Ken McClure - The Anvil

It was three in the afternoon when MacLean finally woke. He bought some shampoo and a disposable razor from the attendant who made a point of telling him how he had disobeyed the rules to let him sleep on. MacLean was suitably grateful. He shaved, dressed and put his old clothes into one of the plastic bags. Tipping the attendant the price of a beer he left feeling ravenously hungry.

There was a pub across the road from the pool. MacLean dumped his old clothes in a convenient trash bucket and made for it. He ordered a beer and a couple of sandwiches left over from lunchtime. He saw that the barman had a first edition of the Edinburgh Evening News and asked if he might take a look. The barman slid it towards him. The story had been too late for the morning papers but here it was splashed over the front page.

‘Bad business that,’ said the barman.

There was a photograph of the smouldering remains of the white bungalow. ‘Man Dies in City Fire Tragedy’, said the headline. MacLean could feel his heart thumping as he read the story. The man, thought to have been a Mr Dan Morrison, believed to have been lodging with Mrs Tania Nielsen and her daughter Carol, had perished in the flames after a mystery explosion tore through the quiet bungalow by the Union Canal. Gas Board officials were investigating the cause of the explosion. Mrs Nielsen’s daughter was said by hospital authorities to be critical while she herself was still in a state of deep shock. It was the second tragedy to have befallen her in recent times. Only last year her husband had been found dead while working on his car. Police had no comment to make at this stage.

‘Bloody Gas Board,’ said the barman.’

MacLean returned the newspaper and left.

The sky was beginning to cloud over; it would start raining again soon. MacLean started looking for lodgings in the area he was in. It was convenient and it was sensible because of the proximity of the university. This made it the heart of bed-sitter land, home to a large, ever mobile and largely anonymous population.

He walked down the main road looking at the signs in windows of the various houses.

MacLean found it hard to put a label on the locality. Normally it was possible to generalise about an area of the city. It was either upmarket or down, decaying or recovering. But here, there seemed to be such a mix that no such generalisation was possible. There were dark, brooding villas that hadn’t seen a lick of paint for years and there were bright, renovated properties which flaunted their refurbishment. There was a girls’ private school and a two star hotel advertising Friday night dinner dances.

MacLean passed an old folks’ home and shuddered at the name. He could see the inmates seated round the walls of a large ground-floor room, sitting in high-back chairs, gazing unseeingly at a television whose back took up pride of place in the bay window. Sunset Valley? The thought of it was enough to make you shuffle off your mortal coil without further ado, thought MacLean. He stopped at a sign that advertised ‘Quiet Rooms to Let’. It was the word ‘quiet’ that made him ‘enquire within’.

The landlord was a west highlander with a soft accent and a slowness of speech that MacLean could have found irritating if conversation were to be prolonged. It was his intention that it shouldn’t.

After a monologue on the rules of the house and a look at a couple of the rooms available, the man said, ‘You’re a bit old for a student I’m thinking.’

‘I’m a visiting lecturer,’ lied MacLean. ‘Chemistry.’

‘Now that’s very interesting… ‘

‘Would you like some payment in advance?’ asked MacLean swiftly.

‘A week if you please.’

MacLean counted out the money and the man smiled and gave MacLean his key. ‘I’m Mr MacLeod, I live just there.’ He pointed to a ground-floor door. ‘Let me know if there’s anything you require.’

MacLean lay down on the bed and listened to the receding footsteps. A downstairs door closed and there was silence. The room was cold and the ceiling blank and featureless, a good thing to concentrate on while he considered what to do next. Until yesterday, he believed that he had plumbed the greatest depths of despair that were possible for any man. Now he knew different. He was personally responsible for what had happened to Carrie and the thought brought such anguish to him that his body developed a slight tremor. He clenched his fists to stop the shaking but that only worked until he relaxed them again. He had to find out how Carrie was but first he had to know if Tansy had recovered from shock.

He wondered if Tansy would remember much about what had happened. She had already been in shock when he found her kneeling on the grass in the garden. The chances were that she had been blown out of the house by the explosion. It was possible that she might not have registered much happening around her after that. She might even think that he really had died in the fire.

For a moment MacLean considered that it might be a good idea to let her continue to believe it and take the chance to disappear from her life altogether but he couldn’t do that. It was too late. The worst had already happened and Tansy and Carrie meant too much to him. He would call the hospital.

He feared that they wouldn’t tell him much if he admitted he wasn’t a relative. Things would not be that much better if he said that he was, but at least he should be able to discover whether or not Carrie was still alive.

MacLean could see that the rain had started again as he waited for his call to be transferred to the relevant ward.

‘Are you a relative?’ asked the nurse.

‘Mrs Nielsen’s brother.’

‘Her brother?’

‘Victor Nielsen. I’ve just arrived back from the United States.’ MacLean remembered that Carrie had spoken of an uncle Victor and Tansy had added that he worked in the USA.

‘Mrs Nielsen is improving,’ said the sister. ‘She has no serious injuries and she will probably be released in a day or so.’

‘And her daughter?’ asked MacLean, feeling sweat break out on his brow.

‘Carol’s condition is serious but stable. She’s been transferred to a burns unit at another hospital.’

‘Has my sister been told?’ asked MacLean.

‘Not yet,’ replied the nurse.

‘Can I see her?’

The nurse hesitated and said, ‘I really don’t thing that’s a good idea at the moment. Mrs Nielsen is heavily sedated. Might be as well to give it a day or two.’

‘I’d like to leave my phone number for her if she improves before then. Is that all right?’

‘Of course. When she’s well enough I’ll tell her you called.’

MacLean put down the phone. At least Carrie was alive.

On Thursday evening MacLean was lying along his bed, fully clothed and with a glass of whisky in his hand. He had read nearly every word in the evening paper and was now reduced to reading the business section. He was looking at the share prices of pharmaceutical companies when the phone rang.

‘Victor?’ said Tansy’s voice uncertainly.

MacLean felt his throat tighten. The pause seemed to go on and on before he could summon the courage to say, ‘Tansy, it’s not Victor. It’s me… Sean.’

‘Sean!’ exclaimed Tansy with a sob in her voice. ‘They told me you were dead! The papers…’ A torrent of disjointed words flowed from her. ‘They told me but I knew… I knew from the dreams… You pulled Carrie from the flames… I saw you… You weren’t in the house. Oh Sean!’ She broke into more sobbing.

MacLean did his best to soothe her until she began to calm down.

‘But if you didn’t die in the fire. Who did?’ said Tansy.

‘Lehman Steiner’s man. They found me, Tansy. They sent a man to fire bomb the house. It was his body they found.’