Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [115]
You have never heard a woman scream as loudly as I did. The bloke looked across and took a few moments to process the scene. Then he leapt down and drove his truck over at top speed. Peter was shouting at me to pass Daniel out, but I held on. As long as the smoke was only waist high, I could keep Daniel above my head in the clear air. Then, like an angel from the heavens, the cherry-picker rose before my very eyes and my saviour in day-glo yellow plucked my son to safety.
As soon as Daniel was out of my hands, I screamed at the stranger to get away from the building. ‘Go, go, I’ll be all right!’ I was terrified the house would explode and I didn’t want him caught in the crossfire, not with the precious cargo he was carrying. In any case, if Peter could get out of the window, then so could I. I jumped up, swung myself through and, not daring to look down, let myself drop onto the roof of the bay below. The funny thing was, when I opened my eyes, I could see all the thousands of shards of glass near my bare feet, but none of them seemed to have gone in.
A few minutes later I was wrapped in a fireman’s blanket on the other side of the road, cuddling Daniel and watching as the brigade extinguished the blaze. It felt surreal to imagine I’d been in there a few moments earlier. If it weren’t for the heat pouring out of the building, it would have seemed just like a film.
When it was all under control, a fireman told me how lucky we’d been. ‘We estimate another thirty seconds, a minute at most, and the lounge would have been engulfed.’
Thank God Peter woke me up when he did.
I spent the rest of the night at Granny’s, still in a fug from our narrow escape. I presumed Peter was sleeping in his van. I hadn’t bothered to ask. Gradually I became aware of pain in my feet. When Granny looked, she said, ‘Cathy, you’re cut to ribbons. Can’t you feel it?’
I was just beginning to. I think the adrenalin from the fear had blocked the pain out. I spent the rest of the day at the hospital, having tiny flecks of glass tweezered out. The following morning, I called the fire station and asked if it was safe to return for my clothes. They said the staircase was entirely destroyed, but it was okay to use the fire escape at the back of the house, which the other lodger had escaped from.
It’s extremely creepy being in a burnt-out building. A fireman had insisted on accompanying me, but I was still spooked by the charred walls and blackened floors. When I got to my private corridor, I gasped. The fire door was completely gone. And that wasn’t all. All my clothes were missing.
They hadn’t been burnt because the wardrobe was still intact – someone had taken them! Daniel’s had vanished as well. In their place were three men’s jackets.
Someone’s been sleeping here!
With the fireman at my back, I explored the rest of the flat. Everything in the lounge was just as we’d left it, apart from being smoke-damaged. The frying pan and microwave were still on the floor where they’d landed. In fact, the only thing that appeared to be missing was some Fairy Liquid. Every other cleaning agent was lined up neatly, as usual, by the sink. But there was a gap where the Fairy should have been.
That was such a confusing discovery that I almost forgot my jewellery box. Dashing back into the bedroom, I found it at the bottom of the wardrobe. I didn’t have much jewellery myself. In fact, the only three things in that box worth anything were all pieces that had belonged to my mother: a silver ring with a jade stone; a gold ring with a square-cut amethyst which Mum had given to Granny and she had passed on to me when Mum had died; and a marijuana-leaf brooch in silver (there was another clue about Mum that I’d missed at the time). Of them all, the gold ring was the most important because that was the one that linked Mum, Granny and me. But that was the one that was missing.
I could have stood there crying,