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For all Hannah’s stubborn independence, Herbert sometimes had to remind himself that she, barely out of her teens, had already been through several lifetimes’ worth of grief and trauma.

Herbert looked around the room.

Furniture was everywhere, sofas overturned and tables upended. Hannah was in the far corner, pressed hard up against the wall. The neighbor was lying by the splintered remains of the low table, and now he, too, was stirring groggily.

The flat was on fire, and they had to get out.

Fire was a living thing, and Herbert knew that it hunted. Never content to burn itself out, it was forever seeking its next target, its next source of fuel and new life.

It had already climbed high enough on the curtains to leap like an acrobat across to a picture frame, and
from there to a bookshelf; and from every beachhead it had made came two more, until it was propagating itself like the code Herbert had deciphered the day before, burning too fast and wide and furious to contain.

Herbert got to his feet, staggered slightly as his head swam in protest, went over to Hannah, and pulled her upright.

“Herbert thank God you alive I no find you help get me out of here,” she yelled.

Her face was smeared in blood, and her breath came in scraping rasps.

She had come around earlier than they had and had pushed herself upright, both of which had led to her inhaling substantial amounts of smoke. Herbert and the neighbor, prone unconscious on the floor, had remained beneath the worst of the fumes.

The neighbor was up too now, hurrying over to them.

“My cane!” Hannah cried. “My cane!”

There was a loud crash to their left as the curtain rail burned free from its stanchions and dropped in swirls of orange to the floor. Smoke as thick and black as that from a power plant chimney was already rolling in billows across the room, obscuring the ceiling and walls.

“I’ll get it,” Herbert yelled. “Go! You two go!”

The neighbor, bless him, did not demur. He laced Hannah’s fingers firmly in his and set off across the living room toward the door. Left and right and right and left they went through pockets of fire, quick sidesteps past tongues of flame lunging with malicious desperation at them.

This was what it had been like under fire in the war, Herbert remembered. Never think, never think, the
first to think died, keep moving and don’t look back if you wanted to stay alive.

He had missed that feeling, and he embraced its return with relish.

Herbert took a deep breath and immediately choked it out again; superheated air singeing the inside of his throat, acrid smoke pulverizing his lungs.

He crouched down close to the floor, blinked hard to get some water onto his eyeballs, and ran as if the hounds of hell were at his heels.

The fire had worked its way through the door into Hannah’s bedroom, and for a second Herbert thought all was lost. Then the smoke shifted sufficiently for him to see that the bed was as yet untouched, and Hannah’s cane was still there.

Herbert grabbed it, winced slightly at how warm it was already to the touch, turned around—and there was the fire again, right in his face, even bigger and more impenetrable than before, draping a sheet of flame across the doorway.

He was trapped.

Funny how the mind worked.

Herbert was trapped, minutes at most from certain death unless he could find a way out of his predicament; and yet he felt no fear.

A sense of urgency, yes, but no more. He had honestly been more vexed while cracking Stensness’ cipher.

What he faced was, quite simply, a puzzle.

The only way out was the way he had come in: through the door and down the stairs. He had to get out. As things stood, he could not.

There was the window, of course.

Thirty feet or so down to the pavement, though he could lop a quarter off that distance by hanging at full stretch from the window sill before letting go.

Even so, onto concrete, he would inevitably break one leg, perhaps both, and who knew what else?

Ambulances were as unreliable in the fog as fire engines, so he would face an indeterminate delay, unable to move and very possibly suffering serious internal bleeding to boot.

He would have to be very desperate to jump, he decided.

Then there was the bathroom, which adjoined Hannah’s bedroom, and which the fire had not yet reached.

Herbert ran into the bathroom and shut the door behind him.

There were two towels hanging on the rail, both grimy from the fog, but that was the least of his worries.

He grabbed both, hurled them into the bathtub and turned the taps on full blast. The water darkened the towels and pooled in their folds, soaking them through in a few seconds.

Herbert climbed into the tub and placed his own body under the taps, constantly shifting position to get as much of himself wet as possible.

It might not make the slightest bit of difference in the end, he thought; but it was pretty much all he had going for him.

He remembered the mountaineer’s old adage, that the summit was not the end but only halfway, because once there one had to get down again.

The water splashed in and around his mouth, but he could not taste it.

He got out of the bath, wrapped one of the towels
like an Arab headscarf around his face and head, leaving only a thin strip free around his eyes, and tied the other towel tight on the cane.

His arms and legs he kept free for speed and balance. He couldn’t afford to have them wrapped inside a towel, notwithstanding the extra protection that would give.

If Herbert had stopped for a second and considered the magnitude of what he was attempting, and the mortal danger he was in, he would have frozen, simply stood and waited for the fire to come, hoping that the smoke got to him before the flames.

But then that went for everything in his life over the previous few days. To cease, even to pause, was to die, whether slowly or fast.

The fire was merely another enemy, the latest in the collection he had recently been amassing.

So this, perhaps the gravest predicament he could remember being in, seemed nothing out of the ordinary; and that was the most extraordinary thing of all.

Besides, there was something very pure about the situation. It was a question of survival; either he would, or he would not.

Nothing else mattered. Not his mother, not Stensness nor Papworth nor Kazantsev nor Fischer nor de Vere Green, not even Hannah; not one of the thousands of strands which formed the matrix of a life.

He reached for the handle of the bathroom door, and took his hand away even before he touched it; the metal knob was virtually glowing with the heat coming through from the other side.

He pulled the wet sleeve of his jacket over his hand, twisted the knob and opened the door, holding himself
flat behind the door, against the wall, in case there was an inrush of flame.

There was not, but there might as well have been.

The bedroom was ablaze, a frenzied dance of reds and yellows which tore at the wood panelling and devoured the bed with swift mouthfuls.

