Firewatching

by Russ Thomas

  “No, I’ll take it.”

  “I think we should get you home. I’ll drive, get one of the lads to bring your car later.”

  They stop at the twenty-four-hour pharmacy to get cream for his burns and some painkillers. The only other customers are meth heads waiting for their prescriptions. Tyler shows the pharmacist his neck. She winces and tells him to go to the hospital. Instead he makes Enfield stop at the twenty-four-hour Tesco so they can buy tins of dog food and a bowl.

  When they get back to the flat, Enfield turns off the engine. “I’ll help you up.”

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “Let me help, Adam. Please.”

  They have to coax the dog into the lift, where it immediately cocks its leg and pees up the mirrored wall. Great. He seems to spend half his life cleaning this lift. The keeping of pets is directly forbidden in his rental agreement. Once inside, the dog jumps up on the sofa, turns round a couple of times, and goes straight to sleep.

  Tyler looks at the fire officer. Then he sighs, loads up his laptop, and shows him the blog. Paul Enfield fixes his eyes intently on the screen. They read the final entry together and Tyler lets out a breath of air.

  After a short while Enfield asks, “How long have you known about this?”

  “Since the evening before last.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Adam!” It’s the first time he’s properly seen the man lose his temper.

  “We didn’t want to scare him off by letting him know he’d been rumbled.” It seems wrong to blame Doggett.

  “You mean you thought it might be me.”

  Tyler says nothing.

  “And you still do. So why now?”

  “I guess because I’m suspended. It’s not like I can get into any more trouble. And I’m trusting you. I don’t want anyone else to die.”

  Enfield nods. Tyler can still see the fury in the man’s eyes, but he holds his temper in check.

  They spend some time discussing the various entries and what they might mean. Whoever this is, it’s clear they are damaged, and that the damage was caused in the first instance by Gerald Cartwright.

  “Maybe we can trace the IP address,” Enfield says.

  “We’ve got someone working on it.”

  “Yeah, well, forgive me if I don’t rely wholly on South Yorkshire’s finest. In my experience they’re a little loath to share information.” He sighs heavily. “I’ll get the tech guys on it in the morning.”

  “It is morning,” Tyler says again. He reaches out on a whim and touches Enfield’s arm. “You were right; he’s been talking to us all along. We just weren’t listening.”

  “He hasn’t been talking to us, Adam. He’s been talking to you. You should be concerned about this. He’s been to your flat.”

  They are close now. He can feel Paul Enfield’s muscles tense under the fabric of his T-shirt.

  Then Enfield is leaning in, pressing his lips to Tyler’s mouth. He pulls away again, just as suddenly. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “No, it’s . . . Look, I’m tired. Maybe we could talk later.”

  Enfield smiles. “Sure. I’ll get to work on that website.”

  After Enfield leaves, he reads through the blog entries again. Then he reads them again. It’s all here. The reasons, the psychosis. Whatever it is. Unless . . . The thought occurs to him this could just be a game someone’s playing. Someone who knows how to manipulate people, how to get what they want.

  After his third read he begins to find it hard to focus on the screen. His eyes refuse to stay open despite his best efforts. But when he goes to lie down for a minute or two the words from the blog begin running round his head in broken fragments.

  You shouldn’t have come back . . . unearthing buried secrets . . . Screaming. Always screaming . . .

  On and on as he drifts in and out of consciousness.

  So they have found him . . . he wants more . . . remember how they watched and they laughed . . . you survived . . .

  Tyler turns over, tries to drive the voice out by humming a tune in his head.

  The schoolteacher . . . she knew . . . the one who called himself God’s servant . . . got what he deserved . . .

  As he drifts off, he dreams he is the arsonist, playing with matches, just like Bonfire Night when he was a kid. Gerry’s voice screaming in his head.

  He wants peace . . . an end to it . . . it’s up to you to finish it for him . . .

  A dog barks and he wakes. Tyler sits up sharply, and his T-shirt pulls the skin from his blistered neck, setting it on fire once again.

