Hearts of Oak Page 4

  * * *

  Iona hadn’t intended every tutorial to take the form of a field trip but she was amenable to whatever Alyssa wanted to do. She was thinking less about the content of the tutorials and more about using this time to puzzle Alyssa out.

  Together they walked to a half-completed building, the skeleton of which reached a height of eight stories. The ground floor was much taller than the rest and had been designed to accommodate printing presses. The floors above it had been intended as offices. An ornate entranceway gave access to both spaces—you could either take the stairs up to the offices or walk through to the print shop floor. However, the site had been emptied of all tools and materials and cordoned off with a temporary fence. This was because the entire structure listed 9 degrees to the right and 5 degrees forward. Part of the building had collapsed and supports had been put up. The rubble of the collapsed section had been cleared away. The sign on the fence read UNSTABLE—KEEP OUT.

  This was going to be the new newspaper offices. Iona had been surprised when Alyssa had suggested coming here—the young woman had asked if she felt okay about it. But Iona gave it some thought and decided it would do her good to see.

  Iona stepped over to the fence and found a plank that hadn’t been properly fixed into the ground, betraying the speed with which the fence had been erected. She lifted the plank aside, making a gap large enough to squeeze through. “Come on,” she said to Alyssa.

  Alyssa glanced around herself, then followed Iona inside.

  Together they proceeded around the perimeter between the fence and the building. “Mind your head,” Iona said as they reached the corner, where the building’s tilt was at its most extreme and the gap between building and fence was narrowest. When they reached the right-hand side of the building Iona crouched down and indicated where the wall had fractured. “So you read the report about the collapse in the newspaper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll already know what caused this.”

  “I’ve forgotten. Subsidence?”

  “No, the ground underneath was solid. The foundations were prepared in the same way as the ones I showed you yesterday.”

  “Were they not slotted together properly?”

  “No—there was a mistake when the boards were being cut. The wood had been incorrectly loaded so the grain was pointing the wrong way and the boards were weak. The central support beam of this wall tore straight through them.” Iona straightened up. “Nine people were killed.”

  “Including your colleague.”

  “Yes,” said Iona. Weston had been on-site, consulting on modifications to the design, when the collapse had occurred. It could easily have been her standing by that wall.

  Mistakes happened. She made plenty herself. She didn’t feel angry at whoever had made this one. But she hoped they were not in a position to repeat it. There were plenty of other jobs they could be moved to.

  “So what are they going to do about it?” asked Alyssa.

  “They’re building a support structure for this wall and then they’ll finish the building. They’ll be able to publish three editions of the newspaper a week when it’s done.” Although she wasn’t sure what would fill those extra editions, since a bigger building didn’t mean there was more news to report.

  “And they’re just going to finish it to the original design? Even though it was dangerous?”

  “It won’t be dangerous, we know what the problem was. I think the feeling is it would be a fitting tribute to Weston to complete his design as he intended.”

  “So this was all him? You weren’t involved?”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve designed more buildings in the city than anyone else.”

  “I haven’t counted.” But it was true. She didn’t need to count.

  “You’ve been doing it longer than anyone else, haven’t you?”

  Iona hesitated. “I have been doing it a long time . . .”

  “But when did you start?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  Alyssa gave her a relaxed smile and shrugged. Her hands were in the pockets of her coat again. “I’m just interested. I thought it’d be a simple question.”

  Iona nodded slowly. “It should be a simple question. But I don’t know.” She tried to think back—when had she started doing this? What did she do before?—but all she found inside herself was a rising sense of panic. Focusing on the question was like staring at the sun—no, the opposite. It was like staring into the void, like facing an awful truth she couldn’t bear to acknowledge, that she could only cope with by looking away. She felt nauseous and dizzy, and involuntarily put a hand on Alyssa’s shoulder to steady herself. The younger woman flinched.

  “Are you alright?” Alyssa asked.

  “Yes,” said Iona. “I’m tired. Can we finish this tomorrow?”

  “Do you need me to walk you home?”

  Iona shook her head. She was already making her way back to the gap in the fence. “I’ll catch a rickshaw.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  * * *

  Iona told the rickshaw driver to go slowly because she was feeling unwell. She was afraid she might throw up, and the thought of people seeing the contents of her stomach made her feel even worse. The driver was quite old anyway, and not capable of pulling her very fast even if he wanted to, and they completed the journey without incident.

  Iona entered her house and went to bed even though it wasn’t yet late. She lay there and wondered if she really wanted to finish the tutorial tomorrow. Perhaps she’d followed her curiosity about Alyssa too readily. Their first two meetings had made her uneasy but the experience she’d just had at the newspaper office had terrified her. She should have heeded her sense of unease, not rushed toward the source of it.

  Before drifting off to sleep Iona resolved that tomorrow morning she would write to the planning department and, with apologies, tell Alyssa she was busy with design projects and would have to discontinue the tutorials.

