Fire Pattern

CHAPTER 1

The Whiteford Examiner was much like any other small-town newspaper which had reached the year 1996 in a healthy condition.

It had survived the electronic revolution largely because it was impossible to take a television set out on the back porch, find in it enough small ads and local gossip to make a day’s reading, and drape it over one’s face when the summer heat and the drone of insects had finally induced sleep. The paper’s headquarters were in a narrow four-storey building in the main street, sandwiched between a modern department store and an even more modern bank. Its owners, the Kruger family, were proud that the Examiner building was listed as having historical and architectural interest, and each day a stat of the front page of fifty years earlier was posted in a glazed box by the front entrance.

Ray Jerome usually liked the working environment of the reporters’ room on the second floor. There was a feeling of vitality about it, a sense of being close to the living heart of the community, which helped to fill the gap at the centre of his own life. The loss of his wife through illness and of his engineering job through redundancy had almost broken him at one stage, but the newspaper work—a complete change of direction—had come along at the right time. He had taken to it with all the zeal of an intelligent, lonely, middle-aged man beginning a new life and, as often happens in such circumstances, had created problems both for himself and those around him.

The first difficulty of the new day arose when Hugh Cordwell, the young journalist at the adjoining desk, began to compose his report about a clash between two juvenile gangs in one of Whiteford’s most troublesome districts. Cordwell brooded for a moment, began typing rapidly with two fingers, and on his VDU there appeared the heading: POLICE CALLED TO GANGLAND FLASHPOINT.

Jerome leaned sideways to get a better look at the screen. “You’re not going to let that go through, are you?”

Cordwell stared at the words and then at Jerome. “What’s wrong with it?”

“A flashpoint isn’t a geographical location—it’s a temperature.”

“This isn’t one of your fancy technical journals,” Cordwell said, his china blue eyes showing the first hint of resentment. “Plain American is good enough around here.”

“But how can the police be called to a temperature?” Jerome decided to go for absurdity. “It’s like saying there was an incident on thirty degrees Celsius, at the corner of ten degrees Fahrenheit.”

“Bull,” Cordwell commented. “You’ve got more shit than a Christmas turkey.”

“There’s no need to be like that about it—I was only offering some friendly advice.”

“Shove your advice!”

“Charming attitude,” Jerome said in injured tones, looking around for backing. “You try to guide someone’s faltering footsteps in the general direction of literacy, and all you get…”

He allowed the sentence to trail off as his roving gaze encountered the slim, elegantly tailored figure of Anne Kruger, the Examiner’s chief editor. She had paused on the way in to her office, apparently overhearing the exchange between Jerome and Cordwell. A slight lift of her head as she went through the doorway told Jerome she wanted to speak to him. He stood up, threaded his way through a cluster of desks and joined her in the spacious room which overlooked Mayflower Square.

Before speaking to him she took off her brocade jacket, put it on a hanger and smoothed down her white silk blouse—a series of actions which made it clear to Jerome’s watchful eye that she was one of those women who appear, in defiance of time and biology, to reach their physical best at the age of forty. She had black hair, high cheekbones and a touch of hauteur which often led Jerome to picture her in Spanish-style riding clothes.

“Ray, what was going on out there?” she said, sitting down at her desk.

Jerome took off his steel-rimmed glasses and began to polish the already brilliant lenses. “Who’s to know what goes on in the mind of a juvenile? I simply mentioned to Hugh that he had misused a word and he…”

“That juvenile, as you call him, is a good reporter,” Anne cut in. “He’s quick to get hold of the facts and quick to get them into print.”

Jerome recalled, belatedly, that Cordwell was in the same age group as the men in whose company Anne liked to go water-skiing and hang-gliding at weekends. It had been undiplomatic to describe him as a child, but there was such a thing as sticking to one’s guns.

“But what about the language?” he said. “Doesn’t that come into it?”

“I’ve been over this with you before. Any slips in grammar or usage are picked up by the Leximat. Why do you think we installed it in the first place?”

