Firewatching

by Russ Thomas

  He suspected Doggett and Jordan were at risk, too. If the superintendent had anyone else to take over the investigation, they’d both be joining him in the doghouse. They might still.

  “Fuck,” he says.

  “That pretty much covers it.”

  Tyler shakes his head. “No, it doesn’t make sense. How could he know I’d get the case?” But even as he asks the question he finds the answer. Sally-Ann. A few carefully worded questions about who handles cold cases in the department. He wonders which came first the night the two of them met, Oscar’s revelation to Sally-Ann about his sexuality or Sally-Ann’s mention of her “friend” in CID. Could Oscar really go that far? Sleep with someone? Pretend to be . . . something he isn’t just to get away with murder? Perhaps. People have done far worse for less.

  He shakes his head again. “What about the fire watcher?”

  Doggett heaves his shoulders up. “Who knows how unhinged he is? Or maybe we were wrong; maybe the fires aren’t connected.”

  Tyler shakes his head. “You’ve read that blog. It’s the same village. We’re talking about a place where the last crime reported was someone failing to register in the Domesday Book. Come on.”

  Doggett acknowledges the point with another shrug. “Well, maybe it’s not connected in the way we think.”

  “What about Thorogood? Why would Oscar kill him?”

  “Maybe it was an accident? Or maybe the vicar had something on him.” But the doubt is creeping into Doggett’s voice. Too many maybes. He looks at Tyler closely. “We’re bringing him in anyway. Jordan wants to show him and Denham their threats aren’t going to shake us.”

  “You’re wrong,” he tells Doggett. “Not about the money maybe, but about the fires. It was the discovery of Gerald’s body that set the arsonist off. The two things are linked in some way. You need to follow that blog.”

  Doggett nods. “I’ll keep it in mind. Speaking of which, how’s your friend getting on with tracing the Internet thingy?”

  “I’m not sure,” he admits. “We’re not really talking at the moment. You’ll have to follow it up with her yourself.”

  Doggett grins at him. “Christ, you really do know how to piss people off, don’t you?” He lifts a hand and again touches Tyler’s arm. “Stay away from the Cartwright lad, eh?”

  “I’m suspended,” Tyler says. “I can’t damage the case any further.”

  “It’s not the case I’m worried about.”

  They’re trying to protect him, Doggett and Jordan both. They don’t want him to end up like Rabbani.

  “Just go home and think of this as a few days’ holiday. The DCI will straighten it all out once the super calms down.”

  He wants to believe that. He wants to believe they can somehow go back to the way things were before. But he thinks of Rabbani lying in the hospital struggling to breathe on her own, and Jordan still trying to protect him in spite of everything he’s done behind her back. He’s let them both down, just as he lets down everyone sooner or later.

  * * *

  —

  Tyler stares at Rabbani through the window. They won’t let him go in to see her because it’s “family” only. Her chest moves up and down too slowly. Now and again the breath catches in her throat and she coughs through the mask. It’s a small sign, but a comforting one. He knows the reason she’s here is his fault. He neglected her, spoke up for her on a whim to prove a point to Jordan and then forgot all about her. Like a pet he begged to have and then gave up feeding. He leaves the flowers he brought with the nurse and heads back to the car.

  He doesn’t realize where he’s headed until he’s almost at the gates of the cemetery. He hasn’t been here for years but it looks exactly as he remembers it, the newest graves laid out in neat little white rows, the older ones more haphazard, overgrown and crumbling. Eventually the dead are forgotten.

  From the visitors’ parking lot, he follows a network of paths that meander through a rose garden, and then he is searching the pale white headstones for the one he has come to visit. When he finds it, the grave is bare; he should have brought flowers, but from what he remembers his father was never really a flowers sort of person. He certainly can’t remember him ever bringing any home for their mother.

