Nobody was answering the buzzer for Hawaiian Island Suite Three; Lil had already pressed it three times, holding it down to a determined count of twenty on each go.
‘Maybe he’s gone out?’ suggested Nedly. ‘We could try the Nite Jar?’
Lil pondered it. ‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘Unless …’ Nedly shuddered. ‘You don’t think Weasel came back and got him?’
Lil bit her lip. ‘Nah, he’s probably just asleep up there.’ She moved out of the way as a delivery man in a pale brown coat pressed one of the other buzzers and told the occupant she had a parcel. As the door closed behind him Lil stuck her foot in it and then waited for him to disappear up the stairs.
‘Come on,’ she said.
They tramped upwards, switching the lights on as they reached each landing. Lil sensed an unusual level of reluctance in Nedly. He was lagging behind.
‘You know, it’s OK if you don’t want to come with us to Rorschach. I mean, I understand, given the situation with you being … d-different now. If we do find anything you … you might not want to see it.’
The lights on the staircase between floors four and five flickered and somewhere in a far-off room a tiny cat’s-collar bell tinkled urgently. ‘We might find … me. My body, I mean,’ Nedly said flatly. ‘I know.’
‘But I’ll be there with you,’ said Lil. ‘Whatever happens, OK?’
There was no answer. Nedly had stopped midway down the stairs; he was standing very still. ‘OK?’ she said again.
He held up a hand as if to say, Be quiet a minute, then he whispered. ‘Did you hear that?’
She listened and then shook her head. ‘Hear what?’
‘Someone laughing.’
Lil shrugged. ‘I know it’s an unusual sound in this place but –’
‘No, it’s not like that. It wasn’t a nice laugh.’ A doomed look came into his eyes. ‘I’ve heard it before somewhere.’
‘When you say “somewhere” …’
‘Somewhere bad.’
A chill snaked up Lil’s spine.
Nedly’s expression was pale and pinched. ‘Something’s wrong.’
The air felt too still. They crept onwards and the lights went off just before they reached the landing as usual, but this time Lil’s breath plumed out in the darkness, a cloud of mist. They could hear the sound of doors banging upstairs.
Fear sent a rush of adrenalin through her veins. ‘Come on!’ she shouted, and they started running. She hit the next switch as they reached the sixth-floor landing and then launched herself back off the wall and towards the last flight of stairs, but Nedly suddenly stopped in his tracks and she nearly ran through him. He took a step backwards, pinning himself to the sticky wallpaper, his eyes stretched wide in his thin white face as they tracked something moving past.
A curl of sharp cold air wound round Lil, stinging her cheeks like a burn. Fear tightened its grip, squeezing the breath out of her lungs.
‘Nedly? What are you doing?’ She stepped into his sightline. ‘Cut it out, you’re giving me the creeps.’
‘Nedly!’ she yelled, glaring at him even as he looked past her, transfixed by something on the stairs. ‘Come on! We don’t have time for this.’
Nedly suddenly snapped out of it. He panic-blinked a few times then said: ‘You’re right.’
Lil smelt the smoke before she saw it creeping towards them from the seventh-floor landing. The corridor ahead was fuzzy with it. The lights went off again and Lil stumbled. Gasping for breath, she picked herself up, patting down the walls to locate the light switch.
She found it in time to see Nedly running off ahead, unaffected by the smoke. When he reached the seventh floor he shot arrow-straight and head first through the wall into Abe’s rooms. Lil made it to the top of the stairs a few moments later and tried the door. The handle was hot to the touch and she could see a thin veil of black smoke spreading from the gap under the door. She lurched back to the hallway, her sweatshirt over her nose and mouth and, following her mum’s example, but not her advice, elbowed the glass box at the top of the stairs to set off the fire alarm.
Nothing happened.
She furiously cursed the landlord and then sucked in a lungful of fumy air and half screamed, half choked out the word: ‘FIRE!’
With a noise like a cork popping Nedly shot back through the wall. ‘I can’t wake him!’ he yelled.
Lil picked up a fire extinguisher.
‘Do you know how to use one of those?’
‘Yes,’ she said and hurled it at the door to the Hawaiian Island Suite. The lock splintered and the door swung open. Lil leapt aside as a giant fiery breath was exhaled into the corridor.
The room was ablaze. Blue flames were running over the photos on the wall and spreading to the curtains, which lit up like touchpaper. The linoleum was blistering and curling at the edges. The settee had burst into a black and gold fireball and the boxes of files were smouldering, splitting open and spilling papers onto the floor where they caught light and were blown around by the gusts of hot air, igniting everything they came into contact with.
