Bright Spark (3 page)

“Keep
up the good work, PC Jones.”

PC
Jones, a Rottweiler by looks and nature, had allowed Slowey to approach despite
the fact that he’d left his warrant card in his other suit. Jones had made it
plain that this was only because he knew and liked Slowey, but had still felt
obliged to lecture him on the solemn and sacred responsibilities of the scene
guard.  He’d listed the name, address and description of everyone who’d crossed
his path, most of them firemen and paramedics. He’d overheard Slowey’s phone
call and carefully noted the time he’d been notified that SOCO had been
notified. 

Slowey
locked the keypad on his house-brick of a mobile phone, dropped it in his
jacket pocket, yanked at his shirt collar for the tenth time that minute,
cocked his chin and advanced on the parked ambulances.

“You
a policeman?” shouted a figure, leaping from a stretcher and dropping a red
blanket to the ground.

“I
am that,” replied Slowey, idly wondering who else would be wearing a suit at
this ungodly hour.

“You
wanna be looking for him, not pissing about here.” The man breathed ethanol and
pear drops from his pores and spoke as if he were trying to get served in a
club. Bleached, spiky hair crowned a face scrubbed red raw by a house fire or a
long afternoon in a beer garden. The three lions on his football shirt were
stretched by a bulging belly from the passant into the couchant.   Faint strap
marks suggested he’d just discarded an oxygen mask.  The paramedics seemed busy
enough with their other charges, an elderly couple and what appeared to be a
grey haired youth, and happy to have the sot off their hands.

“You
are?” began Slowey, flicking open his book and holding his pen poised.

“Don’t
matter who I am, youth, you wanna be lookin’ for that bastard. Like I said. Not
fuckin’ right, them babbies dead and him out on the piss.”  The man rocked on
his heels and his hands fidgeted in the pockets of baggy shorts as if he were
trying to tame a wayward ferret.

Slowey’s
night had only just begun and was already getting longer.

“Oi,
mouth.” Slowey shouted, and for a moment could hear only the generator
churning.  “Plenty of kiddies left round here can hear you.”

The
man stared into Slowey’s eyes, spat into the gutter between them and allowed his
shoulders to drop. “Keith Braxton, number nine, your boys know my name from
years ago when I was a bad lad.”

He
shot out a hand which Slowey grasped and shook firmly. “I’m DC Slowey. So what
do you know, Keith?”

“Alright
then, DC Slurry, still need to get him locked up though.”

“Top
of my agenda, right after you tell me who he is and why I want him."

Harkness
had squeezed his size thirteens into the largest fire boots McKay could find at
short notice. The borrowed jacket chafed, its sleeves left inches of wrist
exposed and the gloves and helmet were still sticky with the sweat of their
previous occupant.

“I
always wanted to be a fireman. The glamour, the big trucks, the hen parties,
the chance to spend night shifts asleep. Why is this stuff so heavy?”

“We
fill it with asbestos and lead for our special guests.”

“Don’t
we need masks?”

“If
it’s that hairy in there, you’re not coming.”

McKay
ventured inside, mask at the ready, and Harkness kicked his heels, watching the
occasional flicker of a torch beam from within while he tugged at the sleeves
of the fire jacket and tried not to feel like a fat and badly outfitted
stripper. He watched with approval as Slowey tamed a drunken buffoon using
nothing more than a biro and a cheap suit. 

“Right,
you should live through it. Just don’t touch anything and don’t sue me. Oh, and
still bring that.” McKay, emerging from the doorway, gestured at the respirator
mask in Harkness’s hand. Rivulets of sweat had smeared the dirt on his face and
he smelled like a lathered horse. “Don’t pass out in there, either.”

Harkness
glanced at his watch and thought about making notes but the thick gloves made
this impossible. He followed McKay’s footsteps precisely, memorising their
route, conscious that it was bad form to disturb a crime scene with new and
unnecessary footprints, sweat, skin cells and every other kind of impression
the human body was capable of making. Yet fire had already made a good start on
obliterating evidence and he needed answers now.

