Skyfire Read online

  Skyfire

  Sam Galliford

  Austin Macauley Publishers

  Skyfire

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Acknowledgement

  Copyright Information

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  About the Author

  Sam Galliford is a scientist who has authored over two hundred research papers, reviewed articles and conferenced presentations in biochemistry and chemical pathology. It was when a colleague described one of his scientific offerings as “fiction”, he thought, “What a good idea!” Skyfire is his first novel.

  About the Book

  An old lady dreams about a Zeppelin being shot down over her childhood village during World War I.

  Her grandnephew tells her about a young woman friend of his who was raped and murdered.

  * She talks to her cocker spaniel about it, to her grandfather clock and to her potted aspidistra, but she can only come to one conclusion.*

  Her grandnephew is in the most terrible danger.

  Acknowledgement

  Many thanks to Jane Weightman, friend and critic, for her artwork on the cover.

  Copyright Information

  Copyright © Sam Galliford (2019)

  The right of Sam Galliford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781528913959 (Paperback)

  ISBN 9781528960687 (ePub e-book)

  www.austinmacauley.com

  First Published (2019)

  Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

  25 Canada Square

  Canary Wharf

  London

  E14 5LQ

  Chapter 1

  The old lady was dreaming.

  “Gwen, Gwen, wake up!”

  It was Alice’s voice.

  “Come and see the fire in the sky.”

  She was being shaken but it was all warm and snug under the bedding.

  “You must come quickly or it will be all gone.”

  “Come, my little bairn.”

  That was Mother’s voice.

  She stayed boneless as the blanket was wrapped around her and she felt herself lifted. She gave a short cry as the cold air licked at her feet and she pulled them back into the warmth as Mother’s hand pressed against the back of her head.

  “Hush, my bairn. There’s no need to fret. Just you come and see the great big fire in the sky. It’s all over the place.”

  She was bundled downstairs to the front door where the cold east wind washed her face and the night air rushed up her nostrils waking her completely.

  “Look, look our Gwen. Look,” called Alice.

  She rubbed her half-asleep eyes and looked down at Alice shivering on the doorstep. She only had on her nightgown and her teeth were chattering in the cold, but she was excited and jigging around on her bare feet and ignoring the chill that cut through the hills from across the North Sea.

  “Up there, Gwen, up in the sky,” she pointed. “See? It’s a great big skyfire.”

  A crackling sound drew her attention upwards and she saw the huge fire hanging above them, roaring against the blackness of the night. It filled half the sky, blotting out the stars and sending a rain of sparks spitting and flying away from it in all directions. She stared at it wide-eyed.

  “Fire,” she echoed in her baby tones.

  “That’s right, my pet. It’s a great big skyfire.” There was fear in Mother’s voice. “They’re rotten ones, my bairn. Rotten devils. They’ve come over to see what damage they could do to the Works. But they’ll not get it. Our lads will see to that. They’ll not come over here to get you, my little bairn.”

  Mother jiggled her comfortingly while a thunder rolled down on top of them. She gave a start as a vast puff of luminous smoke blew out, obliterating more sky and highlighting the twisting display blazing from end to end. Alice squealed and Mother’s arms tightened instinctively around them both.

  “It’s coming down, Mam,” shrieked Alice. “It’s coming down.”

  More cracking and tearing fell down on them and the massive silver thing folded near its front end where a huge black cross had been ripped apart. Sparks spewed out of it to scatter and fall and finally disappear down behind the silhouetted chimneys and roofs of the Pit and Iron Works on the opposite side of the valley. They reminded her of the glowing pieces of taper that fell into the hearth when her dad stood by the fire and lit his pipe.

  “That’s it, my bairn. They’ve got the beggars. They’ll come here no more.”

  Mother’s words ground out through her fear-tensed jaws. The roaring beast was dying. Its front end had broken loose and was falling but its tail continued to flame, rising higher and higher under its own heat and breaking up as it did so. And as it rose, six stars flew out of its belly like bright beads on a string. She watched them and, young as she was, she counted them. Six five-pointed stars that seemed to wave to her as they fell. They burned and flailed and called to her with a noise that sounded like the siren when there was an accident at the Pit, only further away. Uncertainly, she waved back to them before a shudder ran through her and she let out a cry and reached out her hand to try and catch one of them, but they slipped through her fingers until they too became lost behind the black and jagged shapes of the roofs of the Ironworks.

  A small cry started out of the old lady as she woke.

  “Goodness me,” she gasped, feeling her heart pounding in her chest.

