Incinerator

by Niall Leonard

  Frenzied now, we snatched and pulled and pushed and ripped, ignoring the dust and the splinters and the razor-sharp shards of slate, feeling the viscous, poisonous heat in the room gush past us into the night, as hungry as we were for oxygen. The draught grew stronger and stronger, sending the dust we had dislodged flying upwards until it felt like we were wedged in the chimney of an incinerator. I could feel the hairs on my legs curl and singe, and the skin scorch, but I pulled back from the hole in the roof, grabbed Susan and shoved her upwards. The towel round her face snagged on the broken battens and she tugged at it. I grabbed it, pulled it up and free of her head, and manhandled her out into the night—only to see her sliding downwards, screaming hoarsely.

  I scrambled after her, somehow gripping the roof’s rough edge with my stomach, and unthinkingly flinging something towards her—the damp towel she had worn over her mouth. She grabbed it with both hands, her knuckles turning white, and waited, eyes shut and face turned upwards, as I climbed after her, through the hole, one hand clenched on the towel, the other fumbling upwards to the ridge tiles of the roof. Now I could make out sirens boiling to a frenzy as the fire engines pulled up in the street below. The racket mingled with the roar of the inferno and the peal of shattering glass, and the tongues of flame in the smoke around us merged and fought with the flickering blue light of the fire trucks like demons at war. Finally my left hand grabbed the ridge of the roof, and my right gripped the towel so hard my nails dug welts into my palm, and I folded my body together somehow, slowly pulling Susan up from the sagging gutter towards me. Ten centimetres from the apex she threw a hand out and grasped the ridge tiles herself, and her smooth-soled boots somehow managed to grip the slate, and she pushed herself upwards to straddle the roof.

  We were more than twenty metres above the street, with nothing between us and the drop but a short slate ramp slick with moss, and we could feel the heat underneath us and the judders of the building as the inner walls tumbled and crashed through the blazing floor into the cauldron of molten plastic below. And Susan smiled at me, coughing, because now we could breathe, and we had won maybe sixty seconds before the roof we were perched on would start to burn. But sixty seconds was enough. We could creep like scorched slugs along the ridge towards the eaves, where the blank wall dropped two metres to the flat roof of the building next door.

  And that’s what we did.

  * * *

  I’ve never liked hospitals at any time of day, but on this particular morning the local accident and emergency unit was empty, apart from a frazzled young couple fretting over a fat bald two-year-old who seemed perfectly happy to me. A nurse wearing spectacles held together with the traditional Band-Aid—he told me a drunk had knocked them off his face the night before—patched up the cuts to my hands, fed me sips of water and gently sponged me clean of grit, soot and scorched crumbs of slate. I sat there in a daze, gazing upwards through the skylight at dawn creeping through the sky, dissolving the stars and diluting the black to a pale, peaceful luminous blue.

  The curtains around my cubicle were pulled back, but instead of the strung-out skinny doctor who’d checked me out earlier, Susan appeared, in a flimsy hospital gown that left little to the imagination. It seemed incongruous to get steamed up at the sight of a girl so soon after we were nearly barbecued, but I’d heard it was a common reaction to near-death experiences. It seemed to be true in my case, and hers, because she slid her arms around my neck and her tongue into my mouth almost before the nurse had time to make a retreat. My arms went round her slim, firm waist, and I pressed her body against mine, and a shudder of desire ran back and forward through both of us like an electric shock. She pulled away and looked into my eyes. I never know which eye to look in when a girl does that to me.

  “Thank you, Finn,” she said.

  “No. Thank you,” I said. “For an unforgettable evening.”

  “Will you do me a favour?” she said.

  “Right now, anything.”

  “Will you stop chasing after Nicky?”

  I hesitated, not sure I’d heard her right.

  “You know that fire can’t have been a coincidence. Nicky obviously found out something she shouldn’t—maybe about that policeman—and she ran. She’s not a coward, and she’s not stupid, but she left, and she doesn’t want to be found.” She grabbed my face with her hands. “Please, let her go, forget about her. You’ll get your compensation, you’ll get your life back. Keep asking all these questions—I’m scared you’ll lose everything.”

  She kissed me, and the electricity ran tingling through my body, and it went on and on, and I let it. When she pulled away her eyes were full of tears.

  “Susie, I can’t,” I said. “Nicky was a friend of mine, and someone hurt her, and I’m not going to let that go. I have to know who did it—maybe it was Lovegrove, maybe it wasn’t—and I have to know why. Nobody else is going to try, so … I’m sorry.”

  Her face showed a tumult of emotions—anger, exasperation, fear, and something else that I thought might be jealousy. And I could think of no way to persuade her to feel otherwise, so I didn’t try.

  “I’m going to get dressed,” she said, turning to leave.

  “I’ll see you later,” I said.

  “No, Finn, you won’t.” With a bitter glance over her shoulder she pushed through the curtains and disappeared.

