I was so shocked, so taken by surprise that it actually took me a few moments to work out what had happened. It may be that I was also briefly unconscious. When I opened my eyes, Charles was standing over me with a look that I can only describe as apologetic. I was lying on the carpet, my head close to the open door. Something trickled round my neck, coming from under my ear, and with difficulty I reached up and touched it. When I moved my hand away, I saw that it was covered in blood. I had been hit, extremely hard. Charles was holding something in his hand but my eyes didn’t seem to be working properly, as if something had been disconnected. In the end I managed to focus and if I hadn’t been frightened and in pain I might almost have laughed. He was holding the Golden Dagger Award that Alan had won for Atticus Pünd Investigates. If you’ve never seen one of these before, it’s a miniature-sized dagger encased in a fairly substantial block of Perspex, rectangular, with sharp edges. Charles had used it to club me down.
I tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come. Perhaps I was still dazed or perhaps I simply didn’t know what to say. Charles examined me and I think I actually saw the moment when he came to his decision. The life went out of his eyes and it suddenly occurred to me that murderers are the loneliest people on the planet. It’s the curse of Cain – the fugitive and the vagabond driven out from the face of the earth. However he might try to justify it, Charles had parted company with the rest of humanity the moment he had pushed Alan off that tower and the man who was standing over me now was no longer my friend or colleague. He was empty. He was going to kill me, to silence me, because when you have killed one person you have entered a sort of existential realm where to kill two more or to kill twenty will make no difference. I knew this and I accepted it. Charles would never know peace. He would never play happily with his grandchild. He would never be able to shave without seeing the face of a murderer. I found a little solace in that. But I would be dead. There was nothing I could do to prevent it. I was terrified.
He set the award down.
‘Why did you have to be so bloody obstinate?’ he asked in a voice that wasn’t quite his own. ‘I didn’t want you to go looking for the missing chapters. I didn’t care about the bloody book. All I was doing was protecting everything I’d worked for – and my future. I tried to get you to back off. I tried to send you in the wrong direction. But you wouldn’t listen. And now what am I going to do? I still have to protect myself, Susan. I’m too old to go to prison. You didn’t have to go to the police. You could have just walked away. You’re so bloody stupid …’
He wasn’t exactly talking to me. It was more a stream of consciousness, a conversation that he was having with himself. For my part, I lay where I was, unmoving. There was a searing pain in my head and I was furious with myself. He had asked me if I had told anyone else what I knew. I should have lied. At the very least I could have pretended I was with him, that I was happy to be an accomplice to Alan’s death. I could have said that and walked out of the office. Then I could have called the police. I had brought this on myself.
‘Charles …’ I croaked the single word. Something had happened to my eyesight. He was going in and out of focus. The blood was spreading around my neck.
He had been looking around him and picked something up. It was the box of matches that I had used to light my cigarette. I only understood what he was doing when I saw the flare of the phosphorous. It looked huge. He seemed to disappear behind it.
‘I’m sorry, Susan,’ he said.
He was going to set fire to the office. He was going to leave me to burn alive, getting rid of the only witness and, for that matter, the incriminating pages, which were still sitting on the desk where I had left them. I saw his hand move in an arc and it was as if a fireball had streaked across the room, whumping down beside the book shelves. In a modern office, it would have hit the carpet and gone out but everything about Cloverleaf Books was antique; the building, the wood panelling, the carpets, the furnishings. The flames leapt up instantly and I was so dazzled by the sight of them that I didn’t even see him throw a second match, starting a second blaze on the other side of the room, this time the fire rushing up the curtains and licking at the ceiling. The very air seemed to turn orange. I couldn’t believe how quickly it had happened. It was as if I was inside a crematorium. Charles moved towards me, a huge, dark figure that filled my vision. I thought he was going to step over me. I was lying in front of the door. But before he went he lashed out one last time and I screamed as his foot slammed into my chest. I tasted blood in my mouth. There were tears flooding out of my eyes, from the pain and the smoke. Then he was gone.
The office burned gloriously. The building dated back to the eighteenth century and it was a fire that was worthy of that time. I could feel it scorching my cheeks and hands and I thought I must be alight myself. I might simply have lain there and died but alarms had gone off throughout the building and they jolted me awake. Somehow I had to find the strength to get up and stagger out of there. There was an explosion of wood and glass as one of the windows disintegrated and that helped me too. I felt a cold wind rush in. It revived me a little and prevented the smoke from asphyxiating me. I reached out and felt the side of the door, used it to pull myself up. I could barely see. The orange and red of the flames were burning themselves into my eyes. It hurt me to breathe. Charles had broken some of my ribs and I wondered, even then, how he could have brought himself to behave so brutally, this man I had known for so long. Anger spurred me on and somehow I found myself on my feet but that didn’t help me. I had actually been safer closer to the floor. Standing up, I was surrounded by smoke and toxic fumes. I was seconds away from passing out.
The alarms were pounding at my ears. If there were fire engines on the way, I wouldn’t be able to hear them. I could hardly see. I couldn’t breathe. And then I screamed as an arm snaked round my chest and grabbed hold of me. I thought Charles had come back to finish me off. But then I heard a single word shouted into my ear. ‘Susan!’ I recognised the voice, the smell, the feel of his chest as he pressed my head against it. It was Andreas who had, impossibly, come out of nowhere to rescue me. ‘Can you walk?’ he shouted.
‘Yes.’ I could now. With Andreas next to me, I could do anything.
‘I’m going to get you out of here.’
‘Wait! There are some pages on the desk …’
‘Susan?’
‘We’re not bloody leaving them!’
He thought I was mad but he knew not to argue. He left me for a few seconds, then dragged me out of the room and helped me down the stairs. Tendrils of grey smoke followed us but the fire was spreading up not down and although I could barely see or think, with my whole body in pain and blood pouring from the wound in my head, we managed to make it out. Andreas dragged me through the front door and across the road. When I turned round, the second and third floors were already ablaze and although I could now hear approaching sirens, I knew that nothing of the building would be saved.
‘Andreas,’ I said. ‘Did you get the chapters?’
I passed out before he could reply.