Fire (21 page)

‘I just think it was a really mean thing to do,’ Daisy said, dunking her biscuit into her cup of tea and trying to keep her voice down so no one at the surrounding tables would hear. ‘I mean, I know Irene’s an awful flirt, but I never thought she’d, you know, go that far. Especially not with poor Martin right there!’

Louise and Daisy had spotted Vince Reynolds lurking in the bushes behind the toilets at the Domain, and when Irene had swanned past them as they’d come out they’d put two and two together. Louise thought it was utterly disgraceful.

‘I don’t understand her,’ she said. ‘Martin’s a perfectly nice bloke. Well, he’d have to be, wouldn’t he, to put up with her shenanigans? So why does she have to carry on like that? And particularly with someone as revolting as Vince bloody Reynolds! What’s wrong with her? Lots of women would kill to have a lovely bloke like Martin.’

Allie could see that Louise was really upset, and knew it was because she actually liked Irene—when she wasn’t behaving like a tart.

‘Do you think it’s because she’s dissatisfied?’ Daisy asked.

‘Dissatisfied?’ Louise snapped. ‘How the hell could she be dissatisfied? She’s got a good job with prospects, a freehold home, a car that doesn’t leak when it rains. It’s more than a lot of us have got.’

‘Well, she likes to be the centre of attention, doesn’t she, and maybe she isn’t, with Martin. Maybe she needs more.’

Allie and Louise stared at Daisy, startled at the depth of her perception. It wasn’t like her at all.

‘Too bad,’ Louise said bluntly. ‘Nobody ever gets
everything
they want, do they? And she’ll have even less if Martin ever finds out.’

After a long silence, Allie spoke up: ‘He already knows.’ And she told them about what he’d said at the picnic.

Daisy’s eyes filled with tears. ‘That’s really sad. Poor Martin.’

‘And she knows he knows?’ Louise was appalled. ‘God, what a bitch.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Allie said. ‘And I think he’s too frightened to confront her about it in case she packs up and leaves him.’

Daisy sniffed loudly. ‘He must really love her. That’s so sad.’

‘Oh, shut up, Daisy,’ Louise said, though there was no malice in it. ‘But you’re right, it is sad.’

‘But what can we do about it?’ Allie hated to think that everyone might not be as in love with life as she now was. ‘Shall we talk to her about it?’

‘No,’ Louise replied, lighting a cigarette. ‘We won’t. Because it’s none of our business, it’s for Irene and Martin to sort out. It’s their marriage.’

Daisy looked up. ‘Shssh, here she comes.’

Weaving her way through the cafeteria tables, Irene pulled up a seat, set her cup of tea and a cheese scone on the table, and sat down.

‘What?’ she said as she noticed the others looking at her. Except for Louise, who was pointedly staring in the opposite direction. ‘Have I got something stuck in my teeth?’

‘No,’ Daisy said hurriedly. ‘We were just, um, drinking our tea.’

‘You’re a hopeless liar, Daisy,’ Irene said. The moment she’d sat down she’d felt something, a coldness, coming from the other girls. No, not a coldness, more an air of, well, mistrust. ‘Right, what’s going on?’ she demanded.

This was the last thing she needed. She had letters to type piled up to the ceiling on her desk, Martin had hardly said anything at all to her last night, just moped around with that wounded look he got sometimes but insisting that nothing was wrong whenever she asked—and on top of all that she felt guilty about what she’d done yesterday. And because she felt guilty she’d started doubting herself, asking herself whether she did actually deserve to have or feel anything good, and when that happened, as always, she needed reassurance. She hoped Vince would be around at lunchtime.

‘We saw you and Vince yesterday,’ Daisy blurted.

The blood drained from Irene’s face for a second, then rushed back, staining her cheeks pink.

‘Daisy!’ Allie exclaimed, appalled.

‘I don’t like there being secrets,’ Daisy said, her voice wobbling. ‘We’re all supposed to be friends, aren’t we? Secrets ruin everything.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Irene said, and
it sounded a particularly feeble denial even to her own ears.

