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A quick head count told her there were about fifty people dancing now and a good twenty more hanging around. The street whiffed of whacky-backy. Rosa had forgotten her nagging joints and aching legs; the grimy shelves with mounting dust; the delivery boxes she couldn’t carry. For a few sweet moments, she’d stopped feeling sick to death of the damn shop, of book-keeping and fretting over decisions. She didn’t care about any of it anymore. All she wanted was—
A loud splitting sound tore through the air, followed by a series of cracks and bangs. Rosa gasped as orange flames burst out of the top floor windows of the shop opposite, and billowed upwards. Swirling streams of black smoke inked the pale sky. Fire raged behind the first-floor windows, and the ground floor shop was filled with smoke and flames. She cried out in pain as acrid fumes hit her lungs, forcing her to clamp her hand over her mouth. Everyone was shouting and running for cover as burning timber peeled away from windows. Screams pierced the air as lengths of wood and red-hot embers rained down on the crowd below. Rosa’s legs were like jelly and she felt dizzy. She stumbled over something on the ground in front of her and lurched forwards. She made out a woman, clutching her arm.
‘Help,’ came the agonised cry at Rosa’s feet. ‘Please help me.’
Panic engulfed Rosa, and she was transported back to the sensory onslaught of the Warsaw Ghetto, to primitive memories of endless screaming, to the cacophony of bombs and blasts and gunshots. From behind, someone shoved her out of the way and she stumbled forwards. All around her, people were coughing, retching and staggering, scarves and hands clasped over their mouths, desperate to escape the blaze. The air was cloying. Putrid. She was plunged into blind terror, realising she could die. This wasn’t Poland, and it wasn’t the end of the war, but she had to get away from the fire and ring 999 before someone died.
As the blaze ripped through the roof, smoke continued to spiral upwards into the sky. Rosa staggered blindly towards the blue door of her shop, to the step and doorway, arms groping ahead for something to grab. The fumes bit at her lungs and she was gasping for air so much she was retching. Finally, her hands grabbed the handle. She used all her weight to heave the door open and stumbled inside, pushing it shut behind her as quickly as she could.
She sucked in some air.
It was like breathing through needles.
She had to get to the phone in the back room. Stands and magazine racks flashed past her as she lurched towards the till, gasping for breath and snatching for a hold. She hauled her way round the counter, head spinning, and grabbed the phone receiver from the wall. Her eyes were streaming.
Keep blinking, she told herself.
Breathe.
She tried to calm herself; to rub away the tears that the fumes had produced; to steady her shaking hands and press the buttons. What should she say? Was it terrorists? Had there been an explosion?
Just say FIRE.
Rosa felt her head starting to spin. Lights flashed, dots appeared and she went floppy. Her mind slipped sideways and everything stopped.
I scraped my scruffy hair into a ponytail and took a deep breath. It was the first moment’s peace in the MIT room since seven this morning. I opened the email app on my phone and scrolled down to the one from Forensic Services with ‘Mr K A Rahman’ in the subject line. The message had dropped into my private inbox moments earlier. My finger was poised, ready to click, when Dougie’s advice popped into my mind. ‘If you’re going to do this, you need to be prepared for all possible outcomes,’ he’d said.
Was I?
I wasn’t sure.
I’d given up trying to find out what had happened to Dad. We’d all accepted he was dead, until a year ago when Mum started saying he’d visited her. And now it seemed like he might be alive after all.
‘Emergency services have been on the blower, eh.’ Dan’s Australian accent cut through my thoughts. Never one to enter a room slowly, he lobbed his keys on the desk, curved his athletic frame down on the seat next to me and whacked the space bar on his computer. The impact made my desk shake.
I grunted my disapproval and tucked my phone back in my pocket. ‘What about?’ After eighteen months of working with Dan, I still found some of his behaviour—
‘If you stop texting your boyfriend, I’ll tell you.’ He faced me, his hazel eyes red-rimmed and puffy. ‘Listen to this. First response has flagged up the smell of accelerant.’ He pressed ‘play’ on the recording on his phone.
‘Poleece?’ The woman’s voice was shrill. A heavy accent. ‘My husband is in the fire in Brick Lane. I think someone’s tried to kill him.’ Her words came out in snatches. There was a female voice in the background. It sounded like the person was prompting her. ‘I think someone’s murdered him.’
‘Shit.’ I searched Dan’s face for a reaction, but it was its standard pallid hue. ‘Do we know who made the call?’
‘Can’t trace it. Cell site data places the phone in East Ham but it’s an unregistered mobile. Goes straight to voicemail and there’s no personalised message.’
‘Is there a fire in Brick Lane?’
‘Yeah. Massive one. Uniform are there now with the fire brigade. Here.’ He passed me a transcript of the call. ‘No CID yet though.’
‘“My husband is in the fire” and “I think someone has tried to kill him”? We’d better get over there. I’ll tell Superintendent Campbell we’re going to check it out. What’s the shop?’
‘New place.’ Dan checked the incident log. ‘The Brick Lane Soup Company.’
‘You’re kidding?’ I stared at him. ‘That’s where the Jewish bagel shop used to be. Developers bought it a couple of years ago. There was a real hoo-ha.’ I could vividly picture the freshly cooked salt beef and bagels that had once sat in the window. I grabbed my jacket. ‘Come on. Let’s get over there.’
Minutes later, we were zig-zagging along the A13 from Limehouse, in the clank and clatter of the afternoon traffic. Lorries and red buses belched out choking fumes into the watery April sunlight.
In Brick Lane now, and on foot, the blue lights from the emergency services vehicles barely cut through the black smog which hung over the area. As we approached the street, heading north, discombobulated voices echoed through the haze. Two motorcycle responders tore past us, sirens blaring and blue lights flashing. Dan’s stride quickened, and I broke into a jog to keep up, past the takeaways of my childhood, the barber’s and money shops.
Up ahead, it was a scene of devastation. Smoke caught in my throat and I fished in my pocket for a tissue to cover my mouth and nose. I made out a terrace of three-storey buildings. Here, parts of the roof hung precariously over the shop I’d known since I was a child. Torrents of water were gushing down the street, and spray and fizz had sent puffs of steam into the atmosphere.
A few yards away, the liveried news crew vans were in a cluster, and their staff were frantically assembling satellite dishes, gangly tripods, panels of bright lights, video cameras and sound equipment. The BBC, Sky and ITV reporters were shouting into microphones over the noise of the water pump.
Carly, one of the Sky reporters, had just begun live broadcasting.
‘ . . . here in Brick Lane, it’s a scene of utter carnage. Earlier this afternoon, at around two thirty, emergency services were inundated with calls about a fire in the shop behind me.’ She stopped and pointed. ‘Many callers mentioned music and people dancing in the street before the blaze began. Locals are worried that this might be a tragic case of arson.’ Carly paused. ‘Unusually, it appears that the shop was closed today and . . . ’
We’d arrived at the red and white fire tape now. Outside the cordon,