To the Ends of the Earth Page 5

  What had I done?

  Something irrevocable?

  Surely I could apologize tomorrow.

  “All would be well, and all manner of things would be well.” Blessed Julian of Norwich’s comforting words consoled me.

  Chapter 6—Incendiary

  I WENT to bed that night, my mind in confusion. Of course his mobile was switched off, but I left a message, begging him to get in touch. Later I tried again and got the terrifying response: This number is no longer available. Jesus, what had I done?

  I didn’t think I’d sleep at all, and around about three o’clock, I was still tossing and turning in a bed that felt so lonely, so huge and lonely.

  I must admit I cried, tears of self-pity, I told myself, but had I ruined a relationship that had been so happy, except for that one thing? What did it really matter if he didn’t tell me, if he couldn’t tell me?

  I stared at the ceiling, with the light from outside percolating through the window, and sniffed—and smelled a strange smell. Imagining it. I blew my nose and tried again. Yes, there was a smell pervading. Smoke! And what was that other smell, almost hidden by the smoke? Petrol? Could it be? But that was daft. We had no open fires in this ultramodern house, unless there’d been some fault in an electrical appliance, which had caused some minor conflagration. I switched on the light, looked down the stairs with the intention of dousing it with a wet towel. No, that was stupid, electricity and dampness didn’t mix, or rather they mixed only too well.

  I went back into the bedroom and shut the door. A moment later I saw it, creeping under the bedroom door like an insinuating probe—a curl of smoke. Naked, I rushed to the door and threw it open. A spurt of flame followed it, singeing my chest and face. The whole staircase was alight, crackling with flames delighted to find so much flammable material. There was no escape there.

  I ran to the window. Already the smoke was filling the room, billowing round the ceiling as my movements created their own vortices. Keep as near to the floor as possible, smoke rises. The window. The window. Double-glazed of course but surely openable. No, the only air intake was through a grid at the top, which could be opened or shut as required.

  I banged with my fists, knowing that would be useless, tried with my elbow but nearly broke my funny bone. Funny, I thought, inconsequentially. Find something heavy to bash it with. But what was in a bedroom apart from a bed, chest of drawers, wardrobe? Couldn’t use those, couldn’t actually lift them.

  Then I thought of the bedside lockers. Crawled my way back to the bed. I could scarcely see even with the light on, and then that flickered and died. Felt for a locker, Lex’s side, grabbed hold of it, and crawled back to that barely discernible rectangle of light.

  Holding my breath, I stood up, raised the locker above my head, and brought it down with all the force I could muster on the inner window. It cracked but didn’t splinter. Damned toughened glass. Once more. More cracks but no hole. Third time lucky, I told myself and gave it all I’d got. Glass shattered all around me. I could feel several cuts but ignored them. The outside window was ordinary glass; it shattered at the first blow, and I gasped as fresh air filled my lungs. Bits of jagged glass stuck out from the frame as I tried to grip it.

  The smoke in the room was marginally clearer so I went to the bed, grabbed the duvet, and used it to cover the glass. I was on the first floor, which meant, if I could hang from the frame, probably no more than a six-foot drop onto… what was under the window? Concrete? No, a narrow patch of garden with bedding plants. Well, it wouldn’t do them much good, but I’d probably be all right.

  I was halfway across the sill when the door suddenly crashed open and immediately the room was full of flames, licking over my left side. With a cry I flung myself forward, and I think knocked myself out on a stone or something, for all went black and I knew no more.

  I REMEMBER coming around a couple of times. Once, when someone in a dayglo uniform, presumably a paramedic, kept asking me what my name was.

  For a moment I couldn’t remember, but I knew that, for some obscure reason, I mustn’t give my real name. “Lex.”

  “Hold on, Lex,” said the guy. “Keep hold of everything, try to stay awake.” But however hard I tried, everything swirled away out of my grasp, and I must have blacked out again.

  The next time I came around, I was on a hospital trolley and above my head were bright white strip lights. So many that it seemed that they were joined in one long stream, stretching into infinity.

  “Lex,” said someone. “We’ll soon have you….”