Louise angrily ground out her cigarette in the ashtray. ‘Oh, come off it, Irene, you do so. It’s not on. Flirting’s one thing, but having an affair’s another. And if
we
all know, who else does? Martin’s bound to find out. And you’ll lose your job.’

Instantly on the defensive, Irene snapped back, ‘He’ll only find out if someone tells him. I suppose that’s going to be you, is it?’

‘No, it won’t,’ Louise said. ‘But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me.’

‘Well, I’m sorry if it
bothers
you, Miss High and Mighty, but it’s actually none of your business. Or yours, or yours,’ Irene added to Allie and Daisy, who leaned back in their chairs, shocked at the vehemence in her words.

The people at the next table turned around and Irene lowered her voice.

‘Don’t you
dare
judge me! You’ve got no idea what it’s like going home to someone like Martin, sitting there watching him doing bloody paperwork night after night before he stumbles off to bed early, and then having to lie there listening to him snore his head off because he’s out for the count! Have you? I bet you don’t. It’s
boring
, that’s what it is.’ After a second, she added, ‘And it’s lonely.’

She put her hands in her face, and just for a moment Allie thought she was going to cry. Instead, she took a deep breath, looked up and said, ‘I know what you must think of me, and that’s up to you. But if I can’t make myself happy, who the hell will?’

And with that she stood up and walked off, leaving her tea and scone untouched.

Allie, Louise and Daisy looked at each other, but no one said anything.

Irene took the stairs to the ground floor and went outside onto Wyndham Street, where she lit a cigarette and dragged on it furiously until she felt her heart-rate begin to slow down. A middle-aged man going past looked her up and down and leered, so she gave him the filthiest look she could muster, feeling a certain level of satisfaction when his eyes widened in surprise and he sped up.

How the hell could she have explained to them what was happening? They wouldn’t understand, not even Allie, who seemed to have the most open-minded and tolerant view of life, even if she was sometimes quite naïve. Louise was a good, decent girl, but she was so old-fashioned with her ideas of steadily putting money in the bank and saving for a house—a lot like Martin, really—and rushing home to cook Rob’s meals and making sure that little girl of hers could read her Dick and bloody Janes even before she got to primary school. And she was really quite judgemental, Louise. But she was honest, and loyal, and it hurt Irene very much to know she had upset her. And Daisy, well, poor Daisy with her little blonde head crowded with wedding dress patterns and her belly full of Terry’s baby. She was kind and generous but she was just too young, and Irene had been dismayed to see the wounded look in her eyes, her realization that she, Irene, appeared to be gambling away everything that Daisy yearned for.

She took one last drag on her cigarette and flicked the butt into the gutter.

Well, they didn’t understand, and that was just that. But
it wouldn’t stop her—she was going to spend her lunch break down in the basement with Vince if it was the last thing she did.

Upstairs, in his office on the first floor, Keith Beaumont sat at his desk, sweating freely and staring at the handwritten note in front of him.

Keith,

I have a matter I’d like to discuss with you in private. I wonder if you can spare a minute some time after lunch today—say, 2.30 PM?—and pop into my office.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely

Max Jones

It had appeared on his blotter pad while he’d been in the toilet: since that bloody staff picnic yesterday his bowels had been giving him gyp, cramping and making him pass the most appalling gas. Now, his innards rumbling and banging like a set of unlagged old pipes, he felt an urgent need to empty them again.

It could be about anything, he thought. God, it could even be about getting that stupid sports trophy engraved, or something equally trivial.

But he didn’t think so.

J
ock McLean, stores manager and supervisor of Dunbar & Jones’s basement, finished his fag. He’d missed smoko because he’d helped to load up the van for the Epsom delivery, but he was buggered if he was going without his mid-morning cigarette. All of the other lads were out at the moment, too, so he’d be on his tod for the next hour or so.

