The Fire Fighter Read online

  What the hell, Finlay thought, in weariness and a sort of capitulation. They know it all already. It’s on my file. And so he fetched himself and Grey, without prompting, fresh pints from the now-deserted bar, and recounted his saddest litany of misapprehension, and death.

  ‘He’s like one of those Catholic confessors,’ Babcock said. ‘He’d get you to tell him anything in the end. And because you’ve told him, and because he is the great confessor, it really is the end. And you burn.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop banging on about burning. It’s morbid.’

  ‘I mean metaphorically. As in to burn in the theological sense.’

  ‘How does a Communist know so much about the history of religion?’

  ‘Because the study of religion helped make me what I am,’ Babcock said, triumphantly. And I’m not a Communist.’

  Finlay sank back against his pillow.

  ‘Now,’ Babcock said. ‘I’m going to have to clean this wound. What did you tell Mr Grey?’

  ‘All about Pimlico Rubber.’

  Babcock whistled. ‘Lock, stock and barrel?’

  ‘It was supposed to be an exchange of information.’

  Babcock dabbed gently with the disinfectant. He was good at this. He had insistent, healing hands.

  ‘And what did he tell you?’

  ‘Not one single thing. I think I’d lost more blood than I realized. I passed out.’

  ‘I can suture this wound. Or I can get you transport to a hospital and a surgeon and he can suture it instead. Organizing transportation will take time.’

  Finlay thought about the giant pugilist who walked into pubs on silent feet and sat with patient malevolence behind the ticking engine of Grey’s car.

  ‘A surgeon, of course, will have more expertise than me. On the other hand, he’ll likely have a bigger workload and poorer concentration, dealing with a non-life-threatening wound. That’s because all the while his hospital will be a target for bombs, whereas down here, we’re relatively safe.’

  Finlay was barely following this.

  ‘It’s your choice, Chief Fire Officer.’

  ‘You do it,’ Finlay said.

  ‘And you’ll tell me about Pimlico Rubber?’

  ‘I’ll tell the world,’ Finlay said, expansive on morphine and pain and tiredness.

  Finlay dreamed about Tom. In the dream they were in Ireland. They had been taken by their mother for a holiday in Bray in County Wicklow. Tom, who was not yet two and was toddling, was wearing restraining reins. They were standing on the big pebbles at the top of the beach by the low sea wall. There was Wurlitzer music from one of the rides outside an amusement arcade on the opposite side of the coast road. The tune was ‘Oh, Susanna’. The tune drifted in loudness, up and down on the strength of the breeze. It was early in May and chilly and Tom had on his blue duffle coat with the toggles and the chinstrap fastened. A blue cap with ear muffs was secured by a tie under his chin. He had on his Wellington boots and was frowning and under the frown, his huge eyes, blue and serious, were staring intently at the sea. The sea broke in big, rhythmic waves and sang into the shingle. The breeze came off the sea and pervaded the air with salt. Their mother, younger, suppler in movement before the affliction of her arthritis, was squatting at Tom’s side, unclipping his reins. ‘Oh, Susanna’ was jaunty in sudden warm sunlight between shifting oceans of cloud. And then the boys’ Aunt Cath, their mother’s slightly older sister in whose house they were staying, stepped over the sea wall with ice-cream cornets for each of them held between the bridged fingers of both of her hands.

  Jack had taken the first sweet, frozen bite from his cone, had swallowed it and was experiencing an intense tingle of cold at what felt like the back of his right eye when he saw his mother point with her free hand and let out a sound stifled by ice-cream. He turned and saw Tom, tiny, arms outstretched, toddling for all he was worth down the shingle decline of the beach towards the breaking waves. His legs, those of a baby becoming a little boy, were pumping furiously inside his rubber boots as he hurtled on the very edge of balance towards his goal.

