After the Fire (Maeve Kerrigan)

by Casey, Jane

  Derwent nodded. ‘Well, I have been thinking about it. And if you see any of the little shitbags who scared you, I want to know about it.’

  ‘Forget it,’ I said lightly. ‘I have.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not convincing.’

  ‘I’ll have to try harder.’

  ‘You do that.’ He stepped back and let me walk ahead of him. ‘Don’t worry, Kerrigan. I’ll be right behind you.’

  It was typical of Derwent that it sounded more like a threat than reassurance. I hunched my shoulders against the prickling unease that made me want to run away and stalked into the Maudling Estate ahead of him, hoping I looked as if I didn’t know what fear was.

  The first person I saw was Una Burt, deep in conversation with two men. One wore the black and yellow London Fire Brigade uniform. He carried a yellow helmet in one hand and sweat had plastered his hair to his head. He was middle-aged, obviously senior and just as obviously fed up to be talking to Una Burt. I could imagine he had more important things to do with his time, like managing the teams of firefighters who were swarming through the building. The other man was in a blue boiler suit with Fire Investigation written across the back and had a white hard hat on his head. Burt was nodding as he spoke. She glanced over his shoulder and noticed us. To say she looked pleased would be an exaggeration but she beckoned us over. The senior firefighter took the opportunity to disappear while Burt was distracted.

  ‘Here are two more of my team, at last. DI Josh Derwent, DC Maeve Kerrigan, this is Andrew Harper, the fire investigator.’

  Harper was tall, with very blue eyes under his white hard hat and a weathered complexion. He nodded to us, then turned back to Una Burt.

  ‘So I can’t take you up to the affected areas yet – it’s too hot and the structure could be unstable. The firefighters are still damping the building down in case the fire flares up again, and the rescue operation hasn’t officially ended. It’s too risky to have any untrained personnel up there, for everyone’s sake.’

  ‘I understand that. Let us know when you can show us the scenes. As soon as possible, obviously.’

  ‘Do we know if it was an accident or deliberate?’ Derwent asked.

  ‘Not yet. I’ll need to speak to the survivors. It could have been accidental.’ He sounded slightly dubious, though, and Derwent pounced.

  ‘But your instinct says it was deliberate.’

  ‘I don’t rely on instinct. I’ll do a thorough investigation and go from there.’ Harper had a slow way of speaking, measured and unflappable, like an air-traffic controller. It was impossible to imagine him losing his temper, even with Derwent. ‘But I will say this. There are two stairwells in these towers, one on the outside of the building largely enclosed in concrete and one inside, running up the centre of the tower by the lift shafts. It seems the fire started on the tenth floor. It blocked off access to the external stairwell. The lifts were both out of order. The residents only had one way out, and that was the internal stairwell which was basically acting as a chimney. It was full of smoke and hot air. Anyone who escaped this fire from the tenth or the eleventh floor got very lucky indeed.’

  ‘So if it was deliberate,’ I said, ‘it was meant to kill.’

  ‘If it was.’ Harper tilted his head back to look up. ‘I’m going to have a look at how they’re getting on up there. The sooner I can get in and get started, the better.’

  ‘You can come with me,’ Una Burt said to us. ‘The one good thing about this investigation is that we have access to one of the bodies already, since Mr Armstrong was kind enough to meet his end outside the tower block.’

  ‘How?’ I asked, hurrying to follow her as she barrelled through the crowds surrounding the cordon near the tower.

  ‘Fell, jumped, pushed. Take your pick.’ She ducked under the tape and carried on around the side of the building, through a gate, to an area that was obviously where the residents’ rubbish ended up. Huge red and blue wheelie bins filled a yard where the ground was disturbingly slick under foot. Half of the bins were so full the plastic lids wouldn’t close properly. The place smelled strongly of rotting food and dirty nappies.

  In one corner, a familiar figure was standing on a step ladder, taking a photograph of the top of a bin with exquisite care. Arc lights shone on the scene, and a few other people, anonymous in hooded white suits, stood around waiting for the photographer to finish. Kev Cox lowered the camera and began to climb down, stocky in his white overalls but sure-footed.

  ‘Hi, Maeve.’ He waved at me. ‘This is a bit of fun, isn’t it?’

  ‘If you say so.’ I was staring at the shattered figure draped over the bin, the body twisted and broken by the fall. The bin lid had splintered from the impact. He was soaked in blood, his head tipped back and misshapen where the back of it had split open. His eye sockets were distorted, his nose and jaw askew. It was hard to work back to how he might have looked in life. In death, he resembled something that had stepped out of a medieval painting of hell.

  ‘Is that Armstrong?’ Derwent asked.

