Where There's Smoke

“You know what about. I’m sorry, Kate, but I think you’ve got to accept that abortion’s a serious consideration now.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, leave it alone, Lucy!” Jack snapped.

“No, I won’t! I’m as pro-life, or whatever, as anybody, but there have to be exceptions! And, let’s face it, being made pregnant by a deranged murderer has got to be one of them!”

Kate felt buffeted by the words. Lucy pressed on. “You’ve got to face facts, Kate. I liked him too, I admit, but the man’s a lunatic. Apart from anything else, he got you pregnant under false pretences. They do emergency terminations for rape victims, and I don’t see that this is much different. But the longer you leave it, the worse it’ll be. The sooner you—”

“Please, Lucy.” Kate shut her eyes. “Just... don’t. Please.1”

“I know but—”

“Leave it, Lucy.” Jack spoke firmly, putting a restraining hand on his wife’s shoulder. Lucy hesitated, then sat back.

“Okay.” She threw up her arms with a sigh. “Okay.”

Behind the mesh screen, the coal fire blazed, indifferently. Hands clenched, Kate stared into the depth of the flames.

The message light was flashing on her answerphone when she arrived home. She stood in front of it, looking down at the insistent pulse, then quickly reached out and stabbed the play button. Only a bristle of static came out of the speaker.

She thought she could make out faint breathing before the final clatter of disconnection, but she wasn’t sure.

There was one other message, a sales pitch from a double-glazing company, then the machine rewound with a whir. As it clicked into readiness, Kate went into the bathroom, stripped off and showered. It was her third of the day. She stood under the flow of hot water until the tank emptied and it began to run cool. Climbing out, she saw there wasn’t a clean towel and padded into her bedroom. As she pulled one out of the drawers, something else flipped into view. She looked at it, blankly, before there was a dip of recognition.

The child’s mitten was shockingly red against the white towels. The sight of it stabbed at her. Kate had forgotten about it, and its sudden appearance now seemed deliberately mocking. Snatching it up, she took it into the kitchen and threw it into the bin.

Chapter 15

The red-haired librarian remembered Kate. His windburned cheeks seemed to redden even more when he saw her. She would have been flattered at another time, but now it barely registered. “It was several months ago,” she said. “You helped me with something called—”

“Don’t tell me...” He snapped his fingers. “A PsychLIT search, wasn’t it?”

“You said that I could have photocopies of the actual articles. Can I still do that?”

He nodded, pleased to be helpful. “There’s a fee, but provided we’ve got the journals they appeared in on file, no problem.”

He led her to an unused monitor screen. She gave him Alex Turner’s name again, and he accessed the CD-ROM records. “Which was it you wanted?” the librarian asked.

“All of them, please.”

The librarian ran a print-out and asked Kate to wait. She sat at a table near the computer consoles. Around her, students and one or two older individuals stared at screens with degrees of absorption. It seemed a long time before the librarian returned. He had a sheaf of photocopies with him. “Take you a while to wade through this lot,” he said, cheerfully. “One or two were in obscure American journals that we don’t stock, but we’d got most of them on file.”

Kate waited until he had gone before flicking through the photocopied articles. She’d asked for all of them, but there was one in particular she wanted to see. It was half-way down the pile.

“PROMETHEUS’ CHILDREN: CASE STUDIES OF PYROMANIA.”

This had been the last record she had looked at when she had checked out Alex Turner’s credentials. She had only glanced at it before giving up, but the title had obviously lodged. At least, the fact that it was about pyromania had. She didn’t know what, if anything, it would tell her. But pyromania was an obsession with fire. And Inspector Collins had called Timothy Ellis an incendiary.

She began to read. The first section came under the heading “Classification”.