Ninepins (38 page)

Flicking open the phone, Laura found the nine and thumbed it three times in quick succession, then pressed the green button.

‘Emergency. Which service do you require?' The words were disembodied in the darkness, as from another reality.

Then came her own voice, sounding high-pitched and over-loud. ‘Ambulance. Please hurry.'

Come now. Be here now
. It seemed inconceivable that she should have to wait, when everything, the whole world of time and space, was concentrated in the shape of the limp body in her lap.

A click, followed by another voice, equally unreal, saying, ‘Emergency ambulance. Please give your location.'

‘Yes. Please. It's Ninepins, Elswell. Four miles past the village on the Stretham road, then left into Ninepins Drove. We're outside in the garden and I can't move her. It's Beth – my little girl. She can't breathe, can't use her inhaler, she's only half conscious. She's asthmatic, you see, and with the smoke – '

Smoke! How impossible, almost ludicrous, that she could have forgotten the smoke, and the scorching heat at her back. The pumphouse – and Willow.
Oh, God, Willow.

‘A fire. There's a fire, too – we need the fire brigade. And there was another girl in there, a teenager …'

Some other distant self relayed the details of names and postcode, of medical history. Then everything else receded until there was only Beth and the scourging battle for air. With a fierce, tight focus of will, Laura drew in each breath along with her daughter. Breathe, Beth. Breathe, my sweetheart.
Please breathe, please breathe, please breathe
.

The events of the rest of the night were indistinct, or rather, consisted of a series of discrete and vivid episodes, spliced apparently at random into an unfamiliar version of time. The ambulance arrived before the two fire engines, which came only as Beth was being lifted onto the stretcher. A minute, ten minutes, half an hour: Laura could no longer judge things in the intervals of normal existence.

The paramedics were kind, but as they swung into their practised routine they distanced Beth from her, relegating Laura to a bit part player, a redundant bystander. The oxygen mask was bulky, swamping Beth's pale, pinched face and taking her further away, and in the ambulance the cylinders to which they connected her were tall, metallic and torpedo-like, making Laura feel she might be inside a military aircraft. She was obliged to sit in a bucket seat and wear a belt, which meant she couldn't reach to hold her daughter's hand. Instead, she kept up a constant, quiet stream of reassurance, which she had no idea if Beth could hear.

In A&E, they took her away completely for a time, bowling her off on a trolley through doors that swung shut behind her. Her mobile, Laura realised, was still in her hand. Vince. She badly wanted to call Vince, she wanted him to be here, but of course it was quite impossible. Instead, although her watch told her it was barely five am, she rang Simon.

‘Hi. Look, sorry, I know it's stupidly early – '

‘Laura – are you OK? Is it Beth? What's happened?'

‘A fire. But it's all right, Beth's all right …'

A nurse found her some clothes to put on under her raincoat: disposable knickers, an unaccustomed summer dress and a pair of hospital slippers. She struggled into them in a narrow toilet cubicle, and on her way out she glimpsed in the mirror a haggard stranger who could not possibly be her. No wonder the nurse had been tight-lipped; she looked like a drunk or a madwoman.

Some time later, she was allowed into a room where Beth was trussed up in a metal-framed bed, with smaller torpedoes at her side, and a heart monitor straight off the television. Laura found a plastic chair and sat down to watch and wait. Her daughter, she saw, had been undressed and dressed again in a white hospital gown. Her vest top and pyjama bottoms were folded neatly on a shelf at the foot of the bed; on the top, on its plaited string, lay the mirrored sun of Willow's good luck charm.

Just once, Beth surfaced from the place where she was trapped, a place where all there was was breathing. She opened eyes, above the mask, that were clouded with fear; they met Laura's, registered some slight alleviation, and flickered closed again.

After what could have been days or only minutes, a plain-clothed fire officer came in, together with a woman, not in uniform either, who identified herself as ‘police liaison'. Willow was not inside. Laura asked them to repeat the intelligence three or four times, in her trembling anxiety to believe it true. Willow was not in the pumphouse; it was empty, completely empty, as it had been on the night of the flood.
Thank God
. But the faces of the officers were grave and their manner still noticeably reticent.

