by Jo Bannister
‘Poachers?’ hazarded Daniel, without much hope.
‘I think we should assume it’s the police.’
‘Does this’ – he didn’t know how to put it – ‘change anything?’
Kant considered, but not for long. ‘I think it might, yes.’
An hour ago, when he thought it was inevitable, Daniel had been able to face death with something approaching composure. Not exactly reconciled, not exactly unafraid, but giving a good enough performance to satisfy the critics.
But then, for just a moment, he’d thought he’d dodged the bullet, and with that had come the realisation that appearance isn’t everything, that a good performance may convince the audience but the actor will always know it’s not the real thing. Of course he was afraid, even if he didn’t dare admit it. The keenest astronomer in the world would sooner observe a black hole than dive into one. Now the void loomed again and his courage was all used up. His voice came out a plaint ‘Please …’
There was a note almost of kindness in Kant’s tone as he climbed into the box. ‘Mr Hood, you misunderstand me. Your death will not serve me now What I need from you is a distraction. Let us look on the bright side. You may survive.’
Threats come in different forms. Daniel had heard a few of them in his time. That was one of the worst. ‘What are you going to do?’
Perhaps nothing had changed. Perhaps this was what Kant had had in mind all along. His hand went straight to the right pocket and came out with a cigarette lighter.
‘No,’ whispered Daniel. ‘Oh dear God, no. Don’t do this.’
A man who could call setting fire to someone a distraction had probably heard a lot of entreaties in his time, and paid scant heed to any of them. He bent over and began gathering straw from the floor into a pile. ‘Try not to be alarmed,’ he said as he worked. ‘Look, I’ll put it well away from you. There’ll be plenty of time for them to get you out. But while they’re doing that, they’re not chasing me.’
‘You can’t …’ Daniel’s voice cracked and he had to start again. ‘You can’t start a fire in here! It’ll be an inferno in seconds! If you’re going to kill me, at least make it quick. I’ve been burnt. I don’t — I can’t …’ He ran out of words. And for all that they were achieving, there was no point struggling for more.
Kant paused in what he was doing and for a moment eyed his captive with something akin to compassion. But practicality – what he’d called the balance of necessities – intervened. He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. Naturally you are afraid. But whoever it is out there won’t let you burn. In just a few minutes now you will be free. And so shall I.’
‘And what if it isn’t the police?’ In his agitation Daniel was actually stammering. ‘What if it’s a couple of teenagers using this place as a Lovers’ Lane? You think they’re going to risk their lives to get me out? I’m going to die in here! I’m going to burn and I’m going to die!’
‘Ah.’ The man hadn’t thought of that. He thought about it now, but only briefly. He couldn’t know for sure it was the police closing in on him until it was too late, and he wasn’t prepared to gamble with his safety. He shrugged dismissively. ‘What are the odds? No, you’ll be fine.’ And he bent and lit the fire.
And the pony snorted and, white-eyed, backed to the limit of its tether. And Daniel let out a wail like a terrified child.
There aren’t many retiring violets in the police force, but even among colleagues Jack Deacon’s temper was notorious. It’s why the whole of Battle Alley, with the exception of the loyal DS Voss and (usually) Superintendent Fuller, referred to him as “The Grizzly”. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, people tended not to notice that his language was not particularly colourful. When he swore it wasn’t cutting-edge obscenity but the slightly old-fashioned oaths of his London childhood that he fell back on, and they were just quaint enough these days to have an odd gentility about them.
But there was nothing genteel about what exploded from his lips when his carefully manoeuvred cordon revealed its position with a few jolly bars of military music. Even these tough police officers listened with interest in case there were some in there they hadn’t heard before — but only after they were sure it wasn’t their mobile sounding off.
Alison Barker might not be a professional stalker like Deacon, or even a semi-pro like Brodie, but she knew instantly the magnitude of what she’d done. It took her possibly three seconds to find the phone and shut it up. After that she stared at the dim pale circle in the darkness that was Brodie’s face and was too appalled even to apologise.
