Come to Harm

thirty-five

Mr. McKendrick arrived just after 3 a.m. and joined Keiko and Malcolm in the unlit living room, dropping into a chair and resting his head against the back of it. He smelled of oil and faintly of smoke, causing a jolt like an extra stair in the dark, reminding them of what was going to happen-what was already happening, while they sat here in the stillness. Keiko spoke first.

“Fancy’s gone home and Mrs. Poole is downstairs with the washing. Did everything-”

“I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “The less you know the better, in case you’re questioned.”

“And did you really not know any of this, Mr. McKendrick?” said Keiko. “I was so sure that you had a secret.”

“Me?” said Mr. McKendrick.

“The committee,” Keiko said. “I was convinced that something was going on and that everyone on the committee knew.”

“Aye well, you were right enough there,” Mr. McKendrick said. “But I can’t blame the committee. It was me pushing it all the way. Hand-in-hand with the redevelopment, you know.”

“What was it?” said Malcolm.

Mr. McKendrick shifted about a little before he spoke. “A grand idea,” he said. “Etta tipped us off. She got wind of it from a pal of hers at Holyrood and she let us get ahead of the pack here in Painchton, so we’d win the bidding.”

“Win the bidding for what?” said Keiko.

Mr. McKendrick laughed, but it was a dry and ugly sound. “Oh, a high honour,” he said. “Lots of publicity, lots of press, good for business. We were going to be Scotland’s Food Town.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Malcolm.

“Ah,” said Keiko. “That’s why I was so important then. A scholar of food.”

“Studying our traditions and writing about them,” said Mr. McKendrick.

“Jesus,” said Malcolm again.

Mr. McKendrick’s jaw worked for a while, then he sniffed deeply, clapped his hands onto his knees and pulled himself forward until he was sitting up straight. “Now, I don’t think anyone saw us, but still we’d all better get gone. Malcolm?”

“I’m going to stay here,” said Malcolm. “I don’t want Keiko to be on her own with Viola when the sirens start.”

“Keiko can manage,” said Mr. McKendrick. “Your mother shouldn’t be alone.”

“You stay with Mum,” said Malcolm. “My place is here.”

And that was the start of it; Malcolm saying straight out what he wanted to do. Typical though, that what he wanted to do was take care of someone.

And perhaps that was all there was to it, but she didn’t think so. She lay in bed beside Viola listening to her breathing and remembered. Malcolm, saying if aliens came he would talk to them. Malcolm, making suet pudding and yakitori, making sure people on the budget option didn’t feel their poverty. Malcolm, dancing in the streaming gutters when it rained. She slid out of bed and went to stand outside the spare bedroom door, talking herself in and out of it twice before knocking. There was no reply and she wondered if he was sleeping, but when she went in he was standing in the middle of the floor as close as he could get to the window without his shadow cutting into the block of moonlight. He had wrapped himself in a blanket and his silhouette was mountainous. When she walked up and leaned against him, letting her whole tired weight fade into his, it was as if he had taken root there; it was like resting against an oak tree.

She put one arm across the middle of his back and clutched the blanket in a fist to hold it there, remembering their collision and struggle, Craig McKendrick’s hoots of laughter rising behind them, their swift embrace cluttered with wineglasses, how she had backed away.

In a moment, she heard or felt him shift to look down at her, taking his gaze away at last from the window. One side of his face was in deep shadow, and where the moonlight hit the other it made pale, lava-lamp shapes of his features. His breathing was laboured, his mouth hanging slightly open as usual, and the breaths warming her face were sweet, as clear and clean as Viola’s breath when she was sleeping.

He turned to look out of the window again, forcing a draft of cool air between them with his movement, making Keiko shiver.

“Cold?” he asked. She nodded and he opened his arms, making a space for her in the roll of blanket, releasing a trace of that rosemary-scented warmth. Keiko stepped in and his arms engulfed her, spreading so that she felt swaddled from her neck to her waist and she let him take her full weight. She couldn’t make her arms reach around him, so instead she threaded them under his armpits and hooked them over his shoulders, squeezing as hard as she could, trying to make something big and strong out of her small body to comfort him. She rested her face against the middle of his chest where his shirt was open. And it didn’t feel clammy after all, but fur-covered, solid and warm, with the thump of his heart in her ear like a club beating on bark. He cupped the back of her head in one hand and she looked up at him, put her hands to the sides of his face and found that his hair was not oily as she had always imagined, but so soft and fine that she could draw her fingers through it from the roots to the tips and let it fall back like hanks of silk. He bent and kissed her head before pulling her against him again and, although her heart was racing, his remained slow and steady against her cheek until the first shout came from outside.

By the time the crowd had gathered, standing outside with coats over their nightclothes, the fire was burning as high as the two-storey buildings framing it at either edge of the Green, making a giant yellow-red cradle of flame wisping off into the black of the winter’s morning, occasionally split by a gust of wind that revealed a skeleton of rafters with the roof peeling back from them.