  * * *

  The king’s attendants came to wake him in the middle of the night. He didn’t come around right away, so Clarence jumped on his head to speed the process along.

  “What is it?” the king asked.

  “Open the window and see for yourself,” Clarence replied.

  The king got out of bed, taking the blankets with him because it was cold. He pulled open the shutters—

  And smoke poured in. Masses of it drifting right toward the tower. The king blinked it away and tried to see where it was coming from.

  Through the murk he could see a building below blazing from the inside, the flames licking around the windows and threatening to spread to the exterior at any moment. He was unsure which building it was. The smoke made everything look different.

  “Oh my god!” said the king, his pulse rapidly rising. “What are we doing about it?”

  “Don’t worry, the firemen are already there.”

  “Right. Good.” But the king didn’t feel reassured at all. He squinted to try and see the firemen. It was just as well the city had some firemen, even if he couldn’t remember the last time they’d been needed. “How did it happen?”

  “We’ll have to find that out.”

  4

  THE FIRST IONA KNEW of it was as she crossed the street to go to work. A newspaper distributor was handing out a new edition, which struck Iona as odd because there had been an edition published only yesterday. Sometimes if an issue was in heavy demand it would be reprinted the next day: had the report on Weston prompted this? The urgency of the clamor around the distributor suggested otherwise. This was not a crowd gathered for yesterday’s news.

  Iona walked over to the distributor and took a closer look at his wares. Indeed, the newspaper was a new edition. Iona held out her hand, accepted a copy, and read the news.

  Her immediate reaction to learning of the fire was sadness and pity.

  Then
she realized which building had burned down, and her next reaction was panic and paranoia.

  * * *

  Upon entering the school Iona strode directly to her office, closed the door, and locked it. She went over the events of last night in her mind. She had told nobody they were going to the construction site. Alyssa said she’d had the idea about going there on the way to her office, so it was unlikely she had told anyone. And they hadn’t actually gone inside the unfinished newspaper offices, and it said in the report that the fire had started inside the building. Iona was feeling so guilty she had to remind herself that she had not started the fire. She and Alyssa had left the building exactly as they’d found it.

  But they had gone into the building site last night. Had anyone seen them do that? From a window across the street perhaps? If so, Iona could truthfully say she hadn’t gone into the building itself but nobody would have reason to believe that. Had the rickshaw driver realized where she’d just come from? Iona didn’t think so—she’d hailed him from around the corner—but maybe when he heard about the fire he’d put two and two together?

  And was Iona certain Alyssa had nothing to do with this? Could Alyssa have tossed something inside while Iona wasn’t looking? Left something burning so slowly it didn’t catch until they’d gone?

  Iona had a choice. She could come forward and tell the Bureau of Order she’d been there last night. If Alyssa was involved in what had happened, Iona would be helping bring her to justice. Iona was innocent so she had nothing to fear.

  Or did she? Nobody knew why she had associated with Alyssa. Only the two of them knew why they had gone to that building. If Alyssa chose to bring Iona down with her, she could easily name Iona as her accomplice, claim they’d planned it together. And even if she didn’t, people might say Iona had helped her unwittingly and was a fool for doing so. People might judge Iona a liability, decide she should have asked more questions and next time the consequences could be more serious. She might be punished. Stripped of her position. Retired in disgrace.

  She would say nothing.

  * * *

  Unfortunately, nobody in the staff room talked of anything else.

  Had the fire been an accident? Or had it been started deliberately? Either way, would it happen again? Who could have done something like this, and why? Iona had none of the answers and didn’t want to give anything away by speculating. She just said she felt bad about the waste of materials and labor.

  “Yes,” said Hammond, a senior member of the teaching staff. “But we can’t rest easy until we find out who did this.” He theorized that it might have been burned in protest at the deaths of Weston and the others: because they wanted more severe punishment for those responsible, or were outraged the building wasn’t going to be abandoned, or both.

  “That’s assuming the fire really was set deliberately,” Iona replied, trying to sound uninterested.

  Hammond leaned in toward her. “You and I both know it was.”

  Iona blinked. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because we’ve studied how fires start. Even accidental fires are caused by people. Something poorly maintained, or left burning when it should have been put out. But nobody had been in that building since the collapse. Why would it suddenly burn down now?”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Iona admitted. She had been deluding herself with the possibility that the authorities would conclude it was nobody’s fault and ask no further questions. “But then,” Iona continued, “it might be a blessing in disguise.”

  Hammond looked at her quizzically, and Iona instantly regretted having said it.

  “I just mean it was going to be such a lot of work to repair the damage,” she went on, “and would people ever have felt comfortable in it? I’m just thinking of the people who would’ve had to work there. We can start afresh and do it right.”

  “That’s not like you. You love solving problems.”

