The Fire Fighter Read online

  Grey stroked his chin.

  ‘Illuminate me.’

  ‘Iron is brittle,’ Finlay said. Grey lit a cigarette. The cigarette was lit with a lighter, with a flourish, in flagrant disregard of the black-out. Finlay would have been less shocked seeing somebody piss in front of the altar half-way through mass. Then it occurred to him that with pockets of fire burning throughout their entire, blasted vicinity, the glow of a cigarette tip was a less than significant thing.

  ‘Can we get into the basement, Chief Fire Officer?’

  ‘You might remember I wanted to fill it with a supply of standing water.’

  ‘But you couldn’t, could you, because I told you it was out of the question.’

  ‘It might contain water now,’ Finlay said. ‘The depth of the basement is twenty-five feet. We’ve played an awful lot of water over the site.’

  ‘Most of what I saw evaporated,’ Grey said, drily.

  ‘Some of the mains around here have ruptured in the bombing,’ Finlay said. ‘That’s why the lads were struggling with water pressure. The water table is high in this part of the city anyway.’

  ‘You’re fencing with me, Chief Fire Officer. Unless you’ve got the wind up.’

  ‘There’s a storm drain runs under the basement. It’s a fair size drain. And there’s a fair chance it could have kept the basement from flooding. But there’s no guarantee.’

  Grey dragged hard on the last of his cigarette, wincing, his face cadaverous in the firefly brilliance of its extinction. He flicked the butt away. ‘How do we find out?’

  ‘We’ll know pretty quickly,’ Finlay said. He nodded at the pile. ‘With that lot there, the storm drain is our only means of access.’

  Grey would not leave the site and Finlay had to run as far back as Bishopsgate to locate an appliance equipped with what he needed. He collected two fire axes, two electric torches, a crowbar and a pair of boots, helmet and spare tunic for Grey. He was buggered, he thought, if he was going to let Grey go down there in civvies. It occurred to him then that buggered was not a wisely chosen word to use in this connection and he laughed, spirits raised at the prospect of the mad, perhaps even crucial adventure which was imminent. The crew of the appliance turned and looked at this barking apparition, teeth and eyes brilliantly white against the soot blackening his face, and they recognized his rank and were able to stop the incredulity and contempt from spilling into their weary faces. It would not have mattered. Finlay was at a pitch where he would no longer have noticed. He had a fire fighter help him back with the equipment for the sake of speed, the pair of them sprinting through still-smouldering chasms of brick, over hot rubble and furniture shards heaped high in the streets, like scree, through crunching, blackened glass, breathing always ash, soot; everywhere the dank, bile-bitter flavour of defeated fire. Grey pulled on the rubber boots and buttoned the tunic without comment. He buckled his belt and fastened the chinstrap of his steel helmet and then stood there with the fire axe held between both hands at port arms, the way an infantryman might carry a rifle into combat. Attired in the tunic, belt and helmet, in the glow of heat and the light of diminishing flames, he did not look very much like a fire fighter. He looked more than ever like a soldier, one awaiting the word of command that would take him unflinching into action. Finlay appraised Grey, full of confusion about him. He had never before so respected and despised a man. He had not thought so contradictory a combination of feelings possible.

  ‘This way,’ he said. To his own ears, his voice sounded flat, devoid of its usual inflection. Grey’s remark about having the wind up had stung. Finlay knew that what they were about to do was very dangerous. But he did not want Grey to hear in his words a hint of the trepidation he felt. He was exhilarated at the thought of doing something important. His experience and his training urged him to be cautious. Experience had demonstrated to him the sometimes lethal distinction between vanity and courage. He was about to take a man undrilled, unconditioned and entirely ignorant of the most basic procedures into a place of potentially lethal hazard. He knew it was a stupid thing to do. At that decisive moment, there were many opposing imperatives in the mind of John Patrick Finlay. But he was a man for whom, in an emergency, action had always presided over thought. He started off towards a manhole from which he knew he could reach the basement storm drain of his bombed building. This was always assuming, of course, that the manhole in mind was not covered by a ton of newly delivered rubble. Finlay started off. Grey, like the dutiful soldier he was, fell in behind.

