All Bones and Lies (24 page)

He kept his temper. ‘Yes, Clarrie. Exactly that.'

‘Well . . .' She turned her attention to her perfect thumbnails. ‘I try not to listen for more than a moment. But once there was something rather nasty about hanging you upside down by—'

Delicately, she broke off and went down another track. ‘Oh, and he thinks people like you should—'

Again, tact stopped her finishing. ‘And when he phoned this morning, he said that now he's finally worked out where you live—'

‘The man said that? This
morning
?
When?
'

She gave one of those careless little shrugs of hers that drove him mad. ‘I'm not s—'

‘Think! It's
important
. Think!'

She did a little brain search. ‘I think it was just after I came out of the Ladies'.'

Eight forty, if the coven was on form.

Just after he had yet again given up on Mel answering her door, and had hurried down the stairs and out of Chatterton Court, back to his car.

‘Oh, yes. And
once
I remember that he said to me—'

But Colin was no longer listening. He had pushed past her and was gone.

COLIN CAME UP
behind the policeman and the two fire officers just as the building's innards were collapsing. Professional interest was intense. ‘Look at the way those walls are coming down – a textbook infill! I certainly hope all the trainees are paying attention.' The uniformed trio continued to gaze with satisfaction on the blaze. ‘No, the only possible disappointment has been the absence of Crispies.'

Even in Colin, curiosity could triumph. ‘What's a Crispy?'

The officer who'd spoken turned. It turned out to be Jamie-boy, from the Battle of Sperivale.

‘Back behind the rope line there at once, if you wouldn't mind, sir,' he ordered, failing to recognize Colin in his new roseate, firelit hue.

‘You know me. I'm from Environmental Health.'

‘Oh, right.' And Jamie stepped aside to make a space for Colin in the favoured front row for the rest of the spectacle. Though he didn't go so far as to explain the word Crispy, its meaning clearly informed his next glum utterance: ‘Not a single fatality. Everyone
safely out, tickety boo, on the tarmac.'

One of the fire officers obviously shared his disappointment. ‘Well, for that, of course, you have only the lifts to blame.' Catching his colleague's warning eye, he corrected himself hastily. ‘I mean, to thank.'

In the face of this burning vista of destruction, Colin's intense anxiety about the performance of council fittings would not, he hoped, sound out of place or excessive. ‘What's that about the lifts?'

Jamie went back to watching coils of water being spilled from a great height. ‘All broken, weren't they? Every last one. Doors wouldn't even close. So no one, not even the absolute thickies, could manage to get stuck in them.'

Again, the fire officer beside him unguardedly added his own note of regret. ‘Ergo, no Crispies.'

‘Still,' Jamie insisted, nodding at the throngs of rosy-flushed faces behind, absorbed in the blaze. ‘Bit odd that they
all
got out.'

He said it almost as though it offered grounds for suspicion.

‘Train of events,' explained the fire officer. ‘It seems that someone on the fifth floor still had an active battery in a smoke alarm. So it went off.' He turned to Colin. ‘It was a dicky toaster that started it all, apparently.'

The sudden flaring of the nearside ground floor went some way to disguising the rush of blood to Colin's cheeks. ‘A dicky toaster, did you say?'

‘That's right. This ancient little painter guy felt a bit peckish, lifted his dust sheet to notice some old toaster in a box, and didn't think twice until he smelled burning. Even then, he says, he could have had the little bonfire out
in a trice, but for the fact that he tripped on a pile of boxes cluttering up the place and sent a bottle of white spirit flying.'

It was, Colin upbraided himself, nobody's fault but his own. The black miasma that was Perdita seeped far and wide. He should have known that, just as a sorcerer needs only the slightest of fingernail parings to wreak the worst of voodoo witcheries, so asking Perdita's little painter man to slosh a bit of emulsion around Mel's walls would be enough to bring a curse on all their heads.

‘But what about the sprinklers?'

Everyone turned to stare.

‘On the stairs,' persisted Colin. ‘Were they not working?'

They looked at him as if he were a man unhinged.

This time, the flickering firelight disguised a face from which all colour drained. ‘What,
none
of them?'

