Trial by Fire (24 page)

The sooner he went back to ignoring her the better. Look at him with his beseeching eyes, like an ancient puppy with none of the appeal. 'Later, Dad, later. Take someone else. I'll be all right on my own.'

`No, you won't, of course you won't. I've had that Mr Bailey in here only this morning asking about you. All about homework, washing up, and did you have a bicycle, for heaven's sake. Everyone seems to think I bloody neglect you, and I'm not having them thinking that.

What would you do if I left you here?'

Meaning what would they think, all of them out there. Mind my own business, that's what I'd do, if you and everyone else would only mind yours. Words at the back of her throat ready to be shouted in sheer exasperation and gut-wrenching panic: Why don't you leave me alone? Can't you see I've got far too much to cope with already? It's a bit late to look after me now, Dad.

`Later, Dad, like I said,' stammered in a voice of wheedling humility. 'I couldn't cope.

Not just yet. I'm not quite ready.' A better note to strike with him unable to see her little fists clenched behind the desk.

`Sure, darling child, but I don't see why.' The eyes filled with tears again. God, he had an inexhaustible supply that his customers never saw. He came around the desk again with his automatic gestures, automatic voice, patting her back.

"S'all right, Dad, 'S'all right, really it is. Let's just stay still awhile, shall we? After that man's been tried, Daddy, then we'll go, shall we?'

He thought of the hideous expenditure he was offering and might be avoiding, considered the business he might miss if he went away, thought of the evening ahead with delicious Amanda Scott, found himself suddenly less tearful, and patted Evelyn's behind in turn. She leapt away like a scalded cat, calmed immediately, and sat down away from him, smiling her placatory smile.

ÒK, darling child. Anything you say.'

Evelyn could have wept during her afternoon of industry, ploughing through the list of shopping he had given her and she had not dared refuse. Father was watching her: it seemed everyone was watching her: she felt it when she walked down Branston High Street like a grown-up with a grocery bag, sick of it, very sick. She was even watched when she was out of bounds with William.

She'd been seen on a tube platform, and he'd gone home alone, saying God knows what. If they found out about William, and what darling child did with William, that would be the end of holiday plans, school, and just about everything else that made life tolerable, like being ignored, for instance. William had to be protected and that was all there was about it.

Going on holiday and leaving that vulnerable lump was quite unthinkable. He had to be protected from himself was what, and both of them had better stay protected from the outside world.

`Buy more groceries, will you, darling child? Especially washing-up liquid?' As if she was the skivvy her mother had wanted her to be. 'I don't know what you do with it,' he'd said.

'Do you drink it or something?'

Ì like the dishes clean,' Evelyn had said primly. Yes, she would love the holiday, even with him — she could lose him somewhere; he would soon be bored with her — but it was impossible. She bought the washing-up liquid, cheapest brand, like he said, looked at it quizzically.

Quite impossible to leave now.

Not without William sorted out first.

The flames were still murmuring towards the beginnings of stars when Bailey arrived at this fire. The fury of them had diminished, but the display and the noise were still significant. Most of the noise was the row of human endeavour, but as he walked towards the scene, there was a cracking of glass above the shop yard, then warning shouts as broken windowpanes clattered into the tiny yard below, musical and sinister, loud above the spitting of flame. The fire had long since engulfed its own beginnings.

Bailey knew on first sight exactly what fuel had been used, watched the hungry heat that had stroked the windows into explosion. A low pyramid of boxes was tumbled by water.

The firemen always used too much water, causing more damage than the fire. It was dramatic but pathetic, the whole sight, but it was under control. He noticed Amanda Scott's presence and her slightly festive clothes. Beneath her cloth coat, he could see the shiny material of an unusually flamboyant blouse catching the reflections of the dying flames, which also threw into focus the hard planes of her face. Her eyes shone like crystal: she was stiff with resentment at the interruption of her evening. Without a word she handed him the souvenirs she had found so efficiently, knowing he disliked her for it. For one bizarre moment, Bailey imagined her incandescent with malice.

