ASHLEY WAS TAKEN back into the dormitory at Red Rigg House, and despite everything, she slept.
It was a long time before anyone knew exactly where the fire started. For much of the household, it was in full swing when they awoke, with a large portion of the east wing an inferno. The stairs and the hallway leading to the dormitory were ablaze when Mr Haygarth – whose room was a few doors down from the dorm – awoke to a crashing noise. He made it out of the room and banged his fists against Miss Lyonnes’s door, waking her up and saving her life. She fled downstairs, her dressing gown over her head to stop her hair from catching alight, while Jonathan Haygarth moved down the hallway towards the dormitory. He had almost reached the door when a portion of the ceiling fell down, trapping him and killing him just feet from where a lot of frightened children were beginning to wake up. The debris from the ceiling prevented them from opening the door themselves.
Later, the police and fire investigators concluded that the children had tried to break the windows and failed. Most of them were overcome with smoke inhalation, and several did indeed burn to death, although this information was kept strictly within the investigation itself. Details, such as the strange contorted positions of the children’s bodies as the heat caused muscles to contract and shrink, were not revealed to the families. It was thought that they had suffered enough.
Fire engines arrived within fifteen minutes of the blaze becoming visible from windows, and they fought for over an hour to bring it under control.
In the uneasy light of dawn, covered in a skein of smoke and soot, the staff of the house and the police officers present began to take account of what had happened, and crucially, began calling parents. As far as they knew, every child that had come to Red Rigg House for the Easter weekend had perished. The work of recovering bodies and identifying them was expected to take days, if not weeks.
When Helen Whitelam picked up the phone, very early on that Easter Sunday, she was half asleep, not awake enough yet to feel the panic that can sometimes come with an unexpected phone call at an unsociable hour. She listened to the voice on the other end, which sounded very far away and remarkably calm, and a great wave of terror picked her up and knocked her down. Logan Whitelam, who had been woken up by the sound of her screaming, came into their narrow hallway to find his wife curled up in the corner by the door. The phone receiver was on the floor, so he picked it up.
These were the facts as given to him on that morning:
There had been a terrible fire at Red Rigg House, where his daughter had been staying for the weekend. The police and fire investigators were still sorting through the debris, but they asked that all parents of the children travel to Cumbria as soon as possible. Logan had asked if his daughter was safe, and the person on the other end of the phone simply repeated that they should come as soon as they could, and that the Lyndon-Smith family would pay for their transport if needed. And that, in Logan’s opinion, was as good as telling him his daughter was dead.
When he went to Helen and tried to pick her up off the floor, she had grabbed him by the neck, her eyes wild.
‘She knew! She wanted to come home, and we left her there to die.’
* * *
Three days later, Ashley Whitelam walked out of the woods at the foot of Red Rigg Fell. She was covered head to foot in dirt and soot, and seemed near catatonic. She had no memory of the fire, and no memory of where she had spent the last three days. By that time, however, Helen Whitelam’s fragile sanity had already been shattered, and she never returned to being the ballsy, no-nonsense woman that Ashley had grown up with.