After the Fire (6 page)

I still couldn’t do it. I knew Liv well enough to believe she would step aside if she wasn’t happy with her work on the murder team. She was her own fiercest critic. I knew her partner, Joanne, and she was a police officer too. She would see the signs if Liv began to crack up. So all in all, there was no need for me to intervene.

Especially since I needed Liv’s presence more than ever. She was the best friend I had made in the job. She was reasonable where Derwent was perverse, supportive when he was undermining me. I had missed her very badly when she was on leave. I still hadn’t told her all the details of how my life had managed to come apart so spectacularly in such a short space of time. All she knew was that Rob, my handsome, funny, clever boyfriend, had gone on leave after his colleague was killed. She knew that we weren’t in touch, but she didn’t know why.

The funny thing was, neither did I. I’d have spoken to him, if he’d contacted me. I’d have forgiven him if he asked me to. I’d forgiven him already, in fact.

I still hadn’t quite forgiven myself, but that was another story.

‘Who are you working with on this one?’ Liv asked.

‘Derwent.’

Her eyebrows went up. ‘Does Una Burt know?’

‘It was her idea. She sent him to collect me.’

‘I thought she wanted you to stay away from him.’

‘So did I.’ I’d been thinking about that, off and on. Almost the first thing Una Burt had done on taking over the team was to make a point of telling me I wouldn’t be working with Derwent. We were too close, she thought. He impaired my judgement. He slowed me down.

Which, translated into plain English, was:
you keep him on the straight and narrow but I want to get rid of him, so let’s see what happens if you’re not holding him back from self-destruction
.

To everyone’s surprise, not least mine, Derwent had behaved impeccably since Una Burt took over. I wasn’t convinced he’d changed, or that he was capable of changing. To me it felt like the false, uneasy peace that comes after a war has been declared, before the first battle. He wasn’t ready to fight her yet, but it was only a matter of time.

I looked for Derwent in the crowd and found him almost immediately. He took up a lot of space, somehow, and it wasn’t that he was tall or broad-shouldered, although he was both. Even where people were gathered close together, he stood apart. Instinctively, everyone around him gave him plenty of room. Maybe it was the scowl that put people off standing near him, or some subliminal awareness of the rage that burned within him. He was alone, as he tended to be these days. No one on the team could have failed to notice that Una Burt had it in for him. Being too friendly with Derwent was a bad career move.

I was never going to be friends with him, but I couldn’t stand to see him on his own.

‘He’s got his brooding face on,’ I said. ‘I’d better see if he wants me to do anything.’

Liv grinned. ‘You complain about him but you love him really.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Yeah, you do.’

I shook my head at her but I was smiling as I went over to him. The past two months had been crushingly dull, even though I’d been busier than ever before. Una Burt had made sure I did more than my share of legwork, the routine inquiries that involved endless phone calls and knocking on doors. My colleagues had been pleasant, considerate and professional; three words I’d never applied to Derwent. But there was something bracing about working with him, in spite of the stroppiness and the sulking. There weren’t many people who could make you feel as if you’d launched yourself down a set of rapids just by saying hello.

‘Hi.’ I made myself sound chirpy. Derwent reacted to chirpiness the way most people reacted to stinging nettles. I got a grunt in response.

I cast about for a neutral subject. ‘Cold, isn’t it?’

‘It’s the middle of the night and it’s November. It should be cold. Where did you get that?’ He was eyeing my tea.

‘Liv gave it to me.’

He took the cup out of my hand. ‘She must have meant it for me.’

‘I wasn’t drinking it anyway.’

Derwent’s eyebrows twitched together. ‘Gone off it?’

‘No. Too weak for me.’

He tasted it. ‘Just right. What do you want?’

I blinked. ‘Nothing, really.’

‘Then go away.’

Even for Derwent, that was rude. I held my ground. ‘What’s going on?’

He wouldn’t look at me. ‘You’re still here.’

‘Sorry, did I do something wrong? You weren’t behaving like this in the car.’

‘I’ve been having a think about a few things, that’s all.’ He took another mouthful of tea. ‘Any sign of your little scumbags?’

