Free Surrender by Sonya Hartnett

charcoal:
See?
said Finnigan. S
ee?
All across Mulyan, chaos ruled. Roderick Bunkle, the town’s famed equestrian, returned from a gallop to find the stable in flames, his prized horses running berserkly over the hills. Papa and Mama Marcuzzi and their seven mousy kits watched with pleasure as their garage burned, proud to be included in the town’s misery. Ms. Evelyn Pree, the school principal, lost an entire season’s homebrew when her bungalow was set alight, and for three days afterward Mulyan reeked of petrol, sugar, and beer.
    There was, naturally, wholesale hysteria. Mulyan had never found itself blessed with so much to seethe about. A frightened, resentful fury slicked the town like dirty grease. People woke at night plagued by hideous imaginings; they became irrational, short-tempered, and quick to take offense. They became ludicrously protective of the few worthwhile things they owned. And they hated the arsonist for making them into the creatures they’d become. At the bar of the Clover and Willow elaborate punishments were devised and made ready to receive the squirming figure of the snared culprit. In the window of the liquor shop an effigy was placed, a matchbox sitting in its hand and brain-fluff leaking from its head. “Know what we should do to him?” asked Danny Collop of Lissie Skene, the pair of them standing in the shade of the incinerated town hall. “We should hang him like in the good old days, and then we should draw and quarter him.”
    “What do you mean?” asked Lissie. “Draw a picture of him, you mean?”
    “No, no — gut him, like he was a pig.”
    “Oh,” said Lissie, and nodded; I took my timely leave.
    Inside my own small family, it was my father who took the burnings hard. A man of solitude within his own four walls, preferring the privacy of his study and the company of his plants, he cultivated an outgoing and forthright persona when in public. He was Mulyan’s only lawyer, and saw himself as the town’s representative of all that was correct: as such, he took the rampage of the firebug as an attack upon himself. He would make haste to the site of each new burn, and pick through the rubble for evidence — which brought him to the attention of Constable McIllwraith, who had the gall to warn him off and thereby gained for himself a dire enemy. Helpless and frustrated, my father thrashed like a mud-mired bull. He combed great books to discover how arsonists had been cornered and dealt with in the past. His dread was that our criminal, once caught, would escape on a technicality — madness, perhaps — or would prove too young to be blasted by the full force of Justice’s wrath. He voiced this concern everywhere, railing against the cunning of the crazed and underaged. In the meantime, while the felon was nameless and faceless and free, it was necessary that
someone
should shoulder the blame. Lacking a criminal, my father turned on the one charged with solving crime.
    Constable Eli McIllwraith had not been born in Mulyan — had, indeed, been born in the city, which made him unacceptably alien. He was also young and inexperienced, his uniform still creased, and thus he provided good sport for the rowdy elements of town. His posting in Mulyan loosely coincided with the beginning of the firefly’s reign, and when someone put these facts together a rumor went round that the policeman himself was lighting the flames. My father dismissed this idea as idiotic, a symptom of our desperation; nonetheless he had McIllwraith in his sights. Father despised incompetence, and the Constable, with his ongoing failure to apprehend the culprit, was clearly unfit for his task. So Father began planting little bombs of discontent — a mutter here, a chuckle there, an overheard sniff of derision — which soon scratched like sandpaper against Mulyan’s confidence in the young man. Everyone respected my father’s opinion — he was a lawyer, which meant he knew things. It wasn’t wise to