Gideon's Fire

by John Creasey

  Another tank exploded with a menacing, booming roar, the air in and above the depot seemed to become a seething, writhing mass of metal and burning debris. Margetson, staring at the struggling man on the escape, saw him falling, saw the six men beneath him making last minute and almost despairing efforts to spread the net.

  They caught him.

  More fire engines were coming, alarms rang continuously, and heavy police reinforcements were drafted into the area as more and more homes were threatened. Debris from the explosion, hurled hundreds of feet into the air, fell upon the little houses, upon shops and offices, upon larger houses; some wasted themselves in the river and hissed and seethed angrily; some fell sullenly on waste ground.

  Gideon, stopped nearly half a mile away from the scene, saw much of this as he turned the corner. A constable told him where to find Carmichael. Heat from the fires and red light which was everywhere fell upon his face, and lit up the whole district with its devilish glow. Gideon didn’t run, but strode as fast as his strong legs would carry him, desperately anxious to find out what the casualties were likely to be. He heard the ting-a-ling-ting of an ambulance, and was pushed to one side as it moved along. In the distance other ambulance bells were ringing.

  He was forced to stop at a corner where a police radio car was parked. Round the corner was a police crowd-control car, its loud speaker silent for the moment. An ambulance swung round the corner, and as it passed Gideon heard a man call from the police car:

  ‘There’s another one.’

  ‘Another what?’ a man called back.

  ‘Another bloody fire! Out at Limehouse, this time, got a whole block of tenements.’

  Gideon strode to the car. ‘I’m Gideon,’ he announced. ‘What’s this about a fire at Limehouse?’

  ‘Just had it over the air, sir,’ a man said. ‘Big show, too. That’s five tonight.’

  ‘Five?’

  ‘One at Bethnal Green, one at Lots Road, this one, and one at Wapping.’

  ‘I see,’ said Gideon. ‘How many control cars further up?’

  ‘This is the advance one, sir.’

  ‘Check on the other fires and send reports up to me every fifteen minutes,’ said Gideon. ‘Tell Information to call Mr. Rogerson, and advise him of the situation, also advise him I don’t think it will help if he comes out, but if he does it might be better for him to go to the next largest fire.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  ‘Know if Mr. Margetson is here?’

  ‘Saw him with Mr. Carmichael half an hour ago, sir.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Gideon. He went striding off, feeling the heat getting worse, his anxiety greater, his face brushed every now and again with hot smuts, his mind depressed under the weight of dread. He heard the hissing of water, steam and fire. He reached a small concrete wall, and found Margetson and Carmichael standing in front of it. An ambulance was moving away.

  ‘What kind of casualty list?’ demanded Gideon.

  Margetson jumped round. ‘Hallo, sir!’

  ‘Good evening, Gideon,’ said Carmichael. ‘It is impossible to be sure, but largely due to the promptness with which your people worked, I think most of the district was cleared. Casualties should be limited to my men and yours - except for two in the house where fire was first found. I was told only ten minutes ago that it started in a house next to one where they’ve been keeping paint ready for some decorating work, a kind of estate paint store. Once that caught alight . . .’ He broke off, as the ambulance passed, and then said: ‘I think we’re over the worst, now.’

  ‘Here, anyhow,’ Gideon said. ‘Lucky, there’s another, at Limehouse.’

  ‘Gawd,’ breathed Margetson. ‘Five of them in one flickin’ night. It can’t be a coincidence. This time there weren’t any telephone calls, though.’ He looked at Carmichael. ‘Need me here, Mr. Carmichael? I ought to go and take a peek at all the others.’

  ‘Please proceed,’ said Carmichael. The burnishing light of the fire made him seem very handsome, and he had not looked away from the flames all the time that Gideon had been here. ‘I am still sure that we’re over the worst here.’ He broke off as a fire officer came up, saluted, and said:

  ‘We’re on top of it in the petrol depot, sir, and that means we’re over the worst.’

  ‘How’s that man who fell just now?’

  ‘Not serious, sir, apart from a broken leg. But one of our chaps has got his, I’m afraid - caught by a chunk of metal as big as the side of a house.’

  Carmichael said: ‘Oh,’ and made no other comment.

