No other floors seemed to be affected but tongues of bright fire streamed from our balcony. The pavement below was dotted with people in nightclothes and dressing gowns. Someone I didn’t know said, ‘It’s ok, they’re on the roof!’ and then raised their voice to where we were. ‘The fire brigade are on their way.’
We could not reply. It took everything we had to breathe. There was a sweet, meaty smell, like barbecued pork, on the air, and I remember looking around me, surprised that you could smell cooking at this hour; surely all the restaurants were closed. It wasn’t until I looked down and saw his bubbled flesh that I realised I could smell the seared flesh of Kit’s left palm.
Blue lights circled across the common. The ladders went up and the hoses went on. You could hear the sizzling from the pavement. Kit and I sat on the back step of the ambulance, oxygen masks around our necks and blankets over our shoulders. One paramedic treated Kit’s hand while the other called the A&E department at Bart’s. I was appalled that I had risked both our lives for a photograph.
‘Your landlord’s got a lot to answer for,’ said one of the firefighters, helmet off, sweat carving red tributaries on a blackened face. ‘I’ll bet you anything it’s electrics. I can’t think of anything else that’d cause a fire like that in a stairwell. You can see where the plaster’s come off the wall; that wiring’s got to be sixty years old.’
‘It’s the force as much as the heat,’ said the paramedic, gently wrapping bandages around Kit’s palm, making him whimper in pain. I’d never seen beads of sweat on anyone’s face before, but his forehead was studded with fat droplets that looked solid as set wax. I could hear him grinding his teeth with the effort of not screaming. The firefighter was called away by a colleague. ‘If you’d only touched it we’d be talking about a little sting. You must’ve given that door handle a good yank. Mind you, if you hadn’t, you’d be toast now.’
Another firefighter approached us, his gloved hand flat.
‘We’ve found the culprit.’ In his palm sat a tiny charred pink disc that I identified in seconds as a Blood Roses candle, or rather its remaining base. Even smashed and charred it held a ghost of its scent. I didn’t need to meet Kit’s eye to know that he knew it too. ‘If it was up to me I’d have these things banned. They’re the new cigarettes in terms of starting fires. Well, you won’t be doing that again in a hurry, will you?’ He leaned down like we were naughty five-year-olds. ‘What were you even doing, burning it on the stairs? Seriously, what were you thinking?’
‘Why did you . . .?’ I asked Kit, just as he said, ‘Why on earth would you . . .?’ Our voices were not our own, our vocal cords tattered by smoke. My own anger was reflected in his face. ‘I didn’t,’ he said.
‘Well, neither did I,’ I said. In the swelling silence we both put together the same puzzle. Mac and Ling aside, there was only one person who knew our flat, one person who knew where the candles were. I remembered with a swoop of horror the day I’d left her alone in our flat. She’d had eight hours to get herself a key cut. It was the only opportunity she’d had.
She’d wanted control from the start.
The firefighter’s face took on a completely different expression. ‘You’re sure neither of you did it.’
‘Absolutely not,’ we said in unison.
The firefighter nodded the answer to some internal question. ‘Right. We’ll take this seriously. We’ll get forensics to look for signs of forced entry. There’s CCTV on the kebab shop next door, it might yield something. You’ll have to make statements to the police. You wait here—’ as if we had any choice – ‘while I go and call a colleague.’
After his departure, we sat there in stunned silence for a while, watching the firefighters traipse in and out of our smoking building.
I finally faced the naivety that had made me lie in court and risk my relationship, risk my life. Taking as deep a breath as my charred lungs would allow, I said to Kit, ‘It’s not arson, is it? It’s attempted murder.’
Totality
Chapter 39
LAURA
28 September 2000
Seven days after the fire, I drove Ling’s old van round and round Clapham Common, looking for somewhere to park. Kit sat beside me, his left hand still in its big white mitten. On my third loop I finally found a metered space outside our flat. I managed to manoeuvre the van in without scraping the paint off the vehicles at either end, and we fed the meter enough coins to give us two hours.
‘I half expect her to be sitting on the doorstep,’ I said as I slammed the doors.
The police hadn’t been able to question Beth. Although they’d ‘had a chat’ with her, it wasn’t as a suspect. There were no witnesses and the CCTV camera on the side of the kebab shop turned out to be a dummy. The fire brigade had broken the door when they put out the fire, corrupting any evidence of forced entry. I braved Kit’s fury – ‘What were you thinking, leaving a stranger in the house?’ – to tell them about the possibility of a copied key, but all the local locksmiths drew a blank. Beth’s DNA was all over our house – she had let herself out only hours before the fire – and so forensics would have been meaningless. There was nothing to stop Beth coming after us. My bottomless reservoir of compassion had dried up. Empathy wasn’t going to save us when we were choking.