Her body lay exposed here for hours. The body that suffered pain and violation, that an unknown man wanted and decided to take against her will, the body that was then probed and dissected for evidence.
Yet even though her spirit has gone from here, perhaps some residue of his evil remains. Maybe he comes to sit on one of these benches next to the flowerbeds so he can relive his violent sexual actions again and again.
Is he the same man or has he, like the ground on which I’m standing, been reconstituted over the past quarter of a century from new and different materials?
Does he cherish his dreadful secret, or is he filled with guilt and remorse? If he was here now and I could look into his eyes, what would I see?
I’ve never believed that the truth can be glimpsed in a person’s eyes. How would that even happen? Would it be something physical, like eyes that dart away and refuse to meet yours? That’s rubbish, isn’t it? We go on believing in something like the mark of Cain and yet there were people who employed Fred West as a builder and thought him a good bloke. The truth is that we don’t recognise evil when we see it because, if we did, we’d know better than to end up with it in a park at night.
I grew up celebrating my birthday with presents and cake and candles, unaware that it was also the anniversary of Heather’s death. Is it just chance who is born and who dies? There are so many things that don’t make sense and that we hardly ever bother to think about. Birth and death, a terrible fire and a heroic rescue, good and evil, all happening at the same time. What’s the real story? How are these things connected? Are Heather and her killer, and the teenage fire-starters and their rescuer, all part of my life, or are such ideas about fate and destiny meaningless? But the fact remains that an unknown man took a life as mine began. I need to understand the true significance of that. I need to understand him.
I feel as if I’m setting off on a journey. Not jumping on a plane to a war zone or to report on an earthquake or a famine. Horror isn’t always as far away as you think it is, and I’m venturing into the dark heart of what happened here in this apparently tranquil English park. I’m leaving one world behind and entering another that looks exactly the same, but isn’t. I’m embarking on a voyage into the mind of a murderer.
I’m Freddie Craig. Thanks to all of you who have subscribed and are helping spread the word about Stories from the Fire.
9
The smell hit Grace as soon as she got out of her car. Acrid, sour, steamy. On one side of the undistinguished house where, when she had visited that morning, there had been a door and windows, there were now gaping black, soot-streaked, dripping holes. Trails of smoke curled up into the night air, lit by the garish lights of the three fire appliances parked in the yard. Men in thick boots, fluorescent jackets and helmets were still busy straightening out and rewinding hoses.
A figure emerged from the apparent chaos and came towards her. ‘Are you the duty DI?’ he asked.
‘Grace Fisher.’
‘I’m Paul Arningham, one of the fire investigation officers with the Essex brigade. Thanks for coming.’
All she could see of his face between the raised collar of his jacket and his protective helmet was a pair of dark eyes and cheeks streaked with soot and dirt.
‘What have you found?’ she asked. ‘Why do you need us?’
‘Two bodies,’ he said. ‘One upstairs in bed, the other downstairs. And I’m fairly certain the fire was started at two different sites. We’ll bring in a sniffer dog to check for accelerants as soon as it’s cooled down a bit, but by my reckoning it’s arson. That’s why you were called.’
‘I was here this morning,’ she said. ‘I spoke to Reece Nixon and his wife Kirsty. Is that who you’ve found?’
‘I’m told they’re the only people living here,’ he said, ‘but formal identification may take a little longer.’
‘Could it be suicide?’ Her heart thumped with dread that her mismanagement might have led to this.
‘That’s what his brother asked, too.’
‘His brother?’
‘He called the emergency services. Tried to get in and rescue them. He’s been taken to hospital with burns and possible smoke inhalation.’
‘Larry Nixon was here?’
‘That’s right.’ The fire investigation officer spoke with exaggerated patience.
‘Sorry,’ said Grace. ‘It’s a complicated situation.’
‘Arson generally is.’
‘Was he badly hurt?’
‘Looked like he opened the door and got hit by a backdraught.’
‘I’ll get someone over to the hospital to take a statement.’ She looked at her watch: it was after midnight, so she’d have to send whomever was on duty.
Arningham waited while she connected to the MIT office. ‘Want me to walk you round the perimeter?’ he asked, as she finished the call.
‘Yes, please.’
He took her over to his van and kitted her out with protective clothing. The boots were far too big for her, but he insisted.
‘I won’t take you inside. You can come back tomorrow once we’ve got forensic boards down. Tonight we’ll make it secure and get the bodies moved.’
‘Did anyone else call it in?’ she asked. She peered into the blackness beyond the lights of the various vehicles, dimly remembering that the house and yard, up a small lane and surrounded by gardens and a couple of scrubby paddocks, had no close neighbours. ‘There must have been quite a blaze. Someone must have seen it.’
‘Any calls made will be recorded,’ he said, ‘but I’m pretty certain that the brother’s was the first.’ He took her round to a back door that led into the kitchen. Pushing it open, he shone the beam of a powerful torch inside. Apart from a trail of footprints across the floor, the room looked miraculously untouched by the fire. He directed the light onto a counter top. ‘Can you see what that is?’
‘No.’
