#Taken by Tony Parsons

Author:Tony Parsons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

I pushed past a pair of uniformed officers in PASGT helmets who were shouting something I could not understand as they emptied the fire extinguishers they were holding over the burning man. Then I was in the smoke, my left hand brushing the cream-coloured brick of the house, looking for the door, then finding the door, closed but unlocked after the men had fled their fire, the smoke thicker here, and all at once in my eyes and my throat and my nose, choking me, sickening me.

This is how you died in a fire, I knew. The smoke suffocated you before the flames ever had a chance to reach you.

I went deeper into the house.

The screaming had stopped.

The air was a black, churning fog. And then it was something else, an unbroken, unmoving mass. Blacker still, and thicker. I was moving down a corridor. I plunged deeper into the smoke and I did not want to die.

There were stairs down to what had once been a kitchen. I was at the top of them.

And through the smoke, thinning now that I was out of the corridor and the roof was suddenly higher, I saw that I was at the top of a staircase that led down to a dungeon.

I stopped halfway down the stairs, retched and cursed, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and carried on to the basement.

I saw the flames licking the skirting board in the basement, burning it black, but the houses of the rich do not burn as easily as the houses of the poor and the basement had not ignited as quickly as the men had hoped and expected.

And now I saw what they had tried to burn.

There were three cages down here.

And I saw that in each of the cages there was a woman.

One was shaking the cage door.

One was on her knees, gagging on the smoke.

And one was not moving.

‘Ju lutem!’ the woman still standing begged me.

And that was Albanian too.

Please.

‘Get down! Get down!’ I shouted at them, because smoke rises, and the closer you are to the ground the more likely you are to find oxygen.

I tore at the nearest cage with my hands.

It did not move. I screamed into the black fog that covered the stairs.

‘We need that shotgun down here now!’

Whitestone came down the stairs, her hands covering her streaming eyes.

When she took her hands away, she saw the women in the cages.

‘Jesus Christ,’ she said.

I shook the cage door and cried out again for help because I knew I could not budge it, I knew a battering ram or a Benelli shotgun was needed and I could feel the sweat streaming down my body inside the stab-proof jacket.

Then there were shots moving through the black smoke and into the basement and one of them carried the bosher battering ram, its red paint almost completely worn away by time, slamming it expertly against the lock of the first cage but only putting a deep dent in the metal bars.

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