Reflections

by Bannister, Jo

  “Then why lie?”

  Voss shrugged. “If that’s what happened, why not?—he’d lied about everything else.”

  “And what was he doing at Sparrow Hill?”

  “Maybe he was looking for that knife.”

  “But he didn’t use it in the main house. He used it in the cottage—Serena’s studio.”

  “There was a lot going on that day,” said Voss reasonably, “maybe he couldn’t remember where he’d been. Or maybe he never was in the house. Maybe the girls imagined it. They’ve had a rough time, it’s no wonder if they’re having nightmares.”

  “And now I’ve got to go and tell them that their father’s dead too,” groaned Deacon. “Dear God, why does anybody ever want to become a policeman?”

  Voss glanced round Dr Roy’s preserve of rubber and stainless steel, smelling of disinfectant and, right now, pond water and decomposition. “It’s the glamour, sir,” he said woodenly. “That, and the women.”

  Deacon gave him a hard look. Then he found himself chuckling. “That must be it. Speaking of which, I still haven’t called Brodie. Well, maybe she’s still at Sparrow Hill. If not I’ll call when I’ve got this done.”

  “Do you want me to come?”

  The superintendent shook his head. “I’ll take a WPC. You can… you can…” He looked at his watch. It was half-past six. “Here’s a novel idea: you can have the night off. Catch up with some of those women who can’t keep their hands off a man smelling of death and pond-weed.”

  Charlie Voss pursed his lips judiciously. “One night may not be enough.” All the same, he was gone before Deacon could find something to throw at him that wasn’t a bottled human organ.

  “Run that by me again,” said Brodie. Her voice was thin. “How I haven’t got to call them monsters. How they’re mostly misunderstood, and anyone can make a mistake, and

  “Later,” said Daniel. “Call me a fool later. Right now, let’s find a way out of here.”

  It was impossible to guess how long they had. Depending on where and how it was set, a fire might smoulder for an hour without doing much harm, or it might race up through the chimney that was the main stairwell and into the attics with their stores of old treasures as dry as kindling in a matter of minutes. Neither of them felt like trusting to luck. Nothing that had happened so far suggested this was their lucky day.

  They tried the door again, one at a time and both together. There wasn’t a suspicion of movement. Neither the door, the frame nor the heavy iron lock would yield to anything less than dynamite. Brodie went to the window. “I guess this is Plan B.”

  It could have been worse. The attic windows were set into the hip of the roof: they wouldn’t need fifteen metres of knotted sheets to reach the ground, had only to crawl along the gutter to the next window, get back inside and hurry downstairs.

  “This isn’t going to take both of us,” said Daniel. “If the key’s still in the door I can unlock it.”

  “//,” said Brodie.

  “Why would they take it?”

  “Spite?”

  But if it wasn’t there she could still get out along the roof. If they could open the window. Generations of paint prevented the sash from travelling more than a few inches.

  “Stand back.”

  Brodie looked round as the butt-end of a brass coal-scuttle swung past her ear and smashed the window, taking glass, glazing bars and very nearly Daniel with it. She hauled him back by his belt. “A little more warning would have been nice.”

  “Sorry. I was striking while the iron was hot.”

  They cleared the spears of glass from the frame and Daniel leaned out and peered along the roof-line. The next window was only five metres away. “I can do this.”

  “I have every confidence in you,” said Brodie; but she held onto his belt until he was safe on the roof and pointing the right way. “Don’t forget this.”

  He gave the coal-scuttle a puzzled look. “To break the next window?” suggested Brodie. “Don’t drop it. And don’t take so wild a swing with it that you bounce yourself over the edge.”

  He looked back at her, his face a pale moon against the night sky as he crouched on his hands and knees in the gutter. “I can do this,” he said again, insistently.

  “Of course you can,” said Brodie.

