FIRE PATTERN
Bob Shaw
PROLOGUE
“When you finally set yourself alight,” Maeve Starzynski said, “don’t come crying to me.”
“Very funny,” her father replied, vigorously brushing flecks of glowing tobacco from the front of his cardigan. He had been smoking his oldest briar, the one with the green insulating tape around the stem, when a sudden cough had sent ash spouting from the bowl.
“I’m not trying to be funny. Smoking is a disgusting habit. All the doctors say it’s bad for your health.”
“They’re talking about cigarettes—the pipe is different.” Art Starzynski smiled in his special infuriating way, lowering his eyelids to screen off any sign of opposition to his views. “The pipe is good for a man. People who smoke pipes live longer than people who don’t smoke at all.”
“Yeah—because they poison the rest of us off.”
Her father’s eyes were almost closed, Buddha-smug. “Coffee,” he said pleasantly. “Nice and hot, nice and fresh, and I don’t want instant.”
“Oh, I wish you would burn to death,” Maeve snapped, not hiding her exasperation as she strode out of the room and went through to the kitchen at the rear of the house. Her father was only sixty, but he assumed the attitudes and made the demands of somebody much older, seeming to revel in the infirmity which had overtaken him a month earlier.
Maeve was as quiet as possible when preparing the coffee and setting out two mugs—banging crockery around was too obvious a way of expressing resentment—and while the water was coming to the boil she stood at the window and breathed deeply, forcing herself to relax. The news from Doctor Pitman about her father’s X-ray tests had been unexpectedly good, suggesting that his abdominal pains resulted from nothing more than some vague colic. His medication was bound to conquer the problem in a day or two, then she would be able to get back to her job and resume a normal life.
Keep thinking about that side of it, she told herself. Be positive!
While she was waiting for the coffee to finish percolating she became aware of a sweetly heavy smell of burning drifting into the kitchen. She guessed that her father was, as occasionally happened, experimenting with an exotic new brand of tobacco. She poured the coffee, set the two mugs on a tray and carried it towards the front room. The sweetish odour grew overpowering as she moved along the hall and now she could actually see a light blue haze in the air—a first intimation that something out of the ordinary might be taking place.
“Dad?” Maeve opened the door to the sitting room and gasped with shock as she saw that it was filled with blue smoke. Dropping the tray, she ran into the room, fully expecting to see an armchair on fire. She had heard how quickly some modern furniture could burn and also knew how vital it was to get people clear of the fumes without delay.
There was no sign of a blaze, nor could she see her father anywhere.
It was difficult to make out anything through the billowings of the curious light blue smoke, but it seemed to Maeve that there was a blackened area of flooring near the television set. She went towards it, gagging on the sickening sweet stench in the air, and her hands fluttered nervously to her mouth as she saw that what she had taken to be a black patch was actually a large hole burned clear through the vinyl and underlying boards. Several floor joists were exposed, their upper surfaces charred into curvatures, but—strangely—there was no active flame. In the floor cavity, supported by the ceiling of the utilities room below, was a mound of fine grey ash.
“Dad?” Maeve looked about her uncertainly, fearfully, and her voice was barely audible. “Dad, what have you been…?”
At that instant her slippered foot touched a slightly yielding object on the floor. She glanced downwards—still an innocent, with thresholds of terror still to cross—and when she saw what was lying there she began to scream.
The object, easily recognizable by its signet ring, was her father’s left hand.
CHAPTER 1
The Whiteford Examiner was much like any other small-town newspaper which had reached the year 1996 in a healthy condition.
It had survived the electronic revolution largely because it was impossible to take a television set out on the back porch, find in it enough small ads and local gossip to make a day’s reading, and drape it over one’s face when the summer heat and the drone of insects had finally induced sleep. The paper’s headquarters were in a narrow four-storey building in the main street, sandwiched between a modern department store and an even more modern bank. Its owners, the Kruger family, were proud that the Examiner building was listed as having historical and architectural interest, and each day a stat of the front page of fifty years earlier was posted in a glazed box by the front entrance.
Ray Jerome usually liked the working environment of the reporters’ room on the second floor. There was a feeling of vitality about it, a sense of being close to the living heart of the community, which helped to fill the gap at the centre of his own life. The loss of his wife through illness and of his engineering job through redundancy had almost broken him at one stage, but the newspaper work—a complete change of direction—had come along at the right time. He had taken to it with all the zeal of an intelligent, lonely, middle-aged man beginning a new life and, as often happens in such circumstances, had created problems both for himself and those around him.
The first difficulty of the new day arose when Hugh Cordwell, the young journalist at the adjoining desk, began to compose his report about a clash between two juvenile gangs in one of Whiteford’s most troublesome districts. Cordwell brooded for a moment, began typing rapidly with two fingers, and on his VDU there appeared the heading: POLICE CALLED TO GANGLAND FLASHPOINT.
Jerome leaned sideways to get a better look at the screen. “You’re not going to let that go through, are you?”
Cordwell stared at the words and then at Jerome. “What’s wrong with it?”
“A flashpoint isn’t a geographical location—it’s a temperature.”
“This isn’t one of your fancy technical journals,” Cordwell said, his china blue eyes showing the first hint of resentment. “Plain American is good enough around here.”
“But how can the police be called to a temperature?” Jerome decided to go for absurdity. “It’s like saying there was an incident on thirty degrees Celsius, at the corner of ten degrees Fahrenheit.”
“Bull,” Cordwell commented. “You’ve got more shit than a Christmas turkey.”
“There’s no need to be like that about it—I was only offering some friendly advice.”
“Shove your advice!”
“Charming attitude,” Jerome said in injured tones, looking around for backing. “You try to guide someone’s faltering footsteps in the general direction of literacy, and all you get…”
He allowed the sentence to trail off as his roving gaze encountered the slim, elegantly tailored figure of Anne Kruger, the Examiner’s chief editor. She had paused on the way in to her office, apparently overhearing the exchange between Jerome and Cordwell. A slight lift of her head as she went through the doorway told Jerome she wanted to speak to him. He stood up, threaded his way through a cluster of desks and joined her in the spacious room which overlooked Mayflower Square.
Before speaking to him she took off her brocade jacket, put it on a hanger and smoothed down her white silk blouse—a series of actions which made it clear to Jerome’s watchful eye that she was one of those women who appear, in defiance of time and biology, to reach their physical best at the age of forty. She had black hair, high cheekbones and a touch of hauteur which often led Jerome to picture her in Spanish-style riding clothes.