I take the joint out of my mouth and throw it into the petrol tank.
There is a tiny gap of time in which absolutely nothing happens. One of those relativistic moments, where my clock is running at warp speed and the rest of the universe seems to be locked in super slo-mo. Just me. A car. A frozen snowfield. And a hillful of nothing.
Then it changes.
There’s a woof of flame, so hot and intense I’m stunned by its arrival. I jerk instinctively back from the blast, but find I can’t. My cheek has frozen fast to the side of the car. For some seconds, the flame is still not merely pouring from the tank opening, but actually jetting, flame-thrower-like. I’m still wrapped like Michelin Man in foam rubber and I can hear and feel the bubbling crackle of the foam as it burns back toward my hair. I rip my frozen cheek from the car. In other circumstances, I think it would have been a painful thing to do. Right now, I feel nothing at all.
And then – I’m free. Standing in the glorious heat of my burning car. Still utterly hypothermic. Still much more frozen that not. But, for a few magical minutes, I am not getting any colder. I can feel the texture of the air change. It becomes alive, expansive. The torrent of flame is no longer just confined to the petrol tank. The car itself has begun to burn. Seats. Matting. Paint. Lining. I stand much too close to the delirious flame and simply welcome its presence. Its consuming, destructive, life-giving presence.
I don’t know how long I stand there, but my returning brain kicks back into gear. My hiking boots are still in the back of the car. I try to rescue them. Make one attempt and am pushed back by the density of the blaze. Try again and come away with one boot.
I think the other’s lost.
I’ve already thrown the spare petrol can into the snow, but I shift it farther away to protect it.
As I do this, I realise that my coat is on fire. I’m not sure how that happened or even how long it’s been burning. I fall over and roll in the snow until it’s out. I can’t feel any pain. There is a huge hole in the single best survival garment I have, but I’m still winning this particular game.
Or I assume I am. I do take a moment to look back up the hill. Looking by firelight now as well as moonlight. If Olaf and Hamish had seen this, they’d be back for me now, wouldn’t they? And the hill is empty.
I’ve only the cold to battle now. Hamish and Olly are long gone.
So for a while, I just relax. Explore my burns. Embrace the heat. I can feel its crackle changing my skin. Like when you bring your hand close to a grill. Intense, but good. I try hard not to set myself on fire again and seem to perform that task without further hiccups.
My brain is warming up too. I’m thinking more freely again.
Hypothermia is about core temperature, not surface temperature. Close as I stand to this blaze, a few glorious minutes won’t bring me back to life. I’m gaining breathing space, nothing more.
But I don’t care. Breathing space is all I need. This girl is going to make it.
I check repeatedly that I still have my cigarette lighter. I do. My fingers still can’t operate it, but they will as they start to warm.
But there’s no rush. I take a little more time to roast in the heat of the car. The gale of flame from the petrol tank is subsiding now, but everything else is burning beautifully. The flames are starting to shift from the back end of the car to the front. The engine still seems untouched, but I hope it starts burning too.
Once I’m warmed enough to have approximate control of my limbs, I jog over to the barn. A corrugated iron roof supported on long wooden pillars and trusses. Beneath it, hay. Gathered in those big round bales. The barn is two-thirds empty, but that’s still one-third full. Winter fodder.
The hay is tightly packed and frozen hard. I can twitch out a few loose handfuls, but my hope that I could just burrow into a pile of warm hay is a forlorn one.
Oh well. Arson it is.
Jog back to the car. The engine is on fire now too. Wonder vaguely about the insurance. I’m covered for fire damage, but presumably they don’t normally pay out when you start the fire yourself. But maybe they have to if you started the fire to avoid dying. Who knows? And who cares? I can measure the state of my body by the suppleness of my mind. And I’m warming up: I can think again. Not well, admittedly, but I’m beginning to clamber out of that great deathly idiocy that had threatened to bury me.
I spend another few minutes by the car. Adjust my foam rubber padding so it’s as well distributed as possible. Then, when the car blaze is starting to trickle down, head back to the barn.
