She texted him back: OK x. Considered putting a smiley face instead. Kisses on texts seemed adolescent – well, on texts to Sean anyway. And they weren’t kids, were they, not now? But they’d had a thing back then, from time to time, when there was nothing better on offer.
She ran as hard as she could on the path back down, savouring the feeling of speed and power, feet thudding and her heart beating fast in her chest. If she could just keep running, how great would that be? To just go, leave it all behind, Sean and her mother and her brother Dominic. Except for the job, she didn’t want to leave the job. Or Janet, who she worked alongside.
Halfway down she pitched forward, her left foot catching on a stone, she yelled out, slammed into the ground with a jarring thud. She staggered to her feet. Her knees stung. She took a couple of deep breaths then carried on.
At the car, she saw the dark slashes of blood on her knees. Nothing to worry about. She ran a towel over her face and neck, her arms.
The route back to her flat, their flat, she reminded herself, took her through Manorclough, where the blaze she’d seen from the tops was still raging. One of the buildings was on fire. Curious, she parked in the car park at the small shopping precinct and walked past the shops and on to the road where the fire was.
She knew the area. They’d done a few jobs roundabout here in her time: a domestic where the bloke had paid a mate to knife his ex, to teach her a lesson for chucking him out; and the rape and murder of an elderly woman.
Closer to the blaze, the stench of the fire filled the air and she could see fire tenders at the scene, three of them, as she walked up the road. Uniformed officers were keeping the crowd away from the site. The Old Chapel, she realized, now belching clouds of acrid smoke into the air, the inferno roaring. Hoses were spraying water but bright flames were still visible through the holes in the roof and the windows where the shutters had burned away.
Fire always drew a crowd, a spectacle and free at that. It hadn’t been a chapel for ages. Probably closed back in the seventies and she remembered it was a carpet place for a while then that went bust. Rachel had no idea what it was used for now, if anything. The state of the grounds, neglected and overgrown behind the wire fencing, and the holes in the roof suggested it was derelict. Just begging for some fire-starter to come along and set light to it.
She looked at the crowd. Whole families, mum with a pram and a bunch of kids around. Teenagers, some of them filming with their phones. A few older people too; one man had made it with his Zimmer, determined to be at the party. A lad on a BMX bike, stunt pegs on the rear wheel. Dom had wanted one of them, their dad had played along but they all knew the only way it would happen was if it was robbed. So it never happened. Rachel had found an old racing bike at the tip and dragged it home and Sean had begged new tyres off a cousin and they’d done it up for Dominic. Never had working brakes but Dom was made up.