I pushed away my plate, suddenly not hungry. I saw the General in person once but from far off. It had been during the World Cup in Buenos Aires in 1978. I had been seventeen years old. Videla had been out of his general’s uniform for a change and was wearing a blue suit. As President it had fallen to him to present the cup to the Argentinian captain, Daniel Passarella, who had looked as if he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to take it from him. Much later, I had learnt that, less than a mile away from the stadium, hundreds of Argentinian citizens, hooded and handcuffed to beds in clandestine detention centres, were listening to the match along with their captors on the radio.
To me the old General had always seemed a little bit like an untrustworthy and seedy-looking accountant. One who had just been caught cooking the books. And he still had that absurd Adolf Hitler moustache.
I slammed my fist hard on the table, so that Enzo jumped and scurried off, and my knife fell off the table. The bastard was supposed to be in jail. I read the article, remembering now in growing dismay. The courts had decided to let him serve out the rest of his sentence from the comfort of his own home back in 1998. According to the article, Videla had a history of heart problems, and a few weeks ago the authorities had bundled him out in the middle of the night to see his doctors and run some tests. The relatives of those whom he had made disappear while he had been in power had got word of it and been ready for him when he got back.
I was glad of the reception he had received, but the article had made me angry, and I knew I was going to start thinking about home again and raking it all up. Thinking about what happened is useless, and with a great effort of will I blocked it out. I imagined the past as something small and black and inconsequential and crushed it beneath my heel, and, just to make sure it wouldn’t come back, before I went to bed I settled down to some more work. I took the box of files and tapes into my study and emptied them out on to my desk. As I went through them, I thought not of home and people like Videla but of Hurst lying stone cold on a mortuary slab and that horrible gashing wound in his neck. I thought of Hurst’s house standing there, dark and impenetrable like some kind of bunker.
I thought of those dark corridors at night and of the elegant gun clutched in Hurst’s hands. In my mind, Hurst, as he had patrolled those corridors, was a man white-faced and afraid. The dog, sensing his fear, was at his heels, its ears pressed tight against its head. Then I thought of all those empty rooms gathering dust, and of his daughter’s room kept so immaculate that it must look exactly as it had the day she ran out on him. Hurst had definitely been trying to find her.
The last letter in the third file was dated April 2001 and had an invoice attached. Bray’s Detective Agency was embossed on the head of each typed sheet, along with an address in Warwick. I didn’t recognize the name or the address. It looked as if Hurst believed she had been in London, and that’s where he had sent Bray to find her.
Bray had personally carried out the investigation himself. Visits to hotels and youth hostels. Inquiries made at employment agencies where Hurst’s daughter might have applied for work. Bars and restaurants and letting agencies. Possible leads, and where he had planned to look for her next. A thorough job. But he had not been able to find her. I went through the files a second time, and then I went to bed, leaving the box locked up in a filing cabinet in my study.
I closed my eyes, and after what seemed a very long time I was able to think about something other than Frank Hurst and the weird emptiness of his house. I began to remember a holiday with my parents a few years before they’d had their accident. I remembered swimming towards a big black rock in the sea.
My father, an engineer for the railways, had been granted an entire month’s holiday from the British company where he worked. I remembered my mother, brown and slender, lying in the sun. I couldn’t be sure now where it had been. Mar de las Pampas or perhaps Mar del Plata. Somewhere along the Atlantic coast. The water had been very cold. I remembered reaching the rock and suddenly becoming frightened by what lay waiting for me, because I couldn’t see the bottom any more. I had swum out too far.
I had waved to my father on the beach for reassurance, but my father, indifferent as usual, with his head buried deep in the paper or a book, hadn’t seen me. And it was while I was thinking of my father and mother and of the cold water that I finally started to drift off to sleep. My mind fixed on one random object after the other; images flickered and vanished. And then I began to dream.
I dreamt that I was back at Hurst’s house. In my dream it was winter, but I was sitting on a deckchair in front of Hurst’s swimming pool. Hurst was with me, and, past his shoulder, young girls dressed identically in school uniforms were lining up near the metal stairs that led to the pool on the far side. They were all wearing hairpins in the shape of broken flowers. One after the other, they jumped into the swimming pool in the cold, frosty afternoon. But the pool was dirty and dark and full of rotting leaves and rubbish. Bottles and plastic shopping bags floated on its white, scum-covered surface, while oily black branches bobbed and were churned by some strange current below. But the children did not seem to notice. They disappeared one by one beneath the surface and did not come back up.
In my dream, there was something dark in the water – something below the surface, sliding about, waiting for the children to jump in. I wanted to stop them, but found that I could not. I wanted to scream out, warn them against whatever terrible fate was down there.
But in my dream Hurst grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go. I looked into his deep-set blue eyes in his suntanned weathered face. I stared down at his checked workshirt, the sleeves rolled up over his strong sinewy forearms. I looked beyond his shoulder. I couldn’t take my eyes off the foaming waters and the grinning children; I couldn’t pull myself out of the nightmare.