‘No.’ I wasn’t going to tell Derwent that I hadn’t even looked for them.

‘Maeve. Sir.’ Liv was hurrying towards us. ‘The fire investigator is ready to show us the crime scenes. He says we’ll need boots. It’s mucky up there.’

‘Ten flights of stairs.’ Derwent shook his head. ‘Onwards and upwards, Kerrigan. After you.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, surprised that he was being a gentleman.

‘Don’t thank me. I’m just making sure I’ve got something nice to look at on the way.’

‘WATCH YOUR STEP.’
Andrew Harper was waiting by the top of the outside stairs on the tenth floor. ‘The surfaces are slippery up here and there’s a lot of debris on the ground.’

In front of me, DS Chris Pettifer was wheezing like a broken accordion. He and Una Burt had set the pace, which was not as quick as I would have liked it to be given that Derwent’s face was a few inches from my bottom most of the way. Every time I glanced back, I got a leer from him. Eventually, I stopped glancing back.

There were eight of us from the murder team, all officers I’d worked with before. We followed Harper from the cold, draughty staircase into the corridor, which was still hot and smelled strongly of burning. It was humid, like a sauna, and the ground was covered in wet ashes that were sticky underfoot.

Harper stopped, letting us gather around him and the senior firefighter I’d seen talking to Una Burt earlier. He introduced himself as Gary Northbridge. He looked more tired than he had in the car park, and defensive. I assumed that fatal fires generated more hassle and paperwork than I could imagine.

‘Okay, we’ll be drawing up proper plans of the building for your reference, but here’s what you need to know,’ Harper said. ‘There are ten flats on each floor, four on the left and six on the right. We have eight occupied flats on this floor, but two of them were empty at the time of the fire – the residents were still at work. The residents on the left side of the corridor who were present at the time of the fire had enough warning to evacuate. The left side is also where the internal stairwell and the lifts are accessed, which is why there are fewer flats on this side. On the other side we have six flats, two of which are not in use at the moment according to the management. Some are in private hands but most are council-owned. The flats are not numbered consecutively throughout the building – numbering restarts on each floor. So flat 101 is here on the right, opposite flat 107.’

‘That caused some problems for the fire crews,’ Northbridge said. ‘They knew there was a vulnerable person in 104 but they had to find the flat before they could find her.’

‘Is she one of the fatalities?’ I asked.

‘Not so far. She was taken to hospital. We have sixteen in hospital at the moment, mainly with smoke inhalation, minor injuries, a couple of broken bones, one with serious burns. I can’t tell you who they are or where they lived yet, but we’re working on it. A few of them were unconscious or confused when we picked them up, so we don’t have a name for everyone.’

‘More injuries than I’d have expected,’ Derwent said. ‘Sounds more like a fight than a fire.’

‘That happens in serious fires,’ Northbridge said. ‘It’s not just the smoke and the flames you have to worry about. Crush injuries and falls kill just as many people.’

‘Where were the bodies?’ Pete Belcott asked. He was abrupt, as usual. Charm was not one of his qualities.

‘There were two fatalities up in 113 on the next floor, and your gentleman outside.’

‘So everyone else escaped from this floor.’

‘They escaped or they were rescued by firefighters,’ Northbridge said. ‘We had a 999 call from flat 101. There were two adults and two children. They were advised to make their way to the internal stairwell and progress down if it was safe to do so. That is where they were located when the first crews came in.’

‘Was that the first call you had about the fire?’ I asked.

‘That’s what our records indicate,’ Northbridge said.

‘So they were the first people to notice the fire. Did it start in their flat? Or nearby?’

‘We don’t know yet,’ Harper said. ‘It’s possible. The level of damage along this side of the building is considerable. It will take some time to work out where the fire began and how.’

‘So it could have been an accident,’ Belcott said, and I could see from the look on his face that he was losing interest.

‘It could have been an accident. It could have been arson,’ Harper replied patiently.

‘What makes you say that?’ Una Burt asked.