Lighter. Petrol. Hay.
It takes me a minute or two to make it work, but I get there. Before long, I have more lovely flames licking up the side of something flammable.
This fire will be a big one. A long one. It will burn for long enough to warm me properly. And once I’m warmed through, I’ll jog up the hill, back to the road proper, and follow Olaf and Hamish’s tyre tracks down to Capel-y-ffin. Their tracks can’t lead anywhere else. There’s only one way out of this place.
A barn fire makes a car fire look like nothing. A child’s toy oven next to a catering-scale range. There are flames now reaching the full height of the building. The raging intensity of this heat forces me back, then back again.
I spend happy minutes by this blaze. Fuck Olaf. Fuck Hamish. Fuck Prothero and the whole stinking lot of them. I’ll kill ’em or jail ’em. They’ve messed with the wrong girl.
I’m thinking these happy, arrogant thoughts when something heavy strikes me from above. I fall sideways onto the ground. I can’t move. And though the air is warm, the ground is frozen hard. I hear the fire blazing beyond my feet, but feel the heat leaching from my body into the frozen earth. And the night is still freezing, with hours to run until dawn.
I try again to move, but can’t.
There is blood on my head.
I don’t know what’s happening.
The last thing I’m aware of is a rumble of machinery grinding away and light descending from above.
35
Newport. The Royal Gwent Hospital.
I’m swaddled like a cartoon character. Bandages on my hands. Dressings on my head and arm. I’m on a drip. Antibiotics. Painkillers. But I’m in one piece, even if the piece itself has seen better days.
The thing that knocked me down in the barn was a timber falling from the roof. It struck me on the back of the head. Could have been fatal if I’d been standing farther back. I don’t know how long I was lying there, but as it turned out, it didn’t matter. The farmer whose barn it was came out in his tractor to see what was going on. Found the wreck of his barn. The loss of his hay. And me. Hauled me semiconscious into his cab and drove us down to his farmhouse. His wife dialled the emergency services while the farmer – Arthur, as I subsequently learned – picked me up, carried me upstairs, and dropped me in the bath.
I was in and out of consciousness at this point. I remember I kept saying ‘tepid, tepid,’ because I was worried that hot water would be bad for my burns, cold water terrible for my hypothermia. But Arthur had hauled enough sheep out of snowdrifts that he didn’t need any advice from me. He dumped me in that bath and kept me there while his wife – Mary – bobbed in and out offering tea and kindness. For some time I could talk only with extreme slurring and used that slurring to apologise for having burned down his barn. We even, I think, got into one of those stupid courtesy-fights. Me saying I was a terrible person to burn his barn. Him practically telling me the damn thing needed destroying.
They couldn’t get an ambulance up the hill and any helicopters were in use elsewhere. But a pair of coppers fought their way to me in a police Range Rover, with a paramedic and a case of equipment in the back.
Jouncing down the hill was an agony. They took me to the hospital in Abergavenny, where the duty staff took a quick look at me before rejecting me. Some of my burns are third-degree: that is, penetrating all the way through the skin. Abergavenny didn’t have the capacity to deal with that, so the
y sent me straight on to Newport. Lights flashing all the way but still never creeping above fifty on icy roads.
The radio told us that temperatures in the hills were fourteen degrees below zero.
T-shirt weather.
The burns unit at the Royal Gwent enjoyed the clinical conundrum that came gasping in from the Range Rover. Not every day they deal with hypothermia and burns on one and the same patient. A junior doctor told me with barely concealed delight that he thought some of my toes might have frostbite. The doctor who patched me up told me that on average I was in great shape. Medical humour: a beautiful thing.
It took most of the night for them to repair me. Some skin was removed from my left buttock cheek and grafted onto my left side. There’ll be some scarring on my bum. My side will show some marks, but should be okay. The areas involved aren’t huge. No bigger than the palm of my hand. The doctors didn’t regard the procedure as especially complex. They just got on with it.
Everyone was very kind.
Hospital trolleys and lidocaine. Surgical instruments flashing under lights.
