The Make

one of the fire engines. There was an oxygen mask clamped over his nose and mouth. His thin face was grimy with soot, and he looked rough, but he was there.

‘Brynn!’ Gracie hollered, and he looked up at her.

The white-helmeted fire officer was standing close by. ‘We’ve got an ambulance coming,’ he told her as she dashed up. ‘Best get him to hospital. Check him over.’

Gracie knelt down beside Brynn and put a hand on his knee. She stared up at him anxiously. ‘You all right?’ she asked.

Brynn nodded. He looked exhausted, hunched there in grubby pyjamas. There was madness all around them, men bellowing orders, the flames roaring, people – for fuck’s sake! – taking pictures of the blaze on their mobiles. The policeman had abandoned Gracie and gone to harangue them instead.

‘What the hell happened?’ she asked Brynn.

Brynn moved the mask away from his face.

‘I came down . . .’ He paused, and coughed hard. ‘. . . I heard something at the front of the building about an hour ago. Woke me up. I came down, and got the shock of my life. The outer door was well alight. It didn’t set off the sprinklers straight away, it wasn’t close enough to the lobby for that.’ He stopped speaking again, coughed, drew in a whooping breath. ‘I got the fire extinguisher out and sprayed it from inside, but it was too fierce, I had . . . had to leave it. Came out the back way.’ He stuck the mask back over his face, shaking his head.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Gracie, patting his knee. His pj’s smelled smoky. Running chillingly through her brain was the thought that if he had not heard that noise at the front door, he would now be upstairs in his flat, asleep and drifting into death as rolling black smoke stole the air from his lungs.

The casino alarms were bellowing, and through the smoke-haze and the orange glow of the flames Gracie could see that the sprinklers were working now inside the building, drenching the lobby, the slots, the tables, everything. She stood up and looked at the wrecked building and felt a spasm of real pain. There was going to be a lot of damage. It was going to take a long time before they could resume business. Thank Christ for insurance.

‘What could have set it off?’ she wondered aloud. ‘Any idea?’

‘Not the bloody foggiest,’ said Brynn. ‘Electrical fault’s my best guess. Something blew. They’ll look into it.’ He coughed again, long and hard.

There was an ambulance nudging its way towards them now down the packed street, siren wailing.

Gracie stood up and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Think that’s our lift,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to come too,’ said Brynn, getting to his feet and standing there swaying like someone caught out in a gale. ‘They’ll want to talk to you here.’

‘Of course I’ll come too,’ said Gracie. ‘I’ll leave my details with the chief fire officer, and he can pass it to anyone else who wants it. And . . . Brynn . . .?’

He swayed and Gracie found herself putting an arm around his thin shoulders, half supporting his slight weight against her.

‘Feel a bit shaky,’ he said, half laughing. He looked very pale.

The ambulance men were opening the back doors of the ambulance, sliding out a stretcher.

‘You’ve got every right to feel shaky – you’ve had one hell of a fright,’ said Gracie. ‘Brynn . . . look, I’m sorry I snapped at you last night on the phone.’

‘Ah, forget it.’ He waved a limp hand, dismissing it.

‘When I drove up I thought you’d got fried in your bed,’ said Gracie with a trembly laugh. She felt pretty damned shaken herself. She’d lost Dad, and for a horror-filled few minutes she seriously believed she had lost Brynn too.

‘Can’t keep a good man down,’ said Brynn. His eyes turned up in his head. His legs folded just as the ambulance guys reached them. If they hadn’t grabbed him right then, he would have collapsed on to the road, unconscious.

Chapter 11

20 December

Gracie stood looking at the wrecked frontage of Doyles the next day. She felt drained to the point of exhaustion by all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Going to the hospital with Brynn, making sure he was all right, phoning his sister because he had no wife – Brynn had never been married. The job was his life. Angie was anxious, asking, ‘Is he all right? How did it happen?’

Good question, thought Gracie grimly.

They released Brynn later in the day, not even keeping him in overnight. His swift exit from the building had saved his lungs from the worst of it. Angie pitched up at the hospital in double-quick time and said he was coming back to stay with her, and she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

To Gracie’s surprise, Brynn was so shaken by the whole thing that he didn’t even raise a murmur in protest. Sometimes, she guessed, all a person wanted was a safe haven, a friendly hug.

She wasn’t about to get one of those, she knew that. She rang round all the staff, told them what had happened and that she or Brynn would be in touch when Doyles was operational again. By the time the fire officer had finished questioning her at the scene next day, asking her if she had any money worries, any enemies (she answered no to both), and she had contacted the insurance people and the building had been secured, she was worn out.

She drove home, looking at all the twinkling Christmas lights, the shoppers in search of that perfect last- minute present. A giant inflated blow-up Santa bobbed past on the back of a flatbed truck. It was three thirty in the afternoon and already beginning to get dark. There’d been more talk of snow on the forecasts, but she thought it was too cold for that. She parked up underneath her building, and with relief took the lift up to her flat.

There was more post on the mat. She picked it up and took it through to the kitchen, with that other thing niggling at her again – the divorce papers. Talk about ‘it never rained but it bloody well poured’! She leaned on the kitchen counter, weary to the bone, and thought about her short-lived marriage to Lorcan Connolly.

There had been something wild, almost indecent, about the passion that had flared up between them. Gracie liked to be in control. But with him . . . she had lost that. Found her inhibitions being thrown to the wind, and it had made her feel too vulnerable. Like she couldn’t steer the good ship Gracie any more; as if she was being buffeted by some force stronger than herself. She was cool and logical, whereas Lorcan was fiery and impulsive. They attracted and repelled each other, like powerful magnets.

Lorcan had worked for Gracie’s father when he had managed a casino in London’s West End. Then, when Paddy had taken off for Manchester with Gracie after his divorce, he had head-hunted Lorcan and installed him as manager of his new casino up there. Inevitably, Lorcan and Gracie had met. She’d been learning the business, working her way up the greasy pole as Dad insisted she should. She and Lorcan had fallen in love, then married on Gracie’s twentieth birthday.

It should have been happy-ever-after. But Lorcan hadn’t been content in Manchester. He was a Londoner, and he wanted to return there, to open and run his own place. Gracie, however, was settled in Manchester. Her dad was there, she loved Doyles and was thrusting ahead with her own career. So Lorcan went off down to London to get started up, expecting her to join him – but by then she had his old job, managing the entire casino, and she was happy.

There had followed weekends together, arguments, endless wearying debates. And all it boiled down to was this: he was settled in London. She was settled in Manchester.

Gracie heaved a sigh that shuddered through her frame. She’d loved him. But she had loved her career too, her burgeoning, swiftly growing career up here in Manchester with Dad.

Never one to mince his words, Lorcan had told her flat out that something was going to have to give, but it seemed he was sure it wouldn’t be his career to go, it would be hers. Then he had said he wanted children, but Gracie had been so busy forging a career that she didn’t want children, not yet anyway. Why couldn’t he understand that?