Gideon's Fire Read online

  ‘Mrs. Gideon for you, George.’

  Gideon said: ‘Eh?’ and looked astonished because Kate so seldom called when he was at the office, and inevitably when there was some kind of emergency. There was the coming family conference tonight, that was probably what she wanted to talk about. As he lifted his telephone, he thought with a grin that she was going to tell him to be home in good time, or else. ‘Hallo, Kate,’ he said, quietly, and Cornish went across to Bell’s desk while Bell put down his receiver.

  ‘Hallo, dear,’ said Kate speaking rather more quickly than usual. ‘I thought this would be worth a call. The conference is off this evening.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s off, George, you needn’t break your neck to get home.’

  ‘But why? What’s happened?’

  ‘The immediate crisis is over, you can say due to natural causes,’ Kate announced, and gave a little high-pitched laugh, which told more vividly than anything else could how she had felt about Matthew and Helen. ‘There’s no need to worry, Helen will have a bad time for a day or two but she’ll be all right.’

  ‘Well I’m damned,’ exclaimed Gideon. ‘Well, that takes the pressure off, somehow. All right, Kate. Tell you what, you come up to Town and we’ll have a meal out somewhere. Haven’t done that for months. Now, don’t say you can’t, I’ll be free at six o’clock even if Joe Bell has to work overtime for the rest of the week . . . Okay, dear, that’s fine. I’m very glad.’ He rang off, grinned across at the others, said:

  ‘And you needn’t look like that, this is my secret.’ He took out his pipe and began to fill it, then brought his mind to bear on his job. He simply hadn’t time to think any more about Matthew, but he hadn’t felt so easy in his mind for days.

  One case before him was Riddell’s, down at Brighton. Riddell seemed to be on top of the situation, and there was a lot to be said for the theory that if Chloe Duval was to be next on Harrison’s list, there would be some sign of a cooling off in passion first. Better let the affair go on for a while.

  Gideon did not give a thought to Harrison’s wife. No one but Harrison did.

  About that time the man whom Mrs. Tennison knew as Mr. Brown, and whose real name was Walter Biship, opened the door of Mrs. Tennison’s kitchen apologetically, and said:

  ‘I’m so sorry to worry you, Mrs. Tennison, but do you think I could have dinner a little earlier tonight? At half past six, say? I have to go out for the early evening, but I shall be home by ten o’clock.’

  ‘Couldn’t be easier,’ declared Mrs. Tennison, ‘and it works out lovely, too, I can wash up and go to the pictures before the programme starts. Thank you ever so much.’

  ‘The question is, when are we going to do it, and how?’ asked Ericson, that same evening. ‘What scares me is that we’re all followed, everywhere we go.’

  ‘I think the best thing would be to go and see that man from Scotland Yard,’ said Joan, quietly. ‘The man with the French name, Lemaitre. If you go there, surely it will tend to prove that you think you’ve nothing to fear.’

  ‘Could be,’ conceded Roscoe. ‘What can we offer?’

  ‘We could buy back sixty-three percent of the shares now,’ Ericson said, ‘and there’s a reasonable chance that at least fifty per cent of the people who own them will think that we’re really trying to buy back because we want to corner the market. We ought to be all right, provided the police . . .’

  ‘What I need,’ said Roscoe, ‘is a stiff whisky.’

  Alan Paul Scarfe, alias Alan Peter Spender, alias Arthur Philip Simpson, sat in the Brighton flat, listening to television and reading at the same time. He still had the Sunday newspapers handy, and the Globe gave him especial pleasure. So did all mention of the allegations against Gideon. So far as he knew, the police were not yet on to him either as Scarfe or as Spender. Much would depend on what would happen at the second hearing tomorrow.

