Suddenly, there were two men beside her, police officers in black boiler suits and stab jackets, a stocky one with a shaven head and a taller one with a brush cut.
‘Get back, please, lady,’ the stocky one said. He put both hands on the door handle and pulled, as the other ran around to the other side and tried that door.
Inside, the figure in the burning cagoule was turning his head frantically, his mouth twisted open in an expression of utter terror and agony, his skin blistering in front of her eyes.
‘Unlock the door! Skunk, for God’s sake unlock the door!’ the stocky one was yelling.
The figure inside mouthed something.
‘It’s my car!’ Cleo jumped forward and put her key in the lock, but it would not turn.
The policeman tried for a moment, then, giving up, he pulled out his truncheon. ‘Stand back, miss,’ he said to Cleo. ‘Stand right back!’ Then he hit the window hard, cracking it. He hit it again and the blackening glass buckled. Then he hit it again, punched it through with his fists, showering the squealing occupant, ignoring the flames that were leaping out of the window, the dense black smoke, the stinking fumes of burning plastic. Putting his hands on the window frame, he pulled frantically on the door.
It would not give.
Then, taking a deep breath, the officer leaned right in through the window, into the inferno, put his arms around the figure and somehow, with his colleague’s help now, slowly, far too slowly for the poor, squealing man, it seemed to Cleo, dragged him out through the window and laid him down on the street. All his clothes were on fire. She saw the laces of his trainers burning. He was writhing, thrashing, moaning, in the most terrible agony she had ever seen a human being experience.
‘Roll him!’ yelled Cleo, desperate to do something to help him. ‘Roll him over to get the flames out!’
Both officers knelt, nodding, and rolled him, then over again, then one more time, away from the burning car, the stocky one ignoring or oblivious to his own singed brows and burnt face.
The burning hood had partially melted into the victim’s face and head, and his shell-suit trousers had melted around his legs. Through the stench of molten plastic, Cleo suddenly caught a momentarily tantalizing smell of roasting pork, before revulsion kicked in, at the realization of what it actually was. ‘Water!’ she said, her first aid course from years ago coming back to her. ‘He needs water and he needs covering, seal the air off.’ Her eyes jumped from the terrible suffering of the man in the road to the fiercely burning interior of her car, frantically trying to think if she had anything she needed in the glove compartment or boot, not that there was much she could do about it. ‘There’s a blanket in the boot!’ she said. ‘A picnic blanket – could wrap him – need to stop the air—’
One of the officers sprinted up the road. Cleo stared down at the writhing, blackened figure. He was shaking, vibrating, as if he was plugged into an electrical socket. She was scared that he was dying. She knelt beside him. She wanted to hold his hand, to comfort him, but it looked so painfully blackened. ‘You’ll be OK,’ she said gently. ‘You’ll be OK. Help’s coming. There’s an ambulance coming! You’re going to be fine.’
He was rolling his head from side to side, his mouth open, the lips blistered, making pitiful croaking sounds.
He was just a kid. Maybe not even twenty. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked him gently.
He was barely able to focus on her.
‘You’ll be OK. You will!’
The officer came running back, holding two coats. ‘Help me wrap these around him.’
‘He’s covered in molten fabric – do you think we should try and get it off?’ she asked.
‘No, just get these around him, tight as we can.’
She heard a siren in the distance, faint at first, but rapidly getting louder. Then another. Followed by a third.
From the darkness of the interior of his Prius, the Time Billionaire watched Cleo Morey and the two police officers kneeling on the ground. He heard the sirens. A splinter of blue light skittered past his eyes. He watched the first police car arrive. Two fire engines, then a third. An ambulance.
He watched everything. He didn’t have anything else to spend his time on tonight. He was still there, watching, as dawn was breaking, and the low-loader arrived and craned the MG, its interior all blackened but the exterior looking fine, considering, out of its space and carted it away.
Suddenly the street seemed quiet. But inside his car the Time Billionaire was raging.
103
The alarm was due to go off in a few minutes, at five thirty, but Roy Grace was already wide awake, listening to the dawn chorus, thinking. Cleo was awake too. He could hear the scratching of her eyelashes on the pillow each time she blinked.
They lay on their sides, two spoons. He held her naked body tightly in his arms. ‘I love you,’ he whispered.
‘I love you so much,’ she whispered back. Her voice was full of fear.
He had still been in the office at one a.m., preparing for his meeting with the CPS solicitor, when she’d rung him, sounding truly terrible. He’d gone straight over to her house and then, in between comforting her, had spent much of the next hour on the phone, tracking down the two officers who had first arrived on the scene. Eventually he had got through to an undercover PC on the Car Crime Unit called Trevor Sallis, who explained what they had been doing. It had been a sting to catch the ringleader of a gang.
According to Sallis, a local lowlife villain had been cooperating with the police and, in one of life’s coincidences, it had been Cleo’s car that was targeted. Something had gone badly wrong, it appeared, in the thief’s attempt to hot-wire it. MG TF cars were, it appeared, notoriously hard to steal.
The explanation had calmed Cleo down. But something that he couldn’t quite put a finger on bothered Grace deeply about the incident. The would-be thief was now in the intensive care unit at the Royal Sussex County Hospital – God help him in that place, he thought privately – and was due to be transferred, if he survived the next few hours, to the burns unit at East Grinstead. The other officer, Paul Packer, was also in the same hospital, with severe, but not life-threatening, burns.
What could make a car catch fire? A lowlife jerk, fiddling with wires he did not understand, rupturing a fuel pipe?
The thoughts were still churning through his tired brain when the alarm started beeping. He had exactly one hour to get home, shower, put on a fresh shirt – there was another press conference scheduled for later this morning – and get to the office.
‘Take the day off,’ he said.
‘I wish.’
He kissed her goodbye.
Chris Binns, the CPS solicitor who had been allocated to the Katie Bishop case, was in Grace’s opinion – which was one shared by a good many other officers – several miles up his own backside. The two of them had had plenty of encounters in the past, and there wasn’t a huge amount of love lost.
Grace viewed his own job as, principally, to serve decent society by catching criminals and bringing them to justice. Binns viewed his priority as saving the Crown Prosecution Service unwarranted expense in pursuing cases where they might not secure a conviction.
Despite the early hour, Binns entered Grace’s office looking – and smelling – as fresh as a rose. A tall, trim man in his mid-thirties, sporting a bouffant hairstyle, he had a large, aquiline nose, giving his face the hawkish look of a bird of prey. He was dressed in a well-cut dark grey suit that was too heavy for this weather, Grace thought, a white shirt, sharp tie and black Oxfords that he must have spent the whole night buffing.