He might just be able to do it.
More importantly, all he could see at the rear of the house was smoke and flame. On the other side, beyond Willow Walk, was the park he’d seen earlier. In it he could see trees, and the trees were not on fire.
That was good enough for Doc. With his eyes he carefully measured the distance across the alley to the house opposite, and he calculated. He picked up the cat bag and put its strap over his shoulder, carefully rotating the bag so that it was in the middle of his back and was symmetrically placed.
Like this it wouldn’t - hopefully - twist in mid air and send them both plunging to a fiery death.
He backed as far across the roof as he could, then took a running leap towards Willow Walk, launching himself off his good foot. He sailed through a hot, dense cloud of smoke and soot and hit the roof of the building opposite. This roof wasn’t conveniently flat. It had a shallow slope and was covered with tiles. Some of these tiles gave way with the impact of his landing. The cat in the bag gave an unearthly yelp when they crashed down, then fell silent. Doc could feel it trembling through the fabric of the bag.
The heat was tremendous, and getting hotter.
He started climbing laboriously up the roof to its peak. Sneezy was a rustling, shifting weight on him as the cat darted back and forth in his bag desperately trying to maintain his balance. The tiles on the roof were coming free under Doc’s weight. The tar underneath them was melting and his hands were soon sticky and black with it.
He reached the top of the roof, shifted the cat bag so it was against his stomach, and started down the other side, sliding slowly on his bag. As he descended, the heat got steadily worse. Smoke was thick here and it was hard to see. He knew he’d reached the bottom edge of the roof when he felt the hot metal of the gutter against the toe of his right shoe.
A gust of wind cleared the smoke for a moment and he got a clear look.
The distance from the edge of this roof to the nearest tree in the park was less than the jump he’d just made. It was perhaps half as far.
However, this time there’d be no chance for a running start. He’d just have to launch himself from where he was standing now and jump by sheer muscular strength.
Plus, if he made it, he wasn’t going to land on a nice flat surface. Instead he was going to be in the middle of a cluster of tree branches. Doc was going to have to grab one of those pretty damned quick if he didn’t want to fall back out again.
And then there was the additional complication of the fence around the park. It was an iron fence consisting of upright railings with nasty decorative spikes at the top. If he miscalculated, these would be just right for impaling an idiot and the cat he was carrying.
But only if he miscalculated.
Sneezy had gone strangely silent. Doc turned the bag around and peered through its mesh door to see if the cat was all right. The cat peered anxiously out at him, its eyes enormous. “Okay, we’re going to have to jump again,” said Doc in a soothing voice. “But not so far this time.” He shifted the bag on its shoulder strap, rotating it around behind him again. “Are you ready?” he said over his shoulder. “Squeak once for yes. Twice for no.”
Sneezy squeaked once.
Doc jumped.
4: Park
Doc hit the tree’s canopy, or rather fell into it. Leaves lashed his face and small twigs gouged at his eyes, combed his hair, probed his gasping open mouth, cut his lips. He managed to seize a branch and arrest his fall. The cat shrieked and squalled as its bag slammed painfully into the small of his bag. Pain pierced the muscles of Doc’s shoulders as they took his full weight.
He swung on the branch for a long, straining moment.
Then it broke.
Snatching frantically as he fell, Doc seized another branch.
This one broke as well.
Floundering, falling, he frantically grabbed again. Nothing. A branch struck him in the face. It was like being hit across the forehead with a cricket bat. For a moment he was stunned, falling, weightless, and it all seemed quite pleasant. There was no urgency, no need to do anything. It was as if he floating in warm water. Leaves were rustling all around him as he fell, like the murmuring of tiny voices.
The cat shrieked.
Doc came around and reached out -
He grabbed hold of a branch. The impact almost pulled his arm out of its socket. But the branch held. He grabbed it with his other hand. Doc didn’t dare to breathe. The branch continued to hold. He pulled himself up, further onto it, the rough bark scraping the skin off his arms. Doc didn’t mind. He loved the bark, he loved the branch. It was a good, thick, solid branch. It wasn’t going to break under their weight. Doc began to breathe again. Much to his embarrassment, these breaths sounded suspiciously like sobs.
He clung to the branch, breathing and sobbing. When finally he fell silent, Sneezy started up, in a torrent of feline complaint.
“We’re in a tree,” said Doc. “You’re a cat in a tree. You could climb down yourself from this point. Would you like to?”
A tactful silence ensued from the cat carrier.
When he caught his breath, Doc looked around them and calculated the best route down to the ground. He had often climbed trees when he was a kid. It was almost a nostalgic experience, a sentimental journey. He’d never done it with his prosthetic leg though, and he discovered that he had to be careful about exactly how he placed his weight, or he’d slip. Something to report to Sofia and her team. Performs admirably well under most conditions but could be improved in arboreal contexts.
But even allowing for the learning curve of the experience - ‘Tree Climbing with an Artificial Leg,’ a monograph by Dr Thomas Palfrey, PhD - he was down from the tree in a minute or so. Feeling very light headed, though.