‘With this level of damage we can tell that the fire burned extremely hot and it took hold very quickly. That makes me suspicious. Fires that begin accidentally often start slowly, then gather pace as they increase in size. This was overwhelming in minutes. It generated a lot of smoke that seeped into the corridor and vented itself via the outside stairwell, effectively making it unusable for the people on this floor and the floor above. The fire burned through into flat 101, where it caused a great deal of damage in the kitchen and one bedroom.’

Harper led us through the front door into the flat. Everything inside it was blackened by smoke and the carpet felt squelchy underfoot. Nothing looked salvageable. I could make out metal-framed shapes that had once been a sofa and a couple of armchairs, and the television was still recognisable, but the rest of the furnishings were essentially gone. A cut-glass chandelier still hung from the ceiling, incongruous in those surroundings anyway but doubly so when it was streaked with dirty water. The residents had cared about their home, I thought. The fire would be devastating for them in every way, not just the material loss.

‘The internal doors were closed, initially, which was lucky,’ Northbridge said. ‘One of the children opened the bedroom door and discovered the blaze.’

There were scorch marks around the door and across the ceiling.

‘These are from the flashover that occurred when the door was opened,’ Harper said, playing his torch over them. ‘Fire is hungry. It needs oxygen. Any firefighter will tell you not to open a hot door. The little girl didn’t know any better. They were lucky the grandmother was nearby and managed to get the door closed before the fire could take hold out here. She gave the child first aid while the dad was on the phone to 999. That call came in at 17.36.’

‘Hold on. Shouldn’t there have been a smoke alarm in the flat?’ Una Burt asked.

‘It wasn’t working.’

‘What about in the hall?’

‘It was vandalised.’ Northbridge pulled a face. ‘Not all that unusual here. The alarms are linked to a main control centre in the estate’s management office and they’re supposed to inform us straight away when one of the alarms goes off-line, as well as getting it repaired.’

‘But they didn’t,’ I said quietly.

‘It happened this morning. No one got around to fixing it before this afternoon.’ Northbridge shook his head. ‘If everyone didn’t persist in thinking fire regulations are just there to annoy them, my job would be a lot easier.’

‘The real problem with this fire,’ Harper said, leading us out of flat 101 into the next-door property, ‘was the smoke. We had a lot of thick, black smoke and it made it very difficult for the residents to make their way to the exits safely. I gather there was a lot of confusion. The call-centre operators in our command centre encouraged people to use their own judgement about whether it was safer to remain where they were or risk making an attempt to escape.’

Flat 102 was significantly smaller than its neighbour, but it was just as thoroughly destroyed. I nudged a jumble of wires and melted plastic with the toe of my boot. ‘How did the fire pass into this flat from next door?’

‘There’s a ventilation system running overhead. The hot air and smoke from the fire spread through the pipes. It was hot enough to ignite materials wherever it found an outlet.’ Harper smiled. ‘You shouldn’t assume the fire started in flat 101. The ventilation system could just as easily have passed it the other way.’

‘Who lived here?’ Derwent asked.

Northbridge checked his notes. ‘It’s registered to a Mrs Edmonds. Someone made a 999 call from here at 17.37, saying that her flat and the corridor were full of smoke, but she broke off contact with the operator almost immediately. She said she was planning to use the internal staircase to escape.’

‘Did she say anything else?’ I asked.

‘She said she was scared.’

There was a short silence and then Harper guided us back out to the corridor, to flat 103. ‘Now this is where it gets interesting. The fire went up from 102 to 113 on the floor above via the ventilation system. It caused significant damage. We’ve found two bodies up there. No ID on them yet. This flat, 103, was supposed to be empty. But when the firefighters got here, the door was open. All of the windows were open, not broken. Someone was here, and that person was desperately trying to get air. Smoke doesn’t just kill through suffocation. People start making bad decisions. They can become illogical or uncoordinated.’

He led us through the flat, which was empty apart from debris from the ceiling and walls. ‘This was a bedroom and that was a bed.’

‘How can you tell?’ Liv sounded confused and I flashed her a smile. I couldn’t see it either in the rubble of charred planks and ashes that filled the small room.

Harper crouched and dug in the rubbish on the floor. ‘This is a wire spring,’ he said, holding it up in a gloved hand. ‘It’s likely to have been from a mattress.’