Scared to Live bcadf-7

by Stephen Booth

  Next door, Keith Wade was complaining to a uniformed constable that he’d had to park his car at the end of the road because of the outer cordon. Fry saw that he was still wearing the same sweater. It must smell like a badger by now. No wonder Mr Wade lived alone.

  And, of course, the fire investigator from the Forensic Science Service had arrived at Darwin Street when Fry wasn’t looking. As a result, he’d already assessed the scene and was setting out his equipment in the Mullens’ sitting room when she found him.

  ‘Glad you could make it,’ she said. ‘DS Fry.’

  He was a small, middle-aged man whose white paper suit emphasized his pear-shaped body. And when he spoke, he revealed a Scottish accent.

  ‘Quinton Downie,’ he said, taking off a glove to shake hands.

  ‘Do you have all the background information you need?’

  ‘All that you can give me, apparently.’

  ‘You know the time of the call to the fire service, and the apparent seat of the blaze, based on the firefighters’ observations. We can’t tell you anything about the contents of this room.’

  ‘Yes, yes. So what is my objective? The cause of the fire? Mode of spread? Want me to comment on the accuracy of witness statements?’

  ‘The cause of the fire will do for now, thank you.’

  ‘Just so we’re clear. It would be very useful to examine photographs of the scene during the fire.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Downie looked up at her. ‘Try asking around the neighbours — someone may have taken photos or videos of the fire. It’s amazing how often the offender stays on to watch the fun.’

  ‘It’s already been done. Right now, I just need you to concentrate on your own job.’

  ‘OK. So … Locate seat of fire. Consider possible ignition sources. Excavate seat?’ Downie tilted his head to one side and looked at the charred remains around him. ‘Yes, I think so. Then take samples, formulate hypotheses. And report conclusion.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ said Fry.

  Downie was unpacking what looked like a series of pre-prepared forms. ‘You’ll get a location plan, as well as photographs as I excavate the seat of the fire. Samples will go straight to the lab.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘By the way, I examined the outside of the building before I came in. Do you know that you have unsooted broken glass in the vicinity of a side window?’

  Fry had been about to leave the room, but turned back. ‘What?’

  ‘A broken side window. I wondered if your people had noticed it already. There don’t seem to be any markers round there.’

  ‘A lot of these windows are broken,’ said Fry. ‘That’s the result of heat from the fire, surely?’

  Downie looked up and smiled. ‘If that were the case, the glass would be sooted on the interior surface. It isn’t, which implies it must have been broken either in the early stages of the fire — or before it started.’

  ‘You mean a point of entry?’

  ‘Could be. I took samples anyway. But you might want to get that window examined for fingerprints or tool marks before the evidence is compromised any further.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me my job.’

  Downie just sniffed, as if she wasn’t even worth a reply.

  Fry glared at the back of his head as he continued to lay out his equipment. Looking around for someone to give instructions to, she caught sight of the fire officer standing in the doorway, grinning.

  At that moment, her phone rang. It was the sergeant in charge of the search team.

  ‘I thought you’d want to know straightaway, we’ve found an empty lighter fluid can. It’s butane, but quite an unusual brand, I believe. It looks like someone found a use for a hundred millilitres of Swan Extra Refined recently.’

  ‘Where did you find it? How near the house?’

  ‘It had been chucked in a wheelie bin a hundred yards down the street, near the corner of Lilac Avenue. The householder says no one at this address smokes, and she has no idea how the can got in her bin. She insists it wasn’t there on Sunday when she last put some rubbish out.’

  ‘You’ve got it bagged properly?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Fry ended the call and turned back to Downie. ‘Show me this side window,’ she said.

  He sighed and stood up. Together, they made their way out of the house and into a side passage near the garage. Brian Mullen’s car still stood on the drive. It was a red Citroen, almost the same colour as the fire appliances that had surrounded it on Sunday night.

