Dying Fall

boarded up. The walls are streaked with soot, half the roof is missing. Ruth thinks of Dan, trapped inside, choking with acrid smoke, breathing his last …
    ‘Are you OK?’ says Caz.
    ‘Yes,’ says Ruth, wiping her eyes. ‘It’s just … thinking about it.’
    ‘I know,’ says Caz. ‘I drove past the day I found out about it. You hear the words “house fire”, but you just can’t imagine the damage a fire can do.’
    ‘Why didn’t he jump out of the window?’ asks Ruth. ‘It’s such a tiny house.’
    ‘At the funeral his father told me that the bedroom window didn’t open,’ said Caz. ‘They all wondered why he didn’t get out though. He was found right by the door. I guess the heat was just too intense.’
    Ruth remembers Nelson telling her that the door had been locked from the outside. She imagines Dan pounding away at the door, slowly losing consciousness. Someone had pushed petrol-soaked rags through the letter box. The hall must have been the white-hot heart of the blaze. Did Dan know, as he tried desperately to escape, did he know that he was going to die? Did he know that someone had killed him?
    ‘Shall we go?’ says Caz gently.
    Ruth nods. As Caz performs a U-turn, with difficulty as the car is about the size of a Blackpool tram, Ruth looks back at the house. And she sees two people, a man and a woman, letting themselves in next door. They are youngish, dressed in jeans and windcheaters, and, for some reason, she thinks that she might know them. It is only when they are halfway back to Lytham that she realises who they were. Elaine and Guy. The Brideshead couple, who turn out to live in a run-down backstreet, next to a burned-out house.
    *
    ‘Well,’ says Sandy, overtaking with a perfunctory blare of the horn. The rain has reduced visibility to almost nil but this has not affected Sandy’s driving. ‘What did you think of Professor Henry?’
    ‘He’s hiding something,’ says Nelson.
    ‘He’s got an alibi for the night of the fire, though.’ This last had been ascertained from Pippa Henry in an icy exchange on the door step. ‘He was with his wife all evening, apparently.’
    ‘She’s quite something, the wife,’ says Nelson.
    ‘You can say that again. How did a little pipsqueak like him ever end up with a woman like that?’
    ‘Sometimes beautiful women like ugly men,’ says Nelson. ‘Look at Michelle and me.’
    ‘You might be ugly but you’re not a pipsqueak in a pink jumper.’
    ‘Thanks.’
    ‘Clayton Henry’s afraid of something,’ says Sandy. ‘It might be his wife, it might be these White Hand bozos, it might be something else entirely.’
    ‘How much do you know about these White Hand people?’
    ‘Never heard of them,’ admits Sandy. ‘Tim, my sergeant, might know. He’s the one who’s put in all the work on these extreme right-wing groups. In general the people he’s investigating are pretty much what you’d expect, low income, not very well educated, wound up over immigration and lack of jobs. There are some very deprived areas round here, you know.’
    Nelson looks out of the window. They have reached the outskirts of Blackpool now. He has never thought of the area as being deprived exactly but there’s no denying that the rows of glum terraces are not looking their brightest in the driving rain.
    ‘But the recent trouble at the university is something else,’ Sandy is saying, putting his windscreen wipers on full speed. ‘There have been some very nasty threats made, a real undercurrent of violence.’
    ‘What about all that King Arthur stuff? Have you come across anything like that before?’
    ‘No, that’s a new one on me, I must admit, but nothing would surprise me about these idiots. They have all sorts of heroes – Hitler, Enoch Powell, Boadicea, Asterix the Gaul.’
    ‘Asterix? Isn’t he French?’
    ‘He stood up to the Romans, didn’t he? I tell you, these people would hero-worship anyone, even the French.’
    *
    The image of that horrible blackened house remains in Ruth’s head all evening. When she gets back, Cathbad is still out and the rain is still falling. Kate wakes up as soon as they enter the cottage and, deprived of her teenage minions, she is grumpy and determined not to be placated. Ruth makes toast for them both (she is too tired to attempt any Cathbad-style gourmet cooking and, besides, she’s still full up from lunch) and prepares to start the nighttime routine. Kate cheers up slightly in the bath