A City of Strangers (10 page)

The grass of the lawn was spongy under her feet. Moss. Adrian should do something about the moss. He didn't like using those chemical weed-killers, but he would have to. It was beautifully neat—he had done a good job of sweeping up. The two trees Rosamund loved, even in their autumnal state. The lilac had been there when they had bought the house, but the cherry Desmond had planted. And several of the roses too. They were old now, naturally—exhausted really. But a dot of color caught her eye at the far end of the garden and there, near the gate, she found not one but two roses in bud. Late roses always moved her: so brave! She was just wondering whether to pick them to show Adrian she had been out when she heard footsteps in the lane, and turned rapidly to go back into the kitchen.

“Why, Rosamund! How wonderful to see you out!”

It was Daphne Bridewell, on her way from her end house to the garages. Rosamund Eastlake felt forced to turn round.

“Hello, Daphne.”

She smiled a social smile, then turned back to resume her walk toward the kitchen.

Carol had to stand in, that Monday, for a colleague who was sick. It was Dot Fenton, who had a variety of nervous illnesses she could call on. Carol was not familiar with 4C, but she soon realized it was the class that contained Cilla Phelan.

She only just knew the girl by sight, for, though she had been curious about her, Cilla had been away sick recently. But she was a girl who would in any case make herself noticed. This was not by any of the sort of rowdy behavior that might have been expected, she gathered, from the two elder Phelans. It was something else, something more disturbing and difficult to cope with. She might almost have thought, if she hadn't heard about the child before, that she was mentally disturbed or retarded.

It was the laugh that gave that impression—or the laughs: They ranged from a snicker to a brief burst, like a guffaw. Cilla was sitting there writing at her desk—Carol had not wanted to interfere with any teaching program Dot Fenton might have had, and had set them something to write that they could read out toward the end of class. Cilla sat hunched up, only occasionally putting pen to paper, yet coming out periodically with this odd, essentially solitary laughter. Occasionally she would lean over and pinch the girl nearest
to her, or whisper something to her. She, clearly, was her friend. Otherwise she gave the impression of being an isolated child. When Carol walked up the aisle by her, she looked at her exercise book. One glance told her she was virtually illiterate. When class broke up at half past twelve, she heard her chant, “I know something you don't know,” in the voice and manner of a child half her age to the girl who had been sitting beside her.

“Is Cilla Phelan childish, retarded, or what?” she asked Bob McEvoy, back in the staff room.

“Neither,” he said, in his comfortable, seen-it-all way, which she was beginning to like very much. “Very backward educationally, but sharp in other ways. Secretive and sharp.”

“I did wonder if she was being abused. There was a girl who was being sexually abused in the school where I did teaching practice—by her mother's boyfriend. She was very different—there was an open, horrible sexuality about her.”

“I don't think there's any question of that—not in the home, anyway. It came up in connection with the dreadful June, who
did
have that open sexuality from quite young, but there was found to be nothing in it. What
was
happening was quite outside the home. She had got herself involved in a sporadic way with this Carrock business—a nasty ring procuring children of both sexes for prostitution. Cilla's quite different, as you say.”

“She's just a horrible child?”

“Yes, something like that. I haven't actually had a lot to do with her, though for my sins she's one of the party I'm taking over to the Palace Theatre in Manchester on Thursday.”

“Really?”

“Yes—
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

“My God, is that going the rounds again? I saw that when I was a child. It's getting to be like the
Messiah
—always with us. At least the
Messiah
is good music.”

Bob McEvoy shrugged.

“It gets the kids in, that's all I'm interested in. Your Michael is coming as well.”

“Oh, good. Is this a consequence of the Phelans' new prosperity?”

“Oh, no. We have a fund for poorer kids who want to go but can't afford to. The Phelan kids always apply. It's not from love of theatre on the parents' part, just to get rid of the kids for the night. And perhaps to get something for nothing—that always makes our Jack feel better.”

“Well, keep on eye on her, will you? And tell me what you think.”

“Sure. Cilla is a child you always have to keep an eye on anyway.”

That afternoon, after school, Carol had to go to the Burtle shopping
center to stock up with food. At that time of day the supermarket there was usually crowded. That Monday it was crowded with the Phelans.

She saw them first, luckily. She was pretty sure that by now Jack Phelan had her clear in his mind as Michael's teacher, perhaps as someone who had given the boy ideas, anyway as a target. Carol had always felt that you could tell a lot about people by the way they pushed their supermarket trolley. You certainly could tell a lot about the Phelans.

There were five of them going the rounds of the aisles: the parents, June, Jackie, and Dale. Dale's push-chair and the supermarket trolley made them a formidable group to encounter—practically an armored battalion. Jack pushed the trolley aggressively, shouted instructions, got out of no one's way, cursed old ladies who were peering at prices to save a penny or two on a packet of teabags, and abused one of the shelf-boys who happened to be black. “I wouldn't go to a Paki shop and I don't expect to see the buggers here,” he shouted ostensibly to his wife, really to all and sundry, and the black youth in particular, who was in fact Caribbean. Carol stayed a few feet behind, close enough to hear what they were saying, and sometimes to see what they were buying. There were large packets of sirloin steaks, an immense cream cake from the bakery section, a twelve-can pack of Castlemain 4X from drinks, ready-to-heat dinners from the freezer, and the most expensive Cheddar cheese.