Out of sheer pity at his innocence, they all turned back to watching the blaze. But the subject of sprinklers had rekindled the interest of the firemen. ‘Be fair, mind. Even with half the sprinklers shot out and the rest bunged up with gum, you'd never usually get a fire as good as this.'

‘Absolutely not. No, for that you must give credit to the person who dumped all those piles of old clothes in the basement.' The fireman held out a singed scrap of chequered brown tweed that Colin distinctly recalled his mother wearing to Aunt Ida's divorce hearing. ‘Look! Textbook, that is. A quality material, soaked in cheap alcohol – possibly even meths – and dried off nicely in the boiler house.' He turned to the man beside him. ‘I ask you, could you find a better form of tinder if you went searching?'

His colleague's tired shaking of the head implied he was a man of far more sense and experience than to bother to try.

‘Not only that,' persisted the first fire officer, ‘but it must have been a fair long while before anyone living here bothered to ring in and mention the building was alight.'

Colin flinched as a roar of flame shot up the last stairwell. His ears cleared to the sound of a carillon of agreement.

‘No, can't get a blaze like this up without a good deal of local co-operation.'

‘Still a close-run thing.'

‘True. One single responsible citizen taking the trouble to phone 999, and it would never have got this far.'

Still, not even the thought of this unhappy possibility could take the edge off their good cheer. And as the last wall fell and the fire burned lower so they could finally see their colleagues on the other side playing their hoses in gorgeous glistening loops over the flaring rubble, Colin found his own spirits rising to match. Praise be to Mother! If she'd done nothing else in her long life, she had at least achieved what eighteen councils in a row had failed to do – get rid of Chatterton Court for once and for ever.

And, on this score, a party atmosphere seemed to be developing all round now. None of the flats' inhabitants appeared in the slightest bothered by this dramatic and colourful destruction of their habitat. Slipping back under the rope, Colin strolled between clusters of cheery people, some clutching a few possessions, one or two even guarding piles of plastic bags. After a while, he realized most of
the conversations were centred round the happy coincidence of Tor Grand Insurance's recent Special Promotion: a taster offer of one month's free contents insurance, prior to checks or inspection. It seemed that, gamblers to a man, and furnished with prepaid envelopes and the chance to win a speedboat, pretty well everyone in Chatterton Court had, in the past week, whiled away a few unemployed minutes filling in an application form with some wildly inflated opinions of the value of their property. Indeed, the general view appeared to be that Mel's altruistic gesture of bribing her painter to set fire to the building had simply anticipated by a few days the plans of a slightly more dilatory gang of professional arsonists.

But, lest this thought seemed churlish, Mel was the happy toast of all. Some smouldering embers had been borrowed to start a small, informal baked-potato franchise. Much of the burning of the boiler house provided the flash and excitement of any reasonably colourful firework display. And, Colin noticed, the former denizens of Chatterton Court appeared to have every confidence that their council would provide, not simply adequate emergency accommodation overnight, but somewhere more permanent to live in the morning. Indeed, he heard the words, ‘Nowhere they put us could be worse,' spoken so many times, and with such confidence, that it was a man on the verge of proud to call himself a council officer who wandered back towards the firemen as they reluctantly prepared to admit to themselves that, regretfully, the best of the show was now over.

‘Still,
classic
while it lasted. Couldn't be faulted. And
if I'd had the sense to take a video of how that boiler blew, I'd have the great bulk of my men through their practical examinations first time.'

‘Nice little run here, too, if you recall.'

‘Splendid. Possibly even a record-breaker.' The fireman turned to Jamie-boy. ‘You were on our tail all the way, weren't you? What do you reckon? Mount Oval down to here in under three minutes?'

‘Two forty at the most. And if I'm being anything, I'm being hard.'

‘Between here and Mount Oval?' Colin was filled with admiration, till he remembered they were allowed to speed through all his council's brooding lights.

Jamie-boy sighed. ‘Would have been a sight faster, but for that idiot who shot ahead of us into the roundabout.' He turned to Colin. ‘You know the bloke. You're always tangling with him.'

‘Me?'

‘Yes. What's his name? Stanley? Jemmy? You know! That nutter with the pods.'

‘Pods?'

