Simon Beckett - Where There's Smoke

“N-no!”

He shook his head, violently. “I–I didn’t...”

“You killed him, and now you want to kill an innocent family as well!”

“Shut up!”

He took a step towards her, but she was reckless now. “Why? You’re going to burn me anyway! You’ve already cut me! What else are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he shouted. “Leave me alone!”

“Leave you alone?” Kate stared at him. “For God’s sake, just listen to yourself! Think what you’re doing.”

His features were contorted with pain. Seeing him, the anger drained out of her.

“Put the knife down.” She almost called him Alex, and in her haste to cover the slip she spoke without thinking. “You need help.”

His head jerked up. “What f-fucking help? People asking stupid qu-questions, telling me what my fucking p-problem is? They don’t want to help. They just want me to behave. So long as I don’t b-bother anybody else, they don’t care! But nobody cares whether I’m bothered! Nobody c-cares about me!”

I cared. The thought went unspoken. “Lucy and Jack did,” she said instead.

“No, they d-didn’t! I thought they did, but they didn’t! That’s why I c-came here, but they’re like all the rest!”

“What about Angus and Emily?”

“I don’t want to t-talk about it!”

“So you’re just going to kill them, too? Burn them, like you did your own family?”

Shock bleached his face. “Who t-told you that?”

“Never mind who told me, it’s true, isn’t it?”

“N-no!”

“Yes, it is! You set fire to the house while your mother and father and your brothers were asleep, and then you stood and watched them burn!”

“I d-didn’t! It wasn’t like that, it was an accident!”

“An accident that you set fire to the house?”

“Yes! No! I d-don’t—” His voice was anguished. “I didn’t mean to hurt them. I just wanted them to take n-notice of me. They were always fighting, and leaving me with M-Michael and Andrew and — and they’d d-do things to me, and then I’d try to tell my m-mum and dad and they wouldn’t believe me! Even though I kept telling them, they wouldn’t. And then my g-gran tried to help, she tried to t-tell them, and they started shouting, and — and then Gran was on the floor, all blue her f-face was blue. And they said she was — she was dead, and nobody — nobody c-cared except me. So I lit the fire, and I thought, N-now they’ll listen, now they’ll know, they’ll be sorry...”

His eyes were focused on something Kate couldn’t see. “And it started b-burning, and I could see right into the flames, like it was another world, all clean and pure. I watched them, and... and nothing worried me any more. They got bigger and bigger, until there wasn’t anything else, and they were... they were beautiful.”

“But it isn’t beautiful afterwards, is it?” Kate said.

His face clouded, losing its transcendent quality. “No.” For a moment he looked like a young boy, lost and scared.

“You didn’t mean to hurt them,” Kate said.

“N-no.”

“Do you want to hurt Angus and Emily?”

He shook his head.

“Let them go, then! Please!”

“I c-can’t.”

“Why?”

“It’s too late.” It was a whisper.

“It isn’t!” Kate shouted. “It isn’t too late! Think about it! Think about how you’ll feel afterwards!”

He looked at her. “There won’t be any after.”

She had seen the same expression on his face when the man had thrown himself onto the bonfire. Perhaps it didn’t seem horrible to him. She hadn’t understood it then.

“This is what you want, isn’t it?” She couldn’t keep from saying it. “This is what you’ve always wanted.”

His gaze was still on faraway flames. She noticed his grip shift on the kitchen knife.

“It’s g-got to be done.”

She could feel him slipping into the fatalism of earlier. She tried to cut through it.

“Got to be done? Like Paul Sutherland? Did killing him ‘have to be done’ as well?”

His eyes snapped back to her. “He was a d-drunk. He deserved it. Drunks are b-burning themselves up already.”

“So you thought you’d save him the job?” she mocked. “Come on, what’s your excuse? You’ve always got one! Let’s hear it? Was it because he hit you?”

“No.” He had a sullen expression.

“Why, then? You didn’t even know him?”

“I knew what he’d d-done!”

His sudden heat surprised her. It took Kate a moment to realise what he meant.

“Oh, my God. You killed him because of what he did to me?”

Ellis wouldn’t look at her.

“What about what you’ve, done?” she demanded.

“That’s d-different!”

“How? How is it?”

“Because you k-killed our b-baby!”

“I haven’t killed our baby,” she screamed back at him. “I haven’t killed anything. I’m still pregnant for God’s sake! I’ve been sick every fucking morning and... oh, Christ!”

She broke off, putting her head in her hands. When she looked up, Ellis was still watching her. But now he had a strange, almost frightened expression.

“I lied about the abortion,” Kate said, quietly. “I wanted to hurt you. I’d been told you were dead, and gone to identify you and seen it was somebody else, and found out you weren’t Alex Turner, and... And I wanted to hurt you back.”

She felt tears closing in. “Jesus Christ, what did you expect? I loved you!”

He was looking at her like a man woken from one bad dream, only to find himself in another.

“You’re still p-pregnant?”

Kate closed her eyes, nodded wearily. There was an almost inaudible moan. She opened her eyes. Ellis was hugging himself, gently rocking backwards and forwards. Tears were trickling down his face.

“Oh, G-God.” He closed his eyes in anguish. “Oh, God. Everything’s gone wrong.”

Kate moved fractionally away from the wall. “Just let us go. You can do that now, can’t you? There’s no need to hurt anybody.”

He didn’t say anything. Just rocked himself, crying quietly.

“You don’t want to hurt the baby, do you?” Kate urged. “Not after all this?”

Ellis shook his head.

“Let us go, then. Give me the knife and let us go.”

He didn’t seem to have heard. He was still shaking his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve made such a m-mess of things. I’m sorry.”

He was crying as he came towards her, and Kate was never sure if he was apologising for what he had done, or for what he was about to do. She saw the knife in his hand and instinctively swept the lamp off the table at him.

There was a bang as the bulb exploded. She cringed back, dazzled by the flash, waiting for the cut of the knife. But none came. And then the darkness was broken by a new, unsteady illumination.

The igniting petrol on Ellis’s clothes filled the room with a sick light. As Kate’s eyes adjusted she saw him beating at the flames on his arm and chest. The next moment they had spread like a flood tide to his shoulders and head.

There was a clatter as he dropped the knife. He cried out, taking wild swipes at himself as his hair caught fire. The light in the room was brighter now, more yellow, and the stink of burning hair and petrol made Kate gag. She stood, too stunned to act, and then ran forward and began to slap at the fire leaping from Ellis’s head. Her hands came away covered in blue gloves of flame as the petrol on them caught.

Panicking, she beat them out against her coat, feeling the first sting of it, and then grabbed a quilt from the nearest bed.

She tried to throw it over Ellis but he reeled away, lurching first into the wall and then from the room. Hindered by the bulk of the quilt, Kate chased after him. The flames threw a crazy light on the walls as he staggered blindly down the corridor, flailing at himself, and she knew what was going to happen an instant before it did. She shouted as he hit the railing at the end of the corridor, too far away to grab him, and in a swift, choreographed motion he toppled over.