  “Where’s Lex?” I asked, but no answer came, and I passed out yet again. It seemed to be becoming a bit of a habit—and not a good one at that.

  Someone was calling a name, a woman’s voice from very close at hand. “Lex,” she said insistently. “Wake up, Lex.”

  I opened my eyes. A nurse was sitting beside my bed. A drip from a bottle was going into the back of my left hand through a cannula. My head felt tight and throbbed a bit. Other parts of me hurt as well, especially my left arm, which throbbed. These clues suggested to me that I was in Intensive Care. If not I felt I ought to be.

  “Ah. You’re awake at last, Lex,” she said.

  “My name isn’t Lex,” I said, or tried to say, though the words came out so slurred and indistinct that even I could hardly understand them myself. I settled for “wa’er” and tried to point to my throat.

  The nurse picked up a sort of bottle with a spout and held it to my lips. The water was cool, though it tasted slightly of chemicals. But it was good and felt marvelous on my tongue and going down my throat. She wouldn’t let me have much, though.

  “Not at the moment, Lex,” she said. “Just a few sips.”

  “Why do you keep calling me Lex?” I asked, when I could actually make coherent words again.

  “Can’t you remember your name?” she said. There was a touch of anxiety in her tone.

  “Of course I can,” I said, my strength returning. “It’s… it’s—” For some obscure reason, I knew I didn’t want to give my real name. Perhaps I feared that the incendiaries, if there actually were any, would be able to trace me. “—it’s Johnny Appleseed.” Why I picked on that name, I have no idea. At the back of my mind, I had some idea that he was a guy—in America, was it?—who wandered round the country planting apple trees.

  “You gave your name as Lex,” she said, “when you came into hospital. Do you remember the fire?”

  Did I remember the fire? “Of course I do. Christ, I was nearly burnt to death.”

  “Keep calm, er, Johnny. Are you in any pain?”

  “Everything hurts.”

  “We’ll give you some intravenous morphine through the drip. That should help a lot.”

  She fiddled a bit with the bag, and soon I felt calmer. It was nice. My brain, though, was still working overtime. Petrol and fire? But that meant—petrol is an accelerant—and that meant? I couldn’t take it in, so I dozed.

  Next time I woke, there was a policeman in uniform sitting by my bed.

  “Hello, sir, I’m PC Douglas Onslow. You can call me Duggie if you like, or Constable if you don’t.”

  He had a nice smile and a pleasant, rather round face, and thank God, no mustache, so I made my choice. I was feeling much better, though still sore.

  “Okay, Duggie, what’s up?”

  “Well, to tell you the truth, I’m here to protect you. We believe last night an attempt was made on your life.”

  I tried to look amazed, as I’d already worked that out for myself, but having no eyebrows, this was difficult.

  “What we’d like to do, sir, is move you to a private hospital under a false name. There we can keep you safe, look after your burns and cuts until we can find out who did this to you.”

  I nodded and waited for him to go on. There was obviously more.

  “Now, sir, there is the question of your name. When you came in, you told both the paramedics and the doctor who attended you at first that your n
ame was Lex. Now you say it’s Johnny Appleseed. Could you clarify that a bit please, sir?”

  “Oh, come on, Duggie. You know the Appleseed is false, but it’ll do for the time being. By the way, if I can call you Duggie, if it doesn’t infringe any police regulations, please call me Johnny.”

  He waited, biro poised over notebook.

  “I was obviously confused when I came in, been through a bit of trauma! The ‘Lex’ was, as you probably know Lex Warrington, who owns the flat. I wondered if he’d returned and had been caught in the blaze.”

  As I said this, my stomach curled in anticipation. Please, God, let him be okay.

  “There was no one else in the house according to the fire brigade guys—”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “—but what I really want to know, er, Johnny, is, can you think of anyone who might want to hurt you, anyone you’ve offended, quarreled with recently?”

  Oh God, that row with Lex, before he shot off in his car! But impossible! No way would my charming, loving Lex try to burn me to death. Yet was there a dark, vindictive side to him that I’d never seen? Though I had been living there for a comparatively short while, I felt I knew him so well, but the doubt lingered at the back of my mind and I couldn’t shake it free.