  You rarely see burned-out buildings in London, so you don’t realize how much mess a fire makes, or how that mess is made a million times worse by the oceans of water firefighters pump onto it. My home and my business was now a blackened shell, and I could see the sky through the charred timbers of the roof where Susie and I had felt so safe a few hours earlier. Long tongues of grime licked upwards from every window opening, and the empty frames were charcoal. Through them you could see the ground floor where my gym equipment was steaming gently—a scorched, worthless mess of metal tangled up with blackened sofa springs and flaps of wet leather. Burned plaster had been washed over the pavement into the gutter and across the road. It crunched underfoot, and it stank, with an acrid odour of rot that went right up my nose like a rusty bedspring.

  The road nearest the gym had been closed, and red and white plastic tape cordoned it off from pedestrians. The Saturday morning traffic was beginning to build up, drivers parping their horns and saluting each other with single fingers as they jostled for precedence. They barely threw a second glance at the wrecked building where I and Susan had nearly burned alive.

  “Sorry, mate, you can’t go through there,” said a lanky red-haired firefighter, as I ducked under the cordon tape. He was wearing one of those dusky pink fire-resistant overalls and carrying his helmet under his arm. I wondered if male firefighters miss the huge yellow helmets and black woolly coats they used to wear. Surely they couldn’t pull the same number of groupies wearing gear that made them look like glorified plumbers?

  “I lived here,” I said. “Top floor.”

  “Oh, that was you?” he said. “How’s the girlfriend?”

  “Not impressed.”

  “She should be. You’re both bloody lucky to be alive.”

  “Don’t think it was luck,” I said. “I think it was you guys.”

  “You’re welcome. Made a change anyway—we haven’t had a good blow-up in weeks.”

  “Can I take a look?”

  “Long as you don’t get too close. There’s not much to salvage, if that’s what you’re after. Sorry.”

  Someone called his name and he turned away. As I crunched over the muck and cinders that littered the tarmac, the other firefighters ignored me and carried on rolling up their hoses and sweeping the crumbs of wreckage into soggy black piles. Even now I could see wisps of smoke and feel the heat from the embers through the soles of my trainers, and I suddenly realized that I too could have been inside that incinerator, a charred heap of bones and teeth mixed in with all that tortured metal and damp ash.

  Of the four tenders I had seen hosing down the inferno when t
he ambulance took me and Susan away there were only two left, and now one of them was revving up its engine. I watched it move off with a quick ear-piercing burst of siren to cut a hole in the traffic. Nearby, a chunky four-wheel drive vehicle was parked half on the curb, splashed with the hi-viz red livery of the fire brigade, with some writing on the side. I didn’t bother to read it—I guessed it was the officer whose job it was to establish the cause of the fire. In fact, I could see him now, stooping at what used to be my doorway and taking photographs with a standard digital camera. On the tarmac behind him was another heap of rubble, and something glinted in it, something that didn’t look as if it had belonged either in my gym or in the furniture store. I picked it up and peered at it: it was a circle of gold wire with a few purple beads on it. I scraped at them with a thumbnail.

  “Could you keep your distance please—this building’s not safe.” The fire officer had turned from the door and noticed me. I slipped the wire into my pocket. “In fact you should be on the other side of the tape, sir.”

  “I used to live here,” I said.

  “I’m sorry about that, but you will have to retire to a safe distance.” He was short and stout with neatly clipped hair, and I guessed he spoke that way because instead of a personality he had a health and safety manual. What was he like at home? I wondered. Did he disinfect his lips after kissing his kids?

  “Have you found out what caused it yet?”

  “It’s far too early to reach any conclusions, sir. Now if you don’t mind—”

  Maybe I could have been a fire safety officer, because I had already reached a preliminary conclusion using standard issue equipment—namely my nose. Even now, hours after the fire, I could smell the sharp chemical tang of petrol. The front doors that had opened onto the staircase were bulging and sagging on their hinges, but they were still tightly shut. They seemed almost fused into the doorframe and the threshold. The fire safety officer had opened his arms to shoo me away like I was a stray dog trying to steal his sandwiches.

  “I think someone was trying to kill me,” I said.

  “Sorry, sir, we need to keep this area clear. I can’t discuss any of my findings at this stage.”

  “That’s why they screwed the doors shut, so I wouldn’t be able to get out,” I said. That shut him up, and I knew my guess had been right. The same trick had been used by whoever had torched the old pub where Alan Leslie had taken shelter with his boyfriend. I could have ended up like one of them—scarred for life, or mixed with landfill.

  “Sir,” insisted the fire officer. “If you don’t clear the area I’ll have to—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I got it,” I said. I walked away with my hands in my pockets, fingering that bent beaded piece of wire. I remembered now where I’d seen it before, but I wasn’t about to tell that pompous jerk of a fire safety officer about it—not just yet.

  This had nothing to do with Detective Sergeant Lovegrove.

  As I crossed the road and headed east towards the Tube station I checked my phone. Fourteen per cent charge left. All my phone chargers were melted lumps of clag now, of course, at the bottom of a smouldering brick pit. And suddenly I realized everything else was in there too: my laptop, my paperwork, my family photos … and Nicky’s copied files. All of it had gone for ever, leaving me just the clothes I stood up in. Even the tired anorak I was wearing had been donated to me by the hospital—I hadn’t wanted to know where they’d got it from. And only now, looking back at the gaunt blackened shell of the place where I’d lived, did it occur to me to wonder where I would sleep that night.

