Never Go Back (19 page)

By the time Harry reached the landing, the stairwell was engulfed in flame. There was no escape that way. All he had on was pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt, but he could not turn back to fetch any of his clothes. He had been caught in a house fire once before. He knew how quickly he might be overwhelmed. Thick, dark smoke was billowing up to the ceiling. His chest was already tightening.

He rushed into the next bedroom, where Chipchase was still asleep, snoring for Britain. Harry jostled him awake, shouting his name in his ear.

‘Wha… What… What the bloody hell?’ Chipchase opened his eyes and instantly broke into a cough. There was a haze of smoke thickening around them. The speed with which the blaze was taking hold was frightening.

‘Get up, Barry. Quick. The house is on fire. We’ve got to get out of here.’

Amid woozy blinks and phlegmy coughs, Chipchase put his feet to the floor and sat up. He stared transfixed at the plume of flame beyond the door, roaring up from the hall as if from the mouth of a furnace. ‘Bloody hellfire,’ was all he found to say. But it was apt enough.

Harry slammed the door shut. ‘We’ll go this way,’ he shouted, pointing to the window. It overlooked the sloping roof of the kitchen. Never had it mattered so much to him that the houses of the Railway Village were originally built without separate kitchens, which were added later as single-storey extensions. That one detail of obscure architectural history was suddenly a lifeline. Harry ripped the curtain aside and yanked up the sash. ‘Come on. Hurry.’

Chipchase loomed at his shoulder, in the act of pulling on his threadbare bathrobe. ‘Bugger me, Harry. Is this safe?’

‘A lot safer than staying put. You go first. Move.’

Coughing and spluttering, Chipchase hoisted one hastily shod foot over the sill. He clambered out onto the slates, one of which instantly slid from under him. ‘Bloody hell,’ he cried, grasping the window frame and grimacing back at Harry.

‘Move over to the chimney.’

In a lurching slither that loosed another couple of slates, Chipchase made it to the stack of the chimney that had once served the range. Harry climbed out onto the roof, regretting as he did so that he had not stopped to put on shoes himself. Then a glance behind reminded him that it might have proved fatal if he had. The landing was evidently ablaze now. Flames were licking and snapping round the bedroom door.

He moved towards where Chipchase was clinging to the brickwork of the chimney and tried to reassure him. ‘It’s OK, Barry. We’re going to be all right.’

‘How do we get down without breaking our bloody necks?’

‘Follow me out over the privy. We can climb down from there.’

‘I can’t see where I’m bloody going.’

‘Just follow me.’

The roof of the old outdoor loo, set at right angles to the kitchen, took them further from the fire, whose flames lit their path across the slates. The heat at their backs was growing with every second. The contents of the house were being consumed in a crackling inferno. A petrol bomb or something of the kind must have been pushed through the letterbox. Nothing else, it seemed to Harry, could explain the swiftness of the destruction.

He reached the edge of the roof, crouched down and lowered himself gingerly into the gulf of shadow below, where he eventually set his foot on the dustbin. He let go of the gutter and shouted up to Chipchase. ‘It’s easy. Come on.’

It had not been easy, of course. As Chipchase’s awkward, scrambling descent made apparent. ‘We’re both too old… for this kind of thing,’ he panted. And Harry could only agree.

They stood together, in the backyard, gulping air and coughing, shaking from what they had done as well as the mental buffeting it had given them. The chill of the flagstones seeped up through Harry’s bare feet. He was shivering from the cold, but at his face beat the full heat of the blaze, which had spread now to the kitchen. The house where he was born and where his mother had lived through all the years of her marriage and the many more of her long widowhood had become an inferno.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Chipchase. ‘We’re lucky… to have got out of that alive.’

‘We’d better call the Fire Brigade. If the neighbours haven’t already.’

‘We’ll have to go to one to do it. My mobile’s in there. Along with my clothes. Everything.’

‘Same here.’

Chipchase looked round at him. ‘Including… the disk?’

Harry nodded. ‘Melted by now, I should think.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Yeah. Like you say, Barry. Bloody hell.’

—«»—«»—«»—

The neighbours had indeed already called the Fire Brigade. The first engine arrived within minutes. Several more soon followed. Once they had put their hoses and extinguishers to work, the fire was rapidly brought under control and prevented from spreading. But the conflagration at number 37 was strong and stubborn. Harry and Barry watched the firemen’s struggle with it from the shelter of the house opposite, where Mrs Jenkins gave them tea, as well as blankets to wrap themselves in. And the loan, in Harry’s case, of a pair of her late husband’s slippers. By the time the police arrived, they had already told the fire officer in charge that they had no idea what had started the blaze. ‘We were woken by the smoke and got the hell out.’ It was true as far as it went. The evidence of arson would eventually be uncovered and Harry sensed the less they said for the moment the better. The police settled for that and left. But they would be back. It was inevitable. Especially when they realized the two occupants of 37 Falmouth Street were the same two the Grampian force had asked them to keep an eye on.

