Unforgotten (14 page)

Closing the door silently, Hugh made for the stairs again. The muted voices of the Koenig family floated up from below and he recoiled, as he had recoiled last night, from the forced intimacy with people he barely knew and had never terribly liked who had presumed, decided, arranged to take them in. Before last night his only connection with the Koenigs had been through Charlie’s friendship with their computer-mad son Joel and the fact that they lived two doors away. He and Lizzie had met the parents at the occasional local event, but it was significant that Hugh couldn’t even remember their first names. The father was in public relations, a smooth hand-presser on the lookout for the next opportunity, while the mother – Sarah, was it? – was a fussy, garrulous woman with a relish for gossip. It was she who had greeted them three hours ago with effusive sympathy and a relentless determination to tell her part of the tale, the discovery of the fire and the calling of the fire brigade. She had tried to gather them into the kitchen with the lure of food and drink, but only Mike had obeyed. Charlie mysteriously vanished, while Hugh stood his ground in the hall, saying she was most kind but he really would like to go straight to his room now, a statement he had to repeat twice before she accepted she would have to tell her story then and there, standing in the hall, or be forced to bottle it up till morning. Her husband had gone to bed, she recounted, and she had let the dog out for his last widdle when, standing at the back door, she heard a strange sound. Oh, very faint, she said, so faint she almost ignored it. But something,
something
, made her go and look. First she went upstairs to her bedroom window, then she went to the spare room at the front which looked out onto the lane. It was only when she decided to open the window and put her head right out that she caught sight of something through the trees, just the tiniest flicker, so tiny she almost missed it. If it had been summer, of course, she would never have seen a thing. But with the trees bare, well . . . Even then,
it was a miracle she saw that one small flicker of light because she didn’t see another, not for a good two or three minutes.

A surge of heat, a sudden panic, brought Hugh out of his daze. He wasn’t ready to hear about wasted minutes while Lizzie was alone and suffocating from the smoke. He wasn’t ready to face the idea that she had suffered.

Catching something of this in his expression, Joel’s mother told the rest of her story in a rush, how she roused John and they drove along the lane and saw the fire and dialled 999. While she stayed on the phone to the emergency operator John tried the front door and the back door but both were locked. They thought of trying the window but the flames were too bad. They looked for a ladder but couldn’t find one. And then Hugh understood why she had been in such a hurry to tell him her story; it wasn’t just her relish for drama, it was the need to be reassured that she and her husband had done all they could and had nothing to reproach themselves for. Well, reassurance was easy, he offered it willingly, with as much grace as he could muster, longing for the moment when she would be sufficiently consoled to let him be alone. There was more fuss as she showed him the bedroom and bathroom, and, eyes welling, offered a last stream of condolences. When at last the door closed behind her he made his largely abortive attempt to open the curtains before lying down fully clothed on the bed. Then the pain finally overwhelmed him, he sobbed and called Lizzie’s name, and then surprisingly he slept. When he woke, it was to the gloomy outline of the giant beech and the aching realisation that it was still true, Lizzie was dead.

The voices were coming from the kitchen away to his right and, reaching the hall, he veered sharp left, treading softly. Passing the open door of a sitting room he saw two black-socked feet sticking over the arm of a sofa and looked in to see Mike lying on his back, his jacket laid haphazardly over the dome of his stomach, a cushion under his head, snoring steadily.

Creeping away, he let himself out as quietly as possible and
walked quickly along the lane, propelled by the need to see the damage for himself, to stand alone in the spot where Lizzie had died, even to find in the ruins of the fire some glimmer of an explanation. Last night on the way back from the hospital they had stopped at Meadowcroft only to find everything in darkness, the fire engines gone, just a lone policeman sitting in a patrol car keeping watch till morning. Hugh had wanted to go inside but the policeman had said he was sorry, that wasn’t allowed until the investigation was complete. As Mike reversed the car round, the headlights had swept over Lizzie’s silver Golf, standing there as if to deliver her back to him, and it was this of all things that had caught Hugh off-guard and brought him into the Koenigs’ house with the desperate longing to be alone.

