Killian carried both paintings out into the hall. He opened the front door of the house, checked in both directions, saw nobody, then walked across the kerb to his hire car, opened the boot and slid them inside.
He looked back at the house, wondering if he should just drive away. Then he shrugged and retraced his steps. Better to finish the job properly.
‘I have never heard of anybody called Wendell-Carfax,’ the elderly Egyptian man said, his tone polite but with an underlying edge to it.
Bronson and Angela were standing outside a small white house on a side street at the northern edge of Al- Gebel al-Ahmar. They’d received no reply at the first property they’d tried, the one listed as the residence of Hassan al-Sahid in the phone directory, so they’d moved on to the second address, the home of one ‘M. al-Sahid’. The man’s first name had turned out to be Mahmoud, and he obviously wasn’t pleased at the interruption to his day.
‘I am sorry we have disturbed you,’ Bronson said, speaking slowly and clearly. Mahmoud al-Sahid’s English was far from fluent, his accent thick and heavy. ‘Obviously you are not the person we are looking for. Our apologies. You do not, I suppose, know where Hassan al-Sahid lives?’
‘Hassan al-Sahid is dead, as I told the other man. But his son – his name is Suleiman – still lives in his father’s house.’
‘What other man?’ Bronson asked, alarm bells suddenly ringing.
‘The priest,’ the elderly man said. ‘The priest was also looking for Hassan al-Sahid.’
Angela clutched Bronson’s arm. ‘A priest?’ she echoed.
‘Where does Suleiman al-Sahid live?’ Bronson demanded.
Back inside the house, Killian opened the large suitcase he’d brought with him. Inside were three two-gallon cans of petrol, all full of fuel. He picked up the first one, twisted off the cap and tossed it away.
He looked round, choosing where to spread the accelerant. There was a lot of wood in the house, so he guessed it probably wouldn’t matter too much where he put it – the place would burn anyway. He walked across to where Suleiman al-Sahid still lay unconscious, looked down at the man and crossed himself. Then he splashed petrol over his shirt and trousers, spread it out all around him and poured out still more in a trail that led to the door of the room. He continued laying a river of fuel out into the hall, then closed and locked the dining-room door from the outside.
Killian hoped Suleiman would come round before the flames reached him, and he spent a few moments imagining the look of terror on the man’s face as the trail of fire swept under the door and headed straight for him across the floor. Killian knew it would be a painful and protracted, but ultimately cleansing, death. The Church had always believed that fire cleansed even the most unrepentant sinner or heretic, and had used the flames of sacred fires to save the souls of thousands from eternal damnation during the various Inquisitions across Europe.
He splashed the contents of the other two cans liberally around the ground floor of the house, finishing just inside the front door. Then he took a small plastic bag from his pocket, and extracted a stubby candle through which he’d bored a hole from one side to the other about an eighth of an inch below the wick. Then he took a short length of twine which he’d soaked in paraffin and fed that through the hole. He positioned one end of the twine in a pool of petrol and placed the candle a few inches away. He’d experimented with different types of candles and knew that the wick would burn down to the twine in about five minutes, which would give him ample time to get clear of the area before the accelerant blew.
Killian lit the candle, made sure it was burning properly, then strode across to the front door and left the house.
* * *
‘Where the hell is it?’ Bronson demanded, looking frantically for a street sign – any street sign – that would tell them where they were in the maze of roads that made up Al-Gebel al-Ahmar.
‘Stop,’ Angela yelled, pointing. ‘There’s a sign.’
Bronson braked hard, slewing the car sideways, then reversed back up about twenty feet so Angela could see the sign clearly.
She read the letters, checked the map and then pointed ahead. ‘Keep going down this road,’ she instructed, ‘and take the second turning on the left.’
In the hall of Suleiman al-Sahid’s house the candle flame burnt steadily, the flame flickering slightly in the erratic air currents that worked their way under the front door. Four minutes after Killian had applied his lighter to the candle wick, the flame reached the length of twine. There was a sharp fizzing from the twine as it ignited, and then the flame started burning its way down it towards the petrol.
Killian had chosen paraffin for his fuse because it would burn more slowly. Even so, the flame reached the pool of petrol in less than thirty seconds. The moment it did so, there was the sound of a dull ‘whump’, and in an instant the hall was ablaze, the tendrils of burning petrol spreading out in all directions.
* * *
‘Are you sure this is the right address?’ Bronson asked. ‘It all looks really peaceful here at the moment.’ He switched off the car engine and opened the door. For a moment he just looked at the whitewashed property in front of them. Then he sniffed.
‘Do you smell burning?’ he asked.
Before Angela could reply, there was a thump from inside the house, and the first tongues of flame licked under the front door, bubbling the paint as the old wood caught fire.
‘Oh, shit,’ Bronson muttered, then started to run towards the house. ‘Call the fire brigade,’ he shouted.
Behind him, Angela yelled out in alarm. ‘Chris, don’t. Come back.’
Bronson knew something about fires and the way they spread. If he opened the front door, he would probably be immediately engulfed in flames. But there had to be a back door, some other way in to the house. He wasn’t bothered about the paintings – they would either survive the blaze or not – but he was worried about anyone inside the property. He didn’t know if Suleiman al-Sahid or his family were in there, but he was going to do his best to check out the house before the fire took hold everywhere.
Bronson ran around the side of the house, stopping at every window and peering inside. But he saw nothing until he looked in through the glass panel of a wooden door at the rear of the property and caught sight of the body of a man lying motionless on the floor.
He wrenched on the handle, but the door was locked.
There’s a technique to kicking down a door. Charging at it almost never works, despite the way TV detectives always seem to do it. Instead, the energy has to be concentrated, focused, as near to the lock – the weakest part of any door – as possible.
Bronson took a step back and kicked out, the sole of his foot connecting with the door right beside the lock. It didn’t budge, and felt as if it never would. The door was absolutely solid.
He looked around desperately, searching for anything he could use to break it down. On one side of the garden were some lumps of masonry, perhaps left over from some repair work. He ran over, grabbed the biggest lump of stone he thought he could handle, then crossed back to the locked door. Gripping the stone firmly in both hands, he swung it as hard as he could, smashing it straight into the door next to the lock.
The wood splintered and cracked, but the door still held. He glanced back into the room. As he did so, he noticed the man on the floor move slightly, little more than a twitch of his leg, but it proved that he was still alive. Bronson redoubled his efforts, swinging the stone as hard as he could.
On the third impact, the door finally gave, crashing back on its hinges, and Bronson immediately smelt the petrol. The sudden rush of air into the room seemed to act like the bellows in a furnace, fuelling the fire. A tongue of flame crawled up the inside surface of the interior door opposite, followed almost immediately by a river of fire that snaked across the room, arrow-straight towards the inert figure.
Bronson dropped the stone and raced inside, getting to the unconscious man a bare second before the burning petrol reached him. He grabbed him by the arm and dragged him bodily away from the flames, heading towards the door to the garden.
But even as he hauled him across the floor, the end of the man’s trousers brushed against one of the flaming pools of petrol, and instantly caught fire.
Bronson heard a sudden gasp of pain from the man he was trying to rescue, and looked down. Dropping his arm, he wrenched off his jacket and flung it on to the man’s lower legs, pressing it down hard to smother the flames. Then he grabbed his shoulders and dragged him as quickly as he could to the door and out of the blazing room, the flames licking behind them all the way.