  Jack was agile and quick. In seconds he was parallel with Tom. And so he was able to see the intense determination to reach the sea focused in the toddler’s set mouth and immovable gaze. Tom continued, unaware of Jack. He was unaware of anything except his destination. But in the determination on his brother’s face Jack could see past adventures denied; toddler exploits cruelly dashed and above all the will, this time, to succeed. In Jack’s mind, in the rushed appreciation of the moment, there was something hugely impressive and at the same time hilariously funny about the antic race of the baby in his hampering duffle coat and rubber boots towards the sea, about the resolution cast in features shaped by such a short experience of the world. Tom continued helter-skelter towards the surging water, arms outstretched to either side of his tiny body for balance, tiny hands wobbling up and down at the ends of their plump wrists.

  He was less than a foot from the furthest reach of the last, exhausted wave when Jack swung him up by his armpits and held him to his chest, his own back to the water, the baby still staring over Jack’s shoulder, the reverie broken, but his eyes still on this latest, newest and most mysterious and exciting element to confront his emergent life. He lifted a finger and pointed.

  ‘Sea,’ Tom said.

  Jack Finlay kissed his little brother on the cheek. The baby’s skin was soft and cool in the chill of the wind. ‘Oh, Susanna’ was cheery and faint.

  ‘Gack,’ Tom said. ‘Gack.’ It was how he said his brother’s name. He was still pointing.

  ‘Sea,’ he said. ‘Sea!’

  Jack Finlay awoke and appraised himself. His leg was a percussive, endurable throb. He tossed aside his blanket and hooked his hands behind his knee and lifted the injured limb and sniffed. His wound smelled only of antiseptic cream. The rest of him, he realized in the total absence of light, smelled of no doubt tiled and marbled areas of the Dorchester Hotel. Babcock must have negotiated soap and unguents and scents and bathed and barbered him while he slept.

  Finlay groped for light and found it, taking no great comfort in these discoveries to do with health and hygiene. The dream had occurred in real time. The event had unfurled itself on the blank screen of his unconscious mind in the exact time it had taken to happen in the actuality of his history. The reality had been in colour, and Finlay had dreamed it in black and white, but he could take no comfort in this departure from reality. In his adulthood, Finlay had always dreamed in monochrome. For that, he blamed fire.

  ‘Jesus Christ our Lord, don’t let him die,’ Finlay said. The words emerged loud in the dim, encroaching silence of his cell. He said them again. And he felt no shame in saying them. ‘Oh, Susanna’, like a happy lament, echoed around his gathering alertness, the tune jauntily haunting his waking mind.

  Ten

  Finlay breakfasted with Nevin, after a call from Grey summoning him to Whitehall; after packing his grip with his gym kit and posting a letter to his mum, dropping into the Moorgate station merely on the off-chance of some proper company.

  Finlay arrived at Moorgate to find Nevin seated upright and asleep, alone at a table in the canteen. A breakfast of sorts congealed in front of him. There was a full cup of tea beside his breakfast plate, pale, a skein of condensed milk thickening on its surface. His elbows rested on the table-top and a cigarette burned between Nevin’s fingers. The length of grey ash suggested he had dropped off soon after lighting it. Finlay was no expert on smoking, but judged Nevin’s fingers to be three or four minutes away from a cigarette burn. Callused patches of ochre flesh to either side of the cigarette suggested it wouldn’t be the first. The canteen was a weary hum of men trying to cheer and replenish themselves. It smelled of tea and tobacco and sweat and the sour polish with which someone daily buffed the floor. The low insistence of conversation was brightened surprisingly often by bursts of laughter.

  A man he recognized as the B Watch lead fire officer slid into the cha
ir beside Finlay’s.

  ‘We’ve found it’s best to let him wake of his own accord, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Just so long as he doesn’t do this in bed.’

  ‘He doesn’t go to bed, sir. He just catnaps. Like this.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘He hasn’t slept a night since it started, sir. Can I fetch you a mug of tea?’

  ‘If you would.’

  Finlay was half-way through his tea when Nevin came to. He actually took a drag of the cigarette burning his fingers before dropping it and grinding it out under his boot. His eyes registered the man opposite.

  ‘Some of my auxiliaries are looting,’ he said, quietly. ‘I could understand it if they were taking goods from shops. But they’ll take anything. Wallets. Watches. Rings. Caught one of them stealing coal. Another one taking a pair of boots from a corpse.’

  Finlay took this in.

  ‘Thing is, these are good men, otherwise. Brave as you like. Committed. Full of initiative.’

