After the Fire (17 page)

‘I opened his post,’ she said quietly. ‘I read his emails. I knew about all the threats.’

‘Were there many?’

A nod.

‘Did you ever mention them to the police?’

‘No. Geoff thought it was a waste of time. He told me to throw them away. He didn’t think the people who made the threats were the type to attack him. It was all bluster, he said.’

‘So who did he think might attack him?’ Derwent asked.

‘Extremists.’ John Grey saw the look on our faces. ‘I can’t be more specific, I’m afraid. People from very different walks of life objected to Geoff’s stance on politics and the economy.’

‘Because he wanted everyone who wasn’t rich and English to disappear,’ Derwent said.

‘Because he wanted the government to stay out of people’s lives, and stop interfering with doing business. He wanted us to leave Europe. He wanted to call a halt to immigration. He wanted everyone in the UK to wake up. He wanted us to grow up and stop expecting hand-outs.’

‘He wanted to dismantle the NHS and the welfare state, the two greatest post-war achievements of any government,’ Derwent said.

‘He wanted to take away the safety net for people who used it as a trampoline. He hated anyone who worked the system to their advantage.’ John Grey spun Armstrong’s line effortlessly; it was like hearing him talk again. He smiled. ‘I gave quotes on his behalf when he was too busy. I used to think I shared his brain.’

‘Did you believe in his policies too?’ I couldn’t help asking. ‘Or was it just work?’

‘I believed his policies could have led him to electoral success.’ Grey held my gaze for a second. ‘It’s all about winning, you see. There’s no point in being worthy and politically correct if the voters don’t want that. Geoff knew it and I knew it. It was my job to get him to the top of his profession, not to worry about how he’d done it.’

‘Was he really going to get to the top, though? People hated him,’ Derwent point out.

‘More people voted for Geoff than would ever admit it. The figures didn’t lie, even if the voters did.’

‘Did either of you ever think that Mr Armstrong was having an extra-marital affair?’

Grey’s response was immediate. ‘No. He wasn’t like that.’

‘It’s just a theory at the moment.’

‘It’s impossible,’ Elaine said. ‘He was devoted to Cressida. His career mattered very much to him, as did his marriage.’

‘When did they meet?’

‘When we were at Cambridge. She wasn’t an undergraduate. She just came to a ball. They’d been together ever since. Hardly a day apart.’

‘And you were there too.’

‘I was there too.’

‘Were you ever romantically involved with Geoff Armstrong?’ Derwent said, jumping in feet first.

‘No. It was never like that.’ Elaine Lister frowned. ‘Geoff and I were friends and colleagues. Nothing more. Please tell me you’re not so unimaginative that you believe a man and woman working together must be romantically or sexually involved with one another.’

‘If it helps, I can imagine that quite well,’ I said. Derwent’s expression didn’t change but he shot me a look out of the corner of his eye:
touché
.

‘I met Miles – my husband – when I was at Cambridge, before I met Geoff.’

John Grey gave a short, cruel bark of amusement. ‘How could Geoff begin to compare to Miles?’

She flushed. Consciously or not, she was fiddling with her rings. ‘Miles is a philosophy professor. He’s not like Geoff. He lives in his own world a lot of the time. But he’s an excellent husband.’

‘He never minded her spending all her time with Geoff,’ Grey said. ‘We should all be so lucky with our partners.’

‘Geoff and I were friends for a long time. We worked together very closely. He was part of my family and I was part of his.’ Elaine pressed the tissue under her eyes carefully once again. ‘People saw him as a monster but he wasn’t. He was a good man. He wanted to make a difference.’

‘We’ll never know what he could have achieved if he’d had the time,’ John Grey said. ‘Ah well.
C’est la vie
, as they say.’ He drained his coffee and set the mug down on the table with a bang.

THIS TIME ROUND
I walked into the meeting room and found Derwent had got there first. He was sitting in the middle of the front row, right in front of Una Burt. His hair was suspiciously neat, his tie pushed right up to his collar. Immaculate. Irreproachable.

Up to something.

Una Burt had her back to him. She was busy writing on the whiteboard, her marker squeaking as she went. I took the seat behind him, close enough to risk nudging him if I thought he was going too far. I liked working with Derwent and I had missed him more than I’d expected when Burt had kept us apart but he wasn’t the hill I was going to die on. If he fought Burt and lost, he was on his own.

