“Some people,” McGrath commented sadly, “have no respect for the dead.”
It was a little past noon when Jerome got back to the Examiner building. Most of the ten desks in the reporters’ room were occupied, but the noise level was low and the atmosphere was relaxed. The midday lull signified that all the major deadlines for that evening’s paper had been successfully met, that human brains could coast until quitting time while machine intelligences took over the job of getting the paper on to the streets. It was a period Jerome savoured for two reasons. As a latecomer to the profession, he felt it linked him to the historic days of journalism when stout shoes were an essential, the work could be physically demanding and there was a glow of personal achievement each time a paper was put to bed. Also, he liked the freedom from noise and interruptions which enabled him to make good progress with his work.
He collected a cup of iced tea from the dispenser, went straight to his own desk and sat down, swearing under his breath as his left knee produced a defiant stab of pain. The tea was cloyed with artificial sweetener, but cold enough to be refreshing. He opened his notebook and began to study his record of the morning’s two interviews, glad of the opportunity to think calmly about what he had learned. A few seconds later he became aware of somebody standing at his side. He looked up and saw Hugh Cordwell, who was in a jovial mood now that the pressure of work had eased, peering over his shoulder at the pages of shorthand.
“Squiggle, squiggle,” Cordwell said. “Squiggle, dot, squiggle.”
“That’s the most perceptive remark you’ve made in ages,” Jerome said. “What do you want, Hugh?”
“Randy Kruger is mad at you.”
“Why?”
“You’ll find out the reason why soon enough.”
“‘The reason why’ is a tautology,” Jerome pointed out, hoping to detract from the younger man’s evident pleasure. “And your utterances never merit repetition.”
A reporter at a nearby desk snorted in amusement, causing Cordwell’s eyes to shuttle angrily as he sought a reply. “Squiggle, squiggle,” he said finally, before returning to his seat.
“The spirit of the Algonquin lives on,” Jerome muttered. He tried to think of something he had done to earn Anne Kruger’s displeasure, but his mind was quickly drawn back to the infinitely greater problem represented by a human hand and a mound of ash. A man called Art Starzynski had died a strange and terrifying death, and nobody could explain why. Or could they? Jerome found that he now had an intense interest in the Examiner’s file on auto-incendiarism—if other people had died in similar circumstances the phenomenon was bound to have been investigated and the findings put on record.
Setting his tea aside, he activated his desk terminal and called up the related index pages, aiming to get a broad impression of the extent of the file. He had been prepared for a chronology going back a decade or two, and so it was with a distinct sense of shock that he picked out a listing of the year 1852 coupled with the name of Charles Dickens. More intrigued than ever, he screened further details and learned that Dickens had disposed of one character in Bleak House—Krook the money-lender›by having him undergo spontaneous incineration while alone in his room. Frowning, aware of an uncomfortable speeding up of his heart, he raced through an extract from the novel, his gaze skipping from phrase to key phrase…
The cat has retreated…and stands snarling…at something on the ground, before the fire…smouldering suffocating vapour in the room…small burnt patch of flooring…and here is—is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he is here! and this from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him.
Jerome sat back and stared at the glowing words on his VDU, wondering where the dividing line between fact and fiction actually lay. He had always thought of Dickens as a chronicler of the social conditions of his day, not as a reporter of phenomena in the dark hinterland of science. The description of what had happened to Krook, apart from one reference to contamination of the ceiling, so closely paralleled the fate of Art Starzynski as to make it clear that Dickens was no stranger to the notion of spontaneous human combustion. Another fact which Jerome found striking for a different kind of reason was that he had read Bleak House at least twice in his youth, but had retained no memory of such an unusual episode. It was as though a highly conservative and sceptical censor in his mind had decreed against the storage of obvious heresies.
Having broached the subject of classic literary references to the fire death, Jerome went further on and was fascinated by the discovery that it had been touched upon by such writers as Mark Twain, Washington Irving, Balzac, Marryat, de Quincey and Zola. Several of the books mentioned were familiar to Jerome but, again, the relevant passages were gone from his memory. Marryat was among those who went into detail, in a novel entitled Jacob Faithful published in 1834, emphasizing the point that although the victim had died in her sleep—completely reduced to black ash—the curtains of the bed had not even been singed.
But that’s impossible, was Jerome’s instinctive protest; then he recalled the curious localization of the fire damage in the Starzynski house—paintwork only a single pace away from the site of combustion had not even discoloured. Feeling baffled, almost personally affronted by the screaming scientific anomaly, he took off his glasses—transforming his surroundings into a complex blur—and polished the lenses, something he did almost unconsciously when he needed time to think. It was difficult enough to accept that a sponge filled with salty water, which was how one might regard a human body, could spontaneously generate furnace-core heat, but to go a giant step further and envisage that awesome heat being contained…
“There you are!” Anne Kruger had appeared at his side as if by magic. “How was your vacation. Ray?”
Recognizing that she needed to vent some angry sarcasm, he gave the reply she wanted. “I haven’t been on vacation.”
“Really! I was under the impression that you had.”
Brilliant witticism, Anne, he thought, replacing his glasses and bringing her face into sharp focus. “Does this mean I’ve forgotten to do something?”
There was a white beacon-flash from her eyes. “Ray, I’ve just looked through the make-up of today’s paper and I didn’t see your fire story in it.”
“My fire st—!” Jerome was shocked and indignant. “You can’t expect a piece like that to be written in a couple of hours.”
“That’s true—I’d have said something in the region of ten minutes.”
“Anne, this isn’t one of your fry pan fires—four lines on page twenty—there’s an important story here. It looks as though a citizen of this town simply burst into flames and burned away to almost nothing.”
“I’m the one who mentioned SHC to you in the first place. Remember? You as good as said I was crazy.”
“I know, and I’m sorry about that,” Jerome said, genuinely apologetic, aware of Cordwell grinning at him from the neighbouring desk. “I prejudged the matter without looking at the evidence, but I’ve just come back from the morgue and what I saw there…”
“You went and actually looked at the body?”
“Remains is a better word.”
“I didn’t realize you’d gone that far into it.” Anne’s voice had become more amiable. “All right, come into the office and we’ll have a talk.”
“Gladly.” Jerome stood up and nodded pleasantly to Cordwell, who promptly turned away. As he followed Anne to her office, breathing an invisible wake of French perfume, Jerome was again impressed by her physical attractiveness. Only ten years separated them, yet she managed to personify freshness and vitality, whereas he seemed to have been precipitated from youth into middle age with no noticeable interval between. Perhaps, if he had persevered more with contact lenses—as Carla had always urged—and had kept himself in trim, and had learned to dress younger, and had acquired more money…The list, he suddenly realized, could grow for ever, and its compilation was an exercise in futility.