‘Didn’t you hear?’ said Kal angrily.
‘If it’s your smell, it’s not a problem.’ He picked up her bag. She glared at him but he only smiled. Did he not know how close to death he was? Mind, he was built like a large brick shithouse. Two large brick shithouses actually. In fact he was so big it was possible he distorted time and space. He had his own gravitational pull, like a blond planet, and he’d fallen for Kal like a sperm whale failing to clear the Grand Canyon on a bicycle. He thought no one knew. He slung her bag over his shoulder and helped her to her feet. ‘Come on.’
Moving like an old woman, she hobbled out.
The Chief smiled at me. ‘Your turn.’ I reached for my bag but he’d already picked it up. I looked at my burned hands and my stiff, red fingers, swollen from all that time in water. Now it was all over, I doubted I had the strength to put one foot in front of the other.
‘Lean on me,’ he said and, just for once, I allowed myself to do so.
Chief Farrell visited us in Sick Bay the next day, bringing with him a box of various bits and pieces we’d left behind in the pod. All the records had been uploaded and everyone was waiting on our reports. We nodded.
He said, ‘I’ve already debriefed Sussman and gather it wasn’t shellfire after all, but an accidental explosion. Can you give me the details?’
‘I think Max is the best person to talk to,’ said Kal, ‘She was the one on the spot.’ To my surprise, she pulled an incomprehensible face and left the room.
‘So,’ said Farrell, sitting down next to me and smiling. ‘How are you?’
‘Absolutely fine,’ I said, so pleased to see him.
He regarded me warily. ‘Is it safe to be this close?
I hear you’ve developed your own defence mechanism.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said ruefully. ‘I don’t think he’ll ever forgive me.’
He looked at me carefully for a while and then said, ‘So, tell me all about it.’
‘There’s not much I can tell you. First of all I was behind the door and then I was underneath it. Then the corridor was full of smoke. Then I was outside. I know it spread really quickly.’
‘Yes,’ he said absently. ‘Old building. Did you smell anything?’
Did I? I shut my eyes and walked through it again. And again. And there it was, on the very edge … ‘Yes, yes I did.’ I actually sniffed, tasting it with my nostrils. ‘Yes … chemicals … like the lab sometimes.’
He sat back. ‘I think probably not gunfire at all. I think sabotage.’
‘Someone sabotaged a hospital?’
He shrugged. ‘Looks like it. There’s no source of combustion, only the hot pipes from the boilers running through the rooms to air the linen. So I think someone very carefully mixed a chemical cocktail. I think it smouldered for a while, generating some heat and actually opening the door provided additional oxygen and created the fireball.’ He was watching me carefully. ‘Does that sound likely?’
I wasn’t listening properly. ‘So it was me? I did it? I set fire to the hospital?’
‘No, no, no. Absolutely not, Miss Maxwell, I didn’t mean that at all. Please don’t think … The person who mixed the chemicals set fire to the hospital. It wasn’t you.’
‘You can’t know that.’
I spent the rest of the day going over and over things in my mind. If I had noticed that warm door handle … If I’d been paying attention … If I just stopped and thought occasionally … I know the fire had to happen because it had already happened, but it was a shock to discover that I was the one who might have caused the very catastrophe we went to investigate.
We were both restless all day. Sussman had been discharged. By unspoken consent we left the lights on. Nurse Hunter irritated us by constantly sticking her head round the door and going away again. After an hour, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I sat up and, for something to do, rummaged around the box the Chief had brought. There was something knobbly at the bottom. I pulled out a paper-wrapped bundle. Six pieces of chunky charcoal. The big stuff, not the little girlie willow sticks.
I looked at them.
I looked at the big wall to my left.
The big, blank wall.
The nice, big, blank wall.
I swung my legs out of bed. ‘Give me a hand to shift this table.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to stand on it.’