‘Downes,’ Hurst was saying. ‘There’s something I have to tell you. Something I should have…’
I leant forward, trying to make out what he had to say, but Hurst’s words were torn away from me and lost in the wind.
On my bedside table the phone was ringing. I could hear it in my sleep. It sounded as if it were coming from under water. I tried to wake up, but I couldn’t. I tried to pull myself out of the dream, but it was as if a current seethed all around me and held me down. I was in the back of the Falcon again. Trying to open the window. But the window wouldn’t open. And then, as the water finally pulled me under, I woke up. I reached for the phone.
‘So sorry, sir,’ Graves’s polite voice said on the line. ‘But I’ve just got word from the station. Something’s up.’
I shifted my feet to the floor and stared mournfully at my legs poking out of my pyjamas. ‘Up?’
‘Over at Hurst’s place,’ Graves said.
‘What’s happened?’
‘It’s the house.’
‘The house,’ I said immediately, awake now. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Well, it’s on fire,’ Graves said.
13
Even though I had already been told what was happening over the police radio, I was not prepared for the enormity of the blaze when I got there. The rolling flames filled the entire windscreen as I approached the house, and when I got out of the car the raw power of it hit me like a wave. Even from the other side of the front gates, I could sense its urgency, and its desire to keep on going until all the trees and the surrounding fields had been laid to waste.
As I stared at the house, a narrow stick of timber beneath the tiles hit the guttering at the top and landed on one of the great yew trees standing by the side of the house. It remained lodged stubbornly in the crook of a branch, and then ever so slowly the branch caught fire. As if in triumph, the fire raging inside the house rose higher, its bright flames piercing the smoke that seemed to envelop the sky.
A sudden wave of heat hit me across the gravelled driveway, and a chimney pot fell from the roof to the ground. Its image, set against the dark walls of the house, stayed with me for a moment when I blin
ked: a shaft of light framed against the blackness of my eyes.
It crashed into the flowerbeds beneath the kitchen window and burnt at the base of the house. The weeds and flowers, the forgotten ornamental trees and the tough old roses all started to burn and crackle while the water from the fire engines cascaded down in fountains and formed glistening puddles in the driveway.
I took a few wary steps forward, shielding my eyes from the blaze. Already a long, cold line of sweat was dripping from my neck and crawling the entire way down my back. There were two fire engines. And, as I watched, a third, this one a truck with an extra supply of water, came hurtling along the lane, through the gates and straight on to the driveway, shuddering to a halt just outside the front door. A series of groans came from deep within the house, followed by a low wail from somewhere far off. I feared that the noise signified some fundamental and appalling shift in the building’s structure. The roof began to slump further in on itself.
From the very depths of the house came another groan and then an ominous ricocheting bang, as something had finally given way. There was a moment when everything seemed very still. The firemen tensed. The captain yelled out an order above the din, and the men surprisingly quickly, but with their hoses still trained on the blaze, moved back. They had already been pushed back as far as the gates.
I stepped back too and looked up. There was a huge crack as the whole of the eastern section of the roof imploded and fell in on itself. As it did so a massive ball of flame shot up into the sky. Both teams immediately closed in again on the fire, shifting in tandem in the gravel, leaning into the weight of the water jetting out of the hoses.
Although mesmerized by the blaze and all the activity around it, I finally turned away and moved towards an ambulance. There was no sign of Graves, but his car was parked amongst the trees on the other side of the lane. Cleaver was leaning nonchalantly against the bonnet. A medic was wrapping his arm with a bandage. As if he hadn’t breathed in enough smoke already, Cleaver was puffing away on a thick roll-up.
‘Anyone hurt?’ I asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ Cleaver said. ‘A bloke got trapped for a while, breathed in a ton of smoke.’
‘Who? One of the firemen?’
‘No, sir. A passer-by. Came along and saw the fire before they got there. He ran inside before I could stop him.’
‘A passer-by,’ I said, genuinely horrified. ‘How the hell did he manage to do that?’
‘I told him to stay put. It all went up so fast. I didn’t know it was even on fire to begin with, because of all the bricked-in windows and them bars. It was only when I got to the back that I saw it and smelt it. Petrol.’
‘Petrol? Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ Cleaver said. ‘Then I saw the smoke. And then the whole place just went up.’ Cleaver moved both hands in the air. ‘Whoosh,’ he said. ‘You never seen anything like it. The next thing I know this fella’s leggin’ it straight past me and right towards the house. I couldn’t stop him.’
‘He going to be all right?’
‘Yes, sir. I got to him in time. Near thing, though.’ Incredibly, Cleaver sounded immensely pleased with himself.
I walked round to the back of the ambulance, peered in and saw through the back window the blurred shape of a large man sitting with his head forward, breathing into a mask. He took the mask off and pushed it weakly away, while a second medic urged him to replace it. I moved a little closer. There was something immediately familiar about him, although I could not figure out exactly what it was.
‘Breathed in a lot of smoke,’ Cleaver said again, appearing beside me. ‘Thought he was a goner. But I managed to pull him out of there in the end. He were in a right old state. Poor bugger kept on passing out by the time I got to him. You shoulda seen ’im. Looked like he was pissed or something.’ Cleaver laughed.