  “Where is Lex?”

  “Sorry, Johnny, we don’t know and can’t find out.”

  “What do you mean? The police can always find out where people are.”

  “I’m glad you have such touching faith in the force. No, when I say we can’t find him, I mean we’re not allowed to. Orders from higher up, apparently the very top—no searching for Lex Warrington—case closed. Sorry.”

  What on earth did that mean? I stored it in my mind for later examination.

  “There is another possibility. You know my real name, don’t you, Duggie? I’m actually quite famous in my field,” I modified this. “Well, slightly famous. Anyway, that guy responsible for the London terrorist incident, I took his picture, and though you haven’t actually caught him yet, he knows who took it. The paper published my name. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that he might want revenge. He could look up my name on the electoral register—no, that wouldn’t work because the address will be my parents’. Should they be given protection?”

  “I doubt he’d go to such trouble, and why should he be reading the Bristol Gazette?”

  “It was taken up by the National Press and my name accredited.”

  “But not where you lived. No, Johnny, I don’t think you should worry about that.”

  Another thing, though, to store in the back of my mind.

  “Okay, when do we actually make the move?”

  “This afternoon if you feel up to it. The doctor says you’re all right to travel, and if you think you can, we’ll get you into safety ASAP. But it won’t be me. We’re being ultracareful. I won’t even know where you’ve gone.”

  I felt a bit sorry. Even though I’d only known him for half an hour or so, he was nice and caring and, I thought, honest.

  But, as he said, it was not to be. I was transported from the hospital, I think the back way, possibly even through the morgue, into an unmarked van, though equipped as if it was an ambulance.

  “How far are we going?” I asked the nurse who accompanied me.

  “Only about forty miles,” she said cheerfully. “Are you comfortable?”

  I was going to say I was but then decided not to play the frigging hero. “Far from it.” So she gave me a pill to help, and while I was waiting for it to work, I pondered on what towns were within a forty-mile limit. There was obviously Bath, but that was only about twenty miles from Bristol, then Chippenham, Weston-super-Mare, and Chepstow across the Bristol Channel and almost into Wales. And then, as I woozily drifted off, I thought there’s Glastonbury, where it was rumored King Arthur and Queen Guinevere were buried, but that was probably an invention of the abbey monks to increase the number of pilgrims who….

  Again an awakening but this time just from a sleep while the ambulance was backing into a side entrance (a hospital in Glastonbury, I was told) and soon I was ensconced in a very private room with nothing but my thoughts to entertain me. Not that they were all that entertaining. Where was Lex? He couldn’t have been responsible for the fire, yet I remembered, “If you ever leave me, I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth.” But that hadn’t happened. If anything, he had left me, but the outcome was the same, the two of us parted, and he wouldn’t allow it, would kill to stop me going off with someone else.

  The terrorist was the more likely, but how would he know (a) how to find me, and (b) that I was alone in the house? Not possible.

  I racked my brain for a third alternative. (Can you have a third alternative?) Someone I’d upset in one of my articles? The guy on whose behalf I’d gone up to London but had failed to speak to his MP because of the terrorist attack? Bloody daft, no one could be so petty—could they?

  A woman bustled in. I thought at first she was a nurse, but then I noticed the stethoscope round her neck.

  “Well, Mr Appleseed”—obviously, the fiction was being kept up—“I hope you’re settling in comfortably. We’ll change the bandages soon, put more soothing cream on your side, which is best left uncovered, so try to sleep on your right side. Now is there anything I can organize for you?”

  “Thanks, Doctor. I’d like a bit more pain relief, if that’s possible, a computer or, if not, a phone—something I can get in touch with the Net. Oh, and a mirror.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, though I wouldn’t advise the mirror for a couple of days.”

  Oh God, I must look like Frankenstein’s monster.

  “Just a bit singed round the edges,” she added. “But I’ll see what I can do about the other things.” She prodded my chest with the stethoscope, then called in a nurse, who took my blood pressure, temperature, and blood oxygen while the doctor watched. “All what we’d expect under the circumstances.”

