‘I can do that,’ I said.
‘Right.’
I took his place and he went back to help with the fire, and the hot roaring smoky nightmare seemed to go on and on and on.
Crispin lived and they more or less saved the house.
At some point that I wasn’t quite clear about the police arrived, and soon afterwards an ambulance took my still unconscious brother away to a more thorough decoking.
The first thing the firemen told the police was that it looked like arson, and the first thing the police asked me was had I started it.
‘I wasn’t even here.’
‘Have you got any money troubles?’
I looked at them incredulously. Standing there in all that shambles with thick hot smoke still pouring off the damp and blackening embers they were stolidly conducting enquiries.
‘Is that all the help you can give?’ I said, but their manner said plainly enough that they weren’t there to give help.
It seemed the final unreality on that disjointed night that they should believe I had brought such destruction on myself.
By dawn one of the fire engines had gone but the other was still there, because, the firemen told me, with old houses you never knew. Sometimes a beam would smoulder for hours, then burst into flames and start the whole thing over again.
They yawned and rolled up hoses, and smoked cigarettes which they stubbed out carefully in little flat tins. Relays of tea in thermos flasks came up from the village and a few cautious jokes grew like flowers on the ruins.
At nine I went down to the pub to borrow the telephone and caught sight of myself in a mirror. Face streaked with black, eyes red with smoke and as weary as sin.
I told Sophie not to come, there wouldn’t be any lunch.She would come anyway, she said, and I hadn’t the stamina to argue.
The pub gave me a bath and breakfast. My clothes smelled horrible when I put them on again, but nothing to the house and yard when I got back. Wet burnt wood, wet burnt straw, stale smoke. The smell was acrid and depressing, but the departing firemen said nothing could be done, things always smelled like that after blazes.
Sophie came, and she was not wearing the gold aeroplane.
She wrinkled her nose at the terrible mess and silently put her arm through mine and kissed me. I felt more comforted than I had since childhood.
‘What’s left?’ she said.
‘Some wet furniture and a tin of peanuts.’
‘Let’s start with those.’
We went through the house room by room. Watery ash and stale smoke everywhere. My bedroom had a jagged black corner open to the sky where the roof had burned right through, and everything in there was past tense. I supposed it was lucky I had had some of my clothes with me in Newmarket.
There was an empty gin bottle in Crispin’s room, and another in the bathroom.
In the office the ash covered everything in a thick gritty film. The walls were darkened by smoke and streaked with water and my rows of precious, expensive and practically irreplaceable form books and stud records would never be the same again.
‘What are you going to do?’ Sophie said, standing on the filthy kitchen floor and running one finger through the dust on the table.
‘Emigrate,’ I said.
‘Seriously?’
‘No... Seriously, the pub opens in five minutes and we might as well get drunk.’
10
We rolled home happily at two o’clock and found the police there. Two of them, one a constable, one with the shoulder badges of Chief Inspector.
‘Enjoying yourself, Mr Dereham?’ the Chief Inspector said sarcastically. ‘Celebrating on the insurance money, are you?’
It seemed, however, that this opening was more a matter of habit than threat, because they had not after all come to accuse, but to ask and inform.
‘Chilly out here sir,’ the Chief Inspector said, looking up pointedly at the dull wintery sky.
‘Chilly indoors now too,’ I said. ‘The central heating oil tank was in the stables.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes, exactly.’
He chose all the same to go indoors, so I took them into the office and fetched a duster for the chairs. The duster merely smeared the dirt. I had to fetch others for them to spread out and sit on.
‘Tell us about your enemies, Mr Dereham,’ said the Chief Inspector.
‘What enemies?’
‘Exactly, sir. What enemies do you have?’
‘I didn’t know I had any who would set fire to my stable.’
‘You may not have known it before, sir, but you know it now.’
I silently nodded.
‘Give us a name, sir.’
‘I don’t think I can. But it isn’t the first thing that’s happened.’ I told them about Hearse Puller, and about my loose two-year-old, and he asked immediately why I hadn’t reported these things to the police.
‘I did report the Ascot incident,’ I said, thanking Kerry’s indignation. ‘And as for the horse... some of your men came here after the accident, but I didn’t think then that the horse had deliberately been let loose, I thought I’d just been careless.’
As they had thought the same thing they could hardly quarrel with that. The Chief Inspector also knew perfectly well that they wouldn’t have called out the reserves if I’d turned up with the unbuckled rug.
‘Well, sir,’ he said. ‘It seems you were lucky this time. We have a witness. A fourteen year old boy who’d been up in the woods at the end of your lane. He was going home. He says he saw what he saw from the lane, but I reckon he’d come here to help himself to what was lying around loose. He says he knew you were away in Newmarket. Anyway, he said he saw a man go into the store room in the stable block and he heard him making metallic noises in there, and thought it odd that whoever it was had not switched the lights on. He seems to know his way round your stables pretty well. He saw the man strike a match and bend down. Then the man came out of the stable and hurried away along the lane to the village. The boy didn’t try to intercept him, but went to the store room and switched on the light.’
The Chief Inspector paused, with a fine sense of theatre. His riveted audience waited impatiently for him to get on with it.
‘He took one look and retreated without delay. He says the pipe from the oil storage tank at the back of the stove was broken and the oil was coming out on to the floor. Standing in the pool of oil was a cardboard box, and on that there was a large firework. A golden shower, he says. He observed that the touch paper was red and smoking. He did not advance into the store-room, he says, because in his opinion anyone who had done so would have needed his brains examined, that is if his brains hadn’t been burning with the rest of him.’
Sophie laughed at this verbatim bit of reporting. The Chief Inspector permitted himself the smallest of smiles.
‘Anyway, sir, it seems he then made best speed down the village to tell his mum to call the Fire Brigade, which, once he had convinced her, she did. When the firemen arrived here the oil tank had exploded and the stables, being built internally largely of wood, were hopelessly alight. The firemen say that if they had arrived much later they could not have saved the house.’
He smiled lopsidedly. ‘They usually ruin what they only just save.’
‘The house is fine,’ I said.
‘Good. Now what young Kenneth saw is not evidence that you didn’t set the whole thing up yourself. People often arrange to have fires start while they themselves have an unbreakable alibi.’
Sophie started to protest. The Chief Inspector gave her an amused glance, and she stopped abruptly.