`Coming out through the front, sir,' said another voice, irritatingly cheerful.

`Thank you.' He ducked down the smoke-filled alley beside the shop, followed the light to the road beyond.

`No problem here, sir, no one dead. They're in shock and all that, shock and smoke.

One of them is cut. They live in the flat upstairs, sir. No, they're not the owners. They're an elderly couple who were watching TV, saw the flames at the back, and panicked. Couldn't get out, smashed the front door of the shop.'

Cut and crying, controlled tenants who lived above an upmarket gift shop in peaceful disharmony. Now they were consigned to a night in hospital and a lifetime fear of flames. The ambulance rolled away. One panting key holder was conferring with the fire brigade on the boarding up of his shattered plate-glass window, moaning about ruined stock already accumulated for Christmas, what a mess, what a bloody mess, a man disliking his life in the semidarkness and the acrid stench of the smoke. Bailey was momentarily oblivious to the fate of the survivors.

His mind was busy with its own stock in trade; he was puzzled, alarmed, quietly angry. Deep in the pocket of his raincoat — Burberry, generously bought by Helen, stained by the smoke and by his having stooped to examine the dusty ground beyond the shop's back yard— his long fingers closed around the discordant collection of things given to him with such lack of ceremony by Amanda. Strange things to the uninitiated eye, so obviously placed, almost trampled in the rush as if the depositor of the incrimination, with a greater faith than Bailey in official vigilance, had wanted them found and relied on the eagle eye of a policeman to do so.

Souvenirs.

To Bailey's mind, in the sight of anyone with even primary knowledge of the boy, souvenirs with the hallmark of William Featherstone, almost bearing his autograph. A pile of bus tickets, a piece of chipped enamel half fashioned into a brooch, William's jewellery and William's favourite pastime scattered on the ground like his flag.

Early yet. An early dark, as if this arsonist had seized the first opportunity evening offered for the kind of display that would be spoiled by daylight. Even the timing served to illustrate how easy it would have been for him to arrive and depart prosaically by the bus that stopped outside the shop, timing his operation perhaps in accordance with the fictional timetables that only became fact in the early part of the evening, buses disappearing into total silence with the onset of night.

Nine forty-five now.

The work of minutes to stack boxes as he had done before; apply paraffin, as he had done before; discard the tickets and the shiny thing by the gate, as he had never done before. Flung apart from the other souvenirs was an empty washing-up liquid container, cheapest brand.

Bailey thought fleetingly of the Featherstones' brimming sinks, the ever-expensive tastes, the mismanagement of provisions, buying the best and misusing it. It was too impractical a household for economy, not parsimonious enough. A richer, more successful household would feature such cheeseparing.

He thought of William with savagery. You have gone too far, boy, and you wanted to be discovered. This time you endangered lives; you could have killed that elderly couple with your flames. No, I have gone too far with my strange reluctance to arrest you sooner. This is my fault, you little bastard. those deaths would have been on my conscience; now it is only these lives. Tramping back to the front of the shop, he regarded the damp but tasteful stock, saw in the key holder's hands the smooth edges of dull and tasteful jewellery, smooth handbags dusted down, and wondered with one slight tremor of shock why William had chosen such a place, so different from the tacky glitter he preferred.

Looking at the damp tissue paper billowing in the road, the broken display stands crashed into by the old couple in their panic to escape, he had a sudden vision of the leaves strewn about in Antony Sumner's garden, the letters scattered on his desk with the same manic untidiness. There had been such control in the lighting of this fire and the others, such a sense of order; he could not equate this with an untidy mind.

Again he thought of Antony Sumner's garden with the dead Mrs Blundell's clothing folded with such precision and placed in his otherwise disused compost bin. Her jewellery and her handbag, both purchased in exactly this kind of expensive emporium. Image crowded upon image. Untidy minds, unhinged minds, like William's. Bailey hunched in the street, trying to fathom how minds worked, confused by all the images in his own.

Perhaps in William's swimming grey cells there existed this sense of order, imposed on his actions to save himself from the constant mess of his environment, but suddenly Bailey doubted it, doubted everything, sensed at work an alien mind devoid of William's clumsiness.