  She blinked a few times and sniffed at the moisture that had collected in her eyes. Her cocker spaniel was whimpering anxiously at her feet, swishing her tail stump on the deep carpet and tapping at her mistress with an enquiring paw.

  “Yes, I’m quite all right, Rani,” she reassured the dog. “There is n
o need to worry. It was just a dream.”

  She reached for her handkerchief and checked her surroundings. The only noises in her house were the steady tickings of her clocks. The tray with its cold cup from her afternoon tea was on the table in front of her but nothing seemed out of place.

  “It was nothing, Rani,” she repeated. “It was only an old memory of something that happened a long time ago, when I was a child.”

  Her heartbeat began returning to its more normal stroke.

  “Even so,” she continued, “it was a strange dream to be having, a very strange dream indeed. I wonder what it means?”

  It had unsettled her more than she thought was reasonable.

  Chapter 2

  “I suppose it was Janet Brinsley’s bloody awful murder.”

  Gerard mumbled the words, only half intending his elderly aunt to hear them. But they rang as clear as a bell to Aunt Gwendoline and jolted her as she prepared to bid him goodbye. It was not how their afternoon had started.

  “She smashed it, Aunt Gwendoline, smashed it beyond repair,” he had begun.

  “So you keep telling me,” she replied. “But I’m still not sure what you expect me to do with this intelligence.”

  Gerard smiled. It was exactly the sort of reply he needed in his present mood and only Aunt Gwendoline could have delivered it to him. He looked at her sitting elegant and erect in the chair opposite him. He reminded himself she was actually his great-aunt, his grandmother’s sister, born in the time of the War to end all Wars, so he should not be surprised that their regular Wednesday afternoons with dainty sandwiches, fussy cakes and Lapsang Souchong tea, always left him feeling that it only needed the gloved butler and for him to be in something other than jeans to complete the transformation back three-quarters of a century.

  “So, tell me more about my sister Alice’s vase,” she invited him, refreshing his cup.

  “I’m very upset about it,” he answered.

  “I won’t tell her if you don’t,” she chuckled.

  Gerard grinned and relaxed at the joke. Great-aunt Alice had died several years earlier.

  “It was a special piece to me, especially as it was given to me by Aunt Alice, but I have to admit I didn’t know much about it. Its style was English, probably late eighteen hundreds, and it was chunky enough to be made for export. Mother insisted on describing it as Ming.”

  Aunt Gwendoline’s chuckle burst out into a laugh. “Forgive me for saying so but your mother would have difficulty distinguishing Ming china from the sort of plastic ware one can buy in supermarkets these days,” she declared. “But you are mostly right. It was Chatterwood, early Australian colonial porcelain made at the Chatterwood factory in Victoria around the late eighteen sixties. It was nothing special. It came from my parents’ home where it stood on the mantelpiece above the fireplace and held the paper tapers our dad used to light his pipe.”

  She stopped in mid-speech, puzzled as to why that particular memory should come so suddenly into her mind. She brought forward the recollections of pieces of charred taper, some with the dying glow still in them, falling into the hearth as her father stoked his pipe. And superimposed on them came the image of sparks falling from the blazing skyfire in her dream.

  “I didn’t know Chatterwood had a factory in Australia,” Gerard interrupted her thoughts.

  “It’s not a terribly well-known piece of our history,” she continued half distracted. “One of the sons of the English Chatterwoods decided to kick over the traces and go to Australia for the gold rushes. No doubt the poor fellow couldn’t help himself and he ended up in the colony of Victoria in the mid-1860s. He didn’t find any gold but he did stumble upon a very fine deposit of clay whereupon his family background mercifully reasserted itself. He set up a factory near Ballarat and began to make some better quality china, which he proceeded to sell to all those who had found gold and who lived in large and ostentatious houses in Melbourne which they liked to decorate in the European style. He was enormously successful, even managing to export some of his china back to England, which is how your vase came to be here. He was generously philanthropic and was made a baronet by Queen Victoria. But I cannot think that any of this gives us the reason why your lady friend, what is her name?”

  “Susan,” he replied.

  “Why Susan decided to demolish your vase,” she completed.

  She suppressed her annoyance with herself. She knew the girl’s name, of course. It was just that she always had difficulty recalling it. Somehow, she had never been able to put ‘Gerard’ and ‘Susan’ together in the same sentence and feel it harmonious. But it was not really her business and if Susan was her grand-nephew’s choice, then so be it.