The whiteboard was filling up: names, times, lots of question marks. Armstrong’s name was in the centre, blocked from my view by Burt’s square body. Time to tell the class what we’d found out, I gathered. It was unintentionally revealing of how Burt thought about this case: Armstrong at the centre, the other victims incidental. And if I wasn’t sure she was wrong, I wasn’t altogether sure she was right.

The rest of the team filed in, all tired faces and crumpled suits. The initial investigative rush was slowing, the fast-time enquiries winding down as the tedious painstaking work reasserted itself. So many cases unravelled for us because of something as mundane and administrative as reading phone records or checking CCTV or analysing automatic number-plate recognition, not to mention the old routine of door-to-door inquiries that eventually turned up a witness who didn’t realise the importance of what they’d seen. That was our job, and knowing it could solve a crime was what kept me going when I was ready to come apart at the seams from the dreariness of it all.

‘Okay,’ Burt said, eyeing the latecomers as they hurried to fit themselves into the last remaining spaces. ‘The purpose of this meeting is to focus our inquiries now that we’ve started on this investigation. There’s a big picture here and you can’t see all of it at once, so this is your opportunity to stand back and see how your part of the puzzle fits into the rest of it.’

The door opened to admit a man I didn’t recognise. He murmured an apology and leaned against the wall rather than trying to find a place to sit. He had untidy dark hair and soft brown eyes.

‘I know you’re all tired,’ Una Burt went on, ‘so we’ll keep it brief. But we have a lot of ground to cover. Let’s start with the fire. Colin? Anything on the CCTV?’

‘I’ve only just started looking at it,’ Colin Vale said apologetically. ‘It took us a while to get it from the estate. I’ve got footage from ten cameras to review and obviously we can widen that out beyond the estate once we know what we’re looking for.’

‘So nothing useful so far,’ Burt said, her manner impatient.

‘The opposite of useful.’ Colin gave us a lopsided smile. ‘As luck would have it, a lot of the footage from Murchison House is unusable. The camera on the tenth floor hadn’t been working for months. They were waiting for a part, they said.’

There was a groan from the officers in the room, but there was no surprise in it. CCTV was often far more useful as a deterrent than as an investigative tool. The image quality was wildly variable, and that was assuming it was working in the first place.

‘The camera above the entrance that should have shown us everyone coming in and out of the building had been vandalised more recently.’

‘Who by? When?’

‘Kids, last week.’ Vale shrugged as a general mutter arose. ‘I know. I was hoping it would be our arsonist too.’ It wasn’t unheard of for a criminal to give us a perfect shot of their faces as they tried to deal with a security camera. ‘I don’t think it’s connected, I’m afraid. They’ve had a problem with kids damaging the cameras for a while. They know who did it and I’ve had a word but it doesn’t lead us anywhere. No one asked the boy to do it. He was just bored. He’s eleven and a very promising fast bowler, apparently. He hit it with a cricket ball and it was all over.’

‘So what have we got?’

‘Bits and pieces. The usual.’ Colin smiled. ‘There’s a camera in the car park that should show us most of the people who came out from a distance, and I’m trying to match up the footage with the rest of the material we have. I’ll be able to patch it together but we might not have the best quality images at the end of it all. Enough to give us some direction, though.’

‘What about local petrol stations?’ I asked. They generally had very good CCTV so they could trace drivers who try to drive off without paying. ‘Isn’t it worth getting hold of the footage in case our arsonist bought a can or two of petrol?’

‘Already done,’ Vale said. ‘What I’d like is to know what I’m looking for. If I see someone I recognise, we’re home and dry.’

Burt stood back and used the end of her pen to tap Armstrong’s name. ‘What have you found out, Josh?’

Quietly, calmly, Derwent explained what we’d found out at the post-mortem and from Armstrong’s wife, not to mention his secretary. We had briefed Una Burt first so she knew it was murder already. She nodded while everyone else muttered.

‘It does complicate matters for you.’
For you
. I got the hint. ‘I still wouldn’t rule out the fire being set to target Armstrong.’

‘But they couldn’t have known how he’d react,’ I objected. ‘If he’d evacuated the flat along with his girlfriend, he’d be alive now. Embarrassed, but alive.’