—«»—«»—«»—

As the fire abated, Harry walked across for a closer look, hobbling as he went, his climb to safety having aggravated the injury to his knee he had suffered in Aberdeen. The neighbouring houses had escaped largely unscathed, he saw, but his old home had been reduced to a burnt-out skeleton. Hoses were still being played on the smouldering interior. The walls between rooms were just about the only features that remained recognizable. The rest — doors, windows, stairs, furniture and all — had been reduced to heaps of ash and blackened wreckage.

‘You the tenant?’ a fireman asked, approaching from one of the engines.

‘Er, yes. Yes, I am.’

‘I picked this up.’ He handed Harry a framed photograph. ‘It’s a pity not to save something.’

He walked away, leaving Harry to squint in the lamplight at the Commonweal School group photograph of September 1948, which had hung on his bedroom wall from then until this last night of the Barnetts’ presence in Falmouth Street, Swindon. It was over now. It was finished. Not much sooner but a lot more brutally than he had anticipated, the end had come.

Back in 1948, Harry had mischievously run round behind the group after the camera had begun shooting, in order to appear at both the left- and right-hand extremities of the picture, grinning triumphantly. As he looked at it now, however, he saw the heat of the fire had not only cracked the glass but had singed the edges of the paper. A dark brown scorch mark obscured all but the middle third of the group. There was Dr Jones, the headmaster, flanked by his staff. And there, behind them, were the central ranks of boys and girls. But of Harry, at either end, no trace remained. His grin had disappeared in both places. He had been erased twice over.

‘What’s that?’ Chipchase asked, materializing at his elbow.

‘Nothing worth keeping,’ Harry replied, tossing the picture down among the broken glass and other debris in front of them. ‘That’s for sure.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Chipchase, looking up at the house. ‘What a mess.’ He wrapped a consoling arm round Harry’s shoulder, which had to amount to the warmest gesture of friendship he had ever displayed. ‘It’s a facer and no mistake.’

‘You could say that, Barry. Yes, I think you could.’

‘But look on the bright side.’

‘Is there one?’

‘Certainly. You don’t have to clear the place out now, do you?’

The Fire Brigade were still on the scene, albeit at a reduced level, when a new day dawned, preposterously bright and vernal. Sunlight glinted on the puddles of water in Falmouth Street, limned with rainbow slicks of diesel, and shafted through the smoke drifting up from the hollow, blackened walls of number 37.

Harry surveyed the dismal scene through the window of Mrs Jenkins’ front parlour. It was a small mercy for which he was duly grateful that his mother had not lived to witness the destruction of her home. But he was aware that it was really no mercy at all. If she had still been alive, he would be safe in Vancouver with Donna and Daisy, blissfully unaware that an Operation Clean Sheet reunion had even been held, let alone disrupted by murder. And the house he had been born in would be as he remembered it, not the gutted, smouldering ruin he saw now.

The door opened behind him and Harry turned to see Chipchase, wearing one of Mrs Jenkins’ home-knitted cardigans and a pair of her late husband’s capacious bowls trousers under his bathrobe, looking as a result like a bewildered fugitive from a down-market nursing home. Harry might have laughed, but for the knowledge that his own outfit was not one he would wish to be seen in on the streets of Swindon.

As far as that was concerned if no farther, Chipchase was the bearer of good news. ‘Jackie’s going to buy us some clothes as soon as Marks and Sparks opens and bring them round. She knows my size and you’re about the same. It’s the spring ‘05 leisure look for you and me, Harry old cock. She said she’d pop into Boots, as well, and kit us out with a toothbrush and razor each. She never took such good care of me when we were married, I can tell you. I’m seeing a whole new side of her.’

‘I hope she’s not expecting us to pay her for all this stuff.’

‘She knows we got out with nothing but our hides. Play our cards right and she might even… extend us a loan.’

‘We’ll need one.’

‘At least until Donna wires us some cash, right?’

‘Ah. Donna.’

‘You’ll be telling her about this, won’t you?’

‘Actually… I’m not sure.’

‘Not sure?’

‘I’m worried how she’ll react. Until we decide what to do next…’

‘What can we do without the disk?’

‘I don’t know, Barry.’ Harry looked back through the window at the remains of number 37. ‘I just don’t know.’

—«»—«»—«»—

Jackie arrived shortly after 9.30 with two large M&S carrier bags bulging with clothes and an offer of emergency accommodation at her house. Chipchase was all for accepting, but Harry felt obliged to object.

‘Somebody tried to kill us last night, Jackie. They might try again. We’d only be endangering you by staying at your place.’

‘You really think it’s as bad as that?’

‘Every bloody bit,’ Chipchase reluctantly agreed.

‘Then you should tell the police.’

‘They’ll realize it was arson soon enough. But as for catching the arsonist… they’re more likely to conclude we did it ourselves to get us off the hook with Grampian CID.’