  The water was no more than ankle deep in the stink and quiet of the storm drain. Moisture dripped down the curvatures of its moss-covered brick like a busy rumour of the catastrophe above. Finlay held his torch at waist height and pointed the beam a few feet ahead of where they were going. There were no rats. The dank and furtive slither of rats had always been a feature of his past excursions under London’s streets. Their absence was at once welcome and strange. He could hear Grey splash after him, guided by his light. He had told Grey to save the battery of his own torch. It was quieter than Finlay had thought it would be. The density of the brick above them made it silent to the chaos of the streets. The quiet had a dense, subterranean quality. Finlay fought his claustrophobia as he always had to fight it, with measured breaths and images of space and light in his mind and at the back of his mind, with the anchor of responsibility tethering the high flights of panic. He thought briefly, and with self-reproach, of his brother, trapped in a tube of steel and rivets under a turbid sea. He listened for the steady splash of Grey’s rubber boots through the runnel of filth. And he heard them. And he heard Grey’s panting breath. His consumption of cigarettes had inflicted poor wind on the Captain. It was a habit Finlay assumed he had taken up in the trenches. The cigarette ration had been more generous than the food. They had all chain-smoked. Except his dad. After the armistice, Jimmy Breslin, his father’s best mate in the battalion, had come to their house and spent an hour in the kitchen talking to Finlay’s mum. When Jimmy went, he left a scattered snowfall of stinking dimps on the kitchen floor. As if at random an image of Rebecca Lange, slumbering in the dawn light, invaded Finlay’s mind. Finlay had never smoked.

  ‘How do you know which way to go? I’m lost already.’

  ‘There are two ways of telling.’ Finlay gestured at the water in his torch beam. Curls of weightless ash floated towards them, past their ankles. ‘The current is one indication. Storm drains are designed to empty outwards.’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Grey, chiding himself. ‘What’s the other sign?’

  ‘Heat. We’re walking towards a heat source. A bloody great mountain of hot rubble. Can’t you feel it getting hotter?’

  In the glimmer of reflected light from the torch beam, Finlay saw Grey nod and unfasten the collar button of his tunic.

  An iron grille protected the branch tunnel that Finlay estimated would access their basement. It was secured by heavy steel staples sunk into cement. Finlay examined the obstacle and then offered his torch to Grey and asked him to play the beam steady on it. He took his fire axe from his belt and swung the blunt of the head upward, using the power of his hips and then his shoulders in a savage blow that struck sparks and sang with metal protest around the tunnel walls. After the third blow aimed at the same spot, the bar of the grille under Finlay’s assault snapped.

  ‘Brittle. Just like you said.’

  ‘Not that fucking brittle,’ Finlay said. He grinned and spat on his hands and went back to work. After ten minutes of loud violence he had smashed his way through four more of the bars. Then both men worked together to lever off the grille with a crowbar.

  The branch tunnel they had accessed was no more than three feet high and they were obliged to crawl along it through a thick sludge of sodden ash. After about forty feet, they came to another obstacle, this time a set of bars, set vertically, like those that confine a convict behind the window of a prison cell. Finlay examined these in the torchlight. By now, the heat and damp were
tropical in their intensity and both men were sweating heavily with effort under the clumsiness of protective clothing and equipment.

  ‘Looks pretty formidable,’ Grey said.

  ‘Could be worse,’ Finlay said. ‘If those bars were set into concrete we’d be well and truly fucked.’

  ‘What a marvellous thought. To be well and truly fucked,’ Grey said.

  Despite himself, Finlay laughed. ‘Here, I’m going to try to kick our way through these bars. They’re only secured by screws cemented into the stone, so far as I can tell. They seem to be there mostly for effect, as a bit of decoration.’

  ‘Cosmetic,’ Grey said.

  ‘You will have to brace me, Mr Grey. I can’t get the purchase lying in this shit. I’ll just slide about.’