‘What is it? There's something else, isn't there? Tell me.'

‘You will receive a full report in due course,' said the man from the fire service, ‘once our investigations are complete. But I think you should know that there are suspicious circumstances.'

‘I'm sorry, Mrs Blackwood,' said the woman. ‘I'm afraid we are treating it as a possible case of arson.'

Laura heard them as though from inside a bubble, as if it were she and not Beth who lay drifting behind the oxygen mask. A petrol can was mentioned, found empty by the pumphouse window. Did she keep one in her shed, perhaps? Fuel for her lawnmower? Really, she should have a lock on the shed door. A search of house and garden and the area surrounding had revealed, to date, no trace of Willow.

When they were gone, she switched back all her attention to her daughter in the bed. Anything but Beth was a distraction for the moment, an irritation, an irrelevance, and far too burdensome for her exhausted brain.

Nurses came and went with charts and checked readings and tweaked tubes but Laura was too numb and tired even to smile at them. Presently, morning noises began to filter in from the corridor outside the room: voices, and doors banging, and the clank of metal trays and trolleys. Thirst, hitherto unnoticed, seared her throat; when she swallowed, she tasted ash.

It was just before six when Simon came.

‘Hello, sorry it's taken me so long to – '

‘Shh!' Rising slightly from her chair to greet him, she cocked a thumb towards their daughter in the bed. Beth still wore the mask, was still wired up to all the monitors, but her state of inward concentration had relaxed and her breathing had slowed to an easier rhythm which Laura, the experienced watcher, could recognise as sleep. ‘Don't wake her,' she whispered.

‘Sorry,' he said again, now
sotto voce
, and approached the bed. ‘How is she? What have they said?'

‘Not much. You know how it is in hospitals. But they say there's no cause for alarm.'

‘But the mask?'

‘A precaution, I gather. They're going to run some tests, they say, and keep her under observation for a while.'

‘Tests?' His voice had risen again, and she flicked her eyes warningly towards the bed.

‘Because of the smoke – to see what she's inhaled. In case there were toxins or something, I suppose.'

‘Toxins?' he repeated, and she thought, in her weariness, what a child he still was, sometimes – and then, more charitably, how very much he loved his daughter.

Simon stayed for as long as he could. There were frequent texts, no doubt from Tessa, which he was trying to ignore.

‘Look,' said Laura finally, ‘there's nothing you can do here. You're needed at home. Go.'

Uncertainly, and with repeated promises to call and check on progress, he did as he was told. When he had gone, Laura subsided in her chair. She pushed it back against the wall next to the bed and let her head rest there on the cold plasterwork, closing her eyes. The wall was hard and the chair uncomfortable but she was dog tired, and it wasn't long before consciousness began to loose its hold.

Suspicious circumstances. A petrol can
.

 

When she woke with a start, somebody else was in the room.

‘Did I wake you?' The voice, from close beside her, was gentle and familiar.

‘Vince.'

He was standing between Laura and the bed, where Beth was still asleep behind her mask. ‘How is she?'

‘She'll be OK.'

He studied Beth closely. ‘She looks pale,' he said. ‘But peaceful.' Then he turned to Laura. ‘You look pale, too. Maybe it's the light in here.'

He hunkered down at her side and took hold of her hand, and she couldn't remember why it was she'd imagined she shouldn't ring him. It was so right that he should be here. But confusing, too, now that her thoughts began to clear.

‘How did you know …?'

His laugh was low, no more than a rumble in his throat. ‘Cambridge is a small place. I heard it on the radio: a fire in a historic pumping station, converted to residential use; a village to the north of the city. How many places could it be?'

She nodded dazedly.

‘I was terrified.' His simple admission touched her with surprising force.

‘I drove straight out to Ninepins. The fire brigade are still there. They said to try the hospital.' Then, more softly, he added, ‘What a mess.'

Her throat clenched as she wondered what he meant. ‘The pumphouse?'