  One of the white-suited figures stepped forward, pushed the hood back and revealed itself to be the pathologist, Dr Early. She had met Derwent before, and looked appropriately wary. ‘We don’t have a formal ID yet. To be honest, the level of damage means it’s hard to say for certain just on visuals. We’ll check the dental records, or fingerprints if they’re on file. We should be able to get a sample of his DNA quite easily from his home so we can double-check it.’

  ‘So why do you think it’s him?’

  She blushed but held her own. ‘Because there was an anonymous tip-off that he was in the flats. Someone phoned 999 and mentioned him specifically. He was on the tenth floor, they said, but they didn’t give a flat number. The firefighters didn’t find him until one of them looked out of a window.’

  Derwent pointed at the ladder. ‘Can I take a look?’

  ‘Be my guest. But don’t touch him.’

  That earned the pathologist a glare. Derwent climbed up so he was looking down on the body. It was clad in grey suit trousers and a shirt that had once been white. There was a shoe on the left foot, but the right had a torn sock on it. There was something particularly pathetic about the pale foot sticking out over the edge of the bin. It looked undignified and vulnerable. Derwent leaned in, peering intently.

  ‘What do you think?’ Una Burt demanded.

  ‘Could be him. Could be someone else.’ Derwent straightened, his phone in his hand. ‘No wallet?’

  ‘No wallet,’ the pathologist confirmed. ‘No ID. Two hundred pounds in twenties in his back pocket.’

  ‘If robbery was a motive for killing him – if his wallet was stolen and he was pushed out of the building – they’d have taken the cash as well,’ Derwent said, tapping at his phone.

  ‘If they knew about it,’ I pointed out. ‘You might assume all the money was in his wallet, if you found that first.’

  ‘Or his wallet could have been stolen after he fell,’ Burt said.

  ‘But what about the two hundred quid?’

  ‘It was … messy.’ Dr Early wrinkled her nose. ‘I don’t think you’d have gone looking for it in his back pocket. And even if you found it, you wouldn’t have taken it. The notes are saturated.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Una Burt asked Derwent, who was still concentrating on his phone.

  Please don’t say you’re checking Tinder, I thought. For my sake and yours, don’t wind her up.

  ‘Looking for a picture of Armstrong.’ Derwent jumped down and held out the phone. ‘He’s not looking quite as smart now, but that’s the same watch.’

  It was a heavy gold watch with a brown leather strap. The glass had shattered in the fall, but it was recognisably the watch in the photograph Derwent had found. Armstrong was grinning, his face shiny in the camera flash. He looked sleek and well fed and oblivious to his fate.

  ‘Car keys? Phone?’ I asked.

  ‘We found a BMW key fob here.’ Dr Early pointe
d to a marker a few feet away from the bin. ‘It could have fallen out of his pocket on the way down.’

  ‘I’ve run him through the PNC,’ Una Burt said. ‘He’s the registered owner of a 7 Series BMW saloon. I’ve circulated the details. If it’s parked near here, we’ll find it.’

  Derwent frowned. ‘You’ve checked the car park.’

  ‘No.’ She waited a beat so he could jump to the wrong conclusion, then gave him a tight little smile. ‘I told someone else to check it. No 7 Series BMWs. No BMWs at all.’

  ‘This wasn’t an official visit,’ I said. ‘He was trying to fly below the radar. Let’s say he wasn’t robbed. Let’s say he chose to jump. He got rid of his ID if he was carrying any. And he dumped his phone.’

  ‘Or it’s upstairs in the flat along with his ID,’ Derwent said.

  ‘I’ll tell the firefighters to keep their eyes peeled for his personal effects,’ Burt said, as if she was in charge of them too. ‘We can have a look when it’s safe for the SOCOs to go in. At the moment we don’t even know which flat he was in before he jumped. I’d like to know that. I think it would help a lot.’

  ‘I know a trick or two about that,’ Kev Cox said amiably. ‘We can work back from here and trace the route he took down the side of the building.’

  ‘How?’ Burt asked.

  ‘When you fall out of a building, even if you jump, it’s hard to get completely clear.’ Kev nodded at the body. ‘The reason he looks so battered is because he bounced off the concrete a few times on the way down. If we have a good look on the balconies and protruding detailing, we should find his blood and fragments of skin or bits of muscle. I’ll get a couple of lads to abseil down the side and we’ll work out where he started off.’

  ‘Lovely.’ Una Burt’s face was pale. I fought another wave of nausea, tipping my head back to look up at the building as if I was interested in seeing the blood trail. The air was full of smoke, and even though the night was cold the smell from the bins was, briefly, overwhelming. I stepped back, away from the crowd of people around Armstrong’s body, into the shadows. It was a long way from the tenth floor to the ground. I imagined him deciding to jump, choosing what he took with him. Hiding as much as he could about what he had been doing there. Keeping secrets, even in death.

