survivors but then, as the smoke cleared, he recognised their yellow helmets and dark dusty jackets.
He followed Weir across the street. They reached the edge of the garden and the heat was terrible, unlike anything he’d ever felt before. The firemen emerging from the smoke were carrying something and, as he got closer, he could see that it was one of their own, blackened by soot and convulsing as if in the throes of an epileptic fit. The marshal immediately called the paramedics stationed nearby. Carrigan could tell that the injured man was on the verge of slipping away, his face red and blotchy, the skin already pulsating, his eyes rolling white into their sockets.
Weir spoke to the fallen man, held his hand and squeezed it gently, then stood up. ‘Jesus . . .’ he said, wiping his brow. ‘He’s been in the house. He’s been upstairs. You better listen to him.’
Carrigan knelt down, feeling the sweat and heat engulf him, and he could only just make out the man’s voice above the roar of the flames.
‘What? What did you say?’
The injured fireman tried to repeat what he’d said but he broke into a fit of coughing, vomiting a thin yellow stream of bile onto the pavement beneath him. ‘There’s . . .’ his voice wheezed and stuttered and broke, ‘upstairs . . . body . . . bod . . .’
Carrigan leaned closer until he could smell the man’s burned flesh, dark and funky and familiar in his nostrils. ‘There’s a body up there?’
The fireman shook his head and even that small movement seemed to cause him incalculable pain, his eyes turning small and pale. ‘Mm . . . mm . . . more than one.’
‘How many?’
The fireman started convulsing again, his teeth cracking loudly against one another.
‘All over the place . . .’ he coughed and spluttered and retched. ‘Everywhere . . . there’s fucking bodies everywhere.’
3
Ambulance sirens now added to the general noise and chaos. The fire continued burning, the wood cracking and breaking, the sizzle and hiss of water hitting flame filling the night like the beating wings of a thousand butterflies.
‘I need to get inside,’ Carrigan said, sweat dripping into his eyes.
The fire marshal was signalling his men, pointing out areas of the blaze they weren’t covering. He was talking on the radio, his voice low and deep as he recounted the situation, his eyes fixed on his fallen colleague being stretchered into a waiting ambulance. He put down the handset, took off his gloves and pulled a packet of chewing gum from his pocket. ‘Want one?’
Carrigan shook his head. ‘When can we go in?’ He was impatient now, wanting to see what was waiting for them in there, what they would have to deal with over the coming days.
‘Not for a couple of hours at least,’ Weir replied. ‘Not unless you want to end up like him.’ Carrigan followed his eyes towards the stretchered figure, groaning and gasping in pain as they raised him onto the ambulance bed.
‘I need to get in there,’ he repeated. ‘I need to see what we’re dealing with.’
Weir nodded. ‘We don’t get this under control in the next hour, all you’ll be dealing with is ashes and dust.’
Carrigan found Geneva helping the uniforms extend the cordon. The public were swaying and cramming against the blue-and-white crime-scene tape, their mobile cameras held aloft, shopping bags discarded for the moment as they posed in front of the burning building. He pointed to a small cleared space and led her away from the noise and press of the crowd. He kept having to wipe sweat from his face and he was tired and hungry and pissed off he’d missed his movie. Geneva called for more back-up as Carrigan rounded up the uniforms.
‘Stop looking at the fire,’ he told the young constables, ‘and start looking at the people looking at the fire.’
They stared at him, confused and disoriented. ‘Start asking questions. Some of these gawpers might have seen someone running away from the