He went back inside through the Wyndham Street door, trying to keep in the background to minimize the possibility of customers seeing him in his old grey work coat with the red Dunbar & Jones logo on the pocket. He’d had his smoke in the service lane behind the store, but, because he was a conscientious sort of bloke, he’d locked the big set of sliding metal doors from the lane into the basement so no one could get in and pinch anything. Not that anyone’d get far with a bloody great roll of linoleum balanced on their shoulders, or a dining suite or a grandfather clock. Still, it was better to be safe than sorry.

He passed through the staff door at the rear of manchester, then trotted down the steps leading to the basement, wondering what his wife had put on his
sandwiches today. She could be quite inventive sometimes, but he never looked before lunchtime because he quite liked the surprise of discovery. Last week it had been sliced left-over sausages with gravy one day, and then cheese and celery the next, but the week before it had been brisket and pickle four days in a row, because she’d been a bit short with the housekeeping. His absolute favourite was cold savoury mince, and judging from delicious aroma coming from his lunch-box, he suspected it might be that today. Fingers crossed.

When he reached the bottom of the steps he stepped into the basement and closed the door behind him. Then he stopped, all thoughts of savoury mince gone.

There was something wrong.

‘Anyone down here?’ he called, his voice echoing around the cavernous space and bouncing off the piles of goods stacked neatly in gloomy corners, against shadowed walls and in rows along the floor.

No one replied, but that odd, sharp smell was still there, tickling the hairs in his nostrils and reminding him of something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

He slowly walked further into the basement, noting that the big sliding doors were still closed, turning his head this way and that, trying to locate the source of the smell. It was almost…metallic, and a little bit acrid, and now he could hear a faint buzzing noise as well.

The sound led him over to the wall where the main switchboard was, and then he saw it: a cable drooping from the ceiling, not yet broken but with the rubber peeling away in several places and tiny sparks fizzing along it. He squinted and saw that most of the wires inside the cable had come apart, making it sag, and that it was now held
together by only two or three strands. It hadn’t been like that before he’d gone for his smoke, he was sure of it!

Jock swore—if the cable broke, Dunbar & Jones would lose most of its electricity. Then he winced, thinking of the thousands of pounds that would be lost in sales if the store had to be closed. This week of all bloody weeks! There was an emergency generator for that very reason, but he knew for a fact that it wasn’t particularly reliable. But if he could somehow shore up the cable, perhaps by wrapping some sort of tape around it, disaster might be averted at least until an electrician could be called in. But who knew how long that would take? He’d always said they needed one on site. He would have to be extremely careful, though, because there was a hell of a lot of current surging through the bloody thing, and he didn’t fancy being fried. Perhaps it would be wiser just to ask Mr Beaumont for permission to ring the electrician.

Without taking his eyes off the cable, just in case it did something untoward, like break, Jock walked over to the telephone mounted on the wall and dialled Keith Beaumont’s extension. The phone rang and rang, but no one picked it up. He hung up and tried again, but with the same result: the bugger must be away from his desk. Typical.

Perhaps he’d just have a closer look at the wires, to see if he couldn’t do anything himself before he tried Beaumont again. Wishing that one of the lads were here with him, he set up a ladder near, but not directly under, the still-sparking cable. He climbed to the second-to-top rung and peered at the cable, wondering how much longer it would last before it broke altogether.

And that was when it did break. The lights flickered and
the live end of the cable swung down and hit Jock in the face, burning his cheek and causing him to fling up his hands to bat it away. One hand touched the bare wires and involuntarily closed around them, sending volt after volt of electricity coursing through him. His body spasmed as the electrical energy travelled along his blood vessels, nerves and bones, searing tissue as it went, and both hips were dislocated as he was hurled off the ladder. He hit the floor and rolled several yards, coming to a stop some feet from the lift doors. Although smoke wafted out of his clothes and from the melted ruin of his hand, he was still sufficiently conscious to register that the emergency generator had kicked in.

Unable to make any sound other than a low whimpering, he dragged himself over to the lift on his elbows and managed to reach up and hit the button that would summon it to the basement. Miraculously, it arrived almost immediately, and when the cage opened Jock collapsed halfway across the threshold, the last life wheezing out of him as his face hit the floor. A moment later his clothes burst into flames.