  Behind Finlay, Grey wedged himself sideways in the tunnel with the pressure of his feet and shoulders. And then with his back braced against Grey, Finlay lifted both feet and kicked hard at the bars. They shuddered and flaked with rust and falling brick dust. But they did not budge. In minutes Finlay’s feet were sore, the heels tender and bruised. He cursed his rubber boots, wishing he could swap them for a pair soled and heeled in stiff and heavy leather.

  ‘I don’t think this is going to work,’ Finlay said.

  ‘Do we have a fallback plan?’

  ‘Yes. We fall back.’

  ‘Not possible, I’m afraid.’ There was command in Grey’s voice, sudden and unmistakable.

  ‘You’re not in charge down here,’ Finlay said, angered. ‘Turning back has nothing to do with having the wind up. There are no people here in need of rescue. And you don’t carry out salvage ops in conditions like these.’

  ‘This is not a salvage op.’

  ‘I’ve seen the machines this building housed for myself. They look like the sort of contraptions kids feed with pennies in amusement arcades. How hard can it be to make more of them? You must have plans. Circuit diagrams. Technicians.’

  Grey sweated and breathed through his mouth. ‘It isn’t the machines, Chief Fire Officer. It’s the information one of them contains. The information is irreplaceable. And therefore priceless.’

  ‘We’re being bombed, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘You should have copied the information. Duplicated it.’

  ‘Do that and you immediately compromise security.’

  ‘What’s the nature of the information?’

  ‘Please,’ Grey said. ‘Trust me on this.’

  Just then there was a groan, melancholy and terrible, like the sigh of some great beast of the sea. Finlay and Grey looked at one another. ‘That was the floor above the basement,’ Finlay said. ‘We don’t have a lot of time, Captain.’

  ‘Swap places,’ Grey said. This was difficult in the cramped, wet space, and lack of time made them both urgent and clumsy when they needed to be deft. But they swapped around and Grey lashed and jack-knifed with his long piston legs against the bars. They gave with a sudden clang, an opening rent on one side, and Finlay felt the impact of recoil as Grey kicked even harder.

  ‘You are stronger than you look,’ Finlay said, as they crawled into the cellar.

  ‘Just as well,’ Grey said, trying and failing to brush brick dust and rust in the gloom from his sodden tunic with his fingers. He nodded to a corner of the cellar where something glowed. ‘What we’re after is over there, I believe. Best not hang about.’

  The heat in the cellar was intense, like weight, or the pressure of being deep underwater. Heat forced air from their lungs and sang in their ears and made movement a slow wade through something denser than air. Above them, in protesting girders under tons of rubble, the beast noise rumbled again. Burned-out electricity cables gave the air an acrid, ozone stench. Other smells assaulted them; a cocktail of ether, tar, machine oil, steam from stagnant water and, everywhere, burn.

  ‘Do we need to put on our respirators?’

  Finlay shook his head. ‘No time. Just don’t light a cigarette. And we need to be very quick.’

  ‘Right,’ Grey said. He was panting for breath, his face slick and his eyes wild, pale, the pupils adrenalin pinpricks even in the darkness encroaching on their tiny cone of torchlight.

  The basement was a hidden clutter of equipment. Finlay followed as Grey picked a path through the obstacles, barking a shin on something bolted to the floor and biting his lip with the suddenness of pain. The beast above gave another great, heaving groan. Fragments of ceiling fell with a wrench in a far corner and clattered heavily on machinery and stone.

  ‘This is what we’re after.’

  Grey’s torch was pointed at a smallish object, a bakelite housing bristling with valves and coloured cables and jack plugs. It looked to Finlay not unlike a wireless set with the back taken off, only more complicated. Instead of one frequency tuning dial, there were several dials set into it. Some of them were calibrated with arabic numerals and others with letters of the alphabet. One elliptical dial was marked with symbols entirely new to Finlay. The housing was charred on the top and heat had cracked it along one side. Up close, it smelled strongly of hot bakelite. The dials set into it glowed greenish and dull. It was sitting on a metal table. Finlay felt relieved it wasn’t bolted down. Grey picked the apparatus up. It was no bigger, really, than a wireless set. And obviously it was no heavier. The beast above them moaned, sinking. Dying. Finlay fumbled on his belt for his torch.

