Authors: Rhys Bowen
Something caught his eye beneath a half-consumed roof beam. He moved closer and looked again, then he nudged Sergeant Watkins. “Is that what I think it is?”
They were looking at a charred hand.
“Oh God,” Watkins muttered. “Here, help me lift this beam.”
The two men were struggling to move it when they heard a shout behind them.
“ ’Ere. What do you two think you’re doing?” Peter Potter leaped from his car and stalked toward them. “I thought I told you to touch nothing until I’d had a look in the morning!”
“Yes, well, things have shifted a bit,” Watkins said dryly. “It’s moved from your territory to mine.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that it looks as if we’ve got a body under here.”
Potter came closer. “Christ. You’re right. Come on. Let’s get these away.”
The body lay sprawled amid the ash and mud. If it had been wearing clothes they had now melted into the charred flesh. It was hard to tell if it had been a man or a woman, impossible to believe that it had been a living person until recently. It reminded Evan of the Egyptian mummies he had seen on a long-ago visit to the British Museum.
“I thought she said she’d checked the place and shut up for the night?” Potter demanded.
“She was wrong, wasn’t she?” Watkins pulled out his cell phone. “Don’t touch the body, please, until Dr. Owens has had a chance to take a look at it.” He moved aside and Evans heard him requesting the Home Office pathologist.
While they waited, Evan was studying the way the body was lying amid the beams. “It looks to me as if he might have been upstairs,” he suggested. “See how that one beam is under him.”
“Not necessarily,” Potter said. “If he’d been trying to get out when the top floor collapsed, a beam could have crashed in front of him and then he could have been struck or felled by smoke.”
Evan nodded, appreciating this possibility.
“You weren’t wrong in what you said last night.” Watkins came back to join them. “This certainly is one step further, all right. Whoever it is has just moved from arson to manslaughter.”
“If it is the same person,” Potter said. “I’ve got the dog in the car, and I’ll bring him out to take a sniff around, but I don’t see any immediate evidence of the area being doused with petrol this time.”
“Is it possible that this was the bloke who set the fire and then got trapped in his own blaze?” Watkins asked.
“It’s happened before,” Potter said, “but I’d have thought in this case it would have been simple enough to get out. There was a back door here, wasn’t there?”
“Madame Yvette managed to get down the stairs and out of the back door after the fire started,” Evan pointed out.
“And you thought that the bloke might have been upstairs, too?” Potter looked at him with sudden interest. “You’re suggesting that she was in bed with someone and she got out and he didn’t?”
“But then why wouldn’t she have told the firemen right away that someone was possibly trapped up there?”
Potter shrugged. “Didn’t want to ruin her reputation?”
Evan had to laugh. “She isn’t that kind of woman. I don’t know her well, but I can’t imagine she’d be the type who would just leave someone to burn.”
“The first thing is to find out who he was,” Watkins said.
“You’re sure it was a he?”
“Pretty big bones,” Watkins said. “And look down here, where the beam was lying across his feet—that definitely looks like the remains of a man’s shoe, doesn’t it?”
Potter knelt beside the body. “If the beam was covering his foot there’s a good chance the inside of the shoe might be intact. No oxygen will have reached it to go on burning.”
Watkins took out a clean handkerchief and cautiously eased off the shoe. The inside leather at the heel was still brown, and in one spot, shiny. Watkins held it up so that Evans and Potter could both examine it.
“I think it says
Made in Spain
.” Watkins’s disappointment showed in his voice. “That doesn’t tell us anything. All shoes come from somewhere else these days.”
“If we take it to the lab, they could possibly identify the model of the shoe and where it was sold. But as you say, people buy their shoes all over the place these days. The wife stocked up in Italy last year.”
“It says forty-six here, I think.” Evan pointed at the numbers. “That’s continental sizing, isn’t it? That probably means it wasn’t made for the English market.”
“The boy’s quick, isn’t he?” Potter was half-mocking.
“Yes, he is,” Watkins agreed. “So you’re suggesting that the bloke was a foreigner?”
“Or, as Sergeant Potter says, he buys his shoes abroad,” Evan added “Although I’d imagine you can buy imported shoes easily enough here.”
“Not much to go on.” Watkins sighed. “I suppose the next thing is to find out if anyone was reported missing this morning. If he was a local and he didn’t show up last night, we’d have heard by now.”
