It was shortly after eleven-thirty that it was done.
In the Belfield Grove Estate something like a quarter of the streetlights were out of order, leaving large, uneasy pools of blackness. The more rowdy of the local youth aimed bottles at the lights when they’d had a few too many: They liked broken glass, and they liked blackness. This left the Estate an uncomfortable place to walk in after dark. Late shoppers and dog-walkers scurried through their tasks and retreated indoors.
On Thursday the Belfield Arms had turned out about ten past eleven, and the few that were still there had rolled home, most of them to go straight to bed. By eleven-thirty the lights that were on in the Estate were mostly in bedrooms. The few still lit up on the ground floor belonged some to families whose children had gone with the theatre party to Manchester, and who were waiting up, others to a few incurable late-nighters who had hired videos and who sat there entranced in their flicking wombs. All were inside, with no reason to look out. The lights were out in the Phelan home. Jack Phelan had left the Railway King at ten-forty-five, and the house had been dark, bar the faint blue flicker from the television, by five past eleven.
The figure came from Grange Street and walked quickly through the Estate, crossing the road at one point to take advantage of those pools of darkness. At the gate he paused for a second, then threaded his way, in the thin light of a distant street lamp, past the looming shapes of dismembered car parts and up to the front door, which was in fact round the side of the house and in deep darkness. The figure stood for a moment in that pitch blackness, listening. What it could hear, from a far room, were snores and the sound from a television. Quickly it dived into the pocket of its heavy, capacious coat, took out a handful of something, then opened the flap of the letter box and began stuffing it through. There was another pause as it listened—and perhaps thought that this was the crucial moment, the last chance of pulling back. Then there was a tiny spurt of fire from a lighter; something was lit and pushed through the letter box. There was a sharp burst of light from behind the glass window that illuminated—for no one—the shape on the outside of it. Then that shape scuttled down the path and out into Belfield Grove Avenue where, once more crossing the road to hug the patches of darkness, it walked briskly and normally along the Avenue and out of the Estate.
Malcolm Cray was dropped off from the police car at a corner of the Battersby Road, the main road from East Sleate into the center. They had been at a minor incident in Pudleigh, where a drunk had been making a scene outside a Chinese restaurant. Now his shift was up. He raised his hand to his colleague in farewell and walked down Grange Street toward the Estate. He noted that the Belfield Arms was dark and quiet, and then turned into the Estate. He did not notice the fire then—there was a curve in the Avenue that prevented that. Only when he had gone a few yards along the Avenue did he wrinkle his nose and quicken his steps.
It was when he had started into the curve that his instinct told him something was up. As he began to run, he was aware of a patch of lurid light ahead of him. This was no garden bonfire, no precursor of Guy Fawkes night: This was a house on fire. An awful premonition seized him and he speeded up, but as he came out of the curve he saw at once that he was wrong: This was not his house. It was the Phelans’. In a final burst of speed he ran past it, up his own path, and put his key in his front door.
“Selena! Are you there? . . . For God’s sake, get up, put a coat on and come out!”
His wife had been in bed. Policemen’s hours are unpredictable, and Malcolm was, if anything, early. She was in her eighth month of pregnancy and found she needed a lot of sleep. But she heard through the fug of her dreams, shouted back, and within a couple of minutes was out and in the Avenue, pulling her warmest coat around her nightdress. The lower story of the Phelans’ house was an inferno. Malcolm had darted through the treacherous shapes of the front garden and was now at the side door. Immediately he saw that it was no go.
“Get her out next door. Mrs. Makepeace—get her out. And get the brigade. Don’t ring from our house, go to the phone box.”
The kitchen door, round the back of the house, was a bit easier. Inside the smoke seemed thick, but the room was not alight. Malcolm Cray found a piece of heavy metal, part of a motorbike, by the back step, but when he had broken the glass in the door, turned the key inside, and opened up, he was driven back by thick, acrid smoke—the sort of smoke produced by synthetic stuffing in cheap furniture. It was a smell he remembered, with revulsion, from a previous fire he was at, at an Asian family’s home.
He ran round the front, still clutching the metal. He found Mrs. Makepeace now out in the road, and his wife haring down it to the phone box.
“A ladder—have you got one?”
“No—but there’s one in the next-door garden. The painters were here earlier.”
He dashed into the garden two down from the Phelans’. Yes, there was a painter’s ladder, left down behind the hedge. It was heavy and unwieldly, but he maneuvered it through the gate and along to the Phelans’.
“Can you stand at the bottom?” he asked Lottie Makepeace. “Don’t endanger yourself—but there are children.”
“I’ll be all right, Malcolm. There’s only the young ones there, so far as I know.”
“Thank God.”
He cursed as he knocked his ankle against the spare parts that littered the front garden. By now the flames were providing ample light, but it was difficult to find a place to set up the ladder under an upstairs window. He kicked debris aside, set the ladder against the wall, and ran up.
“Stand back!” he called down, and hit with all his strength at the glass beneath the window handle.
By now lights were going on all over the Estate. Selena’s was not the only call to the Fire Station, though it was the first. As she came out of the phone box, on the corner of Grange Street, a woman came out of her house, in curlers and dressing gown. She put her arms around Selena.