Now, as he came in through the gates he saw parked beside Lizzie’s car a white van with its rear doors open and two men lifting out a panel of chipboard, and to the other side of the front door a car and a small van, both in the scarlet livery of the fire brigade. There was no sign of the police car.

What struck Hugh as he drew closer to the house was the relative lack of damage. In newspaper pictures of house fires the outside walls always seemed to be scorched with soot, the roofs holed or collapsed. But the walls of Meadowcroft were untouched, the roof was intact, only the windows looked wrong, all of them wide open, some blackened from smoke or lacking glass.

The two men had a generator going and were about to run the board through an electric saw. One of them looked up as Hugh approached and seemed about to say something, but Hugh ignored him and went straight into the house. And stopped, all sense of normality gone. At first the devastation appeared complete. The walls of the hall were black, the ceiling charred, with gaping holes where the plaster had come down, the floor covered in a layer of sodden debris. But as he made his way slowly forward he looked into the dining room and saw that, though licked with a thick coat of soot, it was largely
intact, while the kitchen seemed bizarrely untouched, and it occurred to him in some remote logical corner of his mind that the kitchen door must have been closed. He paused by the living room and knew immediately that the fire had been very bad there. Everything was blackened and contorted, the furniture barely recognisable. The stairs were scorched but solid underfoot. When he reached the turn he looked up and saw that the fire had raged up the stairwell, consuming half the landing rail and banisters, burning into the ceiling above. As he climbed higher, the acrid smell he had dimly registered on entering the house grew much stronger and caught in his throat until he began to cough.

A brisk voice called out, ‘Hello?’ and a man in a hard hat emerged from the main bedroom. ‘You are?’ he asked. Then his expression changed and he said in a different tone, ‘Family?’

Hugh was overtaken by another fit of coughing, and the man drew him across the landing into Lou’s bedroom and an open window. ‘Take some long breaths,’ he said.

The coughing made Hugh’s stomach heave and he struggled not to retch. But at last the worst was over and, panting slightly, eyes watering, he straightened up.

‘Mr Gwynne, is it?’

Hugh nodded.

‘You’ll feel better outside, sir. Why don’t you follow me down?’

Hugh shook his head.

‘The thing is, you aren’t meant to be in here just yet. Not till we’ve finished our investigation. The police officer should have told you that.’

‘Not here,’ Hugh managed to say through his raging throat. ‘Gone.’

‘Has he now? All the same . . . if you wouldn’t mind.’ The man was short, with a round face and large features.

‘Your name is?’

‘Ellis. Peter Ellis. Fire investigation department.’

Hugh put out his hand, and Ellis hastily moved his clipboard to his left hand to return the handshake. ‘My condolences on your loss, Mr Gwynne.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I understand you were away on business when the fire broke out.’

‘London.’

‘And your wife was here alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘No other family?’

‘No. Our children were away.’

‘No dogs, cats, other pets?’

‘No.’

Ellis nodded, then took a step towards the door, as if to conclude the interview and escort him downstairs.

Hugh said, ‘I just want to see the bedroom.’

Ellis hesitated.

‘I want to see where my wife died.’

Ellis regarded Hugh thoughtfully before giving in with a quick nod. ‘If you could be sure not to touch anything.’

It was becoming a refrain.
Look but don’t touch
.

Ellis led the way across the landing. In the bedroom a second man was standing by the bathroom door, holding a camera to his eye. He acknowledged Hugh’s arrival with a sideways glance before lining up another shot. Hugh took a couple of steps into the room and halted, taking in the smoke-daubed walls, a pale grey towards the floor, darker towards the ceiling, the ceiling itself, very black, the trampled carpet, the smashed window with a few jagged shards still adhering to the frame, the harsh acrid smell, and finally the bed itself. The duvet, thrown back on itself, had been dragged half off the bed, the lower sheet was ruckled and pulled free of the mattress, baring some of the mattress cover; all the pillows, grey with smoke, were lying at odd angles and crumpled. By contrast some of Lizzie’s clothes were lying neatly folded on the seat of
the upholstered chair in the corner, a pair of shoes lined up side by side on the floor beneath.

‘She was found in bed?’ Hugh asked, selecting a matter-of-fact tone.

