Page 100 of Fire Must Burn

‘That, my dear, is the great diving beetle, Dytiscus marginalis, the terror of the pond. A predator to be feared, if you happen to be smaller than it.’

Gwen watched as the fearsome predator suddenly disappeared below the surface.

‘Hence the name,’ she commented. ‘How do they breathe?’

‘They can make an air bubble and clutch it to their abdomens as they dive,’ said Iris.

‘To think they’ve known how to do that for thousands of years, and mankind has only figured out scuba-diving this century,’ said Gwen. ‘I shall never underestimate the humble water beetle again.’

‘Is this a full conversion, or are you only being nice to me?’

‘I’m still going to church after breakfast,’ said Gwen. ‘You are welcome to join me.’

‘Sorry, darling,’ said Iris. ‘I’ll stay here and commune with Nature until you return.’

‘Do you find Nature to be more or less forgiving than God?’ asked Gwen.

‘I can’t compare the two since I don’t believe in one of them,’ said Iris. ‘I think that if I did believe in God, I’d be even angrier at the world than I already am.’

‘Would you be angrier at yourself?’

‘It would be hard to be angrier at myself than I already am,’said Iris. ‘OK, that one over there is a crescent water scavenger beetle. They go through dung and decayed vegetation searching for nutrients, and in doing so break them down into useful components for the soil. Very valuable creatures. More so than me at the moment, and I’ve dug through worse.’

‘Iris, after what we learned last night, I am still of the opinion that what happened to Nancy wasn’t your fault,’ said Gwen.

‘I should have helped her more than I did,’ said Iris. ‘I keep coming back to that.’

‘You tried. She refused to be helped.’

‘I should have done a better job of convincing her,’ insisted Iris. ‘Maybe I could have persuaded her to go to the police herself. Or to a doctor.’

‘She did what she did because of who she was, how her parents raised her, and most importantly because she was raped by Bruce Cater and Kevin Pickard,’ said Gwen. ‘Nothing you did, or didn’t do, caused any of that. Including her suicide, which we both believe it was. I think she did that because she felt betrayed by Mrs Dorter and was terrified of what would happen when her parents found out she was pregnant.’

‘That still doesn’t explain why someone tried to kill Tony,’ said Iris.

‘Not directly,’ said Gwen.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Iris, looking at her sharply.

‘My original thought was that this had been vengeance for Nancy,’ said Gwen. ‘But now that we have a more detailed account of what happened to her it seems unlikely that someone would want to punish Tony for it.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because they could have gone after him when he came back from Spain, for one thing. But also because they haven’t come after Mrs Dorter – or you. And both of you have been in England the entire time.’

‘Maybe they considered us unimportant or uninvolved compared to the others,’ argued Iris.

‘Then why would Tony have been any more significant? He wasn’t involved in the rape.’

‘No, he wasn’t,’ admitted Iris.

‘I think that the attack on him was because of something else. Remember when I said that the choice of a Molotov cocktail was to make him suffer before he died?’

‘Yes.’

‘There was something that Mrs Dorter said about Bruce Cater that struck me. About his death. “The fire found Bruce.” Not that he died in battle, or in a hail of bullets or from a shell, but that the fire found him.’

‘Tony said something similar,’ remembered Iris. ‘“And in the end, the fire found him anyway.” I had thought he was talking about everlasting hellfire. Maybe it was literal? How odd that an atheist like me would choose the religious meaning over the secular.’