Highgate Rise (22 page)

Murdo hesitated.

“My boots are in the kitchen.” Pitt turned and left him to do as he pleased. He heard the latch close and Murdo tiptoeing heavily after him.

In the kitchen he put up the gas and sat on the hard-backed chair, reaching for his boots and then lacing them tightly. Murdo came in as far as the stove, relishing the warmth. His eyes went over the clean wood, the china gleaming on the dresser, and he caught the smell of laundry drying on the airing rail winched up towards the ceiling above them. Unconsciously the lines in his young face were already less desperate.

Charlotte appeared in the doorway in her nightgown, her bare feet having made no sound on the linoleum.

Pitt smiled at her bleakly.

“What is it?” she asked, glancing at Murdo and back at Pitt.

“Fire,” he said simply.

“Where?”

“Amos Lindsay’s. Go back to bed,” he said gently. “You’ll get cold.”

She stood white-faced. Her hair was dark over her shoulders, copper where the gaslight caught it.

“Who was in the house?” she asked Murdo.

“I dunno, ma’am. We aren’t sure. They was trying to get the servants out, but the heat was terrible, scorch the hair off—” He stopped, realizing he was speaking to a woman and probably should not be saying such things.

“What?” she demanded.

He looked miserable and guilty for his clumsiness. He stared at Pitt, who was now ready to go.

“Eyebrows, ma’am,” he answered miserably, and she knew he was too shocked to equivocate.

Pitt kissed Charlotte quickly on the cheek and pushed her back. “Go to bed,” he said again. “Standing here catching a chill won’t help anyone.”

“Can you tell me if—” Then she realized what she was asking. To dispatch someone with a message, simply to allay her fears, or confirm them, would be a ridiculous waste of manpower, when there were urgent things to be done, injured and perhaps bereaved people to help. “I’m sorry.”

He smiled, an instant of understanding, then turned and went out with Murdo and pulled the front door closed behind him.

“What about Shaw?” he asked as they climbed up into the cab and it started forward immediately. It was obviously quite unnecessary to tell the cabby where they were going. Within moments the horse had broken from a trot into a canter and its hooves rang on the stones as the cab swayed and turned, throwing them from one wall to the other, and against each other, with some violence.

“I don’t know, sir, impossible to tell. The place is an inferno. We ’aven’t seen ’im—it looks bad.”

“Lindsay?”

“Nor ’im neither.”

“Dear God, what a mess!” Pitt said under his breath as the cab lurched around a corner, the wheels lifting for an instant and landing hard on the cobbles again with a jar that shook his bones.

It was a long, wretched ride to Highgate and they neither of them spoke again. There was nothing to say; each was consumed in his own imagination of the furnace they were racing towards, and the memory of Clemency Shaw’s charred body removed from another ruin so shortly before.

The red glow was visible through the cab window as soon as they turned the last corner of Kentish Town Road onto
Highgate Road. In Highgate Rise the horse jerked to a halt and the cabby leaped down and threw the door open. “I can’t take yer no further!”

Pitt climbed out and the heat hit him, enveloping him in stinging, acrid, smut-filled, roaring chaos. The whole sky seemed red with the towering brilliance of it. Showers of sparks exploded in the air, white and yellow, flying hundreds of feet up, then falling in dying cinders. The street was congested with fire engines, horses plunging and crying out in terror as debris fell around them. Men clung onto them, trying to steady them amid the confusion. There were hoses connected up to the Highgate Ponds, and men struggled with leather buckets, passing them from hand to hand, but all they were doing was protecting the nearest other houses. Nothing could save Lindsay’s house now. Even as Pitt and Murdo stood in the road a great section of the top story collapsed, the beams exploded and fell in rapid succession and a huge gout of flame fifty feet high went soaring upwards, the heat of it driving them back to the far pavement and behind the hedge, even as far as they were from the house.

One of the fire engine horses screamed as a length of wood fell across its back and the smell of burning hair and flesh filled the immediate air. It plunged forward, tearing its reins out of the fireman’s hands. Another man, almost too quick for thought, caught up a bucket of water and threw it over the beast, quenching in one act both the heat and the pain.

Pitt ran forward and caught the animal, throwing all his weight against its charge, and it shuddered to a halt. Murdo, who had grown up on a farm, took off his jacket, squashed it into another bucket of water, then slapped it onto the beast’s back and held it.

