Steam suffused with light was already wafting from the tops of the windows and the little chimney on the pitched roof.
Fifteen minutes passed, and seemed like fifty.
Then the radio silence was broken. Stella's voice. Stella's position was close to the sauna. 'Someone approaching.'
'Okay, this is it, Stell. Don't go too soon. I want them stinking of petrol, right?' She radioed everyone and ordered them to move in closer to the sauna and await the order.
Steam in large amounts was billowing from the sauna. It was easy to picture the middle-aged, bollock-naked man inside, ladling water on the hot stones, unaware of the arsonist closing in, or the police in wait. He'd never have agreed to do this.
But it put a heavy responsibility on Hen to get the timing right.
'Guv?'
'Stell?'
'Suspect at the door.'
'Okay,' Hen said in as calm a voice as she could manage. Everyone on the team was listening. 'Can you see the can?'
'Not yet, but I think the door's open.'
This had to be it. She couldn't risk waiting any longer.
'Go, go, go!'
She'd have liked to lead the charge, but she had to get down the stairs and across the drive to the sauna entrance. She was in time to see in the glare of the lights the suspect felled like a tree as three of the team grabbed at the same instant. The resistance was brief and useless, the cuffs in place and a hood over the head.
'Top result,' she said. 'Bring 'im in the house.'
Keen to see who the prisoner was, they streamed through the front door and into the hall and surrounded Hen and the prisoner. She asked Shilling to remove the hood. There were gasps from the team.
Hen said,'Idon't believe this.'
They had nicked Bob Naylor.
He was blinking a lot. 'Something in my eye,' he said. 'Do I have to wear these bracelets?'
'What was he carrying?' Hen asked Stella.
'Nothing, guv.'
'No petrol? Smell his hands.'
Shilling lifted the cuffed hands and sniffed at them, causing the prisoner to bow. 'Nothing I can tell, guv.'
'What the hell were you up to?' Hen asked Naylor when he'd been allowed to straighten up.
'Look, my eye's giving me gyp.'
Ridiculous. 'Someone give me a tissue,' Hen said.
Stella produced one and Hen wiped the corner of Naylor's eye. 'Now will you tell us what you're doing here?'
His words came in a burst. 'I was trying to find Thomasine, wasn't I? She's here somewhere. Her car's on the road outside. I get back from work today and listen to my calls and there's this message she's left and some others about a website I ought to be looking at, so my daughter got it up on the screen and I guessed straight away what Thomasine was up to. Bloody dangerous, going it alone, but she's like that — fearless. It took me some time to find out where Lord Chalybeate's place is, but I did, and came looking.' He paused. 'She's got to be somewhere around here.'
'In the back room,' Hen said with resignation. 'You two have screwed up an entire police operation. Why couldn't you leave it to us?'
'Guv.'
Hen turned to listen to Stella, who was by the door. 'What's that?'
'The sauna's on fire.'
31
You must think about people's reactions to afire in terms of the three basic stages of making sense of what's going on, preparing to act and then acting.
And it was well alight, flames and sparks leaping high into the night sky.
It couldn't get any worse than this. Now there was a helpless man about to be incinerated.
She told Stella to call the fire service. Then she raced across the drive with the rest of them to see what they could do.
Not much. The door to the sauna stood open and the fire had ripped through the ventilated area where you were supposed to cool off. Chalybeate's only chance of survival was that the closed inner room of the sauna was insulated to hold in the heat. But it was all made of timber and would soon be ablaze.
'No way we can reach him,'Johnny said. 'Can't get through that lot to the inner room.'
'Then we'll force our way in through the walls.' Hen looked around for something to use. There wasn't much at the front of the house.
The sauna had a solid look. Chalybeate didn't go in for flimsy building. This wasn't a job for shoulders. Or boots.
She stared across the drive.
'Can someone start the car, please?'
'The Porsche?' Johnny said.
Hen didn't answer. There was only one car in view.
'Duncan?'
DC Shilling knew about cars. First he opened the door of the Porsche and checked that the key wasn't inside. Then he released the bonnet lid and started loosening the leads to make a contact. The ignition fired and the engine started. He slammed down the lid.
'Go on, then!' Hen said.
Shilling got in, revved the engine like a racing driver on the grid and drove the Porsche straight at the sauna. Some of the wood splintered and some of the car buckled and there was glass everywhere, but the meeting of metal and wood wasn't a total success. He reversed and tried again. This time there was a definite splitting of the tongue-and-groove facia of the building, not to mention a concertina effect in the Porsche. It must have been well designed because it still responded when Shilling went into reverse. At the third attempt most of the bonnet burst through the structure. With a rending and scraping, Shilling backed away. A hole the size and shape of the knee- space under a desk was left. And out of it crawled a naked man.
'Is he all right?' Hen said.
Stella and Johnny got to Chalybeate together and helped him upright. He was wide-eyed and shocked, but unhurt. They hustled him away from the burning building with little time to spare. A sheet of flame ripped through the space he'd come from.
Kate the housekeeper came running from the house with a white bathrobe. Speechless, Chalybeate drew it round his shoulders. Whether it was the near-death experience, or the destruction of his sauna, or his Porsche, it was all too much.
'Where's the boss going?' Stella said.
Hen was haring away into the darkness.