Brodie didn’t do a lot of swearing either: partly because she had a young daughter and children soak the stuff up like blotting paper, and partly because she didn’t have to. She could get all the venom imaginable into a few quite ordinary words. ‘You stupid girl,’ she hissed, just loud enough for Ally to hear, and Ally burst into tears.
When Deacon had established that none of his borrowed officers was responsible, he spun and found exactly what he was expecting – Brodie on his heels. ‘Was that you?’
‘It was us,’ she agreed with a kind of terse contrition. ‘What do you think – any chance he didn’t hear?’
Deacon weighed up the distance from where they were to the van in the courtyard, and also the deep silence broken only by his own furious heavy breathing. ‘What do you think?’
‘Sir?’ It was one of the firearms officers. He’d noticed a change in the quality of the light coming from the open door of the horse-box. It was growing stronger, and it was flickering.
For the merest second Brodie tried to tell herself it was an optical illusion. Or the light had been on long enough to weaken the battery, hence the flickering; or just long enough to warm up and brighten. But even as she ran through the options she knew she was fooling herself. She knew what kind of light flickered as it strengthened. ‘It’s on fire!’
Then they heard the cry, desolate as the night, and it might have been fear or it might have been agony but either way they knew, every one of them, that its author needed help right now. And it didn’t matter that they broke their cover at a run, and it didn’t matter that for a second the bright rectangle of the doorway framed a leaping figure that landed in the dark and ran. Seconds counted, fractions of a second counted, and every one of them had held a cigarette stub too long or touched a casserole fresh from the oven and knew what a burn felt like. It was no longer a question of containing a dangerous situation. A man was alive inside a burning box, and nothing else mattered until either he was out or he was dead.
In the same way that you tell children never to run with scissors, firearms officers are strongly advised not to run with weapons drawn. However John Wayne makes it look, you can’t fire an accurate shot on the move. At a run, you’d be lucky to hit a barn wall from the inside. But, like children, there are times when the urgency of the situation makes it impossible to obey. This was one of those times.
Even so, the guns slowed them down, so that Deacon and Brodie reached the courtyard first. For a big man, Deacon could move fast when he had to. And Brodie, who took a positive pride in never unduly exerting herself, had all the incentive necessary.
They came together, breathless, both ripping off their coats, a couple of metres from the van, with a clear view of leaping flames through the open door. The fire seemed to fill it. Smoke was pouring out of the high-level ventilators, and the vehicle rocked with the thundrous panic of the animal inside.
Deacon grabbed Brodie’s arm as she went to climb up. ‘You can’t go in there!’
‘Daniel’s in there!’
‘What if he can’t walk?’
The urgency of the situation notwithstanding, Brodie could see the sense in that. If need be, Deacon could lift Daniel bodily and throw him onto the cobbles in a way that she couldn’t. She nodded quickly. ‘Be careful.’
‘That boat has sailed,’ grunted Deacon, grabbing both sides of the doorframe and swinging himself up.
Inside,
conditions were marginally better than he’d expected. The fire had started – had been started – opposite the groom’s door precisely in order to be visible and alarming. It would spread, there was too much straw and wood in here for it not to, but it hadn’t spread yet.
The frantic pony was in the far stall and Daniel in the nearer, his hands lashed to the breast-bar. His face was white with fear, the eyes stretched behind the thick lenses. ‘Jack …’
It was a moment’s work to free him. Deacon used his penknife to cut the baler-twine. As his hands came free Daniel’s knees gave way and he dropped to the rubber floor, gasping in the smoke and fumes.
Deacon fisted a hand in his clothes and yanked him upright. ‘On your feet, little man. You’re not hurt, it’s just shock – fight it. I don’t propose to carry you while you can run.’
Daniel hit the ground like an inept diver, knocking the wind out of himself, and an instant later Deacon landed beside him. They helped one another to their feet and then others were there too, Brodie among them, clutching their arms and dragging them clear. They staggered back from the burning van, the flames filling their eyes, the smoke gnawing at their lungs, their muscles turned to string by the awareness of how narrowly they had escaped.