The chief fireman was coming towards Pitt, his face a mask of smoke stains. Only the eyes showed through, red-rimmed and desperate. His eyebrows were singed and there were angry red weals under the blackened grime. His clothes were torn and soiled almost beyond recognition by water and the charring of heat and debris.

“We’ve got the servants out!” he shouted, then spluttered
into coughing and controlled himself with difficulty. He waved them farther back and they followed him to where there was a faint touch of coolness of night air softening the heat and the stench, and the roaring and crashing of masonry and the explosion of wood were less deafening. His face was haggard, not only with sorrow but with his own failure. “But we didn’t get either of the two gentlemen.” It was unnecessary to add that it was now beyond hope, it was apparent to anyone at all. Nothing could be alive in that conflagration.

Pitt had known it, yet to hear it from someone else who spoke from years of such hope and struggle gave him a sudden gaping emptiness inside that took him by surprise. He realized only now how much he had been drawn to Shaw, even though he accepted that he might have murdered Clemency. Or perhaps it was only his brain that accepted it, his inner judgment always denied it. And with Amos Lindsay there had been no suspicion, only interest, and a little blossom of warmth because he had known Nobby Gunne. Now there was only a sense of sharp pain for the destruction. Anger would come later when the wound was less consuming.

He turned to Murdo and saw the shock and misery in his face. He was young and very new to murder and its sudden, violent loss. Pitt took him by the arm.

“Come on,” he said quietly. “We failed to prevent this, but we’ve got to get him before he does any more. Or her,” he added. “It could be a woman.”

Murdo was still stunned. “What woman would ever do that?” He jerked his hand back, but he did not turn.

“Women are just as capable of passion and hatred as men,” Pitt replied. “And of violence, given the means.”

“Oh no, sir—” Murdo began instinctively, the argument born of his own memories. Sharp tongues, yes; and a box on the ears; certainly greed at times, and coldness; nagging, bossiness and a great deal of criticism; and mind-staggering, speech-robbing unfairness. But not violence like this—

Memory returned, crowding in on Pitt, and he spoke with surprise.

“Some of the most gruesome murders I’ve ever worked on were committed by women, Murdo. And some of them I understood very well—when I knew why—and pitied. We know so little about this case—none of the real passions underneath it—”

“We know the Worlinghams have a great deal of money, and so does old Lutterworth.” Murdo struggled to gather everything in his mind. “We know—we know Pascoe and Dalgetty hate each other, although what that has to do with Mrs. Shaw …” He trailed off, searching for something more relevant. “We know Lindsay wrote pro-Fabian essays—although that has nothing to do with Mrs. Shaw either—but the doctor approved it.”

“That’s hardly a passion to kindle a funeral pyre like that,” Pitt said bitterly. “No, Murdo. We don’t know very much. But dear God—we’re going to find out.” He swung around and walked back towards the fire chief, who was now directing his men to saving the houses in the immediate vicinity.

“Have you any idea if it was set the same way?” Pitt shouted.

The fire chief turned a filthy, miserable face to him.

“Probably. It went up very quick. Two people called us—one saw it from the street at the front, towards the town, the other down towards Holly Village and half at the back. That’s at least two places. From the speed of it I daresay there was more.”

“But you got the servants out? How? Why not Lindsay and Shaw? Were the fires all in the main house?”

“Looks like it. Although by the time we got here it was spread pretty well all over. Got one man badly burned and another with a broken leg getting the servants out.”

“Where are they now?”

“Dunno. Some feller in a nightshirt and cassock was running ’round trying to help, and getting in the way. Good-hearted, I suppose—but a damn nuisance. Woman with ’im ’ad more sense. ’Nother couple over off to the side, looked white as ghosts—woman weeping—but they brought blankets.
’Bin too busy to watch ’em when they’re safe out. Now, I’ll answer your questions tomorrer—”

“Did you get the horse out?” Pitt did not know why he asked it, except some dim memory of terrified animals in another fire long ago in his youth.

“Horse?” The fire chief frowned. “What horse?”

“The doctor’s horse—for his trap.”

“Charlie!” the fire chief yelled at a soaked and filthy man who was walking a few yards away, limping badly. “Charlie!”

