Hugh’s heart was so full of dread that everything stalled inside him, he could hardly speak. ‘But she’s all right?’
Charlie made a stifled sound.
‘She’s all right?’ Hugh demanded again.
A silence, no sound at all, then a deep resonant voice. ‘Hugh, it’s Ray here. We’re at the hospital. Listen, you should come straight away.’
Hugh shut his eyes against the darkness. ‘Tell me. Tell me now. Is she all right?’
A soft pause, then: ‘It’s not too good, I’m afraid.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I’m so very sorry, Hugh. I’m afraid she didn’t make it.’
Afterwards he remembered little of the journey. Just Mike’s profile as he drove through the night. The dark motorway stretching westward. A stop at a petrol station, Mike placing a coffee in his hand, though he had the impression he never got round to drinking it. Calls to Ray, Hugh clutching the phone dumbly to his ear for minutes at a time before asking a question Ray couldn’t answer or, when he could, that Hugh was too dazed to take in so that he asked the same question time and again. Ray didn’t have many details at first, but either during the journey or later at the hospital he told Hugh that the medics had tried very hard to resuscitate her, that she’d been brought into A & E at about half past midnight, that there was nothing the crash team could do to save her. She. Her. It seemed neither of them could bring themselves to use her name.
Mike must have spoken several times during the journey but Hugh could remember only one comment he made, that in fires most people died of smoke inhalation, they never knew what had happened to them, they didn’t suffer. This had caused a wave of horror to engulf Hugh because he hadn’t got that far, not in words or images and, forced to confront the idea, he immediately suspected the opposite, that she had suffered, that utterly terrified she had been beaten back by a wall of flames. But there was only so much the mind could take without going mad, and he had the impression it cut out on him after that, plunging him into a sense of unreality.
He had a clearer recollection of the hospital, of going into A & E while Mike parked the car, of announcing himself politely at the desk, of being asked to wait, of taking a seat until a nurse in scrubs took him through a pass-door and led him between rows of curtained cubicles, past a brightly lit area where doctors and nurses sat hunched over computers, to a small room with a few chairs where Charlie and Ray were waiting. Charlie, white-faced under the lights, came forward to embrace him, their arms meeting awkwardly so that they ended up in a half embrace, Hugh’s right arm pinioned, his hand looped up behind Charlie’s shoulder. Charlie held him very tightly and when they drew apart he was crying. Unable to speak just then, Hugh squeezed his shoulder. Ray went to find the doctor, a young girl with dark shadows under her eyes who expressed her sympathy and explained that the paramedics had tried to resuscitate Mrs Gwynne on the way to hospital, but there had been no vital signs on arrival. The crash team had tried further resuscitation without success and at a quarter to one Mrs Gwynne had been pronounced dead. The doctor looked so young and exhausted, so worn down by the business of death and bad news, that Hugh offered her a smile of thanks and commiseration. Maybe it was this distraction or the numbness clouding his brain, but when she asked if he had any questions he shook his head. All he would like, he said, was to see his wife. The young doctor turned expectantly to Ray who, taking his cue, said that the police had requested a formal identification. Assuming Hugh wanted to be the person to make it, the arrangements could be made within half an hour.
He did want to be the person, he said. When the police turned up, Hugh and Ray left Charlie in the small room and followed the two uniformed men down long obscure passageways to a door marked Mortuary. One of the officers rang the bell and after a short wait a face appeared in the window high in the door and they were admitted by a youth in overalls. After a whispered consultation the senior officer explained to Hugh that at this time of night, without the full complement of staff, it wouldn’t be possible to see his wife in the viewing room, would he mind very much seeing her in the mortuary itself? He wouldn’t mind at all, he said politely. The youth led them to a room with two raised stainless steel tables in the centre and three large stainless steel doors along the side. As the youth went to one of the doors the senior officer said to Hugh in a tone of mild apology that due to procedural restrictions it wouldn’t be possible for him to touch his wife.