  It’s late; he’s slept too long. He takes the dog out, letting it run round the grounds of the flats. While he’s trying to dig it out from under a bush, Enfield’s colleague turns up with his car. Somehow she manages to persuade the dog to come out of hiding. He thanks her and offers to give her a lift home, but she declines.

  He showers gingerly, trying to avoid the burns, then spends twenty minutes trying to rub cream into his neck and shoulders. Then he goes back to the blog.

  It tells him so much, and yet so little. He prints off the entries and arranges them on the floor. When Doggett arrives the dog launches itself at his ankles. A Yorkshire terrier against the Yorkshire Terrier. Tyler feels a sudden affection for the creature. Nevertheless, he shuts it in the hallway so they can talk. It immediately begins scratching at the door.

  “I wondered what happened to the bloody thing.” Doggett is looking down at the printouts on the floor. “How’s the neck?”

  “Still there.”

  Doggett takes out a photograph wrapped in plastic and places it very deliberately onto the breakfast bar in front of him. Its corners are singed, and the photo is obscured by crusted black ash. “We found that at Wentworth’s, along with a load more.”

  Tyler picks it up.

  “Is it him?” Doggett asks.

  It takes Tyler a moment to understand what he’s seeing. The angles are all wrong, the camera too close to the subject. Just patches of blond hair. Pale white flesh crisscrossed with marks. Scars, burns, weeping sores. And in the background, hanging in its original place, the portrait from the Old Vicarage. The details are blurred, out of focus, but Tyler is confident it’s the same picture.

  “We’ve rescued what’s left of Wentworth’s PC. The speccy-techies are looking at it as we speak, but I think we know what we’re gonna find. More of the same. Is it him?” he asks again.

  They both know who he means. Oscar.

  “No.”

  “The hair matches. He’s the right age.”

  “It isn’t him.”

  Doggett takes back the photo and examines it. “Even if it isn’t, he grew up in that place.” He slips the photo into his jacket pocket. “Wentworth was the gardener, for Christ’s sake! Probably babysat the lad. Given what Rabbani’s told us about their conversation, and the fire at the scout hut, it’s not much of a leap to suppose the very Reverend Akela Thorogood was involved, too. Being abused gives the lad a bloody good motive for murder. I’m not sure I’d even blame the kid.”

  “How is Wentworth?”

  “Dead. On the way to the hospital.”

  Neither of them voice any sympathy for the man . . . got what he deserved . . . But if Tyler had got there sooner . . . Or if Paul hadn’t had to come back to get him out of the house . . . The world should not mourn him.

  Doggett is crouched over the blog pages, reading them. “Well, well. You’ve been busy.”

  “It isn’t him,” Tyler says again, but he doesn’t have the energy to argue further, and he knows it wouldn’t make any difference to Doggett. His mind is made up.

  Doggett leaves with his evidence bag. “Be careful,” he says. “If Oscar makes contact with you, ring me. You hear?”

  On his way out, Doggett stops and looks at the dog cower
ing in the hallway. “What are you gonna do with this?”

  Tyler shakes his head.

  “I’ll take it if you like. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a thing for terriers.”

  After they’ve gone Tyler goes back to the floor and the blog entries. He sits cross-legged and reads them through again. He thinks he has most of it now. He visualizes the picture Doggett showed him: the pale, scarred flesh, the steep gabled roof of an attic bedroom, and the corner of an ashen-faced portrait hanging on the wall above the bed. He rereads the last entry. The night Lily and Edna sat up watching for fires. The fire watcher. He thinks about what Paul Enfield told him, that desperate compulsion to watch. Where is he? He should be back by now. He googles the words fire watcher and lowry, and sure enough the first hit is the portrait from the Old Vicarage that once hung in the attic but now sits above the mantelpiece in the living room. The Fire Watcher.

  He thinks of opening lines. My dad used to drink that.

  And closing ones. It’s up to you to finish it for him.

