The Fire Fighter Read online

  Toxic fumes was the best guess as to what must have killed forty-year-old Edmund Eagan, a widower and father of two girls still at school. He had pulled off his respirator, which may have been faulty, having recently been through the maintenance workshop, the log showed, twice. The position of the remains suggested that Cecil Tooley, thirty-one, a single man who lived with his mother, died trying to haul his unconscious colleague back along the obstructed corridor and out.

  Seven minutes had elapsed since the arrival of the first fire appliances at Pimlico Rubber. At this point Finlay handpicked two crash crews and, in the shelter of one of the Dennis pumps, told them what it was he expected them to do.

  ‘Firemen were running around that burning building like a swarm of ants,’ said sheet-riveter Tony Malloy, who had watched the blaze from an observation platform at the top of a gasometer across the railway embankment, five hundred yards from Pimlico Rubber. ‘The heat was something fierce. I could feel it from where I was standing. And the flames! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t believe what those blokes were doing.’

  They went in. Clumsy with breathing apparatus and fighting to control their breathing, they went in at either flank of Pimlico Rubber; through a service entrance on the embankment side and, on the side neighbouring the paintworks, through the entrance senior management used. Each end of the building was equipped with a stairwell. Both crews were working blind in the black, noxious limbo. At least the respirators guard us from the stink, Finlay thought, leading the paintworks-entrance crew. At the other extremity of the building, he knew that Gaines, Lampetter and Cooper were groping through the same billowing filth. They reached the first floor, hauling the hoses after them, heavy over their shoulders. They climbed towards the second floor, groping upwards, labouring for breath.

  ‘Visibility was very poor,’ Albert Cooper said in a submission dictated from his hospital bed. ‘They were just about the most difficult fire-fighting conditions I have come across. We had no choice but to try to contain the blaze because of the adjacent paintworks. But we were working practically blind in toxic smoke. If the latex vats had been vats, like we were told they were, it might have been a different story. But they were airtight tanks. Either way, we fought the fire at Pimlico Rubber the only way we could.’

  Finlay’s stairwell was obstructed by blown-out and still fiercely burning debris outside the second-floor entrance, a double door blasted off its hinges and itself forming part of the obstruction. As he and his men struggled to climb through and over, using the play of their hose and their axes, at the other end of the building the second crew gained the third floor and got the first direct jet of water on to the latex tanks.

  By now, support crews were clambering after their colleagues at both ends of Pimlico Rubber. Crews were readying branch hoses which would suffocate flames with foam once water had sufficiently subdued the surrounding heat. All around the building, hoses, like a plague of restless worms, pulsed and twitched with pressure in heaps on the puddled ground. Water played on Pimlico Rubber from a dozen extension ladders, but the seat of the fire still roared in white defiance through the blasted windows at the building’s centre.

  Latex in the five sealed tanks had heated far beyond the temperature at which it would ignite. At the base of the tanks was water, always present in the sump of stored liquid. As the water heated, it turned to steam and its vast, gaseous expansion ruptured a tank, sending its contents skywards in a bucketing, volcanic spew, twelve seconds after Cooper and the two men with him gained the third floor. Cooper was on one knee by the door, hauling hose up the stairwell, when he realized that it was raining latex. He turned to see Gaines and Lampetter struggling on the floor through smoke, swimming in agony, screaming through masks they were trying to tear off with hands turned to mits by the deluge of boiling rubber. Dicky Gaines was a father of five and a grandfather, two months away from retirement. Sid Lampetter was twenty-seven and due shortly to become Dicky’s son-in-law. Cooper, his tunic and helmet on fire in fierce splashes of rubber flame, never knew until the day he died how he got out. Fourteen ascending men were burned on the stairwells by rivers of descending fire. Three of them never worked again. But they put Pimlico Rubber out, extinguished it, before the danger to the adjacent paintworks grew to be acute. The newspapers hailed Finlay and his men as heroes. The loss of life meant an official enquiry, which exonerated Finlay of any blame but was distinctly short of anything approaching praise. His own view was that Pimlico Rubber was always going to be as close to a total balls-up as he’d get in his professional life. It was six weeks before he could sleep without seeing the faces in his dreams of the men he had led to their deaths.