The computer should be an adjunct to the human brain, not a replacement for it, Jerome replied inwardly, then decided there was such a thing as sticking to one’s guns too long. “I promise not to bother Hugh again. He’s only got a university degree in journalism—it isn’t fair to expect him to know the meanings of words.”

“Drop it, Ray.”

“Sorry. Sorry.” Jerome was about to leave the office when he noticed that Anne had not given her customary dismissive flick of the head. “Was there anything else?”

“Yes. You’re always telling me how good you’d be as a science correspondent—so I’m going to give you the chance to prove it.” Anne handed him a scrap of paper on which she had written an address in a residential swath on the town’s south side. “Contact a woman called Maeve Starzynski. There was a fire at the house last week and her father got burned to death.”

“I saw the…” Jerome paused, gripped by an uneasy premonition. “What kind of a science story is that?”

“I’ve just been talking to a friend in the coroner’s office and he tells me there were some very unusual aspects to this particular fire. It sounds to me like spontaneous human combustion.”

“Oh, no!” Jerome gave a scornful laugh, deliberately making it as explosive as possible to signal the strength of his feelings. “Don’t do this to me, Anne. Don’t do it to the paper. In the last few months we’ve been up to here in phony spiritualists, UFO nuts, telepathic twins and characters who foresaw airliner crashes but kept their mouths shut till afterwards. We’re going to lose all credibility with our readers.”

“There’s a great deal of evidence…”

“There’s no evidence! None at all! People who babble on about astrology and thought photographs and spoon-bending and telekinesis and card-guessing don’t even know what the word evidence means.”

“If you call up our ‘Unexplained’ file you’ll he able to find…”

“Nothing that hasn’t been explained.”

“Do you mind letting me finish just one sentence?” Anne’s face darkened with aristocratic anger and for a moment Jerome could almost see it framed by a flat black sombrero. “If you look in the file you’ll find that people sometimes do burst into flames for no reason, and you’ll also find that the details are quite odd.”

“No doubt I will,” Jerome said sarcastically. “The human body has a built-in fire extinguisher which is otherwise known as blood. Four or five litres of it. Those people who combusted must have been a touch anaemic, or—better still—perhaps they had two strange punctures in their necks…”

“If you would rather try earning your living as a comedian instead of reporting for this newspaper I’m sure I can arrange a quick release for you.”

A hard brightness in Anne’s eyes told Jerome she was in a dangerous mood and that he was not going to evade the unwelcome assignment. He clamped his lips and nodded as she gave her end-of-interview wave, a limp-fingered flick of the hand which might have been directed against a bothersome gnat. Ignoring the amused looks from the other journalists, he returned to his desk and pressed the REF key on terminal. He called up the “Unexplained’ file and ran his gaze down the list of headings which appeared on the screen. The list was extensive, reflecting the editor’s personal interest in the subject, but there was no mention of spontaneous human combustion.

Jerome’s sudden flickering of hope was doused as he backtracked and found “Auto-incendiarism’, a word to which he took a dislike on sight, classifying it as one of the pretentious labels which abound on the lunatic fringes of science. He stared at the screen in distaste, fingers hovering over the keys, experiencing a broody reluctance to involve himself any further with Anne Kruger’s foibles.

“Did old Randy Kruger work you over?” The question came from Julie Thornback, a petite and doll-like blonde who, in spite of being less than half Jerome’s age, had a couple more years experience in journalism and liked to give him advice as from an old hand.

“No. We were having a nice little chat.”

Julie nodded in casual disbelief. “Don’t let her wind you up, Ray. You’ll never guess what she had the nerve to say to Hugh and I.”

“Hugh and me,” Jerome said, hoping the correction would be enough to show he did not want to be disturbed.

“What?”

“You should have said ‘to Hugh and me’.”

Julie’s lips moved silently as she tried the phrase out. “It doesn’t sound right.”

Jerome sighed. “Look at it this way—if Hugh hadn’t been there, if Anne had been talking to you alone, would you have said she was talking to ‘I’?”

“No.”

