If Snow Hadn't Fallen (a Lacey Flint short story)

sure. I slowed down, telling myself I couldn’t appear in the park out of breath. I’m not that old, that big or that intimidating. I needed to look in control and I needed my breath to shout loud. That’s what I told myself.
    The truth was I didn’t like this park. It reminded me of a period I’d prefer to forget, when every mistake I’d ever made had decided it was payback time. I’d come here in the small hours to meet a killer – who hadn’t showed – but even so I think I left a part of myself behind that night. I hadn’t been back since, and I certainly wasn’t thrilled at the idea of doing so now. On the other hand, I was a serving officer, this was south London, and after sun-down parks remained playgrounds, but sometimes the games got a whole lot darker.
    Smoke in the air, which seemed to confirm the kids-messing-around theory, and something akin to the smell of summer barbecues or roasting meat. Well, cooking sausages in here was a new one. I’d chase away the firelighters and call out the Fire and Rescue Service. So long as accelerants hadn’t been involved, it could be done and dusted in half an hour. I stepped into the park and smelled petrol. I’m not sure I even bothered with the heavy sigh. After a while, police work gets a bit predictable.
    I braced myself, moved out of the screen of laurel bushes and, for a second, in spite of everything I’d been through during the Ripper case, honestly thought I might faint. I didn’t – people rarely faint from shock alone. It was a second or two more, though, before I really took in what I was seeing.
    A circle of dark figures, all but melting into the shadows, only the occasional gleaming eye or flash of paler-coloured clothing visible. Every eye fixed on the bonfire in their midst.
    A bonfire that moved. A blinding column of fire that surged nearly seven feet high and twisted and jumped and shook. A bonfire that screamed. And then the screams became words. Words that I didn’t understand, although the agony behind them was unmistakable. Instinct kicked in. I opened my mouth to yell at the others, to tell them to get him on the ground. I was starting to take off my coat, meaning to wrap it round the man who was the bonfire, roll him up, get water from somewhere, and as I did so the realization dawned that this was no band of horrified onlookers. The figures surrounding the burning man were too still. They watched, their bodies showing no horror, no panic. Each carried a rough stick, a broken branch, which they held out before them, as though to ward off the staggering, dying figure if he came too close. Each wore a grotesque, carnival-style mask.
    It was coming at me. The human bonfire had seen me, was running towards me. I could see eyes, arms reaching out, the screaming was aimed at me now. The others had seen me too. Three, four, five dark figures had turned my way. I saw wolf’s teeth, a green, bug-eyed alien, the cracked skin and staring eyes of a zombie, a goblin with a tight leather skullcap, and, strangely, the most horrifying of all, a tiara-wearing Queen. All coming towards me.
    ‘Police!’ My warrant card was held high. Not that any of them could see; it was far too dark. ‘Stay where you are!’
    They didn’t, of course. Thank God. They ran. I’d like to think it was the authority in my voice that drove them away, but far more likely they heard the approaching siren before I did. One yelled a command and turned. The others followed. There was only one way into the park and I was standing there, but they pushed their way through bushes and I could hear them scrabbling over the railings. On the other side were football pitches edged in a narrow strip of woodland, a large area of open space.
    They say that people commended for acts of courage talk afterwards about not thinking, just acting. I certainly didn’t think that night, although there was no talk of courage afterwards. I ran towards the burning figure, by this stage prone on the ground. He was still burning and the acrid smell of petrol, smoke and scorched meat was sickening.
    I say ‘he’ and ‘him’. At this stage I had no idea.
    I pulled off my coat and flung it over him, covering his head, dropping to the ground, picking the coat up, putting it down again. The coat was long – nearly ankle-length on me – and made from heavy red wool, but the flames weren’t giving up easily.
    They told me later that he didn’t burn for too long. That it was lucky I lived