  The cause of the blaze was arson, the fire set on the first and second floors by the company’s owner, a third-generation Italian immigrant called Paolo Cardoza. Mr Cardoza exported the bulk of his footballs and cycle inner tubes to Italy, where he had lucrative contracts to supply schools and sporting and cycling clubs. At least, they were lucrative until Benito Mussolini discovered that rubber goods were being imported from a British manufacturer with an Italian name. Mr Cardoza was offered the opportunity by II Duce to move his plant to Genoa and recruit an Italian work-force. But with a son at Winchester and a wife born in Shrewsbury, he demurred. Facing ruin after losing the Italian contracts, Mr Cardoza set his fire at the centre of two floors with forty-gallon canisters of an accelerant he declined, when arrested and questioned, to identify. He believed he could retire from business on the payout from his insurance policy. He had never been late in paying a premium. In the event he became the last fatality of Pimlico Rubber when he hanged himself by a braid of bedding from the bars of a remand cell at Wormwood Scrubs. He left no note. The fact that the older brother of Sid Lampetter, who perished at Pimlico Rubber, worked as a warder on the wing in which Cardoza was held, was simply a ghoulish coincidence not thought worthy of investigation.

  The looting auxiliary with the talent for jokes was a music-hall stagehand called Pickering, Nevin told Finlay. Finlay went over and pulled out a chair and sat at Pickering’s table. A pack of cards lay on the table-top, greasy and scuffed with use. Finlay reached over and picked them up and began, without looking, to shuffle the pack.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ he said, speaking into the silence his presence had provoked, looking at Pickering.

  Pickering licked his lips. ‘Someone important,’ he said. ‘Judging by the cap-badge.’

  ‘I understand you’ve been stealing from the dead.’

  ‘Not me,’ Pickering said.

  Finlay extended the spread pack. ‘Take a card.’

  Pickering took one. He turned it over. It was the ace of spades.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Finlay said. He recovered the card and shuffled the pack again. ‘Take another.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Pickering said. His mouth was no longer working with the rubbery facility it had had when recounting jokes.

  ‘I’m fucking well telling you to take a card,’ Finlay said.

  Pickering plucked one from the pack. It was the ace of spades. The man in the chair next to Pickering’s whistled. Pickering dropped the card like it was diseased. Finlay picked it up and reconstituted the pack and gave the cards to the man who had whistled. ‘Here, you shuffle them,’ he said. The man did. Finlay fanned them in front of Pickering, who took one this time without prompting. He closed his eyes when he turned it over and saw for the third time the black blossoming of the ace of spades.

  ‘We don’t steal from the dead,’ Finlay said. ‘The dead take exception. This is a proud service, and sensible. Nobody sullies it for very long. If you get my drift.’

  Pickering was staring at the cards. He appeared to get Finlay’s drift. Outside, in the autumn sunshine, Finlay remembered Kevin Pilley, a real artist at three-card tricks and apprentice conman with whom he had shared a dormitory at Borstal. Finlay had possessed no great aptitude for the cards. But Pilley had been patient and they had both had a great deal of time to k
ill. He had turned at the canteen door to look back at Nevin. Nevin slept once more over his breakfast, his recumbent head heavy in the cradle of his hands.

  ‘They’re bombing Liverpool,’ Finlay said.

  ‘And Portsmouth. And Glasgow. And Sheffield and Coventry and Crewe. And Swansea and Bristol. Frankly, if they weren’t bombing Liverpool, it would be a gross slight on the city of your birth. Of course they’re bombing fucking Liverpool. They’re bombing the entire bloody country. We’re at war, Chief Fire Officer.’

  White sat looking at his linked fingers after his short but vivid speech. The Major sat to his left, surpassingly immaculate in the freshly blast-damaged room. To their right was Grey, insouciant and nicotined, with a loosely tied silk cravat bright as a wound at his throat. Finlay sipped tea. The most recent bomb had shattered their blast-proof panes and chicken wire was strung across windows dingy now with absence of light. Finlay’s tea had been delivered to him cold and there had been no offer, on this occasion, of biscuits. He sensed something significant; a ratchet turn, emphatic and ominous in the spiral towards defeat. His leg ached. He had lost three of his buildings. In Liverpool, the docks were being bombed.