  ‘Come on,’ Gideon said to Margetson. ‘I’ll be seeing you, Carmichael.’

  There were not only the fires to worry about; there were the sneak-thieves and the looters. The police automatically watched for these and went into action against them. A middle-aged policeman in the Limehouse district, NB Division, was hurrying towards the scene of the fire there when he saw a movement inside a shop where the roof was smouldering, and giving off occasional flames. He stood to one side, and watched a very big man shoulder his way out of a doorway into the shop.

  ‘There’s Tiny Repp,’ the policeman said with satisfaction, and looked round for help. A police car was turning the corner, and he waved it down. As it drew up, the shop door opened and the giant appeared in it. At sight of the car and the policeman he drew back.

  ‘So you couldn’t miss a chance, Tiny,’ the policeman said. ‘This will send you down for three years. When are you going to learn?’

  ‘B-b-but I wasn’t doing anything!’ the giant protested. ‘I thought old Gran Muggs was upstairs, I didn’t want her to burn to death. I thought . . .’

  ‘You thought there were some easy pickings,’ jeered one of the men from the car. ‘Don’t make a fuss, Tiny. Come along.’

  ‘But . . .’ the big man began, and then gulped and fell silent.

  The fire at Wandsworth was the worst.

  Gideon and Margetson, in Gideon’s car, went from fire to fire, took on-the-spot reports, and began to form a picture of how they had started. The timing had been remarkable - each had been within about half an hour of the previous outburst, and there seemed little doubt that there was a deliberate rhythm in that. A smaller fire, at Islington, had been discovered, with the remains of a loose ball of petrol soaked rag, not much bigger than a cricket ball, which had been found with the ash of a fuse close to it. Had the occupant of the house not smelt burning and sent for the fire brigade, it would have developed into another inferno.

  At half past five, Gideon and Margetson headed for the Yard, faces blackened, clothes singed in places, Hallowe’en masks of men, their red-rimmed and tired eyes reflecting the horror of all they had seen.

  ‘No point in going back home,’ Gideon said to Margetson. ‘We’ll have a snack and a shower here, and I’ll put my head down for a couple of hours. You’d better, too.’

  Margetson said: ‘Don’t know that I feel like taking any time off until we’ve found this chap.’ Nine out of ten Yard men would have said ‘this swine’ or ‘this devil’ or something stronger. ‘I’m going to be on the ball by ar’ past eight. We’ve got to find that tallyman, Biship, even if it means knocking on every door throughout the whole perishing area.’

  Gideon said, heavily: ‘There are nearly two million front doors in London.’

  ‘We’ve got a week, anyhow, I’d say,’ said Margetson. ‘Every Wednesday . . .’

  ‘Hold it,’ said Gideon, and after Margetson had paused, he went on: ‘Until tonight, there was one fire at a time. Until tonight, there was always plenty of warning to allow people to get away. If this was the same chap, then he changed his tactics because of the publicity he got on Sunday and last week. He knows we’re looking for a cyclist. He knows we’ve got a description. He knows that we are putting two and two together. If he changed his tactics tonight, he might well change them again - by selecting a different night, say. We can’t wait until next Wednesday. We’ve got to get the door-to-door laid on, and we
’ve got to get thousands of the photograph from that group printed. Even when we’ve done it,’ he added, ‘we can’t be sure that Biship’s our man.’

  Margetson didn’t speak.

  Gideon had a sandwich and some tea, a shower and a shave with the electric razor he kept at the office, then went to the rest room on the top floor, where there were a dozen camp beds for emergency use. Two men were sleeping there already, one of them snoring. There was no sign of Margetson. Gideon took off his shoes, loosened his collar and lay down. The rhythmic snoring began to irritate him, but soon he got used to it, and his eyes began to close. He couldn’t have had an hour’s sleep at home. That fact and the surfeit of fires seemed to dull his senses. He kept dozing, then reminded himself that by the time the night’s toll was reckoned there might be a dozen fatalities, and might be even more. Until a few days ago they had not even begun to suspect that there was a kind of chain reaction behind the slum fires, but now - God, why hadn’t he cottoned on to it sooner?