  Tyler picks up his keys and his mobile. On his way downstairs he tries Sophie Denham, but she either can’t or won’t answer. So he calls Rabbani instead and tells her to find out what he needs to know. Then he gets into his car, hoping for the first time he can ever remember that for once he’s got it wrong.

  * * *

  —

  There’s no one on the gate at the Old Vicarage. The lack of reporters isn’t overly concerning; he imagines the bulk of the television vans and photographers are currently camped out at the top of Wentworth’s cul-de-sac. But the lack of any officers on the scene is a little more worrying. The police tape that should be stretched wide across the driveway has snapped and is fluttering in the breeze. He leaves his car on the main road and walks toward the house. There are two cars parked outside the front door. Daley’s beat-up Mondeo, and a BMW convertible that once drove him to Ladybower Reservoir. Oscar’s car.

  The mobile incident room is locked. There’s no sign of Guy Daley. He takes out his mobile, but the screen is blank. He holds down the power button but nothing happens. It looks like the battery’s gone for good this time. He steps across the gravel and shivers; for the first time in weeks the temperature has dropped below sixty degrees. There’s a strong wind whistling through the trees, and thick, dark clouds race above the house.

  The front door is standing wide open. He waits a moment, listening. There’s nothing but the wind rustling the branches above. Even so, he walks past the front door and moves around the side of the house, aware that his shoes are crunching loudly in the gravel. The back door is open too, but he can see through the window that the kitchen is empty.

  As he steps into the house there’s that same faint, sharp odor that he caught at Wentworth’s. This time he recognizes it immediately. It catches in his throat. There’s a steady orange glow coming from the hallway. He crosses the kitchen and sees tea lights scattered along the corridor, lining the floor like the emergency lights that mark the exit routes on an airplane. When he reaches the door that leads down to the cellar, he stops and places his hand for a moment on the ravaged wood of the door. It’s cool to the touch. He moves on, taking an exaggerated step over the hole in the floor and stepping into the dim living room.

  There are more tea lights here. Hundreds of them. On the mantelpiece, the floor, balanced on the brown, moldy arms of the sofas. With the curtains drawn, it’s enough to throw dark shadows into every corner of the room. Again he has that feeling of being watched. This time he looks straight toward the portrait on the chimney breast. He moves slowly, stepping carefully across the rotting floorboards, his shoes sinking into the soggy carpet. The eyes of the man in the painting—the fire watcher—follow him all the way across the room, drawing him in. The fire watcher is here in the house with him. And he’s sure now he knows who it is.

  * * *

  —

  Rabbani holds her finger against the tiny metallic intercom button and listens to it trill for several seconds. Still nothing. She tries calling him again, but once again her call is immediately directed to voicemail. What is wrong with him? Surely he hasn’t switched it off again? On the other hand, she imagines that if she’d been suspended, that would be the first thing she’d do.

  But she isn’t Tyler. And he specifically asked her to call him, so why isn’t he answering? There could be any number of reasons, of course, but she has a nasty feeling something’s wrong.

  She was given the all clear to leave the hospital that morning but decided to tell her mother they weren’t letting her out until the afternoon. That way she could avoid the fuss and finish the job Tyler had given her.

  As soon as she left the ward, even as she was negotiating the corridors out of the hospital, she made the call to Sophie Denham. Tyler had told her he was having trouble reaching the girl, so she was surprised when she managed to get through the first time. At first, Denham refused to speak to her, but Rabbani swallowed her pride and begged. She needed to know only one thing. Eventually Denham agreed. Rabbani asked the question Tyler had given her, and Denham gave the answer. Just like that. No equivocation, no reluctance to confide or attempt to find the right words. All of which only convinced Rabbani she was telling the truth. After a couple of hours of listening to the same honeyed voice tell her how sorry she was that her call could not be connected, she’d called in a favor from a girl she knew in HR in order to get hold of Tyler’s address.