  ‘We’ve offered to move your mother. To evacuate her. We’ve offered twice. She’s refused,’ the Major said.

  ‘She’s more stomach for this war than I have,’ Finlay said, quietly.

  ‘Not true,’ White said. ‘Doctrinally, I suppose she might have. Your mother is a militant Socialist and we are at war against Fascists. But at this stage, frankly, I don’t think the politics of it make much difference. Anyway Mr Grey says that you conducted yourself splendidly the other night.’

  ‘I have lost more than fifty per cent of what you originally charged me to protect. In a matter of weeks.’

  ‘Hardly your fault.’ This from Grey.

  ‘Just don’t lose any more buildings, Chief Fire Officer. To lose what’s left would be very careless.’ The Major smiled. Finlay was more astonished by the smile than the source of the humour.

  ‘Do you think their bombing of my triangle a coincidence?’

  White continued to be fascinated by his nails. Rictus afflicted the Major’s grin and then, wisely, he withdrew it. Grey lit a cigarette with what Finlay judged to be an attempt at a flourish. But the hands could not remember their choreography and the result was almost palsied. The cigarette was successfully lit, but Grey fumbled the lighter on to the desk-top. It was a type Finlay had not seen before. It was nickel, chunky and rectangular, where he had expected to see sleek gold. Rebecca Lange, crimson-lipped, invaded his mind. But he expelled the image.

  ‘My mum says they bombed Liverpool in revenge. She says it was because Churchill ordered Berlin bombed and we hit civilian targets.’

  ‘Well,’ White said. ‘As the Whitstable incident demonstrated so vividly, your mother is no great admirer of Winston.’

  ‘She blames him for Gallipoli.’

  ‘No more than he blames himself for Gallipoli, I can assure you.’

  Was Finlay ageing like the men in front of him? They were hunched and bled of colour. Blood, atrophied and blue, shaped veins like a trellis of dead vines on the back of the hands White so scrupulously examined. The Major’s face was as pale as the skin exposed whenever he raised his gloved hands and deposited scabrous drifts of it on to the desk. Grey seemed shrunken, receded. He looked as though he were emptying into some dark vacuum. Finlay thought of Nevin; of how the flecks of grey in his abundant hair had turned to pale ravages framing the Watch Commander’s gaunt features.

  White cleared his throat. ‘There are those who will tell you that government intelligence is a contradiction in terms. At least three of the four people in this room are at odds with that view. But as we have explained to you before, there were many Nazi sympathizers in this country at the outbreak of war and there is no earthly reason to suppose that all of them have left.’

  ‘Having said which,’ Grey said, ‘the bombing of your buildings could merely be unfortunate. Most of the personnel from the financial institutions fled to the suburbs during the phoney war. But Jerry doesn’t know that. If they cripple the economy, nobody in the munitions factories gets paid. That could be their thinking. Their logic. Couldn’t it?’

  It took a moment for Finlay to realize that the question wasn’t rhetorical.

  ‘Why did you let Rebecca Lange go to Scotland?’

  Grey leaned forward and looked towards the Major, also leaning forward, across the sedate sheet anchor of White.

  ‘We couldn’t really stop her,’ White said. ‘She is a civilian.’

  ‘She’s an alien. What’s she doing there?’

  ‘Gone to see some architecture. Built by some Scots chappie named after a raincoat.’

  ‘Mackintosh.’ Grey said.

  ‘That’s the fellow.’

  ‘Is there anything that we can do for you, Chief Fire Officer?’

  Finlay thought about this. ‘For me, no. Babcock makes me very comfortable. In the circumstances I’m a lot more comfortable than I’ve any right to be. But you could put me in the picture. How are things generally?’

  White shifted in his seat. Grey and the Major both had their eyes somewhere near the point behind Finlay at which, in elaborate scrolls of blast-damaged plaster, the wall met the ceiling of the room. It was White who spoke.

