Peter picked up the sarcasm in Trevor’s voice but ignored it. He drew on his cigar as he retreated back into the noisy room, leaving a trail of acrid smoke in his wake.
‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ Trevor reached out intending to embrace Lyn, but she stepped into the kitchen away from him.
‘I won’t wait up.’ There was an edge to her voice he didn’t have time to soften.
‘See you.’ He opened the front door and strode down the garden path. The car was parked, blue light flashing at the bottom of the narrow driveway.
‘You took your bloody time,’ Anna said.
‘What’s the problem? Needed one more double brandy to convince yourself that it really is your birthday?’
Twenty minutes later, it wasn’t only Trevor who was wishing he’d had one more stiff drink. Dan Evans was waiting for them in the middle of Jubilee Street, police cars and fire engines parked either side of him. Behind him the forensic team was busy winding “scene of crime” tape around poles, cordoning off an area of waste ground and pavement the size of a football pitch. In the centre, behind a scorched hoarding, were the smouldering remains of a fire that had blanketed the street with the stench of burning flesh.
‘No more bloody water or foam. Please!’
Patrick O’Kelly, the pathologist from the General Hospital who was police pathologist on call, shouted to the firemen as he hoisted his leg over the tape.
‘Sorry about your party, Trevor.’ Dan stuffed a peppermint into his mouth as Trevor and Anna climbed out of the car.
‘So am I,’ Anna retorted.
‘You were enjoying it?’ Dan asked.
‘Glad someone was,’ Trevor said.
‘What we got?’ Anna shied away from the maudlin note in Trevor’s voice. There was nothing worse than a copper whose personal relationship was foundering. She recognised the symptoms because it was a familiar scenario. Police work didn’t make for happy marriages or long-term relationships. Her last one had disintegrated when her boyfriend had been interrupted once too often during the crucial stages of passion by the telephone at her bedside.
‘We’ve a body, or what’s left of one.’ Dan indicated the smoking ashes that Patrick was peering at, as he pulled on his rubber gloves, boots and sterile white paper overall.
‘Doesn’t look like there’s much left,’ Trevor commented.
‘Murder?’ Anna asked.
‘That’s what Patrick is here to find out.’ Dan led the way towards the tape barrier.
‘Bring the tent up here before these ashes blow all over the docks,’ Patrick shouted to his assistant who was heaving a heavy wooden box from the pathologist’s car. ‘Any witnesses?’ he asked Dan, without looking up from the blackened mess.
‘Sam Mayberry.’
‘Father Sam Mayberry?’ Trevor checked.
‘He said he knew you.’ Dan offered his peppermints to Anna and Trevor. ‘He heard a cry. It took him a few minutes to unlock his door. By the time he crossed the street all he could see was a burning mass with a screaming blob in the middle –his words, not mine.’
‘He saw no one else? Didn’t hear anyone running away?’ Trevor asked.
‘No.’ Dan looked towards the church hostel.
Sam Mayberry, short, round and diminutive, was standing in the doorway talking to Captain Arkwright who ran the Salvation Army shelter. ‘But I only spoke to him briefly. He might have something to add.’
‘Is there anything to indicate this could be murder?’ Trevor had worked with Patrick many times. During the initial stages of an investigation every word had to be dragged out of the man. The pathologist avoided making statements until he was one hundred percent certain of his facts; a trait that usually meant a slow start to investigations into “suspicious deaths”.
‘I can tell you that if he or she was alive when the fire started, he or she didn’t last long.’ Patrick rose to his feet and straightened his back. ‘And petrol was used.’
‘How do you know?’ Dan asked.
‘The smell.’ Patrick waved the forensic photographer forward. ‘Once the site’s been tented and photographed I’ll take a closer look. When the body’s ready for moving I might be able to tell you more.’
Anna groaned; her hopes of returning to the party dashed. ‘It’s going to be a long night.’
‘And that’s before you begin questioning the hostel inmates,’ Dan said.
Trevor didn’t say a word. He had been posted to the Serious Crimes Squad for eight months, four months longer than Anna, and he knew exactly how long a “long night” could be.
‘You didn’t hear, or see anything before the scream, Sam?’ Trevor asked.