  There was not a great deal that Biship had not learned about fires and their causes in the past five months, and he had learned that the simple way to start a fire was always the best. He was also a shrewd man, who knew quite well that once the police began to suspect the truth, the odds would be against him. Since he had recovered from the shock of the Miller tragedy, and since he had seen the tremendous amount of publicity which it had aroused, his mind had become very sharp indeed. The newspaper suggestion that the fires were connected told him that the police would be on the lookout in all slum areas, and there was another obvious fact: they would be on the lookout for a cyclist in the early hours of the morning. Moreover, the tragedy of the last fire had gained a lot of publicity and brought the problem of the slums into the open again. He felt as if he were really making progress. And the landlords were the murderers.

  His work as a tallyman, first selling to housewives on the instalment system, and then visiting them once a fortnight to collect the payment on clothes and footwear, had taken him into most of the poorest and slummiest districts of London. Few men knew these districts better, few knew what areas of them ought to be destroyed. That evening, he hired a small car - having to pay a hundred pounds deposit - and spent a long time preparing some petrol soaked rags, and attaching to each a slow burning fuse made by soaking string in candle grease which he melted in an old saucer. He visited six different places that evening, just after dark, and made for little gloomy corners in smelly houses which looked liable to fall down. There was always plenty of rubbish to put near the pile, and once a fire started each place would burn like matchwood. He knew each district well, knew exactly how to get in and out of the various places, and hid wherever he heard footsteps near a place where he started a fire. He did everything with detached, business-like efficiency, and he was such a small and ordinary-looking man that no one took any notice of him.

  The fuses gave off a slight smell and a wisp or so of smoke, but neither was so noticeable as a cigarette end smouldering, and the occupants of these homes were used to peculiar smells. Biship judged that the first fire would start at about half past ten, and the others would be staggered according to the length of fuses on them.

  The last should begin about half past one.

  He would be home and in bed soon after ten.

  13 SMELL OF BURNING

  ‘Hallo, Mum,’ said a bright-faced boy who lived near Lots Road Power Station, on the borders of Chelsea and Fulham. ‘I think I smell burning.’

  ‘It’s only Mrs. Coker again, she’s damped her fire down,’ his mother replied. ‘You put out that light and go to sleep.’

  ‘Okay, Mum.’ The boy stretched up in bed and touched the switch, for his bed - one of two in a room hardly large enough for one - was very close to the wall. Yet the wallpaper was attractive and newly put on by the boy and his father, while his mother had spent a lot of time making gay curtains and bedspreads. The two girls in the family slept on the double bed, divided from the boy’s by a wooden screen also made by their father. The parents had a shakedown bed in the living-room. Every inch of space was utilised, and every inch was spotless.

  The boy lay half asleep for a while, still vaguely aware of the burning, but quite reassured. His mother did not give the matter another thought. Nor did the two girls, who were going out for an hour, while the boy got to sleep. There was an absolute rule in this house that he be given no opportunity of peeping over or round the screen.

  The smouldering was, in fact, behind a broken piece of wainscoting in an empty flat immediately beneath them.

  Another family of five, who lived just across the river at Wandsworth in a hovel which was one of four hundred scheduled for demolition, presented a different kind of picture. They lived in and accepted squalor. The whole family slept in one room, the parents on a rickety double bed, the two daughters on narrow camp beds, the one boy, who was two years older than the girls, on the floor in a corner opposite the door. No one worried whether he ‘peeped’ or not. No one worried, in fact. The mother was a slattern who dreamed away half of her waking hours in th
e semi-stupor of the alcoholic, and the husband was a big, lusty and lustful man who took his pleasures wherever he could find them. The miracle was that the two girls always left their home and returned to it looking as if they had come out of a beauty parlour. They had one corner of the bedroom, with an orange box covered with chintz as a dressing-table, a mirror fastened to the wall, and their clothes in a corner hanging cupboard. In a casual, rather careless way, they were fond of their mother, who had one transcending gift: she could cook. Their father’s good quality was that he always provided enough money. Out of doors, the whole family looked bright, fresh and healthy, except for the sleepy mother.

  Gin had killed her sense of smell.