And then a shriek ripped through their brains like shrapnel, and the horror surged back that there was still a living soul in there, trapped and burning. Daniel spun on the spot, staring back into the flames. He retraced a couple of steps, then stopped. He looked from Brodie to Deacon in terrible distress. His voice cracked. ‘We can’t leave it in there!’
Brodie took his hand. ‘I don’t think we have any choice,’ she said softly.
‘Jack …?’
Deacon shrugged roughly. ‘I nearly didn’t go in for you, I’m sure as hell not going back for a horse.’
‘We can try! We have to try …’
‘No,’ said Deacon firmly, ‘we don’t. It’s an animal. Nobody’s risking their life for an animal.’
‘It’s too dangerous,’ Brodie agreed. ‘Anyone who went in there now would likely be kicked to death by a panic-stricken pony. And he’d never get her out. They won’t — the fear confuses them, they’re too scared to leave a burning building. Isn’t that right?’ She turned to Alison for support.
The rosy glow of the flames was reflected in the streaks of tears on Ally’s thin face. She’d thought her stupidity had cost a good man his life. Now he was here, singed but safe beside her; but relief was tempered by the knowledge of what was happening, what was going to happen, just a few metres away, before her very eyes unless she screwed them tight shut. And what she didn’t see she would hear: the screams of terror and then of agony as the flames consumed the box and its occupant. She whispered, ‘Can’t we put the fire out?’
‘Sure we can,’ snarled Deacon. ‘With the fire extinguishers my guys carry in their free hands. Look, if we’d brought the cars up there might have been a chance. But it’ll take ten minutes to get them, and that’s too long to leave that animal to suffer. The kindest thing we can do now is get someone close enough to shoot it.’ He strode away, looking for someone with a gun.
Daniel shook his head in despair. ‘I’m going to try. I know it’s stupid, but I have to at least try.’
‘You’re going to get yourself killed!’ cried Brodie, aghast. ‘Jack risked his neck to get you out of there, and you want to go back in? Are you mad?’
‘Maybe.’ He nodded. ‘Maybe. But Brodie — I know what she’s going through.’
She had no answer to that. He didn’t mean it as a reproach, but it slid in under her ribs like one.
Ally said, ‘I’ll help.’
Daniel stared at her. Then he shook his head again. ‘It’s too dangerous.’
‘Too dangerous for me but not for you? At least I can handle a horse! Listen,’ she said urgently, her hands fisted in his clothes, demanding his attention. ‘I don’t know if we can do this. But if we can’t do it together, you sure as hell can’t do it alone.’
Without waiting for an answer she was struggling out of her coat. But she didn’t throw it down, she tucked it under her arm. ‘Listen to me. We need to get the back ramp down. Let me do the slide-bolts – they’re tricky if you haven’t seen them before. Inside the ramp there’ll be some kind of a gate, maybe double ones that fold back to form a chute. The pony’s on the left, yes?’
Daniel nodded, surprised that she knew.
‘You always travel a single in the offside stall,’ she explained briefly. ‘Until they reached the Channel, that was the left-hand side. So we go up the right side and duck under the breast-bar. I’ll use my coat as a blindfold and untie her. There won’t be room to turn her, she’ll have to back off. Daniel, you’ll need to keep the fire off both of us for as long as you can. If we can calm her down, it won’t take half a minute. If we can’t we won’t be able to do it at all.’
For just a second longer he didn’t move. ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘The same reason you helped me,’ she said. ‘Because I can.’
‘I don’t want you to die paying me back.’
‘I don’t intend to,’ she retorted, half laughing, half crying. ‘If this isn’t going to work you won’t see me for sparks.’
He tried to grin back, couldn’t. Sick with anticipation, he nodded. ‘All right.’
When they reached the rear of the box Brodie was there too. Daniel shook his head. ‘Not you.’
‘Why not?’ she demanded, ready to be offended.
‘Because of Paddy.’
She accepted that. ‘I’ll do the gates, and wait for you here.’