  There’s a funeral taking place at the crematorium. He imagines they rarely bury anyone here nowadays; perhaps his father was one of the last. Perhaps Jordan somehow pulled strings to get him in. He doesn’t remember that time well. He missed the funeral. He watches the mourners emerge from the building, an older woman dressed in black surrounded by friends and family. The way she leans on the arm of the young man walking next to her makes him think the man is probably her son. Another father being buried then. They are a fair distance away, but he can see the sweat break out on their brows as they step into the blazing heat. The crowd that spills out behind them begins to pay its respects while everyone waits for whatever comes next: a taxi to the house or a local pub, sandwiches and tea, stiff drinks and reminiscence. Soon the enforced quiet that has been laid on them lifts and evolves into gentle chatter as their cars begin to arrive. The son helps the mother into the back of a silver Mercedes and they are gone. Life goes on.

  Tyler looks down at his father’s gravestone. This is where they all end up; the girls butchered in their apartments, the football crowds and the Friday night drinkers of O’Hagan’s. Gerald Cartwright. Oscar Cartwright. Adam Tyler. They all end up here, tidied away in their boxes, vases, and urns. Cramped together, as though still searching for the same human contact.

  He thinks back to that day. He’s coming home from school and he’s happy. Perhaps for the last time. His mother is long gone and Jude is mostly away in the army, but he and Richard are doing okay. He has plans. A-levels next year, and then university to read mathematics or physics. After that, a job doing something important. He doesn’t know what exactly, just that it should count. The one thing he is sure of is that he’s not going to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the police. His tutor, Mr. Barton, tells him it’s too early to be making concrete plans, and he should try not to put so much pressure on himself. It’s a funny thing for a teacher to say, and he remembers it in the months to come. Wonders if perhaps Mr. Barton had a premonition and knew what was waiting for Tyler at home that day.

  He remembers things differently from the way they must have been. For instance, in his memory, he sees his father through the frosted glass in the front door before he actually goes in. A silhouette, a shadow. An unfinished Tarot card—the Hanged Man. He knows this can’t be real; otherwise why would he have closed the door behind him and flicked down the latch? Why would he kick off his trainers and drop his school bag just as he always did? Why would he have opened the fucking door in the first place? But this is the way he remembers it.

  In truth, it must have been only after he’d finished all those everyday, habitual actions that he looked up. Richard—and it is at this exact point he begins thinking of the man as Richard, rather than Dad—is hanging from the groaning banister, a thin red cord cutting deeply into the folds of flesh at his neck. They try to hide the detail of the rope’s origin from him, but he finds out. It’s Japanese bondage rope, bought the week before. They find the receipt on his study desk, with the receipt for the paracetamol. Perhaps he had plans to claim them back on expenses.

  Richard’s eyes are bulging from his face as though, at the end, this event has taken him by surprise. There is crusted vomit still drying on his collar and chest, and a puddle of urine soaking into the deep shag of the hallway carpet. There is the stench of loosened bowels. Does he remember these things? Or are they, like the silhouette, just ghosts of memories? Things he has put together after the fact. Things he has learned from attending similar scenes.

  Much later they say his father was on the take. Bent as a nine-bob note and about to be found out. They say he had a broken marriage and an estranged son.
They say he was struggling to cope as a single parent in charge of a wayward teenager (it’s the first time Tyler realizes he’s wayward). They say he was overworked and underpaid and struggling to handle the stress of the job. They say he took enough paracetamol to fell a horse before lowering himself over the banister. They say it wouldn’t have made any difference if the lad—that’s Tyler—had been home an hour before, or two hours, or had come home sick from school the minute he’d got there; Richard would still be as dead as England’s chances of winning the European Championships. But in Tyler’s mind is the thought that, as Richard hung there, perhaps regretting his decision and clawing at his throat, perhaps just waiting patiently to be found (and truly it doesn’t matter which), at that exact moment, his wayward son, the last hope in Richard Tyler’s crumbling life, was using silly string to draw a giant cock-and-ball motif on the back of a butcher’s stall in the Castle Market.