“Something to do with that blow to the head, I imagine, Sneezy,” he said. His voice rang oddly in his own ears. Standing on firm ground again felt strange, as well, as though he’d been at sea for weeks.
The muscles in his right leg and what was left of his left thigh were all trembling and he shook like a drunk. He carefully lifted the cat carrier off his shoulder and set it on the ground while he looked around and got his bearings.
Doc was only just beginning to realise something very strange.
It was as if he had left the fire behind.
He could smell the smoke, but that was all it was, a fragrance on the wind. The air he was breathing was clean and cool. He could feel the heat of the fire, but it was a safely distant heat, coming from the road beyond the fence. The most immediate thing about the blaze was the sound of it, the roaring and the scattered explosions and the high keening of sirens.
Doc stared around in wonder. There was no fire of any kind in the park. Not even in the branches of the trees which hung over the fence into the street beyond.
It was as if this place was sealed off from the flames by a physical barrier. Doc tried telling himself that the grass and trees in the park must be particularly damp, and that this had stopped the flames. But he wasn’t very convincing, even to himself. He lifted the cat carrier again, slung it across his shoulder and started across the park, moving away from the fire. He could still feel the inferno as a faint sensation of heat on the back of his neck, like the dying rays of the sun, and he could still hear it, but it faded rapidly as he walked.
At first he cut to his left and found an exit to the street after walking for a few minutes. But here he still had not escaped the fire. There was a cluster of fire engines parked at the intersection of Short Street and New Square, red and yellow vehicles with Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service emblazoned on their doors. Fire fighters in black and yellow jackets and yellow helmets with wide glass visors were directing hoses into the conflagration, to no discernible effect. Some of the men wore respirators.
The height of the flames and their ferocity made the effort of the human seem puny and futile.
Doc had been cursing what he’d interpreted as the slow response of the
emergency services. But now that he saw the extent of the problem, he began to feel a sharp sympathy for the men. They were combating a solid wall of flame. Nearby one of the fire fighters had removed his helmet and was holding a phone to his ear. His face was streaked with dirt and sweat and his hair was standing up in damp tufts.
“We’re not making any impression on it all,” he said. “It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen. We don’t know what the hell happened here. There’s no obvious source.”
Doc reflected that this was not the sort of thing you wanted to hear from fire fighting professionals.
Water flowing back along the street from the hoses nudged the toes of Doc’s shoes. He watched the spectacle for a moment more, then the heat and smoke began to get to him. He went back into the park.
It seemed the only safe place.
*
It took him much longer to cross the park than he’d expected. So long that he began to wonder if the blow to his head had affected his sense of time. Maybe he was walking in circles. He stopped and turned around. No - the hot red of the fire was reflected on the clouds in that direction. Sneezy squeaked anxiously in his bag. “It’s all right,” said Doc. “We’re not going back there.” He turned around the way he’d been walking before and continued. There were trees and lawns and footpaths and flowerbeds. Signs pointed the way towards the tennis courts.
After what he’d been through, the thought of playing tennis seemed a singularly surreal notion. Finally it occurred to Doc to take out his phone and check where he was. The park was called Christ’s Piece. He finally crossed it and went out the other side through a small gate.
Doc carefully closed the gate behind him again. He seemed to have re-entered a world where small things like that mattered. A sane world. A world that wasn’t in flames.
He was in a residential street. It was peaceful and normal except for the distant yelp of sirens. Looking back over his shoulder at the red glare in the sky he wondered, yet again, what was going on.
He started looking around for a taxi.
*
It was another hour and a half before he was able to get on a train to London, but it was time well spent. Doc had noticed a medallion hanging around Sneezy’s neck with a phone number on it. He’d dialled the number while he sat outside a café in Emmanuel Street drinking bottled water, with the cat carrier concealed under the table. He’d poured some water into a saucer and carefully unzipped the flap at the front of the bag just enough to give Sneezy access to it. The cat lapped it up thirstily and then sneezed a couple of times for good measure.
The woman who owned Sneezy was called Kay Winthorpe. She was stout and dressed in a smart navy blue business suit with a suede briefcase tucked under her arm When she arrived, looking flustered and anxious, Doc bought her a coffee. It was the least he could do. She had lost everything she owned in the fire. Everything except the cat.
She thanked Doc profusely, and repeatedly.
“That’s all that matters,” she said, her voice trembling. “Everything else I can replace. But not Sneezy. Thank god you were there.” Doc had invented a story about looking at the flat downstairs with a view to buying it, and having heard the cat crying out when the fire started.
“It’s so horrible,” she said. “When I heard what was happening, that was all I could think about. I couldn’t bear the thought of him being trapped there, unable to get out, and the fire getting nearer and nearer…”
She began to cry.
Doc had to get out of there before he started crying, too.
The train back to London was not as empty as the one that morning but it was still comfortably uncrowded. However, Doc discovered that the other passengers in first class were giving him strange looks. He went to the toilet compartment and looked at himself in the mirror. No wonder. He had black smudges all over his face and clothes, black stains on his hands from the tar, and a livid, gashed bruise on his forehead where he’d connected with the tree branch.
Altogether not the standard of person you expected to encounter in first class.
