A female voice answered. ‘Look, there’s someone over there!’

Footsteps pounded the pavement towards her.

Stevie slowly began to uncoil, first her legs, then her back. Other than her shoulder she could detect no other areas of damage. Deafened by the explosion she had trouble hearing what the man crouching by her side was saying to her. The roar of flames filled her head. A sudden crash of falling timber made her gasp and crushed the words struggling to leave her mouth. She tried again to gather her breath. ‘We need to get away from here ... there might be another explosion,’ she panted.

Shaking arms pulled her to her feet. She hissed an expletive when a hand was placed on her shoulder. ‘Sorry, dear,’ an elderly male voice said. ‘Needs must.’ He guided her wobbling steps further down the street. She looked to the sky. Above them, peeping through a cloud of oily smoke, the moon glowed.

‘It’s your house, isn’t it? Susan and I have been meaning to introduce ourselves,’ the old man said, a pattern of flickering flames dancing across the crevices of his face. ‘But we never expected it to be like this. I’m Ted. You’ll be all right, don’t worry. Susan’s called an ambulance. The police and fire brigade are on their way too.’

‘My house.’ Stevie struggled to free herself from the man’s grip. Our house. She tried to turn her head but pain shot up her neck, causing her to hiss out an expletive. She shook herself free of the man’s guiding arms and almost stumbled at the sight that confronted her, her house that was no longer a house. The blown front window was awash with fire, the central part of the roof collapsed. A quick glimpse around told her that none of the other houses in the vicinity had been affected by the blast—she had to be grateful for something, she supposed.

Susan hurried over. ‘We must get her off the street.’

Ted agreed with his wife, then said to Stevie, ‘Never trust the wiring of these old houses.’

Stevie knew too well it wasn’t the bloody wiring, but she’d let the old man think what he liked. Susan gave her a gentle push and attempted to guide her away from the inferno. Anger flooded through her, then an enraging sadness. Ignoring the pain from her shoulder, Stevie shrugged herself free from the fussing woman. She wanted to scream out, had to hold herself in check. Bloody bastards, look what you’ve done to my house!

The police and the fire truck pulled up simultaneously. With her left arm clamped to her side, she ran over to them, telling the firemen which parts of the house to save first, begging them to go easy with the foam. She yelled to the police, telling them her house had been the target of an attack. Her sentences, she realised were running ten to the dozen in a gabble of nonsense worthy of Mrs Hardegan. She fell silent. Froze. Gazed at the sympathetic faces surrounding her. A strong arm supported her waist and she found herself propelled toward the open door of an ambulance. The attendant gritted his teeth and firmly helped her in, probably having already pegged her as one of those silly, hysterical females.

‘I’m not going in that,’ she yelled before collapsing on the trolley. ‘Our house,’ she heard herself repeating again and again until the attendant silenced her with an oxygen mask.

What the hell was she going to tell Monty? (Image 23.1)

Image 23.1

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Just after midnight, against medical advice and with sixteen stitches in her shoulder, Stevie discharged herself from the hospital and caught a cab back to her ruined home. The fire trucks had left, but a police incident van remained. She heard voices, members of the arson squad sifting through the wreckage, looking for clues as to the cause of the explosion, and called to them across her front garden. Yesterday her garden had been filled with lavender, frangipani and oleander; now it looked like something from the Gaza Strip. A man in black police overalls appeared through a hole that had once been the front door.

‘I thought you were in hospital,’ he said through the rising tendrils of smoke that separated them. He picked his way through the rubble towards her and said his name was Paul Aubin. He squinted back at her through the spotlight. White lines threaded through the soot around his eyes, etching out his concern.

‘I had some glass in my shoulder; they pulled it out and stitched me up. There’s was nothing more they could do,’ she said.

His pause told her he didn’t believe a word of it. ‘And you’re with Central, yeah?’

She had trouble hearing what he said; her ears were still ringing with the sound of the explosion. She asked him to repeat himself and studied his lips carefully. ‘Yes, Central.’ After a moment’s hesitation she said, ‘I think this might be something to do with a job I’m working on.’

‘That figures.’

‘Why, what have you found out?’

He scrutinised her again. ‘Are you sure you’re okay? You’re as white as a sheet.’

‘Halle Berry would look pale in this light.’ She shouldn’t have shrugged; the local anaesthetic had worn off and the pain in her shoulder jabbed raw again. She masked it with a smile.

He chuckled, became serious one more, absently peeling the charred paintwork from her front picket fence. ‘You opened the gate and...’ he smacked his hands together, ‘Boom.’

Had she only imagined the flicker of flames in the windows immediately prior to the explosion? She tried to remember as she stared at the gate. Smoke-blackened and blistered on the inside and hanging on only one hinge, the frame was still relatively intact. ‘Surely the gate wasn’t booby trapped—it would’ve been blown to smithereens,’ she said.

‘No. The bomb was in the house. If the gate had been booby trapped, or if you’d been home five minutes earlier, we’d still be scraping you off the rubble.’

Stevie swallowed, rubbed her face with her hands. Despite having been cleaned up in hospital, she could still detect the acrid smell of smoke on her skin. ‘I would normally be home at this time, only tonight I was staying with my mother. My daughter would have been here too...’ The ground began to sway. She steadied herself with a hand on the fence.

‘You were very lucky,’ Aubin said.

She bit her bottom lip until she tasted salty blood and deliberately flexed her shoulder. The pain helped her focus. ‘So what caused it?’ It was a relief to hear the steadiness of her voice.

‘I’ll show you if you’re up to it. You might be able to help us out with a few things, anyway.’

He offered her his arm and she took it without hesitation. To hell with keeping up appearances—right now she really was a helpless female. They negotiated the rubble of her front path, climbed the singed steps and he steered her around a ragged patch of splintered timber on the front veranda. They entered the black hole where the front door had been. The heavy jarrah door with the colourful leadlight was one of the original features they’d planned on saving. Some of the leadlight had ended up in her shoulder. She wondered where the rest had landed.

In the front passage, the wallpaper—ugly stuff put up by the previous owners—was soggy and smoke-blackened, but the bedrooms and lounge room, apart from water damage, still appeared to be structurally stable.

‘It gets worse, I’m afraid,’ Aubin said as he led her to where the kitchen had been. She stood in the middle of the crater and turned a slow circle, trying to get her bearings. Some twisted pipes were all that remained of the sink, but the oven and the kitchen furniture seemed to have vanished into thin air. Above them, stars winked through a jagged hole in the roof.

‘The stove’s in the backyard,’ Aubin said as if reading her mind. ‘Funnily enough it doesn’t even look damaged.’