“That’s your answer then. Excellent fellow though Hugh undoubtedly is, we don’t change the rules of English simply because he appears on the scene.”

Hugh Cordwell, who had been deep in his gang war report, raised his head. “Are you sniping at me again, professor?”

Before Jerome could reply Anne Kruger came out of her office, instantly detected the charge in the atmosphere and accused him with a luminous stare. He blanked his VDU screen, stood up and walked out of the room, suddenly deciding that any kind of outdoor assignment was preferable to being in a psychological autoclave. Why should he elevate his blood pressure over the fact that youngsters whose job was communication cared little for the tools of their trade? What was it to him if the chief editor of an influential paper enthusiastically promoted belief in the paranormal? It was ironic that the first and only woman to stir any feelings in him since the death of his wife had to be Anne Kruger—the least compatible and least attainable of all—but that too was something he had to accept. To do otherwise was to invite hypertension.

Wincing a little from the arthritis in his left knee, Jerome went down the stairs and out past the front office. In the street he blinked to adjust his eyes to the morning sunlight, then crossed to where his car was parked in the shade of the trees lining Mayflower Square. He opened the trunk, took out a detergent spray and some paper towels and spent a few minutes cleaning bird droppings from the car’s paintwork. When it had been restored to a satisfactory condition he placed the towels in a litter bin, got into the car and edged it into the traffic flow.

The address he had been given was almost ten minutes away and he used the time to listen for news of the Mercury expedition which had been slung out of Earth orbit a week earlier. The three-man ship, Quicksilver, was the first ever to have been designed, built and launched by a private corporation, and coverage of its progress was the sort of thing Jerome had had in mind when pressing for the post of science correspondent. All he got on the radio, however, were reports of the Argentine-Chile war and of the Philippines continuing with atmospheric H-bomb tests in defiance of the UN injunction. Vietnam and Western Malaysia, the countries suffering most from Philippine fall-out, were gathering a joint invasion force in spite of having been warned off by every major power which had an interest in that theatre.

The reminder that his personal problems were microscopic compared to those facing humanity in general gave Jerome the idea that he should adopt a more relaxed attitude in life. He knew exactly the kind of story Anne wanted—so all he had to do to squelch the matter was to write the one she did not want to see. It had to be cold, factual, rational and—above all else—dull. He switched off the radio and began checking street numbers. The address he wanted was in the SE twenties and it turned out to be a framed bungalow of medium size, elevated from the street by a neatly tiered rock garden. Its masses of red, white and blue alpines might have been planted with a patriotic theme in mind. The house itself, Jerome noticed, bore no external signs of fire.

He parked, got out of the car and was locking the door when it occurred to him that he had been too preoccupied with logical arguments to think about the human tragedy involved. A woman had lost her father in particularly disturbing circumstances only a few days earlier, and there was no telling how she would react to finding a newsman on her doorstep. Now that he considered the matter, he should have telephoned for an appointment and perhaps have saved himself a journey. Maeve Starzynski could be staying elsewhere with relatives, for all he knew. Half hoping that was the case, Jerome went up the steep concrete steps. He was breathing heavily by the time he reached the front door and his knee felt as though the joint interfaces had been dusted with powdered glass. Only fifty years on the clock, he thought as he rang the doorbell, and the damned machine is wearing out fast.

The chimes were answered almost immediately by a youngish but tired-looking woman, and he knew at once she was the dead man’s daughter. She was wearing a charcoal suit and her face was round and pleasant, giving the impression of a bookish intelligence which Jerome found appealing.

“Good morning,” he said. “My name is Rayner Jerome and I’m a reporter with the Examiner. I hate to intrude at a time like this, but my editor asked me to call…”

“It’s all right,” she said in a resigned monotone. “Come in.”

“Thank you.” Jerome followed her into the house, noting that though her hair and clothing were acceptably neat they did not have the precise control he instinctively associated with her character type. He guessed she was making her own way through purgatory, seeking no help from outsiders, and his natural sympathy became stronger. He had been along the same road. She led the way into a copper-glinting kitchen, picked up a carton of tea bags and gave him an enquiring glance. Jerome nodded gratefully.