  But as my dad would have said, look on the bright side. I still had my mobile, and all the information on it. I picked a number from my contacts, and pressed “dial.”

  “Zoe, hi,” I said. “Yeah, I know how early it is. How are you getting on with that phone?”

  nine

  It had started raining by the time I got to Bisham’s house, and water was running down its front wall where the guttering had fallen away. I jogged up to the door and huddled in the shallow porch. That’s what it meant to be homeless, I saw now; if I got soaked or filthy, I’d have nowhere to dry off and no clean clothes to change into. But that mattered less to me at that moment than getting the truth out of that demented Bisham.

  When she opened her front door her face registered plenty of annoyance but not a trace of fear or guilt. Then again, anyone nuts enough to murder by arson wouldn’t react like a normal human being. My own face must have registered plenty of anger, because she stepped back to slam the door, only to have it bounce off my foot as I stepped inside the hall. Ever helpful, I took hold of the door and slammed it for her.

  “Get out of my house,” she said.

  “I think this belongs to you,” I said. I held up the bent golden wire with the scorched purple beads. Where my thumbnail had cut into them they gleamed blue, the same shade as the beads she’d been wearing last time I called. Bisham looked confused and tried to snatch the earring from me, but I pulled my hand away. “I found it near the front door of my home,” I said. “Or what’s left of my home. Next time you torch a place, don’t wear clip-on earrings.”

  “What?” she said. “Piss off!” She actually managed to sound indignant.

  “Is that what Nicky found out?” I said. “That you burned that pub down and killed that squatter, and made it look like your husband did it?”

  “You’re talking bull!” she spat.

  “Who did you send to scare Nicky into leaving,” I said, “when those obscene texts and the sick tweets and the threatening emails didn’t work? Do you have someone on the company payroll for jobs like that?”

  Cornered now, Bisham came back at me, snapping in my face like a rabid dog. “I said, piss off! I never sent her any texts or twitters or whatever the hell it is you’re talking about—”

  “I had a friend check, an IT expert,” I said. “The IP address of the sender resolves to this house—”

  “The IP what?” For the first time she seemed rattled.

  “The address of your Internet connection,” I said. “It leads right back to you, just like this earring does.”

  “How did you get hold of that?” Bisham came back. “That was a present from my—”

  Abruptly she clamped her mouth shut, and stared at me. I could see calculation cross her face, as if she was working out whether to placate me or get rid of me or try to bribe me somehow. That was when I knew I had her wrong. In the kitchen a glint of blue light from the wireless camera caught my eye, and from outside I heard the faint bong of a footstep on a metal staircase. I turned and bolted back out the front door.

  Bisham’s son had scurried unseen down an ancient fire escape at the back of the house, but he wasn’t headed for the front gate—he was running for a corner of the muddy overgrown garden. I guessed there was a hole in the fence among the bushes, a way out his mother didn’t know about, but he never made it that far, because the podgy little bastard couldn’t run to save his life. He had barely reached the hedge when I brought him down hard, flat on his face into the rotting leaves and chipped bark. He yelped and screamed incoherently as I dragged him upright and hopped him, with his arm halfway up his back, towards his mother’s house.

  Joan Bisham stood white-faced and shaking with shock in her disgusting kitchen, while Gabe Bisham sat at the table sulking. He seemed insulted that he’d been caught by someone he considered a moron, but then he probably considered everyone he knew a moron, compared to him. Underneath his bratty screw-you defiance was a smugness, like no one would ever believe he was guilty. Maybe he was right—if he hadn’t tried to run I’d never have guessed that this pasty, obese slob was a killer.

  It was clear his mother had no idea how her son liked to spend his spare time, but I did—I’d read the threats and insults he’d sent to Nicky, and to his mother. The sewers of the Internet were full of paranoid hate-spewing wankers, and Gabriel Bisham was one of them.

  “Where’s my blue earrings, Gabe?” His
mother wanted to sound calm but her voice was stretched tight as a drum skin ready to split. “The clip-on pair you bought me for my last birthday. Gold with blue beads.”

  “Uhuhuh,” said Gabe, shrugging. I recognized the teenage term for “I dunno.” I’d used it myself on my dad when I didn’t want to talk, and now I knew why it had always infuriated him.

  “I’ve been all through my jewellery twice: they’re not there. I was wearing them the other day.” She was appealing to her son for any explanation less awful than the truth.

  “He’s hidden the other one,” I said. “It would have turned up when the police came to search this place.” I took the twisted golden wire from my pocket and tossed it onto the table. “This one still has your DNA on it, and that would have been all they needed to charge you with arson and murder.”

  Gabe looked at me with a sneer. “Why would the police even search this house?” He was trying to snarl but it came out like a whine.

  “Because you’d tip them off,” I said. “With an anonymous message. You’re good at those, but not that good. What do they call guys like you, copying hackers’ tricks off the Internet? Oh yeah—script kiddies.”

  “Fuck off,” snarled Gabe. Now we were getting closer to the real him.