The cottage had been Sarah's cathedral, and cataloguing it felt, Emma said, standing in the studio doorway with a clipboard and an expression she had borrowed from June Park, like counting the hymn books after the funeral. They had come for a working weekend — Leo deposited, ecstatically, with Margaret, who had promised pancakes in shapes and delivered, by all photographic evidence, a recognisable fleet — so that the two of them could do the slow, archival labour Sarah's solicitor needed: photograph every mural, list every canvas and sketchbook, and sort the drift of an illustrator's working life into the boxes marked keep, court, and Leo, when he is older.
By Saturday afternoon the studio smelled of turpentine remembered rather than present, and of the sea through the open sash, and Nathan had learned that Sarah Collins drew the way Daniel had sailed: completely, and with her whole weight on the rope.
On the studio door frame, under the window, they found Leo's height in pencil, a rising column of dates and lines in Sarah's hand, each one annotated in her illustrator's shorthand — Leo, four, mostly jam; Leo, five, lost the hat; Leo, six, DRAWING ARM REACHES THE SILL. The last line had no joke under it, only a date three weeks before her final admission to hospital, and a small, careful star. Emma stood in front of it for a long time with the clipboard forgotten against her chest. "She knew," she said. "She measured him like she was — stocking a shelf. For afterwards." Nathan photographed the door frame first of everything, from four angles, before either of them could say the word afterwards aloud.
"She painted the tide," he said, on his knees, photographing the great mural on the north wall — a harbour at first light, populated, if you stood close, with a whole civilisation of gulls in waistcoats. "Leo's going to grow up inside his mum's weather. Even here, even after—" He stopped.
"Even after," Emma agreed, and photographed his hands holding the camera steady, before she could think better of keeping it.
The smell reached him first, because smell always reached him first; it was the trade's one permanent injury. Not the old turpentine. Not the sea. A new smell, bright and wrong, laying itself over the afternoon like a hand over a mouth: accelerant and hot dust, the specific, chemical sweetness of a fire in its first dishonest minute, still deciding what it intended to become.
"Emma. Out. Now — shoes, no bag, garden, go." He was already moving, and she, to her credit and his lasting gratitude, did not ask a single question until she was standing on the wet grass in her socks with her telephone in her hand and the number already dialled.
The fire had taken hold in the small lean-to store at the back of the studio, where Sarah's solvents and primed canvases had stood in labelled tins for a decade, and it was travelling the way Nathan had watched a hundred fires travel and had described in a hundred training rooms: up, and then hungrily sideways along anything that would agree to burn. It was not yet a catastrophe. It was the five minutes before one, which is the most useful and least forgiving address a fire ever has.
He did the arithmetic that his body did before his mind had furnished the numbers. Wind off the sea, toward the studio. The studio joined to the cottage by the old porch. Leo's photograph box — the keepsake box, the original, the one with the creased photograph and Sarah's handwriting in it — was on the studio table where they had set it at noon to catalogue its contents in order. And the mural photographs, the half-finished catalogue, the only systematic record of Sarah's work, were in the laptop beside it, and the canvases themselves were simply themselves, and could not be backed up at any price.
"Stay on the grass. Whatever you see, you stay on the grass, and you keep that line open." He took the garden hose from its reel with one practised movement, soaked his shirt and tied it across his face — poor equipment, training-room instructors would have failed him cheerfully — and went in low through the studio door.
It was not heroism, and he would say so later, in writing, twice, to men with clipboards. It was fifteen years of knowing how a room behaves when it is burning: where the heat layers, where the floor will hold, how long a held breath lasts. He got the photograph box under one arm and the laptop under the other and came out through the smoke coughing into his sleeve, set them in Emma's arms on the grass like a christening, and went back once — once, and he counted it — for the flat tin of Sarah's brushes. The ceiling of the lean-to went as he came down the porch steps, tidily and completely, and the fire crews — his own profession arriving as strangers — had the rest of it under control in forty minutes.
One of the first firefighters through the gate was a probationer from a neighbouring house who stopped dead at the sight of him in the smoke-streaked shirt and said, "Captain Reed?" with the stunned reverence of a man meeting a training manual in the wild. Nathan sent him to the hydrant with the tenderness of long habit. The incident officer, a woman with twenty years in her face, took his statement on the garden wall and did not once write the word hero, for which he would have recommended her for promotion on the spot. "Occupants?" she asked. "None inside," he said. "Two idiots cataloguing," and she wrote, after a pause, civilian occupants accounted for, with the ghost of a colleague's mercy.
The damage, the incident officer said, in the dusk, with the house standing and the garden steaming gently around them all, was remarkably contained. Studio store gone. Studio itself smoke-blackened, one wall scorched. Cottage untouched but for smell. Murals intact behind a skin of soot that conservators, Alicia was already promising down a telephone, could almost certainly lift. "You're a lucky woman," he said to Emma, writing. "An hour later, a bit more wind—"
"I know," Emma said, white to the lips. "I was a firefighter's—" She stopped, astonished at her own sentence, and did not finish it, and Nathan, wrapped in a foil blanket he did not need and could not seem to refuse, very carefully did not hear it.
The accelerant container was found by the second crew, in the long grass behind the cottage's back fence, where no gardener had ever kept one: a red, one-gallon fuel can, hardware-store standard, still a third full, its cap off and lost, and beside it in the mud of the access lane, preserved by the day's earlier rain like a signature in wet cement, a single clear boot print, adult, large, the heel worn in a distinctive sideways slant. The investigators bagged the can in silence of a new and professional quality, photographed the print with a scale rule, and noted the gate latch, which had been lifted with a tool. "I touched the gate," Nathan said. "Put everything in the statement."
"Before we go any further," the investigator said, not unkindly, in the lane, "who knew you'd be here this weekend? Who knew the papers would be out of the boxes, all in one room, all in order?" Nathan watched Emma understand it a half-second before he did, which was the order of most things now. The working weekend had been arranged by letter — Sarah's solicitor to Emma, copies, as the estate file demanded, to Gary's lawyer. The date. The purpose. The room. "It wasn't a secret," Emma said, in a voice she was clearly borrowing from somewhere. "It was correspondence." "Most arson is," the investigator said, and photographed the print again from the other side.
"Who does this to a dead woman's house?" Emma asked him, at midnight, in Margaret's kitchen, with Leo asleep upstairs in Daniel's old room and the photograph box drying page by page on tea towels across every surface like a small, saved harvest. "Who does this to Leo's house?"
Nathan looked at the prints of Sarah's murals spread out to dry, at the gulls in waistcoats emerging from the steam of the kettle, and he thought of a developer's polite letters in their foiled folder, and of a man who placed sentences in neighbourhoods the way other men placed bets, and of a signature on a loan paper that Alicia had said looked traced.
"Someone," he said, "who needed paper to stop existing. Which tells Alicia exactly where to look next. He didn't burn a house today, Em. He made a mistake — in mud, in daylight, with his whole weight on it."
Chapter 16: The Truth in Daniel's Handwriting
The handwriting expert's office smelled of paper dust and strong coffee, and Alicia Grant set Gary's loan document on the table with the care of a woman laying down a winning card.
"Tell me what I'm looking at, Dr. Feldman," she said.