“I wasn’t sure if anybody would come out to see me,” she said as she prepared two mugs of tea. “I don’t know your editor personally, but a friend in the Pythian Sisters said she would speak to her on my behalf. I’m glad you were able to call.”

“So am I,” Jerome said, floundering a little as he realized a new complication had been added to the situation. The bereaved woman had views of her own which might or might not coincide with those of Anne Kruger, and which in any case constituted another editorial pressure on him. He began to feel impatience, an urge to have done with the sad affair as quickly as possible.

“People can be so silly, so vindictive,” Maeve Starzynski went on. “They’re saying my father had so much alcohol in his system that he flared up like a torch…as if alcohol isn’t converted into other substances in the body…as if you store it up inside you like a gas tank…That’s just plain silly, isn’t it?”

“Extremely.” Jerome drank some tea and set the mug down. “May I see the room where you had the fire?”

“Through here.” Maeve led the way along the central hall and turned left into a sitting room which Jerome had passed when coming in. It was a corner room, with windows on two adjoining sides, furnished for comfort rather than style with deep settees and home-made bookshelves. Orange throwrugs on a floor covering of café-au-lait vinyl added to the general brightness and cheerfulness of the place. The walls and ceiling were close to being immaculate and the air was fresh. Jerome, who was familiar with the acrid stench which lingers for weeks at the scene of a house fire, looked around with some puzzlement. The only discrepant feature was a square of hardboard which had been placed on the floor near an empty television stand.

“There has been remarkably little damage,” he said tentatively. “Usually when a house catches fire there’s a lot…”

“The house didn’t catch fire,” Maeve interrupted. “It was my father who caught fire and burned away to nothing.” Her gaze wavered for an instant. “Almost nothing.”

Jerome indicated the piece of hardboard. “I know this must be distressing for you, but is that where you found the body?”

Maeve shook her head, her face stubborn. “There wasn’t any body to find. This is what I can’t make people understand. My father was turned into a heap of fine ash. Cigar ash, almost. It was in there.” She stooped and slid the hardboard aside, revealing a roughly circular black-edged hole about a metre across. It was traversed by floor joists whose upper edges were badly charred, and at the bottom of the cavity were visible the laths and plaster forming the ceiling of a basement room.

Jerome studied the strangely circumscribed fire damage, noting that there was only slight blistering on the nearby skirting board, and his mind balked at what he was being asked to accept. The amount of heat needed to incinerate a human body to the extent Maeve Starzynski had described should have seared everything within a sizeable radius, should have started a serious blaze. He waited a few seconds then abruptly raised his head and scanned the woman’s face. Her gaze locked with his, her eyes candid, intelligent and very troubled.

I respect this person, Jerome thought. But where is she trying to take me?

“Would you mind telling me exactly what happened?” he said, beginning to walk around the room and examine the rest of its contents.

“It has to be done,” she replied steadily. “The first point is that my father was smoking his pipe when I last saw him, and he had just gotten some hot ash on his cardigan.”

Jerome paused in his circuit of the room, feeling an immediate stirring interest.

“No,” Maeve said, anticipating his question. “I only mention it because the men from the coroner’s office made such a fuss about it. There wasn’t nearly enough ash to set his clothes on fire. And even if there had been it wouldn’t explain anything important, would it?”

“I see what you mean.”

“Secondly, my very last words to my father were, ‘I wish you would burn yourself to death’.”

Jerome halted again, shocked, aware of the conversational focus making an uneasy slide from straight reportage into murkier regions. Refraining from comment, he stroked the cool curvature of a millefiori paperweight which was sitting on a bookshelf.

“The main reason I mention that,” Maeve went on, “is that it happened and it’s the sort of thing some women would be stupid enough to develop a neurosis over, but I’m going to keep it up front and let the fresh air blow around it. We were having a tiff about his smoking. I’m quick-tempered and that’s what I said and we both knew I didn’t mean it.”

“I’m sure your attitude is absolutely correct. What happened next?”