‘All over the pavement. Crunch-crunch. Crunch-crunch. Outside his restaurant.'

‘Do you mean
Haksar
?'

‘That's the one. I hope he cooks a whole lot better than he drives. He was spinning round that roundabout like a nut in a blender.'

To a man less absorbed in a last pretty flare-up of the embers, Colin's distress might have been evident. ‘Where was he headed, for God's sake?'

‘Sorry?'

‘When he came off the roundabout! Which way was he going?'

‘Up towards West Priding – luckily for him, or we might just have stopped to book him for driving like a bloody astronaut on wh—'

But Colin wasn't listening. He'd already gone.

Mr Herbert could not have apologized more graciously or more often.

‘I simply don't know what to say to you, Colin. My workmen know the rules about smoking on other people's property, and they're usually most careful.'

‘Be fair,' the fire officer said. He was still panting from the second run. ‘Your bloke was standing outside, after all. He was hardly to know those windchimes had been stuffed with tissue paper.' He shook his head admiringly. ‘Nasty, floaty stuff, tissue. It catches all too easily. In my experience, it's part and parcel of a lot more fires than people are prepared to give it credit.' He gave Colin's mother's scorched buddleia one final going over with the last of the hose dribbles. ‘Mind you, it was only luck that the wind happened to be in the direction of the woodshed.'

‘
Bad
luck,' corrected Colin, since the man's more sensitive colleague had not yet managed to arrive in time to do so.

‘And then there was that stripper in there – practically uncovered, if you please!'

Christ! Had he spotted Suzie?

‘Paint's bad enough. But stripper! Well, you might as well drop matches in a tank of kerosene.'

They all gazed at the dripping, roofless ruin that had been Colin's hideaway. Then at the blackened walls of Holly House. ‘It's only the back, really,' said the fireman, reeling in his emptied hose. His voice had taken on that tone of glum wistfulness with which Colin was becoming all too rapidly familiar. ‘And a lot of that's nothing but smoke damage.'

‘Still,' Mr Herbert said to Colin, ‘I can't see your mother being very pleased.'

Colin gazed up at the windows, each with its brand-new sooty eyebrow. ‘I could ask them to keep her in hospital another day or two. Till I've cleaned up a bit.'

He waited for Mr Herbert to offer to lend him a couple of men to give him a hand. But there was an uncomfortable silence, till Mr Herbert suddenly thought to dig in his breast pocket. ‘Well, I can at least give you this.'

‘What's that?'

‘It's what you said you wanted when you rang in all that hurry.' Sensing there might be a moment of stickiness when he sent in the bill, Mr Herbert made a point of repeating in front of the fireman as an uncommitted witness, ‘“Mr H.,”' you said. ‘“Double time for your men if you can get that sodding Certificate of Approved Electrical Installation fixed up and watertight before my mother's out of hospital.”'

‘Really? Did I say “sodding”?'

Holy Joe Herbert shot him a look of reproof. ‘Indeed you did. And as I said to Mrs H. at supper afterwards, that's not like Mrs Riley's Colin. In fact, frankly, after that sort of language, if it hadn't been for thinking of your
poor dear saintly mother, I wouldn't have leaned on my men as hard as I did to get the job finished.'

Through phantom drifts of bills for restoration and repair, Colin sensed, rather than saw, his first real glimmer of hope since, skidding round Mount Oval, he'd seen the wreaths of smoke rising from beyond the end of Green Lane. Maybe his world was brightening. This fire, after all, had been an accident. Maybe, charged with some sense of inner satisfaction that came from presuming he had successfully reduced Colin's home to a heap of charred rubble, Mr Haksar had simply been shooting off with such verve to lay in a fresh supply of uncontaminated turmeric. Perhaps, when Mr Herbert so casually let drop the little word ‘finished'—

‘Finished? Did you say
finished
?'

Mr Herbert looked smug. ‘Oh, yes. We had the cabling buried by last night. It was only trying to get that massive overgrown hydrangea back upright that fetched us back this morning.' He gazed round. ‘Still, the garden looks nice again, doesn't it? I think the men have done a lovely job of stamping things back in. And just so long as anything that decides to die has the sense to take long enough, she might not even cotton it was your fault, Colin.'