  ‘The bombing has so far made a quarter of a million people homeless. In Stepney, the figure is almost fifty per cent. The slum dwellings of the East End have no resistance to bombs and have proved impossible to repair. There are pockets of disaffection, of course. But Mass Observation tells us that large-scale civil insurrection is still unlikely.’

  ‘The general feeling is that we can take it,’ the Major said.

  ‘The invasion of the Underground is a worry,’ White said. ‘Last month, four Underground stations took direct hits over the space of three nights and at Balham there was carnage. People have light and company down there and they can’t hear the bombs, so they feel safe. But they are very far from safe.’

  ‘How many are down there?’

  ‘We estimate close to two hundred thousand. And we know that some of them stay down there. A hefty minority aren’t coming up at all.’

  ‘So your deep shelter mentality does exist, then.’

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘We rather encouraged the climate for it when we allowed surface shelters to be built without cement in the mortar that bonds their bricks,’ Grey said.

  ‘There’s quite a community on your own doorstep, Chief Fire Officer,’ White said. ‘An uncompleted extension tunnel runs east underneath Liverpool Street. Every night it is home to around ten thousand shelterers. A cramped tunnel city of sweat and lice and the stench of excrement and carbolic soap and tea and rumour stretching for miles.’

  ‘Sounds like a trench,’ the Major said. ‘Except for the carbolic soap. Never was any soap, to speak of. Not in my part of the line.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘What are you thinking, Finlay?’

  ‘About those big thousand-kilogram mines they drop, Mr Grey. If they drop one of those over a tunnel under the Thames, all the people on the Underground platforms will drown.’

  ‘The odds are against that happening,’ White said. ‘Disease is actually our biggest fear. We fear the spread of epidemics. So far, all we’ve recorded is a serious increase in scabies and impetigo. But a child has died of meningitis on a tube platform.’

  ‘And none of the hospitals in London can boast the luxury of running water,’ Grey said. ‘Not all the time.’

  ‘Can you confirm that my brother is safe?’

  ‘We can,’ White said. ‘He is as safe as anyone can be in a naval vessel serving a country at war with a major naval power. His submarine has not been lost, if that is what you mean.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘The feeling is that we can take it,’ the Major reiterated. ‘But the work being done in the two of your buildi
ngs still intact can help shorten this war. We urge you to do everything you can to protect them.’

  ‘I am doing,’ Finlay said.

  White stood. ‘We’re sure you are. Though I have to confess, Chief Fire Officer, that we fail to see any but the most oblique connection between fire prevention and brawling with Irishmen.’

  Finlay did not believe that Rebecca Lange had been allowed to traipse off to Scotland merely to look at architecture. Travel was too difficult. Every major road was cratered and petrol was in terribly short supply and so the burden on the rail network, of passengers and of freight, was huge. Most of the main-line stations had suffered bomb damage. Millions of tons of rolling stock had been destroyed in the raids. There was nothing about it in the newspapers, or not much, but he had witnessed for himself the damage inflicted by a single raid on the main-line terminus at Liverpool Street. He could vividly recall how laboured, how tortuous, had been his own seventy-mile return journey to the Kent coast. The trains were teeming with troops, unwashed and uncouth, and Rebecca Lange just did not seem the sort of woman to endure sharing cramped space with them, clanking wearily over the slow miles to Scotland, only to look at cleverly embellished brick.

  He walked along Whitehall towards Trafalgar Square and the Strand, where he intended to visit his gymnasium. He had packed his kit when they had summoned him by telephone early in the morning and carried it now in a canvas grip. He would have to amend his regular routine to accommodate his injured leg. But Finlay felt a deep need for exhaustive physical exercise; not the kind that came incidentally, with wielding the heavy nozzle of a pressure hose to fight fire, but the controlled, choreographed kind of exercise that spent muscular strength and energy in a manner that nourished even while it was depleting those resources. He was still deeply troubled by the dream he had dreamt of Tom and in the absence of concrete assurance about his brother, needed at least to dissipate his energy to a point that would enable him to relax physically. He thought that mental calm might return to him over a period of time, as the dream itself, his having had the dream, became less of an abrupt, assaulting shock to his mind. His wish was more in hope than expectation.