It was not the trolley of a family on Social Security. Any hope that the Wynton Lane residents might have had that the Phelan pools win was a jape seemed likely to prove unfounded.

I
t was shortly after eleven-thirty that it was done.

In the Belfield Grove Estate something like a quarter of the streetlights were out of order, leaving large, uneasy pools of blackness. The more rowdy of the local youth aimed bottles at the lights when they'd had a few too many: They liked broken glass, and they liked blackness. This left the Estate an uncomfortable place to walk in after dark. Late shoppers and dog-walkers scurried through their tasks and retreated indoors.

On Thursday the Belfield Arms had turned out about ten past eleven, and the few that were
still
there had rolled home, most of them to go straight to bed. By eleven-thirty the lights that were on in the Estate were mostly in bedrooms. The few still lit up on the ground floor belonged some to families whose children had gone with the theatre party to Manchester, and who were waiting up, others to a few incurable late-nighters who had hired videos and who sat there entranced in their flicking wombs. All were inside, with no reason to look out. The lights were out in the Phelan home. Jack Phelan had left the Railway King at ten-forty-five, and the house had been dark, bar the faint blue flicker from the television, by five past eleven.

The figure came from Grange Street and walked quickly through the Estate, crossing the road at one point to take advantage of those pools of darkness. At the gate he paused for a second, then threaded his way, in the thin light of a distant street lamp, past the looming shapes of dismembered car parts and up to the front door, which was in fact round the side of the house and in deep darkness. The figure stood for a moment in that pitch blackness, listening. What it could hear, from a far room, were snores and the sound from a television. Quickly it dived into the pocket of its heavy, capacious coat, took out a handful of something, then opened the flap of the
letter box and began stuffing it through. There was another pause as it listened—and perhaps thought that this was the crucial moment, the last chance of pulling back. Then there was a tiny spurt of fire from a lighter; something was lit and pushed through the letter box. There was a sharp burst of light from behind the glass window that illuminated—for no one—the shape on the outside of it. Then that shape scuttled down the path and out into Belfield Grove Avenue where, once more crossing the road to hug the patches of darkness, it walked briskly and normally along the Avenue and out of the Estate.

Malcolm Cray was dropped off from the police car at a corner of the Battersby Road, the main road from East Sleate into the center. They had been at a minor incident in Pudleigh, where a drunk had been making a scene outside a Chinese restaurant. Now his shift was up. He raised his hand to his colleague in farewell and walked down Grange Street toward the Estate. He noted that the Belfield Arms was dark and quiet, and then turned into the Estate. He did not notice the fire then—there was a curve in the Avenue that prevented that. Only when he had gone a few yards along the Avenue did he wrinkle his nose and quicken his steps.

It was when he had started into the curve that his instinct told him something was up. As he began to run, he was aware of a patch of lurid light ahead of him. This was no garden bonfire, no precursor of Guy Fawkes night: This was a house on fire. An awful premonition seized him and he speeded up, but as he came out of the curve he saw at once that he was wrong: This was not his house. It was the Phelans'. In a final burst of speed he ran past it, up his own path, and put his key in his front door.

“Selena! Are you there? . . . For God's sake, get up, put a coat on and come out!”

His wife had been in bed. Policemen's hours are unpredictable, and Malcolm was, if anything, early. She was in her eighth month of pregnancy and found she needed a lot of sleep. But she heard through the fug of her dreams, shouted back, and within a couple of minutes was out and in the Avenue, pulling her warmest coat around her nightdress. The lower story of the Phelans' house was an inferno. Malcolm had darted through the treacherous shapes of the front garden and was now at the side door. Immediately he saw that it was no go.

“Get her out next door. Mrs. Makepeace—get her out. And get the brigade. Don't ring from our house, go to the phone box.”

The kitchen door, round the back of the house, was a bit easier. Inside the smoke seemed thick, but the room was not alight. Malcolm Cray found a piece of heavy metal, part of a motorbike, by the back step, but when he had broken the glass in the door, turned the key inside, and opened up, he was driven back by thick, acrid smoke—the sort of smoke produced by synthetic stuffing in cheap furniture. It was a smell he remembered, with revulsion, from a previous fire he was at, at an Asian family's home.

He ran round the front, still clutching the metal. He found Mrs. Makepeace now out in the road, and his wife haring down it to the phone box.

“A ladder—have you got one?”

“No—but there's one in the next-door garden. The painters were here earlier.”

He dashed into the garden two down from the Phelans'. Yes, there was a painter's ladder, left down behind the hedge. It was heavy and unwieldly, but he maneuvered it through the gate and along to the Phelans'.

“Can you stand at the bottom?” he asked Lottie Makepeace. “Don't endanger yourself—but there are children.”

“I'll be all right, Malcolm. There's only the young ones there, so far as I know.”

“Thank God.”

He cursed as he knocked his ankle against the spare parts that littered the front garden. By now the flames were providing ample light, but it was difficult to find a place to set up the ladder under an upstairs window. He kicked debris aside, set the ladder against the wall, and ran up.