  ‘I suppose you have to have a degree of initiative to pull the boots off a corpse,’ Finlay said.

  Nevin smiled. He looked terrible. ‘I challenged one of them personally after seeing him pick something up and slip it in his tunic pocket. It was one of those silver bracelets children are given when they’re christened.’

  Finlay swallowed.

  ‘Fellow seemed very put out I’d taken it up with him at all, Jack. Said it didn’t seem the same as stealing when bomb blast had put it there. Seemed to think it was fair enough. Like finding a fiver in the pocket of a second-hand coat. Perk of the job, so to speak.’

  ‘What did you do with him?’

  Nevin said nothing. He blinked a couple of times. He seemed on the verge of dropping off again. His fingers tapped a tattoo on the table. ‘Same fellow, previous week, smothered two incendiaries by hand in a schoolyard coke store. First one damaged his gauntlets so badly, he sorted out the second one by wrapping it in his tunic. What do you do?’

  ‘What you can, I suppose.’

  ‘Thing is,’ Nevin said, ‘there was blood still on the christening bracelet.’

  Finlay couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say.

  ‘I was at Ypres in the ’fourteen-eighteen. On the Salient,’ Nevin said. ‘And one morning I drew the ticket for a firing squad. There were two of them, roped to the wheel of a wagon with a sheared axle, a few hundred yards behind the line, in a depression in the ground so that the Bosch snipers couldn’t kill them before we did. Deserters. Kids, to tell the truth, Jack. They’d shat themselves and the shit and the fear off them smelled something terrible. It had brought the birds. Crows, ugly fuckers, squarking and preening. I aimed over their heads. Both volleys.’ Nevin jerked his head. ‘The bloke who took the bracelet is sitting over there. He’s the one they’re laughing at. He has a real way about him with a joke.’

  Finlay nodded and looked over at the man and reached for his mug of tea. His curiosity had been satisfied, at least, concerning Nevin and the ’fourteen-eighteen war.

  Pimlico Rubber was five storeys of yellow-glazed brick that was cracking and pinging like shrapnel with the heat spreading outwards from the burning building by the time the fire crews got to it, shortly after dawn on a beautiful April morning. The ground and first-floor windows exhaled smoke in great billows of black that climbed skywards in a column so dense it looked solid, like a pillar fashioned to grotesque dimensions out of obsidian, or coal. Finlay was in the first tender on the scene and right behind it came the second and then the third, which carried Sub-Officer Dicky Gaines, possessor of a near-photographic memory and a man whose knowledge of the ground was generally held to be encyclopaedic. Together, Finlay and Gaines sought out the beat officer who had raised the alarm. Police Sergeant Paul Armitage had joined the force straight from the army in the winter of 1918 and served all of his time in the borough of Westminster. More tenders arrived, their bells shrill and insistent in the calm of the morning. The flames at the base of the building roared and spread heat. Finlay could feel the familiar prickle of menace as heat caused sweat to trickle under his shirt and tunic down the length of his spine. The flames were blackening the brick at the base of the building, smudging greasy daubs of black around the lower storeys, causing windows to implode and glaze to snick and shatter and fly from the storeys above. About them, well-drilled men set up radial branch holders; static hoses with a delivery of 600 gallons of water a minute and a throw of 100 feet through a nozzle only an inch and a half across. Their back pressure too formidable for men to hold them, these hoses were mounted on a brace, with men standing on its backplate and a forward strut clawing the ground to anchor them. As the radials began their assault on the blaze, Gaines and Armitage told Finlay what they knew about the burning building. And Armitage, vitally, offered his opinion as to the probable cause of the fire.

  ‘I didn’t know the meaning of the term fire fighter until Pimlico Rubber,’ Armitage would be quoted as saying later, in the official report. ‘I thought it was just a term coined by the Victorians, with their taste for melodrama. And because they needed to drum up public funding for the service. How mistaken can a person be?’

