PAIN HAS A PERMANENT ADDRESS - READ BETWEEN THE LIES

PAIN HAS A PERMANENT ADDRESS - EPISODE SEVEN

Chapter Seventeen

Kira helped my arms into the garments she had brought and fastened the fronts.  Next, she brought out a flask full of hot soup from the suitcase, along with cups.

  I looked into Kira’s eyes as she held the cup to my mouth.  I loved her.  Who wouldn’t love a woman who thought of hot soup at a time like this?

  She glanced at me and said, “Maybe you can do without a doctor, at that.”  I gave her back the cup, and she settled herself into the driving seat and, switching off the light inside the car and drove me back to Oxmarket.

  “Who did it?”  Kira asked after about half a mile.

  “Tell you later.”  I could hear the exhaustion in my voice.

  She didn’t press and the car sped on.

  “I had a job finding you,” she explained.  “It was such a big area to search.”

  “You came, though.”

  “Yes.”

  I found sitting in the back of her swaying car very uncomfortable.  My arms and shoulders ached and if I leant back too heavily the raw bits didn’t like it.

 I had become used to getting knocked around since becoming a private detective, with black and blue places frequently on my body. I had broken several of the smaller bones, been kicked in tender places, and dislocated one or two joints.  Still, my general sense of well-being, and my optimism that I would always recover.   My resilient constitution could take a knock and be back in business quickly, faster than the medical profession considered normal.

 I had a routine for dealing with discomfort by ignoring it and concentrating on something else. But for some reason, my system did not want to cooperate this time. It didn’t work, for instance, when I sat for a while in a light armchair in Kira’s warm living room.

  My recovery began as a tingle, faint and welcome, soon after we had got back and Kira had put her central heating on.  She dug out some rather powdery-looking paracetamol in a bottle.  There were only three of them left, which I swallowed.  Then she made black coffee laced with stiff brandy.

  “At least you’ve stopped shivering,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She took the empty mug into the kitchen and was several minutes coming back with a full one for herself.  She looked at me concerned.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She wiped some sweat from my forehead.  I felt terrible.  My head drooped.

  I looked up and saw Kira standing in front of me, watching me with an unreadable expression.

  “I’d better wash those grazes on your back,” she said, blinking to disguise the tears in her eyes.

  “No,” I shook my head.  “In the morning.”

  “There’s a lot of dirt in them,” she protested.

  “It’s been there so long already that a few more hours won’t hurt.”

  She didn’t argue.  She unzipped and helped me off with my jacket and guided me upstairs to her bedroom.  The sheets on her double-bed were rumpled from her lying on them, waiting for me to regain full consciousness.  There was still a dent in her pillow where her head had been.  I put mine there too, with an odd feeling of delight.

  “I’ll sleep in the spare room,” she said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “You need to sleep.”

  She perched herself on the edge of the mattress and looked down at me before bending forward to kiss me on the forehead.

  I couldn’t help it; I put my arms up around her shoulders and pulled her down onto my chest and kissed her full on the mouth.  Everything went into that kiss, all the desperation and fear of dying I had experienced earlier that day.  It was hungry, passionate, and desperate.  She relaxed and kissed me back.  But her passion was so brief and passing that I thought I had imagined it.

  She stood up and looked at me and smiled, “When you’re better.”

  She walked round to the light on the bedside cabinet and switched it off.  She turned away without speaking and went across to the bedroom door.

  Her voice reached me across the dark room, calm, self-controlled.  “Good night, John.”

 “Good night, Kira,” I said, before rolling over onto my stomach and put my face on the pillow.

  In the silence, time passed slowly.

  I don't know how long I slept but just after daylight, I heard Kira taking a shower, then brushing her teeth. She went downstairs and made coffee.  The warm roasted smell floated upstairs, but I didn’t leap out of bed eagerly to greet it.  I turned over from my stomach and onto one side, shutting my eyes against the stiffness which afflicted every muscle from neck to waist, and the sharp soreness of my back and hands.  I really didn’t feel very well.

  Kira came upstairs with a mug of steaming coffee and put it on the bedside cabinet.

  “How are you feeling?”  She asked.

  “Alive.”

  “That’s good,” she sat down on the edge of the bed, smiling.

