free. He was scared, I guess. It was a final gesture. I walked out.’
‘So did he confess?’
‘No. But then, I think now, he didn’t know his crime. Or hadn’t guessed. I wanted him to know. I wanted to punish him for making Mum do it. Telling the lie that’s done all this, brought us here. He was dying from the thirst. I could see that. So I watched.’
‘Why don’t you give me the lighter?’ asked Dryden.
Lyndon smiled again. ‘Then I just found that guy’s body – his head stoved in. Sutton? I read it in the paper – the name. I cried… You know? I cried for that guy. I’d seen worse in the Gulf. But he looked kinda innocent. I guess he was.’
He heaved in a breath and choked on the monoxide. ‘And then I thought he must have told someone he’d gone to the pillbox. He had a family, people who cared. They’d come looking. And someone had killed him. So someone else knew Johnnie was there. They’d find out what I’d done to him. How I dragged him there, through the dust, and chained him up.
‘I had to get rid of Sutton’s body.’ He looked out at the drifting smoke and dust, untroubled by anything outside his own head.
Dryden tried to stem the fear that was constricting his throat. ‘And Freeman White took care of that. He’s on the fire crew at the base – it says it on his door. Your door.’
Lyndon tipped his head by way of assent. ‘Then Johnnie died. That was the Sunday. I just found him. Taut, like that, and reaching out for the glass.’
‘I presume we met at the pillbox,’ said Dryden, fingering the blue-black eye.
‘Another five minutes and I’d have had the body out… I was shocked, you know – shocked that he’d died so suddenly. I didn’t expect that.’
Lyndon flipped open the top of the Zippo. Dryden tried to think. ‘You can put it back together again. Your life. Lyndon’s life. She’s in the car.’ Lyndon looked up then, but outside there was now only the drifting pall of the dust, darkening by the second. ‘She’s got something to tell you. She said there was more,’ said Dryden.
Lyndon shrugged. ‘Murder. In Texas they give you the chair,’ he said, fingering his throat. ‘Burn. That’s what they say: Let ‘em burn. Killed his own father. That’s me.’
‘But not here,’ said Dryden.
‘Civilized,’ said Lyndon, sneering. ‘But hey. They might deport me. US citizen… but then again. The final laugh on me. Well, well, he ain’t a Yank after all. So he can rot in one of our jails. Ten years… fifteen? Maybe more.’
‘She loves you. Estelle. That’s why she’s here. She doesn’t need to be.’
He held the Zippo at arm’s length and lit it once. In the gloomy penumbra of the dust storm it was a brilliant flame. ‘She wouldn’t come with me. She wouldn’t just leave. I knew it was right. She didn’t trust me. Didn’t believe. She knows that. We’ll always know that.’
He flicked the turning ignition wheel on the Zippo lighter and held it to his chest: a tender gesture of almost religious beauty. Like most moments which change people’s lives it was enacted slowly, almost mundanely. He was, Dryden knew, dead already. A cold blue flame spread over Lyndon’s sweatshirt for what seemed like a miniature eternity. Then the flame flapped like a wing and jumped silently to his arm, and the doused leather seat beside him. Lyndon raised a fluttering hand, despite himself, to ward off the heat. Then the blue flames engulfed him in what looked like a cool shroud. The colder orange flames slipped down to the bare floorboards where the petrol ran in a river towards the kitchen. A beaded curtain of heat rose, blocking the exit.
Then Lyndon began to scream. Even in the moment Dryden thought of Johnnie Roe, his vocal cords shredding in that long hot night.
But this cry was muted, contorted within the blue shroud of flame which was burning his skin. He turned his head rapidly from side to side as the heat bit in, wanting to end his life with the dignity of self-control. But the pain was too much, and the scream broke through the blue shroud and Dryden ran from it, ran anywhere, to escape the agony.
He closed the heavy wooden door behind him as the fire leapt across the room. He was in a corridor as familiar as a nightmare, at the end of which stood a front door like any other. He ran to it, his heart leaping, and turned the Yale lock to open but the door wouldn’t move. There was a Chubb below it, locked fast, and no key. So he turned to face the fire which he could hear buffeting the door he had closed. It was an odd place, he thought, to die.
‘Not here,’ he said, without conviction, as he considered the smoke slithering under the door, and then the tongues of flame which began to curl under, like searching fingers.
Then the door imploded with a silent percussion which popped his ears. In slow motion the wood became kindling. Then a tumbling fireball swept towards him and as he turned his back on it he was yelling – Humph said that later – yelling for water. Then he yelled for anything that would stop the pain which was eating into his back. As he screamed he imagined the worst because he could not see: imagined the flame digging in to the bones of the spine, uncovering them by burning away the thin layers of flesh and muscle. Firing the bone like human pottery.
Which is when he thought of Laura. It was the coolness of her bed which called him. The lack of fire and warmth. The iciness which he desperately craved now. He wanted to be by her bedside for ever, forever cool, under the falling snowflakes which he could summon up when his eyes were closed. They could lie together in a drift, the antithesis of fire.
‘Please, God, let her see me again,’ he said, and gagging on the gases, he dropped to his knees.
It wasn’t his own death that scared him. It was the idea that she’d think he’d left her again, left her like he had in Harrimere Drain, in the flooded car. There were many things he had said since the crash, but only one thing had he repeated each night at The Tower: ‘I’ll be back.’
‘Please, God,’ he said, silently this time. ‘Let her see me again.’
When he opened his eyes he was an inch from the lock. It was the Chubb: gold, and oddly icy. He put his lips to it and the kiss was as cold as Laura’s skin. So he pulled the chain at his neck and the key rose, and he put the key in the lock and even in the screaming chaos of the house in which he should have died he heard it effortlessly tumbling, the locksmith’s wheels falling nicely into their allotted slots.
