10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [43]
A camera flashed.
Two men in yellow suits like moon suits were sprinting, heavy-gloved hands outstretched, dragging as they went a circular trampoline thing for catching jumpers. No time to position it. They simply ran, and my father crashed down into them, all the figures sprawling, arms and legs flying. People crowded to help them and hid the tangle from my sight but my father’s legs had been moving with life, and he had shoes on, which he hadn’t had upstairs.
I was covered in smoky dirt and bleeding from a few cobble-induced scrapes and grazes, and I had tears running down my face, although I didn’t know I was crying: and I was dazed still and was coughing and had blisters forming on my fingers and feet, but none of it mattered. Noise and confusion filled my head. I’d aimed to keep my father safe from danger and I hadn’t even contemplated a smoke alarm.
His voice said, “Ben?”
I looked up woozily. He was standing above me; he was smiling. How could he?
Men in yellow suits unrolled hoses and poured gallons from the tanker onto the killing bow fronts. There was steam and smoke and unquenched flame: and there were people putting a red blanket around my bare shoulders and telling me not to worry. I wasn’t sure where they had come from, or what I didn’t have to worry about.
I wasn’t actually sure of anything.
“Ben,” my father said in my ear, “you’re concussed.”
“Mm?”
“They say your head hit the ground. Can you hear me?”
“No smoke alarm. My fault ...”
“Ben!” He shook me. People told him not to.
“I’ll get you elected,” I said.
“Christ.”
People’s familiar faces loomed into my orbit and went away again. I thought it extraordinary that they were walking around fully dressed in the middle of the night but at one point learned that it was barely twenty minutes past eleven, not five to four. I’d gone early to bed and jumped out of the window wearing only my watch and my underpants and got the time wrong.
Amy was there, wringing her hands and weeping. Amy crying for the charity gifts lost to ashes, the ugly whatnot gone forever, still unsold. What’s a whatnot, Amy? An étagère, you know, an upright set of little shelves for filling an odd corner, bearing plates and photographs and whatnot.
And bullets?
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I left the bullet in my awful cardigan in the shop, and now I’ve lost it, but never mind, it was only a lump of old lead.”
Mrs. Leonard Kitchens patted my shoulder reassuringly. “Don’t you worry, boy, there was nothing in those old shops but junk and paper. Leaflets. Nothing! My Leonard’s here somewhere. Have you seen him? Likes a good fire, does my Leonard, but the fun’s all over now. I want to go home.”
Usher Rudd stalked his prey backwards, framing his picture, stepping back and clicking. He grinned over my blanket, took time to focus, aimed his lens.
Flash.
The cameraman from the local TV station arrived with his brighter light that was still outwatted by fire.
Mervyn wrung his hands over the lost heaps of JULIARDS. He’d barely been home half an hour before someone had phoned to warn him the charity shop was on fire.
Crystal Harley knelt beside me, dabbing bloody trickles with tissues and said worriedly, “Do you think I’d better come into work tomorrow?”
Paul and Isobel Bethune illicitly drove into the pedestrian-only precinct. Emergencies made new rules, the local councillor said, bustling towards my father, presenting a surface of urgent concern, all camaraderie for him and with hail-fellow greetings individually for the firemen.
Isobel asked me weakly if I was all right.
“Of course he’s not,” Crystal snapped. “He jumped through fire and hit the ground. What do you expect?”
“And ...