The reluctant guest left after ten minutes, having swallowed her sherry in one gulp and handed her glass back, saying that she must get back across the road. Holding her bag against her chest, as if protecting it from some sort of attack, she walked across the road, without even turning to wave goodbye.
Virginia stayed on for another half an hour, mentioning that she had seen Mrs Course visiting at High Gates before her parents went away, and gave it as her opinion that it was odd that the other woman hadn’t mentioned it. Harriet was rather short with her about this, for she was sure that, if it were true, her mother would surely have informed her with one of her superior smiles, implying she was more popular than her daughter.
With a small blush that this piece of information may be true, and withheld by her mother out of spite, Harriet consoled herself that she had had the rather charmless woman round for refreshments all on her own.
Virginia tried other conversational gambits, but finally gave up in sheer boredom, for Harriet talked about nothing other than the harsh and unsympathetic treatment she suffered at the hands of her parents. Making an excuse about Richard expecting her back to make the lunch, she gathered up her jacket and left, glad to get away, and not impressed in the least with the woman who was holidaying next door to her.
The rest of Easter Sunday passed without notable incident in the unremarkable village, and the sun went down in a blaze of glory, setting the clouds on fire with the splendour and richness of its colours.
Back at High Gates, Harriet Findlater dined off a piece of shop-bought quiche with a microwave-baked potato and salad, washed her few dishes, and settled down in front of the television set, in sole control of the remote. Yet even this unusual situation did not comfort her, for with the arrival of darkness she had become nervous again, remembering her fears of a prowler, and the fact that she was on her own.
It wasn’t much of an advantage having her own choice of what to watch on the television, if someone came in and strangled or stabbed her. Rising from the most comfortable chair, usually her mother’s perching place, she locked both the front and back doors, and the windows that she had had open earlier to air the house on such a fresh and relatively warm day. No one was going to catch her unawares tonight, if she could help it.
She was well-secured inside the house, and she would take a couple of her mother’s sleeping tablets when she retired. The old biddy might give her a right verbal going over when she got back, but there’d be no way she could retrieve her two tablets, and Harriet would have had a good night’s sleep – in fact, she got a rather longer sleep than she had intended, as it turned out.
Cursing both her mother and her late boss as singularly unsympathetic to her, Harriet Findlater’s, wishes and desires, she stumped off upstairs to bed, wondering if maybe she would be put in temporary control at the school after the holidays. At least that would be a consolation, even if a very small one.
[1] See Choked Off
Chapter Eight
Sunday 3rd April – after dark
The first light became visible through the glass panel of the front door, flickering and jumping, desperate to grow up, and learn to roar. It was hungry, and needed urgently to feed, and there was little food here in the hall. Maybe the coats on the coat hooks would make a tasty little snack. Hunger! Hunger! Hunger! It had to eat, and it had to eat now, or die.
The first person to become aware of the light was a man from Leaze Hollow, out walking his dog, as he couldn’t sleep. ( The dog was compliant, grateful even, of this unexpected late exercise.) The man dragged his mobile phone out of his pocket to inform the appropriate authorities of what he was witness to, his dog whining at this unexplained halt, so far from home.
The first ring woke Falconer, and he reached automatically for the phone, his body well ahead of his brain. ‘Whoozzit?’ he asked, his normally immaculate hair spiked and askew, as if he had been asleep in a ghost train, when the telephone rang. ‘Whaaa …?
Consciousness finally returned as he realised what he was being told, and he sat bolt upright, his brain racing now, its previous torpor shed like an old snake skin. ‘Let Carmichael know,’ he requested, ‘Tell him I’ll pick him up as soon as I can get there, and tell him not to expect to be back home much before breakfast.’ As he terminated the call he was already halfway into his trousers, theories forming then evaporating in his brain.
He had not anticipated this, and realised that his previous opinion on who may be responsible for the murder might be a bit off kilter. It could still be one of the people on his cork board, but there was also the possibility that there was someone out there who had managed to stay under his radar, and was very, very dangerous.
The light licked its way into the living room and started to make its way up the stairs, beginning to crackle now, like a chuckle of evil laughter. There was enough food here for it to grow to magnificence, to become a fire to remember; a fire to go down in village history. If it remained unchecked, it might even be the bringer of a village tragedy, and it produced as much smoke as its fuel would allow, trying to build up its strength so that it could roar its power through the house, destroying everything in its path, licking, as if to taste, new areas and objects it came upon.
The man with the dog, after making the emergency call, approached from the other side of the road, to see if there was anything he could do, but Harriet had made a good job of locking up. Having taken two sleeping tablets, she was determined not to be disturbed that night. Little did she know that she would never be disturbed again, but would have been comforted to know that she would not have to endure her mother’s fury, and look suitably chastened under the fire of her contumely:
Harriet, how could you have been so stupid as to burn down the house? We were only gone a couple of days, and now we’re homeless. Have you got no consideration for your poor old parents? Whatever were you thinking of to allow the house to be gutted like that? You really are a very careless and stupid girl, and I don’t know why we put up with you .
