Violent Exposure (37 page)

*

Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Oh fuck.

Ella was shit-scared, but saw Mick dragging at the chair
and leapt forward to help. Dennis shoved in behind her and seized another corner. Aidan reached the chair’s back then collapsed onto his hands and knees.

‘Get up!’ Mick screamed.

Aidan fell onto his face. Mick let go of the chair. Ella and Dennis staggered with the sudden extra weight. They hauled it along the tiles then hit the doorsill. Ella heaved it up and felt something snap in the old
injury in her left shoulder. Mick lugged Aidan across the floor by the arm then let him go to help them lift the chair over the sill. The taped-up man in it went suddenly quiet. Ella hoped he’d only passed out.

Flames were devouring the far end of the hallway. She tried to lift but had little strength in her left arm. She heaved at the chair with her right. Mick had grabbed Aidan again but let
him go to come over and help.

Embers flew around them as they dragged the chair down the hallway. The flames roared behind them, the sound drowning out their constant coughing. Ella focused on the doorway to the verandah and begged for the strength to make it. Her eyes stung and she couldn’t breathe and she was sure she could feel her hair and skin start to burn, but then they were out and on
the verandah, then over the side, falling onto the ground, cold water spraying over them from somewhere, the fire a bright, bright glow and above it the cool, calm blue of the twilight sky.

Then Mick turned and ran back in.

*

Mick’s chest hurt as he took and held a breath then stumbled back along the smoke-filled hallway. The flames licked around the doorway and he shielded his head with his
arms to duck past them. Aidan lay unconscious on the floor, his hair smouldering.

Mick grabbed him under the arms and pulled him across the room. His lungs burned and he had to breathe out and in again, taking in smoke that made him choke and cough. He stumbled backwards over the sill and fell. Aidan landed on his legs and pain shot through his right knee. He saw the ceiling above them blistering
with heat as the flames roared along it and he scrambled onto his good knee and started to crawl down the hall, hauling Aidan by the collar, his injured knee alive with pain, embers falling onto his back, his streaming eyes focused on the thin spot in the smoke where the outside world would let him breathe.

F
irefighters hosed down the smouldering ruin while the beacons on their trucks and the hard lights of news cameras cut bright beams into the falling night. Three ambulances stood along the far curb and police cars barricaded the street, while beyond them onlookers milled and kids ran around in their pyjamas.

Ella sat on an ambulance’s back step with an ice pack on her shoulder as a
fresh, unsmoked paramedic attached a probe to her finger, and Peter Hepburn told her on the phone what had happened to John Oberon.

‘Excellent,’ Ella said. ‘Fabulous.’

‘And Wayne Rhodes called,’ Hepburn said. ‘Said he couldn’t get through on your mobile. Want me to let him know what’s happened?’

‘No, thanks,’ she said.
My responsibility. I’ll tell him everything later. Everything
.

‘Quiet for
a second, please.’ The paramedic pressed a stethoscope to her chest.

‘Call you back,’ she said to Hepburn, then hung up.

The paramedic took his stethoscope from his ears. ‘Your lungs are clear but you need to go to hospital because problems can arise later. You need your shoulder checked too.’

‘It hardly hurts now.’

‘It’ll come back later.’

She nodded. ‘Give me five?’

She went first to Dennis,
who sat on the ground with an oxygen mask on his face, and told him about Oberon. ‘You okay?’

‘Never better,’ he said through the mask, and winked.

Aidan sat upright on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance, coughing into a mask, while Mick stood under the open rear door wearing a mask of his own. Another paramedic stuck dots onto Aidan’s chest.

‘He all right?’ Ella said.

‘Think so.’ Mick’s
voice was hoarse. His hair was singed and there was soot around his nose and mouth. An icepack was bandaged to his right knee.

Ella said, ‘Great job, both of you.’

Mick shook his head.

‘It was,’ she said. ‘You’ll be up for awards.’

Aidan choked off a cough. ‘I don’t want one.’

‘Neither do I ,’ Mick said.

Ella saw them look at each other.

Aidan struggled forward and put out his hand, and
Mick hesitated, then took it in his.

They said nothing, and the expressions on their faces didn’t change, but Ella saw an understanding pass between them nevertheless. She guessed that saving a colleague’s life like that was something special.

Her phone beeped. She stood in the light of the ambulance to read the message.
Dad all good, blood tests show he needs medication change. Home in an hour.
She smiled.

The beaten man had been cut free from the chair and carefully stripped of tape. He now lay on a stretcher in another ambulance, a probe on his finger, coughing constantly into the mask on his bloodied face. The skin around his eyes was striped red from the tape and his eyebrows and eyelashes were patchy. Ella watched the paramedic bend low and ask him questions with a gloved and gentle
hand on his shoulder.

When the paramedic glanced her way, she said, ‘Can I have a word with him?’ He nodded and she climbed up.

The beaten man looked at her. Tears rolled down his gaunt, unshaven cheeks. His lips were swollen and cracked, IV lines ran into both his arms, and he stank of urine and faeces and smoke.

‘Connor?’ She put out her hand. ‘Detective Ella Marconi.’

He took it gingerly,
careful of the IVs. ‘Connor Crawford.’ His voice was cracked and hoarse and he had to stop talking to cough. ‘And Robert Mailer.’ Another cough. ‘Thank you all for saving my life.’

‘We got John Oberon,’ she said. ‘He crashed into a pole and broke his leg. A handgun in the car went off and blew a hole in his other foot too. And we know why he did it. We know about the fire in 1984.’

‘I didn’t
mean to hurt anyone.’ He coughed so hard the paramedic pushed past Ella to check on him.

‘It’s okay,’ Ella said.

‘I need to explain.’ More coughing.

She touched his shoulder. ‘Explain later. There’s time.’

‘He murdered my wife.’

‘We know that too.’

More coughing. ‘Emil was sort of accidental though.’

She nodded. ‘But you wouldn’t have been.’

‘No.’ He coughed, then looked into her eyes.
‘No.’

On the way to hospital, she held her phone and thought about calling Shep, then decided she’d go and see him after the doctor had checked her out. He might hear some things on the news but he would get the full story from her. She could tell him that his dreams about Suzanne had been right. She felt like an idiot being wheeled into RPA on the ambulance stretcher but the paramedics only
smiled at her gripes.

She sat with her arms folded and the oxygen mask hissing on her face, fingering a lock of singed hair, listening to Dennis cough on his own stretcher nearby and trying not to think how close they’d come.

‘What have we here?’

The voice sent a shiver down her spine. She looked up and found Callum McLennan standing beside her in a doctor’s coat, a hospital ID badge pinned
to his lapel and a stethoscope around his neck. His eyes locked on hers.

‘Smoke inhalation,’ the paramedic said. ‘All obs stable but she’s coughing a lot.’

Callum looked from the paramedic to Ella, then away.

Ella croaked, ‘Enough about me; how are you?’

But Callum only thanked the paramedic and turned around.

Ella’s heart fell, and she watched him walk the length of the corridor away from
her. Then, at the last second, before he turned the corner, she saw him glance back at her with just the ghost of a smile.