The
heat embraced them, the floor and walls still radiating energy and turning the
house into a kiln. Harkness instantly felt dampness blossoming from his armpits
and creeping over his skin, and his breathing became ragged. Whatever had
covered the floor in the hallway had been incinerated.

A
shadow the colour of the void, empty and without lustre, formed a ragged
ellipse from the interior surface of the door to the base of the stairs. The
surrounding walls were striated, blackness giving way to grey and white
charring, speckles of white emulsion visible through the soot on the ceiling.

McKay’s
torch picked out a molten lump on the floor. “That was a smoke detector. Don’t
know about this one but there were no batteries in the one upstairs.”

Harkness
stooped and considered the molten object. He flicked his own torch up the
staircase, picking out the blackened but intact profile of the other smoke
alarm on the ceiling. Satisfied, he gripped his torch by its lamp and brought
its blunt end down hard on what he took to be the battery compartment of the
object. It disintegrated in shards of plastic fused with green and silver
circuitry.

“Oh,
for …..,” began McKay, training his torch on Harkness’s destruction. “You do
know you get acid in batteries, don’t you?”

“Good
point. Just as well it hasn’t got any.” Harkness pointed at the blackened and
distended springs and contacts, nothing filling the space between them.
“Interesting. Shall we continue?”

“Right,
bog standard three-bed semi. Kitchen ahead of you, large living room to your
left, conservatory at the back. Interior doors left open.”

The
other rooms had been less thoroughly ravaged by fire. Here and there, the forms
of furniture were recognisable: the skeletal springs of a sofa; the shattered
screen of a TV like a mouthful of broken teeth; a high tidemark of burning
where curtains had given the fire a conduit to the ceiling; a strand of colour
from a carpet; a raised hand or half a smile still visible on fragments of
photographs.

“Those
windows have done well,” continued McKay. “Frames seem to have warped but
nothing has shattered.”

Harkness
moved through the lounge, the remnants of a glass coffee table splintering
underfoot. Two large double-glazed frames dominated the room, matching in size
the smashed windows he’d seen above. The inner panes had been stained yellow
and brown, but the sealed units were intact. He tried both handles, finding
them securely locked. It would be easy even with his bulk to exit through a
window that size, assuming he could open it.

“I
take it your boys smashed their way in upstairs?”

“Too
right. Staircase wouldn’t hold a child. We’ve got a hammer for this sort of
glass. If it’s like that Stellarglaze stuff they’re always selling in my neck
of the woods, a fat man bouncing up and down it on won’t crack it, so forget
using your bare hands or a bedside lamp. Bloody liability.”

“You
mean the window wasn’t open.”

“I
keep forgetting you’re a detective.”

Harkness
gazed at the windowsill, seeing nothing but the blurred grain of wood turning
to charcoal and fractured body parts from ceramic figurines fused into new and
grotesque shapes. Nothing resembled a key or a nail where a key might be hung.

“Why
don’t you and I go upstairs, Mr McKay?”

“I
know you think I’m easy, Sergeant Harkness, but I don’t do this for all the
cops.”

Back
outside, Harkness watched McKay scale the ladder and pivot through the window
with the nimbleness of someone ten years younger and five stone lighter.
Nodding to the fireman assigned to steady the ladder and prevent actionable
accidents, Harkness followed, eyes fixed on McKay’s. The ladder shimmied and
skittered on the loose gravel below as he clutched and kicked the steps,
causing cold sweat to prickle his brow and the vomit to surge into his throat.
He was more than half-cut and on the verge of giving way to a fear that had
nothing to do with falling ten feet onto a well padded fireman. He hauled his
chest over the windowsill with the grace of a rutting walrus and McKay looped
an arm under his and helped him the rest of the way.

“You
look like shit. Sure you should be here?”