The youth swung the heavy door wide open and pulled out a trolley with a white-sheeted figure on it. Hugh stepped forward, bracing himself for the worst, however terrible that might be, only to find himself unprepared. When the youth rolled back the sheet, she was completely unscathed, no burns, no signs of fire, nothing to show for what had happened, her features beautiful but empty, her lovely lips parted to speak words that would never come, her hair wild and windblown.
She was gone, quite gone, but the prohibition against touching her was suddenly a torment, and turning to the senior officer he said briskly, ‘Yes, this is my wife.’
FIVE
Another unfamiliar room, this one clad in busy floral wallpaper with matching curtains and a skirted dressing table. The curtains, operated by some unfathomable cord system, had jammed when Hugh had tried to open them some two hours earlier, so when dawn came the light was grudging, the view narrowed to a single tree. In his confusion he thought the tree was the giant beech on the north-western boundary of his own garden but then it came to him that this was wrong, just like everything else was wrong, there was another garden between this house and Meadowcroft, and Lizzie was dead.
He showered but could not face himself in the mirror to shave. He dressed rapidly and made for the stairs, passing the room where Charlie was sleeping, only to turn back with a pull of concern. He found Charlie sprawled face-down on the bed, deeply asleep, the duvet half off, one leg and arm uncovered. Hugh drew the duvet back over him, tucking it in around his shoulders as he and Lizzie had done when the children were small. In sleep Charlie looked like a kid again, the skin fresh and untouched, the hair thick and golden, the chin dusted with stubble so pale and soft it might have been down. Amid the jumble of images from the long and terrible night Hugh had a vision of Charlie in the small room off A & E, barely able to meet his eye when he came back from the mortuary, of him trailing behind as they walked to the car park, shivering slightly when Hugh dropped back to put an arm round his shoulders, of his shadowy face in the back of the car staring blankly out of the window, silent, remote, scarcely responding when Hugh asked if he was all right. Sleep was the best thing for him. Awake, Hugh wouldn’t have been much help to him just then.
Closing the door silently, Hugh made for the stairs again. The muted voices of the Koenig family floated up from below and he recoiled, as he had recoiled last night, from the forced intimacy with people he barely knew and had never terribly liked who had presumed, decided, arranged to take them in. Before last night his only connection with the Koenigs had been through Charlie’s friendship with their computer-mad son Joel and the fact that they lived two doors away. He and Lizzie had met the parents at the occasional local event, but it was significant that Hugh couldn’t even remember their first names. The father was in public relations, a smooth hand-presser on the lookout for the next opportunity, while the mother – Sarah, was it? – was a fussy, garrulous woman with a relish for gossip. It was she who had greeted them three hours ago with effusive sympathy and a relentless determination to tell her part of the tale, the discovery of the fire and the calling of the fire brigade. She had tried to gather them into the kitchen with the lure of food and drink, but only Mike had obeyed. Charlie mysteriously vanished, while Hugh stood his ground in the hall, saying she was most kind but he really would like to go straight to his room now, a statement he had to repeat twice before she accepted she would have to tell her story then and there, standing in the hall, or be forced to bottle it up till morning. Her husband had gone to bed, she recounted, and she had le
t the dog out for his last widdle when, standing at the back door, she heard a strange sound. Oh, very faint, she said, so faint she almost ignored it. But something, something, made her go and look. First she went upstairs to her bedroom window, then she went to the spare room at the front which looked out onto the lane. It was only when she decided to open the window and put her head right out that she caught sight of something through the trees, just the tiniest flicker, so tiny she almost missed it. If it had been summer, of course, she would never have seen a thing. But with the trees bare, well . . . Even then, it was a miracle she saw that one small flicker of light because she didn’t see another, not for a good two or three minutes.
A surge of heat, a sudden panic, brought Hugh out of his daze. He wasn’t ready to hear about wasted minutes while Lizzie was alone and suffocating from the smoke. He wasn’t ready to face the idea that she had suffered.
