Before There Were Angels (16 page)

“He did. He said exactly that.”

“I have to agree that it must seem ridiculous to him, and frustrating. And he had no idea who Genevieve Giraud might be?”

“None at all.
He said he would dig. I am not optimistic about the outcome. He will probably be too busy laughing.”

I hugged Belle. She was resistant at first, assum
ing that I was about to patronize her, but finally melted into me.

“You have to agree it is perplexing,” I said, “and the San Fran police are mostly used to dealing with petty crimes, cakes and coffee. Ghosts following people down the street must be completely outside his experience
, murderers too. I don’t think this situation is funny. I think it is extremely dangerous, but it is bizarre, and that is all I am sure he is saying.”

“He should pick
his words more carefully,” she said.

“Yes, I agree. It was an unfortunate choice of words. Come on, let’s relax for a bit.”

*  *  *

There was no relaxation that night, though. No sooner had we gone to bed and Stevie settled down in the attic, than something smashed in the kitchen.

“George?” Belle and I shouted out together.

There was another crash which sounded like glasses, followed by a whole pile of plates breaking singly.

I jumped out of bed and rushed downstairs to see if George was chasing a cat, was being pursued by a mosquito or had contracted rabies.

I found him in the sitting room looking distinctly alarmed and he rushed up the stairs to our bedroom as I entered the kitchen.

It looked like a building site and a very dangerous one for someone with bare feet.

“What the fuc
k …?” I exclaimed and then leaped in the air as Belle came in behind me and put her arms around my waist.

“All our things!” she said. “Who has done this? Why?”

“It wasn’t George,” I said.

“No, I know it wasn’t George, but it must have been someone.”

We then heard things breaking in our bedroom and George tore down the stairs again to the accompaniment of the sound of sheets being ripped – neatly in two, as it turned out.

Belle and I raced each other up the stairs to find a snowstorm of feathers and a
snowscape of bed coverings about to be ignited by overturned candles and lamps.

“Who turned the lights on?” Belle asked. “What is going on?”

“It looks like they are intent on burning down the house. We had better keep an eye on anything that could cause a flame.”

Sure enough, five minutes late
r we could smell the rancid odor of hot oil cooking in the kitchen. Belle abandoned her cleaning up of the bedroom to head for the door. I held her back.

“This is hot oil
we are dealing with here. Be careful. We don’t want it being hurled all over us.” I grabbed two towels from the bathroom and soaked them. “It’s not much protection but they might help put out the flames.”

“Remember there
’s a fire extinguisher behind the door.”

“If it is still there,” I muttered grimly.

I tiptoed down the stairs, watching for any movement in the kitchen. Instead I saw smoke billowing up and the reflection of flames in the high gloss paint on the walls of the hallway.

“Get out of the house,” I shouted to Belle, “and get Stevie out too. Then call 911.”

George was standing in the hallway barking ferociously - yes, ferociously not frenziedly. He wasn’t afraid of the smoke and the flames, he was angry with an intruder.

I jumped the last steps and raced to the front door. Belle and Stevie would be coming down the external fire escape. I threw open the door, which made the flames burn even more enthusiastically, and demanded that George leave the house. Eventually I had to grab him by the collar and haul him out.

I wrapped a wet towel around my waist as I closed the door behind me and draped the other one over my shoulders. San Francisco is rarely cold and they would have to do for a while. The thought crossed my mind,
what if the house burns down entirely? I will have no clothes.

Belle and Stevie were descending the last steps of the fire escape and we hugged each other, relieved that we had all got out alive.

Belle had phoned the fire department from the top of the fire escape and the first fire engine arrived within about two minutes. San Francisco is paranoid about fires breaking out in the city after what happened in 1906 when the city was virtually razed to the ground.

It took them only another ten minutes or so to get the fire under control. The damage was mainly confined to the kitchen and hallway
, but the kitchen itself was gutted and we knew that the smell of smoke would linger for weeks to come. It would smell like hell itself and that effect might have been intended.

The firemen were
confused to find so much mess across the kitchen floor. Was someone having a fight in there and accidentally managed to knock over a pan of cooking oil?

No, we said, there was no fight
. All the glasses and plates seemed to have been smashed by an intruder who must also have started the fat fire and trashed out bedroom upstairs. This didn’t make a lot of sense to the firemen and we assured them that it didn’t make any more sense to us either.

“Are you well insured?” one f
ireman asked us as if he was on to something.

“We are insured,” I replied but I don’t know if we are well insured.”

“It looks like the fire was started deliberately,” he said.

“Yes, it does,” we agreed.

He scrutinized us suspiciously, holding our gazes in a momentary silence that was clearly meant to be inquisitorial. “You agree?”

“Yes, we agree,” I said.

“So who started it?”

“That we don’t know,” I replied. “Not one of us.”

“So someone came into your house to break up your kitchen and bedroom, and then set fire to the house?”

“So it would seem,” I said.

“Do you know who this person is?”

“No, we haven’t
got a clue.”

“What room was hit
first?”

“The kitchen.
Then, when we rushed down to the kitchen, they trashed our bedroom, and when we returned to our bedroom, they set fire to the kitchen.”

Th
e fireman eyed me suspiciously. “Didn’t you see them on the stairs?”

“No, neither saw them nor heard them.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. How else would they get up and down the stairs?”

