‘I’ll be needed at the fire station, you know that. Don’t worry, Mama, we’ve been training. I know how to be careful.’
‘NO!’ His mother screamed the word and the baby jerked in her arms, awake again, crying again. ‘No,’ she shouted again. ‘You must not go, Tobias. I forbid you to go.’ Her face was red. Furious. Almost accusing. For a moment, Tobias hesitated. The boy from the house two doors up from Tobias’s pulled at the shelter door, opening it an inch, peering outside. Tobias couldn’t remember his name. Kai? Or perhaps Karl.
‘Come on, Tobias, we’d better get a move on,’ he said.
Tobias peeled his mother’s fingers from around his wrist. ‘I have to go. It is my duty.’
‘Duty is what got your father killed.’
‘You don’t mean that.’ Tobias glanced around but people were too busy with their own fear to pay much attention to them.
‘You will die out there.’ She was crying now and Tobias reached for her hand, squeezed it.
‘I won’t. I’ll be careful. I’ll be back soon.’
‘Do you promise?’ It was nearly a whisper.
‘I swear on my life.’
He glanced at his brothers, wrapped around each other like puppies in a basket. He put his hand on the baby’s head, her soft curls damp and hot against his fingers. He did not bend to kiss his brothers. Not in front of everyone.
He would regret that.
Later.
Out in the streets, it was clear that this wasn’t like the other times. This time, the bomb had come for them. Dresden was on fire.
It was like a depiction of hell that Tobias had seen in a religious book in his grandmother’s house when he was a small boy. The heat was like a wall that you couldn’t scale. People ran, crying and screaming. Mostly women and children together, or children on their own crying for their mothers, or mothers on their own screaming for their children.
Tobias ran through the streets, following a line of fellow fire officers, trying not to look, trying not to see. They were needed at the hospital where the roof had collapsed, Kai – or Karl? – told him.
The fire turned the night sky into howls of furious orange. Flames billowed from every window, every door and the smoke it produced was thick and black.
As the fire tightened her grip, sucking oxygen from the night air, running became difficult, then impossible. Tobias slowed to a jog, then a walk, then he stopped. He leaned against a wall, recoiled from the bright heat of the brick. He stood there and now he looked. Now he saw. An old woman, stumbling from a building, tearing clothes from her body as the fire licked her with treacherous tongues. The air was scorching, it burnt his nostrils, the inside of his mouth.
Tobias ran again, against the rush of people churning through the streets. He concentrated on getting to the hospital. Many of the roads were impassable; he kept having to turn back, find a different way.
Only one section of the building was intact when he got there. Herr Smidt, who was in charge of Tobias’s unit, was at the front of the building, shouting to be heard.
Their job was to evacuate the patients – the ones who were still alive – to the section of the hospital that remained. And to salvage as much medical equipment and medicine as they could.
Tobias got to work. Everything he saw seemed shadowed by sound. The noise of the fire was like cymbals clashing. And on the fringes of the sound were the flames, the heat, the smell. People everywhere, dead and dying, their tiny, shrivelled corpses stiff and smouldering.
He held the damp blanket that Herr Smidt had given each of them against his face. He moved on, looking for another survivor.
Up ahead, something fell from the top storey of the burning building. It was a man.
Along a corridor, a small boy lay quiet on a blanket. Maybe Bruno’s age. A narrow bone poking out of his knee where the rest of his leg should be. A deep, bloody gash down one side of his face. Tobias didn’t look at the bone. Or the gash. He lifted the boy, wrapped his damp blanket around the boy’s head. He was grateful that the boy made no sound. He was as light as a bag of feathers.
It was this boy who saved Tobias’s life. Tobias never knew his name, what age he was, where he lived. But the boy saved Tobias’s life as surely as if it were he who had lifted Tobias, carried him away from the burning city.
Tobias reached the part of the hospital that still remained – which was a ward on the ground floor at the back of the building. He looked for a space to deposit the boy, found one near the wall, beside a woman who looked like she might be kind. Tobias turned and headed towards the door.