   I shoved myself up into a sitting position, wincing somewhat from various aches, and brought a hand out from under the bedclothes to reach for the coffee.

  “What’s the time?”  I asked.

  “About eight o’clock. Why?”

  I told her.

  “You don’t mean it? You aren’t seriously thinking of continuing with this case?”

  “I seriously am.”

  “You won’t be able to.”

  “I must.”

  “Why? You look ill.  You need a couple of days rest.”

  “I’ll do that once this case is solved.”

  She looked at me without speaking for half a minute – thirty solid seconds – and then she cleared her throat and asked, “What do you want to do first?”

  “Hot bath and breakfast,” I said.

 Kira straightened up the bedroom when I got up and hobbled to the bathroom. It was easy enough to say, but it wasn’t all that easy to do.  It was exasperating, how much havoc this case has affected my mind and soul.  I turned on the taps and stepped into the bath and lay down in the hot water.

  Gradually the heat of the water did its customary work of unlocking the worst of the cramps until I could rotate my shoulders and turn my head from side to side without feeling that I was tearing something.  Every few minutes I added more hot water so that by the time Kira came into check on me, I was up to my throat in it and steaming nicely, warm to the backbone and beyond.

  She dried my body with care after I had climbed out of the bath with reluctance.  She helped me put on my jeans on, and I followed her downstairs to the kitchen where the entire contents of her first aid box were set out on the table.

  I sat down, and she bathed the grazes with disinfectant, dried them and redressed the wounds. She was neat and quick, and her touch was light.

  “Most of the dirt came out in the bath luckily,” she observed bust with the scissors.

  She went upstairs and came down with another of my jumpers.  Pale green.  The colour suited my state of health rather well.

  “You should have gone to a doctor,” she said.

  “Not yet.”

  “Are you going to the police?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t face the thought of telling DI Silver and him having that infuriating, ‘I told you so,’ expression on his face.”

  “So you are going to put your pathetic pride first, instead of common sense.”

   “Correct.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever understand you.”  She looked exasperated.

  “I don’t understand me,” I said, and she laughed.

  The pity about hot baths is that although they loosen one up beautifully, for the time being, the effect doesn’t last; one had to consolidate the position by exercise.  And exercise, my battered muscles protested, was just what they would least enjoy; all the same I did a few rather half-hearted bend-stretched arm movements while Kira scrambles us some eggs, and after we had eaten, and I shaved I went back to it with more resolution, knowing that if I wasn’t going to be in a reasonably supple condition by the evening then I would have no chance in carrying out what I intended to do in the evening.

  After two hours work, though I couldn’t screw myself up to swinging my arms around in complete circles, I did get to the stage where I could lift them above shoulder height without wanting to cry out.

  Kira washed up and tidied her house, and while I took a breather, she said, “How are you feeling now?”

  “Tired.”

  “Well,” she said, “it’s only a suggestion but why don’t you go to bed for a little while I nip down to the shop and get something in for lunch.”

  “That sounds like a great idea, I’m starving.”

  She gave a laugh which ended in a choke, and called, “All right, I won’t be long.”

Chapter Eighteen

And cook she did; fried chicken with sweet corn, pineapple, and bacon.  I had dozed on and off for a couple of hours and stirred from a fractured slumber when the preliminary smells wafted with tantalizing wickedness out of the kitchen and up to the bedroom.

  I got up and put my clothes on and stripped her bed.  I found clean sheets in the drawer beneath, and I made it up again fresh and neat for her to get in with me that evening.

 She carried a tray of plates and cutlery up from the kitchen and saw the bundle of dirty sheets and the smooth bed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You obviously haven’t slept well in the spare room and your eyes are red.”

  “That isn’t . . .” she began, and then stopped.

  “It isn’t lack of sleep?”  I finished.

  She shook her head.  “Let’s eat.”

  “Then what’s the matter?”    “Nothing.  Nothing.  Shut up and eat.”

  I did as I was told.  I was hungry.

  She watched me finish every morsel.

  “Oh, yes.  Much.  Thanks to you.”

  “I’d like you to stay, John.”

  I looked at her.  I could see she looked vulnerable.  Not the time to go home.

  “Of course,” I said smiling.

  Kira became animated and talkative and how the case had national headline news.  DI Silver hadn’t covered himself with glory at the most recent press conference, particularly when he was asked why I had been taken off the case.

