Alice lay still for a second, gasping, then rolled over and looked towards me, wide-eyed in horror.
“You’re on fire!”
I wasn’t-much. Harry was. His saturated clothes were ablaze.?m not sure if it was Bernard’s lighter or the gunshot that had ignited the petrol. I jerked away from the corpse and ripped off my smoldering jacket.
The speed of a petrol fire is awesome. I looked towards the door and saw huge white-and-yellow flames leaping for the gap. We’d never get out through there.
Alice was on her feet and beside me, trying to drag me to the other side of the barn where the fire wasn’t raging yet. With her help I crawled and slithered across, but there wasn’t much comfort there. No petrol, certainly, but black smoke swirled in our faces. They say that you usually suffocate before you burn.
“The ladder,” I shouted, dragging myself upright against a beam. If we could get up there, the hayloft would screen us from the worst of the flames and the heat. I wasn’t thinking about survival, just the immediate need to put something between us and the fire.
Together we hoisted the ladder and propped it against the hayloft. The heat was intense. There was a roar like Niagara, and things were cracking and spitting all round us.
Alice shinnied up first.
You may think this ridiculous, but I looked for my stick before I followed her. I groped in the hay until I found it and threw it up. Then I grabbed the ladder and climbed rapidly hand over hand, with a technique that was improving with practice.
Up there, the smoke was the main problem. Alice had unfurled her polo-neck collar to cover her mouth.
I’ll take some credit now for smart thinking. I gestured to her to help me pull up the ladder.
Together we hauled it up to our level. It was blackened and smoking at the lower end. I indicated to Alice that we should use it as a battering ram to attack the tiled roof from the underside.
It was a high risk. There was a chance that the flames would be drawn up and leap through any gap we made. I pinned my faith on the loft floor screening us for long enough to make an escape. At the rate the fire was progressing, the floor couldn’t last many minutes more. It was a moot point whether it would collapse from underneath before the sparks ignited the bales stored on top.
I propped myself on a bale, and with Alice guiding the front of the ladder, we drew it back and thrust it against the tiles at the innermost end of the loft. All we got was a numbing jolt in our arms. I thought cynically of the truism that old structures like this were built to last. Oh, for a nineteenth-century jerry-builder or an apprentice tiler on his first job.
We gave it another crack. With an exhilarating crunch, two tiles split open together and the end of the ladder projected through. We tugged it back and drove at the rest more frenziedly. Another tile fell out, and then, praise be, a group of four. A sizable hole. We dropped the ladder and rushed forward, desperate for air. I picked up my stick and poked out more tiles, then signaled to Alice to climb through.
She was quick. I tried pushing the ladder through after her, thinking we could use it to get down from the roof, but she shouted, “Theo, forget it. It’s too short!”
I could feel the heat of the loft floor through my shoes. I told Alice to move aside. Then I hauled up a bale of hay and thrust it through the gap and over the edge of the building. It would cushion our landing when we jumped. I dragged another towards me and shoved it after the first.
Alice cried, “Theo, for God’s sake!”
I climbed out onto the tiles.
The top couldn’t have been much over fifteen feet, and the smoke gushing out behind us was a strong incentive to jump. I looked down at the bales and said a familiar phrase. “All right, then?”
Alice was black-faced, and her glasses were peppered with carbon. She smiled and put out her hand to me and we jumped together.
TWENTY-THREE
“I hope to God I had the exposure right,” said Digby for I the third time at least. “If you’d given me more warning, I’d have brought a photographer with me.”
“Quit complaining, will you?” Alice told him in an up-rush of anger, letting the tension out. “You got your scoop.”
Digby bunched his shoulders and tried to look uninvolved, like a perching vulture.
“What’s one picture?” demanded Alice.
In a pained voice Digby said, “You two jumping off the blazing roof? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s?scape From Death Barn’-the shot of a lifetime. Millions will see it on the front page of their paper tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. I didn’t want to know about tomorrow. Coping with the past was more than I could manage. The three of us were sitting around the kitchen table in the farmhouse. One young constable was in attendance. In another room, Inspector Voss was questioning the Lockwoods. Across the yard, a fire crew was hosing the gutted barn.
“Let me get this right,” I said to Digby, letting my resentment show. “You were actually waiting outside with a camera while Alice and I were in that inferno in danger of our lives?”
“It’s not a pressman’s job to get involved, old man.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Digby.”
“I couldn’t have got near, anyway, once the fire started.”
“Before it started, you stood and watched Alice go in there to tackle a man of Bernard Lockwood’s size?”
Digby said blandly, “She acted independently, didn’t you, my dear?”
Alice ignored him and said to me, “What happened is this, Theo. I read in the paper about Sally being killed in the fire, and I knew I was wrong about you-shooting Morton, I mean. Whoever killed Sally did it to silence her. They were scared of you and me getting to speak to her. Whatever mean and hostile things I said about you, you’re no coldblooded killer. I thought of Harry first, but I couldn’t see him burning his own house, and I was certain he wouldn’t actively harm Sally, for all his insensitivity. I mean, he was willing to let her speak to us on Sunday. He was really upset when she got drunk. So who else could have done it? The answer had to be at Gifford Farm. After Digby called you on the phone and you hung up on him, I told him that’s where we have to go. He snatched up a camera and drove us here fast. We left the car up the lane and came in quietly to avoid Bernard and his shotgun, if we could.”
“We saw the kitchen door open,” put in Digby, “so I advised a discreet withdrawal to the farm-machinery shed.”
“Then we saw you come out of the back door with Bernard holding his gun to your back.”
“And what did you make of that?” I asked Alice with faint amusement. “Me-your number-one suspect.”
I believe Alice reddened under the smears of soot. “I already told you, I changed my mind about that. Anyway, Bernard took you into the barn. After a while he came out and put down the shotgun and collected the gasoline, so I went closer and took a peek inside. When I saw him pouring gas over the floor, I thought, Somebody’s got to stop this.”
She sighed and gave a weary smile. “I could use a few lessons in how to disable a man.”
I reached out my hand and clasped it over hers. “You did all right. I’d never have got out alive without you.”
At this she laughed suddenly and openly. “I figure you’d never have been in there if you hadn’t met me.”
I think it was the first time I’d seen her laugh without a trace of unease or suspicion in her features. Her glasses were twisted askew and her elegant nose was heavily smudged, but I warmed to her. I laughed too. Then I said impulsively, “Now that we’ve straightened out a few things, let’s meet again.”
Digby felt into his pocket and said, ‘I’ll quote that, if you don’t mind.”
I said, “Shut up.”
But as you, my loyal reader, will appreciate, life isn’t what you want, it’s what you get. Alice had her return flight booked for the following day. We didn’t even manage a night out together, or a night in, because that puddinghead Voss kept me waiting for the rest of the afternoon and evening sorting out what had happened in the barn. I admitted to shooting Bernard in self-defense, which seem straightforward enough, but Voss tied himself in knots trying to decide whether it was manslaughter or justifiable homicide. As they didn’t propose to charge me, anyway, I lost all patience with them. By the time I was free to leave, Digby had long since driven Alice back to Reading.