Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

She reached down and gripped his chin, wrenching his head so that he stared up at her. ‘I want to know,’ she said, ‘who gave my mother the five thousand dollars. I want the name of the man you were to meet at Los Angeles.’ His eyes closed. The choking died away to a thin gurgle in his throat.

She straightened up. She knew she could leave him and he would be dead within minutes. But with him would go the answer to the one question that meant everything to her now.

Turning towards the window she pulled it open. The cold air struck her face, and the mass of street lamps and store lights seemed like distant salvation. Below her she could see a man running across the canal bridge and others further down the wharf. Standing on the narrow iron-railed balcony she looked straight down to the canal sixty feet below, its surface flat and still.

The man on the bridge was waving his arms. ‘Jump,’ his voice carried in the cold air. ‘Jump!’

She turned back into the room. The lights still burnt whitely through the dense smoke. Other light, flame, blackish-red as blood, sprang from around the doorway. Cy Stevenson lay face down on the floor. She bent over him, the smoke in her lungs tasting black as soot. Taking his jacket collar she hauled him across to the window. Heaving and pushing she brought his body up on to the sill. In the sudden rush of cold air he seemed to be suffering some sort of a seizure, his face twisting into tortured shapes, his tongue lolling.

She lifted his legs. Below, several men had reached the bridge. With one final heave she lifted him clear of the balcony rail, watched him fall silently, arms and legs spread wide, and hit the surface with a gigantic eruption of white water.

With the heat of the fire on her, she stepped back a pace. At that moment flames, rising from the floor below, threw up an impenetrable wall between Nan Luc and the window over the canal.

Chapter Forty-Three

An orange glow had settled in the sky over Meyerick, a dome of light through which snow fell steadily upon the town. By now large crowds were pressing into the waterfront area and fire tenders, klaxons braying, lights flashing, were obliged to force their way through corridors in the crowds opened up by the police.

At the far end of the waterfront the fire blazed uncontrollably. Wooden flooring and old timber staircases fuelled flames which had already collapsed the roof. Sparks and snowflakes swirled upwards and a strange, leaden light was reflected from the surface of the water.

‘There were two people, a man and a woman,’ the wharf-patrolman said. ‘I could see them in the top window.’

‘You say they were fighting, you could see that?’ Jason Rose said.

‘It’s not far, Jason.’ Ruth turned him slightly to face the burning building. ‘From here up to the main office window is no more than thirty, forty yards.’

Jason nodded, turning back to the patrolman. ‘Did you see the fire start?’

‘No, sir. Perhaps it was smouldering away somewhere downstairs. But when it went up it was like a box of firecrackers. One moment there was no fire. Next moment the whole building had burst into flames. What I don’t understand is why the sprinkler system couldn’t slow it down.’

‘Is it right that the alarm system failed too?’ Ruth asked.

‘Seems like it,’ the patrolman said. ‘I sure as hell didn’t get no warning.’

‘OK, so then what happened?’

‘There were lights up on the top floor, the Meyerick Fund offices. That balcony window up there’s a long one, Mr Rose. Goes right down through the length of the room. So as I ran forward I could see clear enough there were two people up there, struggling it seemed as the room filled with smoke.’

‘Two people,’ Ruth said. ‘A man and a woman.’

‘That’s the way it looked. I’d even be pretty sure the man was Mr Stevenson.’

‘Then what?’ Jason said.

‘I ran back to the canal bridge to sound the manual alarm. I guess I was shouting to them to jump, I don’t know. When I looked again the woman had the window open. She was dragging something heavy from inside. She got it up on the ledge and toppled it over.’

‘The man she was fighting with? She toppled him out into the canal?’

‘He must have been pretty nearly dead then. His clothes were smouldering as he fell. Maybe he was dead already.’

‘And she jumped right after him?’

‘No. She seemed to disappear in a rush of flame. The next thing I saw was someone at the loading bay there.’ He pointed.

‘One floor down from the fund office,’ Ruth said to Jason. ‘Directly above the canal.’

‘The doors slid open,’ the security man said, ‘and the woman stood there for a moment, looking down at the water. Smoke was pouring out past her. Maybe she was scared to jump. I don’t know. But then the flames roared out of the loading door and she was blasted clear into the water.’

‘Did she come up?’

‘I don’t know, sir. She was below my line of sight. By this time the police were arriving and that many people running to see the fire, it was chaos. Maybe she swam clear, I don’t know. All I know is she went in just down there beside the canal bridge in the same spot the man dropped. If they’re down there, they’re down there together.’

With shocking suddenness, the warehouse buckled. A crack opened up in the brickwork the length of the building and flames and smoke, like a dragon’s breath, roared out across the wharf. From the fire hoses, glittering spouts of water arced through powerful lights. As the front wall crashed on to the waterfront a deep baying sound rose from the crowd cordoned off beyond the canal.

On the canal bridge a powerful searchlight had been set up, its beam pointing down into the water where the figures of two frogmen moved slowly like undersea monsters. Hector Hand bustled through the police line and rejoined Jason and Ruth where they were standing in the lights of a half circle of police cars.

‘Appalling, appalling,’ Hand said. ‘The fire chief says it was almost certainly started deliberately.’

‘Arson?’

‘Or murder,’ Hand said. ‘Both the sprinkler and alarm systems had been turned off. Do we know for sure the Vietnamese woman was here?’

‘We don’t know anything for sure, Hector,’ Ruth said.

At two in the morning, with the fire at last showing signs of burning itself out, the first body was brought up from the canal.

Water poured from the black bundle of clothing as the two frogmen manhandled it on to the canal path. Leaving Jason and Hector, Ruth ran quickly up on to the bridge. The body was face down, six feet below her. As one of the frogmen turned it over she saw, with horror, Cy Stevenson’s face green in the searchlight glare, water pouring from the side of his mouth. Returning to Jason’s side, she slipped her arm back in his.

‘I heard someone say it’s a man,’ Jason said. ‘Is it Cy?’

‘It’s Cy,’ Ruth said. ‘On the bridge they’re saying there’s a woman down there too. The frogmen are trying to release the body from all the junk lying on the bottom.’ She paused. ‘It could be some time yet. Why not come home?’

‘I want to wait, Ruth.’

‘You can’t blame yourself for what’s happened.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ he said. ‘I already had a feeling she might be planning to go it alone. Something in her voice. A lot of resolution. A hell of a lot of pain.’

It was an hour later before a woman’s body was disentangled from the hundred years of iron junk which lay along the bottom of the canal. Jason and Ruth had already moved on to the bridge. The crowd, hearing the winch begin to whirr, pressed forward. The silvery chains glittered in the searchlights, rippling the flat blackness of the canal as they drew a weight from the depths. The crowd fell silent as a woman’s body broke the surface, the whiteness of her dangling legs caught in the light beam.