“Sir?” Charlie stopped and came over towards them, his eyebrows scorched, his eyes red-rimmed and exhausted.

“You were ’round the back—did you get the horse?”

“Weren’t no ’orse, sir. I looked special. Can’t bear a good animal burnt.”

“Yes there was,” Pitt argued. “Dr. Shaw has a trap, for his calls—”

“No trap neither, sir.” Charlie was adamant. “Stable was still standing when I got there. No ’orse and no trap. Either they was kept somewhere else—or they’re out.”

Out! Was it possible Shaw was not here at all, that once again the fire had not caught him? In all this fearful pyre could only Amos Lindsay be dead?

Who would know? Who could he ask? He turned around in the red night, still loud with the crackling of sparks and the roar and boom of flame. He could see, at the far edge of the tangle of engines, horses, water buckets, ladders, and weary and injured men, the two black figures of Josiah and Prudence Hatch, a little apart from each other, huddled in a private and separate misery. The cassocked figure of Clitheridge was striding along, skirts flying, a flask in his outstretched hand, and Lally was rewrapping a blanket around the shoulders of a tiny kitchen girl who was shuddering so violently Pitt could see it even through the smoke and the melee. Lindsay’s manservant with the polished hair stood alone, stupefied, like a person upright in his sleep.

Pitt skirted around the horses and buckets and the men still working, and started towards the far side. He was off the
opposite pavement and in the middle of the road when he heard the clatter of hooves and looked automatically up the street towards Highgate center to see who it was. There was no purpose in more fire engines now—and anyway there was no sound of bells.

It was a trap, horse almost at a gallop, wheels racing and jumping in their speed and recklessness. Pitt knew long before he saw him that it was Shaw, and he felt an intense relief, followed the instant after by a new darkness. If Shaw was alive, then it was still possible he had set both fires, first to kill Clemency, now to kill Lindsay. Why Lindsay? Perhaps in the few days he had stayed with Lindsay, Shaw had betrayed himself by a word, an expression, even something unsaid when it should have been? It was a sickening thought, and yet honesty could not dismiss it.

“Pitt!” Shaw almost fell off the step of the trap and took no trouble even to tie the rein, leaving the horse to go where it would. He grabbed Pitt by the arm, almost swinging him offhis feet. “Pitt! For God’s sake, what’s happened? Where’s Amos? Where are the staff?” His face was so gaunt with horror it was impossible not to be moved by it.

Pitt put out his hand to steady him. “The servants are all right, but I’m afraid Lindsay was not brought out. I’m sorry.”

“No! No!” The cry was torn from Shaw and he plunged forward, bumping into people, knocking them aside in his headlong race towards the flames.

After a moment’s stupefaction Pitt ran after him, leaping a water hose and accidentally sending a fireman flying. He caught Shaw so close to the building the heat was immense and the roaring of the flames seemed almost around them. He brought him to the ground, driving the wind out of him.

“You can’t do anything!” he shouted above the din. “You’ll only get killed yourself!”

Shaw coughed and struggled to get up. “Amos is in there!” His voice was close to hysteria. “I’ve got to—” Then he stopped, on his hands and knees facing the blaze, and realization came to him at last that it was utterly futile. Something
inside him collapsed and he made no resistance when Pitt pulled him to his feet.

“Come back, or you’ll get burned,” Pitt said gently.

“What?” Shaw was still staring at the violence of the flames. They were so close the heat was hurting their skin, and the brightness made him screw up his eyes, but he seemed only peripherally aware of it.

“Come back!” Pitt shouted as a beam fell in with a crash and an explosion of sparks. Without thinking he took Shaw by the arms and pulled him as if he had been a frightened animal. For a moment he was afraid Shaw was going to fall over, then at last he obeyed, stumbling a little, careless if he hurt himself.

Pitt wanted to say something of comfort, but what was there? Amos Lindsay was dead, the one man who had seemed to understand Shaw and not be offended by his abrasiveness, who saw beyond the words to the mind and its intent. It was Shaw’s second terrible bereavement in less than two weeks. There was nothing to say that would not be fatuous and offensive, only betraying a complete failure to understand anything of his true pain. Silence at least did not intrude, but it left Pitt feeling helpless and inadequate.