by Tammy Cohen
Still, I strained to get free.
‘Look!’ Claudia shouted.
A figure was materializing from the smoke-filled doorway. At first it was just a dark shape but, as I watched, with every single one of my muscles knotted, it slowly revealed itself to be Frances, her face blackened, her normally smooth hair standing up in a halo of singed frizz around her head.
My eyes moved past her to the doorway, waiting for the second figure to follow, but nothing else moved.
‘Where is she?’
Frances was bent double and coughing, her shoulders heaving, but her head shot up at the sound of my voice just inches away.
‘Tessa? I’m so sorry. I tried. I really tried.’
The words were deep rasps that tore from somewhere raw in her throat. Her face was a mask of horror, her eyes wide with shock as she caught sight of Claudia behind me.
But even before Frances had finished speaking I was moving towards the doorway.
I heard Claudia’s voice shouting for me to stop and someone put their hand on my sleeve trying to pull me back, but I shrugged them off. All I could see was that awful black, gaping mouth of a doorway through which, somewhere inside, my daughter waited for me.
Just before I plunged inside I heard Frances’s distinctive rasp cut through the air behind me. ‘Keep going straight, Tessa. All the way ahead.’ At the same time, someone thrust something at me – a wet towel – which I snatched without thinking.
The hallway was thick with smoke and I instinctively ducked low to the ground, holding the towel over my head. I could just make out the bottom of the staircase, and I crawled up on my hands and knees with the towel draped over me. The noise of the smoke alarm as I ascended was deafening.
Adrenaline was an electric force running through me, powering me into action. My brain, as if aware that the instinct for self-preservation would override everything else if left unchecked, seemed to have switched itself off, so I was merely a collection of limbs and muscles acting without volition.
At the top of the stairs, by another open doorway, which I assumed to be the front door to Frances’s flat, I hesitated and fumbled in my pocket for my phone. The screensaver came up and I was able to click on the flashlight icon. The beam didn’t extend far into the black smoke, but it was enough to see a few feet ahead along what looked to be a long corridor.
By this time I could feel the intense heat of the fire and, even with the towel pressed to my face, the acrid smell of smoke was getting into my nose and throat. I was fighting the urge to cough all the time. Further up ahead, through the black smoke I could make out a flickering sliver of orange at floor level.
Ahead.
Wasn’t that exactly where Frances had told me I’d find Em?
My phone was growing hot and I turned it off. I knew on some deep, primordial level that if I stayed where I was I would never get moving again, so I forced myself forward, crawling along the corridor, my breathing fast and shallow.
The smoke alarm stopped abruptly, leaving a thick, ominous silence. I unwrapped the towel from my face to shout Em’s name and a wall of heat hit me. As I took in air to shout again, smoke burned the back of my mouth. A spasm of coughing stripped my throat raw and I turned my head to the side to be sick.
Again I forced myself forward through the black smoke in the direction of the orange strip, until I was stopped in my tracks by a sharp, shooting flare of pain in my temple. When I felt around I realized it had been caused by the corner of a low table or bench.
As I edged around it, I could feel blood trickling down my forehead, but I pressed on. By now I was struggling to breathe and had lost all sense of direction. All I knew was that I needed to keep going straight ahead towards that orange glow, which, it occurred to me now, must be the fire blazing behind a closed door.
If Em was in there, she had no chance.
Yet still I went on. I knew now that I’d probably die in here. I could feel the smoke scalding my lungs, making breathing increasingly painful. My eyes were streaming and my eyeballs felt as if they were burning. But I couldn’t, wouldn’t, leave there without my daughter.
I crawled on, but more slowly now. Realizing it was all but impossible. I remembered the heart-wrenching accounts of survivors of the Grenfell tragedy, how people had talked about door handles scalding their palms. And even if I managed to open the door, surely the flames would burst out and engulf me in seconds.
My breathing had changed now, becoming noisy and laboured, and it felt as if everything was closing down, like my body was a dark building in which all the lights were being extinguished one by one.
All of a sudden my fingers encountered something. I felt around uncertainly, and then my heart was suddenly pounding inside me, reminding me I was still alive.
It was a foot. I was holding Em’s foot.
You are staring at me, your eyes wide in your smoke-blackened face.
This wasn’t part of your fantasy plan. I see it instantly. You have not considered that your victims might find each other. Share stories. Swap notes. Find the cracks in your lies through which the truth trickles out.
Everything is about external validation for you. You are scared that we will make you confront what lies inside yourself.
Your neighbour has draped a blanket around your shoulders and is fussing over you, but you keep sneaking looks at me.
‘Claudia,’ you say at one point, in a voice like scraped rust, struggling to be heard over the screaming of the smoke alarm. ‘I really tried to reach her.’
You are in shock, I can see it. You know you have gone too far.
For a moment I almost feel sorry for you.
Almost.
Then I remember Matt and how he’d said to me once, ‘All my life I’ve felt I was waiting for something, and now I know I was waiting for you.’ And I remember Henry’s face at the funeral. Tear-stained and tired and asking for Daddy.