‘Sir?’ It was the boy. His voice was small. Tobias turned back.
‘Do you know where my mother is?’ the boy asked.
Tobias shook his head and the boy began to cry.
Tobias moved towards him and then he stopped. He could hear something.
It was a sound. Not like the sound the fire made. This sound was clear. Like a screech.
Outside, Tobias could hear people. Running. Screaming. There was an anticipation in the room, like a breath held. Something was coming for them. Something else.
Tobias dived towards the boy, covering his small, broken body with his own as the bomb fell, exploded, made the world shake once more so that all the bones in Tobias’s body felt like they would shatter with the force. He kept his eyes shut, held on tight to the boy whose skin was slick with sweat. There was a smell coming from the place where the rest of his leg used to be. Like old meat.
The heat inside the ward was like an animal, hurling itself against the bars of a cage. Tobias could feel the oxygen draining from the room, like water down a plughole. He knew they had to leave, knew there was nowhere for them to go.
He picked the boy up, hauled him across his shoulders as they had been trained to do during the drills at the fire station. The handle of the door was too hot to touch. Tobias pulled at the cuff of his jacket, wrapped the threadbare material around his hand and pulled open the door. Outside, more of the city burned, the long orange flames dancing up the sides of buildings, swallowing everything whole.
Much of the hospital was rubble now. Under an iron bar lay the body of a boy. Kai. Or Karl. Tobias didn’t need to touch him to know he was dead.
His father always said, in an emergency it is important to have a plan and stick to it.
Tobias’s plan was to find somewhere safe to put the boy, return to the shelter, get his mother, his brothers, his sister, head for the river maybe. They could hide along the bank, perhaps. Immerse themselves in the water, protect themselves somehow from the heat and the flames.
It wasn’t much of a plan, Tobias knew, but the thinking of it, the concentration of his mind on it, helped him put one foot in front of the other, make some progress, instead of standing by and waiting and watching.
Tobias ran. ‘Are you bringing me to my mother?’ the boy asked. ‘Yes,’ said Tobias.
There was nowhere safe to put the boy so Tobias carried him – heavier now – to the street where his home was and where his family was.
Except they weren’t there. Along the side of the street where Tobias had lived with his mother and his brothers and his baby sister, there was nothing. Just burning mounds of bricks and wood and shattered glass and pieces of a world that seemed far, far away – a smouldering book, a pair of broken glasses, a doll with matted hair and vacant, staring eyes, a blackened saucepan, broken cups. Ordinary things from ordinary lives that now seemed somehow extraordinary to Tobias. He laid the boy in a doorway on the other side of the street where the buildings were, for the moment, intact. He hauled at the rubble covering the cellar where he had left his family, but the debris scorched his hands and the smoke it produced – black and toxic – threatened to overcome him.
I swear on my life. That’s what he had told his mother. What he had promised her.
He sat beside the boy. He didn’t remember how long he sat there. Perhaps he slept. There was daylight in the sky when he looked up. That seemed
impossible to Tobias. Daylight. The world, turning its face again towards the sun, as if nothing had happened.
The boy was dead.
Tobias gathered him in his arms and rocked him like he wasn’t dead, like he was rocking him to sleep the way he used to rock Lars. And Bruno. And baby Greta.
Tobias didn’t know the boy’s name. He should have asked the boy his name. He laid him on the path, pulled the blanket over his head. He wiped tears from his face. He was glad his father couldn’t see him now. Crying for a stranger. When he hadn’t been able to save his own family.
He hadn’t been able to come up with a plan.
And the promise he’d made to his mother, broken, in pieces, like the buildings all around him.
‘ ... let me know as soon as he wakes up – that would be helpful.’ The man again. The detective. There were people who might share a confidence with a voice like that.