I took a long deep breath and looked beyond the ambulance at the fire rising up above the tops of the trees. Then I said with a great deal of restraint, ‘Did you see anyone else, Cleaver?’
Cleaver shook his head.
I looked past his shoulder, thinking that if there really had been any more evidence in the house, it had literally gone up in smoke.
Graves came round the back of the ambulance. ‘They can’t control it, sir,’ he said. ‘Called in for backup. Looks like the whole place is finished. They might have to let it just burn itself out.’ Graves paused when he saw Cleaver and said, with a nasty glint in his eye, ‘Good job, Cleaver.’
Cleaver didn’t say anything. Graves turned on his heel and disappeared.
‘I reckon whoever started it must have come over the back, through the fields,’ Cleaver said. ‘If he’d have come round the front, I woulda seen him.’
‘You mean you would have seen him if you’d been awake, Cleaver. It was a passer-by, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘A passer-by who saw the smoke from the road, ran down the lane, rapped on the window and woke you up. That’s what happened, wasn’t it? And by the time you’d woken up he was already halfway round the back, and it was too late to stop him.’
Cleaver sighed and gave in. ‘I tried to catch up with him. But the next thing I know he’s running towards the house. Christ knows why – but he went straight down those steps. The whole thing nearly fell right on top of him.’
I looked through the ambulance window again. The injured man was sitting upright on the stretcher. The tips of his fingers looked red and swollen, and there were grazes along the sides of his hands as well as thick gouges of broken skin along his arms. He had lost a boot, and the wet imprint of his right foot inside his sock stood out clearly in the fluorescent light.
‘Sir,’ Graves said.
I turned around.
‘They’ve found something,’ Graves said breathlessly. ‘Round the back. You’d better come and have a look.’
There was a fireman standing beside him. He took off his helmet, ran his hand through his hair and put the helmet on again, leaving it cocked at an angle on his head. The visor was streaked with what looked like black oil.
‘We’re playing it a bit by ear here,’ Graves said, ‘because apparently nothing like this has ever happened before. And I mean ever. They think you might not get another chance to look at it. Looks like the whole thing is going to go up any minute, and they may never get it out.’
‘Get what out?’ I said impatiently. ‘Come on, Graves. What is it?’
‘A body.’
‘What?’
‘They were checking to see if anyone was still alive in there as they put the fire out. So they got as close as they could to the blaze. They didn’t know that no one was living here, so they assumed that there were people trapped inside. They couldn’t get that close, but they saw something. Deep down. There’s a body beneath the house. Round the back. It looks like it might have been there for a very long time.’
We all started to run towards the gates. Then I turned round so suddenly that Graves nearly ran straight into me.
‘Graves, I need you to start a search right now,’ I said. ‘Get everyone you can and tell them to start looking all around the fields, and the roads too. Looks like whoever started the fire probably came from across the fields. They’ll be trying to change their clothes, because they torched the place with petrol. Stop any cars coming out of the village too.’
Graves nodded and took off towards the car. The fireman was waiting for me, looking anxiously towards the house.
My God, I thought, as I began to follow him. Another body. That made two within twenty-four hours. A record. I wondered grimly if there would be a third.
14
I followed the fireman through the gates and on to the fire engines. The din beyond the gates was unbelievable. The fireman handed me a thick coat exactly like his own; I pulled off my coat and left it on top of one of the tool boxes inside the fire engine. The fireman, despite the heat and noise, felt compelled to introduce himself as Fred Turner and shook my hand.
‘We can’t hang about,�
� Turner said. ‘When we get to the side, wait for me to give the all-clear, then we’re going to have to peg it. Once we’re through, we should be all right for a few minutes.’
Turner was surprisingly young but big and built like a farmer. He rummaged around in the fire truck, found a helmet and passed it to me. Then he took off his own, threw it carelessly inside, grabbed another one and put it on before sliding the visor down his face and gesturing for me to do the same.
He shot off, and I followed, breaking into a run, leaping over pieces of broken glass and chunks of burning wood, until we reached the side of the house. Ignoring the path, Turner ran straight across the garden, following the thick hose snaking its way across the lawn, to the raised stone platform that straddled the bottom of the house. The hose cut thick swathes into the snow.
One of the men was using a pike to tear away at the bricks on the French windows. He had already cleared a gaping hole, through which another fireman was directing water at the flames inside, but the platform looked as if it could give at any moment. The fireman with the hose suddenly drew well back and changed his position to the edge of the lawn. The globes of stone on the balustrades rose up before us as we drew closer. Una fila de tumbas, I thought when I saw them: they looked just like a row of tombs.
The house continued to wail like a stricken animal from deep inside its centre. Another almighty cloud of dust and debris came hurtling towards us. The cloud spread, obscuring the firemen in a billowing mass of splintered glass, shattered timber and shards of brick. The whole side of the house seemed to sag, and then what was left of the eastern section of roof above the living room finally came tumbling down. Fire shot out through the broken bricks of the French windows, but was immediately quenched by tonnes of falling tiles.
The Drowning Ground Page 9
