‘No problem, sweetheart, I’m just trying to fill in the gaps. So, are you okay to collect me? My car’s still playing up and we’ve got a job early doors.’
‘Bit of a snag there. My car’s at the station, remember? I had to take you home in a cab last night.’
‘That’s not an issue, is it? Just get a cab to the station, pick up the car and then come and collect me. Easy peasy.’
‘Okay,’ she said.
‘Soon as you can, yeah?’
‘Right, guv.’
‘I’ll have breakfast waiting,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry? What?’
‘Breakfast. The most important meal of the day.’
The line went dead. Vicky stared at the phone in disbelief. What Farmer wanted made no sense. All he had to do was call a cab and make his own way into Dowgate. Instead he wanted her to get a cab to the station, pick up her car and then collect him? What the hell was he thinking? She had half a mind to call him back and tell him that she wasn’t his bloody chauffeur but then she remembered what she’d said when she’d first met him. She’d do whatever it took to prove herself and that was what he was doing. He was testing her.
She groaned and rolled out of bed. She brushed her teeth, then took a quick shower in lukewarm water. Showers were better than baths, her doctors had told her. The scars had to be kept clean but soaking in a hot bath actually dried the skin out, which would slow down healing. She moisturised her scars and then spent five minutes exercising her left hand and arm. When she had first left the hospital she could barely use her left hand but over the months she had followed the exercise programme that the physiotherapist had given her and it had improved to the point where it was almost as good as it had been before the fire. But at night the hand still seemed to tighten up and lose its flexibility and it took several minutes to take the stiffness out of it. When she’d finished she put a silicone gel sheet over the back of her hand and pulled on a black cotton glove before dressing.
When she went downstairs, Baxter followed her, tail wagging. Her mum was up and making toast. There was a cup of tea already on the kitchen table. ‘Eggs?’ asked Barbara.
‘The guv’s giving me breakfast,’ said Vicky. She opened the back door so that Baxter could go out into the garden. Vicky sipped her tea and looked at the clock on the wall above the cooker. ‘I’d better go.’ She used the Addison Lee app on her phone to order a taxi. There was one just a couple of minutes away.
‘Your boss is cooking you breakfast?’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘Well, that’s a first.’
Vicky took another sip of tea, pulled on a coat, kissed her mum on the cheek and headed out. A taxi pulled up and she climbed into the back. Her mind flashed back to the strange display in Farmer’s spare bedroom and she shivered.
The driver dropped her outside Dowgate station and she collected her BMW and drove to Bethnal Green. She parked and sat for a few minutes with her hands on the steering wheel, wondering what she should do. Was he going to rip into her for letting herself into his house? Did he know that she’d gone into the spare bedroom? He had been out for the count, and he hadn’t moved while she’d been out of his bedroom, but had he picked up on the fact that she’d been in the spare room? She got out and rang his doorbell. It had a buzzer system so he didn’t have to come downstairs to let her in, the front-door lock simply clicked and she pushed it open.
She went upstairs and found that he’d opened the front door for her. She stood on the threshold, frowning. ‘Guv?”
‘In here!’ shouted Farmer.
She stepped into a narrow hallway. To her right was an open door and she saw a sofa and a coffee table piled high with hardback books. She went in and saw Farmer at the far end of the room in a kitchen area. He was wearing a bright orange apron over his uniform and standing in front of a stove. ‘How do you like your eggs?’ he asked, without turning around. There was a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher on the floor by the fridge. And a fire blanket attached to the wall by the cooker. Like most firefighters, Farmer obviously believed in practising what he preached. Vicky had never yet met a firefighter who didn’t have fire extinguishers, smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors in their homes.
‘My what?’ she asked.
‘Eggs? Fried? Scrambled? Poached? Please say fried because that’s the easiest and that’s what I’m having.’
‘Fried is good, thanks.’
‘Grab a seat and butter some toast.’
There was a table by the window, just big enough for two people. On it was a plate of toast and a jar of marmalade and a pack of Lurpak butter. Vicky sat down and buttered two slices of toast as Farmer cracked two eggs into a frying pan. ‘So what’s the job this morning?’ asked Vicky.