  She watched from the window, though mostly all she could see were the soles of his shoes and his backside. When he swung the coal-scuttle again it sounded like the opening bar of a modern concerto, the bass boom of the brass threaded with the crystal timpani of shattered glass. He disappeared head-first, and a few seconds later she heard him at the door.

  When it opened he looked less jubilant than she expected. “Hurry,” he said briefly, “I don’t think we have much time.”

  Dead on cue the electrics failed.

  But the attics were not plunged into immediate blackness, though it took Brodie a moment to realise why not and another to see why this was not a good thing. A rosy glow was coming up the staircase.

  Deacon collected WPC Meredith from the police station and headed for the Guildford Road. He tried Brodie’s number again—ignoring the disapproving look of the young policewoman beside him, who habitually stopped drivers for talking on the phone—but there was still no answer. He didn’t want to call Sparrow Hill because this wasn’t something you could say over the phone. Better to wait until he got there. It was a ten minute drive, and he didn’t know of any reason to hurry.

  They edged cautiously towards the stairs. The heat hit them before they got there and warned them what they would find. But it was like the door: they had to look to believe it.

  The whole of the stairwell was filled with flame. How far down in the house it had its roots they had no way of knowing, but the last flight with its bare wooden treads was well alight, roaring like a train in a tunnel.

  “We’re not getting out that way,” Brodie said with conviction. Somewhere in the last minute she’d taken hold of Daniel’s hand, and didn’t feel inclined to give it back just yet. “Is there another staircase?”

  But he’d only been in the house a couple of days, up here only once before. “I don’t know. Even if there is—?”

  “We could crawl along the roof and break in through another window,” said Brodie.

  They hurried back to the room they’d escaped through and Brodie leaned out of the window. There was one more dormer beyond it, but that room too was served by this corridor and these stairs. Possibly there were no others.

  “All right,” said Daniel, keeping his voice calm, “what are our options?”

  “We roast on the stairs or make gravity pizza on the cobblestones below,” said Brodie shortly. “Not a great choice.”

  His hand tightened on hers. “Not much of an answer either. You can do better than that. Do we wait to be rescued or try to escape? We could wait too long and waste time we could be using. But shinning down a drainpipe has its dangers too.”

  She moistened her lips and tried to think. Fear was getting in the way. “There are two people who should get here any time now. And there’s a farm across the lane. When somebody spots the flames, help will be on its way. We don’t want to break our necks just as the fire engine turns up.”

  He nodded agreement. “No, we don’t. Well, if we’re going to sit it out up here we want to keep the fire and smoke at bay as long as possible. That door that we couldn’t break: it’ll protect us. The curtains from the dressing-up box laid along the bottom will keep the smoke out.”

  Brodie pulled the red plush curtains out of the box and packed them against the crack. No light came through so possibly no air could either. “Mental note,” she said. “Next time I’m trapped in a burning building, make sure it’s with someone who has a thorough grasp of the physical sciences.”

  “That, or a fire extinguisher,” said Daniel drily.

  There wasn’t much more they could do. They felt round for anything which might help if in the end they were forced to attempt an escape,
but the darkness defeated them. There might have been a rope ladder stored somewhere in the room but it would be merest luck if they found it. Daniel found a rusty scythe, by the simple expedient of cutting himself on it—Brodie responded to his yelp of pain with a testy, “Now what?”—but nothing to help them down from the roof.

  Listening at the door, Daniel thought the fire sounded closer but said nothing. “I don’t understand. I told them Nicky would be all right. If they’d killed him maybe they’d have felt they had nothing to lose. But now they’re in twice as much trouble. They can’t think they can stay ahead of the police forever.”

  “They can,” said Brodie. “Think it, I mean. You’re right: they’re not monsters, they’re children. Children have a simplistic view of the world. They probably think they can run away with a travelling circus. You know they’ll have to face the music sometime, I know, but they don’t. They’re thinking in the present tense. We were going to tell the police what they’d done and they had to stop us.”

  “By setting fire to the house around us?” His voice climbed incredulously.