‘As I told Inspector Evans,’ Father Sam Mayberry, who rarely used his title outside of church meetings, and never in the hostel, continued.
‘I was sitting in the office, trying to work out the accounts –’
‘The time?’ There was a nagging pain between Trevor’s eyes. The dry, metallic taste of hangover tainted his mouth. His stomach heaved at the smell that hung in the atmosphere despite another shower of rain. He wanted to be home and in bed with Lyn.
But he licked his pencil and held it over his notebook.
‘A quarter past twelve. I looked at the clock in the hall. The door to the office was open.’ Sam’s gnome-like features crumpled with the effort of remembering. ‘There was a scream –’
‘And before then?’
‘Nothing out of the ordinary. Rain pattering…’
‘It was raining?’
‘Light but steady, like now. I got wet when I ran outside.’
The revelation warranted another scribble in the book.
‘I wasn’t even sure if the scream was human. I jumped up and ran to the door.’
‘What exactly did you see?’
‘As I told the inspector. A dark figure in the centre of a fireball. It looked like a cartoon shape of a man.’
‘Standing or sitting?’
Sam Mayberry frowned. ‘Possibly kneeling.’
‘Why kneeling?’ Anna asked.
‘Because the figure was too close to the ground to be standing upright and its arms were waving in the air, as if clawing at its face.’
‘At its face?’ Trevor looked up from his notebook.
‘It might have been the face or the back of the head. I can’t say which. The fire was so bright he was just a dark silhouette.’
‘And you noticed no one else in the street?’
‘I didn’t look,’ Sam answered in his soft Irish brogue. ‘I shouted for help. Afterwards I gave the poor soul the last rites.’
‘Thanks, Sam.’ Trevor stowed his notebook and pencil in the top pocket of his shirt. He’d carried them there even during his birthday party. Habit?
Lyn would have said conditioning. ‘We’ll need a formal statement, but it can wait until morning.
Looks like we’re going to be here all night. In the meantime if you remember anything else –’
‘I’ll call the station and ask to speak to you, or Inspector Evans or Peter.’
‘I don’t work with Peter any more, Sam. He’s still on the Drug Squad.’
‘Then you’ve been promoted?’
‘A sideways shift.’
‘Was the victim still screaming while you gave the last rites?’ Anna moved closer. The light from the street lamp fell on to her face. Harsh, unflattering, it threw her strong features into relief, emphasising the determined set of her jaw, the line of her Roman nose and her eyes, hooded, deep set, in her raw-boned skull.
‘Thankfully no, because by then quite a crowd had gathered. Captain Arkwright had come out and Tom Morris and half of their hostel inmates behind them. Everyone wanted to see what the commotion was about.’
‘Did you notice anyone there who shouldn’t have been?’ Unlike Trevor, Anna had no notebook to hand. Without asking, she reached into her colleague’s pocket and removed both book and pencil.
‘That depends on what you mean by “shouldn’t have been”.’
‘The population of Jubilee Street is, to say the least, fluid,’ Trevor explained.
‘The inmates vary from night to night.
Especially in my hostel. We all have our regulars.
Captain Arkwright caters for the ladies, Tom Morris the younger folk, I tend to get the old hands, but we all get casuals who stay only one night. Some are looking for work and when they don’t find it they move on, some, the lucky ones, have places to go to.
A few disappear from Jubilee Street and are never seen again. I like to think that for them, especially the youngsters, one taste of the streets was enough to make them swallow their pride and return home.’
‘But there were people in the crowd you didn’t recognise?’ Anna persisted.
‘Of course, but none from my own hostel. I’ve only taken in regulars tonight. But I can’t speak for Tom Morris, or Captain Arkwright. They’re good people, and like me, they’re fighting a losing battle against the authorities to keep their shelters open.’
‘I read something about that,’ Anna said. ‘Isn’t the council trying to shut the hostels so they can redevelop this area?’
Sam nodded. ‘The church leases my building from the council, same as the Salvation Army. We pay a peppercorn rent, but they can close us down any time they chose. And as Tom is seconded directly from Social Services, which is run by the council, he’s even more vulnerable than us.’
‘Leaving the homeless with the doorways and the underpasses in the centre of town.’
‘No disrespect intended, Sergeant Bradley, but seeing as how your colleagues move them on from there, and the pier was pulled down a while back, it will leave them with nowhere,’ Sam shook his head.
