First things first. Joe rolled the boy off the steps and half carried, half dragged him into the shelter of the nearest trees.
Then he turned back to the house, straining his eyes in search of movement upstairs. Not that he wanted to see any. What he did want to see was Morna Lewis appearing round the side of the house having escaped out the back. But somehow, the way things had gone on this trip, he didn’t really expect that would happen.
And he was right. There it was, second floor now, the pale-faced figure at a window, probably her own bedroom’s.
Safe there for a little while, thought Joe, straining his ears to catch the distant sound of approaching fire brigade sirens.
Nothing. God knows how far they had to come. But at least Matthias ought to be fetching help from the college any minute now.
Help to do what? Not put the fire out, that was for sure. It was eating up the old wooden-framed building like Whitey desperate to finish a stolen fish supper before he got caught.
He could hear a voice in his mind, Beryl’s maybe, or Mirabelle’s, or maybe Butcher’s back in Luton when she heard the news, one or more of the womenfolk in his life anyway: One rescue from a raging fire may be heroic, but two’s just macho showing-off.
Made no difference. A macho show-off’s gotta do what a macho show-off’s gotta do.
‘Stay there,’ he said redundantly to the almost comatose Wain.
Then he set off round the back of the house at a steady run.
Chapter 27
Getting in the side furthest away from the fire was easy.
These windows predated toughened glass. He put a stone through a pane, reached inside, released the catch, and clambered through without damage, except that his memory banks were sending out urgent signals to reawaken the aches and pains he’d suffered last time, as if to say, Didn’t you learn anything?
He was in the dining room. The rosewood table looked like the Mad Axeman of Llanffugiol had had his finest hour. When he opened the door into the hallway, the fire was waiting for him, licking around the lower treads of the staircase.
As last time, the answer was not to think, just to act. Like a circus dog going through a burning hoop, he leapt up to the fifth stair, felt it give beneath his weight, but managed to keep going till the stairs felt firm and the fire was just a warm breath on his neck.
Coming down this way wasn’t going to be an option though, not unless his descent started in the next half-minute.
Ascent to the second floor brought a delusion of safety. The heat wasn’t yet perceptible up here and apart from a little smoke which had passed with him through the upper stairway door, there was nothing to indicate the rising inferno below.
He found her where he’d seen her from the garden, still standing by the window of her simple bedroom, looking out. She didn’t turn, but spoke like she was welcoming an expected visitor to her salon.
‘Good evening, Mr Sixsmith,’ she said. ‘I would like to thank you for taking care of Owain.’
‘Yeah, fine, now I’ve got to take care of you,’ said Joe.
She turned then and gave him the Hepburn smile.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘You hurry along now, you should be able to get away quite easily.’
‘I’m not going without you,’ said Joe.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said briskly. ‘All your friends will be terribly upset if anything happens to you. You’re a much-loved man, Mr Sixsmith. It’s not possible to talk with you for more than a few minutes without realizing that.’
‘You too, Mrs Lewis,’ he assured her. ‘What will Wain do without you to protect him?’
This made her laugh.
‘Owain and I have just had an interesting conversation on the subject of my protecting him,’ she said. ‘It seems I am now surplus to requirements. No doubt you have already worked out that it was me who set fire to Copa Cottage and killed that young woman?’
On another occasion Joe might have been pleased at this unsolicited testimonial to his detective prowess, but now he had other things on his mind.
‘She’s not dead,’ he urged. ‘She’s come round and is talking.’
It was counter-productive.
‘Really? Then that means it’s all been for nothing, doesn’t it? She threatened to testify that Owain was a drug dealer, you know. I presume that now she’ll carry out her threat.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Joe. ‘She’ll have other things on her mind, I reckon.’
He hesitated, fearing the effect the news of the girl’s identity and probable reason for coming to Branddreth might have on the woman, but it was a chance he had to take.
‘Her name’s Angela Sillcroft,’ he said in a rush. ‘All she’s interested in is finding out what really happened to her brother. That’s Simon Sillcroft. Or was. The poor kid’s dead.’
His fears were groundless.
‘I knew all that,’ she said lightly. ‘She told me when I caught her rooting around in Leon’s study.’
‘You caught her …?’
‘Yes. It was the second time. The first time I spotted her was on the TV screen in one of the college dormitories. Owain was with her. They were being intimate’ – she made a moue of distaste – ‘but of course it means nothing to a boy of that age, it’s just the hormones talking. It happened once before … Anyway, once I’d spoken with them and discovered they’d only known each other a week and she wasn’t even a student at the same university, I thought the matter could be easily resolved. I pointed out that the Williamses would be back from holiday the following day, to get the place ready for your choir who would be staying there during the festival. She seemed to agree very readily that yes, it was time for her to be on her travels. And when I checked the screens the following day, it appeared that she’d been as good as her word.’
‘The screens … you mean the security TV screens? In the cellar? You know about them?’
She looked surprised.
‘This is my house, Mr Sixsmith. Of course I know about them.’
What does she mean by know? wondered Joe. Were they just part of the college security system to her? Or did she have an inkling of their other vile use? She’d have to be very naive not to suspect. He found himself wanting to believe she was that naive, so he could go on liking her.