Doctors with masks. Nurses with smiles.
Surgery was carried out under a twilight anaesthetic, so I was aware of things, but not very. I tried to say that the sensation was like that of advanced hypothermia. Like being curled up on that car engine counting to twenty as stars wheeled in a distant sky. But it wasn’t really like that. Here, there were people around me. Friendly ones. Creating life, not causing death. In any case, no one could understand my mumbling and they told me, politely, to shut up.
A frozen dawn was greying the sky when I was finally wheeled to my bed.
I’m staggered at how cold it is even here, at sea level, in the wash of the Gulf Stream. I’ve never known it as cold as this in Wales.
Part of my brain is still standing in that field, in that snow.
Handing my coat and jumper to the men who want to kill me.
Wearing a T-shirt, but feeling as naked as starlight.
When I arrived at the hospital, I refused to let anyone notify my family. I didn’t want them woken, but it’ll be time to make that call soon. A nurse comes round with a breakfast trolley. I haven’t ticked any menu, so get given the hospital default meal. Rubber eggs. Sausage. White toast, which is both a little burned and a little soggy. It is all delicious. Every morsel.
The nurse asks if I want more, and I do.
She asks if I am ready to use the phone, and I am.
I call Buzz. Call my family. Call Watkins. Those three, in that order. I tell Watkins not to get here before midday. I want time with the others first.
I haven’t slept at all. Not a wink. I’ve been unconscious at times, but that’s different. I can feel a gathering exhaustion, ready to whack me with its great rubber mallet. I’ll accept that when it comes, but my loved ones come first.
I want to tell them what it said in those texts. Say it face-to-face. Say it properly.
Buzz comes first.
His expression is jaunty when he enters the room, shocked when he sees the scale of the damage.
‘Bloody hell, Fi!’
He wants to kiss me, but kisses aren’t so good right now. One of my hands is less bad than the other, so I let him hold that. The fingertips.
I tell him, through cracked lips, what happened. He gets the abridged, expurgated version. The version that includes idiot-girl-gets-stuck-in-snow. The one that makes no mention of Caledonian-Nordic contract killers. He says, ‘Bloody hell, Fi,’ again, but this time there’s a tint of how-do-you-get-into-these-scrapes? in his tone.
I say my thing.
I say, ‘Buzz, when I thought I was dying, I wrote you a text. It said “I love you.” It said more than that, in fact, but that was the main thing. When I thought I was dying, I wanted you to know that I love you with all my heart. That was the thing that mattered most to me then. I wanted to say it to you properly now.’
Buzz is profoundly moved. His eyes tear up. Mine don’t, but they do prick again. We stay there like that, not quite holding hands, not quite crying.
There are other ways to be alive. Ways other than dying. This is one of them. I am alive now. I am with Buzz. I cannot adequately express how grateful I am that he is here. That he is with me. That he loves me.
I cannot adequately express these things, but I do try.
A grey sun shines on a frozen world.
I sleep a bit with Buzz beside me at the bed. Sleep briefly, because it is not long before my family pours cacophonously through the ward.
Dad has brought a mountain of flowers, a basket of fruit wrapped in tissue paper and clear plastic and tied with a ribbon.
It will take me a fortnight to eat it all and I don’t particularly like fruit.
Mam has brought a clucking anxiety, some home-baked brownies, and a mild, implicit rebuke that getting stuck in the snow and burning upland Powys to the ground isn’t something that nice girls should do. She doesn’t seem very surprised that I did, though. She makes it seem like I make a habit of it.
As for Ant and Kay: they are both shocked but excited. Kay is worried that she won’t get any more rides in my car. Ant half wants to see under the dressings but is half scared at what she might find there.
Buzz stays with us to begin with, then tactfully vanishes to fetch hot drinks for everyone.
While he’s gone, I say to Dad, Mam, Ant, and Kay more or less what I said to Buzz. They’re worse listeners. Mam keeps interrupting and saying, ‘Well, of course, dear.’ Dad is better. He cries openly and tells me how much he – and they all – love me. He’s a sentimental pig, but his sentiments are loving ones. And he speaks for them all. We all hold hands. Then that’s not enough for Dad, so he grabs Ant and Kay in his giant embrace and pulls them down onto the bed for a group hug.
