The Messiah Secret - James Becker [64]
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‘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.
Outside, Bronson paused for breath, then bent down and lifted the man to his