  She and the sixth member of the family, a cat, were alone that evening in the living-room which was also the kitchen and washroom. She could not understand the cat, a tabby with a white patch over its right eye. It kept sniffing at the walls. This house was one of the few occupied here, the others were being emptied as new accommodation was found for the tenants.

  The smell which worried the cat was next door.

  There was a smell of burning in four other places; one at Bethnal Green not far from the scene of the first fire, another at Wapping, a third in Limehouse not far from the river, a fourth in Islington, quite near the spot where Briggs had made his ferocious and forlorn attempt to escape. In each case, someone sniffed and smelt burning, but in most cases this was put down to an everyday cause, because one stench or another was always likely to tease their sense of smell if not to offend it. Only one was investigated more thoroughly.

  The first warning of fire reached the Chelsea Fire Station at half past eleven, when a horrified girl called 999, and explained breathlessly that she had just got home and found one of the rooms of her house on fire, and she couldn’t make her mother hear. The engine was on the spot within three minutes, when smoke was already pouring out of the windows and there was a fierce red light shining on it, giving it an awful kind of beauty.

  ‘I just opened the door, and there was a roar and everything caught fire,’ a girl sobbed. ‘I just opened the door, that’s all I did.’

  ‘Is anyone in there?’ asked a policeman who had rushed from the Police Station at the moment of the first warning.

  ‘My Mum and my brother, they were inside. Oh, it’s awful, it’s awful,’ the girl kept sobbing, while her sister stood still and pale, dumbstruck. The father wasn’t yet home from his working men’s club.

  The second alarm came from Wandsworth. Here, the fire-engines were on the scene very quickly, but the tinder-dry houses were catching alight one after the other, and it looked like being a big outbreak. Engines were summoned from Fulham, Clapham and soon from as far afield as Wimbledon. When the blaze was at its height, and while hundreds of people in their night clothes, clutching a few precious possessions, were being hustled out of the hovels, a third fire was reported at Wapping. Some of the East End Fire Service went out to that outbreak, and it proved to be much less dangerous, but a hundred houses were evacuated for safety’s sake. By then, telephones were humming between Fire Stations and Divisional Police Headquarters and the Yard. It was a little after midnight when Gideon was called; Carmichael was on the other end of the line.

  ‘I can’t be sure that this is part of the other series,’ Carmichael said, ‘but there are three separate outbreaks, each with the same indications of arson, each in slum areas. The difference is that we had no mystery report of any of the fires. I am at the worst of them, in Wandsworth, and from the look of it I shall be here all night.’

  ‘As bad as that?’ Gideon said heavily. He had been woken out of the first heavy sleep of the night, after the dinner with Kate.

  ‘It is very bad indeed,’ answered Carmichael. ‘Just behind the section where the fire began there is an oil storage depot. If that catches, there will be a great deal of damage, as well as many casualties.’

  ‘I’ll come over,’ Gideon said.

  ‘I look forward to seeing you,’ declared Carmichael, as if they were talking about meeting for a drink. Gideon rang off, and hitched himself up on his pillows, yawned, and scratched his head. Kate was also hoisting herself up in bed.

  ‘No, don’t you get up,’ Gideon said. ‘There’ll be a canteen over at Wandsworth, the mobile canteens always get out to these big shows.’ He realised that Kate didn’t know what it was about. ‘’Nother big fire,’ he went on. ‘Wandsworth.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Kate. ‘George, I’ll gladly make you . . .’

  ‘Stay there,’ Gideon ordered, and smiled down at her. She had been happy during the evening, so relieved about Helen; Miall had said that the development made no difference to Matthew’s duty to marry Helen. ‘But he agrees we can give ourselves time to think,’ Kate had said.

  Nothing was more remote from Gideon now than Ted Miall. He dragged on his shirt and trousers, collected everything else he would need and went out, to finish dressing in the bathroom. He closed the door firmly on Kate. From the bathroom, he looked towards the river and beyond, and saw a red tinge in the sky in the direction of Wandsworth, a moving, flickering glow, not like that which came from neon lighting. He doused his face and hands in cold water, and by the time he went downstairs, was feeling much fresher. No one else stirred. He closed the door quietly, strode along to the garage, and was startled when a figure emerged from a doorway near it - a policeman about whom there was an unmistakable odour of tobacco smoke.