‘Cillian?’ A woman’s voice now. The sister-in-charge, Tobias knew, although just how he had acquired this information, he could not say with certainty. She seemed to know the detective. A wife, perhaps? A girlfriend?
‘Ah, Joan, I was just on my way to look for you.’
‘Are you still able to come for dinner next week? Naoise has been talking about nothing else.’
‘I’d love to but I’m not sure now. The Super is throwing everyone he’s got at this bank robbery case. I’d say I’ll be working day and night for the foreseeable.’
‘Well, call over whenever you’re free. I’ll give you a doggy-bag if you can’t stay.’
No, not a lover. Perhaps a sister?
‘Thanks, sis.’
The affirmation of his calculation gave Tobias a small degree of pleasure, which he conceded was foolish but, at his age and especially in the circumstances in which he now found himself, he felt he could permit it.
‘Does this mean you’re not going to Donegal to see Stella at the weekend?’
Donegal! Another – small – victory.
Tobias could hear the detective’s hair rub the collar of his shirt as he shook his head. He deduced that Cillian had neglected his barber in recent times.
‘Stella will be disappointed.’
‘I phoned her yesterday to tell her. She’s fine about it, she has a lot on at the moment with her sisters.’
‘You know, for an intelligent man, you can be fierce stupid at times.’
‘What do you mean?’
Then the woman, speaking again. ‘I saw Martha earlier.’
‘Aye, so did I.’
A pause then in their conversation. Not a comfortable one, Tobias felt, although, what did he know of relationships?
The rustle of starched fabric. Tobias thought it might be Joan folding her arms across her chest, preparing a speech perhaps. Some advice maybe. She seemed protective of this man. More like a mother than a sister.
‘What is it?’ the man – Cillian – said.
‘Nothing, I just hope ... everything’s going well for you now – it’d be a shame if—’
‘Listen, Joan, Martha happens to be a witness in a case I’m investigating. That’s it. There’s no need to be worrying about me.’
Tobias found himself wondering who Martha was and then felt foolish. What business was it of his?
‘I’m not worrying. I’m just ... I’m glad you met Stella, that’s all. She’s ... solid, you know? You can depend on her. You could do with a bit of that in your life.’
‘How’s my wee nephew?’
‘He’s grand now that he got over the igloo melting. And I’m fully aware that you’re changing the subject.’
‘I’d better get back to the station.’
The creak of shoe leather as Joan – Tobias presumed – rose on the tips of her toes and then the rustle of starch again as she pulled him against the stiffness of her uniform. Hugged him. Tobias was quite certain that was what was happening and – oddly – it both warmed and saddened him. The closeness of their bond seemed deeper than he had imagined bonds between grown-up siblings might be. Not that he had imagined much. Just sometimes. The idea caught him unawares and he wondered – briefly – what it might have been like, if things had worked out differently.
Nine
A meeting was going on at the station when Cillian got back from the hospital. The Super said he wanted everybody’s undivided attention on the bank robbery case. ‘I’ve gotten the green light for overtime so I don’t want to hear about plans for the weekend or family commitments or any bollox like that, yeah? Not till we put this thing to bed.’
Cillian Larkin didn’t mind. And he knew Stella didn’t either, no matter what Joan said. ‘Sure, you’ll be home for good soon enough,’ she’d said yesterday when he rang her. ‘I’ll have my fill of you then, won’t I?’ She laughed her comic-book laugh – hahaha – and Cillian felt relieved that Stella understood about his job. How important it was to him.
After Martha, Cillian hadn’t planned on getting involved with anyone. When he’d applied for the transfer to Donegal, he had been after a quiet life. Quieter, at least. Quiet thoughts. He wanted to do his job well, fish with or without any degree of success, read good books, drive to Bray when he had a weekend off, spend time with his nephew and with his sister, Joan, and her husband, Tony. He did not want this new life to be tinged with anything else. Anyone else.
Stella had said she felt the same way. Was after the same thing. Work and family and – when she had time – a day spent on the bank of the river Owenea, between Ardara and Glenties, where – the locals claimed – you could see the salmon leap.
