Her nose and lips were wet. Had she been crying? She put her fingers to them, and they came away red.
She left the gardening fork where it was and stumbled back to the shed to find a rag to staunch the bleeding, gathering her things one handed with the other pressed to her face. No way was she going to sleep here tonight. Bolts and locks and fancy gadgets weren’t going to help her against, against…
‘He who eats the moon,’ she whispered.
She locked up and hurried home. By the time she got there she had a thumping headache, so swallowed a couple of paracetamol and hoped that a night’s sleep would take care of it. But she wasn’t even granted that respite, because her phone rang at a little after two the next morning. It was David Pimblett, calling in his capacity as Neighbourhood Watch liaison.
Her shed was on fire.
PART FOUR
AGGRESSIVELY WEED
1
ASHES
DENNIE STOOD IN THE STROBING BLUE OF THE POLICE and fire appliance’s lights, too stunned to weep.
By the time Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service had responded to the call there was nothing they could do except stop it spreading to the other allotments, and by the time Dennie had arrived they were dampening down, and there was nothing to save. The nearest half of her crops were gone along with it – scorched by their proximity to the flames, ruined by the jets of high-pressure water, or just plain trampled on. Her precious grafted tomatoes had been annihilated.
The shed itself was little more than a scorched black platform covered in sodden ash and the metal debris of anything that wouldn’t burn – she saw her kettle, some paint tins, the thin struts of a stunt kite that they’d taken up Kinder Scout one blustery weekend, and the melted lump that had once been her battery lantern. Her folding chair that she’d sat on for so many nights was a twisted skeleton of blackened aluminium, and the glass of her old cold frame, that she had built herself with panes scavenged from an abandoned plot, was a crust of shattered and blackened fragments that crunched beneath the boots of the firefighters as they moved to and fro. It had been her refuge, her bolthole in times of trouble – more of a home than her actual house, and it was gone.
Sian Watts had her arm across Dennie’s shoulders, gripping tight, and Angie was on the other side, and despite Angie’s recent harsh words she was glad of the company because she felt that without someone to hold her up she might end up like Lot’s wife, who had looked back to watch her home destroyed and been turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for her presumption by a vengeful lord.
There had been a wooden panel beside the door where Christopher and Lizzie had chalked their names when they had been little and her shed had been not just a place for keeping tools but a playhouse, a castle, a Tardis. That was gone too.
That was when the tears came, and Sian and Angie held her up.
* * *
Eventually the emergency services packed up and left, and the residents of the surrounding roads who had watched either from their driveways or back windows returned to their beds. Angie vowed that first thing in the morning she would put wheels in motion to get it all cleared up and to sort Dennie out with a new shed, new tools, whatever she needed, and departed for her own home. Sian asked three times if Dennie wanted a lift home, or someone to stay with her, but took the hint after the third refusal and went her own way, leaving Dennie to stare at the wreckage alongside David Pimblett.
‘They did this,’ she told him, stating it as a simple, bald fact. She didn’t feel angry, not at the moment. Her soul felt like ash. Anger would come later.
‘They?’ he asked. ‘Who do you mean, they?’
‘The newcomers. That Farrow Farm lot. Somehow they must have known I’d seen something and this is their way of punishing me.’
‘Wait, that’s ridiculous. There’s absolutely no reason to think—’
‘Come here.’ She walked over to the sodden mess that had been her shed, and pointed. ‘See that?’
‘What, that? It looks like a storm lantern.’
That was exactly what it was. A faux-retro metal lantern with a glass bulb protecting a cotton wick fed by a reservoir of paraffin in the base. Except that the glass bulb was smashed and the whole thing was bent out of shape, either from the heat or from having been stepped on. The fire crew commander had pointed it out to them as the likely cause of the ‘accident’.
‘I don’t own one.’
‘Are you sure? You had a lot of stuff in that shed. Maybe you got one a long time ago and then forgot about it.’
She shook her head. ‘Nope. I’ve never allowed naked flames. Cooking gas aside,’ she added, as he opened his mouth to object. ‘That’s controlled and switched off when it’s not used and comes home with me. I never leave it in the shed. If I want light I have – had – my little battery lantern.