Harriet slept on, oblivious to the oblivion into which she was about to be plunged, while the good Samaritan banged on double-glazed windows and shouted himself hoarse, the dog joining in with its sharp barking.
Across the road Virginia heard the unexpected noise, and came out of the front door of her holiday cottage to see what was happening. Surely there were not drunken street fights in such a peaceful little village? The only sounds they had heard from the street outside since they had arrived had been that of the occasional car passing.
She looked with horror across the road to the flickering light behind the front door and downstairs windows of High Gates, spotted the man with his dog, and ran over to see if there was anything they could do. She called for Richard to come and join her as she ran, thinking of garden sheds with hoses in, but it was obvious as she approached the building that nothing as paltry as a hosepipe could deal with a situation like this. It was so out of hand now that only the fire brigade could be of assistance in vanquishing the monster that was an out-of-control fire.
Looking back briefly to whence she had come, she saw Richard dragging on a jacket as he made his way, at a run, to join her. At number four, next door to their cottage, she saw a figure in the doorway, silhouetted by the light behind it, and knew it was Caroline Course.
As the flames started to glow dully in the upstairs windows, showing that the fire was inexorably climbing the stairs towards the house’s sole occupant, Virginia idly wondered why their neighbour didn’t join them. There may be nothing they could do at this precise moment, but human nature dictated that people congregated when something disastrous was happening, and her very stillness seemed unnatural.
As if she were aware of Virginia’s puzzled gaze, although this was impossible, given the darkness and the distance, Mrs Course closed her front door slowly, and pulled the curtains across her front window, as if she had seen as much as she needed to.
Inside the house, black smoke roiled lazily where
it found pockets of clear air, filling them with the poisonous fumes emitted by old furnishings. Chairs and sofa showed the skeletons of their frames and springs, as if in x-ray, and the panes in the fronts of glass display cabinets began to explode, showering the downstairs rooms with a rain of deadly shards and arrows of glass.
As the fire reached the landing, it chuckled and laughed as it approached the bedrooms, knowing that behind one of these doors was great fun, and was happy that the owners of the dwelling had been too miserly to install any smoke alarms. Undetected, it would graze more easily on what awaited its hungry maw.
It moved on, unchecked, as the sound of sirens approaching sounded quietly through the oh-so-secure, double glazed windows, and sauntered lazily towards Harriet’s bedroom door in anticipation of a fine barbecue, with no interruptions, until it had finished feasting.
Two fire engines from Market Darley pulled up in Forge Lane, outside the blazing premises, and the leading fireman informed the few bystanders that there was another unit on its way from Carsfold. And suddenly the night was full of uniformed bodies, all made brightly visible by their luminous yellow over vests, shouted instructions and urgent activity.
One fireman grabbed Virginia by the shoulders and asked her if there was anyone inside, and she stutteringly told him that the couple who owned the house were away for the weekend, but that their middle-aged daughter was in there, presumably sleeping through all these disastrous events.
As he walked away from her to pass this information on to the rest of the team, she felt bemused that she had sat, only that morning, in Harriet’s house drinking sherry, and wanting nothing more than to get away from the woman. For all she knew, Virginia might have been the last person she spoke to before this happened. By now, it seemed impossible that anyone could survive the conflagration, and she amended this thought to ‘the last person she had spoken to in this life’, with an involuntary shudder, that anyone might arrive at the Pearly Gates with only her voice ringing in their ears, in tones that declared without need for words, that she wanted to get away and back to her own comfortable life.
Shame flooded her, and she was overwhelmed with the childish notion that St Peter would have a right dressing down waiting for her when she finally popped her clogs: Look at the disgraceful way you treated that poor woman, who had only a few hours to live. There’s no point in saying that you didn’t know that, for you wouldn’t have treated her any better, and you know it. She had a meagre, mean little life, with very little joy in it, and you couldn’t even be bothered to share her last drink with her and offer a little lively conversation and the hand of friendship, so that she could leave this world a happier soul.
Her cheeks flaming as much from guilt as from the heat, she ran towards Richard and flung herself into his arms, horrified at what was happening right before her eyes, and grateful that she was safe, and had a life to get on with on the morrow. As they walked, arms round each other, back across the road, so as not to hinder the fire team, he asked her what was the matter, as he could feel her shaking from head to toe.
‘That poor woman in there! My mind’s running the nastiest video possible in my head, at what might be happening to her. She’s going to die, Richard, while we stand outside watching, and there’s nothing whatsoever that we can do about it.’
‘Don’t torture yourself, Ginny. Most people in fires die from smoke inhalation, and know nothing about what happens to the body they’ve left behind.’ His words of comfort fell on deaf ears, however.
‘That’s as might be, but someone’s got to see what happened to her – what’s left of her – and they’re never going to forget it, are they?’
‘Ginny, stop it! They’re trained men who are hardened to this sort of thing. Just be grateful we have something like the fire service, to save us the horror of sorting through that for her remains. And professional medical staff who can deal with what’s come out of there and pass it on to an undertaker.’