  She went out, leaving the nurse, who fussed about with pillows and straightened my sheets, which looked perfectly straight to me. She seemed disposed to chat, and because people in busy hospitals tend to “forget” patients’ requests, not intentionally but because they’re called away to do something urgent, like save a life, I asked her about the phone, which I felt absolutely lost without.

  She looked doubtful. “I’ve actually got a spare mobile. It’s only basic and you can’t do anything really except make and receive calls. But…. Well, you’re supposed to be a special patient.”

  “Special in what sense? Criminal?”

  “Oh no, nothing like that—just special, no visitors, like, and no communication with other patients, that sort of thing.”

  “I promise I won’t let on. I haven’t any money at the moment, haven’t anything except a pair of hospital pyjama trousers, but as soon as I can get hold of some money, I’ll pay you.”

  She waved her hand in a doesn’t-matter sort of way, felt into her pockets, and produced a box, which she handed to me. “I was getting it for my son. He’s six and probably would think it worse than useless. You’re more than welcome and I’ll get him another. His birthday isn’t until the seventeenth.”

  I unpacked the box, a bog-standard mobile phone with a charger and lead ending in a three-pin plug. Above my head were several sockets. I chose one and plugged in. The phone gave a satisfied bleep and the words “phone charging” appeared on the screen. I hid it under the bedclothes and hoped the trailing wire wouldn’t give me and the nurse away.

  Supper arrived, a macaroni cheese, which wasn’t bad, and something they called Eton Mess that seemed to be a mixture of strawberries, meringue bits, and whipped double cream. Delicious but undeniably bad for the figure.

  The phone beeped, and I was in potential contact with the world. Luckily I have an excellent memory for numbers and was able to input my parents’, Lex’s, and Jacob’s numbers. I tried Lex first but again got the “unavailable” message.

&
nbsp; My parents were overjoyed to hear from me. The police had told them I was unhurt but nothing else. Feeling that I should at least respect some of Duggie’s instructions about secrecy, I said I couldn’t tell them where I was but I’d lost my eyebrows and the police were looking after me. No, I wasn’t in prison and hadn’t done anything wrong. They were just looking after me and soon (I added optimistically), “I’ll be able to tell you where I am and you can visit me.”

  Then I rang Jacob. “Where are you?” were his first words. “Are you badly hurt? When can I see you?”

  I assured him I was almost as good as new. As far as to where I was, I couldn’t tell him precisely because they’d probably move me in a couple of days. “But you wouldn’t want to see me. I’ve got no eyebrows and my arms are all bandaged. I look like a half-unwrapped Egyptian mummy.”

  He laughed, and it was a good sound, the best I’d heard for days. “Get my number and you can phone me whenever you want. I’ll keep it on vibrate rather than ring, so if there’s anyone with me I can just switch it off. And I’ll keep it between my legs. Could be quite an arousing feeling.”

  He laughed again.

  “By the way,” I said as casually as I could, “have you seen Lex recently? I seem to have lost touch and I’ve forgotten his number.”

  “Are you sure you want to get in touch with him?”

  “Of course, why on earth not?”

  “I just wondered if it could be him….”

  “Him, what?”

  “No, nothing. Forget I said it. Just get better as quickly as possible.”

  But of course he’d voiced my own suspicions and again I worried.

  I couldn’t sleep until they gave me some knockout drops.

  “It’s the pain,” I said, but it wasn’t.

  A FEW days later, they moved me into a furnished flat in Glastonbury, with a view of the magnificent Tor with St Michael’s tower on top. I wanted to get out, climb the hill, visit the remains of Glastonbury Abbey, looted and closed down by that arch-dictator, Henry VIII, but of course they wouldn’t let me. I’d be too obvious a sight, they said. Children would probably run screaming from me. Actually I didn’t look all that bad. I’d found myself a mirror, and if I filled in my eyebrows with a makeup pencil, I’d look like a rather surprised campish queen. However, a long-sleeved hoodie would cover my arms and the medical gauze on the back of my head, and I insisted.