  “Maybe I’m just getting old. Don’t have the energy to think my way around things anymore.”

  “As you said before though, such waste. If we’d made the decision to tear the thing down, it could’ve gone into the furnace. But all that heat, just going into the air . . . awful. How much power could that have generated?”

  Iona said she’d love to stay and help him work it out, but she had to go and teach her morning class.

  * * *

  A heavy, dismal feeling washed over Iona when she realized her students also wanted to talk about the fire.

  She tried to start the lesson but the students were utterly preoccupied. She deflected the issue by turning the lesson into one about how good design could help prevent fires, and demonstrated how the layout of the city had stopped yesterday’s fire spreading to other buildings. This held her pupils’ interest sufficiently that they stopped discussing why the fire had started.

  Afterward Iona returned to the sanctuary of her office and sat behind the desk. She considered closing the shutters so no one could see her but realized this would look strange. She would sit here and do some work, or at least give the appearance of doing some work. She found the pile of marking she had set aside yesterday. It all seemed so long ago and she struggled to find where she’d gotten up to with it. Finally she settled, opened an exercise book, and tried to focus.

  She had done barely anything when the knock came at her door.

  * * *

  They could have sent a message. She would have come willingly if summoned. But, Iona realized as the officers marched her through the corridors, she had brought this on herself by not coming forward voluntarily. They were punishing her for that. If she had gone to them herself it could all have been done discreetly. Nobody need ever have known.

  Now everybody would know. Staff and students lined the corridors, stepping aside to allow her to leave, their own business suspended, the atmosphere strange. She wondered how much they knew. If there was anything they didn’t know, rumors would fill the vacuum.

  As she walked out of the school doors and began the journey to the Bureau of Order, a small crowd of familiar faces watched her go. What did they think of these events? As usual, Iona had very little idea what other people thought.

  * * *

  Iona had designed the bureau herself. A broad, four-story cylinder of a building, like a pillar with nothing to support, it lay in the shadow of King’s Tower. The rooms at the center had no windows. This was to permit discussions of a sensitive nature to take place. As Iona was in one of those rooms now, she presumed she was about to take part in a discussion of a sensitive nature.

  Iona sat at the table in the center of the room. The room was lit only by a fire at one side, the heat from which was captured and put to work elsewhere in the building. But not all the heat could be captured and there was enough left over to make the room uncomfortably warm. This was deliberate—she had been asked to design it this way. Iona removed her jacket and hung it on the back of the chair.

  A guard stood at the door. This seemed unnecessary. Why would she escape? Where would she hide?

  The door opened and in walked a woman in her fifties with close-cropped black hair, a hawk-like face, and black clothes. She was a little taller than Iona. Iona didn’t recall having met this woman before, but then she’d had very little contact with the bureau beyond designing their offices. Was she in charge here?

  The woman carried a briefcase that she placed on the table as she sat down opposite Iona. She opened the case and brought out paper and a pencil. Some of the sheets of paper had already been written on.

  “Your name please,” she said, looking at the paper, not at Iona.

  “Iona Taylor.”

  The woman wrote this down.

  “And you are?” Iona asked.

  “We’ve met before.”

  “But you asked my name.”

  “Because that’s procedure.”

  “Right. Well, I’m afraid I don’t remember yours.”

  “Saori Kagawa. I’m head of operations.”<
br />
  “This is about the fire, isn’t it?”

  “Of course.”

  Iona wondered whether the head of operations was tackling this personally because the case was particularly important or because the bureau had nothing better to do. There was rarely any trouble in the city—she couldn’t recall the last time she’d read about any in the newspaper. (Although she remembered how the newspaper had not reported the incident at Weston’s funeral.)

  “What do you want to know?” said Iona.

  “I’m afraid we didn’t bring you in for your expertise, Ms. Taylor.”

  Iona swallowed, inwardly saying good-bye to her faint hope that they had brought her in for her expertise. At this point she should probably admit she had been to the site of the fire just hours before it started. But what good would it do her now?

  Saori shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “There’s no easy way to say this . . . There’s a detail of the investigation we haven’t released to the public. We’ve been sifting through the remains of the burned building—and we found a body.”

  Iona inhaled deeply. It would be Alyssa. Someone had seen them together and the bureau wanted to know what their connection was. Perhaps they wanted her to identify the body.

  “It’s your colleague,” said Saori. “Weston.”

  Iona blinked. “But he’s dead.”

  “I know he’s dead—as I say, we found his body, or what was left of it.”

  “No, I mean he died before the fire—”

  “To be strictly accurate his funeral was before the fire, but these new events have cast doubt on whether he died before the fire. That’s why I called you in.”

  Iona took a moment to comprehend what Saori was implying. “He died in the accident—it was all in the newspaper—”

  Saori looked down at her notes. “You’re sure he was dead at the funeral?”

  “I saw him in the casket—”

  “And you’re sure it was him?”