Waking at about three with a raging thirst, Carole Seddon felt rather less mellow and started worrying again about Stephen and his family’s forthcoming Christmas visit. She was awake for over an hour.
As she lay there, willing sleep to return, she became aware of a light visible through her curtains. A strange, almost pinkish glow. Carole wondered if it presaged snow, and went back to sleep, dreaming of a White Christmas.
But the strange glow she had seen had another cause. The next morning Carole Seddon heard that there had been a fire on Fethering High Street Parade. Gallimaufry had burnt down.
Nine
Jude had heard the news in a phone call from one of her clients, and straight away rushed round to High Tor. Carole was miffed at not having been first with the information. Her head still a little fuzzy from the day before, she had taken Gulliver out for his walk before seven that Monday morning, and it was only by bad luck that she had chosen the route to the beach down by the Fethering Yacht Club and the Fether estuary. Nine times out of ten her walk would have taken her past the shops on the High Street, so she would have been able to see the destruction for herself. And also to spread the news.
As they sat down to coffee at the High Tor kitchen table, it turned out that Jude had little detail, except for the fact that the fire had taken place. “There’ll probably be something on the local news at lunchtime,” she concluded.
“I could check the BBC Southern Counties website,” said Carole, and scurried off to do so. Jude was amused by the way her neighbour, for so long a technophobe, had suddenly become hooked on computer technology. It was also characteristic of Carole that she kept her laptop permanently on a table in a spare bedroom upstairs, as if she were unable to acknowledge its portability.
Jude didn’t bother following, she just sat and enjoyed her coffee. She wasn’t expecting there to be any new information on the BBC website yet, and so it proved. “We’ll have to wait for the next bulletin,” said Carole disconsolately. “No other way of finding anything out.”
“We could visit the scene of the incident,” suggested Jude.
“What, you mean actually go down to the parade and have a look?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, we couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Well, there’ll be lots of other prurient ghouls down there, you know, like people who slow down to look at car crashes.”
“They’re probably not prurient ghouls. They’re just curious.”
“Huh.”
“Are you saying you’re not curious, Carole?”
“Well, I…Well, I…I suppose it’s only natural to want to know what’s happened locally, particularly when it involves people one knows, or rather people one has met…”
“Yes.”
“And there could possibly be something one could do to help.”
“Yes, there could. Come on, Carole, get your coat on.”
“I’ll take my basket, so that it’ll look as if I’ve gone out shopping.”
“If you want to.”
“And if I have Gulliver with me, it’ll look as if I’m taking him for a walk too, rather than just being…”
“A prurient ghoul?”
“Exactly.”
They could smell the fire long before they could see anything. In fact, Carole was amazed she hadn’t smelt it during her earlier excursion with Gulliver. Though no smoke was visible, their nostrils were filled with the stench soon after they stepped out of High Tor. Acrid, redolent of the harsh tang of burning plastic.
As predicted, there was a substantial crowd gathered in front of the High Street Parade. The antennae of Fethering residents had always been finely tuned to catastrophe. But none of the prurient ghouls could get very close to what had once been Gallimaufry. The whole parade had been cordoned off by police tape. There were still two fire engines at the front, and maybe more at the back, the side that faced towards the sea, but the main fury of the flames appeared to have been subdued. A few sparks could be seen in the interior, and some exposed beams still steamed from their recent immersion by the firemen’s hoses.
Basically the building had been gutted, the roof had collapsed, and it stood like a blackened empty box between the adjacent shops which, to the uninformed observer, did not seem to have suffered much damage.
Carole and Jude recognized quite a few of the locals. They also registered the presence of the small, thin, long-haired woman they’d seen in the Crown and Anchor last Friday. She was dressed in a faded green velvet coat over scruffy jeans, and was looking at the wreckage of Gallimaufry with something approaching satisfaction.
They might have commented on the woman’s reaction, had Gerald Hume not come bustling towards them out of the watching crowd. He opined, with all the certainty which he had brought to his career in accountancy, that the fire had been started by an electrical fault. “That’s what it usually is,” he said.
“Do you have any proof that that’s what caused it?” asked Jude.
“That’s what it usually is,” he reasserted.
Nobody else seemed to have anymore reliably authenticated information, but that had never stopped the residents of Fethering from expressing their opinions. There was an atmosphere almost of bonhomie about the gathering. Christmas was only days away, and the burning down of a shop served as a pleasant diversion. It would have been different had it been one of the long-established businesses on the parade. But Lola Le Bonnier was a recent incomer, she lived near Fedborough rather than actually in Fethering, and she had been a bit too flashy for the taste of most locals. The same went for her shop. There was something hubristic in the whole enterprise of Gallimaufry. Even the name was a bit fancy and clever-clever. Did Fethering really need somewhere selling overpriced knick-knacks? Nobody actually used the expression ‘Serve her right’, but that was the dominant feeling amongst many of the crowd.
Jude, who knew and cared for Lola, didn’t share this view. But Carole wouldn’t have taken much convincing to side with the sceptics. “The trouble is,” she said, “when you’re running something like a shop, it’s all very fine to make the place look exotic and trendy, but you can’t ignore basic Health and Safety procedures.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Jude, uncharacteristically combative.
“I mean, having all those candles and fairy lights with stuff draped all over them…well, it was just asking for trouble, wasn’t it?”
“We don’t know that’s what caused the fire,” said Jude doggedly.
“No, but we can make a pretty well-informed guess that – ”
Carole didn’t get to finish her sentence. A policeman with a loudhailer started asking the crowd to move along, telling them there was nothing to see, that there was a danger they might get in the way of the firemen’s work, and that they would be informed when it would be safe for the other shops on the parade to reopen.
Many of the spectators were unwilling to leave, but Carole and Jude separated themselves from the throng and went back home.
“Or the shop could have been torched for insurance reasons.”
“Oh, come on, Carole. What have you been reading?”
“It’s quite a common crime. Particularly in recessionary times. People borrow too much, can’t pay the mortgage…they see a fire as a way out of their liabilities.”
“We don’t know that Ricky Le Bonnier had any money problems.”