Free Devil You Know by Cathy MacPhail

I’ll be back tomorrow. And then I won’t desert you!” I could hear his roaring laugh as he disappeared again.
    He had made me feel good. I wouldn’t let Gary spoil my mood. As I lay in bed that night and looked back on everything, now that we were out of danger, I realised it had been a great weekend. Exciting, dangerous, and we hadn’t been caught. We wouldn’t be caught. And I tried to push the surveillance camera and the people still in hospital to the back of my mind.

Twenty-One
    My mother works in a call centre. Did I already tell you that? I might have. I told them I wouldn’t be good at writing all this down. Anyway, she’s the one who supports the whole family. I should respect her for that. But I never did. I thought she was a mug. Her boyfriend, husband, whatever, Vince, he’s an ex-soldier, dishonourable discharge if you ask me, though of course he would never admit to it. He was invalided out, according to him. There’s nothing wrong with him that I can see. He’s just lazy. And as for that son of his, thank goodness I don’t have to share a room with him any more. He’s off to train to be a soldier too. Just like his dad.
    Don’t know what the army’s coming to with soldiers like that. No wonder we lost an empire.
    Both Mum and Vince were out the night I heard the news on TV. It was a couple of days after the fire. Mum was on a late shift; don’t know where Vince was. I’d been trying to avoid watching the television, always worried that they might show my face from the CCTV footage, rescued somehow from the warehouse. All I did know was some of the residents from the flats were still in hospital. I was just sitting down to my tea when the news came on, and the fire was the first item. It was on before I could switch over to another channel.
    “Whoever did this will be caught,” a policeman said. “The response from the public has been excellent. We do have suspects. We are pursuing all leads.”
    Suspects? Was he talking about us?
    There was an Asian man interviewed, his fire-damaged shop behindhim. It had been on the other side of the block, but not far enough away to escape the flames. “This shop was my livelihood,” he was saying. “Now, I will have to begin again.”
    “You must be very angry about that,” the reporter asked him.
    But the man shook his head. “I believe in karma. What goes around, comes around. They will repay in another way for what they have done.” He said it very quietly, it was softly spoken, yet his words sent a chill through me.
    Karma.
    I knew it would freak me out, but I couldn’t stop watching. I had to hear everything they’d say.
    And then they went back to the night of the fire. I had to look. My eyes were drawn to the screen.
    The warehouse was ablaze, and everything around it too: mountains of flames billowing into the sky. Fire engines were there, tackling the blaze, firemen balanced on the tops of ladders, their hoses shooting water over the flames. Then the same reporter came on again with the backdrop of the ruined wreck of the building behind him, still smouldering.
    Did I feel guilty?
    Yes, guilty about the people in the flats. Guilty about the Asian man who had lost his livelihood. But not about the warehouse itself. Hadn’t Mickey said the owners would claim insurance and end up with more money than it was worth?
    Then the screen focused on one man. The reporter introduced him as the owner of the warehouse where the fire had started. An old man, he looked tired, as if he’d been up all night. But there was something more than tiredness in his voice. There was anger.
    He stared right into the camera, and when he spoke, his voice didn’t sound old, it was cold as ice. “I’m telling you out there, the people who did this, if you’re watching,” he paused, “you
will
be caught.”
    “Have you any idea who might be responsible for this?” the reporterasked.
    The old man didn’t even glance at him. He kept his eyes fixed on the