by Tom Bale
‘Oh, we easily have enough to ruin him.’ Grinning at her confusion, he said, ‘I should have explained – it’s got a SIM card. You can dial in and listen through your phone. I already have the recordings on my laptop. Gerard’s finished.’
For a moment she was speechless. This meant there had been no need for her to stay overnight at Gerard’s: she could have left as soon as the bug was in place, and spent the night with Charlie instead.
She started to protest but the words were lost in a strange rending noise, possibly from outside, that caused Dean to back away and yell at her, furiously: ‘Who’s that? Who did you bring here?’
Freddie had no idea how Dean would react, but allowing Jen and Charlie to stroll out, unscathed, seemed a remote possibility. It was a hope he clung to for a few minutes, while he tried to figure out what he could do to help. Should he bang on the front door and demand to be let in?
A couple of times he thought he heard movement, maybe from the trees on the other side of the house, but there were birds chirping, and the occasional slap of a wavelet on the lake, so he couldn’t be sure. But then came the violent, high-pitched sound of tearing metal. It lasted only a second, the silence returning so abruptly that Freddie began to wonder if he’d imagined it. . .
Until a man strode into view, dressed in a hat and coat that looked totally out of place on a late summer evening. He had a heavy bag, like the sort that doctors carry in old movies. His movements were urgent and precise, and sinister in a way that Freddie couldn’t have defined, but one thing was for sure: this guy wasn’t here to rescue anyone.
The man stopped at a window close to the jetty. That was when Freddie noticed something curling into the air from the far side of the building. A thin stream of grey smoke.
He’d never moved so fast in his life. He understood in an instant and knew that any hesitation would lead to cowardice – and the lives of Charlie and Jen might rest on his ability to find some courage.
He burst out of the trees, nearly skidded on a patch of wet mud but regained his balance and sprinted towards the man. He had no plan other than to stop him from making the fire any worse, but he wasn’t quick enough, or quiet enough.
Sensing his approach, the man dodged to one side, snatching something from his bag. Although he looked to be in late middle age, he was agile, and fast, and clearly used to defending himself. Having lost the element of surprise, Freddie tried to adjust, lashing out with a punch that caught the man on his left shoulder. Grunting, his opponent turned to absorb the blow and brought his right arm up, clutching what looked like a metal bar. Freddie tried to fend it off but the man was too strong, too determined, and he swung the bar and smashed it into the side of Freddie’s skull.
Then darkness.
Dean glared at her. ‘Are you sure you weren’t followed? And you removed the tracker?’
‘I-I came in a different car, but I checked it first—’
‘Gerard will have people hunting for me, you know that? They’ll kill us all to keep this quiet.’
Jen nodded mutely, while praying that Freddie – if he’d come after her and was trying to help – wouldn’t make any more noise. Dean glanced at the skylights, then at Charlie, and seemed satisfied that she wouldn’t be going anywhere. He hurried out, locking the door behind him.
Jen waited a few seconds, hardly daring to believe that Freddie might be able to liberate them, then tested the door. It was too rigid to break down without making a lot of noise. The same went for the shutters over the windows, and there was no chance of climbing out over the roof when she had Charlie. . .
She heard a disturbance from below – thumps and crashing, and a startled cry from Dean. Charlie jumped, and held her tight. ‘I don’t like it here, Mummy. I want to go.’
‘Me too, darling. We will in a minute.’
But how? She sniffed. Looked around, and heard more shouts and thudding noises from below. If Freddie had come after her, what exactly was he doing?
She sniffed again. What was that?
Something nasty.
Smoke.
68
There were running footsteps, then Dean unlocked the door. He was red-faced, coughing, and looked distraught. ‘They’ve found us – Gerard, or fucking Hamilton.’
‘What?’ So it wasn’t Freddie. . .
‘There’s a fire.’ Dean jabbed a finger towards the floor. ‘We can get out, but we have to hurry.’