  “They don’t understand cause and effect in the same way adults do. They can’t picture the consequences of their actions. They left us to bum because they couldn’t imagine what it would be like. When they sent Nicky spinning into a stone wall they didn’t ask themselves what an impact like that would do to a human body, how it would feel. They think killing someone is like turning a switch: bad person, inconvenient person, turn him off/’

  “You’re saying they’re psychotic,” Daniel said faintly

  “I’m saying they’re children,” Brodie said impatiently “Johnny’s fourteen. She has the body of a young woman, thinks she’s all but grown up. But she has the mentality of a child and the emotions of a confused adolescent. That isn’t her fault, she is what circumstances have made her, but don’t lose sight of the fact that she’s dangerous. She’ll go through anyone who gets in her way to have what she wants.”

  For a moment Daniel said nothing more. Then: “You said, they watched.”

  Brodie couldn’t see his face in the darkness. “What?”

  “When they ambushed Nicky. They watched him smash into the wall. They listened to him choke on his own blood. If Poole hadn’t come along when he did they’d have watched him die.”

  Brodie nodded; then, realising that wouldn’t serve, said it aloud. “Yes. It wasn’t real to them until they saw it. Like the Cheyne Wood Phantom—the kids got away with their hoax until Serena couldn’t resist watching. She had to see the fear she’d caused. Johnny and Em had to see Nicky broken in the road in order to feel avenged.”

  “Reflections,” Daniel said softly.

  “What? Oh—yes. Well, they’re the spitting image of their mother and aunt at that age. I guess the similarities are more than skin-deep.”

  “Johnny was terrified of history repeating itself,” murmured Daniel. “That she and Em would go the same way as Constance and Serena—mad and murdered. I told her not to be so silly. But she knew. She felt it in her own blood. Not all ghosts are where they can be seen.”

  Then he drew a sharp breath and his voice went thin with fear. “But some are.”

  For a moment she didn’t know what he meant. Then she did. She smelled it before she saw it—the acrid scent of rubbish burning. Then a glow appeared in the middle of the floor. The fire wasn’t just in the stairwell: the room beneath them was alight as well. The stench was two hundred years of paint and paper and the dust accumulated between the joists alight. The boards had held back both the smell and the fire as long as they were going to.

  Then she understood what he meant. The first time she saw Daniel Hood he was unconscious in hospital with a hole in his chest and little bums over half his body. Maybe Johnny couldn’t imagine how it felt to bum, but Daniel could. Daniel knew. And Brodie had forgotten. A wave of guilt swept through her. Unpleasant as this was for her, frightening as it was, difficult as it was to go on believing that the strong old building would keep the flames away until help came, for Daniel it was worse. It was a nightmare he’d survived only to find it waiting for him again. Brodie could imagine the consequences if they got this wrong—if they were still here when the fire came surging through, if no one noticed and help never came. But Daniel could remember, and there was all the difference in the world.

  She couldn’t see but she knew where he was—frozen by the door, between the blaze on the stairs and the timbers glowing brighter in the middle of the attic room. “Daniel,” she said sharply, “come over here. We have to get out on the roof.”

  He made no reply that she heard. She tried again, peremptorily. “Daniel!”

  The glow in the centre of the room was growing. Little tongues of flame were coming through. There was just enough red light now that she could see him. His back was pressed against the door and the livid light caught first one cheek, then the other as his head turned, desperate for escape and finding none. His eyes were white and she heard the breath saw in his throat.

  Then as she watched the memory, the fear, overwhelmed him and he slid down the door into a foetal heap at its foot, his knees drawn up, his arms around his head. A moan issued from him that was barely recognisable as a human sound. It might have been an animal in pain.

  Even through her own fear Brodie felt her belly knot with compassion. He tried so hard. He got so far on guts alone. Now the courage was all used up, leaving him naked and defenceless before his worst demon.

  If he’d been alone he’d have died there, too afraid of the fire before him to escape the greater one behind. But he wasn’t alone. He was just the width of a room away from someone who cared about him, who wouldn’t let him die in terror and agony while there was strength in her own limbs and determination in her heart.