He pulled out the phone again. “Wonderful invention, these things, aren’t they? Too wonderful sometimes. The wife knows where to find me when she realizes we’re out of potatoes, or to check on why I’m late.”
Potter brought out his dog and they moved around the ruin, examining burn patterns and taking samples. Evan
waited for the medical examiner to arrive, glancing every now and then at the sprawled figure and trying not to feel pity. He’d been on the force long enough now. Why was he still so disturbed by death?
About half an hour later the white incident van pulled up beside Evan’s car. The first person out was D.I. Hughes, Sergeant Watkins’s boss and Evan’s least favorite detective inspector. He didn’t wait for the doctor to emerge from the other door, but strode toward the waiting group of men.
“So we’ve got a body this time, have we?” he called in his high, clipped voice. “I hope you and your wretched dog haven’t disturbed anything, Potter.”
“No sir.” Potter’s face was sullen. “Nobody’s disturbed anything, except for taking the beams away to get to him.”
“Ah, so he was covered in debris, was he?” Hughes peered down at the body.
“Yes sir. There were three big beams over him,” Watkins said. “And some slates where the roof caved in.”
“Ah, quite.” He stared at the body for a long moment. “Poor devil,” he said. “Not a pleasant way to die, I’d imagine. Look how he’s grimacing. Any idea who he was?”
“No sir,” Watkins answered. “I put in a call to HQ to see if anyone’s been reported missing. Evans and I interviewed the restaurant owner last night. She gave no indication that anyone else might have been inside. She says she locked up for the night. The next thing she knew, she woke up to smell smoke.”
“I suppose it’s possible he was a customer trapped in the gent’s loo,” Hughes observed dryly.
Potter sniggered.
“It’s not that unbelievable, Potter,” the D.I. said. “If you’d grown up here like these gentlemen, you could attest to the fact that bathrooms tend to be on the primitive side and doors have a habit of jamming on you.”
“But not in this case, sir,” Evan said. D.I. Hughes’s look implied that mere village policemen, like Victorian children, should be seen and not heard.
“Oh—so you’ve visited the bathroom in question, have you, Evans?” D.I. Hughes managed the ghost of a smile.
“No sir, but the whole place had been remodeled, and I was a customer there last night. My girlfriend and I were the last to leave.”
Hughes began to look interested. “How long was this before the fire?”
“About an hour, hour and a half maybe.”
“And you saw nothing out of the ordinary? No strange cars parked nearby when you left? Nobody hanging around?”
“No sir.”
“Nothing else that struck you as any way unusual?”
“I don’t think Evans goes to French restaurants often enough to know what’s unusual,” Watkins chuckled.
“There was one thing, sir,” Evan said. “A man came in alone and after she spoke to him she was upset.”
“Ah—now that’s interesting,” Hughes said. “That’s definitely something to go on.”
He broke off as Dr. Owens approached, followed by two young P.C.s, one with a camera slung over his shoulder.
“Do you want me to start taking pictures, sir?” he asked, giving a friendly nod to Evan and Watkins.
“Yes, go ahead, Dawson. Try to get where he was lying in relation to the known plan of the building.”
Dr. Owens knelt beside the body. “Luckily the blaze wasn’t too consuming,” he said. “We still might learn something from this chap.”
Evan shot him a look of admiration. “You can still do an autopsy on a body like this?”
“Oh yes. I think we’ll find that the internal organs are pretty much intact—nicely browned on the outside perhaps, but pink in the middle, like good meat.”
A painful recollection of the lamb he had eaten last night sprang into Evan’s mind. He wondered how pathologists could make jokes about their work.
“So you’ll be able to get DNA samples?” Watkins asked.
“Yes, if we have anything to match them to. If the chap’s not on anybody’s file anywhere, we’re none the wiser. I’d say we’ve more chance of identifying him through his teeth. He’s got a couple of gold fillings. We haven’t used those in Britain since the National Health came in.”
“So you think a foreigner?” Hughes asked.
“That would be an initial guess.” He turned to the young police constable. “Now if you’d bring the stretcher from the van, Thomas, we’ll let Constable Dawson finish taking his pictures and then we’ll get the body back to the lab.”