Harkness
swallowed a lungful of air, brimstone and ammonia raking his palate and throat.
He nodded and showed an upturned thumb, waiting for his thoughts to untangle.

“You
just get your bearings then. And watch where you stand.”

The
wide cone of McKay’s torch rotated slowly around the room, beginning at
Harkness’s feet. Long slivers of glass lay on the carpet, jumbled with the
broken frame of a chair, soil, stalks and fragments of a shattered plant-pot,
and the varnished form of a defunct police truncheon.

A
few hours ago, the room could have graced an estate agent’s brochure: beige
carpet, fitted wardrobes and made to measure curtains, with no books, clothes
or other domestic clutter in sight. A colossal family portrait dominated the
room, a soft-focus, textured print of a stocky, well-groomed man, flashing his
teeth in glee while his doting family looked up at him with studied smiles.

For
half a second Harkness believed a hand was crawling from the shadow left by the
king-sized bed which had been flung onto its side. He picked his way across the
floor and swept his own torch across the square of cleaner carpet, chasing the
shadow into another corner then breathing again. He couldn’t see the writhing
ghouls of his imagination but for a moment heard them scream and retch and
plead. Blood daubed the weave of the carpet, an imprecise rendering of the
fingers of a right hand clutching at life, a few feet from a drying burst of
vomit. A teddy bear sat on its haunches, arms outspread, as if hoping to be
found and needed again, one cream leg dark and musky with what might have been
urine.

Harkness
moved through the upper story of the house, trailing soot and crystals of
broken glass from the heavy boots, looking intensely at each window then moving
on to the next. When he reached the rear bedroom window, overlooking the roof
of the conservatory, he paused.

“I
think if there were window keys anywhere handy,” he said, motioning McKay to
look more closely, “she’d have found them.”

On
the locked handle, and printed and smeared elsewhere on the glass, could just
be discerned the delicate whorls and ribbons of fingerprints, picked out in
red.

Slowey
left Braxton reminiscing with PC Jones about town-centre punch-ups. He seemed genuinely
concerned that the old cell block at Beaumont Fee was to be relocated, as if he
were an old soldier learning that the British Legion were to be turned into a
supermarket. Braxton offered his new friend a cigarette, which Jones declined
with visible pride.

Slowey
underlined the name of Dale Murphy in his notebook. He’d established that there
was no record of him on PNC and put out his basic description on the radio,
although he doubted anyone would stumble across him.

Morse
was helping an ambulance to extricate itself from the narrow street, so far
with the loss of only one wing mirror. From another, a green-suited paramedic
toting a clipboard emerged, followed by the slight figure of a woman draped in
a red blanket and clutching it to her chin with trembling fingers. Slowey would
gladly have shared some of the night’s heat with her.

“Morning.
You the police, then?”

“It’s
the suit and the stubble, isn’t it? And I bet you think we’re all getting
younger.”

“This
is Marjorie from number twelve. Husband and son have gone to County to be
checked over. They’ve all breathed in a bit of smoke but Marjorie declined to
come with us. Wanted to talk to you instead.”

Slowey
glimpsed at the paramedic’s clipboard with its duplicate sheets of disclaimers
underscored by the woman’s feathery signature. She seemed to be staring at her
home, its façade almost unchanged but for the bruises of scorched plasterwork,
a corruption inherited from its conjoined and leprous twin.

“Marjorie,”
announced Slowey, striding forwards and finding his pantomime voice, every
syllable flung out with painstaking cheer. He ducked and pursed his lips,
seeking out her eyes between the blanket and her tangled bob of grey hair. “I’m
DC Slowey. Why don’t you and I find a nice spot for a cup of tea and a chat?”

The
woman raised her chin above the blanket and turned her eyes to Slowey, taking
long, shallow breaths and swallowing as if in search of her voice. Slowey was
reminded of a tortoise venturing from its shell after a long and bitter winter.