Where There's Smoke

She stared down at the open Jiffy-bag on her desk as though it would ignite by itself. It had arrived with the post. The effect of seeing the poster the night before had faded a little in the daylight. As soon as she arrived back at her flat Kate had phoned the police incident room to tell Collins about the tramp. But the Inspector couldn’t be reached, and the policeman who had taken her message sounded uninterested and patronising. She had slammed down the phone before she shouted at him. Trying to put the incident from her mind, she had gone into work that morning and occupied herself with opening the post. There were no more large brown envelopes, and Kate had begun to relax. Until she had opened the Jiffy-bag. Collins was still unruffled. “He wants to scare you, that’s why he’s doing all this. You’ve hurt him, and now he’s trying to hurt you back by frightening you. If he was serious, he’d have done something by now.”

“He’s already tried to set fire to where I live, for Christ’s sake!”

“If Ellis had been serious about trying to burn down your flat, he’s had enough experience to make a better job of it than that. If he’d used more petrol, perhaps pushed a few rags through as well, then waited for the fumes to build up, that little entrance hall would have gone up like a bomb. There are all sorts of different ways he could have done real damage. If he’d wanted to.”

“So you’re saying I’ve got nothing to worry about?”

“No, what I’m saying is — sorry, just a second.” There was a hollow whisper of a hand being put over the receiver. Kate could hear distant, muffled voices. The cloying smell of petrol oozed into her pores. She looked again down at the Jiffy-bag. Its mouth gaped, and the self-sealing polythene bag that had been inside was draped half out of it like a pale tongue. The oily black ashes that had spilled out when she had dropped it lay wetly on the desk. Kate knew she should clean them up before the surface was stained, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch them. Only one part of the poster had been left unburnt. She could imagine Ellis carefully turning the burning paper, until everything except her face had been consumed. Then he had soaked the ashes in petrol and sent them to her. There was a rattle as Collins took his hand away from the receiver. Then his voice was back. “Sorry about that. Where was I?”

“You were telling me why I’d nothing to worry about.”

Collins overlooked her sarcasm, which made her feel worse. “Try and look at things in perspective. The posters are upsetting and I know they’ve damaged your business. But they can’t hurt you.”

Kate wanted to believe him. “Can’t they? What about this?”

She waved her hand at the burnt remains of the poster, as though the Inspector could see it. “It’s like he’s telling me what he’s going to do! He’s psyching himself up for it!”

“Look, Kate.” The policeman spoke with weary patience. The unexpected use of her Christian name was somehow comforting. “I’m not trying to kid you that Ellis isn’t dangerous. But you’re taking every reasonable precaution that you can, and he’s made himself too conspicuous to get away with what he was doing earlier. He’s got to be more careful where he puts the posters because he knows we’re watching for him, and he’s going to find it more and more difficult to go out in public at all. He’s probably getting frustrated, so he’s looking for different ways to get at you.”

“But if he’s frustrated mightn’t that make him do something?”

Collins took a moment to answer. “I wasn’t going to tell you this. I didn’t want you to get your hopes up, but we’ve had a sighting of Ellis. It was last night, at Piccadilly Underground. A transport police officer spotted him. He was carrying a couple of plastic bags, and when the officer went to challenge him, he dropped them and vaulted over the barriers and ran out. There was a roll of posters in one and paste in the other.”

Kate remembered the bags the tramp had been carrying. “He got away?”

She felt a strange mix of adrenaline and disappointment, as though the outcome were still in doubt.

“Unfortunately, but it proves my point. Every time he pokes his nose out now, he increases the risk of being caught, and it won’t be long now before he is.”

That thought buoyed her up for the rest of the day. It was a fragile optimism, but better than the feeling of being buried alive. A uniformed police constable called around later that morning for the Jiffy-bag and burnt poster, and once that had gone Kate felt encouraged enough to venture out.

It was the first time since Clive had gone home that she had left the office without getting straight into a taxi. It had only been days, but it seemed much longer. The street seemed wider and longer than usual under the grey and agoraphobic plain of the sky. She walked out by the pavement edge, away from doorways and alleys, checking behind her every few minutes. When she reached King’s Cross she felt the uneasy relief that comes with a fading of tension.