‘Smoke alarm battery. Still in its packaging.’
‘Oh.’
Returning round the side of the house, Grace could hear glass cracking under her oversized boots. Arningham shone the light upwards, illuminating the charred rim of an upstairs window frame above the kitchen. Water dripped down from the blackened guttering and broken roof tiles and wisps of greasy-looking smoke dribbled out into the cold night air.
‘Bedroom,’ he said. ‘A body we assume is either Reece or Kirsty Nixon is up there in what remains of the bed.’
‘How can that room be so badly burnt when the room below is untouched?’ she asked.
‘My theory is that whoever set the fire closed most of the internal doors, but left other doors and windows open so that the passage of air would draw the fire up like a blowtorch.’
‘So the bedroom was deliberately targeted?’ asked Grace.
Arningham nodded. ‘Looks like it.’
‘We’ll get a full forensic post-mortem,’ she said, ‘but what’s your opinion? Do you think a pathologist needs to examine the bodies in situ?’
He shook his head. ‘No. We’ll take plenty of video and can answer any queries that get thrown up.’
‘OK. But at this stage, it’s possible that either Kirsty or Reece Nixon could have set the fire?’
‘The brother seemed to think it would be Reece. They spoke on the phone beforehand, apparently.’
Grace filed the information to consider later: right now, there was too much to take in.
Arningham moved forward to a cavernous opening in the side of the house where the smell of smoke was strongest. She could feel the heat still pulsating off the fabric of the building and tried to breathe as shallowly as possible, not wanting the fetid chemical tang of the fire to penetrate her lungs.
‘Ready?’ he asked.
She nodded, but still yelped when his torch picked out the shape of a human figure lying curled up on the floor among the scorched and melted remains of an ordinary living room.
‘People always think they bunch up like that to protect themselves,�
� he said, ‘but it’s actually the muscles stiffening and contracting.’
‘I had been told that,’ she said, taking a deep breath despite herself, ‘but it’s still a shock when you see it. So you don’t know for sure whether that’s Reece Nixon?’
‘Not until the pathologist confirms it. Should be able to get blood or a muscle sample for DNA.’
To her relief Arningham swung the torch beam away from the body and around the rest of the blackened devastation, picking out piles of debris where the ceiling had collapsed. ‘All the furnishings simply combusted once the fire reached flashover point. Combustion creates enormous heat, but doesn’t last long, except it blew the window out, creating a fresh source of oxygen to feed the fire. It was the same upstairs. It’s not safe to take you inside yet, but the stairwell has burned and the backs of the closed doors are charred while the rest of the house is relatively undamaged.’
‘So the aim wasn’t to destroy the house so much as to kill the two people in it?’
‘We’ll sift through everything tomorrow,’ he said. ‘People imagine that fire destroys evidence, and it often does. What it also does is create evidence of how it started.’
Grace nodded, wondering if this grim scene was Reece’s confession – or his wife’s retribution – and, if so, how was she going to tell Monica Bowyer that they’d so narrowly lost the chance to question Heather’s killer and learn enough to answer her most basic questions?
Was this her fault? Had she bungled it? She’d had no grounds to take Reece Nixon into custody, but should she have placed him under surveillance, or spent longer talking to him and his wife? Had Kirsty known all these years what her husband had done – was that why she, too, was dead? And, if Reece was a serial rapist as well as a murderer, what crucial evidence of those other crimes had also gone up in flames?
10
Detective Constable Carolyn Bromfield was waiting for Grace at the entrance to the Accident & Emergency Department. She was young, and had been transferred from the Domestic Violence Unit to the MIT as cover for Duncan while he was on honeymoon, which was very likely why she’d drawn the short straw and was on night duty. Delicately featured, with blue eyes and dyed and straightened blonde hair, she was dressed in a carefully chosen outfit of tight black jeans and ankle boots, a short black leather jacket and a see-through white lace blouse. It was well after one in the morning, yet her make-up looked recently retouched. Carolyn had only been on the Major Investigation Team a week, but Grace was already finding her eagerness to demonstrate how much she wanted to stay a little trying.
‘Larry Nixon has burns to his face, arms and hands,’ the younger woman told Grace as she led the way to a curtained cubicle. ‘Not deep, thankfully. He won’t need skin grafts or anything. The medical staff have just finished with him.’
‘What did he say about the fire?’ asked Grace. ‘Why was he there?’
‘He said his brother Reece had phoned him and sounded upset. He was worried that Reece was about to do something stupid, but when he got there it was too late, the fire was already raging.’
‘The fire investigation officer is pretty certain it was arson, which makes this a homicide investigation,’ said Grace, ‘so we need to tread carefully.’
She took a deep breath before stepping around the blue curtain. A man in a hospital gown, his legs bare except for black socks, sat propped up on an examination couch. His face was red and blistered and his hair and eyebrows were singed. Both of his arms and the backs of his hands were covered in dressings and bandages. ‘Mr Nixon?’
Larry Nixon nodded.
‘I’m DI Grace Fisher. We spoke on the phone yesterday.’
‘Only a few hours ago,’ he said.