  ‘OK,’ sighed Downie. ‘Look, you have plumes of soot deposited on the exterior wall by smoke emitted from the window. But the broken glass on the ground beneath the window is unsooted. So, we can conclude that the fire didn’t touch this glass.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘Even from here, I can see tool marks on the window frame,’ said Downie. ‘You might care to check whether the firefighters obtained entry this way.’

  ‘They didn’t. They came in through the doors.’

  ‘Right.’ Downie turned to look at her. ‘Pity about the shoe impressions, though.’

  ‘What shoe impressions?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Fry looked at the ground where they were standing. It was a muddy mess, covered in crushed vegetation and trampled by size ten boots.

  ‘Shit.’

  Downie shrugged. ‘Think yourself lucky to get this much. The site of any fire is a challenge to the principles of crime-scene management.’

  ‘If the lab finds butane in your samples, it won’t be up to me any longer anyway, lucky or otherwise,’ said Fry. ‘It becomes a murder enquiry.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  Fry felt herself getting angry. ‘Three people died in this fire. The evidence mustn’t be compromised.’

  ‘I can assure you, Sergeant Fry, everything will be done by the book.’

  Fry looked at the rest of the houses in the street. A few neighbours were clustered outside the cordon. By the book, eh? That was all she needed, some civilian lecturing her about procedure. She knew what ‘by the book’ meant.

  She also knew the principles Downie was referring to: protect, record and recover. Crime-scene examiners said that contamination only really occurred after the scene had been preserved. Anything before that was normal procedure.

  But in this case, procedures had involved smashing down the doors and flooding the place with water, then sending in firefighters in big boots to trample the sodden evidence. Well, the principles still applied. As long as compromises were recorded and reasons given.

  ‘By the way,’ called Downie, passing the RV point on the way to his vehicle, ‘the usual advice is not to fit a smoke alarm in the kitchen. Steam and cooking fumes can set it off too easily. For a two-storey house like this, the bottom of the staircase is the best location, with a second one on the landing as an extra precaution.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to let Mr Mullen know,’ said Fry.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The householder. The husband of the dead woman, the father of the two dead children. He’s in hospital right now, but I’m sure he’ll be pleased to know that he installed the smoke alarm in the wrong place. I bet it’s the information he’s been waiting to hear.’

  Downie scowled, and seemed about to lose his temper. ‘I’m just doing my job,’ he snapped.

  ‘So you said.’

  She watched him stamp off in his scene suit, like an angry paper bag.

  It wasn’t much of a moral victory, though. Fry knew how much she relied on people like Downie following procedures to the letter. If she didn’t have a watertight chain of custody when evidence was presented in court, it could undermine the whole case.

  Now the scene was filling up with personnel. Scientific Support had allocated a couple of SOCOs, who’d waited for Downie to arrive from the lab at Chorley. And the two civilians she could see approaching the outer cordon looked as thoug
h they might be the insurance assessors. Great.

  Fry tried to look on the bright side. This would make a good impression on her next personal development review. It was real team work.

  Brian Mullen’s hands were still bandaged, and he fumbled a bit taking off the radio headphones when he saw his visitor coming. From the look on his face, Fry thought he was going to leap out of bed and make a run for it. The ward sister had said yesterday that he’d been so frightened he’d fought against being kept in hospital. But what was he frightened of? Not her, surely.

  ‘How are you getting on, Mr Mullen?’ she asked, pulling a chair up to the side of his bed.

  ‘Oh, not too bad,’ he said warily. ‘You’re the police, are you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Everyone’s been very good to me. A vicar came round. And there was a counsellor, to see if I needed help.’

  Now the pinkness in his cheeks had subsided, Mullen looked very pale. He had the sort of narrow, angular face and waxy skin that she’d only ever seen in Englishmen and some Scandinavians. His voice sounded hoarse from the effects of smoke inhalation, and he reached for a glass of water standing on the bedside cabinet. He had to hold the glass carefully between the tips of his fingers because the bandages got in the way.