‘So it’s just a coincidence that he’s there and he ends up dead. That seems more likely.’ Her voice was dripping with sarcasm.

‘That’s not what I said. But I don’t think it’s necessarily all about Armstrong either. There are other victims of this fire, other people on the tenth floor who might have been targets. Without the fire, Armstrong might not have been murdered, but that doesn’t mean whoever set the fire even knew he was there. No one else did.’

‘Except his secretary,’ Burt pointed out.

‘She didn’t know where he was. She thought she did, but she was wrong. He’d told her he was at a meeting with Levon Cole’s mother and her supporters. I rang Mrs Cole to check and there was no meeting yesterday. More to the point, she said Armstrong had never been at any of their meetings and he wouldn’t have been welcome if he’d turned up.’

Derwent turned round in his seat to give me one of his hard stares. ‘I thought he was their biggest supporter.’

‘Not according to Mrs Cole. She said he’d been hanging around after the TSG unit got shot up on the estate in September but she’d made it absolutely clear she wasn’t interested in being whatever Armstrong wanted her to be. A figurehead for a people’s revolution, he’d suggested.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘What a user.’

‘Why was he so interested in Claudine Cole’s campaign?’ Una Burt asked, puzzled.

‘If I had to guess, it’s was protective cover for him. It was a reason for him to be on the estate. We know he was with a woman in the flat and according to Mrs Hearn, that woman was black. Where do you think he might have met her? Probably not at his club, I’m guessing.’

‘Someone involved in the Cole campaign,’ Derwent said.

‘That’s what I’m thinking.’

‘So we can get a list of names from her.’

I laughed. ‘Yeah, right. Because Claudine Cole has so many reasons to cooperate with the police. I barely got her to speak to me on the phone once she heard who I was. The only reason she gave me any time at all was to make it clear that she’d had nothing to do with Armstrong and she was adamant he’d never worked on the campaign. If I tell her I need names, she’ll tell me to back off.’

‘Try in person,’ Una Burt said. ‘You might be able to convince her if you’re face to face. It’s easier to say no on the phone.’

I made a note. Another visit to the Maudling Estate. I could hardly wait.

‘We might be able to get something from MI5,’ Burt went on. ‘I’m sure they’re monitoring Claudine Cole and her supporters in case their activism takes an illegal turn.’

I nodded. ‘And Dr Early has sent swabs off to the lab to check for DNA. We might get a hit that way. There’s more than one way to track her down. We’ll find her.’

‘Speaking of finding people, any update on Melissa Pell’s husband?’ Derwent’s voice was casual but he was pressing his thumb on the top of his pen so hard that it had bleached white.

‘Why should we care about him?’ Una Burt’s voice was tight.

‘Because she was hiding from him in Murchison House.’

‘He was possibly abusive,’ Pettifer added. ‘So we should keep him on the list as a potential suspect.’

‘
Possibly
,’ Derwent exploded and I kicked the seat of his chair as hard as I could without being observed.

‘Yeah, possibly.’ Pettifer stared Derwent down. ‘We’ve spoken to the officers who dealt with the family in Lincolnshire. They said it was a difficult situation. Mark Pell struck them as a decent bloke struggling to cope with a wife who’d basically lost the plot. She accused him of all sorts of things but then backed out of pressing charges. She suffers from depression, apparently.’

‘Hardly surprising, if her old man was beating her senseless.’ Derwent’s jaw was tight. ‘Did they investigate whether she was telling the truth with her original allegations?’

‘They didn’t find any evidence of it. She admitted that she self-harmed from time to time. He had no record of any violence. He reported his wife and son missing a few months ago.’

‘And it didn’t hit the headlines? A vulnerable woman with her son – you’d assume they were in danger,’ Una Burt said.

‘They’d been assigned a social worker, who backed up Melissa,’ Mal Upton explained. Derwent made a small, satisfied noise in the back of his throat. ‘According to her, Melissa was a few days away from being sectioned when she took on the case. The social worker didn’t see any sign of insanity or instability or whatever her husband alleges. She didn’t feel the boy was in danger. And when Melissa left, she contacted the social worker and told her she was going. The social worker did try to reassure the husband, but didn’t get very far with him. He complained to her supervisor that she’d become too close to Melissa and wasn’t behaving in a professional way. He got her into a lot of trouble.’