‘That’s right. How are you feeling? Are you up to talking?’
‘I’m not too bad. They’ve given me some painkillers.’
‘The fire investigation officer said you were trying to get into the house.’
‘Was Reece in there?’ he asked anxiously. ‘What about Kirsty? Does anyone know where she is?’
‘I’m very sorry, but they found two bodies in the house.’
Larry groaned and raised a bandaged arm to hide his face. ‘He was only fifty,’ he said in a hoarse voice.
‘Do you think you could take me through the events of the evening?’ she asked.
Larry shook his head slowly and, lowering his arm, gave a long sigh. ‘They’re both dead?’
‘They’ve yet to be formally identified.’
‘What about their kids, my niece and nephew? Has anyone told them? They’re in their twenties and I don’t know where they’re living right now.’
‘We’ll make sure they’re informed,’ said Grace, wondering how much of the background to these events she would have to explain to them.
‘And I’m pretty certain Kirsty’s mum used to live here in Colchester.’
‘Please don’t worry, Mr Nixon. It’ll all be taken care of.’
The man was clearly in a state of shock, but Grace was on tenterhooks to hear how Reece Nixon’s death related to her request for a DNA sample. ‘You said your brother telephoned you?’
‘Yes, I can’t believe it. Can’t believe what he told me.’ Larry seemed to rally himself, trying to order his thoughts and recall events more clearly. ‘I think it was around eight o’clock. He’d called earlier in the day, as I said when you and I spoke, to tell me you’d been to see him, so I was surprised that he called a second time. We’re not particularly close. We don’t speak very often.’
‘So what did he want?’
Larry heaved another deep sigh and hung his head again. ‘He sounded pretty drunk.’
‘But he wanted to talk to you?’ she prompted.
Larry nodded. ‘He said it was him. The man you’re looking for. This cold case you’re investigating.’
‘What exactly did he say? Can you remember?’
‘A woman. He killed a woman. Years ago. Had sex with her, too. Said you’d be coming back for him and he couldn’t face it.’
‘Did he threaten suicide?’ asked Grace.
‘Not in so many words,’ said Larry, ‘but after he hung up I just had a feeling. So I called back, but then he wouldn’t pick up. I kept trying and trying and then decided I had to get over there. I was too late. The fire was too much. I couldn’t get in.’
‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ Grace said helplessly. She caught Carolyn looking at her expectantly, her eyes shining with the drama of the situation. The junior officer’s reaction irked her, although she didn’t really know why it should – a confession, a murder-suicide, a fire, a cold case solved, this was a dramatic situation – but she wished Blake had been on duty tonight instead. She wanted to ask him if they’d failed to pick up any warning signs. Reece had been nervous, certainly, but she didn’t think he’d seemed agitated enough to do something so desperate. And why a fire? Why inflict such a death on either himself or his wife?
If Reece Nixon had raped and murdered Heather Bowyer – and perhaps raped other women, too – then few would see his death as a tragedy. Yet, even though Paul Arningham had explained that the curled arrangement of the body on the floor was solely due to the effects of the fire, Grace couldn’t help feeling a stab of sympathy, given the impression of vulnerability it had left her with, and was thankful she hadn’t been allowed to go up and view the other human remains in the bed upstairs.
Larry reached out for a plastic cup of water on the stand beside him, but, as he drank from it, it slipped through his injured fingers. He rubbed awkwardly with his elbow at where the water had soaked his hospital gown.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said as Carolyn went to his aid, fussing with paper towels from a dispenser on the wall. ‘Doesn’t matter. My dad’s on his way over with some clean things. He’ll be here any moment.’
Grace bent to retrieve the plastic cup. Turning her back, some instinct made her wrap it in a clean paper towel and slip it into her bag. As she straightened up she met the
gaze of an elderly man standing in the curtained opening to the cubicle, a sports bag in one hand. He looked vigorous for his age and bore a striking resemblance to Reece, although his face was harsh and unyielding in a way that Reece’s had not been.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded.
‘Detective Inspector Grace Fisher, Essex Major Investigation Team. And you are?’
‘Owen Nixon.’ He nodded at Larry. ‘His father.’
‘I’m very sorry for the loss of your son and daughter-in-law.’
‘So Reece is dead, is he?’
‘We’ll carry out tests tomorrow to confirm the identity of the two bodies.’
Owen Nixon’s gaze dropped to her bag where she had concealed the paper cup and then back to meet her eyes, although he made no comment and his expression did not change. He placed the sports bag on the floor beside the bed. ‘You all right?’ he asked his surviving son.
‘Looks worse than it is,’ said Larry.
‘So you explained to them what happened? All this nonsense about what Reece told you?’
Larry appealed to Grace. ‘You know more about it than I do.’
‘We’re investigating an unsolved murder from twenty-five years ago,’ she said, ‘and this morning we visited Reece to request a DNA sample for elimination purposes. Until we get the results of our tests I’m afraid there’s not much more I can tell you.’
‘But you must have new evidence if you’re opening an old case back up again?’
Wrong Way Home: Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month Page 4