He remembered the boy's lumbering, his strange popularity with the elderly on the buses, what Helen had described as his weird gentleness. Despite his violence, Bailey could not see him doing this, despite the evidence.

For once Amanda Scott would have to forgo the chance to make an arrest and be allowed to go home to her interrupted evening. For once, he would not phone Helen. He ordered a cursory search for William in the vicinity but not at home, please, I'll see to that.

Then he went back to his office and the murder file — all the material, snippets, nonsense, rumours, documents marked 'unused' and labelled 'irrelevant' — and started again.

All right, said Helen to the kitchen ceiling. All right, all right, all right. He hasn't come home: he's doing to me what I did to him. Surely not: I've often wished the man would do something petty like this, allow me the excuse, once in a while, for a tantrum, but he doesn't, he won't; he's far too reasonable. So where the hell is he? Working, as usual? Spending his time productively? Or is he telling me something? Is he reconsidering his position in this bloody-minded household? Look at this squarely: none of it computes.

His work rarely involves being away from a phone for hours on end; he had only to snap his fingers and someone would make the phone call for him; Amanda Scott would even snap his fingers for him if his knuckles were tired. Oh, be quiet. As with Bailey the night before, concern and anger intertwined in a mixture of growing unreason. She looked at the clean kitchen and envisaged the contents of the fridge: special foods, peace offerings, a good bottle of wine, rehearsed words now chilling with the rest.

Bailey, we have such capacity for happiness. We must talk, or if you won't talk, at least tell me a story. I've made all these efforts with all this food . . . Was that what she was reduced to — Branston housewife in newish home seducing spouse with tidbits? Helen snorted, nine months' experience of domestic bliss, even with the long spells of contentment, curdling into a shout of resentment. I hate to cook, I hate to play second fiddle; I did not join this partnership to be a drudge, to sit around waiting for the man as if he kept me. She paused, struck by the imminence of yet more furious resentment, sat on the modern sofa.

Wait a minute. There is a corollary to this: you are hooked on the man; he is a superior policeman; his partner must have self-sufficiency and endurance, and if you stay, this will be the story of your life. It cannot be otherwise, would not be otherwise were he doctor or parliamentarian; you would still be left waiting, and you would not like it, not like at all the fact that he has, in the scheme of things, greater value to the world than you. But I have even less importance here than I had in London.

Branston diminishes me and no, I do not want artificial aids to fill the gap of uncertainty, joining a club or taking evening classes. I cannot stay in a position where I am scolded like a child, I cannot live with a man who won't talk. And at the moment I need to talk; it's the only way I can find perspective on anything, so I'll go out and find some company, dammit, out. Where? Out. Somewhere.

Suspending judgement on her own reaction to the possible sight of William Featherstone, Helen flung on a coat, not the new coat, left Bailey a note mentioning her whereabouts, and walked to The Crown. Let Bailey find the note and meet her there. Better a meeting on neutral ground: if he walked into that anonymous living room now, she might stain the walls with shouting. Not that The Crown's discordant atmosphere was likely to provide balm, but it was 'out', and the walk to reach it was preferable to static impatience, which was fast creating in her a kind of destructive electricity.

"Lo, Helen. How you been? Not seen yourself in ages. Too smart for you, are we?'

Bernadette Featherstone's greeting was offered from the depths of indifference, or so it sounded, surfacing against her better judgement; Helen found it cheering all the same. There was a party often in the bar, rowdy, post-races, post-wedding somewhere else, the revellers having found the only pub on a deserted road now had Bernadette to serve them with sullen efficiency.

`Where's Harold?' Helen asked, missing his presence leering over the counter.

Bernadette kept her eyes lowered, a posture that Helen did not know well enough to recognize as the symptom of a lie. 'Gone out with William. To the pictures.'

Òh.' Helen found that surprising, given her knowledge of the Featherstones' habits, unprecedented even, but why not? It was pleasing news. She accepted it as truth, no real reason to doubt it.