For a moment she hesitated, then thought: You can smell the smoke. He’s not lying about this. Without waiting, Dean turned and ran towards a flight of stairs. Jen took Charlie’s hand. ‘Let’s go and see.’
She could feel his reluctance, which grew as they crossed a wide landing and started down the stairs. Just like the top floor, the middle floor had been partially gutted, lath and plaster walls removed to expose the innards of a few tatty bedrooms, like images she’d seen of London homes in the Blitz.
Thick smoke billowed into the stairwell from the ground floor. Dean was already out of sight. Charlie put a hand to his throat and made a choking noise, and Jen recalled something a fireman had once told her: Don’t think of it as smoke, but as toxic gas. Even a few inhalations can be fatal.
Over the roar of the fire she heard a metallic wrenching sound, and wondered if Dean was trying to remove one of the shutters. Then a gout of flame shot into view, accompanied by a scream that was almost inhuman in its agony.
‘Go back up!’
‘But Mum—’
‘I’ll stay in sight – just go. And hold your breath, like you did in the sea with Lucas.’
Covering her nose and mouth, Jen moved towards the bottom flight of stairs. The fire was raging through the whole of the ground floor, and in some places the flames were already creeping into the bedrooms, veils of smoke venting between the bare floorboards.
There was another scream, and Dean staggered into view, collapsing at the foot of the stairs, his hair and clothes alight. Then came a cry from behind her: Jen turned and saw that Charlie had followed, too frightened to be left alone.
There was nothing she could do to help Dean, and no prospect of getting out this way. Saving Charlie was the only thing that mattered. But how?
Stemper gazed at the body, and rebuked himself for not having checked the perimeter more carefully. So this was Freddie Lynch.
After ascertaining that Gerard’s son was alive, albeit unconscious, Stemper got back to work, quickly bending the shutter until there was enough space to throw the other incendiaries inside.
As the first one landed, he saw a bright yellow flash and heard a piercing scream. Dean Geary, he hoped; the glass must have smashed at his feet, the chemical igniting upon contact with air.
Stemper lobbed in another for good measure. Probably unnecessary, given the heat and smoke already pouring from the building. There was no chance of anyone getting out of there alive.
It was regrettable, perhaps, that the woman and her son would perish, though a clean conclusion always had its appeal. He was confident that Gerard would come to agree.
Killing Freddie, however, might be a step too far. Stemper knelt to check on his vital signs, then dragged him a little further from the building and placed him in the recovery position.
As he walked briskly back to the car, it occurred to him that the head injury might lead to memory loss. In these circumstances, with no other witnesses, Freddie would be a plausible candidate for the arson attack – and the poor man wouldn’t know whether he’d done it or not.
Stemper probably shouldn’t have found that amusing, but sometimes you had to smile.
‘Go! Go!’ Jen urged Charlie up the stairs and raced behind him, coughing and choking from the single breath she’d taken. As they reached the landing, Jen tripped on the final step and fell, her hands slapping against the floor. It was hot to the touch.
Back in the room full of junk, she slammed the door and grabbed a pile of linen, using it to block the gap beneath the door. She embraced Charlie, st
roking his hair and murmuring encouragement while she examined the room and tried to work out if they had any chance at all of staying alive.
‘We’re going to build a tower.’
Charlie regarded her as though she’d gone mad. ‘The fire’s coming.’
‘I know. So we have to be quick.’
He clung to her as she went to move, and though it felt callous to break apart, she knew they might have only a minute or two before the smoke overwhelmed them.
She put the distance from the floor to the skylight at about fourteen feet. The tower had to be at least ten feet high, and stable – so the mattresses might help after all. Standing the chairs with one pair backed up tight to the wall and the other pair facing them, she lifted several of the radiators and piled them onto the seats to add weight and stability. Then she dragged a single mattress over and placed it across the top of the chairs. Added a second mattress and decided she might get away with three.