Lil stood in the doorway watching it as though hypnotised. The heat in there must have been unbearable but Abe didn’t stir. She could see him silhouetted at the breakfast bar, slumped over the counter next to a bottle and an empty glass. Flames were licking at the rug by his feet, and then the smoke hit the back of her throat and she began to choke; the heat on her skin was searing. She held up an arm to cover her face.
‘Go back!’ shouted Nedly. ‘It’s too hot. I’ll get him.’ He looked at Lil. It was a look that said: I promise.
Lil stepped back into the corridor. She watched Nedly running frantically, knocking pots and pans off the rack in the kitchenette, sending books flying from the shelves like kamikaze pilots dive-bombing the lino. He was desperately trying to make enough noise to be heard over the roar of the flames but Abe wasn’t moving. She ran to the corridor to look down the stairs to see if help had arrived but there was no one in sight. She pulled her mac over her head and stepped towards the room but as soon as she neared the door it began to soften and Lil realised it would melt.
The room was filling with a fog of noxious smoke. Lil could only just make out Nedly standing over Abe amongst the growing flames. He was flickering, only the whites of his eyes standing out in the black and orange inferno. He seemed to suck in a breath so huge that his whole body curled with the effort, and then he released it with a terrifying scream, full force, right into Abe’s ear.
Abe woke with a start, fell back off his stool and onto the floor, where he came face to face with a carpet of luminous flames. He dragged himself to his feet, his eyes wide with panic. Coughing, bewildered, he gasped for breath and immediately started choking on the smoke. His good hand grabbed at his chest, trying to loosen his tie. He looked at the door where Lil stood waving her arms madly. She shouted his name above the heat, the roar of flames, and the din of the alarm bell, which had finally sounded on another floor.
‘ABE!!!!’ This way!’
As the detective stumbled towards her the edge of his mac caught fire. He staggered through the door and onto his knees just as the cooker exploded, blowing the oven door off its hinges.
Leaning heavily on Lil and wheezing all the way down they made it to the sixth-floor landing, and then the sprinkler system came on.
Abe sat on the edge of the pavement with his feet in the gutter. His face was smudged grey with soot and his eyes were even more red-rimmed than normal. Curls of smoke were coming off his singed jacket and the thin rubber soles of his shoes had melted. He took his hat off and patted the bit that was still smouldering – beneath it his hair now had a streak of pure white.
‘The fire crew said I was lucky to get out of there alive. I’ve got to make my way over to the hospital to get checked over, but all things considered …’ His hand was shaking as he reached for his hipflask and then he looked at it grimly and chucked it over his shoulder into a pile of bin bags by the hotel steps. ‘I guess you saved my life there, kid.’ His bottom lip was trembling. Lil couldn’t stand to look at it; a lump had risen in her own throat.
‘It was the darnedest thing,’ he continued. ‘I’ve never been so scared … I was feeling a bit shaky,’ he confessed, ‘after the Weasel incident, but it was more than that; something didn’t seem right. The radio kept coming on full volume, but it was just static, and then the heating went off and, well, that has been on the blink for days anyway. Maybe it was nothing. I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense now. Maybe I’m just getting old.’ He shook his head despairingly.
‘Do you think it was Weasel?’
‘The fire chief said it was probably some electrical fault. Just an unlucky accident.’
‘An accident: that was what they said about the nurse that got killed at the hospital,’ said Lil. ‘And the security guard whose car blew up.’
‘It wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t Weasel,’ said Nedly. ‘I saw someone, someone on the stairs. They were laughing, and then they saw me, and they stopped.’
Lil frowned at Nedly, then she gave Abe a hearty pat on the shoulder and a puff of smoke rose into the air.
‘Back in a tick,’ she told him.
Lil stood scanning the menu through the steamed-up window of the Kam Moon Special Noodle Bar. Without looking at Nedly she murmured, ‘Someone saw you?’
‘He just passed us on the sixth-floor landing. You couldn’t have missed him. He had blonde hair and his chin was scarred pink right down to his neck. Lil, you must have seen him; he walked right by you.’
Lil remembered the shiver she’d felt on the landing. ‘No, I didn’t see him, Nedly.’
‘He walked right by you.’
‘I didn’t see him, OK!’ she snapped, and then turned and looked straight at him. ‘But he saw you.’ She frowned. ‘What does that mean?’
‘I think it means he’s like me,’ said Nedly. ‘The Firebug is a ghost.’