  There were two ways of doing this. Carefully, picking her way round the breach in the floor, trying to judge how far the weakness might extend so as to avoid crashing through charred boards into the inferno below; and fast. Brodie opted for fast. She had no way of knowing what damage the fire had done below them, but the longer this took the greater the risk. She sucked in a great energising breath at the window and crossed the room in three strides, hurdling the hotspot in the middle. She grabbed Daniel’s wrist and yanked it away from his head.

  “Up! Up, damn you! I’m not dying today, and neither are you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Brodie felt the growing heat at her back, ignored it determinedly. She bent down, shoving her face close to Daniel’s, shouting in his ear. “I can’t afford to die. I’ve got a little girl waiting for me. But I can’t go back to her until you get your face off the floor and make the effort to come with me.

  “It’s four metres, Daniel. Thirteen feet. Three strides. A couple of seconds. It can’t hurt you in a couple of seconds! Get up, and get moving, and do it now!”

  At last—and it couldn’t have been more than seconds but it felt like forever—there was movement in the pathetic heap at her feet. She waited no longer, but holding his hand in a grip of iron set off back the way she’d come. For a moment he hung back, terribly afraid, a dead weight she dragged behind her like a stone. Then he seemed to realise that if he had to quit his refuge then the sooner the better. Brodie felt him scramble to his feet behind her but couldn’t spare the time to look. She kept moving, tugging him with her, shoving him aside when the hot-spot in the middle of the floor suddenly fountained fire.

  So it was more than four strides and two seconds, but still they reached the comparative safety of the window untouched by the flames. But Brodie didn’t stop there. She shoved Daniel through almost bodily. “Turn right. Right!” she screamed as he wavered. Then she was in the gutter behind him, pushing him on. He crawled to the furthest end of the roof before she would let him stop and collapse on the slates.

  She sprawled beside him, lungs heaving—not so much with the smoke as the effort. Finally she sat up and peered at him by moonlight. “Are you all right?”

/>   “No,” he whispered. And as she searched him anxiously for signs of injury: “I’m … ashamed.”

  Her womb clenched with pity. “You’ve nothing to be ashamed of!”

  “I could have got you killed!”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “But I could have! I made you cross a fire-pit twice because I was too scared to do it once!”

  “I understand why,” she said quietly.

  “It’s no excuse!” he cried, and she thought his heart was breaking. “You were safe. You put yourself in danger for me. And Brodie, if I’d been the one at the window, I couldn’t have done the same for you!”

  She put her arms round him. His whole body was shaking. “Daniel, Daniel. You talk as if there’s only one kind of thing people can do for one another. You’re my best friend. Not because I think you’re Superman in a really good disguise”—she felt a tremor that could have been an embryonic chuckle—“but because you’re a good man and I love you. You make me happy just by being around. I don’t need you to leap tall buildings—or fire-pits—and stop runaway trains. I only need you to be who and what you are: my kind, gentle, understanding friend. Someone I can always talk to, however difficult what I have to say may be. Someone I can always trust.”

  “But you can’t.” His voice was muffled, by Brodie’s shoulder and his own regrets. “How can you trust someone who falls apart at the sight of a few flames? Put your faith in me and I will let you down. I’d give anything for it to be otherwise—to think I could snatch you from the jaws of death. But I know better. When it matters, when it really matters, when it’s a matter of life and death, you’ll need me and I won’t be there. You’ll trust me to catch you and I’ll let you fall.”

  “Daniel,” she sighed, “your problem’s what it always is -you expect too much of yourself. How many people do you know who have snatched someone from the jaws of death? That isn’t what life’s made up of. It’s made of much smaller but maybe more significant things than that. You don’t have to save someone’s life to add value to it every day. And you can make it not worth living without ever threatening to end it. My life has been better in every way since I met you, Daniel Hood, than it was before.