  She stopped in mid-flow, and in a different sober tone of voice she said.  “What are you going to do now?”

  I told her and it took some time.

  She was shaken.  “You can’t.”

  She shivered.  “These criminals don’t know what they are up against, when they pick on you, do they?”

  “Will you help?”  Her help and support would be essential.

  “Why don’t you let DI Silver know what you intend to do?”

  “No.”

  “But what you are planning . . . It’s dangerous.”

  “I know.”

   “You don’t think you’ll relent, once everything has stopped hurting?”

  “I’m quite certain, now, will you help?”

  “I’ll think about it,” she stood up and collecting the dirty dishes.  She wouldn’t let me help wash up, so I went into the lounge and sat on the sofa and read the morning paper.

  When she had finished she came into the room, sat down beside me, and kissed me.  I put my arm round her shoulders.  She leaned comfortably against me, and I kissed her cheek.  She gazed at me.

  “I love you, Kira.”

  Her eyelids flickered, but she didn’t move.

  “You must believe me.”

  She said nothing.  If I lost this time I had lost her forever, and a leaden chill of despair settled in my stomach.

   I turned towards her and put my hands on the sides of her head and tilted her face up.  I kissed her; gently, and with love.

  Her lips trembled, but there was no rigidity in her body, no fear of where this relationship would go.  I had laid my cards on the table, put my heart on my sleeve and I knew now I hadn’t lost after all.  The chill in my stomach melted away.  I sat back on the sofa, holding Kira’s hand, and smiling at her.

  “I love you too, John.”  She gazed at me for a moment as the corners of her mouth twitched.  “I do believe you because quite simply I’ve never known anyone more determined in all my life.  You’ve always been like that, ever since I’ve known you.  You don’t care what trouble you put yourself in to get the answers you are looking for . . . Like what you are planning to do.  And I know that loving you will not be easy, but whoever said love was easy?”

 We stayed on the sofa talking calmly as if nothing had happened; and nothing had, I thought, except a miracle that Kira’s hand now lay intimately curled in mine without her wanting to remove it.

  The minutes and then the hours ticked away towards eleven o’clock in the evening, and we retired to bed together.  I quickly went to sleep. Kira had gone off before me, judging by the soft and rhythmic gentle purring that she always made when she slept.

  I don’t how long I slept for, but I dreamt I could smell toast.  Kira had left it in the toaster downstairs for too long, and it was beginning to burn.  Burnt toast.  My father had always liked his toast burned black.  He had joked that it wasn’t burnt, it was just well done.

  I was awake, and I could still smell the burnt toast.

  I got up and opened the bedroom door.

  Kira’s house was on fire, with giant flames roaring up the staircase and great billowing black smoke filling the air.

  Oh s**t, how are we going to get out of this?

   I closed the bedroom door.  Perhaps it was all a dream.  But I knew it wasn’t.  I could smell the smoke coming through the cracks around the door and I could feel the heat, even on the other side of the wood. It wouldn’t be long before the fire had eaten its way through.

  “Kira wake up.” I shook her from side to side.

  She opened her eyes and sat straight up in bed and said, “What’s wrong, John?”

  “Your house is on fire.”

  “What?”  She threw back the covers and joined me at the window.

  She was wearing the skimpiest of nightdresses which was decent by about an inch.  Getting her out of this fix, while maintaining her dignity might be nigh on impossibles.

  “What are we going to do?”  She asked with roar panic in her voice.

  “Keep calm, for one thing.” I responded.  Sensing the fear in her body.

  Her house had been built more than two hundred years before and the windows were the original leaded lights, small panes of glass held in place by a lattice of lead strips.  The windows were themselves small with only a tiny hinged opening for ventilation that definitely wasn’t large enough for us to get through.

  Kira opened the ventilator and shouted at the top of her voice.

  “Fire! Fire! Help! Help! Somebody help us!”

  We couldn’t hear if there was a response.  The noise of the fire below our feet was becoming louder with every second.

  She shouted again.  “Fire! Fire! Help! Help!”

  There were no sirens, no hoses, and no yellow-helmeted men on ladders.

  The air in the bedroom grew thick with smoke and made us cough. I made Kira stand near the ventilator to get some air from outside but, even here, smoke billowed up from the window below. And it was getting very hot.

