After the Fire (Maeve Kerrigan)

by Casey, Jane

  I looked for Derwent in the crowd and found him almost immediately. He took up a lot of space, somehow, and it wasn’t that he was tall or broad-shouldered, although he was both. Even where people were gathered close together, he stood apart. Instinctively, everyone around him gave him plenty of room. Maybe it was the scowl that put people off standing near him, or some subliminal awareness of the rage that burned within him. He was alone, as he tended to be these days. No one on the team could have failed to notice that Una Burt had it in for him. Being too friendly with Derwent was a bad career move.

  I was never going to be friends with him, but I couldn’t stand to see him on his own.

  ‘He’s got his brooding face on,’ I said. ‘I’d better see if he wants me to do anything.’

  Liv grinned. ‘You complain about him but you love him really.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Yeah, you do.’

  I shook my head at her but I was smiling as I went over to him. The past two months had been crushingly dull, even though I’d been busier than ever before. Una Burt had made sure I did more than my share of legwork, the routine inquiries that involved endless phone calls and knocking on doors. My colleagues had been pleasant, considerate and professional; three words I’d never applied to Derwent. But there was something bracing about working with him, in spite of the stroppiness and the sulking. There weren’t many people who could make you feel as if you’d launched yourself down a set of rapids just by saying hello.

  ‘Hi.’ I made myself sound chirpy. Derwent reacted to chirpiness the way most people reacted to stinging nettles. I got a grunt in response.

  I cast about for a neutral subject. ‘Cold, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s the middle of the night and it’s November. It should be cold. Where did you get that?’ He was eyeing my tea.

  ‘Liv gave it to me.’

  He took the cup out of my hand. ‘She must have meant it for me.’

  ‘I wasn’t drinking it anyway.’

  Derwent’s eyebrows twitched together. ‘Gone off it?’

  ‘No. Too weak for me.’

  He tasted it. ‘Just right. What do you want?’

  I blinked. ‘Nothing, really.’

  ‘Then go away.’

  Even for Derwent, that was rude. I held my ground. ‘What’s going on?’

  He wouldn’t look at me. ‘You’re still here.’

  ‘Sorry, did I do something wrong? You weren’t behaving like this in the car.’

  ‘I’ve been having a think about a few things, that’s all.’ He took another mouthful of tea. ‘Any sign of your little scumbags?’

  ‘No.’ I wasn’t going to tell Derwent that I hadn’t even looked for them.

  ‘Maeve. Sir.’ Liv was hurrying towards us. ‘The fire investigator is ready to show us the crime scenes. He says we’ll need boots. It’s mucky up there.’

  ‘Ten flights of stairs.’ Derwent shook his head. ‘Onwards and upwards, Kerrigan. After you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, surprised that he was being a gentleman.

  ‘Don’t thank me. I’m just making sure I’ve got something nice to look at on the way.’

  Chapter 4

  ‘WATCH YOUR STEP.’ Andrew Harper was waiting by the top of the outside stairs on the tenth floor. ‘The surfaces are slippery up here and there’s a lot of debris on the ground.’

  In front of me, DS Chris Pettifer was wheezing like a broken accordion. He and Una Burt had set the pace, which was not as quick as I would have liked it to be given that Derwent’s face was a few inches from my bottom most of the way. Every time I glanced back, I got a leer from him. Eventually, I stopped glancing back.

  There were eight of us from the murder team, all officers I’d worked with before. We followed Harper from the cold, draughty staircase into the corridor, which was still hot and smelled strongly of burning. It was humid, like a sauna, and the ground was covered in wet ashes that were sticky underfoot.

  Harper stopped, letting us gather around him and the senior firefighter I’d seen talking to Una Burt earlier. He introduced himself as Gary Northbridge. He looked more tired than he had in the car park, and defensive. I assumed that fatal fires generated more hassle and paperwork than I could imagine.