Which is a nice idea. And the good thing about third-degree burns is that the nerve endings are burned off with the skin, so you feel nothing at all. Aren’t even meant to. But there are enough other parts of my body that do feel things, and that have been variously cut, bruised, burned, frozen, or surgically removed, that I don’t particularly appreciate having three hefty bodies falling on top of them.
I scream.
Everyone leaps off the bed, but the leaping involves more pummelling. A nurse comes rushing to see what the commotion is. Buzz comes in with a cardboard tray of drinks. Order gradually returns. Ant and Kay are sent to scrounge seats from around the ward and we have a kind of bedside party, with me cast as the white queen of Ward Six. The Bandage Princess.
It’s nice. Noisy, but nice.
And after a bit, it’s enough. I tell them all to go.
Dad, inevitably, resists. He’s got a load of alternatives. He’ll just wait in a seating area outside. Sit in the car. Hire a private ambulance to take me home – his home, he means. Bring in nurses to give me private care. And I don’t want that. I want peace. I want sleep. With Buzz’s assistance, I persuade them all to go.
I sleep for a bit. An hour maybe.
Then a doctor comes by and talks to me about my skin graft. I don’t really listen. I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about. The doctor goes and I sleep a bit more.
Then I wake and somehow become aware that I’m not alone. Watkins is there, in the chair that first Buzz, then Dad were sitting in. She’s got her face in her hands. Bowed down. Grey hair. Grey light.
When she’s aware of me looking at her, she straightens up. There’s a lot going on in her face. Worry. Stress. Concern. Other things too. I don’t know what they are. I’m not her.
‘Fiona.’
I nod. ‘Bit of a mess.’
She shakes her head at that. ‘I’ve spoken with the doctors and –’
‘I know. I’ll be fine. I might lose some bits of toe here and there. They’ve already done a skin graft.’
‘Young skin,’ the surgeon had said, pinching it. ‘The easiest stuff to work with.’ I don’t say that, though. Not to Watkins, not in this grey light.
; Watkins isn’t in ogre mode, but her other settings are rusty from underuse. She’s having difficulty with her range-finding. So I help out.
‘There’s a bag under the bed.’
The doctors had wanted to throw my clothes away. They looked like trash. Are trash. But they’re trash with blood spatters.
I tell Watkins the whole story. The laptop. The engineering models in Solid Edge. The weapons.
I tell her about what really happened in that field. About Olaf and Hamish. She asks how come I didn’t die, so I tell her that too. The whole thing, except I say ‘cigarette’ instead of ‘joint.’
‘Does anyone else know this?’
‘No.’
She spreads the coat out until she finds some marks. There’s plenty of my blood on that coat, but there’s some of Hamish’s too. The forensics people will find both.
I memorised the Land Rover’s registration number too. I give her that and she makes a note.
‘You think they killed Khalifi?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because he knew? Because he was going to spill the secret?’
‘Maybe. I suppose so. I’m not sure about that part yet. There could be other reasons.’
‘And the method? The dissection of the corpse? That’s . . .’
I shake my head at that. As I’ve always said, the case has always had coincidence at its heart. Whichever way you look at it. If Khalifi was killed as some kind of revenge for his murder of Mary Langton, it was an extraordinary coincidence that his death coincided so neatly with our discovery of Langton’s corpse – a discovery which was essentially random in nature. On the other hand, if Ali el-Khalifi was being coolly murdered by a pair of contract killers, their decision to scatter his corpse à la Langton was simply an inspired piece of improvisation suggested by the news spreading on radio and TV.
I say that. Not very clearly, but I mumble something along those lines.
Watkins doesn’t hide her disagreement. ‘Why do that? If, as you say, they’re professional killers, why not just make a clean disposal of the corpse? Quite likely they’ve done it before.’
Love Story, With Murders Page 23