THE CAR sped down Geug Place and stopped with a shudder that left them almost sideways outside the gate. They both got out, seeing the flickers of orange through the trees and the billows of smoke carrying the souls of every item Simon Sutherland had ever owned into the night.
Darian ran to the gate and gave it a hard shoulder barge, but it didn’t move even a fraction. He shouted, “We have to get in. How do we get in?”
Sholto said, “We have to get in and open the gate from the inside so the fire brigade can get in. And I have to move the car out of their way.”
Sholto ran round to the driver’s side of his car to move it clear of the gates. Darian was still holding them, trying to shift something he already knew he didn’t have the strength to budge.
He shouted, “Simon, Simon, are you there?”
There was no reply, no movement but the dancing shadows. He looked quickly up and down the street, hoped to see a part of the tall railings and wall around the garden that might be more accessible than the rest, but there was none. What he did notice was that none of the neighbors had come to try and help, and, given the smell of burning that had settled over the street, the growl of the fire and smudge against the sky, there was no way they could all be ignorant of the emergency unfolding. Darian cursed the lot of them, unaware that many of the people who lived there were aging or positively elderly and could do nothing more than call the emergency services, which, telephone records would show later, three already had. Darian had no obvious route into the front garden.
Sholto slammed the door of the car as he got out and stood back, staring at the gates and the railings and trying to come up with a plan.
“We need a ladder. You won’t be able to climb that and I’d have a heart attack just watching you fail.”
There was no time, given that it was possibly already too late. Darian moved down toward Sholto and kept going right past him to the car. That dainty little thing couldn’t hope to smash its way through the gates. It would have been sliced to bits trying, but Sholto had parked it right up against the railings to keep as much of the lane and house entrance as possible clear for more important people. Instead Darian walked round to the back and put his hands on it, pulling himself up so that he was on his knees on the roof, and then standing.
Sholto shouted, “Here, what are you doing? You’ll break your neck and my car.”
Darian ignored him, stepping back carefully and taking a one-step run-up. One stride and a jump and he was grabbing on and pulling himself up to the pointed tip of the railings.
He said, “I’ll try and get the gate open for you.”
Sholto was looking up at him and shaking his head. It was high at the top of the railings and he could see a terrified bald-headed man in the street on one side, the blackness of the garden below and the undulating light from the house on the other. Darian swung his leg over and lowered his weight, feeling the flaking paint dig into his fingers before he let go. There was a swoosh and a feeling of weightlessness that gave a tempting sense that everything was bliss, and then he hit the ground. It was enough of a thud to provoke a shout from him and an echoing one from Sholto on the other side.
Darian shouted, “I’m okay.”
That was a guess when he said it, but confirmed when he stood up. He had landed on his feet, fallen backward and rolled onto his side and now that he was standing again the only pain was in his ankles and neither was badly damaged. He picked his way past branches outstretched as if to block him and onto the drive, running up toward the house.
It was not, at that point, a home any longer because a home envelops a person and their existence. It was now an incubator for a fire desperate to burst out and engulf the garden it could see beyond the cracked windows. The heat was fierce, as if it were a hand pressed hard to his face to try and stop him from getting any closer, and the house and light made the scene difficult to process, an attack on his senses. Darian stopped and took a step backward, not out of fear but because instinct told him not to step beyond that range and because he hoped to find Simon without burning to death in the search.
He saw a figure move. Black against the building but it turned to see him, to look at him. Not Simon, but Harold. The older Sutherland stood closer to the house, looking back over his shoulder at Darian, a look of shock, eyes half-shut against the heat. He was breathing heavily, there was a black smudge on his face and two buttons had been ripped from his coat.
Darian stood beside him and said, “Simon?”
“He’s still inside. I tried to get him out, I tried. He’s still in there. He called me, he was scared, but he won’t come out.”
Darian put his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Simon, where are you? Simon, can you hear me?”
His phone. He reached into his pocket and found Simon’s number in the call log, calling him back. There was no tone, no voicemail and no answer, the phone dead. Darian was about to shout again when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye and saw Sholto coming up the drive, limping heavily and red in the face. The drop from the top of the railings had not been so kind to him, and there were tears in his eyes as he joined Darian and Harold.
“Bloody hell, this whole place is murder. We can’t get in there, but we can still help, we can get that gate open for the fire engines. They’ll be coming; we have to get the gate open.”
He was right, of course, because if the fire engines were delayed then Simon’s already tiny chance of survival would be wiped out. Darian was close to agreeing when he looked up at the house and saw it, movement this time more solid than the swaying fire. In a window on the first floor of the new wing he could see the black figure of a person silhouetted in the glow. A man stood and looked down at them, not shouting or trying to escape. A man who would rather stay and burn.
Darian shouted, “Simon, open the window. Simon.”
Harold screamed, “Simon, come down, please, for God’s sake.”
The figure stood motionless, and then moved away out of sight. They paused, silent among crackling chaos, expecting him to return to the window, but he didn’t. Simon Sutherland had walked into the fire and he hadn’t come back.
Darian looked at Sholto and opened his mouth to speak but before he could Sholto said, “No, Darian, no. I will not let you go in there. We will do all we can to help him but that does not include dying by his side.”
Darian didn’t want to defy his boss, and he knew Sholto was almost certainly right, but he couldn’t stop himself.
Darian nodded to Harold and said, “Don’t let him leave, Sholto. The gate was locked. It was locked with him on the inside.”
“What?”
“It was locked and he was here. Just don’t let him go.”
Darian bolted away from him and ran for the front door of Simon Sutherland’s burning house.
Sholto shouted, “Darian, don’t, Darian.”
By then Darian was kicking in the front door and ducking his way inside as flames and smoke drawn by the draft from the new opening swept past him.