Ruthless (2 page)

Elise opened her mouth in protest. ‘I can’t believe this.’

‘You’re fifteen, Elise,’ Ade said, ‘we’re not letting you swan off, God knows where, with a bunch of strangers without asking any questions.’

Elise rounded on Janet. ‘You said yes, you said I could. If Dad hadn’t said—’

‘Enough!’ said Ade.

‘Find out,’ Janet said, ‘and when it starts and finishes. When we know all that, your dad and I can have an informed discussion and let you know our decision.’

‘This is outrageous,’ Elise said.

Janet did think Ade was going a bit over the top but better safe than sorry. ‘We’re not doing this to be awkward,’ she said, standing up.

‘Yes, you are. It’s like living in a prison camp.’ Elise kicked the back of the door with her foot and stormed off upstairs.

Ade sighed, Janet choked back a laugh. ‘She might want to turn the poor-oppressed-victim act down a bit if she wants to go,’ Janet said. ‘Not like Elise to be so moody.’ Elise was the sensible one, the elder daughter, hard-working, responsible. Usually it was Taisie who tested their patience. ‘I’m off, so we’ll talk about it when she’s done her research, shall we?’

‘Yeah,’ Ade said, face in the paper. Janet had a sudden urge to share a memory with him, a party they’d gone to as teenagers. One room full of couples smooching, the kitchen crammed. Janet had felt jittery, sensed people watching her, and Ade had tried to help her relax by pouring her a large glass of Southern Comfort which she drank far too quickly. They indulged in some heavy petting out in the alley behind the house then Janet had been sick as a dog all down her front. Ade had walked her the four miles home as they didn’t expect to be allowed on the bus.

She’d not been out of hospital long then and social situations were still awkward. She’d feel people’s curiosity, sticky and keen, could hear their unspoken comments and questions as they swapped glances,
she’s a psycho, a nutter, been in the loony bin. Did they strap her down, shock her? Do we need to hide the sharp objects?
And their fear, as if having a breakdown might be catching and distress was an airborne virus. Keep your distance.

Not Ade though. God knows where he got that compassion, that understanding, mature beyond his years – but it wasn’t much in evidence nowadays. Maybe it had all been used up, burned out. Maybe Ade was spent. He’d said at Rachel’s wedding perhaps they should get divorced. That it wasn’t really working, them sharing the house, putting it up for sale and not expecting to sell, stuck there. Had they just run out of steam, of passion, of love? Didn’t the years of backing each other up, of pulling together, of routine and quiet affection, didn’t they count?

Twenty-six years. She owed it to him to hang on. It was Janet who had risked it all for a few snatched nights with another man. Janet who had brought mistrust and jealousy and disruption into the marriage. The least she could do now was bide her time, see if it really was possible to salvage anything.

She looked at the back of his head, the hair thinning, and the folds of skin where his neck had thickened over the years. The warm flush of nostalgia evaporated.

Janet picked up her keys and bag and left for work.

The Old Chapel reeked. DCI Gill Murray could smell it as soon as she parked, even before she opened her car door. And once she’d been logged in and admitted into the scene, the acrid smell filled her nostrils and clawed at her throat.

Not the worst smell at a crime scene, the worst were the corpses left undiscovered until nature had its way. Decay blooming like green and black flowers on the skin, body fat and fluids breaking down, melting, leaking from the corpse, flesh rotting, home to blowfly and their maggots. That truly was the most god-awful reek. This was simply unpleasant.

The fire service had alerted the Major Incident Team earlier that morning, when officers doing a sweep of the Old Chapel had recovered human remains half buried among the charred debris of the fire.

On the threshold, where the main doors had once hung, Gill surveyed the building. Or what was left of it. Above her, open sky, blue and streaked with thin clouds, was framed by the jagged remnants of roof beams. The centre, the spine of the roof, had collapsed taking many ribs with it but others, broken, split, now ringed the gaping hole like so many blackened, jagged teeth.

The place was simply designed, a rectangular prayer hall with a rounded apse. Small anterooms off to either side of where the altar would have been. She could pick out several lumps of beams, charcoal now, among the ash and smashed roof tiles that covered the floor. The brick walls had withstood the ferocity of the fire though they were coated black with soot. Here and there were holes on the ground where the wooden floorboards had burned away.

