Trial by Fire (29 page)

Alarm became a premonition of fear, turning her back to the door of the shed. She ran the few steps forward, shouting, `William, William, it's all right.' Bernadette running with her, both guilty for momentary forgetfulness of his presence, victim of them all. As she reached the door, there was an internal explosion like the long-delayed lighting of the gas in an oven.

She felt Bailey yank her back with enormous force, sending her sprawling to the ground while Bernadette ran on. Not a summer house for a child. A tinderbox.

From the distance, the flames sprang into the air like a beacon. Only the very nearest heard the thin shriek of sublime pain, brief and lost in the crackling of the wood.

END PIECE

The rain was buffeting the windows. Brown leaves from the station's single tree were plastered to the glass by the wind. Dead, they looked, dead and getting deader, pathetic.

Bowles did not want to move, obscurely comforted by the sight and sound of autumn desolation outside the warmth of the police station canteen. He was still in a state of half-mourning, half-shock. Come off it, his wife had said, you've seen worse. No, he told her, I haven't, not really; nothing like that. Or heard worse.

He had recognized in Bailey a condition similar to his own, liked him better for it, both of them suffering a kind of moving tension, a sort of sleepwalking, where all sights, all sounds, were shoved into the background by the memory of a single scream. Shock, the doctor told him, you'll recover, but he knew neither his life nor his perceptions could ever be quite the same.

He wished he had been a drinker like the boy's parents, and had fallen into the habit of watching his own children with obsessive protectiveness, could not stop hugging them, hated letting them out of his sight, patted them and kissed them, was easily moved to tears. They were irritated by all the anxiety in his attention. PC Bowles dragged his eyes back to his companion. She had not been invited, but he had been too sluggish to object.

Òf course, I always thought it was strange,' said Amanda Scott. À bit too neat, you know. But if sir thought so, too, he never said. At least no one's making any formal complaints. Well, they couldn't, could they? Nothing we could do. Not about the boy or anything. How was I to know?'

He could not imagine where she found the energy to chat. It was out of character for her to sit with uniformed plods like himself, failing to perceive the indifference in his eyes or to recognize it for what it was — contempt. His blithe approval of Detective Scott had arisen less from any kind of enchantment than from admiration, and the same guileless glance was currently cold. She was just another tart after all. Out with the rich widower, was she?

Quicker to spot pickings than a magpie. Never a word of pity in her ten-minute monologue, not a thing on the death, the boy, the fires, the pity of it. What price a career like his or hers without pity? What point in doing it? Bowles looked at the scum on his tea, crinkling the brown surface as he heard the desperately casual words of a woman with no one else to listen, speaking to him only by default, decided pity was not appropriate here. She didn't deserve it.

You might have tried courting Blundell when he was one kind of victim; bet you've abandoned him now. Are you worried about complaints? I hope they hang you. He pushed back his chair and left without a word. She sat where she was, surrounded by an ocean of empty seats. On her lap, she scrunched up the piece of paper informing her with crude politeness of her transfer back to the streets from which she came.

Bailey drove back from the coroner's office full of messages. Yes, the parents may bury the body, after Bailey's own punishment of identifying the remains, the only pain he was allowed to spare the parents. Whatever their failures, neither Featherstone deserved to see the curled and black, utterly obscene remains of a son shrunk into a charred foetus. Helen had offered to go with him to the coroner's; he had refused, wondered if that had been kind.

Perhaps he was not the only one who needed to exorcise this crushing burden of guilt.

He had never in his eventful life felt so critical a sense of failure, been haunted with such dreams. He had watched inquests and postmortems, seen physical evidence of barbarism and betrayal, been saddened, sickened, and angered, but in this instance alone, he felt himself the betrayer. He sat in the car outside Branston waiting at the same junction for more than one paralysed minute. The car behind hooted; he moved towards the spread of new houses, a contrast to the shabby old East End office of the coroner. Ì like this old place,' the coroner's officer had said. Bailey had agreed.