I look up at the house, where the black smoke billows, and I think of Tessa voluntarily plunging in there to save her daughter.
Love is strong, I think to myself. Love is the strongest. And you will never know that. Although you will always suspect it, which is what will keep you searching for it.
I know now that, whatever happens today, I am done with running. Done with hiding.
Love is strong and you will not win.
46
Heart hammering in the pitch darkness, I followed the shape of Em’s body that I knew so well, my hands travelling up her leg to her chest, leaning my head close to her ribs, hope exploding inside me when I heard a faint heartbeat. I shook her shoulders.
No response.
Em appeared to be lying in a doorway with her legs extending into the corridor, which is where I’d stumbled on her.
I tried dragging her by the feet, but her torso got caught on the corner of the door.
I raised myself up, only to be hit by a wall of heat. The temptation to drop back down again was overwhelming, but I forced myself to stay semi-upright and squeeze through the doorway so that I could lift Em by the arms into a sitting position and manhandle her around the doorframe and into the corridor.
The heat from the door at the end was now unbearable, and I understood on some instinctive level that the flames would burn through at any moment.
I manoeuvred Em so that I was crouching behind her with my hands under her arms and started dragging her backwards. The blackness was absolute and I couldn’t get my bearings, and breathing was now like scraping knives across my throat and chest.
Light-headed from lack of oxygen and coughing more or less constantly, I found a doorway that I thought must be the door to the flat and was just about to go in when I remembered the table I’d bashed into in the corridor on my way in. Had I passed that yet?
Blindly, I carried on moving backwards, dragging Em along with me until I hit the edge of the table. Squeezing clumsily past it, I felt myself growing weaker, the hope and adrenaline that had borne me this far slipping away.<
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I slowed to a standstill, fighting for breath.
I wasn’t going to make it. It was too hard. I was simply too weak.
That’s when I heard it. A low moan.
Em. My daughter. My baby. She was still alive.
The sound gave me a burst of new energy, as if a battery that had been run down almost to nothing was put back on to charge.
I started up again, shuffling backwards along the corridor, dragging Em with me, no longer conscious of direction or time or anything except the need to keep going. I no longer registered the coughing or the searing pain in my throat. All I knew was that I was trapped in a dark tunnel of pressure from which I could never escape.
And then I was aware of a change in the density of the air, a cooler pocket that my damaged lungs tried to reach towards. I took a big step back and then I was falling. The walls came to meet me in the blackness. Em, was the thought that filled my head, though I don’t think I managed to say her name out loud. I hit my arm on a hard surface, then my head.
And after that there was nothing.
47
‘I’m very sorry. I know you were hoping for different news.’
Detective Byrne looked genuinely regretful at what he had just told me, and I knew I should put on a brave face for his sake, but I couldn’t hide the visceral impact of his words.
‘I was expecting it,’ I said, when I was able to speak. ‘But still I hoped …’
I didn’t need to finish. We both knew what I had hoped.
‘The fire investigation service has ruled that the blaze started accidentally, so there are no charges for Miss Gates to answer.’
It was what Frances had claimed from the beginning. She had lit a scented candle on top of a low bookcase in the living room where she and Em were sitting. She hadn’t given a second thought, she’d said, to the canvas print on the wall above the bookcase. Nor had she had any idea that leaving the spent match lying across the top of the candle would act as an accelerant to the flame. She’d only wanted to make the room nice for her visitor, she’d said.
And there’d definitely been no sign of fire when she’d nipped out to get milk.
Em had confirmed it. My girl who couldn’t lie, speaking in a painful croak from her hospital bed.
Em had been sitting on the sofa leafing through a magazine, with the bookshelf behind her on the back wall near the door to the corridor. Frances had been playing music loudly through her iPhone speakers, so Em didn’t hear the initial crackles of flame. At first the scent from the candle was so strong it had masked the smell of the canvas burning and setting fire to the wooden clothes horse leaning up against the wall. By the time the smoke alarm sounded and Em looked up, the air behind her was thick with smoke and the sofa arm was on fire.
‘Why did you close the door to the living room when you went out for milk?’ the police had asked Frances, after ascertaining that the only smoke alarm in the flat was in the corridor from which all the other rooms led off. If the door had been open, the alarm would have sensed smoke much sooner.
‘I’ve always done it,’ she’d said. That eager look she had. So keen to help. ‘To keep the heat from escaping in winter when the radiators are on. It was second nature.’
When Em had jumped to her feet, she’d felt light-headed and sick from the smoke she hadn’t been aware she was inhaling. By this time, the entire back of the room was ablaze and the air was dense and black and acrid.
Her first thought had been to escape through the window on the other side of the room, but by the time she reached it the fire had taken hold of the wooden shutters and the whole frame was burning.
So instead she’d grabbed a heavy woollen throw off the sofa and wrapped it around herself, covering up her thin cotton T-shirt and dived through the flames, grabbing for the door handle, the red-hot metal melting the top layers of skin on the palms of her hands – an injury for which she was still receiving treatment even now.