‘Unexplained fire last night,’ said Farmer. ‘A garage near Waterloo station. No one hurt but a lot of motors written off. The crew that attended thought it was an accidental fire but the insurance company investigator has thrown up a few red flags so we need to prepare an LFB report in case it ends up in court.’
Vicky looked around for a plate to put the buttered toast on. ‘Plates?’ she asked.
Farmer pointed at a cupboard with his spatula. She stood up and opened it. She was surprised at how neat and tidy it was. There were two sizes of plates, small and large, and above it three lines of upended mugs and three lines of wine glasses, and on the top shelf were neatly stacked serving dishes. She took two small plates over to the table and put the toast on them before cutting them diagonally.
Farmer put two filled plates down on the table – bacon, sausage, black pudding slices, button mushrooms, tinned tomatoes and fried onions. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Vicky. ‘That’s a heart attack on a plate.’
Farmer laughed and went back to the cooker, returning with the frying pan. He put a fried egg on her plate and another on his. ‘You need to stoke the furnace every morning,’ he said. He dropped the frying pan into the sink and joined her at the table with two mugs of coffee that he had apparently produced from thin air.
‘I’m sorry about last night,’ he said. ‘Usually I handle my drink better than that.’
‘It was a long night,’ she said, spooning two sugars into her coffee.
Farmer shrugged and bit into a slice of toast. ‘Well, thanks for bringing me back,’ he said. ‘And for leaving my boxer shorts on.’
‘No problem,’ said Vicky.
He held her look for several seconds as if he was trying to read her thoughts, then he nodded and smiled and attacked his sausages.
It was one hell of a breakfast, Vicky had to admit, but she didn’t have much in the way of an appetite. She made small talk with Farmer but all she could think about was the room down the hallway and the pictures and cuttings plastered over the walls. What the hell was he up to? And did he know what she’d seen? Was that why he’d invited her into his flat, to see how she would react?
She sipped her coffee, watching him over the top of her mug. He seemed relaxed, happy even, just two colleagues sharing a meal before heading out to work. But she could see that he was watching her, too. She put the mug down and smiled. ‘You’re a great cook,’ she said.
‘I can do breakfasts,’ he said. ‘But that’s about it.’
‘My dad was always a big one for breakfasts. He did great fried eggs. The yolks not too hard, not too runny.’ She was talking too much, she realised. It was a sign of nerves. Why was he so interested in women who had died in fires? And why were the cases on his bedroom wall and not back in the office, where they belonged? Did Farmer have a personal interest in the deaths? Something that he wanted to keep hidden from the brigade?
‘Are you okay, sweetheart?’ asked Farmer.
She jumped. ‘Sorry, what?’
‘You were miles away.’ He picked up a slice of toast. ‘Penny for your thoughts?’
Vicky forced a smile. There was no way she could tell him what she was thinking about so she just shrugged and lied. ‘Just missing
my dad, that’s all.’
Farmer nodded. ‘Can’t have been easy. He died too young.’
‘What about you, guv? You got any kids?’
‘Never wanted them,’ said Farmer. ‘In my experience, they tend to fuck up marriages.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Mind you, I seem to have no problems managing that on my own.’
28
Farmer had Vicky drive to Dowgate where they collected one of the fire investigation vans and they drove in it to Waterloo. The garage was around the corner from the main railway station. There was a small forecourt with three second-hand cars festooned with stickers announcing that they had very careful owners and were being offered at the cheapest possible price and that finance was available. All the cars had suffered fire damage on the sides nearest the main building, a single-storey brick structure with a flat roof. To the left was an office with a large window overlooking the forecourt and to the right was the main workshop area. Most of the damage had been done to the workshops. Large sliding metal doors had been pulled back and the interior was a mess of mangled, burnt vehicles and equipment. Blackened water had poured out over the forecourt and run along the pavement to the nearest drain.
As Vicky parked the van by the side of the road, a ginger-haired man in a pin-striped suit and a garish tie hurried over. He was in his fifties with greying hair swept back and a suspiciously smooth forehead that suggested Botox. ‘Are you with the police?’ he asked.
