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about to come to a brutal end.

 

    Chapter Three

    Inferno
     
    I t was a cold, windy day in February. Dad and I had just driven up to the garage and parked on the grass verge when one of the other mechanics, a good friend of Dad’s called Derek, waved him over to a car that was up on one of the ramps.
    ‘Can you smell petrol, William?’ Derek asked. ‘I’ve looked all over but I can’t find where it’s coming from.’
    ‘You get back in the car,’ Dad said to me. ‘This’ll only take a minute.’
    I would rather have helped him with his job, but I didn’t bother to ask because I knew he would say no, and I knew he would come back for me as soon as he had sorted out the problem. He’d explained to me lots of times how car engines were dangerous things and he couldn’t risk having me messing around with them unless he was able to watch me all the time. Thereweren’t many things Dad insisted on when he was with me, but that was one of them.
    He turned the key in the lock of the Ford Capri and I watched through the windscreen as he went over with Derek to examine the damaged engine. I didn’t mind waiting. I loved being at the garage with Dad, even though he had told me this might be the last time we could do it for a while because of all the trouble Mum had been causing for him.
    I sat behind the steering wheel in his driving seat and rattled the gear stick around, imitating the movements I’d seen him make when he was driving. I idolized him and wanted to be like him in every way possible. I wasn’t worried about the locked car doors because I knew perfectly well how to open them if I wanted to. Dad had explained it to me very carefully after that time I let the handbrake off. But I wouldn’t have disobeyed him because I respected him completely. If he said I was to stay there then that was what I would do. He had never had to raise his hand to me in my whole life because I never gave him cause to. I would have followed him to the ends of the earth and never questioned a single thing he told me to do.
    Through the windscreen I watched Dad lying down on the greasy garage floor in his overalls like I’d seen him do a hundred times before and sliding under the car to see if he could spot where the petrol was leaking from.
    It was just another normal day at work for all of them. I heard the phone in the office ringing, the giant bell in the workshop going off like a fire alarm to make sure that it could always be heard above the revving of engines and the clanking of tools. Derek went into the office to answer it.
    ‘Dad,’ I shouted out through the crack in the window, knowing exactly what his answer would be even before I asked the question, ‘can I come under the car with you?’
    ‘No,’ he shouted back, as I knew he would. ‘You stay there. I won’t be a minute.’
    As I went back to playing with the gear stick and steering wheel I saw a customer coming out of the waiting room with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He had the collar of his jacket turned up against the cold. I didn’t really know what petrol was; it had always looked just like water to me whenever I’d seen it – water with a funny smell. So I didn’t think anything of it as I watched the man casually flick his fag end towards the main door of the garage, where the wind picked it up and bounced it back across the floor, making the still-burning tip glow fiercely.
    One minute there was nothing happening, everything continuing as normal, and the next there were huge orange-red flames roaring up around the car that Dad was lying under. I could see his silhouette in the middle of the inferno wriggling its way out and rising throughthe flames and I started to scream for him, my little boy’s voice trapped inside the car just yards away while the fire roared around him outside.
    ‘Dad! Dad!’
    An explosion lifted the car he had been under into the air and flipped it onto its side, like a special effect from some action film