I hate newness for its own sake, he thought. I loathe the deception hidden in new things, all that promise that they will alter the state of the same old humanity by making people happier or even nicer. At least in the comparative poverty of his childhood the neighbours had nothing material to distract them from what their children and those next door were doing. Might have been happier with a little more, no telling, but they would certainly have been less caring and far less observant. Here in the new houses there had been no one looking.

As he drove down Branston High Street, the windows of Invaders Court blinked at him like a series of blind eyes. He had failed to watch like a parent, failed to act and to analyse, earned himself a lifetime's nightmares, but the introspection and the blame would have to find a place alongside all the rest. He could not afford to go to pieces, was too sinewy for that, too practical, but still soft enough to be racked from top to toe with pity and self-recrimination.

He thought of Helen, less proofed against sorrow than he, and almost regretted his thick skin. A year of progressive failure for both of them, and if he had not been dissolved by it, he was beyond making decisions concerning their future. Except for one. She must lead him through the rest and he would follow humbly. Only do not lose me, Helen, not now, not in the future. Do not lose me. We were wrong to come here. Branston's new life has stunted our growth, impoverished my vision, eclipsed your career with this horror at the end.

That cannot be altered: the boy is dead; you have finished weeping for the parents who would not or could not weep and we need a wider compass, greater anonymity for our lives.

We cannot live as others try and fail to do. You must accept me for the deficiency I am — not perfect, neither great nor good, guilty in part for this. I am an embarrassment here, ripe for transfer back to the dirty depths of London, out of the way. Come with me. Before I do any more damage. Poor boy, poor little bastard. I must try to do better with your kind.

He shifted gears, checked his mirror for the impatient one behind, acutely conscious of his hands moving through every movement, his own strength influencing these minor events, progress towards no known goal but the next destination. There was no other way to conduct life. The shadow of William Featherstone which had wrapped itself around him lifted slightly.

There was a duty to live; he had made too many mistakes to be overwhelmed now. He noticed the sun was shining wet on the windscreen, raindrops pushed to the edge, glimmering like William's jewels.

`Where now?' asked Redwood. 'Where now? The law's an ass.' He looked at Helen, blaming her for the inadequacies he had in mind, holding her half responsible for his own predicament and the law's powerlessness. 'We've already arraigned Antony Sumner, but we'll offer no evidence, and discontinue the case against him. He wasn't even grateful.'

`Should he be?' Helen said. 'He's been in jail for nearly three months.' One high summer of life gone as well as one crucial love affair reduced to ashes, a reputation ruined for ever. For what should he be grateful? She was silent.

Ànd the rest,' Redwood continued. 'One juvenile psychopath silent as the grave, apart from insisting that her own confessions on paper, delivered without caution, of course, were simply the stuff of fantasy.'

`The possession of her mother's gold was not fantasy.

Enough fact to charge murder.'

`Yes, and we will, but without William Featherstone, who is too dead to deflect the accusations her inventive mind will shovel in the direction of his memory. We have no more than a forty per cent chance of getting a conviction. Counsel says less than that. Without him we can't even prove he didn't start all those fires. She did, to discredit him if ever he should talk, tell someone about the body, lead everyone to her. But I can't charge her with arson.'

Ànd her father?'

Àh. Counsel also says no to a charge of harbouring an offender. Besides, we don't know if he actually did so. He simply knew darling child had the gold, and he chose to ignore the implications. He saw the jewellery in her pocket the day after the murder, he told Bailey, knew she had it. It strikes me that both of them, father and daughter, preferred Mama to be dead. He would have seen the murder as a massive economy drive, but she committed it.'

And then you and I and all of us fell down while the obvious flowed over us. We were outwitted by a child who delivered the unkindest cut of all. Redwood had dissociated blame and himself from Amanda Scott, but like her, he ignored the second tragedy in deference to the prospects of criticism, recrimination, blame, extrication, and getting a conviction. William had robbed him of that chance. I am going mad, Helen thought. Is it only Bailey and I who feel William to be the only loss, the only innocent, killed by the wilful blindess of us all.