  ‘Good evening, sir.’

  ‘Just the man I need. Close my garage after me, will you?’ asked Gideon. ‘It’s self-locking. Nasty fire over at Wandsworth, I’m told.’

  ‘One of the series, sir?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Must say this,’ said the constable, a middle-aged man not even slightly embarrassed at having been caught having a smoke, ‘he only burns down the slummy stuff. If it wasn’t for the loss of life, you could almost say good riddance.’

  They stopped by the garage, and Gideon took out his keys.

  ‘Many people feel like that?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, sir. After all, in this day and age it’s time such things as slums were done away with, isn’t it?’

  ‘See what you mean,’ said Gideon. ‘Be a bit of an outcry if we cleared up all the slums before building new places for people to live in, though.’

  ‘Oh yes, sir, but . . .’

  He was the beat-lawyer, London’s equivalent to the sea-lawyer, and at any other time Gideon would have been sharp about the smoking. Now, he was anxious to get on the way, and was very thoughtful. This man had simply put into words what Carmichael and Margetson had said and he had thought; there was a great deal of sympathy for what was going on. But for that hideous blaze when eight had died - that was understandable.

  Would there be any casualties tonight? Would the firemen get this blaze under control before it set off an explosion at that oil storage plant?

  Gideon knew the place, some distance away from the main road but on the river and with a slum area quite near it. There must be a dozen storage tanks inside the steel mesh protected walls, for this depot fed a large section of London with its fuel. Gideon drove fast, crossing Putney Bridge, then winging left off the High Street and heading for Wandsworth that way. Now and again, at the end of a long street or when this road went straight ahead, he could see the deepening red glow in the sky, and he began to doubt whether Carmichael’s men could keep this under control. He found himself watching the sky, fearful in case it was suddenly split by the explosive glare that would tell of an explosion.

  He saw a man step off the pavement straight in front of him, jammed on his brakes, knew a moment of wild dread - and came to a standstill only a few yards away from the man, who was wearing a policeman’s uniform. He came slowly and purposefully to Gideon’s window, and as Gideon opened it, he said:

  ‘Excuse me, sir, you’re going a bit fast even for one o’clock in the morning, aren’t you? May I see your licence, please?’, He thrust his
head inside the car, and Gideon knew that he was sniffing and expecting to smell alcohol on the driver’s breath. Gideon took out his driving licence, always handy for identification, and handed it over.

  ‘Next time don’t step out so suddenly,’ he said. ‘It would have been as much your fault as mine if I’d knocked you down.’

  ‘You were going too fast, sir, and . . . Mr. Gideon!’

  ‘On my way to that fire,’ Gideon said. ‘But you’re right, I must have been doing sixty.’

  ‘As it’s official business, sir, that’s quite all right.’ The man was badly shaken. ‘Very nasty fire, I’m told. I saw my sergeant ten minutes ago, and he said that he didn’t think they would be able to save . . .’

  The booming roar of the explosion burst upon his words.

  14 LETTERS

  Gideon just heard the roar.

  Carmichael and Margetson, sheltering behind a cement building which would stand up to almost any blast, were deafened by the explosion. Within sight, fifty or sixty policemen and firemen were driving back the crowd, as they had been driving them back for the last fifteen minutes. In the red glow of the inferno, the sweating faces of the firemen and the policemen, the snaking hoses, the great hissing jets of water, the great clouds of smoke, all turned the quiet of the night into a holocaust. As the first explosion came, two men were blown off their feet and but for the efforts of the police, another fifty would have been. A fireman atop a swaying escape and directing a stream of water towards some of the storage tanks which were not yet affected, was blown back; the nozzle was snatched out of his hand. He stood swaying wildly on the edge of the platform, while a man just below strove desperately to save him.