As the black smoke poured out into the corridor, she’d panicked and pulled the door shut behind her in an attempt to stop the fire spreading, plunging her instantly into total darkness. By now she was struggling to breathe and totally disoriented. She tried to feel her way along the wall, but her hands were burnt and painful. Stumbling upon the doorway to the kitchen, she became convinced it was the door to the outside, and by the time she realized her mistake she was too weak to double back, which is when she must have passed out.
‘And Claudia?’ I said now to the policeman who’d gone out of his way to come around in person to update me on the case. I no longer cared how desperate I sounded. ‘The nude photos. Surely that’s enough proof that Frances mounted a deliberate campaign of harassment against Claudia’s husband?’
Detective Byrne glanced down as if embarrassed. I noticed the patch of psoriasis on his wrist was inflamed and weeping, as if he’d recently given in to the urge to scratch.
‘The photos no longer exist. And even if they did, I’m not sure what law Miss Gates would have broken by sending them.’
It was the same story with the things Dean Baverstock had told me about how Frances always seemed to be conveniently around in a crisis, and with the tissue of lies she’d spun me about caring for her ill mother. Strange behaviour, to be sure; reprehensible, even. But not criminal. And as for what I suspected had happened to my father, well, that was speculation and nothing more. My mother wasn’t capable of providing evidence and the inquest had ruled his death a deliberate overdose. There was no evidence that a crime had taken place, let alone that friendly, eager-to-help Frances Gates who’d never met either of my parents might have had anything to do with it.
Even the anonymous letter that had been sent to Phil had revealed no further clues, a cursory dusting of the envelope producing just one full fingerprint, which was found to belong to Phil himself.
‘I know you don’t want to hear this, Mrs Hopwood,’ Detective Byrne continued now, ‘but we can’t ignore the fact that Frances Gates went back into the building to rescue your daughter and sustained nasty burns to her own arms in the attempt.’
‘But don’t you see, that’s exactly what she does?’ I said, exasperation making my voice higher than normal. ‘She fixates on people and creates dramas so that she can sweep in and save the day. She probably placed the candle under the canvas deliberately and waited until it was just about to catch fire before making an excuse to leave. Em wouldn’t have noticed. She had her back to it and the music was on.’
‘Why would Ms Gates want to set fire to her own flat?’
‘Maybe she didn’t expect it to spread so quickly. Maybe she thought just the canvas would burn and she’d go charging back in to put it out and win Em’s eternal gratitude – and mine – except it got out of hand.’
Detective Byrne fixed me with his sad brown eyes.
‘I hope you’re not going to accuse her of somehow engineering the attack on your daughter too?’
I sighed then. Defeated. ‘No, of course not. That was purely opportunistic.’
‘Right place, right time?’
‘Wrong person,’ I added ruefully.
The man who’d attacked Em had been caught. He’d tried to do the same thing to another girl just a couple of miles away in Tottenham and two men who happened to be driving past had stopped and wrestled him to the ground until the police arrived.
He wasn’t Stephens.
He didn’t even look that much like Stephens. The cleft in his chin was far less pronounced, and his eyes were brown, not green. All he had was a jacket that looked similar and the kind of flashy ring lots of men wear. He hadn’t killed anyone, it turned out, though he had been in prison for common assault. An earlier charge of possession of a firearm with intent to cause violence had been dropped on a technicality. There are a lot of men like him walking the streets. People with histories that would keep you awake at night if only you knew.
And Number Eight wasn’t Stephens either. Just a random bloke who’d volunteered to be
part of the police database.
Stephens had made another complaint in the end. The message I’d sent when I thought he was Rosie’s new boyfriend, begging him not to hurt my daughter, had freaked him out. The police had interviewed me and half-heartedly attempted to make a case that I had a vendetta against him. They wanted me to admit that I’d planted the seed in Em’s head after the ID parade that Number Eight was definitely her attacker and had made her so paranoid that he lived nearby that she’d seized on the first local guy she saw who looked anything like the man in the police video. But they hadn’t pursued it. Stephens’s police record spoke for itself. Besides, I think the blisters on my arms put them off.
But I’d thought about it a lot since then. How quick I’d been to go along with it all, transmuting the flimsiest of supporting evidence – the w-shaped chin, the jacket with the white logo, Frances’s own unequivocal identification – into incontrovertible proof.
Sometimes I wondered if I’d been so desperate to make amends for the car crash with Rosie, and the marriage break-up and not being there for Em when she’d needed me, that I’d invented a scenario in which I would be the one to protect and save my children.
Perhaps Frances and I weren’t so different after all.
Even all those weeks later, I found it hard to separate what had been Frances and what was Stephens. Logically, I knew that the sinister photograph of the front of my house with Dotty framed in the window was Frances’s doing, and the malicious note Phil received calling me an unfit mother (oh, how well she knew what buttons to press), but still my mind persisted in clinging to that other, more familiar narrative, where Stephens was the bogeyman I needed to keep my children safe from. It made things so much simpler and less frightening.
I’d thought about contacting him. Stephens. To apologize.
Then I’d remembered the man who’d died because he couldn’t control his temper and the threatening messages he’d sent: I won’t forget.
I’d have liked to see his grandmother again, though. Just to explain.