  The crews were assailed, assaulted, by the stench of burning rubber. The fire was feeding on car and bicycle inner tubes and football bladders manufactured on the first and second floors and then packed in cardboard boxes and stored in wooden crates stacked on the ground floor to await delivery. Armitage and Gaines agreed that the fourth floor was given over to administration and was therefore stocked with nothing more combustible than paper-stuffed filing cabinets, furniture, adding machines and typewriters. The fifth floor was given over to a staff canteen and the boardroom. There was pure fat in the belly and sump of the big kitchen chip-frier and cooking oil stored in gallon drums in the stockroom at the kitchen’s rear. The fat and oil were volatile and Finlay had a team outside the building looking to cut off the supply of gas that fuelled the canteen kitchen’s three massive cooking ranges. But it was the third floor that gave Finlay his biggest cause for concern. Ten thousand gallons of raw latex sat up there in six fat copper vats, surrounded by the volatile chemicals and the machinery used to process the stuff into various compounds of rubber.

  Evacuation was progressing well. The density and height of the column of smoke stretching upwards into the windless sky from the factory provided a compelling case for the people occupying homes in those streets neighbouring the building to get out. Anyone local left the area urgently enough. Pimlico Rubber was flanked on one side by a railway embankment, which was good for Finlay’s fire crews because it meant they could attack the blaze on that flank with accuracy and from a secure footing, bringing to bear greater force of water than they were able to do from ladders. But the rubber factory was flanked at its other end by the Pimlico Paintworks. Paint, varnish, paint thinners; they would explode in their tins once subjected to heat. They would scatter and spread and burn ferociously. They would form rivers of liquid fire impossible to dam. Armitage and Gaines between them could only guess and speculate until the shift foreman from the paintworks breached the police cordon surrounding the blaze and confronted Finlay direct. Paint deliveries to their wholesalers were done fortnightly and the fleet of lorries and wagons that would do the delivering were due the following day. So the works contained thirty thousand gallons of finished product and the ingredients in their vats and tanks and barrels for a similar amount.

  Phil Carter was the first fire fighter to die in the conflagration that subsequently became remembered simply by the two words Pimlico Rubber. Radials positioned on the embankment alongside the burning building forced back the flames sufficiently for two crews on the ground to get within feet of it. They played their hoses on a side exit, wood banded by steel, its boards charred and splintered and the strengthening metal warped and bellowed outwards with heat. Carter encroached and swung his axe. Wood crumbled and he flattened himself against the factory wall. The execution of his second swing was alm
ost complete when something within exploded and the full furious force of the blast found its exit through the ragged hole Carter’s axe-blade had contrived a few seconds earlier. He was blown off his feet, out of his boots, jerked twenty feet back by the explosion like a strung puppet, with his neck snapped. Carter was twenty-four years old and saving to get married to a girl called Eileen he had met serving on her father’s vegetable stall at the street market in Lambeth Walk.

  A deluge of water from pumps all around the building began to starve the outer extremities of the Pimlico Rubber fire of the oxygen on which it depended for life. Long shots would not defeat the blaze, but could diminish it, enabling the fire fighters to encircle and begin to tackle it, thoroughly and with a strategy, without their uniforms, boots and the hair on their heads simply combusting in the fierceness of the approaching heat. On the ground floor, at the perimeter of the building, fire was spitting and dwindling in stubborn reluctance in pyres of stinking burn. The first-floor fire, through the windows, was diminishing with an unsteady, almost petulant reluctance, its flames forced through grey smoke back to their incendiary seat at the centre of the building. On the fourth floor, there was a wisp and suggestion of smoulder through those windows left open by the last working shift, for ventilation. But the third floor was Finlay’s concern and the latex, bubbling and restless with heat in its copper pans, the concern of all of them.

  Eagan and Tooley were the next to die. They breached the building at the Paintworks end and entered after giving the thumbs-up to the crew they had just left. Neither man was seen alive again.

  ‘We believed they were entering a corridor eight feet wide and nine high with large exterior windows sited every five yards along its length,’ Finlay said in submission under oath. ‘Later we learned that their progress would have been severely hampered by steel girders stacked sideways along that corridor for the planned construction of a warehouse building. Planning permission had been sought and granted, but we didn’t know about the girders. They had been put there because that entrance was seldom used, though it was officially designated as a fire escape and entry and exit should have been possible unimpeded. I understand the girders had been stored there so that they wouldn’t rust in the rain.’