‘Fire Brigade,’ said Farmer, gesturing at the liveried van.
‘Sorry,’ said the man. ‘I suppose the van is a clue.’ He held out a hand festooned with gold rings. ‘Brendan O’Hara.’ He pointed at the name of the garage: BRENDAN O’HARA MOTORS.
‘Looks like you’ve had a bad night, Mr O’Hara,’ said Farmer.
‘Tell me about it.’
Vicky had gone around to the rear of the van and opened the door. Farmer and O’Hara walked to the entrance of the workshop and looked in. Most of the cars to the left had been completely destroyed, the ones to the right had burned but less severely.
Vicky came over. She had put on her overshoes and gloves and was carrying the digital camera.
‘They said we had to leave everything as it was until you’d had a look,’ said O’Hara.
‘Yeah, we need to photograph everything,’ said Farmer. He nodded at Vicky. ‘Start on the left and move across, it’s going to be a complicated one so fill in the report as you go.’
‘Right, guv,’ said Vicky. She headed to the wall on the left where there were metal racks that had once contained tools. All the wood and rubber had been destroyed by the fire leaving misshapen chunks of metal on the floor.
Farmer looked up at the blackened ceiling. ‘No sprinkler system,’ he said, a statement rather than a question.
‘I looked into it a few years ago but the cost was just crazy.’ O’Hara saw the look on Farmer’s face and raised his hands in surrender. ‘I know, I know, hindsight is a wonderful thing. But I never expected anything like this to happen.’
‘In the words of Tom Jones, it’s not unusual,’ said Farmer. ‘Park a lot of cars together in an environment full of fuel and electrical equipment and it doesn’t take much for it to all go tits up.’
‘This is the first time we’ve ever had anything like this happen,’ said O’Hara. ‘And if the insurance company don’t pay up, it’ll be the last.’
‘What’s the problem?’ asked Farmer.
‘The assessor said something about original points or something.’
‘Points of origin,’ said Farmer. ‘It means that the fires started at several places at the same time. That can be a sign that someone set the fire.’
‘Yeah, that’s what he said. He didn’t come flat out and accuse me of setting fire to my own place, but that’s what he seemed to think.’
Farmer nodded. ‘Multiple points of origin can be a sign that something is not right, but you would get that with vandalism as well. He’d have needed more than multiple points of origin to reject your claim.’
O’Hara winced. ‘Business had been well down, and I increased my insurance a few months back.’
‘Yeah, two red flags there,’ said Farmer.
‘We’re still making money,’ said O’Hara. ‘Just not as much as last year. The insurance thing is just an unhappy coincidence. My broker got me a better deal, is all. We’re getting more coverage for a lower premium. It was saving us money. Win–win. That’s what my broker said.’
Farmer nodded as he looked around. The doors to the workshop had obviously been prised open at some point. He showed the marks to O’Hara.
‘The doors were locked when the fire engines turned up. They did that.’
‘You weren’t here?’
‘I’d been gone about an hour. When I locked up everything was fine. I was at home with the wife and kids when I got a call saying the place was in flames.’
‘Let me get kitted up,’ said Farmer. He took some gloves and shoe covers from the back of the van, put them on and picked up a torch before joining Vicky. O’Hara started to follow him but Farmer told him to stay put. Vicky was still photographing the tool racks and the remains of the tools on the floor. ‘Any thoughts?’ he asked.
Vicky pointed to the corner to her right. ‘There’s a power socket over there with V-shaped charring above it,’ she said. ‘I’d say it started there.’
Farmer went over to where she had pointed. It was a double socket and both had adaptors plugged in. The adaptors were almost destroyed but he could make out wires running away from the sockets, the plastic insulation burned away in the fire. Farmer shone his torch around the walls and eventually found a large fuse box, about six feet off the ground. He stood up on tiptoe and used his pen to flip it open. Several of the fuses had tripped. ‘Sweetheart, do me a favour and photograph this, and the sockets.’
O’Hara walked over but Farmer raised a hand to stop him. ‘Can you wait outside, Mr O’Hara,’ he said. ‘We don’t want the scene contaminated.’
