Throughout the day and into the night, he rang Nicole, Justin, Jenna. His panic grew when he heard their answering machines and waited in vain for them to return his calls.
He was upstairs in his bedroom when the crash of broken glass alerted him. Shocked but not surprised, he checked the window and saw them in his garden. Youths, he guessed, their hulking shapes indistinguishable in the darkness.
‘Fucking paedo… out! Out! Out!’ Their voices rose. ‘Burn the paedo… burn the paedo!’
Had they come from Ben’s Shack, high on whatever it took to make their blood race? Secure in numbers, they were in control of chaos, uncaring how it was unleashed. Cameras flashed as the photographers moved around the edge of the riot. Reporters retreated from the pavement to the safety of the road as a flame flared from the mouth of a bottle.
Karl heard another crash and a whoosh as the petrol exploded. He ran down the stairs and grabbed the fire extinguisher from the hall. The petrol bomb had come through the living-room window. He aimed the fire extinguisher at the flames spreading across the wooden floor. They were quickly extinguished but the smoke, black, dense and choking, shoved him backwards. He closed the door and ran into the kitchen, soaked a tea towel in water. Using it to mask his nose and mouth, he returned to the living-room. The floorboards and the curtains were alight. The television screen burst, showering glass into the flames. He struggled to breathe, dizzy and disoriented from the chemical fumes. The fire was out of control, the sofa smouldering as flames licked along the scrolled armrests. He retreated to the hall but he could still hear the roar of fire gaining ground behind the closed door. He had left his phone in the bedroom. He sprinted up the stairs, terrified a second petrol bomb would be flung into the hall and he would be unable to come back down. The electricity blew and he had to scrabble in the darkness for his phone. He hurried downstairs and out into the open air. His throat felt so charred he was unsure if the woman on the emergency line could understood what he was saying. She kept reassuring him that the emergency services were already on their way.
Lights had been switched on in neighbouring houses. Doors opened and figures emerged in dressing gowns. The teenagers had scattered, running from the flames and belching smoke. Karl gave chase and grappled with a youth who had taken longer than the others to run. A solidly built physique, he was probably on the local rugby team, bulked with creatine and aggression. He struggled to escape, roaring with pain as Karl punched him repeatedly in the face. His friends never looked back. Karl had no idea if the youth he had caught was the one who had flung the petrol bomb, nor did he care. All he knew, with a chilling certainty, was that he was capable of hitting this anonymous teenager until he lay lifeless on the ground.
A siren sounded, the whirring noise almost deafening in its urgency. The fire brigade entered Cherrywood Terrace. Hands dragged at Karl, pulled him away.
‘Murdering fucking paedo.’ The youth struggled to his feet. ‘What did you do to Constance?’ He tried to lunge at Karl but was held back by the man restraining him.
‘That’s enough lip out of you.’ The voice of the man who had pulled them apart was familiar. ‘You’re under arrest on a charge of arson,’ he shouted at the teenager. ‘Don’t make this any worse for yourself or you’ll be cooling your heels for the night in a cell.’
Plain clothes detectives. Karl should have guessed. The same ones who had interrogated him at the police station. Before the stunned youth could reply he was clasped in handcuffs. A squad car had followed the fire brigade and the handcuffed youth, blood flowing from his nose and a cut below his eye, was led away. He looked back at Karl before entering the squad car.
‘Murdering paedo,’ he roared. ‘I’ll have you up on an assault charge and you won’t get off so easily on that one.’
‘You stood by and let them burn me out.’ Karl’s voice was too croaky to sound angry or disbelieving as he confronted the two detectives, who must have watched the unfolding scene. The woman looked as dishevelled as he remembered, her eyes sunk into tired folds. She shrugged, without replying, and turned to speak to a guard in uniform.
‘We’ve dealt with it. If you’ve a complaint to make, you’re free to do so.’ The male detective walked away, a tall, imposing figure, illuminated by the fire truck’s headlights.
The firefighters had extinguished the blaze in minutes.
‘You okay, Karl?’ Dominick stopped to speak to him.
Karl rubbed his sleeve across his eyes and tried to focus on his friend. Dominick took off his helmet and ran his hand through his thinning hair.
‘How bad is the damage?’ Karl asked.
‘It’s been confined to the living-room.’ The hard lines of Dominick’s face were streaked with soot, his eyes red-rimmed. ‘Detective Newton alerted the emergency services as soon as those yobs lit the petrol bomb so there was no time wasted.’ His tone was cold and formal. ‘There’ll be smoke damage so you’ll need an assessor to give you the full picture. Just as well you were on your own when it happened.’
Karl’s eyes smarted. Tears chafed his cheeks. Smoke or anguish, what did it matter? Sasha could have been sleeping in her Dora the Explorer bedroom, Nicole in the next room. He staggered, his knees giving way, and reached towards his friend to steady his balance.
‘You heard about Constance?’ he asked.
Dominick stiffened. ‘I heard,’ he said. ‘Heart-breaking.’
His disgust, barely concealed, ran like a fine wire along Karl’s arm. He was surrounded by people, the media, police, firemen, neighbours. The same neighbours who had gathered in Justin and Jenna’s house to help in the search for Constance. He was conscious of a palpable wave of hostility directed at him from all directions. This then, was hell, he thought.
Hell had always been an abstract concept to him, terrifyingly real when he was small, dismissed when he was in his teens, and ignored until now. But it existed, not in some eternal furnace occupied by tormented souls. It was here, in this quiet, suburban terrace where neighbours gathered in each other’s houses for parties and book clubs and children’s birthday celebrations. Hell was watching the uncertainty on the faces surrounding him. Neighbours who believed he was guilty of a crime that had yet to be determined. Hell was watching the smouldering remains of a living-room where he sat in the evenings with Nicole, watching box sets together on the sofa, discussing their day’s work, regaling each other with funny Sasha stories after their daughter had gone to bed. Hell was his dead niece whose disappearance had shattered everything he had taken for granted: trust, love, friendship, family bonds.