“There’s another fire!” He forgot the “sir.” He looked very young, the freckles standing out on his fair skin in its unnatural pallor. “Amos Lindsay’s house.”
“Bad?” Pitt asked, although he knew.
“Terrible.” Murdo kept his voice under control with difficulty. “I never saw anything like it-you can feel the heat a hundred yards up the road; fair hurts your eye to look at it. God-how can anyone do that?”
“Come in,” Pitt said quickly. The night air was cold.
Murdo hesitated.
“My boots are in the kitchen.” Pitt turned and left him to do as he pleased. He heard the latch close and Murdo tiptoeing heavily after him.
In the kitchen he put up the gas and sat on the hard-backed chair, reaching for his boots and then lacing them tightly. Murdo came in as far as the stove, relishing the warmth. His eyes went over the clean wood, the china gleaming on the dresser, and he caught the smell of laundry drying on the airing rail winched up towards the ceiling above them. Unconsciously the lines in his young face were already less desperate.
Charlotte appeared in the doorway in her nightgown, her bare feet having made no sound on the linoleum.
Pitt smiled at her bleakly.
“What is it?” she asked, glancing at Murdo and back at Pitt.
“Fire,” he said simply.
“Where?”
“Amos Lindsay’s. Go back to bed,” he said gently. “You’ll get cold.”
She stood white-faced. Her hair was dark over her shoulders, copper where the gaslight caught it.
“Who was in the house?” she asked Murdo.
“I dunno, ma’am. We aren’t sure. They was trying to get the servants out, but the heat was terrible, scorch the hair off-” He stopped, realizing he was speaking to a woman and probably should not be saying such things.
“What?” she demanded.
He looked miserable and guilty for his clumsiness. He stared at Pitt, who was now ready to go.
“Eyebrows, ma’am,” he answered miserably, and she knew he was too shocked to equivocate.
Pitt kissed Charlotte quickly on the cheek and pushed her back. “Go to bed,” he said again. “Standing here catching a chill won’t help anyone.”
“Can you tell me if-” Then she realized what she was asking. To dispatch someone with a message, simply to allay her fears, or confirm them, would be a ridiculous waste of manpower, when there were urgent things to be done, injured and perhaps bereaved people to help. “I’m sorry.”
He smiled, an instant of understanding, then turned and went out with Murdo and pulled the front door closed behind him.
“What about Shaw?” he asked as they climbed up into the cab and it started forward immediately. It was obviously quite unnecessary to tell the cabby where they were going. Within moments the horse had broken from a trot into a canter and its hooves rang on the stones as the cab swayed and turned, throwing them from one wall to the other, and against each other, with some violence.
“I don’t know, sir, impossible to tell. The place is an inferno. We ’aven’t seen ’im-it looks bad.”
“Lindsay?”
“Nor ’im neither.”
“Dear God, what a mess!” Pitt said under his breath as the cab lurched around a corner, the wheels lifting for an instant and landing hard on the cobbles again with a jar that shook his bones.
It was a long, wretched ride to Highgate and they neither of them spoke again. There was nothing to say; each was consumed in his own imagination of the furnace they were racing towards, and the memory of Clemency Shaw’s charred body removed from another ruin so shortly before.
The red glow was visible through the cab window as soon as they turned the last corner of Kentish Town Road onto Highgate Road. In Highgate Rise the horse jerked to a halt and the cabby leaped down and threw the door open. “I can’t take yer no further!”
Pitt climbed out and the heat hit him, enveloping him in stinging, acrid, smut-filled, roaring chaos. The whole sky seemed red with the towering brilliance of it. Showers of sparks exploded in the air, white and yellow, flying hundreds of feet up, then falling in dying cinders. The street was congested with fire engines, horses plunging and crying out in terror as debris fell around them. Men clung onto them, trying to steady them amid the confusion. There were hoses connected up to the Highgate Ponds, and men struggled with leather buckets, passing them from hand to hand, but all they were doing was protecting the nearest other houses. Nothing could save Lindsay’s house now. Even as Pitt and Murdo stood in the road a great section of the top story collapsed, the beams exploded and fell in rapid succession and a huge gout of flame fifty feet high went soaring upwards, the heat of it driving them back to the far pavement and behind the hedge, even as far as they were from the house.
One of the fire engine horses screamed as a length of wood fell across its back and the smell of burning hair and flesh filled the immediate air. It plunged forward, tearing its reins out of the fireman’s hands. Another man, almost too quick for thought, caught up a bucket of water and threw it over the beast, quenching in one act both the heat and the pain.
Pitt ran forward and caught the animal, throwing all his weight against its charge, and it shuddered to a halt. Murdo, who had grown up on a farm, took off his jacket, squashed it into another bucket of water, then slapped it onto the beast’s back and held it.
The chief fireman was coming towards Pitt, his face a mask of smoke stains. Only the eyes showed through, red-rimmed and desperate. His eyebrows were singed and there were angry red weals under the blackened grime. His clothes were torn and soiled almost beyond recognition by water and the charring of heat and debris.
“We’ve got the servants out!” he shouted, then spluttered into coughing and controlled himself with difficulty. He waved them farther back and they followed him to where there was a faint touch of coolness of night air softening the heat and the stench, and the roaring and crashing of masonry and the explosion of wood were less deafening. His face was haggard, not only with sorrow but with his own failure. “But we didn’t get either of the two gentlemen.” It was unnecessary to add that it was now beyond hope, it was apparent to anyone at all. Nothing could be alive in that conflagration.
Pitt had known it, yet to hear it from someone else who spoke from years of such hope and struggle gave him a sudden gaping emptiness inside that took him by surprise. He realized only now how much he had been drawn to Shaw, even though he accepted that he might have murdered Clemency. Or perhaps it was only his brain that accepted it, his inner judgment always denied it. And with Amos Lindsay there had been no suspicion, only interest, and a little blossom of warmth because he had known Nobby Gunne. Now there was only a sense of sharp pain for the destruction. Anger would come later when the wound was less consuming.
He turned to Murdo and saw the shock and misery in his face. He was young and very new to murder and its sudden, violent loss. Pitt took him by the arm.
“Come on,” he said quietly. “We failed to prevent this, but we’ve got to get him before he does any more. Or her,” he added. “It could be a woman.”
Murdo was still stunned. “What woman would ever do that?” He jerked his hand back, but he did not turn.
“Women are just as capable of passion and hatred as men,” Pitt replied. “And of violence, given the means.”
“Oh no, sir-” Murdo began instinctively, the argument born of his own memories. Sharp tongues, yes; and a box on the ears; certainly greed at times, and coldness; nagging, bossiness and a great deal of criticism; and mind-staggering, speech-robbing unfairness. But not violence like this-
Memory returned, crowding in on Pitt, and he spoke with surprise.
“Some of the most gruesome murders I’ve ever worked on were committed by women, Murdo. And some of them I understood very well-when I knew why-and pitied. We know so little about this case-none of the real passions underneath it-”
“We know the Worlinghams have a great deal of money, and so does old Lutterworth.” Murdo struggled to gather everything in his mind. “We know-we know Pascoe and Dalgetty hate each other, although what that has to do with Mrs. Shaw …” He trailed off, searching for something more relevant. “We know Lindsay wrote pro-Fabian