Ellis, who had been standing respectfully to one side, eyes averted, looked at him solemnly. ‘Yes.’

‘Still alive?’

‘The men couldn’t be sure, so they got her out of the building and undertook resuscitation.’

Hugh tried to imagine the room as it was then, black with smoke and poisonous fumes. ‘It must have been . . . difficult. I’d like to thank them sometime if I can.’

‘They were only doing their job. But I’m sure they’d appreciate it all the same.’

‘It was smoke inhalation that killed her, was it?’

‘I couldn’t make any comment on that,’ Ellis said rapidly, as if to get this absolutely straight from the outset. ‘That’s for the coroner.’

‘Of course. Yes . . . With the help of the post-mortem,’ Hugh added, to show he understood the system.

‘We just report on the fire.’

‘Of course you do. Yes . . . And what have you discovered so far?’

Ellis shook his head. ‘Can’t say.’

‘Forgive me . . . because?’

‘My report has to go to the coroner. It’s the procedure.’

Procedure. Look but don’t touch.

‘I see . . .’

‘Sorry about that.’

‘No, no. I quite understand.’

The photographer had finished taking his pictures. ‘I’ll start on the rest of this floor,’ he said to Ellis.

‘Give me a shout when you’re done.’

As soon as they were alone Hugh said quietly, in the manner of someone keen to learn, ‘Tell me, Peter, how does this sort of
fire behave?’ Seeing Ellis’s hesitation he added, ‘Oh, without going into specifics. Just in general . . . I mean what makes smoke travel to one room, fire to another and leave other places untouched?’

‘Oh, you can’t have fire without smoke. No, no. Fire always produces smoke. But smoke and fumes on their own, they can travel a long way ahead of the fire, and fast too.’

‘So . . . what makes the smoke travel?’ Hugh prompted with the same grave air of enquiry.

‘It depends on layout and what you might call opportunity,’ Ellis explained, with the air of knowing his subject backwards. ‘From the source of the fire it’s a matter of what doors and windows are open and where the smoke can get to easiest. Smoke rises, given the chance, so if there’s an open door and a stairwell it’ll go up to a higher level. If it can’t go up, it’ll spread sideways across the ceilings and then work its way down.’

‘Can you tell how quickly the smoke would have spread?’

‘It’s only ever a calculated guess.’

Taking it slowly, maintaining a look of almost academic interest, Hugh made a show of absorbing this. ‘But you can track the smoke?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘What, based on the smoke damage?’

Ellis nodded. ‘Though certain types of smoke leave more damage than others. It all depends on the type and quantity of the inflammable materials.’

Hugh looked around the walls of the bedroom. ‘But the fire itself, that behaves differently, you say?’

‘Oh yes. Fire needs oxygen and it needs combustible materials, so the speed and intensity of the fire will depend on how much of each it has to feed off. A small fire in an airtight room will burn itself out, while a fire in a room full of combustibles with an open window and a good draught will spread rapidly.’

‘And you can always tell how far the fire got?’ Hugh looked around the room again and up at the ceiling.

Ellis said hastily, ‘Oh, there was never any fire in here.’

‘No?’

‘No way.’ Ellis led the way onto the landing. ‘No, this is as far as it got.’ He gestured towards the ceiling above the stairwell and the burnt banisters.

It was just as Hugh had thought, but the relief still came at him like a shock. A tightness gripped his chest, his throat swelled, his eyes fired with sudden tears. He would have gone outside then, but Ellis, having taken Hugh into his confidence, was in full swing, pointing out the route of the fire as it came up the stairwell, leading the way down into the hall to indicate the badly burnt ceiling, pausing on the threshold of the living room.

‘It started in here,’ he said.

Hugh would have held back, the source of the fire seemed so unimportant to him just then, but he knew he would never have such an opportunity again. ‘Whereabouts, do you know?’

‘Off the record?’ Ellis said.

‘Off the record.’

The room was in an even worse state than Hugh had realised. Much of the ceiling had gone, some of the joists were scorched and burnt, the walls were black for several feet below the ceiling, and the floor was inches deep in squelching debris.