‘Surely not.’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Yeah,’ said Chipchase gloomily. ‘They very well bloody might.’

‘Give them the disk. They’ll have the resources to—’ Jackie broke off and looked at each of them in turn. ‘You don’t have it any more, do you?’

‘It’s just a lump of goo under a scorched floorboard now. I should have grabbed it as I left the bedroom. But…’ Harry shrugged. ‘I didn’t.’

There was a brief silence. Then Jackie asked, almost plaintively, ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I asked him that myself earlier,’ said Chipchase.

‘And I still don’t have an answer,’ said Harry.

—«»—«»—«»—

An answer of sorts, though hardly a reliable one, had emerged by the time they checked in at the police station. The duty sergeant gave no hint that he had any knowledge of the previous night’s fire — or their connection with it. Nor did he react much at all to Harry’s announcement that they were planning to return to Aberdeen the following day. ‘Very good, sir. We’ll let them know.’

—«»—«»—«»—

‘We’re not going back to Aberdeen tomorrow, are we?’ Chipchase asked as they threaded their way through the Saturday morning crowds in the Brunei Centre.

‘We have to go back there sooner or later.’

‘Yeah? Well, in the meantime you and I need to conduct what you might call a strategic overview. I get the distinct impression we’re in a canoe heading for the rapids without a paddle between us.’

‘OK. Where do you want to go for this… tactical talk?’

‘Well, the Pot should just have opened.’

‘Good idea. But they’ll expect us to pay for our drinks. So, first things first.’

—«»—«»—«»—

The hairdresser whose eye they caught upon entering Jacaranda Styling’s Swindon New Town salon waved them through to the back office, where Jackie was waiting.

‘There you are, Harry,’ she said, handing him a bulging wallet. ‘I guess I’m settling a debt that’s been outstanding ever since I let Barry talk me into running out on you all those years ago. So, I added some interest to what you asked for. I even bought you something to keep the money in. If I were you, I’d dole it out to Barry in single note instalments, strictly as the need arises.’

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence, darlin’,’ said Chipchase, smiling ruefully.

‘I still think you should tell the police everything.’

‘Maybe we will,’ said Harry.

‘And maybe we won’t,’ said Chipchase.

‘I suppose it’s pointless urging you to be careful.’

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘It isn’t. We will be careful. Believe it or not, we have been. All along.’

‘Yeah,’ said Chipchase. ‘And look where that’s got us.’

—«»—«»—«»—

‘You know,’ Chipchase announced after a first swallow of the first pint of Monkey’s Revenge pulled at the Glue Pot that morning, ‘I was pretty sure last night I’d drunk enough of this stuff to guarantee a steam-hammer hangover. Instead, my head’s clear as a bell. Must be down to all that night air I got the benefit of. How are you feeling?’

‘Great,’ Harry replied. ‘Just great.’

‘You don’t look it.’

‘That’s because I’m aware somebody wants us dead and may be determined to finish the job they started last night.’

‘Plus of course beige isn’t your colour. Or would you call that taupe?’

‘Maybe we should go back to Aberdeen. Today rather than tomorrow. Protective custody could be our safest bet.’

‘You’re obviously not feeling at your most sparklingly optimistic’

‘Nor should you be. Someone’s after our blood, Barry. You do understand that, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do. But old Chipchase doesn’t turn tail and run at the first whiff of grapeshot. Counter-attack. That’s what we’ve got to do.’

‘But counter-attack who? We still haven’t a clue who’s doing this. Or why.’

‘My money’s on Tancred.’

‘What’s his motive?’

‘Beyond a twisted personality? Well, I don’t actually…’ Chipchase’s boldly launched analysis of their options trickled away, like water into desert sand. He grimaced and gulped down some more beer.

‘Exactly. No plausible motive. And not a shred of evidence. We’ve got—’

‘Harry,’ the barman called.

‘Yeah?’ Harry looked round.

‘Woman on the phone for you.’ He held up the receiver.

Harry was vaguely aware that he had heard the telephone ringing a few minutes before. It would never have occurred to him, however, that it had been ringing for him. He advanced cautiously to the bar and took the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Harry, this is Erica Rawson.’

‘Erica?’

‘Yes. Returning your call. The mobile number you left is out of order. Something to do with last night’s fire, perhaps.’

‘You know about that?’

‘Certainly. We’ve been doing our best to keep tabs on you ever since you left Aberdeen.’

‘We?’

‘Well, as you know, I don’t work for Aberdeen University. But I do work for another organization. So, we is appropriate, I think.’

‘What organization is that?’

‘Not something I can discuss over the telephone, I’m afraid. Which is why I suggest we meet face to face. If you and Barry leave the pub now, you’ll be at the station in ample time for the next London train. Get off at Didcot. I’ll meet you in the long-stay car park.’

‘Hold on. I—’

But the line was dead. Harry had been summoned. And the possibility that he might refuse to answer the summons was simply not allowed for.