Behind him, the slowly swinging live cable continued to spit sparks, one of which was propelled far enough to land in a bucket filled with used cleaning rags. For a moment there was nothing, then a small ‘whoomph’ as the rags caught and flames shot up into the air. In less than a minute they had jumped gleefully from the bucket up to a shelf holding a tin of varnish, four of naphthalene, five bottles of furniture polish and Jock’s spare packet of Desert Gold. When they had all been consumed, feeding the flames until they were twenty times their original size and rapidly becoming white hot in intensity, the conflagration moved onto a skip filled
with shredded paper for packing, then, hungrily, reached out for the huge rolls of linoleum and carpet.

Thirty feet away, the lift door began to close, then rattle open again, close, then rattle open again, jamming on Jock’s incinerating body.

On the floors above, most people had noticed the lights flicker briefly, but nothing else. On the second floor, however, Walter the lift boy, who had left his post to dash off for a quick wee, stood outside the lift jabbing the ‘up’ button repeatedly, trying to get it back and wondering why it wasn’t responding. Some idiot must be holding the door open downstairs.

On the ground floor, a sales assistant from manchester on her way up to the credit office via the staff stairs stopped in the stairwell and sniffed. Was that smoke? Had someone been having a sneaky fag in here? But it didn’t really smell like tobacco smoke—it was stronger than that, and quite nasty.

Deciding that she should really tell someone, she turned back and quietly informed her supervisor of what she’d noticed. The supervisor, Mrs Wolfe, immediately telephoned Keith Beaumont, who was back at his desk by now, his bowels thoroughly emptied but his nerves still in tatters.

He snatched up his telephone and barked into it, but after a second went very still.

‘In the ground-floor stairwell?’ he repeated. When the voice on the other end confirmed it, he said, ‘Well, stay at your post and I’ll be down in a second. And don’t tell anyone else, for God’s sake, we don’t want a stampede.’

He put down the phone and stared sightlessly at his
blotter, the hateful little note now safely in his pocket. What could smoke in the staff stairwell mean? Should he inform Max Jones? No—it was probably just a false alarm, some staff member having an illicit cigarette. He’d find out who it was, though, and they could well be looking at their final pay packet by the end of the day. Smoking in the stairwell was strictly forbidden.

He descended to the ground floor via the public stairs and strode into the manchester department. The supervisor was standing over by a display of Egyptian cotton sheeting, whispering into some other woman’s ear: he hoped she wasn’t spreading rumours.

‘Mrs Wolfe!’ he snapped. ‘A word?’

Mrs Wolfe hurried over, her eyes darting nervously about and her face exhibiting definite signs of panic.

He deliberately kept his voice low. ‘The smoke, exactly where did this girl notice it?’ he asked. Adding hastily, ‘If that’s what it was, of course.’

‘On the ground-floor landing, she said.’

‘Well, I’ll go and have a look myself. Go back to work. And
don’t
say anything to anyone else, do you understand?’

Mrs Wolfe nodded and scuttled off.

Keith went through the staff door and onto the landing. The girl had been right, there was smoke in here, and quite a lot of it. He blinked, wondering if it was growing thicker even as he stood there, or whether that was only his imagination.

But he still didn’t want to tell Max Jones. The longer he put off seeing him for any reason at all, the better. So he went back out into manchester, giving Mrs Wolfe a stern look as he passed her, and hurried through the store to the
main door, where he knew he would find Ted Horrocks, who knew everything there was to know about the three buildings that made up Dunbar & Jones.

Ted’s normally ruddy face blanched when he told him. ‘Smoke? In the stairwell?’ he repeated—rather stupidly, Keith thought.

‘I can’t tell where it’s coming from.’

‘Basement, probably,’ Ted said, and started walking quickly towards the manchester department, his back straight and his arms swinging as he marched off.

Keith had to trot to catch up. ‘I don’t think there’s any reason to panic just yet, Ted,’ he said, and was disconcerted to note that the commissionaire didn’t even respond.