  ‘I hope the hospital have managed to keep the press away, sir,’ said Fry.

  ‘The press? I never even thought about them.’ Mullen looked suddenly panicked. ‘You’ve got to talk to the doctors. Tell them they have to let me go home. I need to get out of here.’

  ‘You’re much better here for now, sir. You’ll be able to leave when you’re fit. Meanwhile, we need to talk to you about what happened at your house.’

  ‘I’ve already given a statement, you know.’

  ‘An initial statement, yes. But that was only the start of our enquiries. There are a lot more questions to be asked.’

  Mullen lay back on his pillows and sighed. ‘Oh God, I suppose it’s necessary.’

  ‘If we’re going to find out what happened, it is.’

  ‘Tell me something, though — is Luanne all right?’

  ‘Your daughter, sir?’

  ‘Yes. Is she safe?’

  ‘She’s with your in-laws. There’s no need to worry about her. Why shouldn’t she be safe?’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s only eighteen months old.’

  ‘A family liaison officer has been assigned. There’ll be support from Social Services, too, if it’s needed.’

  ‘Right.’

  Fry watched his bandaged hands twitching, his eyes roving anxiously around the room. She was puzzled by his reactions. But Brian Mullen was a victim right now, a bereaved relative. Protocol called for politeness and consideration. Perhaps she ought to have brought him some grapes.

  ‘Your daughter wasn’t in the house at the time of the fire, was she?’

  ‘No. Henry and Moira had been looking after her for a few days, to give us a bit of respite. Luanne wasn’t sleeping, you see. She was having us out of bed every couple of hours.’

  ‘I don’t have children myself, but isn’t eighteen months quite old to be still having that problem?’

  ‘It varies.’

  ‘Did your wife take anything to help her sleep, Mr Mullen?’

  ‘Well, she couldn’t when Luanne was in the house, obviously.’

  ‘But on Sunday?’

  ‘Yes, I think she might have done. A couple of pills, maybe.’

  ‘Any idea what she took?’

  He shook his head, and Fry decided to leave it for a while. She could easily get the information from Lindsay’s GP — or even from her bedside drawer.

  ‘As for you, I believe you’d been out for the evening?’

  ‘I won’t ever be able to forgive myself for that. I should have been there with my family. I could have saved them, couldn’t I?’

  ‘Probably not, Mr Mullen. You could have ended up a fatality yourself.’

  ‘I’ve been lying here thinking it would have been better if I had died with them. To have survived seems … well, it seems like a punishment somehow.’

  Fry nodded cautiously. Statements like this always sounded false to her. She couldn’t help thinking that Brian Mullen had been rehearsing the phrases in his head for maximum effect. But her instinct was sometimes wrong — there were people who had difficulty expressing the most genuine emotions in a convincing way. On the other hand, Mullen had also tried to divert her from her line of questioning.

  ‘Who were you out with that night, sir?’

  ‘Just some mates.’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  ‘Oh, my mate from work, Jed — Jed Skinner.’

  ‘And you arrived home at about one thirty a.m. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, I got the taxi driver to drop me off at the corner of Darwin Street. I’d already paid him off before I noticed anything wrong, and I didn’t realize what was happening at first. I saw the flashing lights from the fire engines. There weren’t really any flames then, you know. Just a lot of smoke. An awful lot of smoke.’

  ‘When did you realize it was your own house on fire?’

  ‘Not until I was almost there. Things looked so different with the lights and the smoke, and the hoses running across the road. It felt as though there ought to be a film crew somewhere. And all the neighbours were standing outside in their nightclothes. I was thinking, “Some poor bugger’s got a real problem there,” and wondering who it was. It didn’t seem possible that it was my house they were all looking at.’

  ‘I suppose you weren’t thinking too clearly at the time, either.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I expect you’d had a few drinks, hadn’t you, Mr Mullen?’

