Read A Trail of Fire for Free Online Page A

him.
    ‘Hey,’ he said, breathless from hurry. ‘I’ve had a crash. I need help. Are ye on the phone, maybe?’
    She didn’t answer. She dropped the basket of chicken feed and ran right away, round the corner of the house. He sighed in exasperation. Well, maybe she’d gone to fetch her husband. He didn’t see any sign of a vehicle, not so much as a tractor, but maybe the man was—
    The man was tall, stringy, bearded, and snaggle-toothed. He was also dressed in a dirty shirt and baggy short pants that showed his hairy legs and bare feet – and accompanied by two other men in similar comic attire. Jerry instantly interpreted the looks on their faces, and didn’t stay to laugh.
    ‘Hey, nay problem, mate,’ he said, backing up, hands out. ‘I’m off, right?’
    They kept coming, slowly, spreading out to surround him. He hadn’t liked the looks of them to start with, and was liking them less by the second. Hungry, they looked, with a speculative glitter in their eyes.
    One of them said something to him, a question of some kind, but the Northumbrian accent was too thick for him to catch more than a word. ‘Who’ was the word, and he hastily pulled his dog-tags from the neck of his blouson, waving the red and green disks at them. One of the men smiled, but not in a nice way.
    ‘Look,’ he said, still backing up. ‘I didna mean to—’
    The man in the lead reached out a horny hand and took hold of his forearm. He jerked back, but the man, instead of letting go, punched him in the belly.
    He could feel his mouth opening and shutting like a fish’s, but no air came in. He flailed wildly, but they all were on him then. They were calling out to each other, and he didn’t understand a word, but the intent was plain as the nose he managed to butt with his head.
    It was the only blow he landed. Within two minutes, he’d been efficiently beaten into pudding, had his pockets rifled, been stripped of his jacket and dog-tags, frog-marched down the road and heaved bodily down a steep, rocky slope.
    He rolled, bouncing from one outcrop to the next, until he managed to fling out an arm and grab onto a scrubby thornbush. He came to a scraping halt and lay with his face in a clump of heather, panting and thinking incongruously of taking Dolly to the pictures, just before he’d joined up. They’d seen The Wizard of Oz , and he was beginning to feel creepily like the lass in that film – maybe it was the resemblance of the Northumbrians to scarecrows and lions.
    ‘At least the fucking lion spoke English,’ he muttered, sitting up. ‘Jesus, now what?’
    It occurred to him that it might be a good time to stop cursing and start praying.
     
    London, two years later
    She’d been home from her work no more than five minutes. Just in time to meet Roger’s mad charge across the floor, shrieking ‘MUMMY!’, she pretending to be staggered by his impact – not so much a pretence; he was getting big. Just time to call out to her own mum, hear the muffled reply from the kitchen, sniff hopefully for the comforting smell of tea and catch a tantalising whiff of tinned sardines that made her mouth water – a rare treat.
    Just time to sit down for what seemed the first time in days, and take off her high-heeled shoes, relief washing over her feet like seawater when the tide comes in. She noticed with dismay the hole in the heel of her stocking, though. Her last pair, too. She was just undoing her garter, thinking that she’d have to start using leg-tan like Maisie, drawing a careful seam up the back of each leg with an eyebrow pencil, when there came a knock at the door.
    ‘Mrs MacKenzie?’ The man who stood at the door of her mother’s flat was tall, a dark silhouette in the dimness of the hall, but she knew at once he was a soldier.
    ‘Yes?’ She couldn’t help the leap of her heart, the clench of her stomach. She tried frantically to damp it down, deny it, the hope that had sprung up like a struck match. A mistake.