‘I wonder if she ever considered being cremated when she died? And whatever is her mother going to say about the state of the house when her parents get back tomorrow? Oh, those poor people, having a kebab for a daughter,’ Virginia rambled, with a high pitched hysterical giggle, then sobered up when she saw the woman at the upstairs window of number four.
The flames were now fierce enough for the light to illuminate the occupant’s face, and she seemed to be smiling an exultant smile, but that couldn’t be so. It must be her own hysteria getting the better of her, and she asked Richard to get her indoors where she could do something useful, like making tea for the hard-pressed firemen.
She had just disappeared indoors and shut the front door when a car drew up outside the empty house on the other side of the terrace, and Falconer and Carmichael emerged, their faces glowing an angry red as they neared the source of the heat. All available access to the inside was now open to the elements, and hoses sprayed through the openings in a vain attempt to bring the conflagration under control, and a couple of streams of water played in an apparently lazy fashion over the roof, in an effort to keep the flames damped down.
The fire was much stronger now. Fuel had given it strength and ambition, and it would not be content with just the interior of the house – and of course its sole resident, who was still burning merrily like a church candle. It was determined to aim for the stars, and chewed its way enthusiastically through the upstairs ceilings and into the attic, where it took very little effort to break through the tiles and into the cool night air, defeating without too much effort the pathetic streams of water being aimed at it.
It was strong and mighty, and would not be defeated by these pygmies with their little spouts of water. Exultantly, it reached upwards, casting an orange glow that could be seen for miles around. It knew it had brothers that had destroyed whole towns and forests, but there were also others who had been extinguished almost at birth, and it wanted to ‘burn hay while the sun wasn’t shining’. The opportunity deserved its best shot, so that it might achieve its place, if not in history, then at least in local memory.
Falconer had a quick word with the fire chief, and wandered back to Carmichael, his face a blank mask. ‘Apparently Harriet Findlater is in there, and there’s no way any of the fire service personnel have been able to get inside to look for her. It looks like she’s a goner: there was nothing anyone could do about it.’
Carmichael’s face crumpled with distaste, as he contemplated, involuntarily, what lay within, and asked when they might ascertain the cause of the blaze. Just because there had been murder done in the vicinity didn’t mean that this couldn’t be the result of an electrical fault.
‘The passer-by who made the original phone call said he could smell petrol or paraffin when he went to the door. The tragedy is, if anyone could have got in there then, Harriet Findlater might have been standing with us now, but the house was locked up as tight as a drum – no windows open anywhere. If the man’s right, it’s a case of arson we’re dealing with here – another murder, if you like – but it’ll have to be officially confirmed by the fire investigation officer before we’re allowed to treat it as such.’
At his shoulder a voice asked him if he would like a cup of tea, and he turned to find Virginia Grainger holding a large tray filled with mugs of the English liquid solution to every problem or situation, simultaneously noticing her husband Richard, moving between the fire fighters with a similar burden.
As the two of them helped themselves to mugs, Carmichael adding the inevitable six sugars to his mug, Falconer informed his ad hoc waitress that he had spoken to Inspector Plover about her.
‘Why?’ she asked, her mind not at all on what she was doing, fresh horrors arising with her renewed proximity to the burning house.
‘To make sure you’re not a mass murderer or a bank robber,’ he answered in jest, only to find his little joke had back-fired, and that she had taken him seriously in her distraction.
‘I can’t believe you asked him that!’
she stated, looking bewildered.
‘Of course I didn’t, Mrs Grainger. I was just trying a little levity to lighten the mood.’
‘Well, don’t!’ she replied brusquely, her gaze straying across the road again, to her neighbour’s upstairs window, where the face still stared out at the devastation taking place just a few yards from her holiday home.’
‘Have you met her?’ the inspector asked, inclining his head to the row of houses opposite.’
‘I had sherry with her only this morning in this very house,’ she answered absently. ‘She doesn’t seem a very sociable person. I can’t understand why she’s come to a small village like this for a holiday if she doesn’t want to mix with any of the locals and get to know some of them. She might just as well have gone to a city, where there would at least be lots of museums and art galleries for her to walk around on her own, without having to socialise with anyone else.’
‘That’s a very acute observation, Mrs Grainger, if you don’t mind me saying so. Now, you get off with the rest of those mugs of tea, and make some very thirsty firemen happy.’
With another glance at the face at the upstairs window, Virginia did as she was told, but her mind was busy going over what she had just said to Falconer. It was odd that the woman had chosen Shepford Stacey for her solitary break, and she wondered that she had not just stayed at home behind closed doors. To pay good money to stay somewhere where she was just going to stay inside was mad, absolutely mad, and Virginia could not fathom where the enjoyment that usually was part and parcel of a holiday was, in this reclusive plan.
After her departure Falconer had another word with the chief fire officer, who confirmed that he was of the same opinion as the passer-by, who had left his name, address, and telephone number, and could be more conveniently interviewed in the morning. The seat of the fire would have appeared to be in the hall. If there had been the whiff of an accelerant, then it would definitely turn out to be arson, with someone having poured flammable liquid through the letter box, followed by a lit rag.
Pascal Passion (The Falconer Files Book 4) Page 15