“I went into the kitchen to make us some coffee, and I was in there maybe ten minutes while it was perking.” Maeve gave a rueful smile. “Any time Dad had to make the coffee himself he used instant, but when I was doing it for him it had to be percolated.”

“I see.” Jerome, in spite of his instinctive desire to stay aloof from personalities, was beginning to see the dead man as an individual in his own right. It would have been better if Art Starzynski could have remained Subject X, but the room where he had met his ghastly and inexplicable death insisted on his being accorded a human identity. Everywhere Jerome looked there were mute testimonials to Starzynski having been a man, not an insurance company statistic. There were several unremarkable fossils which derived significance solely from the fact that he had chosen to retain them; a seed catalogue; framed certificates for proficiency in first aid; a little heart-shaped cachou box; antique military field-glasses; tobacco cans; foreign coins. A real person had spent a good part of his life in this room and the evidence seemed to suggest that something very strange had brought that life to a close.

“…making the coffee I began to notice a sweet burning smell,” Maeve was saying. “Heavy and sickly it was, the way you imagine incense would be. When I came into the hall I noticed some light blue smoke and when I opened the door the room was full of it. I couldn’t see anything at first, then I saw this hole in the floor by the television set. There were no flames. Just this hole in the floor and…and…”

Jerome returned to the paperweight and stared into its vivid closed universe, shamed by his eagerness to hear what was coming next.

Maeve took a deep breath and when she spoke again her voice was light and unconcerned, the voice of a stranger. “All that was left of my father was a heap of fine ash. I wouldn’t even have known it was him. I would have thought he had gotten clean out of the room if it hadn’t been for his left hand. That was the only part of him that didn’t burn. It was lying on the floor, right beside the hole.”

Jerome felt a cool prickling on his spine. In part it was due to the overt content of what he had just heard, but in the main it was a reaction to the changes which had taken place inside him. At some indefinable point in Maeve Starzynski’s story he had begun to accept every word she said as true—and that meant there was something wrong with his own private picture of the universe. As a small child first learning arithmetic Jerome had been amazed at how perfectly the whole system of numbers fitted. No matter how many times he added or multiplied or carried out other manipulations there was never a stray quantity left over, and to his infant mind that had seemed too convenient to be true. He had spent hours of his free time performing tortuous calculations he had designed to trick the numerical system into revealing its secret flaw, the place where adult mathematicians had papered over a crack, and he had given up the quest with great reluctance. Now, unexpectedly, after all these years, he felt as though he had discovered the flaw, the hidden place where numbers refused to do what they were told. He looked closely at Maeve and saw that her face was pale and strained.

“I haven’t finished my tea,” he said. “The kitchen?”

Maeve nodded and they left the sitting room. In the kitchen she closed both hands around her mug of tea and took sip after sip from it, her eyes staring past Jerome into the yellow-turfed back garden. An electric clock on the wall made faint scraping sounds.

Jerome finished his own drink and set the mug down. “I have one more question, but if you’d prefer not to…”

“It’s all right. I’m all right.”

“Where is the television set?”

“Oh, that! The police took it away for tests. One detective—I can’t remember his name—must have asked me a dozen times if it was switched on when I went into the room.” Maeve looked wanly amused. “He seemed quite upset when I insisted it wasn’t.”

“Electricity used to be the answer to everything.”

“But not any more,” Maeve said. “Not to this.”

“No.” Jerome had been striving without success for an explanation of what had happened to Art Starzynski, and now he could feel the bizarre mystery of it invading his mind like a stealthy army. It was a curious sensation, pleasurable and oddly familiar, then he realized that for a brief period, and for the first time since her death, Carla had been entirely displaced from his consciousness. And what had done it had been the intellectual challenge, the stimulation he had always felt when tackling some beguiling problem in applied or pure logic. For a moment he saw himself as the emotional equivalent of a vampire, feeding on the suffering of others, and had to repress a twinge of guilt. He gave Maeve Starzynski what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

“There is bound to be an explanation for what happened to your father,” he said. “I’ll do my best to find it.”