  Chapter 3

  Gerard had become lost in the caress of his great-aunt’s voice and her question shook him back into attentiveness. He had sunk, as he always did, into the calm embrace of her sitting room, becoming one with the mellowed browns and golds of its magnificent old furniture all kept in such fine polish so as to show off the glory of each beautiful piece. Aunt Gwendoline’s whole house was a treasure trove from an earlier time, an eclectic collection of furniture and ornaments with each piece firmly in its place and standing proudly against a background of Persian rugs, brocaded velvet and a faint scent of lavender. Somehow, his seemingly ageless aunt had managed to drag forward into the turbulent present the manners and habits of a more genteel and rational past, and in her sitting room especially, she had created an atoll of calm, a harbour in which he had often found shelter when his life was in turmoil. For some reason he felt he needed that harbour now.

  “I don’t know why Sue smashed my vase,” he replied. “All I know is that I feel very unsettled about it. When Sue and I…” he hesitated.

  “When you and Susan moved in together,” Aunt Gwendoline completed for him. “Do you really suppose yours is the first generation to consider such possibilities? I can assure you that in my day far more than that was forbidden, which, of course, made such possibilities much more exciting. But that is one of the misfortunes you younger folk will have to live with. Please continue.”

  Gerard laughed. “When Sue and I set up house together,” he grinned, not conceding the point completely, “we bought an old pedestal in a junk shop and with much ceremony placed Aunt Alice’s vase on top of it. We stood it in our hallway where it could be seen by all our guests and visitors. It became a symbol of our relationship. We became known as the couple with the vase.”

  “Wasn’t that a rather precarious place to put it?” Aunt Gwendoline asked. “And as regards it being a symbol of your relationship, that sounds something of a superstitious exaggeration if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  She was still puzzling over why she should feel there was a connection between the skyfire in her dream and her sister Alice’s vase being broken. It had to be more than just the memory of the sparks falling from her father’s pipe-lighters.

  “I don’t agree,” he countered. “We both felt that way about it. As long as Aunt Alice’s vase was on its pedestal then everything else would continue to go well. It must have been important to us or else we would never have spent so much time guarding it. In the end, we lost count of the times it was nearly toppled over. Its glaze had become so cracked and fractured and it had been broken and repaired so many times it was a wonder it still held together. Yet in the beginning…”

  He stopped and sat staring down into his teacup, and Aunt Gwendoline let a full minute elapse before interrupting his thoughts.

  “Forgive me, Gerard, but is it your vase we are talking about or your relationship with Susan?” she enquired gently.

  He did not reply immediately, and when he did it was not to answer her directly.

  “She smashed it, Aunt Gwendoline. She took one of my golf clubs, lined up Aunt Alice’s vase, and with one swinging stroke smashed it into so many pieces it can never be repaired ever again. And then she walked out.”

  “So you say,” she replied. “But it
sounds as though trying to preserve it any longer was beyond all stamina and reason.”

  Gerard looked at his aunt sitting solitary and regal in her elegant grey, with her fine furniture all around her and her spaniel companion at her feet, and always with her aspidistra in its decorated pot on the table behind her. She was right, of course. He and Susan had come to the end of their relationship. It was simply difficult for him to admit it.

  “Some more tea?” she asked again.

  “No, thank you,” he answered, coming out of his reverie. “I really must be going. I have to get back to the university and mark some assignments for my students.”

  “In that case you must promise to come round again next week and tell me more,” she announced.

  “More about what?” he asked as he pulled on his coat.

  “About your vase,” she replied. “You have given me no indication of what it was that precipitated your lady friend into taking such destructive action with it. I am sure my late sister Alice would like to know and so should I.”

  “Of course I will,” he smiled back to her.

  She was strangely insistent. He shrugged and attempted to be dismissive.

  “And I suppose,” he half mumbled, “that the precipitating event which eventually led to Sue smashing our family heirloom was Janet Brinsley’s bloody awful murder.”

  Aunt Gwendoline rocked back on her heels as the blazing image of the skyfire exploded in front of her, positioning itself shimmering and transparent in the space between her and her grand-nephew. It cracked and broke and crashed to earth, spewing out six fiery, five-pointed stars as it did so, each star flailing and waving and making a noise like the siren when there was an accident at Felderby Pit. Without thinking she reached out her hand to try and catch one, but then she realised where she was and the image faded. She withdrew her hand.

  Rani whimpered anxiously around her feet as she gave Gerard a parting wave and watched him as he latched the garden gate behind him. She closed her front door and leaned against its solid timbers.

  “Oh, dear,” she gasped. “Oh my goodness, oh dear. This is not good. There is something dreadfully amiss, something wrong and our Gerard is in the middle of it. This is not good at all.”