  He felt a hand on his shoulder, shaking him.

  He started, woke, opened his eyes, and saw Lemaitre bending over him, this morning wearing a plain mauve tie and a brown suit much too gingery for first thing in the morning. Someone else was in the background. Lemaitre was holding a newspaper in his right hand and shaking Gideon with his left. He stopped, said: ‘Show a leg, George, for Gawd’s sake.’ The other figure materialised into a uniformed constable carrying a cup of tea. The steam rising from it showed misty and mysterious against the bright sunlight at a window. Sunlight!

  Gideon sat up.

  ‘ ‘Morning, Lem,’ he said, and glanced at his watch; it was only a quarter past eight. ‘Gimme.’ He took the tea. ‘What woke you up?’

  ‘What woke me is going to wake you,’ Lemaitre said, with tension shrill in his voice, ‘and I don’t mean the Ericsons, either, that’s small beer compared with this. Look.’ He thrust the newspaper towards Gideon, and nothing would ever stop him from behaving like an overgrown school-boy.

  Gideon read:

  RECORD GETS LETTER FROM FIRE-RAISER

  INTENDS TO BURN DOWN ALL SLUMS

  Gideon hadn’t yet sipped his tea; and his hand did not move.

  ‘They all got one,’ Lemaitre said. ‘Every newspaper out this morning got it, George. Three of them stopped printing so as to change the headlines. They all telephoned here, your desk looks like a mountain already. They . . .’

  Gideon began to sip his tea.

  ‘What’ve you done?’ he demanded, between sips.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Don’t stand there saying “eh”. What’ve you done?’

  ‘I’ve only just got in, I . . .’

  ‘Priddy was on duty last night - what’s he done?’ Gideon began to get off the bed, keeping the cup level all the time, sipping again two or three times, making a tremendous effort to appear composed. ‘Talked to him?’

  ‘Just had a word . . .’

  ‘Get him on the phone.’

  ‘Okay, George,’ Lemaitre said, in a more subdued tone, and stretched out for the telephone. Gideon finished his tea, tied the laces of his shoes, and then Lemaitre held out the telephone. Gideon took it, and leaned against the wall.

  ‘Priddy?’

  ‘Yes, George.’

  ‘What’ve you done about those letters?’

  ‘Send round for each of them, three are in already,’ said Priddy. ‘There were eight altogether - six morning dailies, two evenings. The letter’s identical in each case. Typewritten - some are carbon copies. Not yet sure what the machine is, but I think it’s a fairly old Olivetti portable, the very light kind. Want me to read one?’

  ‘How long is it?’

  ‘Better part of a page.’

  ‘See they’re all on my desk, will you?’ asked Gideon, ‘and tell me the drift.’

  ‘It’s in the headlines. This chap says that slums are a blot on the face of London, and that as the authorities have left them standing for so long, he’s going to destroy them all. What this city needs, he says, is another Great Fire of London before the authorities will sit up and take notice. Cracked, of course.’

  Gideon didn’t answer.

  ‘You there, George?’ asked Priddy.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gideon. ‘Thanks. I’ll be in my office in about twenty minutes. Any idea where Margetson is?’

  ‘No. Last time I saw him, he said he was going to check on a few odds and ends.’

  ‘Try and find him, I want to see him,’ Gideon said, and then asked the question which almost frightened him. ‘What was the total casualty list last night?’

  ‘Not too bad, all things considered,’ Priddy said, almost brightly; he was showing now what Gideon had always believed, that he was a man with little or no imagination. ‘Six dead, twenty-one injured, only three of them seriously. There were two firemen among the dead and seven among the injured. Four of our chaps injured. The other dead were in two houses at the heart of the fire - mother and a boy of eleven at Lots Road, a mother and one girl at Wandsworth.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Gideon. ‘Could be worse, I suppose.’ He grated the words out, added: ‘Ta,’ and rang off. He poked his fingers through his wiry hair, then lifted the telephone. ‘Telephone my wife,’ he ordered. ‘Tell her I slept at the Yard and won’t be home until this evening, possibly late - got that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Get Mr. Carmichael, the Chief Fire Officer for London on the line for me in my office at nine o’clock sharp. Put through any official who calls about the fire. If Mr. Margetson calls, I’ll talk to him. Check with me before any other calls are put through.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Right.’ Gideon banged the receiver down, went into the cloak-room and sluiced his hands and face with cold water again, and said to the constable: ‘Go down to the canteen, get me some bacon and eggs and the trimmings, toast, butter and sweet marmalade, and some tea.’ He glanced at Lemaitre. ‘You had breakfast?’