Catching something of this in his expression, Joel’s mother told the rest of her story in a rush, how she roused John and they drove along the lane and saw the fire and dialled 999. While she stayed on the phone to the emergency operator John tried the front door and the back door but both were locked. They thought of trying the window but the flames were too bad. They looked for a ladder but couldn’t find one. And then Hugh understood why she had been in such a hurry to tell him her story; it wasn’t just her relish for drama, it was the need to be reassured that she and her husband had done all they could and had nothing to reproach themselves for. Well, reassurance was easy, he offered it willingly, with as much grace as he could muster, longing for the moment when she would be sufficiently consoled to let him be alone. There was more fuss as she showed him the bedroom and bathroom, and, eyes welling, offered a last stream of condolences. When at last the door closed behind her he made his largely abortive attempt to open the curtains before lying down fully clothed on the bed. Then the pain finally overwhelmed him, he sobbed and called Lizzie’s name, and then surprisingly he slept. When he woke, it was to the gloomy outline of the giant beech and the aching realisation that it was still true, Lizzie was dead.
The voices were coming from the kitchen away to his right and, reaching the hall, he veered sharp left, treading softly. Passing the open door of a sitting room he saw two black-socked feet sticking over the arm of a sofa and looked in to see Mike lying on his back, his jacket laid haphazardly over the dome of his stomach, a cushion under his head, snoring steadily.
Creeping away, he let himself out as quietly as possible and walked quickly along the lane, propelled by the need to see the damage for himself, to stand alone in the spot where Lizzie had died, even to find in the ruins of the fire some glimmer of an explanation. Last night on the way back from the hospital they had stopped at Meadowcroft only to find everything in darkness, the fire engines gone, just a lone policeman sitting in a patrol car keeping watch till morning. Hugh had wanted to go inside but the policeman had said he was sorry, that wasn’t allowed until the investigation was complete. As Mike reversed the car round, the headlights had swept over Lizzie’s silver Golf, standing there as if to deliver her back to him, and it was this of all things that had caught Hugh off-guard and brought him into the Koenigs’ house with the desperate longing to be alone.
Now, as he came in through the gates he saw parked beside Lizzie’s car a white van with its rear doors open and two men lifting out a panel of chipboard, and to the other side of the front door a car and a small van, both in the scarlet livery of the fire brigade. There was no sign of the police car.
What struck Hugh as he drew closer to the house was the relative lack of damage. In newspaper pictures of house fires the outside walls always seemed to be scorched with soot, the roofs holed or collapsed. But the walls of Meadowcroft were untouched, the roof was intact, only the windows looked wrong, all of them wide open, some blackened from smoke or lacking glass.
The two men had a generator going and were about to run the board through an electric saw. One of them looked up as Hugh approached and seemed about to say something, but Hugh ignored him and went straight into the house. And stopped, all sense of normality gone. At first the devastation appeared complete. The walls of the hall were black, the ceiling charred, with gaping holes where the plaster had come down, the floor covered in a layer of sodden debris. But as he made his way slowly forward he looked into the dining room and saw that, though licked with a thick coat of soot, it was largely intact, while the kitchen seemed bizarrely untouched, and it occurred to him in some remote logical corner of his mind that the kitchen door must have been closed. He paused by the living room and knew immediately that the fire had been very bad there. Everything was blackened and contorted, the furniture barely recognisable. The stairs were scorched but solid underfoot. When he reached the turn he looked up and saw that the fire had raged up the stairwell, consuming half the landing rail and banisters, burning into the ceiling above. As he climbed higher, the acrid smell he had dimly registered on entering the house grew much stronger and caught in his throat until he began to cough.
A brisk voice called out, ‘Hello?’ and a man in a hard hat emerged from the main bedroom. ‘You are?’ he asked. Then his expression changed and he said in a different tone, ‘Family?’
Hugh was overtaken by another fit of coughing, and the man drew him across the landing into Lou’s bedroom and an open window. ‘Take some long breaths,’ he said.