‘They’ll end up dying from hypothermia. One hard winter will be all that’s needed to kill most of them.’
‘Perhaps that’s what the council wants.’ Anna returned Trevor’s notebook to him.
‘I refuse to believe that any man truly wishes another ill.’
‘The council’s not a man, Sam. It’s a hard, inhuman, faceless institution. I thought you’d have learnt that by now.’ Trevor pushed his notebook back into his pocket.
‘Patrick’s ready to move the body. We’ll give the boys a hand to push this crowd back, then start interviewing the hostel inmates.’ Dan’s massive six-foot-four frame loomed towards them.
‘Has Patrick found anything yet?’ Trevor asked, once they were out of Sam’s earshot.
‘The victim was human. Either doused with petrol, or had doused itself, prior to igniting. The only recognisable bits are a boot with a foot inside, and a charred skull.’
They returned to where Patrick had prepared the remains for removal. A body shell and bag were laid out in front of the tent that had been pitched to protect the ashes from the wind. Patrick moved his gloved hand delicately among the warm embers, lifting each charred discovery carefully as though it was a precious object. He stared at one piece for a few moments then waved it in the air. ‘Cheekbone.’
Trevor stared at the flattish dark bone. Threads of wormy flesh clung to its contours.
‘It was resting against this.’ Patrick pointed to a piece of dressed stone he’d swathed in plastic. ‘The weight of the body must have pressed down on it, cutting off the oxygen. As you see it’s barely singed.’ He squinted at the piece of bone again, then took a pencil torch from his top pocket and shone it directly on to his find. ‘There’s something here that looks like knife marks slicing diagonally into the bone.’
‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’
Dan queried.
‘It could be that this portion of the face was cut off before the fire was set.’ He took a plastic bag from his case and slipped the section of bone into it, holding it against the light. ‘Whoever it was did a good job. Look at that stump on the side. It’s clean cut, not burnt. The ear was taken off before the fire reached it.’
‘Didn’t you know what it would be like when you moved in with Trevor?’ Peter emptied the dregs from the glasses he’d hunted down in the living room into the sink.
‘Trevor warned me,’ Lyn conceded. ‘Perhaps I didn’t want to believe him.’
‘They say love is blind. I didn’t realise it was deaf as well.’ Peter pulled out the bin, hauled up the edges of the black bag inside and tied it into a knot.
‘How do you manage? With your girlfriends, I mean.’
Peter looked at her and kept the quip he’d been about to toss about “not managing” to himself.
Despite her extremely desirable body; her long black hair and enormous dark eyes made her appear younger than her twenty-one years.
He’d noticed Lyn before Trevor had. Watched her as she’d worked as a nurse on the ward Trevor had landed himself in after he’d been injured, and reluctantly left her alone. Not because of Trevor, his friend had been too out of it to notice her at the time, but because of her age. She’d looked so clean and innocent – far too innocent to cope with the baggage a detective the wrong side of thirty carries around with him.
When he discovered she’d moved in with Trevor, he’d slapped his friend on the back and called him a “lucky bastard”; a degree of envy was permissible between friends. But he knew if he took one step closer to Lyn now, he’d run the risk of starting something he wouldn’t want to stop. And ruin his one good friendship. A friendship that had endured since he and Trevor had joined the force together as rookies.
‘I don’t have a girlfriend.’ He lifted the bag out of the bin.
‘Anna –’
‘Anna and I fight in the station and, occasionally, in my flat, but not in my bed. The biggest things between us are our differences. You invited us both, we came.’
‘There’s nothing more to it than that?’ She sounded disappointed.
‘Only banter.’ He opened the back door, deposited the bag in the dustbin, shut the lid and returned to the kitchen. He took his time over washing his hands, delaying the moment when he’d have to look at her again. He was policeman through and through. Conditioned to interrogate, question, detect criminal activity, and somewhere in the process of conditioning he had lost touch with his emotions. It was bad enough when they surfaced in the form of sympathy for a victim during a case, impossible when he tried to deal with them in his private life.
‘You were married once.’
It was a statement, not a question, and he realised Trevor must have told her. ‘It was a disaster.’
‘Because you were never there for her when she needed you?’