The Liar's Dictionary

So what happened? Fire engines added their sirens to the yawp of Swansby House’s alarm. That’s something I remember very clearly, as well as the lines of people gathered outside – the second time today! – where they all stood rubbing their faces or covering their mouths and taking photographs of the building. Everyone looked shocked, baffled, curious. They scattered back a few paces and drew aside as Pip, David and I barrelled out of the burning building. We landed together in a spluttering heap at the bottom of the stone steps.

‘Give them some air!’ I heard. ‘Give them some room!’

Maybe it was a firefighter or a member of this crowd that helped the three of us to our feet and away from the shadow of Swansby House. We were scooped and propped up next to some bollards across the road, and I remember someone checking Pip over. Apparently I was repeating her name as if looking for her even though she was close enough for me to look down and see her hand in mine. Someone else was administering to me, a man with a kind voice and a uniform that had lots of holsters and belt loops. I kept my eyes trained over his shoulder, watching Pip.

She caught my eye. She looked pale, with red-rimmed eyes and grey smudges across her forehead.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked. Her voice was hoarse, and she repeated the question so that it was a little clearer, calling it across to me despite us being so close together.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. It was an odd wheeze in the crisp and crisping air.

Pip waited a little, then she said, ‘I’m fine too,’ over the medic’s shoulder.

She was. She is. Pip is fine. All the important facts.

So, what happened?

If I piece it together with hindsight, David must have been looked after by another paramedic nearby, someone who probably took the time to ask him questions while pointing up at the building. Pip recalls seeing David nodding to the medic as if in conversation but it struck her he did not seem to be really listening. David had got hold of Tits: the cat was nestled in his arms beneath his woollen jumper and I could tell from the movement beneath the fabric that Tits had set about palpitating David’s shirt-front with his paws. If I knew Tits at all, he was probably crooning and purring. This is a detail that will not make the police reports, nor the newspaper columns nor the trivia books that list the evening’s events in their pages, but as I watched David Swansby watching his empire burn to the ground, I saw two furry ears and the top of Tits’s head appear up his collar. Momentarily Swansby’s final editor stood there chimerically two-headed, some greasy residue from the fire stamped in a mask of soot across his eyes.

I remember one of my hands was in Pip’s and that with the other I was gripping the dossier of false entries close to my chest.

But, what happened?

Onlookers stepped up their oohs and ahhs as a snicking burst of glass came from above. As a group we all instinctively ducked and looked up: in Swansby House, flames were visible from the window of the room where Pip and I had been working just minutes before. Dictionary as accelerant. Red and orange tongues lanced into the evening sky. Two tourists took a picture of it.

‘Is there anybody else in there?’ someone asked me and surely I shook my head. Pip tells me that at this point she had shifted her eyes to David Swansby. He was watching the blaze with the crowd and absently patting the cat’s head at his neck. He had the look of a man embarrassed that he could not go down with his ship, she said.

Later, Pip explained exactly what she saw when she ran into David upstairs in the dusty, smoky rooms above my office. She had noticed at once that there was a mobile phone kicked aside or dropped by his shoes, its screen still bright with use, and as she rounded the threshold of the room she had found David frantically trying to extinguish a small blue fire springing from a parcel in his hands. We now know that this was a bomb with a timer. David had messed up setting this timer – ‘I’m a words man, no good with numbers!’ he later joked on the stand, getting not one laugh from the galleries – and had ended up igniting the incendiary prematurely. He admitted this fact in court with a sad defeated shrug.

Pip said she recognised the smell at once, the dull sour tang of electrics fusing and melting.