You could not blame such a clumsy hand as his own. You don't cure by convicting his assassin. Without our intervention he might have lived, under the shade of what dominance and how poor the quality of life does not matter; it is still life lost.

But if her own capacity for guilt was endless, Redwood's was nonexistent. Like the law. She should have known better by now, but because of the guilt, could not criticize either.

She had no right.

`We'll try to avoid using you as a witness.'

`Thank you. I don't see how you can avoid it, but no doubt you'll try. You know I'm transferring back to London?'

`Yes.' He had the grace not to pretend regrets, looked at her with respect, even a tinge of affection. 'I'm sorry. When do you go?'

`Tomorrow if I could. More likely a week or two.'

Ì should stick to road traffic cases if I were you, when you go back,' he said with heavy sympathy. 'Less traumatic.'

`No, ' said Helen, surprised into indignation. 'I've learned plenty.' In the saying of it, she recognized her first positive thought in more than three weeks.

Oh, Bailey mine, what do I do with you now? The cloudburst that had blackened the sky and drenched the ground lifted before brilliant sunlight shimmering on the Tarmacadam of the carpark. The force of the rain had cleansed her car of weeks of sticky dust. Clean enough for a funeral. Go home, Featherstones. Go back to the city where you might at least find like kind. They were bound to attend the last rites, surely they must, although Bernadette had lately taken to the same liquid remedies as her husband and John Blundell, all of them in search of oblivion. Why live? Why open your eyes at all? Because then you can see, and like the force of this sudden sunlight on her own tired eyes, it hurt.

As she started the car, she thought that of all the omnipresent nightmares which had disturbed her sleep in the days and weeks preceding this, there were none as compelling and selfish as the one featuring Bailey running towards her in pursuit of a criminal, pushing her aside in the process, sublimely indifferent to her presence, so seized was he with the urgency of the moment, acting as if she had never existed.

Do not lose me now, Bailey. We have eyes, both of us, a duty to live and do better, cannot afford our superior overview of the world: look at how blind we are. We should not have come here; this place does not suit us. Living under one roof may not suit us; we are both too secretive.

I was so angry with you, so full of blame, keeping my mouth shut until I realized that was unfair. And then I look around and see that, whatever your failings, you are so much finer than the rest. And if I do not completely understand your methods, the workings of your soul, if I am sometimes alienated by your tunnel vision, the hard realism of your policeman's psyche, which sometimes investigates what it needs and nothing more, unable to afford curiosity, I still understand you more completely than anyone else, however incomplete the knowledge, and there is a sort of privilege in that.

As you in your way almost accept me, even admire me. Careless of me sometimes, refusing to share, ignorant of me often enough to wound and enrage me, but still knowing me better than any other living soul. I am less of a stranger with you than with anyone else. I do not want to live without that. You are waiting for me to speak. I have marshalled my packing cases, prepared my own home for my return, but I shall not leave you now.

What was wrong with the indecisions before? Why did we come here? Why were we subject to the universal belief that life is always capable of that kind of improvement? You have injected too many poisons into my conscience, Superintendent Bailey. You make me feel the business of the law is futile, while I know it is not. But it has to be done by someone well equipped, not someone who is tempted to give up.

Do you know something? I do not feel as if I love you at the moment, but I know I do.

There are times when I have to say it to feel it.

She pushed open the door to number fifteen Invaders Court, looked at the automated kitchen, imagined with relief her life packed into boxes. On the draining board, glittering like a warning, lay one of William's bracelets. There was a lump of cheese and half a loaf, Bailey's contribution to an evening meal, hopeful rather than skilled.

Helen put down her files and her shopping, heard his footsteps upstairs.

She would save the next William. Bailey would be more careful, grow eyes in the back of his head. Listen sometimes. One of these days she would grow into an interfering old bitch.

`Come on, Bailey,' she said out loud. 'We can do better than this.'