  They don’t have all the answers, though. They don’t explain why he canceled the hired help that day, but didn’t consider his sixteen-year-old son would find him. They don’t explain why he would go out and buy a bottle of paracetamol when there were packets of the stuff—used for years by his strung-out wife to self-medicate—in the medicine cupboard already. They don’t explain why he didn’t leave a note, some explanation for young Adam. A final farewell. An explanation for yet another abandonment.

  Tyler shivers. The sun is setting, and the trees round the graveyard have draped him in shadows. The parallels between his life and Oscar’s are astonishing. A missing mother. A dead father. The only difference being that Richard didn’t kill his wife and bury her in the cellar. What would Tyler have done if he had? Would he have taken the law into his own hands? Taken revenge on Richard?

  Gerald Cartwright was a bad man. A liar, and a thief, and a murderer. No doubt a terrible father as well, far worse than Richard. Did Oscar lash out one day? Perhaps it was an accident. And of course Lily and Edna would help him cover things up. They would want to protect their precious little boy, just as Diane Jordan had tried to protect him.

  This is Doggett’s theory, and the more Tyler goes over it, the more it makes sense. Was the uncovering of Gerald’s corpse an accident? Or did Oscar, desperate for cash, arrange it? He digs up his father’s body but is unaware of the effect it would have on him. Grief-stricken, racked with guilt, half mad, he begins setting light to things. In a few hours they’ll arrest him, if they haven’t done so already. The psychologists will do their bit, and they’ll argue about what it is that drove him to do it. He once mentioned his father’s cigar smoking; perhaps the link is as simple as that.

  Tyler’s mobile rings. He checks the caller ID. Sally-Ann. He lets the phone ring off and a few seconds later his voicemail calls back with her message.

  “Adam? Oh God, I’m so, so, so, so sorry. I really thought I was helping. I heard what happened to you, everyone’s talking about it. I mean, not everyone’s talking about it but . . . oh, you know what I mean. Look, I’m sorry, okay? Literally, like, really sorry. If I’d known what he . . .” She trails off for a few moments, then, “Anyway, I just wanted to update you about the blog. So . . . it’s taking longer than I thought to . . . oh . . . I probably shouldn’t even be telling you this, what with you being suspended and everything . . . I should probably ring DI Doggett, right? Look, just ring me. Will you? Please? Plea—?” The message cuts off.

  He knows he’s being a bit unfair. She couldn’t have known Oscar’s true motivations when they met. But she did watch the man spike his drink and did precious little about it. He should ring her anyway, have it out with her. But he doesn’t.

  Why can’t he bring himself to subscribe to Doggett’s theory?

  Surely not just because that would mean admitting that he, Tyler, was wrong? Is he too proud to admit he’s made mistakes? No, it isn’t that. He knows he’s made mistakes. Big ones. Mistakes he’s unlikely to get away with this time. But it isn’t that.

  He won’t believe it because he can’t believe it. Oscar is spoiled, changeable, overly confident in his ability to charm. He’s grief-stricken, certainly. At least, he seems it at times; the rest of the time he’s too busy channeling the confident charmer. Could that be it? Schizophrenia or something? Perhaps there are other Oscars he has yet to see. A crazy Oscar, racked with guilt. A serial arsonist with daddy issues. But he just doesn’t buy it.

  Daddy issues.

  The mobile is still in his hand. He finds the number he needs still saved on his phone, and Sophie Denham answers in two rings.

  “Hello?” She speaks hesitantly, obviously not recognizing his number.

  “It’s DS Tyler.” It’s not exactly a lie; he still has his rank on the telephone at least. For a short while anyway.

  She’s quiet at first and then she says, “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”

  “I understand. I just need to ask you one question.”

  “If my father finds out . . .” Her voice is light and whispery.

  “He won’t.”

  More silence. He’s beginning to wonder if she’s hung up on him, but then she says, “Just a minute.” He imagines her getting up, closing the door to her bedroom.

  He wonders who she is with, and when she gets back to the phone he can’t stop himself asking. “Is Oscar there?”