‘Theresa Barton, crime scene manager,’ the plump woman introduced herself.

‘Trevor Hyatt, fire investigation,’ the man with her said. He was tall and bald with a red face and a nose that looked like it had been broken.

‘Body’s over here,’ Barton said, pointing. Gill followed her, taking care to tread only on the stepping plates. The figure, burned black, was partially concealed by a timber. Face and shoulders exposed, lying on its side, fist and forearm close to its neck. Pugilist pose – a side effect of the fire, the intense heat causing the muscles to contract. The wreckage covered the torso and abdomen but poking out below were the legs and feet, the feet curled like claws. No clothing remained.

‘No shoes?’ Gill said. ‘They’d burn?’

‘Yes,’ Hyatt said.

Here and there the scorched skin was split to reveal seams of meat. The lips had shrivelled back to expose long, discoloured teeth, an uneven skeletal grin. It was impossible for Gill to tell from the remains whether this was a man or a woman, to determine age or ethnicity. All questions for the pathologist.

‘Could it be accidental?’ she asked the fire officer.

He shook his head. ‘Almost certainly deliberate. It looks like an accelerant, petrol or something, was used and we can tell by the spread that the seat of the fire was here,’ he gestured to the body, ‘and around this area.’

So whoever had used the accelerant had been inside the building. It wasn’t a case of petrol poured through the doorway, which was three or four yards away.

‘Self-immolation?’ Gill wondered aloud. ‘They usually want an audience, don’t they? Act in public.’ And as for suicide, burning was an appalling way to die, our fear of fire as intense as the pain it delivered. She could not recall one sudden unexplained death she had been asked to investigate where the victim had set themselves on fire as a way to end it all.

‘The body was set alight?’ she said.

‘It’s a possibility.’ Hyatt was cautious. They were all cautious until they had the evidence, theories were no more than that. The job was about facts, science and hard data. The body on the floor might be a fatality due to some awful accident but for now the very presence of accelerant meant it was suspicious. And that meant Gill needed to inform the coroner and ask permission to carry out a forensic post-mortem.

She coughed, hot inside her protective suit. The face mask did nothing to hide the smell.

‘When were you called?’ she asked the fire investigation officer.

‘999 came in at eight o’clock last night,’ he said, ‘no reports of occupants. Place had been empty for several years. Last officially used as storage for a carpet wholesaler in 2009.’

‘We will document as much as we can here,’ Theresa Barton said, ‘but there’s little chance of recovering trace materials after an inferno like that.’

In the normal course of things they would hope to find evidence of any recent contact between the victim and other people. Fingerprints, DNA from hair or saliva, blood or sperm that might lead them to witnesses or, if foul play was suspected, to potential suspects. The fire compromised all that.

‘The remains are at risk of further disintegration when we move them,’ Barton said.

‘Just do your best,’ said Gill.

‘Seeing as it’s you,’ Barton said.

‘Let’s just suppose it was an accident,’ Gill said, ‘our victim decided they were going to make a fire, to keep warm.’

‘Not especially cold last night,’ said Barton.

‘Not outside,’ Gill agreed, ‘but in here it might be like a tomb. No heating for several years. Damp.’

‘OK, go on,’ the crime scene manager nodded.

‘So they build a fire, they’ve got some petrol, slosh it on and don’t realize they’ve splashed some on their sleeves or shoes. They light the fire and puff!’ She splayed her fingers wide. ‘Up in smoke.’

Hyatt was pulling a face, not convinced.

‘But it is possible?’ said Gill.

‘Possible,’ he said slowly.

‘We found a container?’ Gill asked.

‘Not yet, still a lot of debris to sort through. It may have been destroyed with the heat,’ he said. ‘Third case of arson in the area in the past six months.’

‘Really?’

‘The mosque at the far end of Shuttling Way in December,’ he said, ‘and the school, the one over the road, in February.’

Gill nodded. St Agnes’s, a little primary school, most of the kids on free school meals, a significant number on the at-risk register. Manorclough was dirt poor and beset by all the problems that came with poverty, including a high crime rate.

‘We’ll be comparing them,’ Hyatt said.

‘You think this might be the same person?’

‘Often is, and there are clear similarities with the first two incidents.’

