Knock Down - By Dick Francis Page 0,43

nearest us fell in with a roar and a sudden out-gushing of sizzling heat. The fireman raised his eyes from his exertions on Crispin and said encouragingly, ‘Now if the rest of that roof falls in quickly, the house has more of a chance.’

I looked up. The incendiary shower of sparks had diminished, but the house looked more than ever as if it would burst all over into flames in explosive spontaneous combustion. Despite all their efforts the eaves at the far end were blackly burning.

Crispin showed not the slightest sign of life, but when I felt for his pulse, it was there. Faint and slow, but there.

I nodded to the fireman in relief, and he stopped the respiration. He watched Crispin’s chest. There was no perceptible movement. The fireman slid his hand inside Crispin’s clothes, to feel his ribs. Nothing. He shook his head, and went back to pumping.

‘I can do that,’ I said.

‘Right.’

I took his place and he went back to help with the fire, and the hot roaring smoky nightmare seemed to go on and on and on.

Crispin lived and they more or less saved the house.

At some point that I wasn’t quite clear about the police arrived, and soon afterwards an ambulance took my still unconscious brother away to a more thorough decoking.

The first thing the firemen told the police was that it looked like arson, and the first thing the police asked me was had I started it.

‘I wasn’t even here.’

‘Have you got any money troubles?’

I looked at them incredulously. Standing there in all that shambles with thick hot smoke still pouring off the damp and blackening embers they were stolidly conducting enquiries.

‘Is that all the help you can give?’ I said, but their manner said plainly enough that they weren’t there to give help.

It seemed the final unreality on that disjointed night that they should believe I had brought such destruction on myself.

By dawn one of the fire engines had gone but the other was still there, because, the firemen told me, with old houses you never knew. Sometimes a beam would smoulder for hours, then burst into flames and start the whole thing over again.

They yawned and rolled up hoses, and smoked cigarettes which they stubbed out carefully in little flat tins. Relays of tea in thermos flasks came up from the village and a few cautious jokes grew like flowers on the ruins.

At nine I went down to the pub to borrow the telephone and caught sight of myself in a mirror. Face streaked with black, eyes red with smoke and as weary as sin.

I told Sophie not to come, there wouldn’t be any lunch.She would come anyway, she said, and I hadn’t the stamina to argue.

The pub gave me a bath and breakfast. My clothes smelled horrible when I put them on again, but nothing to the house and yard when I got back. Wet burnt wood, wet burnt straw, stale smoke. The smell was acrid and depressing, but the departing firemen said nothing could be done, things always smelled like that after blazes.

Sophie came, and she was not wearing the gold aeroplane.

She wrinkled her nose at the terrible mess and silently put her arm through mine and kissed me. I felt more comforted than I had since childhood.

‘What’s left?’ she said.

‘Some wet furniture and a tin of peanuts.’

‘Let’s start with those.’

We went through the house room by room. Watery ash and stale smoke everywhere. My bedroom had a jagged black corner open to the sky where the roof had burned right through, and everything in there was past tense. I supposed it was lucky I had had some of my clothes with me in Newmarket.

There was an empty gin bottle in Crispin’s room, and another in the bathroom.

In the office the ash covered everything in a thick gritty film. The walls were darkened by smoke and streaked with water and my rows of precious, expensive and practically irreplaceable form books and stud records would never be the same again.

‘What are you going to do?’ Sophie said, standing on the filthy kitchen floor and running one finger through the dust on the table.

‘Emigrate,’ I said.

‘Seriously?’

‘No.… Seriously, the pub opens in five minutes and we might as well get drunk.’

10

We rolled home happily at two o’clock and found the police there. Two of them, one a constable, one with the shoulder badges of Chief Inspector.

‘Enjoying yourself, Mr Dereham?’ the Chief Inspector said sarcastically. ‘Celebrating on the insurance money, are you?’

It seemed, however,