  The look on his face changed then. His colour went a deeper pink, his mouth twisted into a less relaxed shape. Fry tried her hardest to read his expression as guilt, but it looked more like petulance.

  ‘Yeah, a few.’

  ‘Which club had you been in, by the way?’

  ‘The Broken Wheel. There are only two places that stay open late in Edendale, and the other one is full of kids on drugs.’

  ‘All right. So when you finally realized it was your house on fire …?’

  ‘I looked around for Lindsay and the boys, obviously. There was a crowd of people gawping, and a copper trying to sort out the traffic. I couldn’t see my family anywhere.’

  ‘So you ran into the house?’

  ‘Yes …’ He hesitated. ‘No, not straightaway. I saw my neighbour, Keith Wade. I asked him where Lindsay was. He said he hadn’t seen her, or the boys either. Well, I knew from the way he said it, and the look on his face …’

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘That they were still in there.’

  Even Fry could detect a frisson of genuine emotion in Brian Mullen as he reached the next part of his story. A physical reaction was evident in the tightening of his mouth, the half-closed eyes, the sheen of sweat that appeared on his brow. Fear, yes — and a memory of pain, too.

  But, of course, he had been burned by the fire, as proved by his bandaged hands and the notes on his chart at the end of the bed. His breathing had been affected by smoke inhalation, but that was only evident in the hoarseness of his voice, and perhaps in a peculiar inability to vary the pitch of his speech. That might be why his words sounded almost mechanical and insincere. Just might be.

  ‘The firemen took no notice of me at first,’ he said. ‘They were too busy. But I could see some of them getting kitted out in masks and oxygen tanks — all that gear, you know.’

  ‘Breathing apparatus.’

  ‘That’s it. But they seemed to be doing everything so slowly. My house was burning, and my kids were in there, but these blokes were fiddling about with tubes and helmets. So I went in.’ Mullen stared at her defensively. ‘I knew my way about the house a lot better than anyone else. I knew exactly where Lindsay and the boys would be. So it made sense.’

  ‘Perhaps at th
e time it did,’ conceded Fry.

  He bridled at her tone. ‘I couldn’t stand there and do nothing.’

  ‘So how far did you get?’

  ‘Only to the stairs.’

  ‘Tell me about it, please.’

  Mullen subsided, wincing at the memory. ‘The stairs are straight off the hallway. I could find them easily, even in the dark. I ran in and got maybe half a dozen steps up. But then the smoke was so thick that I suddenly didn’t know which way I was going. It was in my eyes and in my throat, and I was trying to hold my breath, but I couldn’t. I started to feel dizzy. I went down on my knees. I wanted to carry on, I really did. But I only managed one more step.’

  ‘And then the firefighters caught up with you and pulled you back out of the house?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  Fry pointed at his hands. ‘What did you burn yourself on, Mr Mullen?’

  He looked at the bandages and frowned. ‘I’m not sure. I think it must have been the banister rail. That would have been the only thing I touched, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘With both hands?’

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’

  She let him think about that for a moment. ‘You didn’t go into any of the rooms downstairs? The sitting room, for example?’

  ‘No. Why would I? I knew my family would be upstairs, in the bedrooms.’

  ‘How could you be so sure of that, Mr Mullen?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, it was almost twenty to two in the morning. Where else would they be, except in bed?’

  ‘Your wife might have been waiting up for you to come home.’

  ‘No, she never did that.’

  ‘You see, the sitting room is where the fire is believed to have started. It must have been obvious when you entered the house that the smoke was coming from there.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, we agree that you weren’t thinking straight at the time, so perhaps your instinct might have been to go to the seat of the blaze and try to put it out. Or you might have feared that your wife was in the sitting room, and had started a fire in there accidentally.’

  ‘None of those things went through my mind,’ said Mullen. ‘I assumed they were upstairs. I had this picture in my head — ’