The coughing made Hugh’s stomach heave and he struggled not to retch. But at last the worst was over and, panting slightly, eyes watering, he straightened up.
‘Mr Gwynne, is it?’
Hugh nodded.
‘You’ll feel better outside, sir. Why don’t you follow me down?’
Hugh shook his head.
‘The thing is, you aren’t meant to be in here just yet. Not till we’ve finished our investigation. The police officer should have told you that.’
‘Not here,’ Hugh managed to say through his raging throat. ‘Gone.’
‘Has he now? All the same . . . if you wouldn’t mind.’ The man was short, with a round face and large features.
‘Your name is?’
‘Ellis. Peter Ellis. Fire investigation department.’
Hugh put out his hand, and Ellis hastily moved his clipboard to his left hand to return the handshake. ‘My condolences on your loss, Mr Gwynne.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I understand you were away on business when the fire broke out.’
‘London.’
‘And your wife was here alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘No other family?’
‘No. Our children were away.’
‘No dogs, cats, other pets?’
‘No.’
Ellis nodded, then took a step towards the door, as if to conclude the interview and escort him downstairs.
Hugh said, ‘I just want to see the bedroom.’
Ellis hesitated.
‘I want to see where my wife died.’
Ellis regarded Hugh thoughtfully before giving in with a quick nod. ‘If you could be sure not to touch anything.’
It was becoming a refrain. Look but don’t touch.
Ellis led the way across the landing. In the bedroom a second man was standing by the bathroom door, holding a camera to his eye. He acknowledged Hugh’s arrival with a sideways glance before lining up another shot. Hugh took a couple of steps into the room and halted, taking in the smoke-daubed walls, a pale grey towards the floor, darker towards the ceiling, the ceiling itself, very black, the trampled carpet, the smashed window with a few jagged shards still adhering to the frame, the harsh acrid smell, and finally the bed itself. The duvet, thrown back on itself, had been dragged half off the bed, the lower sheet was ruckled and pulled free of the mattress, baring some of the mattress cover; all the pillows, grey with smoke, were lying at odd angles and crumpled. By contrast some of Lizzie’s clothes were lying neatly folded on the seat of the upholstered chair in the corner, a pair of shoes lined up
side by side on the floor beneath.
‘She was found in bed?’ Hugh asked, selecting a matter-of-fact tone.
Ellis, who had been standing respectfully to one side, eyes averted, looked at him solemnly. ‘Yes.’
‘Still alive?’
‘The men couldn’t be sure, so they got her out of the building and undertook resuscitation.’
Hugh tried to imagine the room as it was then, black with smoke and poisonous fumes. ‘It must have been . . . difficult. I’d like to thank them sometime if I can.’
‘They were only doing their job. But I’m sure they’d appreciate it all the same.’
‘It was smoke inhalation that killed her, was it?’
‘I couldn’t make any comment on that,’ Ellis said rapidly, as if to get this absolutely straight from the outset. ‘That’s for the coroner.’
‘Of course. Yes . . . With the help of the post-mortem,’ Hugh added, to show he understood the system.
‘We just report on the fire.’
‘Of course you do. Yes . . . And what have you discovered so far?’
Ellis shook his head. ‘Can’t say.’
‘Forgive me . . . because?’
‘My report has to go to the coroner. It’s the procedure.’
Procedure. Look but don’t touch.
‘I see . . .’
‘Sorry about that.’
‘No, no. I quite understand.’
The photographer had finished taking his pictures. ‘I’ll start on the rest of this floor,’ he said to Ellis.
‘Give me a shout when you’re done.’
As soon as they were alone Hugh said quietly, in the manner of someone keen to learn, ‘Tell me, Peter, how does this sort of fire behave?’ Seeing Ellis’s hesitation he added, ‘Oh, without going into specifics. Just in general . . . I mean what makes smoke travel to one room, fire to another and leave other places untouched?’
‘Oh, you can’t have fire without smoke. No, no. Fire always produces smoke. But smoke and fumes on their own, they can travel a long way ahead of the fire, and fast too.’
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