  ‘Okay, we’ll be drawing up proper plans of the building for your reference, but here’s what you need to know,’ Harper said. ‘There are ten flats on each floor, four on the left and six on the right. We have eight occupied flats on this floor, but two of them were empty at the time of the fire – the residents were still at work. The residents on the left side of the corridor who were present at the time of the fire had enough warning to evacuate. The left side is also where the internal stairwell and the lifts are accessed, which is why there are fewer flats on this side. On the other side we have six flats, two of which are not in use at the moment according to the management. Some are in private hands but most are council-owned. The flats are not numbered consecutively throughout the building – numbering restarts on each floor. So flat 101 is here on the right, opposite flat 107.’

  ‘That caused some problems for the fire crews,’ Northbridge said. ‘They knew there was a vulnerable person in 104 but they had to find the flat before they could find her.’

  ‘Is she one of the fatalities?’ I asked.

  ‘Not so far. She was taken to hospital. We have sixteen in hospital at the moment, mainly with smoke inhalation, minor injuries, a couple of broken bones, one with serious burns. I can’t tell you who they are or where they lived yet, but we’re working on it. A few of them were unconscious or confused when we picked them up, so we don’t have a name for everyone.’

  ‘More injuries than I’d have expected,’ Derwent said. ‘Sounds more like a fight than a fire.’

  ‘That happens in serious fires,’ Northbridge said. ‘It’s not just the smoke and the flames you have to worry about. Crush injuries and falls kill just as many people.’

  ‘Where were the bodies?’ Pete Belcott asked. He was abrupt, as usual. Charm was not one of his qualities.

  ‘There were two fatalities up in 113 on the next floor, and your gentleman outside.’

  ‘So everyone else escaped from this floor.’

  ‘They escaped or they were rescued by firefighters,’ Northbridge said. ‘We had a 999 call from flat 101. There were two adults and two children. They were advised to make their way to the internal stairwell and progress down if it was safe to do so. That is where they were located when the first crews came in.’

  ‘Was that the first call you had about the fire?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s what our records indicate,’ Northbridge said.

  ‘So they were the first people to notice the fire. Did it start in their flat? Or nearby?’

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ Harper said. ‘It’s possible. The level of damage along this side of the building is considerable. It will take some time to work out where the fire began and how.’

  ‘So it could have been an accident,’ Belcott said, and I could see from the look on his face that he was losing interest.

  ‘It could have been an accident. It could have been arson,’ Harper replied patiently.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Una Burt asked.

  ‘With this level of damage we can tell that the fire burned extremely hot and it took hold very quickly. That makes me suspicious. Fires that begin accidentally often start slowly, then gather pace as they increase in size. This was overwhelming in minutes. It generated a lot of smoke that seeped into the corridor and vented itself via the outside stairwell, effectively making it unusable for the people on this floor and the floor above. The fire burned through into flat 101, where it caused a great deal of damage in the kitchen and one bedroom.’

  Harper led us through the front door into the flat. Everything inside it was blackened by smoke and the carpet felt squelchy underfoot. Nothing looked salvageable. I could make out metal-framed shapes that had once been a sofa and a couple of armchairs, an
d the television was still recognisable, but the rest of the furnishings were essentially gone. A cut-glass chandelier still hung from the ceiling, incongruous in those surroundings anyway but doubly so when it was streaked with dirty water. The residents had cared about their home, I thought. The fire would be devastating for them in every way, not just the material loss.

  ‘The internal doors were closed, initially, which was lucky,’ Northbridge said. ‘One of the children opened the bedroom door and discovered the blaze.’

  There were scorch marks around the door and across the ceiling.

  ‘These are from the flashover that occurred when the door was opened,’ Harper said, playing his torch over them. ‘Fire is hungry. It needs oxygen. Any firefighter will tell you not to open a hot door. The little girl didn’t know any better. They were lucky the grandmother was nearby and managed to get the door closed before the fire could take hold out here. She gave the child first aid while the dad was on the phone to 999. That call came in at 17.36.’

  ‘Hold on. Shouldn’t there have been a smoke alarm in the flat?’ Una Burt asked.