‘So maybe this is them,’ Gill pointed to the body, ‘the fire-setter, and we’re looking at a case of arson that went horribly wrong. We need an ID, whatever cause of death is, doesn’t get us very far if we don’t know who this is. Right, I’ll let you get on.’

Gill made her first call, waited for the coroner to answer. ‘Mr Tompkins, it’s DCI Gill Murray. I’m at the site of an unexplained death at the Old Chapel, Manorclough. I have a body discovered in a suspicious fire, accelerants found. Identity unknown as yet. I’d like permission for a forensic post-mortem in order to determine cause of death.’

‘Go ahead, DCI Murray.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ He liked to be called sir and it was no skin off Gill’s nose to be respectful. Best to keep on the right side of the coroner. It was his dead body now: the body officially belonged to the coroner, not the police, not the family, and the coroner would determine whether and when the body could be released for burial or cremation, when an inquest was required, and whether to interrogate the police on their actions.

Next she rang Garvey, the home office pathologist. ‘Got a victim, burned to a crisp but I still need a doctor’s certificate of death.’

‘Be there in five,’ he said.

‘Express service? I’m honoured.’

‘I’m heading into the General, you’re on my way,’ Garvey said.

‘That’s it,’ she joked, ‘destroy the moment.’

It was a matter of minutes for them to complete the documentation Gill required, once Garvey had pronounced the death. She liked working with him, he was meticulous, pleasant company, had a sharp intelligence that she appreciated and was easy on the eye too, more than easy. Sadly for Gill he was also gay and happily ensconced in a civil partnership.

‘Doesn’t seem much point taking body temp,’ he said. The measurement was routinely used to help estimate time of death of the victim, but given he or she had been consumed by fire the body had undergone catastrophic changes. ‘And could be destructive to try.’

Theresa Barton agreed with him. ‘Leave it. Suggest we bag the victim and recover all material beneath and around the body,’ she traced an oval in the air, ‘say two metres either side.’

‘Pray it doesn’t rain.’ Gill nodded to the open roof.

‘We’ll erect shelters in any case,’ said Hyatt. ‘From our end we’ll want to spend several days examining the scene.’ In the same way that the work of the crime scene manager and CSIs was to find the evidence to try to build the narrative as to how someone died, so the fire investigating officer would be doing the same to establish the story of how the fire started and developed.

‘Buzz me,’ Gill said as Garvey peeled off his protective suit outside the building, the all-in-one smudged with soot and ash despite his efforts to disrupt the scene as little as possible.

She watched him leave, taking the chance to lower her mask, breathe some less tainted air and let her face cool a little before returning to the chapel. Most people who died in a fire died of smoke inhalation, not from the ravages of the flames. Losing consciousness and dying before the heat reached them. But if this victim had been doused in accelerant and then set alight it would have been a truly horrific death.

Garvey rang as soon as the post-mortem was ready to start and Gill attended along with Pete Readymough, who would be exhibits officer for the investigation. She had briefed her syndicate to stand by in case they were unable to rule out foul play. And she had met with the press officer to instruct her as to the facts that could be made public at such an early stage:
Unidentified body recovered from a fire at Old Chapel in Manorclough. A post-mortem will be carried out later today, after which police hope to release further details
. The fire itself would have made the front pages of the local paper. With news now of a body, interest would be even keener.

The smell filled the dissection room, the stink of burned bone and charred meat overpowering the background smells of bleach and disinfectant. Gill listened to Garvey dictating notes as the body lay on the mortuary table, in exactly the same pose as it had been in at the chapel. The effects of the heat had fused the body in position, carbonizing the flesh. Once the external exam was over it would be necessary to break the limbs to gain access to the internal organs, most of which were likely to be cinders, Gill thought.

Garvey measured the body in sections to ascertain the height. Crown of the head to top of the spine, the curved back, the zigzag of the cramped-up legs. Added together it translated as six foot two inches. ‘Victim presents in the foetal position, left side uppermost. Cranial base evaluation and angle of the pelvic bone tells us victim is male.’ Garvey analysed the shape of the skull and concluded that the man was Caucasian. ‘Substantial charring, absence of clothing, body hair. Visible fractures to the lower ribs on the presenting left thorax. Dislocation to the hip.’ From the beam that had fallen, crushing the man where he lay. Fragments of rib poked through the frazzled skin, reminding Gill of the gaping roof at the chapel.