He could just about see the doorway back into the living room, but little beyond that. No matter; there was no point in waiting.

Herbert remembered a mock Confucius motto:
Coward man keep safe bones.

Once more hunched low to the ground, hearing the angry sizzle as his towels and clothes spat back marauding flames, he ran through the bedroom, through the doorway into the living room, and felt his stomach lurch as his footing partially gave way. A floorboard gone, he realized, thankful that he had been carrying sufficient momentum to bridge the gap; a twisted ankle would have been lethal, no question.

Hannah’s flat was the face of Mount Etna, the court of Vulcan; it was Stromboli.

He could no longer feel the cane in his hand, but when he looked, he was holding on to it as though it were life itself.

Time crawled; each step seemed an eternity.

It was the carbon monoxide, he knew, depriving him of oxygen and slowing him down; just as it had killed de Vere Green.

Herbert battered through flames and upturned furniture alike, the towel-wrapped cane alternately talisman and protection, the water on the towels evaporating fast, but he would be at the front door any moment, out and down and free.

Something hard hit him in the face, and idiotically Herbert wondered whether the intruder was still there, having been lying in wait all along.

Then he realized that his assailant was a wall, and from what little he could see, there was no door there.

He had lost his way.

A normal-size living room now felt as vast as Yellowstone.

Which way was out? Which way was out, damn it?

Fire and smoke all around him, and yet he could no longer smell them.

There was a moment of paralyzing shock as Herbert saw how far and fast the fire had spread. It was now a snarling, roaring monster which reared up at him, daring him to find a way through the searing maze.

Panic started to come on him like a shroud; paralyzing, whitening panic, the surest killer of all. He had only a few seconds left before it engulfed him completely.

Then he heard Hannah’s voice, and with three senses already gone, he wondered whether he was hallucinating.

She could not have come back up here. She could not have.

There it was again, faint but definite.

She must have been by the front door, he thought; and therefore she was safety.

Through the fire again, up and down over chairs and upholstery, stumbling, calling for Hannah with breath he no longer possessed, and now getting no answer back.

Herbert reached the door, but there was no sign of her.

The flames were diving down the stairway, but he could see far enough through them to know she was not there. She must have been somewhere in the flat.

Perhaps he really had imagined it; conjured her up as a guardian angel.

He took two paces to the side to get a better view back into the flat, and inadvertently stood on something.

Hannah’s arm.

She was lying on the floor, flames circling her like angry wolves.

There was no time to wonder how she had got there.

Herbert picked her up, slung her over his shoulder, and ran down the stairs, timbers cracking around him, one hand on the cane and the other holding Hannah’s legs tight.

A crowd had gathered on the pavement. Herbert heard a communal gasp as he came out of the door and laid Hannah on the pavement.

The neighbor ran up and began hitting at Herbert’s right side, and Herbert was about to turn around and clock him one when he realized that the man was patting down small eruptions of flame which had clung to Herbert during his descent.

Herbert looked up.

There was only the faintest orange glow through the mist, even though the fire was just a couple of stories above them. He wondered how thick this fog could get before it officially shifted from gas to viscous, or even directly to solid.

Hannah was in a bad way. Burned patches of skin on her face wept raw and peeling. Her nostrils were caked in soot and swollen almost shut. Her eyebrows and
eyelashes had been singed brittle. It seemed as though every blood vessel in her eyes had burst; the whites were now reds.

She spoke in a hoarse voice through sharp breaths. “Gone … so long … Thought you’d … died … Came … get you.”

“I tried to stop her,” the neighbor said. “No chance.”

Herbert stroked Hannah’s forehead, and she screamed at the touch of his hand on sizzled skin.

He looked up at the faces around them. He had never seen such a bovine bunch.

“Get an ambulance!” he yelled. “Quick! And the fire brigade!”

The neighbor and another man ran off, and Herbert turned back to Hannah.

He wondered how long she had been waiting by the door. He had been in the flat much longer than she had, but had only been exposed to the worst of the fire for a relatively short period, and half of that had been while dripping wet and breathing through a sodden towel.

It would not have taken much more than a few seconds for Hannah, blind and unprotected, to have found herself on the wrong end of savage burns and serious smoke inhalation.

Stupid, stupid girl to have come back for him, through the fire, through her own crippling fear. Stupid girl.

Amazing girl.

Herbert enlisted three of the men standing round them, and together they moved Hannah as gently as possible into the hall of the Welsh dairy a few doors down.

The old ladies there—dairies started their days when the rest of the world was usually asleep—brought blankets and made Hannah as comfortable as possible; which was not very comfortable at all, given that she was alternating between screaming in pain from the burns and coughing so hard that Herbert thought she would bring her own lungs up.

The neighbor appeared. “The ambulance is on its way,” he said.

“How long?” Herbert snapped.

“Well,” the neighbor said, with evident reluctance, “they said it might be some time.”

“How long?”

“What with all the fog, and all the calls they’re getting—”

“How long?
”

“A couple of hours, maybe.”

“A couple of hours” turned out to be a conservative estimate.

It was more than three hours before the ambulance arrived; three of the longest, slowest, most agonizingly helpless hours Herbert had ever sat through.

Hannah was a trouper. She understood the situation. The fog was making a mockery of emergency response times. The Middlesex was the nearest hospital, just the other side of Goodge Street, ten minutes’ walk on a normal day, but in these conditions, and with her suffering the torments of the damned, trying to take her there would almost certainly have done more harm than good.

Not that there were not several occasions on which Herbert thought about it; the occasions when Hannah
screamed like a mother in labor, so loud and hard that she vomited from the effort, which in turn left her short of breath, which in turn made her hack violently, and so the whole cycle would start again.