He cleaned himself up the best he could, although the wound on his head was going to require a dressing and the tar on his hands needed a more resolute soap than the kind provided by this rail franchise.
But he did the best he could, and then returned to his seat where he studied the news reports on his iPhone. The fire in Cambridge was dominating the bulletins on every channel. One eyewitness account said that it had begun with a flash, “Like red lightning.”
The fire itself was described as strangely localised, and proving extremely difficult to put out. There was speculation that it had been caused by some kind of chemical spill, but no hard facts.
Because of the savagely swift onset of the blaze, casualties were anticipated to be high.
Another report offered a map of the area affected by the fire.
When Doc saw it he felt a cold, sinking sensation.
He took the map out of his pocket and unfolded it, comparing the area marked in yellow with the extent of the conflagration.
It almost exactly matched the places he’d planned to visit.
5: Red Lightning
For eighteen months Paola Rimmini had been an intern with Z5 in Milan as part of Sofia Forli’s team, based at Linate Airport.
Today she had qualified as a fully-fledged operative.
Instrumental in her transition from trainee to professional had been her experience dealing with the conspiracy of the Therese Morency - Raoul Duval gang. Paola had been present at the garage in Muggio on the morning when they had raided the establishment, and she had narrowly avoided being injured or even killed in the drone strike which had blown the garage to hell in an attempt to destroy evidence and cover the traces of the gang’s activity.
Paola had also played a crucial role as member of the team that had raided Duval’s mansion in Genoa. She had proud memories of picking the lock on the front door and standing back to allow the strike team, under the command of the magnificent Doc Palfrey, to surge into the building.
She had far less happy memories of what had happened afterwards, when she had been unable to prevent Benadir Abhilasha being wounded and Doc Palfrey being abducted.
Subsequently, after Doc’s safe return, he had asked Paola to show him how to pick locks and she had been thrilled to do so. Paola had acquired her ability to tease locks into submission at an early age, from two older brothers who had enjoyed a rather close acquaintance with certain elements of the Milanese underworld.
Both of the brothers would have been proud to know that Paola was carrying on the family tradition, so to speak.
Paola was proud of her skills. But when she’d taught Doc Palfrey about locks, her thrill hadn’t been entirely one of pride. Her feelings towards the big Englishman with the bad leg were more complicated than that. Now, as she walked across the lush broad lawns of the Parco Forlanini, she wished Doc was with her.
The Forlanini Park was a gorgeous green space in the middle of Milan, dense with tree lined avenues and a forest of beeches. It had been created in the late 1960s and had spared this section of the city from the ravages of urban development. There were ancient farms and an old mill preserved in its depths. In its northeast corner was the Lake Salesina, a large body of cool green water that was a haven for birds and fish, fed by rain welling up as groundwater.
The lake was where Paola was heading now, carrying a picnic hamper that was so heavy she had to keep swapping it from one side of her body to the other, so that it wouldn’t drag her down.
Paola loved this park. A lifelong resident of Milan, she had never visited the place until she’d started working with Z5. The park was located just opposite Linate Airport where the Z5 HQ was based. Indeed, the park had strong connections with the airport. It was named after the aviation pioneer Enrico Forlanini and its beech wood had been planted to commemorate the one hundred and eighteen victims of the 2001 catastrophe at Linate, the worst plane crash in the history of It
aly. In terms of ground collisions, it was only surpassed in magnitude by the disaster in Tenerife.
Paola had read all about this on a plaque at the airport. But she didn’t want to think about disaster and death today.
Today was only about good things. It was about celebrating. Paola was now a real member of Z5, and the occasion had to be marked properly. Which was why she was lugging a picnic basket that was almost as heavy as she was.
The sun was high over head and warm on Paola’s dark hair. It created stingingly bright reflections on the thick glasses she wore. She would be glad to sit down and take off those glasses, and kick off her shoes, and drink some of the wine she’d brought. Paola had carefully chosen several bottles of sparkling wine from the Oltrepò Pavese region. She had chilled them overnight in the refrigerator at her tiny flat and had brought them today wrapped in chiller sleeves to keep them cool.
It was largely these bottles that made the picnic hamper so damned heavy.
On second thoughts, it would probably be best not to open the wine yet. Perhaps it would be better to start with some of the lemonade or sparkling water, the bottles of which were also rolling around so heavily in her basket. She would save the wine until the others arrived.
It wouldn’t do to be drunk when her boss showed up.
Paola had invited Sofia Forli to the picnic, as well as her workmate Rocco and as many of her other Z5 colleagues as could be spared from the office that day. Which was also the reason the cursed hamper was so heavy.
Once again Paola found herself wishing that Doc could be with her here today, for the picnic. For her big day. She wondered what it was like going to bed with a man with one leg missing. That girl of his, Benadir, she obviously didn’t find it any kind of a problem.
The bitch.
Paola wondered how she could ever compete with someone like Benadir, who besides being beautiful and wealthy, had a wildly exotic background. She had been married - some rumours said she was still married - to a billionaire Indian maharajah.
Hard Targets: A Doc Palfrey Omnibus Page 10