Knock Down - By Dick Francis Page 0,42

job efficiently, part time firemen who’d left their Saturday night beer in the local and come out enthusiastically to try to save my house. It was crazy to think of their beer at a time like that, but I did.

The fireman I’d spoken to before said sympathetically that I’d had a hell of a homecoming. He said that there was never much hope for places like stables and farms, once they caught fire, not if there was any hay or straw stored there. Burned like tinder, he said.

‘We sent for another appliance,’ he said. ‘It ought to have been here by now.’ He had almost to shout for me to hear.

‘The road’s blocked right back into the village,’ I said.

He looked resigned, which was not what I felt.

‘Sorry about your car,’ he shouted.

‘What car?’

He swept an arm round to the garage at the end of the stable block and pointed. The remains of Crispin’s car were burning in there like a skeleton.

I caught the fireman by the arm.

‘Where’s my brother?’ I shouted. ‘He’s here…. Where is he?’

He shook his head. ‘The place was empty. We checked. The fire hadn’t got such a hold when we came and there was no danger inside the house then.’

‘He might be asleep.’

‘No one could have slept through this lot, mate,’ he shouted, and looking and listening to the disaster, one could see his point.

‘I’ll have to make sure.’

‘Come back,’ he yelled. ‘You can’t go in there now. You’ll suffocate.’

He fielded me forcibly on my way to the kitchen door. I said we must find my brother.

He began to tell me again that he wasn’t there.

‘He might be dead drunk.’ It was no time to save Crispin’s face. ‘Unconscious.’ And he might have walked down to the pub and be sitting there obliviously over his sixth double gin; but I couldn’t waste time finding out.

‘Oh.’ The fireman pulled me through the scrum of men and hoses to the nearest fire engine and thrust a breathing pack into my arms.

‘Put it on,’ he said. “The lights will be shot to hell by now and you can find him quicker than I can, if he’s there.’ He gave me a helmet and gloves and we ran over to the house, with me struggling to fasten everything on.

The house was unbelievably full of smoke, dark, pungent, hot and oily. The only light was from the flames outside, which meant that all the far rooms were filled with black fog. It stung in my eyes worse than ever and made them water. I straightened the breathing mask over them and tried to see where I was going.

‘Where would he be?’ yelled the fireman.

‘Maybe the sitting-room. This way.’

We blundered down the passage and into the pitch black room. Impossible to see. I felt all over the sofa, the armchairs, and the floor around, which was where he usually passed out.

No Crispin.

‘No good.’

We went upstairs. Everything was very hot indeed up there and the smoke was if anything denser. Patches of woodwork round the doors were charred, as if they had already burnt, but there were no actual flames.

I couldn’t find him anywhere in his bedroom, which was dark, or in mine, which glowed vividly orange through the smoke and was as drenching as a tropical rainstorm from the water pouring through the window.

‘He isn’t here,’ shouted the fireman.

‘Bathroom….’ I said.

‘Hurry. The roof’s smouldering.’

The bathroom door was shut but not locked. I opened it, took one step, and tripped over Crispin’s feet.

The air in there was clearer. The fireman pushed past me, threw Crispin over his shoulder as if he were a child, and went out of the house faster than I could with no burden.

He laid Crispin on a patch of wet grass because there was nowhere else to put him. I pulled off the breathing mask and looked down at him anxiously.

‘Is he alive?’

‘Don’t know. Put your mask on him.’

He started at once giving Crispin artificial respiration by the method of pulling his arms backwards over his head, while I clipped on the mask and checked the air flow.

Without pausing the fireman glanced up at the staring crowd at the gate and at the rows of faces looking over the hedge for as far down the road as the flames lit them, and I could read his mind as if he’d spoken. The third appliance, an ambulance, doctor, police… no other vehicle was going to reach us until the village went home.

The roof down the half of the stables