Then he recalled that this woman by her own admission had attempted to burn Angela Sillcroft to death.
‘But she didn’t go away?’ he prompted.
‘No. As I said, I caught her ransacking Leon’s study. I was going to call the police. She said that if I did, I could wave goodbye to my son for several years as the police did not look kindly upon drug dealers. I said she was crazy, and then she took me up to Owain’s room and showed me these boxes. They were full of tablets. I don’t know what they were, but she said if I didn’t believe her, all I had to do was take a couple and I’d soon find out. Then she said some awful things about Leon too.’
‘What things?’
The small elfin face became closed.
‘Awful things,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t want to talk about them. I told her to go. She laughed and said she was going, but she’d be close. I followed her when she went and saw her going up the hill to Copa Cottage. Owain must have taken his father’s key and let her in.’
‘What did you say to Owain when you saw him?’
‘About the girl? Nothing. But I said I’d found the drugs and wanted them out of my house. He didn’t deny what they were, he just took them, I don’t know where.’
Joe knew where. He’d hidden a strip of Decorax in the cistern no doubt for personal use, then taken the rest to the college, to Bron, whom he’d persuaded to take care of them for a while. How? Not with money, Joe guessed. But with talk of love, a lot more than just talk … the poor kid had thought they were back on track again till Joe had sown new suspicions by telling her he’d seen Wain at the hospital.
This boy might look like he’d be knocked down by the wind blast from a picc
olo, but what with drug dealing and double dealing, he was a real piece of work. And his mother whom he so closely resembled … what was she?
There was a lot of noise building up outside. He went to the window and looked down. For a second he was surprised. Talking to Morna Lewis, he’d all but forgotten the fire, but now he saw by the crazy leaping light it was throwing out into the garden that it must have really got a grip on the ground floor. There were cars pulling up on the edge of that light, and people running forward, shielding their faces from the heat. He saw Lewis and Dai Bard and Mirabelle and Big Merv and Glyn Matthias. They’d found Wain and were talking to him. Probably not getting much sense back. Now they’d spotted him at the window and were waving and shouting.
He waved back and turned to the woman.
‘You went up to Copa Cottage that night,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
To see the girl and try and talk reason into her?’
A hesitation, then the lie. ‘Yes.’
‘How did you get there?’
‘I drove Owain’s car.’
‘Why not your own? You have a car, don’t you?’
‘Yes, but Leon was using it. He was out at a meeting, I knew he wouldn’t be back till late.’
‘So you asked Owain if you could borrow his car, did you?’
Another hesitation.
‘No, he was … busy elsewhere. I just took it.’
Busy. She’d probably checked the screens, seen just how busy her son was with young Bronwen somewhere in the college, cementing his arrangement to have his stock-in-trade stored in safe-keeping. What a nice safe girl Bron must have seemed all of a sudden to both mother and son.
‘But why’d you need to take the risk of borrowing his car anyway, Mrs Lewis?’ asked Joe. ‘Not a long walk up the hill, you’d done it already when you followed Angela. OK, it was night, but you knew the road, you could have taken a torch. Why not walk?’
She didn’t answer but went to the window. Her appearance caused a renewed wave of shouting from below. She didn’t acknowledge it.
‘I got this idea why you did it,’ said Joe wearily. ‘You needed transport ‘cos you didn’t fancy walking up there with a jerry can of petrol in one hand and a spray-can of paint in the other. You didn’t go up there to talk to Angela, Mrs Lewis. You went up there all tooled up to kill her.’
She turned and gave him the full Hepburn. Only now it seemed to him like a skull smiling.
‘She could have destroyed my son, Mr Sixsmith,’ she said.
‘Yeah? She needn’t have bothered. You and his dad seem to have done a pretty good job by yourselves. Come on, time to get out of here.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. Not much point after the things Owain said to me when he came home tonight. He smashed up my furniture, did you see that? All the things I inherited from my mother, everything I valued most. He knew that and he smashed it. And now I’ve burned it, and soon I’ll burn with it.’
‘Then it was you started the fire?’ said Joe.
‘Oh yes. Owain threatened, but he couldn’t carry it through. It takes a certain strength of character to carry something like that through and my son, I fear, doesn’t possess it.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Joe. ‘But your son will go to jail for doing it less’n you and me get out of here. Come on.’
He went to the door and flung it open.
It was a mistake. A blast of heat so strong it felt like a punch came spinning up the stairs, eager to get to grips with this new source of cold combustible air. Its source was clearly visible in the tongues of flame greedily licking round the door which led to the first-floor landing below.
‘Shoot,’ said Joe, slamming the door. ‘We ain’t going down there.’
It was his own stupid fault, letting himself get so taken up with being the great tec, spelling out the hows and whys and wheres and whens, that he’d forgotten he wasn’t Hercule Poirot relaxing in the library, but good old Joe Sixsmith, perched like a November 5th Guy at the top of a house built like a bonfire.
He ran back to the window and tried to open it. It was stuck. He picked up a bedside cabinet and used it as a battering ram. The window flew apart in a shatter of glass and a crumble of rotting wood.