  This time she doesn’t hesitate. “No, I’m round Dad’s. I haven’t seen Oscar for days. We’re . . . well, we’re not together anymore.”

  “Right,” he says, and then realizes that’s probably not enough. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It only started up again because of Dad.” She laughs. “That probably sounds a bit weird, right? What I mean is, he never really liked Oscar, so I figured it would wind him up a bit if we started hanging out again.”

  “Did it?”

  “More than a little.”

  “Why doesn’t he?”

  “What?”

  “Why doesn’t your father like Oscar?”

  “It’s nothing personal. I think he just didn’t want me to get involved with Gerry’s son.” She sighs lightly, perhaps wondering if she’s made the right decision. “He thinks Oscar’s a distraction. And . . . well, I guess he’s right.” She laughs again, a relieved sort of giggle. “The ironic thing is, in the last few weeks he’s probably seen more of Oscar than I have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I guess they have business to talk about? Dad’s on the CWI board of directors. Every time he comes round they’re talking business about something.”

  He wonders about that. If Oscar is as broke as Doggett claims, how does he afford Denham’s services? He’s an old family friend, so he might do Oscar the occasional favor, but on the other hand he disapproves of the man’s relationship with his daughter, so why would he help? Perhaps the two of them are closer than they appear. Perhaps this isn’t the first time Denham has helped Oscar out of a sticky situation.

  Sophie clears her throat, and he realizes neither of them have spoken for several seconds. “Is this what you wanted to ask me about?”

  “No.” He watches the last car depart the funeral. “When you told me about the Old Vicarage, about Gerald, you said there was a group of you used to hang out there.”

  “Sure. The place was always full of all sorts of people. Staff mostly, but sometimes there would be a model or an actor. Once we hung out with a band Gerald was thinking of promoting. I don’t know if they ever made it, but I’ve still got a pair of drumsticks the drummer gave—”

  “Do you remember anyone who was . . . particularly close to Gerald?”

  The line goes quiet for a moment. “I don’t know.” Again she pauses. “What do you mean by close?”

  The mobile beeps in his ear, the battery dying. “Sophie, I think you know what I mean.” She doesn’t answer, so he pushes her harder. “When I asked you before about Gerald, I felt there was something y
ou weren’t telling me. This is really important. Anything you can tell me might help.”

  When she speaks, it’s quietly. “I didn’t like him,” she says. “None of us did.” She clears her throat again, and when she speaks her voice is a little more confident. “Gerald was hardly ever there, but when he was he used to creep us out. He was always watching us.”

  “‘Us’?”

  “Me, I suppose. There was one day we ended up on our own together. I think he said he had a message he wanted me to pass to Dad.” She takes a deep breath, and then it’s all out in a rush. “He started touching me. Running his hands over my legs. And . . .” She trails off.

  “I’m sorry. I know this is hard, but I need to know what happened.”

  “Nothing happened. I froze. I just couldn’t move. I wanted to tell him to stop but I didn’t. Then Edna walked in and Gerry laughed it off and I ran home as fast as I could. After that, I made sure I was never alone with him again.”

  His phone beeps again. “You never told anyone?” Her silence gives him the answer. “Who did you tell?”

  He hears another voice somewhere in the background. “It’s just a friend from uni,” she shouts out. Then she says, “I have to go.”

  “Wait . . .” But she’s already hung up.

  * * *

  —

  Lily can’t get in the house again.

  After they left the cottage yesterday, Oscar had escorted Lily to Her-Next-Door, who’d been surprisingly gracious in offering Lily a bed for the night. She won’t pretend she was anything other than relieved, however, when Her-Next-Door—Judith—had answered the telephone this morning to a Superintendent Stevens. He told her the matter of Edna’s death had been settled, and that the pathologist was confident Edna had died of a massive stroke brought on by her condition. The police would be taking no further action. She wasn’t sure what action they might have taken, but anyway the main thing was she would be allowed back into the cottage.