  ‘It wasn’t working.’

  ‘What about in the hall?’

  ‘It was vandalised.’ Northbridge pulled a face. ‘Not all that unusual here. The alarms are linked to a main control centre in the estate’s management office and they’re supposed to inform us straight away when one of the alarms goes off-line, as well as getting it repaired.’

  ‘But they didn’t,’ I said quietly.

  ‘It happened this morning. No one got around to fixing it before this afternoon.’ Northbridge shook his head. ‘If everyone didn’t persist in thinking fire regulations are just there to annoy them, my job would be a lot easier.’

  ‘The real problem with this fire,’ Harper said, leading us out of flat 101 into the next-door property, ‘was the smoke. We had a lot of thick, black smoke and it made it very difficult for the residents to make their way to the exits safely. I gather there was a lot of confusion. The call-centre operators in our command centre encouraged people to use their own judgement about whether it was safer to remain where they were or risk making an attempt to escape.’

  Flat 102 was significantly smaller than its neighbour, but it was just as thoroughly destroyed. I nudged a jumble of wires and melted plastic with the toe of my boot. ‘How did the fire pass into this flat from next door?’

  ‘There’s a ventilation system running overhead. The hot air and smoke from the fire spread through the pipes. It was hot enough to ignite materials wherever it found an outlet.’ Harper smiled. ‘You shouldn’t assume the fire started in flat 101. The ventilation system could just as easily have passed it the other way.’

  ‘Who lived here?’ Derwent asked.

  Northbridge checked his notes. ‘It’s registered to a Mrs Edmonds. Someone made a 999 call from here at 17.37, saying that her flat and the corridor were full of smoke, but she broke off contact with the operator almost immediately. She said she was planning to use the internal staircase to escape.’

  ‘Did she say anything else?’ I asked.

  ‘She said she was scared.’

  There was a short silence and then Harper guided us back out to the corridor, to flat 103. ‘Now this is where it gets interesting. The fire went up from 102 to 113 on the floor above via the ventilation system. It caused significant damage. We’ve found two bodies up there. No ID on them yet. This flat, 103, was supposed to be empty. But when the firefighters got here, the door was open. All of the windows were open, not broken. Someone was here, and that person was desperately trying to get air. Smoke doesn’t just kill through suffocation. People start making bad decisions. They can become illogical or uncoordinated.’

  He led us through the flat, which was empty apart from debris from the ceiling and walls. ‘This was a bedroom and that was a bed.’

  ‘How can you tell?’ Liv sounded confused and I flashed her a smile. I couldn’t see it either in the rubble of charred planks and ashes that filled the small room.

  Harper crouched and dug in the rubbish on the floor. ‘This is a wire spring,’ he said, holding it up in a gloved hand. ‘It’s likely to have been from a mattress.’

  ‘So there was a bed in the uninhabited flat, and someone who opened the windows.’ Derwent headed to the bedroom window and looked down. ‘Are you thinking of Armstrong?’

  ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘His body was a bit to the left of this window.’ Derwent was leaning out at a perilous angle. I had to restrain myself from grabbing the back of his coat and hauling him back.

  ‘I’d say it bears further investigation.’ Harper’s voice was as calm and reasonable as ever.

  We followed him out to stand in the corridor. ‘From here on the fire was largely contained by the firefighters.’ He pointed. ‘Flat 104, the firefighters rescued the elderly resident without too much trouble once they found the flat. The main issue was gaining access. She was barricaded inside and it took a while to persuade her to open the door.’

  ‘Lucky escape,’ Una Burt commented.

  ‘Very.’ Harper sighed. ‘Not the case upstairs, unfortunately. If you’d all like to follow me, I can show you flat 113. Whoever they were, they had no luck at all.’

  Chapter 5

  SOBERLY, I WALKED downstairs with Derwent.

  ‘I’m never going to live anywhere higher than the first floor,’ he said.