  Now what? She hasn’t thought much past this point. She’s more convinced than ever that something is wrong and yet . . . how to convey that to anyone who’ll give a damn? She can imagine the response she’d get from Doggett.

  There’s a gentle click, and the gates to the block of flats in front of her swing silently open. A Mercedes swings round the corner and sails past her. She ducks through the gates as they swing closed, but the concierge has his head out of the door before she’s made it past the first block. “Excuse me, love? Are you visiting someone?”

  “Tyler. Flat 123.”

  “Popular fellow.” The concierge turns and a large black guy steps out of the office behind him. It’s the fire officer, Enfield.

  “You’re looking for DS Tyler?” he asks her.

  Rabbani nods.

  “Apparently he left about twenty minutes ago.”

  She introduces herself and then thanks the concierge for his help. The man hovers for a moment and then slips back into his office, clearly put out that he’s not to be included in the drama.

  “Do you know where he is? He’s not answering his phone.”

  Enfield shakes his head. “I’ve been trying to reach him myself.” He scratches his neck with a massive hand and Rabbani swallows, determined not to stare at his muscles. Well, not too obviously, anyway.

  “There was another fire last night,” he tells her. “Adam was injured.”

  “Injured? How?”

  Enfield frowns at her. “You’re the girl from the church,” he says as though suddenly recognizing her.

  She lets the girl comment go. “What do you mean, ‘injured’?”

  “Nothing too serious. He probably shouldn’t be driving, though.”

  “Maybe I should speak to the DI,” she says.

  Suddenly Enfield is in front of her. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.” He has his hand on her arm now. She pulls it away sharply.

  “Why not?”

  “The arsonist. I think he’s one of yours.”

  Her voice, when she finds it, comes out in a rasp. “Police?”

  “I managed to trace the blog.”

  “What blog?”

  Enfield looks at her closely. “Maybe we should talk to DCI Jordan. Adam’s probably already with her. Why don’t you come with me? I can give you a lift.”

  She wants to tell him to stop calling the sarge Adam. It’s Tyler. Or Detective Sergeant Tyler. But n
ot Adam. No one calls him Adam. There’s something about this guy that’s off, the way he thinks about everything so carefully before he says it.

  He gestures toward the gate as though inviting her to go ahead of him.

  Rabbani starts to speak, to tell him she’ll make her own way to the station, but suddenly her throat is on fire again and she’s coughing and rasping and doubling over.

  He puts his massive hand on her back. “You look like you need to sit down. Look, my car’s just over here.”

  She wants to struggle, to push his help away, but she realizes that would be ridiculous, so she lets him guide her toward the car. He smiles at her as the coughing fit begins to subside, and then he has the door open for her and she can’t think of a valid reason not to get in.

  * * *

  —

  Edna is refusing to pass on; she has joined Lily’s mother in the woodchip on the walls. It’s worse than when she was alive; at least Lily could escape then.

  Lily has been making arrangements. She has had to contact all manner of people by telephone—solicitors, florists, the funeral parlor. It feels almost as though she’s organizing a big party, and she supposes that is exactly what this is, in a way. Not that Edna would appreciate the description.

  She went early into the village this morning to try to avoid the sympathy of friends and neighbors, but in fact it was all rather novel. The fire at the church has everybody talking. She had whole conversations with people she was previously only on nodding terms with, most of which began with the offering of condolences but then continued on much further than they normally would have done. Had she heard about the church? The poor vicar! The work of an arsonist, the police are saying. Isn’t it coming to something? This would never have been allowed to happen in the old days.

  She had mostly just listened and nodded, offering very little in the way of her own thoughts, but then it seemed that was mostly what people wanted anyway. It is almost as though Edna’s demise has freed Lily in some way, revoked her status as persona non grata and welcomed her back into the village fold. Carol had nodded to her in the paper shop, as close to an offering of deepest sympathies as Lily was ever going to get from that one. And even Her-Next-Door offered to go for the papers and, when Lily declined, stopped to chat for almost twenty minutes about . . . well, almost everything under the sun.