As Evan helped P.C. Thomas slide the stretcher under the body, he caught the glint of metal below the hip. “Hold on a second. We might have something here,” he called and dug out a coin. It was bent out of shape but the words
République Fra
——were still legible.
“A French coin,” Hughes said, taking it from Evan. “And right where his trouser pocket would have been, too. This confirms that he was recently over there at least. A Frenchman comes to visit a Frenchwoman and she fails to mention it? Either he slipped in without her knowing, or she’s in this up to her neck. Get the body back to the van and then I’ll go and talk to her myself.” He handed the coin to Watkins, who dropped it into a plastic bag, then he brushed his hands clean. “All right boys, if Dr. Owens has finished, you can take him away now.”
“I can’t do any more until I get him back to the lab,” Dr. Owens said. “Cover him up, Thomas, and get him to the van.”
Evan helped the other constable carry the body. It felt surprisingly light as they carried it back to the van.
“I’ll give you my report as soon as I can,” Dr. Owens said.
“And you get me your analysis as soon as you can, too, Potter,” D.I. Hughes said, wiping his hands on a spotless handkerchief as he picked his way back through the debris. “Watkins, you might want to check local hotels to see if any guests didn’t show up last night.” He reached the van and opened the passenger door. “Frankly, I don’t think it should be too hard to find out who he was. He must have got here somehow. Check for parked cars nearby and ask local taxi drivers.”
“Right you are, sir,” Watkins said.
Evan said nothing. He was used to being dismissed, sent back to his beat.
“I’ll be getting back to Llanfair, then, sir,” he said.
“Hold on a minute, Evans,” D.I. Hughes said. “On second thought I’ll go and talk to Madame Yvette myself right now. I’d like to see her reaction before she has time to hear the news from anyone else. Watkins, you can ride back in the van with the others and I’ll take your car. Evans, you can show me the way.”
“Yes sir.” Evan tried to hide his pleasure. “It’s just down here at the pub.”
“Now Evans,” Hughes began as they walked away, “tell me about this lone man last night. Could he have been our victim?”
“It’s possible, sir. He came in at the same time as a party of four other people. He sat alone on the far wall. It was pretty dark in there so I didn’t get a good look at him, but I’d say he was around forty, maybe, good-looking in a sort of outdoor way—with dark curly hair, grayish at the sides. He was wearing a leather jacket with a dark turtleneck under it.”
“Foreign, do you think?”
Evan shrugged. “It’s hard to tell where someone comes from these days. Everyone looks pretty much the same, don’t they, sir?”
“And how did Madame Yvette react to him? Do you think she knew him?”
Evan considered this. “I don’t think so, sir. She was at our table when he came in and she didn’t react at all that I could see. She went over and took his order and brought him a bottle of wine. It was only later that he called her over and then she seemed upset. It might have been nothing at all. Maybe he complained about the food. Anyway, he left
quite a while before we did and I don’t think she even spoke to him again.”
“As you say, it might have been nothing at all,” Hughes said. “You’ve met her a couple of times. What’s your impression of her?”
“Well, she’d had those two threatening notes,” Evan reminded him. “She was very upset about them. My impression is that she’s very proud of her cooking and she wanted to make a success of her restaurant.”
“That’s one ambition that’s gone up in smoke now,” Hughes said as they neared the long white building. “I’d imagine it would take her quite a while to start up again after this. If nationalist extremists are really responsible, I’m going to nail them good and proper this time. I don’t like anyone burning down holiday cottages, but when it comes to destroying someone’s livelihood . . .”
“And maybe killing into the bargain,” Evan ventured.
“You’ve got a point there, Constable. They’re looking at manslaughter at the very least this time.” He went ahead and pushed open the studded oak door. “Oh, and Constable,” he murmured as they stepped into the flagged hallway, “don’t mention the body unless I bring it up.”
Evan nodded then rapidly ducked his head as he stepped under a beam.
Madame Yvette was sitting in a dark oak booth, sipping dubiously at a cup of pale frothy liquid. She looked hollow around the eyes but her hair was still well groomed in her usual top-of-the-head style, and she had brightened her pale cheeks with rouge. She was wearing a garish red-and-purple
Fair Isle sweater with a knitted brown scarf wrapped around her throat, which didn’t enhance her appearance. She looked up with resignation as the publican’s wife ushered them in.