By now Charlie was helping, both of them sweating from the effort and from the sauna-like warmth in the room. They both kept coughing, and Jen thought the air might be turning slightly murky. As she worked, a horribly disloyal idea came to her: had Freddie caved in at some point, and supplied his father with the address?
No. He couldn’t have.
‘Looks like The Cat in the Hat,’ Charlie observed of the tower when it was done, and despite everything Jen found herself smiling.
‘You’re right. Let’s hope it doesn’t come crashing down.’
She turned away, searching for perhaps one more object to add to the makeshift climbing frame, and noticed a stepladder resting innocently against the far wall. Cursing her stupidity, she realised that the mattresses had concealed it from view.
In any case, it was an A-frame ladder with only four steps, so nowhere near tall enough to reach the skylight. But could she risk placing it on top of the mattresses?
As she picked it up she heard a loud rumbling noise, and a heavy crash of timber that shook the whole building. Charlie stumbled, almost falling over. Jen guessed that part of the floor below must have collapsed; more smoke was creeping into the room, and the temperature was rising fast.
Either this works, she thought grimly, or we die.
69
Jen forced herself to take it steady. Too much haste and they would fail.
First she helped Charlie to clamber onto the mattresses, and told him to stay on his hands and knees while she climbed up beside him, bringing the stepladder with her. They were level with a window, and when her elbow bumped against the shutter it burned her skin.
Feeling like a circus clown masquerading as an acrobat, she tried to wedge the stepladder against the wall, wobbling a little as she encouraged Charlie to climb up.
‘I don’t want to.’
‘I know. But you’re a good climber – a natural, Nick says.’
He nodded, cheered by this reminder. Praise from Nick seemed to carry twice the weight of anything from his mum, but if it got him up the ladder, who cared? On the top rung he was almost there, and Jen managed to give him the final boost that lifted his upper body out of the skylight.
‘It opens more than this,’ he said, and released a catch that she hadn’t noticed on the way in. Lifting the window higher, he followed her instructions and climbed onto the sloping roof, then used the frame of the skylight to reach the top.
If not for the danger they were in, the idea of sending her young son out on a high roof would have left her catatonic with fear. But there was no other option: if she went out first, she wouldn’t be able to reach in and lift him up.
It was a heart-stopping moment when he disappeared from sight, but then came a shout: ‘I’m up.’
Jen scrambled after him, terrified that the whole building might collapse and plunge them into the inferno. She grabbed the skylight and kicked for more momentum, causing the stepladder to topple and fall. Desperately scissoring her legs, she wriggled over the rim and onto the slope, thick black smoke billowing all around her.
Charlie was huddled on the flat roof, but bravely leaned forward to help her up. Instead of urging him away from the edge, she understood what this gesture meant, so she took his hand, even though she didn’t let him bear any of her weight. ‘Thanks, buddy. We’re nearly there.’
From down in the room, getting up here had seemed a nearly impossible quest, but at least the urgency had demanded her absolute focus. Now there was the next stage to consider.
She led Charlie along the roof until they were at the edge of the rear gable. With so much smoke pouring from the building, it was impossible to see the trees or the lake, but Jen had a good idea of where the jetty lay, on the right-hand corner.
Having to shout over the roar of destruction, she said, ‘Okay, Charlie. Now we’re going to jump into the water, still holding hands like this.’
She expected him to baulk at the idea, but he said, ‘The fire’s going to kill us, isn’t it?’
‘If we stay up here for much longer, yes.’
‘How deep is it?’
Good question, she thought. ‘Probably not very. We’ve got to take a run up and jump out as far as we can, aiming for that corner.’ She pointed to the left. ‘When we hit the water, try and bend your legs—’
‘Like a banana shape,’ he said. ‘Me and Dad were doing it in the pool. He told me not to tell you, cos it’s dangerous.’
Trust Freddie. But Jen nodded. ‘I won’t say a word.’
