Lungs burning, eyes stinging, I carry Jess out through the front door.
The drive is in a state of chaos: drifting gray smoke, an ambulance, people moving in slow motion. Some standing, others sprawled on the ground. Firefighters on the street running hoses toward the house burning behind me. My vision is blurry, streaming with tears from the smoke, my head pounding, every muscle in my body alive with pain.
I can’t see Swann among the mill of activity.
A figure appears in front of me: a green-uniformed paramedic ushering me away from the door and helping me to walk to a waiting ambulance, to lay Jess on a stretcher. An oxygen mask is put over her mouth and nose, another paramedic hooking her up to a machine. My wife’s eyes flutter half open, her head turning toward me.
The first paramedic is leaning over her, talking loudly. “Jess, is it? Can you hear me, Jess? We’re giving you oxygen now. You’re going to be all right—just give me a nod, OK?”
She gives the smallest of nods and I feel my heart filling, expanding, as if it might burst out of my chest.
Someone else is trying to speak to me. A stubble-cheeked firefighter, the strap dangling from his helmet.
“Is anyone else inside, sir?” he says for the second time. “Anyone left in the property?”
“No,” I say, my throat raw. “My kids are… next door. I think.”
Then he’s gone and I see, through the drifting smoke, another group of figures coming slowly down the drive. Eileen from next door and Mr. Sedgewick from the school with the three children between them, Coco on a lead clutched in the teacher’s hand. The two younger children stare up at the house, the smoke, the firefighters, with a mixture of terror and curiosity and overwhelmed awe.
Leah breaks free and runs across the drive, throwing herself into my arms in a tearful hug.
“Dad!” She clings to me in a way she hasn’t done for years. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
“I’m all right.”
“Your hands are bleeding.” She looks horrified. “And your head. Uncle Dom’s been calling me, said he couldn’t get hold of you.”
Callum and Daisy look as if they might follow their big sister across the drive but I hold a hand up.
“It’s OK,” I call across to them. “We’re safe now, we’re both all right. Just stay there with Mrs. Evans and Mr. Sedgewick while the firemen do their work.”
Leah releases me and leads me away from the house and the drifting smoke to where a figure is lying prone on the gravel, with two others on top of him.
Swann, his face twisted with impotent fury, is pinned to the ground.
Blood is running down from his hairline into his right eye.
Maxine sits across his legs while Charlie is on his back, a knee up between Swann’s shoulder blades.
The young man brandishes his metal walking stick in Swann’s face.
“You want me to hit you again? Because I will if you don’t lie still.” He leans down closer. “You deserve much worse for what you did to my dad.”
Maxine raises a hand to me as I approach. “Are you all right, Adam? You look terrible.”
Despite the pain, I find myself smiling. “You caught him.”
“You didn’t respond when I sent you that picture. I was worried, thought I’d come by and check you were OK.” She indicates the dazed figure of Swann beneath her. “We saw the smoke when we pulled up, and then who should come hurrying out the front door but the man himself. Took him by surprise when Charlie whacked him.”
“Good job,” I say. “Both of you. Thank you.”
There is a squeal of tires from the street, the heavy crunch of running boots as two uniformed figures emerge through the smoke.
“Cavalry’s arrived,” Maxine says.
Sergeant Okoro goes to confer with one of the firefighters while PC James approaches us with one hand on his baton, trying to take everything in.
Everyone else seems to move at once, as if all of us have been released from some spell.