He grimaced. ‘That, certainly. It was still smoking when I was there. The roof has gone, and everything's blackened to buggery – not to mention the two tankerfuls of water they've dumped inside.' His other hand was on top of hers now, tracing patterns on the back of her knuckles. ‘But that's not the only mess.'

‘Willow?'

It was his turn to nod.

She licked her dry lips. ‘What do you know? Who told you?' Surely the firemen didn't talk to every passer-by who called to take a look?

‘Here.' Without releasing her hand, he reached to his jacket and a produced a bottle of water. ‘Drink?'

To take off the lid required both hands, and she drank deep and gratefully, but when she set the bottle down, he captured her fingers again.

‘How do you know about Willow?' she asked again.

‘I had a call from the duty social worker. She'd had the police on to her. Wanted to know if I knew where she might be.'

Laura felt foolish then. How could she have forgotten that he was Willow's social worker?

‘And do you? Know where she might be, that is?'

‘No.'

She examined his face. ‘You would tell me, if you did?'

The brown eyes met hers seriously. ‘Yes.'

Just then, there was a slight stirring from the bed by their side. They rose as one and bent over Beth. Her eyes opened, mistily at first, but then they cleared, and moved slowly from Laura to Vince and back again.

‘Hello, love,' murmured Laura. ‘You're all right, we're here. Don't try to talk.'

Vince nodded at the oxygen mask with its tapes and tubes, the white plastic reservoir bag which trailed beneath her chin, rising and falling with her breaths. ‘Nice beard, Santa.'

A grin was visible beneath the mask; one finger lifted from its place on the blanket and wiggled in his direction.

‘You need to rest,' Laura told her daughter gently, but Beth's eyes had already closed again.

Conscious all at once of her own tiredness, Laura sat back down on the chair and shut her eyes, while Vince slid to sit on the floor at her feet.

‘And as for your footwear,' he said, ‘it's quite the fashion statement. What's with the dress, by the way?'

She opened one eye, narrowly. ‘I-I came out without much.'

There was mockery coming, she knew there was, she could see it in his face. But, ‘You look great,' was all he said.

Neither of them spoke for some time, and Laura's mind might have drifted towards sleep, had it not kept returning to the same stubborn, knotted thought.

‘I know it's stupid. I know it makes no sense at all. But I can't help feeling I want us to find her, get to her, before the police do.'

Vince squeezed her hand. ‘Yes, I know. Me, too.'

‘What time did you leave your flat?'

‘Not until almost seven. She hadn't rung there, and her phone's off. I've texted her, but she hasn't replied.'

She had their mobile numbers, Laura's and Beth's as well as Vince's. If she'd wanted to be in touch with them, she would have rung. Even without her own mobile, even if it was lost or burned, she could surely find a call box, borrow a phone …

‘I tried the hospital – the other hospital, I mean. I had some idea she might have gone there, to Marianne. But they couldn't help. I spoke to a nurse on early duty, she said they hadn't seen Willow since Monday. And in fact, she's gone AWOL, too. Marianne – she seems to have done a bunk again.'

Oh, God. What a mess, as he had rightly said.

‘Where can she be, Vince? Do you think she's all right? Oh, where in God's name can Willow be?'

Her voice must have risen rather more than she'd intended. In the bed, Beth stirred again, shifting her legs beneath the blanket.

‘Are you OK, sweetheart? Do you need anything? Are the blankets too tight? Here, let me loosen them a bit.'

Beth shook her head impatiently, twisting it from side to side on the pillow as far as the network of tubes would allow. Behind the cone of perspex, she was mumbling something.

‘Don't worry, love,' said Laura. ‘Just keep calm, don't try to speak.'

But Vince moved up to her head and loosened the tape at the side of her mask; it was only lightly connected, and with the tape undone it lifted away by a few inches with very little incumbrance.

‘What is it?' he asked her quietly. ‘What did you want to say?'

Without the oxygen feed, her breathing was slightly more arduous, though the rhythm remained regular enough. She fixed Vince intently in her gaze, and a slight frown indented her brow.

‘Maybe,' she said, and took a gulp of unenhanced hospital air.