‘I really like fishing.’ That was one of the first things she’d said to him. He remembered thinking this strange because he’d met her at the Donegal Angling Club and had thus made certain assumptions of the members in terms of the hobbies they enjoyed.
She had rung the station a few days later, asked for him, wanted to know if he would come into her classroom. Talk to her kids about his job. He liked that. The way she called them her kids. He agreed and, afterwards, she had asked him to go for a drink with her. ‘Some time,’ she said, and he liked that too. The casualness of it. A drink rather than a date. He said yes. When they went for a drink – the following week – she drank Diet Coke, and when he asked her about it, she shrugged and said she was working the next day and it sounded so reasonable the way she said it. So obvious. Cillian felt something then, although it was only later he identified the feeling as relief. There would be no need to worry. With Stella.
Stella knew about Martha and Cillian knew about Patrick, but neither had gone into the details of their past relationships. ‘I wasted enough time on that fella,’ Stella had said and her tone was matter-of-fact. She had drawn a line, stepped over it, moved on. Cillian felt buoyed by this possibility. The possibility that he could do the same.
And he had moved on. He had moved to Donegal. Left Martha behind him. It had been difficult at first. For a good while. Sometimes, he wished he’d never met her. Things had been simple before he’d met her. He had been someone who thought mostly about work. Then he met Martha and, afterwards, things were different. Everything – every thought – was tinged with Martha. What she would say, what she would think, how she would look the next time he saw her, the sound of her laugh when he told her some amusing work-related anecdote, the raise of her sceptical eyebrows when he held his hands apart to demonstrate the length of the fish he had nearly caught.
It hadn’t been easy. To stop thinking about her. To move on, leave her behind. But he had managed it in the end. Not all of a sudden. Not one particular day or night. It had been a gradual thing. And it had taken a long time.
After he had phoned Stella, Cillian knew he could put her to one side and concentrate on the case. That was the nature of their relationship. It suited him. Suited them both, Cillian felt.
The roadblocks they’d set up had yielded nothing so far, but a jeep that looked like the one the gang had driven away in had been found burnt out near Wavin Lake, cl
ose to Balrothery. Cillian waded through tedious hours of CCTV footage to get one clear shot of the jeep’s number plate, which turned out to be a fake. Forensics hadn’t been able to get anything useful from the car. Only the butt of a cigarette nearby which happened to be the same brand of cigarette enjoyed by Jimmy Carty.
Apart from that, nothing.
Cillian sat at his desk and trawled through records of stolen vehicles but the jeep wasn’t listed. He then studied the log of telephone calls made to the station in the last week. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just seeing if something jumped out at him. It was tedious work and he was about to get himself a strong coffee when he saw something that made him pause. It was a telephone call from Mrs Flanagan in River Valley, who was known to them all at the station, being a regular caller both in person and by phone. She was harmless enough, a nosy neighbour who had managed to get her hands on the reins of her local Neighbourhood Watch scheme which, coupled with her fertile imagination and pessimistic tendencies, made her a regular caller to the station with a variety of crime-related theories. She had a particular fixation on HiAce vans and had accused almost every plumber, electrician and carpenter, who dared to drive such a vehicle in her vicinity, of suspicious activity over the past several years. Which was probably why her phone call – logged three days ago – had received only perfunctory attention. Cillian read her report, then picked up the phone.
‘Mrs Flanagan? Detective Larkin here at—’
‘Ah, Cillian, how are you, love? I haven’t heard from you in ages.’
‘No, I’ve been—’
‘Are you ringing about my neighbour’s jeep?’
‘Yes, I—’
‘They’re in Lanzarote at the minute, the Mitchells. Second time in the last twelve months, if you wouldn’t be minding. And himself on the dole. I ask you! Of course, her mother finally died last summer so maybe she left a few quid behind, you wouldn’t know and of course, I wouldn’t dream of asking ...’
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