  ‘Yes, but I wouldn’t mind a cuppa.’

  ‘Tea for two,’ Gideon said. ‘Come on, Lem.’ He let the uniformed man go out first, and went downstairs in the lift and straight along to the office of the Back Room inspector, the man who served the Press with statements about current cases and investigations. A sergeant was on duty, the C.I. in charge hadn’t arrived. ‘Soames, tell anyone who comes in that we want . . .’

  The door which led from the Embankment opened, and a newspaperman put his head into the room, tired-looking, unshaven and gaunt; he must have been on duty all night. He gave a curious kind of whoop, and pushed further in, letting the door slam behind him.

  ‘Just right timing, Commander!’ he greeted. ‘I’m from the Daily Globe. I wonder if . . .’

  ‘I’ve got a statement for everyone outside,’ Gideon said, and had hardly finished before there was a tap at the door and five men came through in a bunch, one of them even dirtier and more tired-looking than the first, the others spruce after a night’s sleep.

  ‘Hold it,’ Gideon said, as two of them started to ask questions. ‘Here’s a statement about last night’s fires. We have reason to believe that they were started by a man driven insane by grievous personal loss in a previous fire. We have been looking for such a man for several days. We would like to interview a Mr. Walter Biship - IP, not OP - a tallyman or door-to-door salesman for the clothing and footwear firm of Smith, Wiseman and Griggson, of Shoreditch, and Mr. Biship may be able to give us some information.’

  He paused.

  ‘Biship your man?’ asked a young reporter.

  ‘I’ll tell you when we’ve talked to him. We would also like a recent photograph of him from any friend or relation who may have one, the only one we have at the moment is taken from an old group photograph and he doesn’t show up very well. That’s all about Biship.’ The men were scribbling furiously. ‘There were twenty-six casualties last night . . .’

  When he had finished, and the men had gone, the Chief Inspector on duty by day came in,
an elderly man who had been at the door for the last few minutes.

  ‘Thanks, Commander,’ he said. ‘I hoped you’d keep ‘em at bay for a bit. How much am I to tell them when they come back?’

  ‘Release any news you get about the fire unless I tell you to hold it,’ Gideon said, and added almost under his breath: ‘He says he thinks we need a new Fire of London, and if he goes on at this rate he’ll start one. Don’t tell the Press I said that, mind.’

  15 DOOR-TO-DOOR

  Gideon hesitated with a hand on the door of his office. It was still only twenty minutes to nine, and he felt as if he had been up all day. His eyes were bleary and stinging, and one of them kept itching. Bell wouldn’t be here yet, and Margetson had gone off. There would be the morning’s routine to get through, and although he could leave some of that to Bell when his aide came in, he could not push everything on to the older man. He knew even before he opened that door that it was going to be a difficult day, and he paused to take a deep breath, actually a deep physical breath, and to remind himself that at all costs he must prevent the night of fires from making him lose his sense of perspective and his balance.

  He pushed open the door.

  Joe Bell looked up from his desk, apparently no more tired than usual, coat off already, collar a little frayed at the edges. Margetson sat at a corner of the same desk, with a telephone at his ear. He started to get up.

  ‘Siddown,’ Gideon ordered, and his heart lifted. ‘’Morning, Joe. What brought you?’

  ‘Heard about the fires on the seven o’clock news, and I thought I’d better get a move on,’ Bell said. ‘Wish you’d called me.’

  ‘Someone had to keep awake today,’ Gideon said. ‘While I think of it, lay someone on to telephone me the moment they know what time Clapper’s up for that second hearing, I want to be there.’

  ‘George, why don’t . . .’

  ‘I’m going to be there, Joe. If I’m not they’ll say I’m dodging the assault issue.’

  ‘I’ll fix it,’ Bell said.