He looked down, saw the crowd below, heard them all screaming at him, helpful things like, ‘Joe you’ve got to get out of there!’
‘Hey, man, don’t you think I know that?’ he yelled back.
But there was another sound, a much more comforting sound, the bell of a fire engine. He could see its lights coming up the road from the village. He saw it pull into the college drive then turn towards the Lady House. The crowd below scattered as it arrived. From up here it looked tiny, thought Joe. Then it struck him that while he was high, he wasn’t all that high, and in fact, compared with the red giants he was used to in the city streets back home, this vehicle really was small.
It must be the local fire engine, used to contain blazes till the big boys could make it from the town. Well, he wasn’t proud. He was happy to be rescued by anyone and anything.
Except there was another problem. It wasn’t just the engine that was small, it was its ladder too.
Trapped on the first floor they’d have been all right. But up here on the second, all Joe could do was stare in stupor at the topmost rung swaying around beneath him, well out of reach.
Now it was being withdrawn.
‘Hey, fellows, don’t give up so easy,’ he called. ‘Nobody loves a quitter!’
But they weren’t giving up. They were just moving to plan B.
Second thoughts are often best, was a favourite saw of Mirabelle’s.
Didn’t always work out though, thought Joe, as he looked down at the circle of canvas they had unrolled below. There were about twenty men around it, hanging on to the edge and leaning back to hold it taut.
It looked about the size of a dinner plate.
‘Jump, Joe! You gotta jump!’
He recognized the voice and his eyes picked out the source.
Beryl standing a little way back from the tiny circle of canvas, looking up and smiling encouragement. Now that was a real smile, a smile for a man to come home to and wake to and respond to all his life.
He yelled back, ‘Will you marry me if I jump?’
She called, ‘Depends on your aim. Now stop messing around, Joe Sixsmith. Jump!’
Her voice rose to a new pitch of urgency as the house gave a sudden groan and twitch as if the effort of staying upright was getting to be too much for it. Joe looked round. Morna Lewis was standing there, still smiling at him. Behind her the bedroom door was blistering.
‘You’d better go, Mr Sixsmith,’ said the woman. ‘I should hate to think that our little local troubles had brought any lasting damage to someone as nice as you.’
Joe looked out of the window again. Those guys down there were putting themselves at considerable personal risk. If the house collapsed they’d be in real trouble. It was showtime.
He threw back his head, yelled, ‘Geronimo!’, rushed forward, seized Morna Lewis round the waist, flung her over his shoulder like a sack of grain, turned, and as the door exploded open, he let the blast of heat and smoke carry him out of the open window into the rich and balmy star-filled night.
Chapter 28
Joe Sixsmith awoke.
He said, ‘What am I?’
Dr God said, ‘Don’t you mean, where am I?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Joe. ‘I know why I am.’
Joe awoke.
He saw an angel floating over him.
He said, ‘Why haven’t you got red hair?’
Joe awoke.
He was nowhere.
Joe awoke.
He saw Beryl Boddington’s head on the pillow beside him.
He said, ‘How long we been married?’
She said, ‘No need to worry about that, Joe. There weren’t more than a hundred witnesses.’
Joe awoke.
He said, ‘Am I dying? You don’t need to tell me the truth.’
Beryl said, ‘You’ve got a busted rib, a broken wrist, a twisted ankle, a lot of bruises, and a split skull and a concussion.’
He said, ‘I knew I was dying.’
Joe awoke.
Dr Godsip said, ‘Hello, Mr Sixsmith. Can you hear me?’
He said, ‘Where’s Nurse Butler?’
Dr Godsip said, ‘I’m afraid Nurse Butler has left us.’
Joe awoke.
He saw Aunt Mirabelle standing on Rev. Pot’s shoulders.
He said, ‘How’s Mrs Lewis?’
Aunt Mirabelle said, ‘That woman ain’t got nothing worse than a bruised backside. In my gramma’s day she’d have been burnt for a witch, which is no more than she deserves, things they’re saying about her are true.’
Joe said, ‘Believe them, Auntie, but maybe not all. She got a sweet smile and she loves her boy.’
Joe awoke.
He saw Richard Burton glaring down at him like he was an asp.
Richard Burton said, ‘You awake, Sixsmith?’
Joe said, ‘No.’
Joe awoke.
His arm felt like the asp had bitten it.
Prince said, ‘Next time it won’t be your arm I pinch. You’re a hero again, Joe. Know what a hero is? It’s a halfwit who smiles modestly into the camera and when he’s asked questions by the press bashfully mutters, A halfwit’s gotta do what a halfwit’s gotta do. Nothing else. You follow me, Joe?’
‘Don’t know nothing else,’ said Joe.
‘Good. ‘Cos we do. We know where you live.’
‘Hey, where is that?’ asked Joe.
Joe awoke.
Dirty Harry was sitting by his bed, cleaning his Magnum.
Joe awoke.
Perry Ursell was sitting by his bed, eating his grapes.
Joe said, ‘Hi.’
Singing the Sadness Page 28
