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THE INFERNO REACHED high into the early morning sky, the Mountford Street home completely gutted as the fire raged on. A crowd had gathered outside the home of the Hapgood family and looked on powerless as the flames continued to eat the building to the brickwork. The crowd speculated and questioned if the family were home. Some murmured that the wife and children were away but the husband, Charles was home.
‘He was home,’ one man snapped.
The other onlookers glanced at him as he stood and watched the flames.
‘How do you know?’ Someone else asked.
Abberline looked at him, the sharpness in the former detective’s eyes having lost none of their intensity with retirement. ‘Because Charles is a friend of mine. He had invited me here today to discuss my memoirs. I used to be a police inspector.’
‘I hope he wasn’t at home,’ the man said, showing more respect to the retired inspector.
‘At this hour so early in the morning it is likely he was,’ Abberline said. He stared at the house, the gut feeling instinct of a police officer still as strong as ever. There was no chance anybody could have survived such an inferno.
‘You don’t think somebody would have done this deliberately, do you?’
Abberline glanced at the man who had fallen into line beside him. He didn’t address the inspector directly, but stared at the fire, the flames seeming to dance in his eyes. A pang of something - recognition, perhaps- gnawed in Abberline’s gut, but he could not place where he knew the man from.
‘I can’t think of anyone who would wish to harm them.’ The inspector muttered as he stared at the fire.
‘No, I agree. Charles was a gentleman, of that there is no doubt, and yet death waits for no man. It comes when it desires and we are powerless to stop it.’
Abberline glanced at him again, still searching through the vault of hundreds of people he had met over the years to put a name to the face. ‘You speak as if you know for sure he’s already dead.’
The man half smiled, a cruel twist of the lips. ‘Just an assumption based on the intensity of the flame. Nothing more.’
Abberline looked at the man again, frustrated at his inability to recall. ‘Do you know something about this fire?’
The man looked at the inspector, his expression neutral. ‘Of course not. Surely you don’t think I am capable of such a terrible thing. What you are looking for is a monster, and I am clearly not that.’
Another surge of recollection erupted in Abberline at those words. He had heard them before. It sounded like something he might say. A collective gasp from the crowd distracted him as the sagging roof of the house collapsed inward, sending a fresh plume of smoke and flame into the ever lightening sky. Abberline glanced back to speak to the man to ask him his name, but he was gone. Abberline pushed through the growing crowd to find him again, the nagging in his gut not going away. He pushed out of the crowd, looking both ways up and down the street, but the man, whoever he was had gone, already lost in the maze of alleys and side streets.