They weren’t the only people round the box, but everyone else was watching the flames at the front, and listening to the screams and desperate kicking of the pony inside, and cringing. Perhaps no one else realised there was a bigger door at the back. Certainly no one saw them move towards it. Someone would have stopped them if they had.
Ally was right: Daniel would never have worked out the slide-bolts for himself. She touched the metal cautiously but there was no heat in it yet, which was a good sign. Then she gripped and yanked, and the ramp came down. Even before it touched the cobbles, without further instruction Brodie was reaching for the gates. As she dragged the first one aside Daniel was doing the same with the second.
Just for a second, God knows how, he’d forgotten what it was they were trying to rescue. The flying hooves that had been hammering on the gate didn’t stop when the gate was moved – they hammered on Daniel instead, driving into his ribs with enough force to bowl him down the ramp.
‘Careful!’ yelled Ally.
‘Uh-huh,’ grunted a winded Daniel.
Then they were inside. Daniel tried to tell himself the situation wasn’t as bad as it looked from the courtyard, that the fire which had flared up quickly in the nest of dry straw prepared for it was now growing more slowly as it had to find its own fuel. But there was no doubt that it was growing. Another interesting point was that this was a van, not a trailer. Somewhere, possibly under their feet, was a fuel tank. Daniel had no idea if the van ran on petrol or diesel, but he knew that when fuel tanks explode they go not with a whimper but a bang. Halfway through the box he hesitated.
Ally crashed into him from behind, driving him forward. ‘Keep moving!’ she yelled. ‘We haven’t time to think about this.’ So he did.
Trying to get away the pony had stretched her rope to a bar like iron. She’d been loaded by professionals: it was fastened with a quick-release knot, but it couldn’t release under pressure like that. Ally tugged and tugged at the end and nothing happened. ‘She needs to take a step forward.’
Daniel looked at the fire in the front of the box, licking up the timber-lined sides and curling back under the roof, and his eye was white-rimmed like the pony’s. ‘She’s not going to do that!’
‘She has to. Or she’s dead.’
She flung her coat over Gretl’s head and tied the sleeves under her chin, a bit like a baby’s bonnet.
Daniel couldn’t see how blinding the poor creature would help, but it did. Some of the panic went out of her. Her cries turned to desperate gasping snorts, and she stood shaking, stamping her feet; but she stood. Alison, as if unaware of the flames climbing over her, stroked her face and her neck where the butterscotch coat curled with dripping sweat, and spoke gently to her.
Daniel was doing the best he could to fight the fire with his sweater. It wasn’t much of a weapon and the fire was winning. ‘Now,’ he gasped. ‘Ally, it has to be now. There is no more time.’
But all Ally said was, ‘Shhh.’
All Brodie could see from the rear ramp was the flickering of a fire occulted by its own smoke and by figures moving through it. She couldn’t hear their voices over the wild trampling of the pony. She kept her word and stood at the gate, and counted the seconds and the tenths of seconds, and still they didn’t come.
Finally she could bear it no longer. She shouted into the burning box, with as much authority as she could muster with her voice quaking, ‘You have to come out now, Daniel. You did your best — you have to come out now. Grab Ally and leave. Now! Daniel — please!’
Someone grabbed her elbow tight enough to hurt and it was Deacon who’d hurried to the back of the box, drawn by her yells. Lit by the red and yellow flames his face was gargoyle-twisted with incomprehension. ‘They’re in there? You let them go inside?’
She knew he was going to follow them. She didn’t want him to. She thought she was losing Daniel, and that would be unbearable. But what if she lost Deacon too, trying to save him? She hung onto his arm with all her strength. But his strength was the greater, and he cast her off.
His foot was already on the ramp when something changed: the quality of the light coming from the box. A patch of darkness appeared in the middle of it, and grew, and took on the shape of figures. Three of them. Out of hell walked – one of them backwards – a man, a girl and a pony.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Someone found a tank of rainwater in the courtyard and, dunking a coat in it, laid it over the animal’s back. It wasn’t until later that Deacon discovered the coat was his.
