Free The Fireman by Stephen Leather

Scotch and gin and rows of glasses.
    The flat was full of plants, in white pots hanging from the ceiling, standing in saucers on the bar, and trailing over the bookcase. In each corner of the room were circular clay tubs with small trees growing out of peaty soil.
    The furniture was all cane and rattan, a Habitat-catalogue of a room with large bulging green scatter cushions on the floor and a glass-topped coffee table covered in glossy magazines and crumpled newspapers.
    Against the wall opposite the balcony was a dining table big enough to seat eight people, surrounded by high-backed chairs.
    There was a television with a video underneath, and potted ferns on top, and by the bookcase was a racked stereo system with three feet high speakers that looked like a prize from a television quiz show.
    ‘You look like you need a drink,’ said Howard and I realized I was frowning hard. ‘I’ll get some ice,’ he said and disappeared through a white louvred door that swung gently to and fro behind him. They were still moving when he reappeared with cubes of ice rattling in a crystal bucket.
    ‘Gin and tonic?’ he asked rhetorically, because he was already unscrewing the top of the gin bottle by the time I nodded. He made it strong and there was no lemon, but it was cold and I needed a drink, not to quench my thirst but to quieten the panic I could feel building inside, like awakening from a nightmare knowing, just knowing, that something bad, something terrible, had happened, but not knowing if the terror was real or the result of a bad dream.
    I sat down heavily on the cane sofa and put my feet on top of a stack of Far Eastern Economic Reviews, pushing aside a set of car keys. Howard walked up to a free-standing fan behind the television and switched it on. It whirled and the draught ruffled the pages by my feet and cooled my face as I took another swallow of the tonic-tainted gin.
    ‘This is one hell of a nice flat,’ I said, more to myself than to him. He walked the length of the room, pacing like a wary old lion on a route he’d trudged a million times before.
    ‘It certainly is, laddie.’
    ‘How big would you say it is?’
    ‘Three bedrooms, one of them’s a study. About two-and-a-half thousand square feet in all, maybe a bit more.’
    ‘She lived here alone?’
    ‘That she did. She valued her privacy.’
    ‘You’ve been here before?’ I knew he had because he knew there was ice and he knew where to get it and he knew that one of the bedrooms was a study. But he wasn’t stupid and he knew that I knew so he wasn’t going to lie but I wasn’t sure yet if I could trust this man.
    He stopped pacing.
    ‘Several times. We worked together on a couple of articles for the Sunday Times last year, and I helped her back when she’d had a few too many at the FCC.’
    ‘FCC?’
    ‘Foreign Correspondents’ Club.’
    I’d finished the drink and Howard stepped forward to take the empty glass and refill it. By now the ice had melted into pea-sized lumps which bumped against my teeth as I drank. A Singapore Airlines 747 climbed into the sky and then was lost behind a towering residential block and then I watched the wispy white clouds because I didn’t want to ask the questions. I wanted to distract myself, I wanted to be somewhere else, up in the clouds looking down, not sitting on a rattan sofa with a lukewarm drink and a faded old hack who was going to tell me something that I didn’t want to hear, like the policeman who knocks at your door in the middle of the night and says, ‘you’d better sit down, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.’
    Happened to me once, years ago, in Glasgow, when I was a young freelance trying to find the Big One that would get me noticed by London. I was on the graveyard shift for the Daily Record , from eight in the evening to four in the morning, the shift none of the staff men wanted to work. At least once a week somebody would phone in sick and the news desk would call me because I was