A Question of Guilt(3)

By four o’clock it was almost dark outside, hardly surprising, since it had not been properly light all day. It was warm and bright in the kitchen, though, where I was helping Mum prepare the vegetables for supper. The Aga emitted a comforting glow and the hidden lighting Mum had had put in when they were redecorating a couple of years ago supplemented the big old central fitting that had been there, I sometimes thought, ever since the farm house was built, and which I imagined had once supported an oil lamp.

The small digital radio on the window sill was tuned to the local news programme, but I was only half listening. I’d been away from Stoke Compton so long that the items really struck no chords with me at all, and I found it hard to summon up any interest in road works on the bypass, or a traffic light failure in town. I was far away, in a world of my own.

It was my mother’s voice that caught my attention.

‘You have to admire that woman, don’t you?’

‘What woman?’

For a moment, Mum didn’t answer; she was clearly listening intently to the broadcast, and, curious, I began listening too.

‘I’ll never stop fighting for Brian. I’ll never give up as long as he’s in jail for something he didn’t do, while the real culprit is still out there walking free.’ There was fervour and determination in the disembodied voice, a fervour that rang out over the air waves. ‘Brian is innocent. I know that as surely as I know anything!’

‘What was all that about?’ I asked as the interview concluded.

‘That was Brian Jennings’ sister. The chap that started that terrible fire in the High Street – you remember.’

I scraped a satisfyingly long ribbon of skin from a carrot with my vegetable peeler. ‘Vaguely.’

‘Oh, you must remember! It was a terrible to-do.’

I stripped another peeling from the carrot. ‘Mum, I’ve covered dozens of fires. After a while they all blur into one.’

‘Well, you should remember this one!’ Mum sounded a bit put out. ‘Two girls almost burned to death in your own home town! And I’m surprised you haven’t heard about the campaign Brian Jennings’ sister is running to try and get the case looked into again. She’s often on the radio, trying to get someone to listen to her. She’s even got the local MP involved, I think, but it doesn’t seem to be getting her very far.’

The first little prickle of interest stirred somewhere deep inside me, a sensation I hadn’t felt in months.

‘She thinks he was wrongly convicted?’

‘That’s what she thinks. I suppose she would, being his sister. And she says she won’t rest until justice is done. Like I say, you’ve got to take your hat off to someone who just refuses to give up, whether they’re right or wrong. It can’t be easy for her, taking on the powers-that-be as she has.’ Mum cocked an eyebrow at me. ‘Have you finished those carrots?’

‘Last one.’ I chopped the carrot into roundels and scooped them into the casserole. ‘There you go.’ I wiped my hands on the big navy-blue cook’s apron I’d borrowed from its place behind the larder door, and perched on one of the high kitchen stools, looking at Mum quizzically.

‘Tell me about the fire, then. What the story was. I know you think I should know, but just refresh my memory.’

‘Let me get this in the oven, and then we’ll have a cup of tea and tell you all about it.’

Mum was smiling faintly. I think she was pleased and relieved that at last I was actually taking an interest in something!

The terrible fire started late at night, in an electrical-appliances shop in the High Street, apparently the result of petrol-soaked rags being pushed through the letter box, and had quickly become an inferno. Two girls who shared the flat above the shop had been lucky to escape with their lives. They had been in bed and asleep when the fire started, and if it had not been for a baker on his way to work raising the alarm and managing to get a ladder up to one of the rear windows, the fire would almost certainly have had the most tragic consequences.

‘There was never any doubt but that the fire was started deliberately and eventually Brian Jennings was in the frame,’ Mum said, sipping her tea. ‘To begin with everybody assumed it was down to yobs – they were always smashing up the bus shelter or putting a brick through one of the shop windows, that sort of nonsense. Most of the shops in the High Street had got those metal security blinds, but not that one. All he had was a row of concrete bollards to stop ram raids. I think he was struggling, to tell the truth.’

‘So perhaps he started it himself, for the insurance money,’ I suggested.