  I knew people who died in fires usually did so from smoke inhalation rather than from the flames themselves.  I wasn’t sure this was comforting or not.  I didn’t want to die, and I am sure Kira felt the same, and I was certain that neither of us wanted to die like this, trapped in a burning house.  Instead, I got angry, bloody mad in fact, and my anger gave me strength.

  The air in the room had almost filled with smoke.  I dropped to my knees and told Kira to do the same, and we found that it was obvious near the floor.  But we could feel the heat from below, and I noticed that her carpet had begun to smoulder close to the wall near the door.  If we were to get out of this alive, it had to be soon.

  I took a deep breath of the clear air, stood, picked up her bedside table and ran with it where I assumed the window to be.  I couldn’t see anything as the smoke stung my eyes.  At the last second I caught a glimpse through the glass of the light from the fire beneath and made a slight adjustment to my path.

  I crashed the bedside table into the window.  The window bent and buckled but didn’t move.  I repeated the process and the window bent more and some small panes dropped out, but still the damn lead framework held.

  I again dropped to my knees for a breath and gave Kira a smile of encouragement.  The space beneath the smoke had diminished to just a few inches and I knew that was it.  Either I broke out now or we would die.

  This time the table went right through the window and fell out of sight into the smoke and flames below, taking the remains of the window with it.  There was no time to think or worry about what we were jumping into.  Kira clambered through the opening first and leapt, jumping away from the building, away from the fire.

  One of the advantages of Kira having such an old property is that the ceilings were very low and, consequently, the fall from her bedroom window to the lawn below was only about ten feet.  Quite far enough. I landed with my knees together and my body moving forward, so I kept on rolling like a parachutist over the grass and into the road beyond.  I got to my feet and moved to the far side of the road and looked back.

  Flames were clearly visible through what was let of Kira’s bedroom window. We had jumped, literally, in the nick of time.

  I gasped fresh air into my lungs, coughing wildly.  I was cold.  I stood shivering on the grass verge and only then did I realize I was completely naked.

  Kira’s neighbour, roused perhaps by her shouts, was outside watching with her arm around Kira’s shoulder.  She was a small elderly lady and I saw by the light of the flames that she wore a fluffy pink dressing gown with matching pink slippers, and her white hair was held neatly in place with a hairnet.

  I looked for something to cover my embarrassment and ended up using my hands.

  “That’s all right, dear,” she said.  “I’ve seen it all before.  Three husbands, and a nurse for forty years.”  She smiled.  “I’m glad you two got out all right.  I’ll fetch you a coat.”  She turned to go.  “I’ve called the fire brigade,” she said over her shoulder.  She seemed unperturbed at finding a naked man on the side of the road in the middle of the night, next to a raging window no more than fifteen feet from her own bedroom window.

  The fire brigade arrived with flashing lights and sirens but there was little they could do.  Kira’s cottage was engulfed in flames and the firemen spent most of their time and energy hosing down her neighbour’s house to ensure the searing heat didn’t set that alight as well.

    Kira sat pensive and quiet.  Someone was desperate to kill me, and they didn’t care if they killed Kira as well.  Definitely something to think about.

Chapter Nineteen

The morning brought an end to the flames but little other comfort.  Other than the ash and smouldering remains of her life, Kira’s home was a shell. There were no floors, no windows, and no doors.

  “You were both lucky to get out alive,” the chief fireman told us.  “These old buildings can be death traps.  Timber stairs and thin wooden doors and floors.  Even the interior walls are flammable, plaster over wooden slats.  Death traps,” he repeated, while shaking his head.

  Kira and I watched from the road as the firemen sprayed water over the ruin.  The stonework of the exterior walls had survived pretty well, but it was no longer whitewashed as it had been yesterday.  Great black scars extended upwards above every windowless void and the rest browned by the intense heat and the smoke.

  “Can you tell what caused it?”  Kira asked him, her voice wavering with emotion.

  “Not yet,” he said.  “Still far too hot to get in there.  But electrical, I expect.  Most fires are electrical, or else due to cigarettes not being properly put out.  Do either of you smoke?”

  “No,” Kira answered for both of us.

  “Did you leave anything switched on?” he asked.

  “Not that I can think of,” Kira replied.  “I suppose the TV would have been on standby.”