  I didn’t think we’d find ID and his phone in the flat. I didn’t think he was that stupid.

  I walked away from the building towards the other side of the yard, staying in line with the bin where the body had landed. A spindly hedge grew there, along the boundary between the estate and the neighbouring industrial units. The fence behind it was metal and topped with spikes. I pulled on a pair of blue gloves and took out my torch. Crouching, I moved along the boundary, searching for a flash of metal or a glint of glass.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Una Burt was right behind me.

  ‘If he jumped, I think he threw his phone away first.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t imagine him going anywhere without a phone, can you? He’d have needed it to keep in touch with whatever was going on at Westminster, especially if he wasn’t supposed to be here. You can’t be uncontactable in his position. He came here with cash and his car key. Maybe he had his wallet – maybe not. But the phone would have given him away.’

  ‘It could have been stolen too.’

  Something on the edge of the torch’s beam flashed a reflection. It was on the other side of the fence. The casing for an iPhone. I looked further, seeing the screen, electronic components, all shattered and scattered across a wide area.

  ‘Kev?’

  He came trotting across.

  ‘Can you send someone to collect this phone and all the bits? In case they belong to our guy?’

  ‘Will do.’ He nudged my shoulder with a knee. ‘Good thinking.’

  ‘I learned from the best.’ I straightened. ‘Make sure they look for the SIM card. It might not be with the rest of the phone. He might have disposed of it separately.’

  ‘If it’s here, we’ll find it.’ Kev hurried back to the body, his suit rustling.

  ‘He was about to die,’ Una Burt said. ‘He would have known he couldn’t survive the fall. Do you really think he was that concerned about keeping a secret?’

  ‘I do. He was so concerned about it, he was prepared to die for it.’

  ‘So we’d better find out what it was.’

  I nodded. ‘As soon as we can.’

  Chapter 3

  IT WAS A long, cold wait until the firefighters were prepared to allow us into Murchison House. I stood in the car park, huddled in my coat, trying not to scan the crowd for the faces of the boys who’d attacked me on my previous visit. They probably wouldn’t recognise me again, not with my hair tied back and a police jacket in place of the long overcoat I’d been wearing the last time. I thought I’d remember them, though. I thought I might remember them for ever.

  The other thing I was trying not to think about was the person who I had to assume was watching me, the man who had inserted himself into my nightmares: Chris Swain. He was in my thoughts in public places and wherever I called home. He’d shown me he could reach me anywhere, even if I tried to hide. He’d taught me there was no such thing as privacy. He’d made me aware that safety was an illusion. He’d promised me a visit, two months earlier, because my boyfriend had disappeared and I was on my own. I was still waiting. I knew he’d come.

  A promise was a promise.

  ‘Do you think he’s watching?’

  The question echoed my thoughts so closely that I jumped. ‘Who?’

  ‘The person who set the fire.’ Liv Bowen frowned at me. ‘Who else?’

  ‘No one.’ I nodded to where Mal Upton was standing with a video camera, unobtrusively filming the people who were still watching, still enthralled, even though it was two in the morning. ‘If there’s an arsonist here, we’ll get him on film.’

  ‘With any luck.’ Liv looked up at the towers that loomed over us. ‘Too many places to hide, though. You’d get a good view from any of these. If he’s watching he doesn’t need to show himself.’

  ‘From what I understand that’s part of the fun. They like to get as close as possible. Smell the smoke. See the bodies.’

  Liv shuddered. She was pale and thinner than usual, not quite back to her old self, even if she was finally at work after extensive sick leave. Her hair was neatly plaited, her coat immaculate. She looked as if she was in control, but there was something different about her – a fragility that hadn’t been there before. I recognised it like an old friend: fear.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Are you? You look like death warmed over.’

  ‘To think I missed you.’ I shook my head.

  She handed me a steaming cup of tea. ‘I thought you might need this.’

  ‘And all is forgiven.’ I held the cup in both hands, warming them. ‘Seriously, this isn’t too much for you, is it?’

  ‘Not so far.’ She put a hand to her stomach. It was a habit with her now, I’d noticed, whenever she thought about the knife wound that had almost ended her life, not to mention her career. When she felt threatened. When she felt uneasy. It was quite a giveaway, once you knew what it meant – a tell, the gamblers called it. I’d been meaning to mention it to her. In our job, giving information away could be a liability.

  But when her confidence was so fragile, criticising her felt wrong. It felt like the kind of thing Derwent would do.

  Derwent would say it was for her own good, that a weak member of the team put us all in danger. Derwent would say she should find a job in a quieter part of the Met – missing persons, maybe, or working on cold cases. Fraud. Following paper trails, not killers. And it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe, if the biggest hazard you faced every day was a paper cut.

  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 w
as 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.