Dead And Buried

Fry didn’t wait for the answer. She was already fumbling for her car keys, heading for the street. There was no reason or logic for the way she felt, but she couldn’t deny the force of it. The appalling certainty in her heart drove her body automatically to jump behind the wheel and ram the Audi into gear.

Even worse than the fear was a fact banging insistently at the back of her head — the knowledge that she might have created this nightmare herself.

When Cooper finally broke open the hatch, he could see smoke high above him, swirling on the ceiling of the bar, already starting to fill the room.

Raising his head above floor level, he saw that the source of the smoke was a roaring blaze at the far end of the bar. The door they’d come in through was consumed by a sheet of flame, and the fire was spreading rapidly along the room. The curtains were blazing, little tongues of fire creeping up them. Wooden furniture was smouldering, the glass tops of the tables cracking like gunshots. A pile of cardboard boxes burned like a bonfire, spirals of card peeling away like charred flesh from a corpse.

Cooper saw a patch clear of smoke. He drew Villiers up to the top of the steps after him and pointed the direction out to her.

‘That way,’ he said. ‘When you get clear of the hatch, go left.’

Somewhere, the flames were roaring so loud that he could hardly hear his own voice.

‘Keep low,’ he said, close to her ear. ‘And get out fast.’

She nodded, and began to move. Then she stopped, and turned back.

‘What about you?’

‘I’m going for Liz. She’s upstairs.’

‘Ben, be careful.’

On the first floor, Liz might not even be aware of the fire. The smell of the smoke had alerted him in the cellar, but if she was wearing her mask as she worked on the crime scene, she would smell nothing. In a room with the door closed, the flames could be raging in the corridor right outside before she noticed.

Cooper grabbed an old bar cloth and held it over his face. Paper and wood were already burning, because they caught fire at low temperatures. Plastics and polyurethane needed higher temperatures to ignite, but they burned rapidly and gave off toxic gases. In a modern hotel, built of concrete and steel, staying in a closed room could be the safest option in a fire. But in a building like this, no one upstairs would stand a chance. The whole place would burn down.

The stairs to the function room were here somewhere, and the access to the guest bedrooms. There had to be a fire escape.

Smoke was moving up the stairs and filling the corridor where the bedrooms were. But the fire itself hadn’t reached here yet. The flames were still being held back from bursting through into the upper floors. He didn’t have long before these wooden floorboards started burning, though, and then the stairs would be gone.

‘Liz!’

He found Room One from the sign on the door — the Bakewell Room. Inside, Liz glanced up astonished as he burst in. He must look an appalling sight. She was in her scene suit with her hood up but the mask pulled down.

‘What’s that beeping?’ she asked.

Cooper hadn’t even noticed it. ‘A smoke alarm.’

‘There’s a fire?’

‘Yes, we’ve got to get out. Now. Leave your kit. This is an old building, with lots of timber in the structure. If the supports burn through, the whole thing could come down.’

‘Here, take a mask,’ she said.

Cooper pulled the mask on, and they headed back to the stairs. Even through the mask, he could smell the reek of petrol. The conflagration was fiercest around the door of the bar and in the main entrance, so that must be where the accelerant had been spread. Some of the floorboards were already reduced to ashes; others were no more than lumps of charcoal.

He heard glass shatter. That was bad. The windows wouldn’t hold against the fire.

‘The boards over the windows are keeping the air out for now. We have a chance to get out before it really goes up.’

‘Which way, though?’

Black smoke rolled across the ceiling and hung like a curtain, sinking steadily towards him in dense folds. Within a few minutes, the smoke layer was only four feet from the floor. Carbon monoxide was a narcotic gas. Two or three lungfuls of that smoke would kill them.

But the smoke and toxic gases were being forced right through the building. They needed a secondary escape route.

‘Stay low. Stay low, where you can breathe.’

In the corridor, the floor was scorched where the carpet had singed through, but the passage itself was clear of fire. Cooper peered through the smoke, trying to remember the way out from the back of the pub.

Blazing curtains fell on to furniture as their rails burned through, glass shattered as picture cords snapped and frames crashed to the floor. When the flames reached the ceiling, they would get flashover. It could reach five hundred degrees Fahrenheit in here.

The boarded-up windows were alight now, reflecting the glow of the inferno inside the pub. The fire was mirrored on to itself, doubling the size of the blaze until it looked like a vast furnace every way he turned.