“Christ, love, was it you? Were the bastards after you?”
“No, it’s not our house. It’s the Phelans’.”
“Oh. Then they were after the Phelans.”
Together they ran back along the Avenue. The fire was burning with hideous brilliance and a terrible lump came into Selena’s throat as she thought: My baby could be born without a father. From the broken window upstairs smoke was billowing, but it did not have the acrid, somehow unnatural power of the smoke from downstairs. A little knot of neighbors had gathered, looking lurid, almost threatening in the flickering light and smoke. One of the men had replaced Lottie Makepeace at the bottom of the ladder. As they drew near, Selena saw that one of the women from the house opposite was carrying a crying child.
“He’s got Dale out,” she explained. “Your husband’s a marvel.”
“I know. God—I wish the fire engine would come.”
From the distance, on cue, they heard the sound of a siren, and at that moment Selena saw her husband—it had to be him—in the smoke-filled window upstairs, carrying something in his arms. The man at the bottom darted up, and then slowly came down, bearing a burden in his arms.
“Jackie,” said the neighbor. “That’ll be Jackie.”
“Please God, don’t go back in, Malcolm,” prayed Selena. “Come down. They’re on their way.”
But he disappeared again into the smoke.
Now the engine was arriving. It came from the direction of Grange Street and pulled up outside the Phelans’ in a wailing crescendo, scattering the bystanders. There was no sleeping through this: By now lights were on in nearly every house. “Hurry, please hurry. My husband’s in there!” Selena shouted. But she needn’t have. In a moment the ladders were off the engine, up against a wall, and hoses were being trained on the house. Masks were pulled on, windows were broken. And suddenly, in the midst of all that activity, Selena saw through the smoke issuing threateningly out of the broken upstairs window two shapes, cumbrously intertwined. Her heart leapt up in gratitude.
Malcolm was big, but he was having problems. It was a heavy, unyielding, unhelping shape that he was half-leading, half-carrying. But now there was expert help. A fireman positioned a ladder a foot away from the one Malcolm had used, and one fireman went up each. Slowly, clumsily, the three men eased the body out of the window and began carrying it down the ladder. Through the smoke Selena could see that it was wearing a nightdress.
She saw too that the fireman holding the body’s legs was pulling at Malcolm’s arms, telling him to come out. Surely . . . yes: With a heart-thump of relief she saw him climbing out of the window, onto the ladder.
She held herself back. He would not want her to go over to him now. He was a policeman, back on duty, and she was a policeman’s wife. The restraint cost her dear. She looked down toward Wynton Lane: She could see the top stories of the houses, and there were lights in two of them. An ambulance was shrilling near, down the Lane, and turning into the Avenue. But from the other direction, from her right, she heard a shout and running feet. Turning she saw Michael and Cilla Phelan.
The bus from Manchester had let the Estate children off at the corner of Grange Street. The bus had gone on, but as soon as the two children had turned into the Estate they had realized that there was a fire. Selena and the neighbor who was still carrying Dale, now quiet, ran forward to intercept them.
“Don’t go any closer. There’s . . . there’s been a fire at your house.”
“We can see that,” said Cilla.
“What about Dale? And Jackie?” demanded Michael.
“Jackie’s all right, I think,” said the neighbor. “And this is Dale. He’s fine.”
Michael looked up at her, put up his arms, and took the small bundle. He nursed it with an odd, reserved tenderness.
“That’s Jackie over there by the gate,” he said to Cilla. “Go and get her. . . . What about Mum and Dad?” he asked Selena.
“Your Mum—well, she’s out. We’ll hope she’ll be all right. I . . . I don’t think your Dad is yet.”
“He’ll happen have been sleeping downstairs in front of the telly. He often does if he comes back late from the pub.” He looked toward the house with an expression of wonder and fear. “If our Dad’s downstairs, I reckon he’s dead.”
“They’re putting Mum into the ambulance,” announced Cilla, returning with her sister. “She looks terrible.”
Selena and the neighbor looked down at the girl’s face, half illuminated and half darkened by the unnatural light of the flames. It showed neither pity nor fear—only an avid interest, and a sort of pleasure at being in the center of a sensation. The two women looked at each other, but said nothing.
There was a second ambulance by now, come to be in readiness, but it was a long time before it was needed. A police presence had also got to the scene, and Malcolm Cray could get away and come over to see his wife. He said “OK?” and they stood, arms around each other, in a closer communion than words could give. The hoses were giving the house a terrible dousing. From the little hallway the fire had spread, taking in every piece of gimcrack furniture, every pile of discarded clothes or toys that lay around the place. The furniture in the living room had been a firetrap—the suite, bought secondhand with a grant from the Social Security Office, was the main source of the acrid fumes. The fireman who penetrated it finally found a man there, but the word was immediately passed out that there was no question of his being alive. The ambulance men outside had a sheet, and when the body was stretchered out through the back door it was thrown over it, to keep it from the curious gaze of bystanders.
At her shoulder Selena Cray felt her husband’s body racked with sobs. She turned and put her face in the horrible-smelling blue material of his shirt.
“You couldn’t have saved him, love,” she whispered. “No one could.”