  ‘Get us out of here,’ Grey said.

  The Ministry’s car was parked at the kerb when they emerged from the manhole, with the Immaculate Major seated in the rear and Grey’s pet prize-fighter at the wheel. Grey opened the boot of the car and put his machine in there carefully, wrapping it in the swaddling of a tartan picnic blanket. He closed the boot and nodded to the pug at the wheel and the car slid away without them. The Major had not even looked at them.

  ‘A drink, I think,’ Grey said, ‘When I get out of these borrowed clothes and into something a little less histrionic.’ His eyes were still bright and empty with tension, but his voice was firm enough. Under them, the pavement shuddered and air escaped in a hot, foul, urgent exhalation out of the manhole from which they had just emerged. The two men looked at one another and though it was mad, inappropriate, they both laughed, weeping, convulsed by laughter.

  They recovered Grey’s clothes from the cab of the tender in which he had left them and walked through the streets in silence. Finlay felt fatigue under the dissipating tension in his body and brain, but knew that the dull insistence of alert thought would be slow to leave him in a fit state to rest properly. A drink would help, if Grey could locate one at such an early hour. Finlay thought that he probably could. He thought that Grey had been very cool under the ground, unless he had merely been ignorant of the extent of the danger. He was stronger than he looked. Finlay struggled to keep up with Grey, following him through the still-dark, rubble-pitted streets eastward. He had gashed his leg quite badly in that basement. The bone of his shin had been exposed, pale against the blood and torn flesh. One of the fire crew dabbed it with iodine and covered it with a field dressing while Grey changed his clothes. A steady throb of pain was starting to bother him, and he sensed that under the bandage the wound was still leaking blood. But it was better than being burned. And it was infinitely better than being buried under a thousand tons of implacable rubble. They got within sight of The Prospect of Whitby. They were walking on cobbles now, close to the river, the wharves silent, looming in the dark, a slight smell of pitch and cordite borne like breath on the incoming tide. Finlay thought about the docks; about all the things that could and would greedily burn, about the gathered cargoes, piled and roped, waiting to perish in a roaring riot of flame behind these slumbering walls. Paint, varnish, glue, tar, timber, petroleum, rubber, hemp, candle and paraffin wax. Everything packed in barrels and boxes and crates made of wood, their contents cosily bedded in straw or gun cotton. Jesus, how everything burned.

  They reached the pub. Finlay wa
s glad. His leg throbbed and he wanted very badly to sit down and sip cool, dark beer from a pint glass. He realized then, through his fatigue and with a start, that he was beginning not to mind the company of Grey. Beggars and choosers, he supposed. He still didn’t know, though, how they were going to gain access to the pub, outside opening hours, without making a lot of noise and causing lights to be switched on. Then Grey fished in a pocket and in the light that ghosts off the river presaging the dawn, Finlay saw the dull flourish of a key.

  ‘Blinder, Captain,’ he whispered.

  Grey did not react to the fourth mention that night of his forbidden rank. He just turned the key in the lock and they stole quietly, two men with soot-black faces and hair stinking of smoke, into the snug refuge beyond.

  Grey pressed a bell under the counter of the bar in the tap room and in no time a man wearing a dressing-gown and the folded posture and crumple of sleep came down and poured them pints by the melancholy light of Finlay’s service torch.

  ‘I wish we could lengthen the battery life,’ Finlay said, irritated, as the two men sat with their drinks and he switched off the thin beam.

  Grey lit a cigarette and inhaled like a newborn at the nipple. ‘It’s one of the things we’re working on,’ he said, his eyes closed now, his focus on the nicotine reaching through his febrile frame.

  For a while, Finlay let Grey smoke and contemplate and recover from their shared ordeal under the streets. He thought to ask the man why they could not simply have drawn their own drinks from the pumps on the bar without having to resurrect the pub’s overworked proprietor. But that question, he knew, would merely have annoyed Grey. Auspice. Custom. Tradition. Ritual. Rank. Such men as Grey were from a differently structured world.

  ‘Tell me about Pimlico Rubber,’ Grey said.