Ted went straight out the back to the stairwell. He stood for a moment, sniffing and apparently listening, then began to descend the steps one at a time, gripping the iron handrail firmly. Keith followed him all the way down to the bottom.

‘It’s down here, all right,’ Ted said, eyeing the lazy grey wisps escaping from beneath the door leading into the basement. ‘Come on, we need to get everyone out. How long did the fire brigade say they’d be?’

‘Er, I haven’t rung them yet,’ Keith said.

‘
What?
’ Ted couldn’t believe his ears. ‘Well, get on the bloody phone and alert them, man!’ He turned around and belted back up the stairs, heading for the fire extinguisher on the wall behind the lift shaft.

By the time he got back down to the basement landing, Beaumont had disappeared. But now, Ted could hear an ominous crackling coming from behind the door and his heart sank. If the fire was that big, one piddling fire extinguisher wasn’t going to put it out.

On the first floor, Keith rapped on the door to Max Jones’s office, but didn’t wait to be invited in.

Max, sitting behind his desk, looked up, then after a moment carefully put the lid on his pen. ‘Ah, Keith, you saw my note, I gather.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘You’re a little early.’

‘There’s a fire in the basement,’ Keith blurted. ‘Ted Horrocks is down there with a fire extinguisher now.’

Max felt his heart lurch sickeningly. ‘What? Has anyone called the fire brigade?’

‘I thought I’d check with you first,’ Keith said.

‘Do it now,’ Max ordered, and waited white-lipped while Keith made the call. Then he ran out into the foyer outside his office and, using his elbow to smash the glass, pushed the button to activate the fire alarm.

Nothing happened.

Downstairs, Ted kicked open the basement door and was almost knocked flat by a pulsing wall of heat and flame. He dropped the fire extinguisher and scrabbled back up the stairs, smelling his hair ignite and feeling the skin on his cheeks and forehead begin to tighten.

At the top of the stairs, he staggered through into the manchester department, slammed the door behind him and said to the nearest girl, ‘There’s a fire. Tell everyone to get out now,’ then fell flat on his face.

George Lynch, senior salesman in men’s shoes, ran across and bent over him. ‘Ted? Ted! What’s going on?’

‘Fire,’ Ted gasped. ‘Get everyone out.’

And so it began, the evacuation of the ground floor, packed with Christmas shoppers and their children and around fifty of Dunbar & Jones’s staff. Word spread instantly and, though there hadn’t been a proper fire drill since the war, the heads of departments began to herd their customers and staff quietly out of the building and onto Queen and Wyndham Streets, speaking in measured, if strained, voices, urging people to go carefully, not to run, to leave any large parcels or bags behind, to keep hold of small children and, above all, not to panic, all the while fighting the urge to scream in terror themselves and sprint for the nearest exit. Several women did scream when Ted was carried past them on a litter made from sheets from the manchester department, his eyes already swollen closed and his face an alarming, shiny crimson colour.

On the first floor, Max and Keith approached each customer individually and explained that there appeared to be a slight problem with a small amount of smoke in the basement and, though there was absolutely no need to panic, could they please make their way as quickly as possible to the nearest ground-floor exit. To his staff, Max simply said, ‘Get out. Now.’

Ruby Willow heard him, but instead of heading for the public staircase, she quietly slipped through the staff door in the rear of the dress department and up the staff stairs.

When they were satisfied that the first floor had been completely cleared, Max and Keith ascended the public stairs, checking as they went, until they reached the second floor, where, as they had suspected, there were only a handful of customers. Floorings, soft furnishings and furniture were not popular items at Christmas time, and the floor was cleared very quickly.

‘We’ve got to warn the people in the cafeteria,’ Max urged. ‘And the workrooms.’

His heart was thudding in his chest and he was starting to feel dizzy, as though he might faint at any moment. He was terrified—of the fire itself, of his business being ruined beyond redemption and, most of all, of the possible deaths of his staff, the ghosts of whom, he knew, would haunt him for the rest of his days.