“The inside
staircase is the only way,” I confirmed.

“But you didn’t see them or hear them?”

“No.”

“How did they get out of the bedroom? Are there two sets of doors?”

“As it happens, yes. One set in the bedroom itself and another leading from the en suite bathroom onto the landing, but that is usually locked.”

“So you went in and he or she slipped out the other way?”

“Possibly,” I said. “That would be one scenario. But as I say, that door is usually locked and the key left downstairs in the kitchen. If they took the key with them upstairs, they are a lot better at recognizing it than we are.”

“And the other scenario
?”

“That they were silent and invisible.”

The fireman wasn’t expecting that answer. He probably thought I had been affected by the smoke and promptly ushered us to an ambulance that had arrived to be checked over medically.

“I suggest you talk to Officer Martinez or Officer Nielsen at the local police station,” I shouted over my shoulder. “They will explain. Well, they won’t explain the phenomenon but they should be able to explain our predicament, and I am not sure we can even do that. Believe it or not, we seem to be under attack from an unseen force.”

I had said too much. The fireman turned away and started to address his colleagues. I couldn’t hear what he said but I could detect scorn in his voice and once or twice laughter seeped out from the group.

I had to hand it to
Rafaella, she had managed to scare us and humiliate us in one flaming stroke. I didn’t think she was intending to kill us but it might not have bothered her too much if either Stevie or George had died. Belle and I she wanted to hang around a lot longer, I got the impression, and maybe ‘hang’ was the operative word.

How did I know it was
Rafaella? Because I heard her call out from the kitchen as I sprinted between the bottom of the stairs and the front door - “Hello, Luke.”

There again, I could have been imagining it and I could have been turning psychotic. However, I suspected there was only one psychotic
person in our immediate surroundings and I had just caught a glimpse of her looking down at us from the window in Stevie’s old room. She may even have waved.

Rafaella
was having fun. She was fiddling as we burned.

Chapter 20

Officers Martinez and Nielsen returned to our house within a few hours of the fire. They were looking pre-occupied and frustrated. Things were not adding up in their minds, or if they were with regard to our particular situation, they were not adding up with their world view. And if they could come to terms with the idea of some paranormal force murdering a boy and setting fire to the house, there was no way they could say that in the cold rational light of a police report. ‘Death by paranormal malice aforethought’ - you can just see that on the page and the effect on their careers of putting it there.

And yet, there was Genevieve Giraud following Stevie to and from school and there was definitely something inexplicable about her, Ricardo Nielsen knew that first hand.

So, that early morning, Officers Martinez and Nielsen were suffering from a severe hangover caused by cognitive dissonance on a transcendental scale.

“Do you mind if we go through all this again?” asked Martinez. “It sure is smoky in here.”

I laughed. “It’s a disaster. Belle’s gone off for a walk in the park. She cannot bear the smell and she is very upset at what happened last night.”

“I can understand that. So,” continued Martinez, “the most obvious explanation from what you are saying is that there is an intruder who murdered
Zack, and another or the same intruder who deliberately started this fire last night in your kitchen.”

“Correct.”

“But you have no real idea who this intruder is or whether it is the same one or different  ones …”

“I am fairly convinced it is
Rafaella but I have no proof of that.”

“What makes you think it is your ex-wife?” Nielsen asked, leaning forward.

“She is the only person I can think of with a motive.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell the officers that I had seen Rafaella in Stevie’s bedroom. It was too early in the morning to discuss her as a paranormal projection, and describing how I had discovered her as a living, breathing being in Stevie’s bedroom without telling either Belle or the police, was going to be a nightmare to sort out, starting with stark incredulity and ending in abject fury if I actually persuaded them to believe me of the, ‘You saw Rafaella in our house, in Stevie’s bedroom, and you didn’t even tell me? Our whole family was in immediate danger from this woman and you kept quiet about it?’ variety. I would be lucky to be allowed to stay in the house after that.

“What motive do you think your ex-wife would have to kill Zack?” Martinez asked.

“I don’t know exactly but I am sure she has, or had.” I was sure she had a motive because I was sure she had killed him but I was having problems understanding her motive myself. ‘Just to fuck with us’ didn’t sound that convincing a motive. “Maybe she felt that by leaving her, I was depriving her of her own children, so she decided to deprive us of one of ours.” I spread my hands. “I really don’t know.” It sounded like lame psychology even to me and it certainly didn’t seem to satisfy either Martinez or Nielsen.

“So you are saying she is insane
, because that is one insane way of thinking?” suggested Nielsen.

I laughed. “Oh yes, she is definitely insane. I cannot even count the ways she is insane.”

“She doesn’t know what she is doing?” Nielsen followed up.

“She knows exactly what she is doing,” I assured him, “at least most of the time. Sometimes you can’t tell whether she does or doesn’t, but in terms of what she is doing to us now it is a carefully planned and vicious, vengeful campaign.”

“Because you deprived her of a child?”

“She probably thinks I deprived her of her life, the one she and I would have had.”

Nielsen frowned. “Did you ever hit her, Sir?”

“No, never.”

“Or mistreat her in any way …?”

I couldn’t help smiling at that. “Oh, according to her I mistreated her in every way, every day.”

“In what ways?”

To have to go back over all this was exhausting.