Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,85

Most fires are electrical, or else due to cigarettes not being properly put out. Do you smoke?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Did you leave anything switched on?’ he asked.

‘Not that I can think of,’ I said. ‘I suppose the TV would have been on standby.’

‘Could be that,’ he said. ‘Could be anything. Have to get the investigation team to have a look later. Thankfully, no one was hurt. That’s what really matters.’

‘I’ve lost everything,’ I said, looking at the black and steaming mess.

‘You haven’t lost your life,’ he said.

But it had been a close-run thing.

At eight o’clock I used my neighbour’s phone to call Carl.

‘It has not been your week,’ he said after I told him.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I said. In the past seven days I had been informed of an intended prosecution, written-off my car in a collision with a bus, spent a night in hospital with concussion, lost my house and all my personal possessions in a fire, and now stood wearing nothing but my neighbour’s ex-husband’s coat and slippers. But look on the bright side, I thought. It was only seven days since I had taken Caroline out to dinner at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay. I may have lost plenty, but I had gained more.

‘Can you come and collect me?’ I asked him.

‘Where do you want to go?’ he said.

‘Do you have a shower I could use?’ I said. ‘I smell like a garden bonfire.’

‘I’ll be there in five minutes,’ he said.

‘Oh, Carl,’ I said. ‘Can you bring some clothes?’

‘What for?’ he asked.

‘I escaped with my life,’ I said. ‘But with absolutely nothing else.’

He laughed. ‘I’ll see what I can find.’

I stood for a good ten minutes in Carl’s shower and let the stream of hot water wash the smoke from my hair and the tiredness from my eyes.

The fire brigade had arrived on the scene at 3.32 a.m. I knew because the chief had asked me, as the property owner, to sign an agreement that the fire service investigation team had my permission to access the property later that day, when the building had cooled.

‘What would you have done if I’d died in the fire?’ I’d asked him.

‘We wouldn’t need your permission then,’ he’d said. ‘We have automatic right of entry if there has been serious injury or a death.’

Convenient, I had thought.

‘And we can always get a warrant to enter if you won’t sign and we believe that arson is involved.’

‘Do you believe it was arson?’ I’d asked him, somewhat alarmed.

‘That’s for the investigation team to find out,’ he’d said.

‘Looks just like a normal domestic to me, but then they all do.’

I had signed his paper.

After my shower, and dressed in Carl’s tracksuit, I sat at his kitchen table and took stock. I did, in fact, have some personal possessions left to my name as my overnight bag had been sitting safely all night under my desk at the Hay Net. Carl had fetched it while I showered and I was able to shave and clean my teeth with my own tools.

Carl lived in a modern three-bedroomed semi on a development in Kentford, just down the road from where my mangled wreck of a car still waited for the insurance assessor to inspect it.

Carl and I had worked side by side in the same kitchen for five years and, I realized with surprise, this was the first time I had ever been in his house. We were not actually friends and, while we might often share a beer at the Hay Net bar, we had never socialized together elsewhere. I had felt uneasy about calling to ask for his help, but who else could I ask? My mother would have been useless and would have left me with the lady in the pink slippers for most of the day as she went through her normal morning rituals of bathing at leisure, applying her copious makeup and then dressing, a task that in itself could take a couple of hours as she continuously changed her mind over what went with what. Carl had been my only realistic choice. But I hadn’t really liked it.

‘So what are you going to do now?’ he asked.

‘Firstly, I need to hire a car,’ I said. ‘Then I’m going to book myself into a hotel.’

‘You can stay here if you like,’ he said. ‘I’ve plenty of room.’

‘What about Jenny and the kids?’ I said, noticing for the first time how quiet it was.

‘Jenny went back to her mother nearly a year ago now,’ he