  “Could be that,” he said.  “Could be anything.  Have to get the investigation team to have a look later.  Thankfully, no one was hurt.  That’s what really matters.”

  “I’ve lost everything,” she said, her eyes red with tears.

  “You haven’t lost your lives,” he said, before re-joining his team.

  At eight o’clock, I stood for a good ten minutes in my shower and let the stream of hot water wash the smoke from my hair and the tiredness from my eyes.

  The fire brigade had arrived on the scene at 3.32 am.  I knew because the chief had asked Kira, as the property owner, to sign an agreement that the fire investigation team had her permission to access the property later that day, when the building had cooled.

  “What would you have done if I’d died in the fire?”  She’d asked him.

  “We wouldn’t need your permission then,” he’d said.  “We have an automatic right of entry if there has been serious injury or a death.”

  Convenient.

  “And we can always get a warrant to enter if you won’t sign, and we believe arson is involved.”

  “Do you believe it was arson?”  She’d asked him, somewhat alarmed.

  “That’s for the investigation team to find out,” he’d said.  “Looks just like a normal domestic to me, but then they all do.”

  She had signed his paper.

  After her shower, she’d dressed in the clothes she’d left here on the occasions she spent the night at mine and sat at the kitchen table taking stock until I resurfaced, fully dressed.

  “Are you okay?”  I asked her.

  “Yes,” she replied, but I saw that she wasn’t.  “It is all right if I stay here for a little while?”

  “Of course it is.  Stay as long as you like.”

  “Thanks.  So, what are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to find out about my car, and then we should try and get ourselves back to some kind of normality.”

  The garage had repaired my Peugeot 208 but looked customized with knocks, bangs and squeaks.  After that, we went to the bank, where I drew out a large amount of cash and also arranged for a replacement credit card. Without my credit card, I felt as naked as I had been on the road outside Kira’s house last night.

 Kira made the same arrangements at the branch of her bank, further down the High Street.  I then drove to the mobile phone shop looking through a water-streaked windscreen beneath a sky that looked like torn wallpaper.  The wipers slapped open and closed.  Red tail lights flared and faded ahead of us.

  Parking beneath a dripping oak, we ran to the door of the mobile phone shop, dodging puddles and sheltering beneath my umbrella.  Sorting my new phone out wasn’t a problem, but Kira had more difficulty.  She was explaining to a young woman behind the counter that her house had burnt down with her phone in it and needed a replacement, preferably with the same number as before.  Now, this didn’t seem like an unreasonable request to Kira, but she took more than an hour to achieve it and involved her having to raise her voice frequently.

  I felt I had to step in before Kira blew a gasket because she couldn’t produce a utility bill.

  “Can you please produce a duplicate of Miss Reed’s last month’s phone bill?”  I asked in a calm tone.

  “Certainly, sir.”  Kira gave her mobile number to the young woman, who, unbelievably, also wanted the first line of Kira’s address for security reasons.  Kira told her.  A printer under the counter word, and she handed over a copy of her mobile phone bill, complete with her full address printed in the top right-hand corner.

  “There,” I said, handing it back to her.  “One utility bill, proof of Miss Reed’s identification.”

  The young woman didn’t bat a thickly mascaraed eyelid.

  “Thank you,” was all she said before processing Kira’s order.

  “Can we leave our new phones here to charge for an hour?”  I asked after the transaction was complete.

  “Sorry, sir.  You will have to do that at home.”

  I sighed with exasperation and bought two in-car chargers from her and returned to the Peugeot connected my new phone to the MP3 socket.  I looked at my wrist.  No watch.  It had been on the bedside table.  The car clock told me it was half past eleven.

  “Coffee?” I suggested.

  “Good idea,” Kira agreed.

  We left my phone charging while we went for a coffee.  We sat in the window seat of an internet café with the car parked right outside.  I had needed to leave the car unlocked with the keys in the ignition in the order for the charger to work, so I kept a close eye on it.  Kira charged her phone while we sat and had a coffee.

  We then went into a luggage shop and brought Kira a suitcase, which during the following hour and a half, she filled with new underwear and clothes.  Using the rest of my cash, I bought myself a new watch in one of the Oxmarket High Street jewellers and some chocolates and flowers for Kira’s neighbour.