The heat kept the crowd swept back in a perfect arc, unable to take another step towards the oven blast that would tighten the skin on their faces like baking apples. They peered over the shoulders of the police patrolling the line and watched the firemen, distant stick figures against the glare.

Mr. McKendrick, persuaded to give up on his relay of buckets and stay out of the firemen’s way, stood on one side of Mrs. Poole with his arm around her shoulders. Malcolm held her other hand and although the crowd kept back from them as much as from the fire, Mrs. Poole could hear the whispers swoop and ripple.

“Murray Poole.”

“Nobody knows for sure.”

“All she said was he wasn’t at home.”

“But nobody knows.”

“Dear God.”

“God in heaven, no.”

The firemen retreated, hacking and steaming, lighting incongruous cigarettes and muttering to each other. A group standing close together bent respectfully and listened to a police sergeant, who looked like a doll beside them. She stretched out her radio hand again and again as she spoke, pointing into the crowd, and each time the firemen’s heads lifted and followed the gesture. Then two of them made their way over to Mrs. Poole and asked her where they could talk.

Just inside the street door, they peeled off their stinking armour and followed Mrs. Poole, Mr. McKendrick, and Malcolm upstairs, with the little policewoman behind them.

Fancy was sitting with Keiko in the kitchen. She had left her house at just the moment she might have if she had been woken by the sirens, and had come straight to the flat to check on Viola, clenching Keiko into a hug, enveloping her into the smell of washed hair and bathed skin.

“I just saw the fire,” she had said. “Is she awake? Is she sleeping through it? Listen, I’ve just been having the most disgusting nightmares I’ve ever had in my life. I must be psychic, eh? Do you hear me? I had a really bad dream. But I don’t ever want to talk about it, right?”

The firemen insisted, with practised rhetoric, that they should stay on washable surfaces, away from fabric, so they all huddled into the kitchen, Malcolm squeezing himself into the window casement to make more room for the others. Keiko and Fancy started making tea.

“And what makes you fear your son might be in there, madam?” asked what Keiko and Mr. McKendrick decided must be a prearranged spokesman, perhaps a trained communicator, whose job it was to liaise with the public in these soothing and confident tones.

As the sky lightened, dimming the fire ahead of its death, the talk in the kitchen circled and thrashed. Keiko put pans of extra water on the cooker to boil and rummaged out spare cups, Malcolm made toast, Fancy ferried trays of tea up and down to the parched throats of the rest of the crew, busy now. Once the fire had had its glory, there were small victories to be won.

Upstairs, the two firemen’s early hunch-that no discarded cigarette butt could do that much, that fast-was strengthening. The building was changing hands? There was some dispute over who was going to buy? So the missing young man might be angry? Mrs. Poole, clouded by lack of sleep, was not pretending as she reached out for what was being suggested here. She grasped at the fantasy that Murray was on the run from a terrible crime, sickened for real at the other story the fireman skirted round: that he had choked in the smoke while the rest of them were sleeping.

“Nobody seems to know what Mr. Byers’s home address might be,” said the policewoman.

“We’ll just wait for him to turn up for work,” said Mr. McKendrick. “See what he has to say.”

“And Forensics will start as soon as they can, Mrs. Poole,” said the fireman. “If your son was in there, and God forbid that he was, we’ll find something, but it’s not going to be much. You should prepare yourself for that, if you can.” He shook his head in practised sorrow, although he’d always found that a loved one gone with only zips and buttons curled into petals behind them wasn’t as hard to face, after months and cards and flowers had gone by, as a good-sized box of remains. He couldn’t say that right now, of course. Right now, the story of an absconding arsonist was still on the table, but he had been in this game too long not to know the feel of a site where souls had got away. He pulled a sigh up from his stockinged feet. “Whoever set that fire knew what he was doing,” he said. “And I’ll bet my pension that somebody set it.”

Fancy, pushing the door open, coming back with a tray of empty cups, caught Malcolm’s eye, and Sergeant Ballam, seeing the flash that passed between them, drooped into her tiredness just a little more. They cared about this biker boy, then, and she had a feeling there were no happy surprises to come; these good people had only pain ahead. She had seen them before, these shifts between despair and relief that were crossing Mrs. Poole’s face, the exhaustion of worry and that strange euphoria that every fire brings with it, and she knew that when you start your grieving bone-tired already from hope, it was a hard haul to the other side.

She and the firemen did not have to speak as they parted out on the street in the grey light. The men headed back to the trucks in the hero swagger of their heat-proof boots. The sergeant spent another while in desultory interviews with witnesses, each one confirming what she already knew, some of them even joking.

“Bloody good thing the fire was tonight and not yesterday, eh? Or Jimmy McKendrick would be cuffed and cautioned for sure.”

She chuckled. Laughing at their jokes was a big part of community policing.

“Aye, if they knew where to look for him,” said someone else. “I heard it wasn’t his own place he came from this morning.”

“Is that a fact?”

“And Malcolm Poole was on the scene pretty quick too.”

“Oh?”

“Oh yes.”

Behind her smile, the sergeant wondered-and not for the first time-how in God’s name anyone could live in a place like this. They’d eat you alive.