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘What a fucking horrible way to die. Locked in.’ He shuddered. ‘Give me Armstrong’s death any day.’

  It didn’t seem to me that Armstrong’s ending had been a whole lot better than the two people who had been located in flat 113, but I could understand why Derwent was so unsettled. Flat 113 had been a horror show, a nightmare made real. The smell had hit me first and I wasn’t the only one who struggled with the dark, awful stench of charred meat. I’d seen plenty of dead bodies – I’d even seen burned bodies before. These were different, though. The fire had seared through the flat with tremendous speed and heat. I’d never seen destruction like it. Even the front door was warped and buckled. Harper had shown us the lock, proving that the door had been locked at the time of the fire.

  ‘Locked from the inside or the outside?’ I’d asked.

  ‘We don’t know. We haven’t found a key yet.’

  ‘Let’s not jump to conclusions,’ Una Burt said, her voice firm. ‘They might have been waiting for rescue. They might have been scared to leave. It’ll take time to search for the key in this mess, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t here.’

  But it was hard to imagine why you would allow yourself to be trapped in an inferno if you had a choice in the matter. The corpses were distorted and black, charred to the bone, huddled in a cupboard where they had tried to hide. They looked like specimens from a museum, bog people dug out of the ground, withered, alien. You had to remind yourself these had been people, once. Recently.

  Everyone else on the eleventh floor had escaped, though several had suffered injuries that ranged from very minor to serious. If the two people hadn’t been locked in, or if the fire had broken through in a different flat – even if the fire crews had known they were trapped there – the outcome might have been different.

  ‘We’ll be looking at the building regulations and whether they were correctly observed,’ Northbridge had promised.

  ‘I’m sure that’ll make all the difference to them.’ Derwent had walked out, as if he couldn’t bear to stay there for another moment, and after a nod from Burt I’d followed him. I’d caught up with him on the stairs, aware that he wouldn’t want to discuss the fact that he’d walked out. I sometimes wondered why I bothered being tactful around Derwent when he was so absolutely not tactful in his dealings with me.

  ‘So what do you think?’ I asked.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Armstrong. Did he fall, did he jump or was he pushed?’

  ‘Pushed. Definitely.’ He was going faster as he got further
away from the top of the flats, shedding the gloom that had come over him in the charnel house of flat 113.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘If anyone was going to be murdered, ever, it was him. He hated everyone who wasn’t white, English and wealthy, and that’s a lot of people. Especially here on this estate. Frankly, I was surprised he wasn’t lynched two months ago when he was wandering around talking shit about that young black kid who was shot.’

  ‘Shot by the police,’ I said as quietly as I could. I wasn’t prepared to shout about Levon Cole. It was a very raw and recent death, and the last time I’d seen Armstrong he’d been scoring political points as a result of the shooting. It wasn’t something I’d found endearing.

  Behind us, I could hear the others starting to come down, their voices echoing in the stairwell. Otherwise the flats were silent. The residents had been evacuated to the local school for the night. There was something chilling about the empty corridors on each floor we passed, strewn with bags and belongings that people had dropped as they fled. Disaster had come to find them.

  I suddenly, quite desperately, wanted to get out of Murchison House and as far away from the Maudling Estate as I could go. I picked up speed, passing Derwent before he realised that was my intention. He couldn’t catch up with me on the last flight, though he tried, and I was the one who made it to the main door first. I shoved it open and stepped outside. As I passed through the door I slowed right down, walking calmly and with composure. There were still people hanging around, even at that late hour. There would be television cameras too. Police officers didn’t run unless there was a good reason to.

  ‘You should have said you wanted a race.’

  I turned my head to answer Derwent and saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye, between two cars. I put out my hand to grab his sleeve. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Where?’

  I pointed. He looked, ducking sideways, then crouched down. I heard him swearing under his breath and then he motioned to me to go the long way round, behind the cars. He took the shorter, direct route, and I saw him drop to his knees, then onto the palms of his hands, lowering himself so he was almost flat on the ground.