Together they retreated four, five paces, then turned, and at her signal they sprinted along the roof and leapt, screaming, into an oblivion of grey smoke.
As she fell, the only thing that mattered was that she didn’t lose her grip on Charlie’s hand. If this proved to be a tragic miscalculation that killed them both, Jen at least wanted her son to know that she was there with him, at the end.
The drop must have taken only a second or two – she had no concept of time, or of space – but the smoke was clearing and she made out a glimmer of water with just enough time to shout, ‘Curl up!’
The lake was a gloriously cold shock to the system, but her instinct on hitting the water was to draw in her arms as well as her legs. She felt Charlie do the same, wrenching his hand from her grasp as she was submerged and the world went dark and murky, and then her feet sank into the silt and her bottom followed, before she managed to push upwards, already flailing desperately to find Charlie. Her head burst above the surface and she sucked in a breath and turned in a full circle and didn’t see him; she filled her lungs again and prepared to go back down when there was a splash behind her and Charlie was there, spitting out water and grinning with delight when he registered that she, too, was alive.
She swam to him and they embraced, her feet just about touching the lake bed. They could hear parts of the building collapsing, and turned to see flames shooting from the skylights, smoke pouring from the shuttered windows like steam from a kettle. For the first time, she heard sirens in the distance. Thank God.
They waded over to the jetty and then swam beyond it, to avoid the risk of falling debris, coming ashore well away from the house. Jen hoped the emergency services arrived before Charlie got too cold. He insisted he was fine, and more interested in watching the fire. He kept pointing to the roof, marvelling that he had jumped from such a height.
‘Lucas won’t believe it,’ he said. ‘You’ll tell him, won’t you?’
‘I certainly will.’
‘And Dad. Can we call him later on?’
‘He’s here. In the car.’
Delighted, Charlie spun to face her. ‘I want to see him!’
‘We will. We’d better wait till the fire engines get here.’
She looked around, wondering nervously who had set the fire and whether they were still nearby. It seemed that Dean was right: whoever it was had been intent on killing all three of them.
Just as it occurred to her that Freddie must have noticed the smoke by now, something caught her attention. She f
rowned, squinting at the brightness of the flames. There was a strange dark shape close to the jetty; but it hadn’t been there earlier, and didn’t look like debris. . .
She jumped up, took a couple of steps, then turned to Charlie. ‘Stay there!’ she ordered, so harshly that he recoiled.
She raced towards the building. The metal shutters were bulging in the heat, as if they might be about to explode. Dozens of roof slates lay in pieces on the ground. The air here was like a furnace, though it became marginally cooler as she sank to her knees.
The shape, she saw now, was a man lying on his side, with blood on his hair and his face.
Freddie.
She didn’t waste time checking for signs of life – the whole building could come down on them at any moment. She grabbed his upper arms and dragged him backwards over the rough ground, not stopping until they were well clear of the house and Charlie was beside her, asking who it was and then working it out himself.
‘Daddy!’
‘He’s all right,’ Jen said, because the last thing Charlie needed was yet more trauma, but she also prayed that the words wouldn’t come back to haunt her.
Right now she had no idea whether Freddie was dead or alive.
Epilogue
September had been, for the most part, an Indian summer, and Jen and Charlie had regularly gone to the beach after school. A couple of times Nick had joined them, and on one occasion – coincidentally, Jen hoped – they had bumped into her solicitor, Tim Allenby.
Too many men interfering in my life, and the only one I want or need is Charlie. Jen had a distant memory of that sentiment, in the days before she knew what real problems were.
Charlie had started school on the Monday, missing the first two days, but so had three of his classmates. Like them, he blamed the absence on a foreign holiday. It meant Jen had to endure the school’s disapproval, but this was preferable to a lot of inquisitive questions about what had really happened. Charlie’s fear was that if any of the teachers were aware of the truth, they would treat him differently, leading to problems when the other kids invariably picked up on it.
