeant wondered-and not for the first time-how in God’s name anyone could live in a place like this. They’d eat you alive.
postscript
Keiko stood at the kitchen window, staring down into the yard. If she shut her eyes tight she could still just get the sequence to play: the grim-faced woman with her buckets, kicking the door shut behind her and plodding to the centre of the concrete to tip out the water into the drain. But the features were beginning to blur and no amount of effort could map them on to Grace’s face in her imagination, just as no amount of trellis and clematis could disguise the three hulking bins down there and make it look less like a yard and more like a garden, even with the extra space where the slaughterhouse used to be.
She would be sorry to leave. More than that if she were honest; she was scared to leave. The memories were ever a little paler, a little smaller, against the changed reality of the place where she had lived through them, but they might begin to grow again once their only home was in her mind.
The printer was still whirring on the big table in the living room, and she padded through to check on its progress. Seventy pages done and the same to go. It was going to cost her a fortune to post it to Dr. Bryant, but she knew if she took it to him by hand he would make a point of pretending it was nothing very special and, although she didn’t believe he could take away her swell of pride and relief, she wasn’t sure she could resist crumpling up the pages and hurling them at him one by one, or just whacking him in the kidneys with the ring-binder. She squared up the cover sheet on top of the first seventy. Forty-three Cooks and a Pot of Broth: decision-making by committee. The title had been Malcolm’s idea and she knew Dr. Bryant would veto it, but it had made the Traders laugh when she’d presented her final report at the last meeting, and any respect Dr. Bryant might have started out with had been killed off by her swerve into a completely different topic halfway through her first year, despite all the profiling work she’d done.