Where the main road met a twin-rutted track, the wall bordering Les Arbres’ grounds turned right, and became a waist-high, moss-covered mound. Heading down the track, River peered over it into a wooded area: largely leafless but on an upward gradient, so visibility remained limited. There was no sound. He was only a quarter mile or so from Angevin, but could have been transported into the heart of a lonelier region. He would barely have been surprised to meet a horse-drawn cart coming up the track to meet him. But he encountered no one, and only once or twice heard a car on the road, heading to or from the village.
“When was the fire?” he had asked his new friend back in the café.
It had been three nights previously.
“Was anyone hurt?”
The house had apparently been empty. At least, no bodies had been found among the wreckage.
“How many people had lived there?”
Nobody had been entirely sure. It had not been a family situation. A commune, rather. If River was familiar with that term.
River was.
“The fire. Was it arson?”
“Deliberate? Yes, it would seem so. There were no vehicles there, yes? Everybody left before the fire started. And the blaze . . . ha. Big black clouds, blacker even than the night.”
Meaning petrol had been used, River surmised. Petrol or something; something to burn fast and hard enough that no evidence would remain.
But evidence of what?
He reached a pair of gates; large iron ones with a circular sign attached, propriete privee defense d’entrer, in red. They were chained together, but this was as good a place as any to make entrance. River scrambled over the wall, smearing his hands green in the process, and followed a track the width of a car through the melancholy trees. The smell grew stronger. He was reminded of clearing the grate at his grandfather’s house the morning after a late-night session, one in which they’d sat by a dying fire while the O.B. poured out stories, his clarity growing dimmer with the light. But River had always wanted to listen, had always wanted to hear. Never wanted his grandfather’s voice silenced. It was unlikely they’d share another such evening, he thought, as he made his way closer to the heart of the now-dead fire.
His first sight of the house was unexpected, as he crested a rise he hadn’t noticed he was approaching, but in that same first moment it was there, it was gone again too. For the house was no more. What must once have been an impressive structure, three or four storeys high, seven or eight rooms to a floor, was now a ragged outline of walls, with charred lumps of timber piled between. Anything the house had once held had melted to barely recognisable pyramids of scorched and blackened sculpture: window frames and furniture, snakes of cable, lengths of staircase. An enamel sink hovered three feet above the ground, or did at first sight: it was suspended there, in fact, by upright piping. Around it sat the squat lumpy shapes of its former colleagues: a stove, a washing machine, a dishwasher, a fridge. White goods rendered black, half-melted. There was a bath, too, embedded in a mess of rubble, the tap-end reaching out of the ruins like the prow of a dying ship.
And though all of this was still wet, it seemed to retain the memory of heat, as if the recent inferno had been too intense an experience to dissipate entirely. The house was gone, but the ghost of what destroyed it lingered, and all around its ruin the ground was churned up, with heavy tyre tracks moulded in mud, and oily pools in the deeper craters. It must have been deeply violent; not only the fire, but the mission to quell it. The damage done to prevent further harm from spreading—his grandfather would have had a story to illustrate that. But it would have grown confused in the telling, and wound round itself without reaching a conclusion, and River wondered for the first time if he were here investigating the attempt on his grandfather’s life, or simply putting distance between himself and the old man, so as not to have to witness his deterioration.
He crouched and laid a palm flat to the ground, but felt no stored warmth: wet flattened grass was all. He wiped his hand on his jeans. This was where Adam Lockhead’s journey had started, the one that ended on the O.B.’s bathroom floor. It couldn’t be chance that the house had burned so soon before that. But what was the chain that bound the events together?
Something rustled in the woods, but when he scanned the area, nothing caught his eye. The wind, or a small animal. Gossiping trees.
