Free Dark Echo by F. G. Cottam

their rent. It was over a decade since I’d seen a single one of them hanging in his house. They were stacked in darkness and secrecy in the storage facility in South Wimbledon. Everything of my mother’s was there, too, in a room a person with a morbid turn of mind might term a shrine.
    It took me an hour to get to Wimbledon and then another forty-five minutes to travel the half-mile distance to the storage facility car park. When I did finally arrive, I could see what had gridlocked the road. There were two fire tenders, as well as an accident investigation vehicle and a Met police car together blocking half its width. There was foam and surface water all over the road and the fire crews were still damping down. It was odd, because I’d seen no column of smoke nor heard the whoop of sirens waiting impatiently in the crawling column of traffic.
    Most of the steel-framed, breeze-block storage buildings looked intact. I felt fairly sure that my father’s preciousmodern art collection and my mother’s gathered keepsakes would be undamaged and undisturbed. I knew with the certainty of a sinking heart what had been destroyed by the blaze.
    A garrulous fire-fighter confirmed it for me. I asked him what had started the fire.
    ‘A strongbox full of old books was the seat of it,’ he said, chewing gum, his face black with soot from the smoke. ‘Burned with unbelievable intensity, it did. Wonder the fire didn’t spread, but it didn’t, thankfully. Took us ages to put it out, though. We’ve been through two shifts just damping down.’
    ‘Someone used an accelerant?’
    He raised an eyebrow and looked down and rocked on his booted feet. ‘Not for me to say, mate. Out of order for me to speculate. But paper doesn’t burn like that. No way. Not at those temperatures. Not without a bit of encouragement.’
    I nodded. I smelled the air. It was acrid, still. Foam from fire hoses gathered as brown and yellow scum in the street gutters, seeking drains. I’d hang about, of course. I’d verify facts with the people who ran the storage facility. I’d wait in a grey afternoon in this dismal bit of South-West London’s suburbs and establish facts. But I knew with certainty that it was the
Dark Echo
’s five-volume log that had burned, before I could read it, before Frank Hadley could get his judicious hands on it. The fire had been started in the night, in the small hours, when I’d been enduring my wretched, dream-ridden sleep. I didn’t know where it left our restoration schedule with Hadley’s yard. I didn’t even know how long it would take for them to inventory the damage and break the news of the loss to my father. In fact, only one thing was certain any longer in my mind. I would tell Suzanne. I would tell her everything, the moment she got back from Dublin. I did notbelieve that a problem shared was a problem halved. I did not believe in any platitudes with regard to this particular matter. But I did think that continued secrecy could be dangerous. And I was too scared at the momentum with which events seemed to be progressing to keep matters any longer to myself.

 
Three
    My father used to say that confession was one of my distinguishing talents. Perhaps, he used to say, the only one. None of his jokes were ever really intended to provoke belly laughs. They were all cracked in the way of scoring points. But he had a point, where this particular crack was concerned. My failed vocation wounded him very deeply. It was what I was alluding to earlier when I said I had exhausted my credit with Dad where matters spiritual are concerned.
    At the age of nineteen, I thought I had a vocation for the priesthood. The tug of faith in me felt overwhelmingly powerful and I did not try to resist it. I left university and joined a seminary and began to take instruction. I immersed myself in the piety and self-denial of serving God. It was about as unfashionable a life-choice as it would have been possible then to make. My vocation