‘I think your fireman did a pretty good job of contaminating the scene,’ said O’Hara. ‘Breaking down my doors and then spraying water like there’s no tomorrow.’
‘To be fair, that is how you put out fires,’ said Farmer. ‘But seriously, if you can just stand at the doorway until we’ve finished. It’ll make our job a lot easier and we can get out of your hair.’
He went over to the car nearest the tool racks. The tyres had burned away and the vehicle was resting on its rims. The fuel tank had caught fire and the windows had all shattered. The inside was a charred mess. The vehicle next to it was in a similar state. There was a large piece of equipment next to the second car that had been reduced to melted plastic and blackened metal.
The cars in the middle of the garage were also fire damaged, the tyres burned and the roofs blackened, and their petrol tanks had also ruptured and ignited. Farmer checked the filling caps but all were sealed. Car fuel tanks were designed not to explode – giving a lie to most film and TV car crashes – but they did split if the temperature got high enough. It looked to Farmer as if it was the heat of the fire that had caused the cars to burn, rather than vandalism or deliberate fire-setting.
A rubbish bin next to the far wall had been reduced to a misshapen clump of plastic. Farmer bent down to examine it. From the way the plastic had melted it appeared that the heat had been above the bin rather than inside it. He straightened up and called over to Vicky. ‘Sweetheart?’ When she looked over he pointed at the remains of the bin.
‘Will do,’ she said.
When he had walked around the whole garage, Farmer went back to O’Hara. ‘You’ve got a lot of electrical equipment in there, obviously,’ Farmer said.
‘It’s all about electronic testing, these days,’ said O’Hara. ‘In my day you could fix most things with a hammer, a spanner and screwdriver. Now it’s all chips.’
‘Looks like you overloaded a circuit or two,’ said Farmer. ‘Your guys were running too much equipment o
ff two sockets over there and from what I can see they were using it to run a small fridge. The fridge motor probably malfunctioned. The fuses tripped eventually, but I’m guessing that a wire had already started to smoulder. Then at some point last night the smouldering became a fire. Plenty of combustibles around so it would have spread quickly.’
‘So it was an accident?’
‘An accident caused by stupidity,’ said Farmer. ‘Overloading circuits is asking for trouble.’
O’Hara nodded. ‘The mechanics are always complaining about not having enough sockets, but then they complain about everything.’
‘We’ll start following the various circuits to nail down where it started, but it looks pretty cut and dried to me.’
‘So why was the assessor telling me that he thought there was something suspicious about it?’
‘He’d probably seen that several of the cars had ignited separately, even those some distance away from where the fire started. Now, that could mean that someone had set fire to them, but I don’t see any signs of that. It’s much more likely that they were caused by flameover. And that rubbish bin, at first sight you might think a fire had started there.’ He pointed at the fuse box, where Vicky was standing on tiptoe and photographing the inside. ‘But it looks to me that the fire initiated there, probably caused by an overheated circuit. There was plenty of wood and plastic over there and it would have started burning quickly. Lots of heat, lots of combustible gases.’ He pointed at the scorched ceiling. ‘The gases rise to the ceiling, and because you’ve no ventilation up there, the gases would spread out across the garage. Eventually they would have covered the entire ceiling and then they’d start to move down. At some point, those gases would start to burn, which is what we call flameover. That would mean a sheet of fire right across the ceiling, burning at five hundred degrees or more. At two hundred degrees, any nearby wood will start to ignite and at five hundred the tyres will start to burn. So even those cars that are far away from the source of the fire will burn.’ He pointed off to the right. ‘I think the one that probably worried him the most was the Toyota Prius over there,’ he said. ‘It’s a lot more damaged than the others around it. He probably figured that’s a sign that accelerant was used, but I think he didn’t take into account that the Prius has a lithium-ion battery. They burn vigorously and at a higher temperature than petrol, so when the flameover ignited it the damage was much more severe, just because of the battery.’ Farmer pointed over at the melted rubbish bin. ‘I’d bet money that he thought the melted bin was a red flag and that someone had set a fire there, but again that’s typical flameover damage. So in my opinion, he added two and two together and got five.’
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