After the Fire (Maeve Kerrigan)

by Casey, Jane

  ‘That’s right.’

  She looked up and there was nothing but certainty in her eyes. ‘Mark Pell is capable of anything.’

  A knock on the door made us all jump. Mal muttered as he hurried to open it, obviously intending to send the intruder away. Instead, he fell back as Derwent strode into the room, followed by an older woman who bore a striking resemblance to Melissa Pell. It didn’t take a huge leap of imagination to think she might be her mother. Derwent was carrying Thomas, whose arms were wrapped around his neck, his head buried in Derwent’s shoulder again. This time he was hiding rather than asleep. I stood up, moving out of the way as they approached the bed.

  ‘Here she is,’ Derwent said. ‘Look.’

  Thomas risked a peek as his mother said his name. She’d sat up in bed, and the expression on her face made me catch my breath. The boy twisted once he saw her, wriggling to get down, a grubby rabbit clutched in one hand. Derwent dropped him on the end of the bed.

  ‘Mummy.’ He scrambled up the bed into her arms, fitting his head in under her chin as she held on to him tightly.

  I turned away, clearing my throat, to see Mal rubbing his eyes surreptitiously. Melissa’s mother was in floods of tears, not for the first time that day if the redness of her eyes was anything to go by. Pettifer was beaming paternally. I glanced in Derwent’s direction, wondering if the emotion of it all was getting to him too. He stood at the end of the bed, his expression remote, his arms folded, as cold and stern as if he was carved from stone.

  Some things never changed.

  Chapter 13

  GEOFF ARMSTRONG HADN’T been looking all that great the last time I’d seen him. It was safe to say he looked a lot worse after his post-mortem. The incisions the pathologist had made in his body were the least of it. Now that he’d been stripped and washed, the damage he’d sustained was impossible to miss. The blood had hidden the worst of it, ironically. Now he was naked, flat on his back, his skin pale where it wasn’t livid or lacerated or torn away completely.

  Dr Early was just stepping back from his body when Derwent and I walked into the morgue. She pulled her mask down, revealing a disapproving look on her narrow face.

  ‘You missed the show.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Derwent said, as if he hadn’t been dawdling the whole way there. Neither of us was exactly squeamish – not any more – but Armstrong’s post-mortem was unlikely to be a spectator sport, we’d agreed. Besides, it was all so straightforward, compared to the other deaths in Murchison House. He’d been with a woman who was definitely, emphatically not his wife, and his constituents would have been outraged at the idea of their MP in a mixed-race extra-marital affair. Public humiliation, resignation, the end of a promising career as a political pundit, accusations of hypocrisy … he’d deserved it all, and more. But I could see why he’d been desperate to avoid it, why he’d gambled on escaping unnoticed, or why he’d given his life rather than face his future. I hadn’t had much time for him, but arguably he hadn’t deserved to die in a fire. I’d do a decent job of finding out what had happened, close the case, and never think about Armstrong again.

  ‘Maybe you could just give us the highlights,’ Derwent suggested to Dr Early. ‘That should be enough to get DCI Burt off my case.’

  ‘I could make you wait for my report.’

  Derwent winced. ‘You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?’

  ‘Watch me. I have other work to do. Armstrong was first but he’s had his moment in the sun.’ She turned away, and inwardly I cheered. Derwent had made a habit of unsettling her from the first time they met. It was nice to see her being more confident now that she was on her own territory.

  Still, we had Una Burt to deal with. And whenever Derwent was in trouble, so was I.

  ‘Now would be a great time to switch on the charm,’ I said to him.

  ‘I’m trying.’

  ‘Try harder,’ I said, and it was pure joy to use one of his own lines on him.

  ‘I’m disappointed,’ Dr Early said over her shoulder. ‘I was led to believe the Derwent charm was irresistible when you bother to use it.’

  Derwent shrugged, but it was apologetic rather than arrogant. His hands were jammed in his pockets, his posture a slouch. ‘No one’s perfect.’

  ‘Wow. Remember where you were when DI Derwent admitted he wasn’t perfect after all, because it’s a historic moment,’ I said.

  Dr Early glanced at the clock. ‘I really don’t have much time to give you. I’ve got a suspicious head injury to examine. I’m considering whether I need to remove the flesh altogether – get it down to the bones. But that would take quite a bit of boiling.’

  ‘Doc.’ Derwent looked appalled.

  ‘I don’t know any pathologists who like soup,’ Dr Early said with a grin. ‘And you definitely shouldn’t have any they’ve made.’

  It was graphic but not the most gruesome thing I’d ever heard. Still, I felt a sudden rush of coldness followed by heat, sweat prickling down my back. My hands were wet and saliva filled my mouth. I turned away sharply, knocking into a trolley with a clatter.

  ‘Kerrigan?’

  I waved a hand in Derwent’s direction, breathing hard through my nose. If I was sick, Dr Early wouldn’t think anything of it. It wouldn’t be the first time a police officer lost their breakfast in her morgue, and I had a good enough working relationship with her that she’d forgive me.

  Derwent, as ever, was a different story.

  I closed my eyes and kept breathing, swallowing, concentrating very hard on whatever was happening in my stomach. I was clenching muscles I didn’t even know I had, fighting my body.

  ‘Do you want to go outside?’ Derwent’s voice was soft in my ear. He took hold of my elbow and I shook him off.

  ‘I don’t need any help.’

  Instant withdrawal of sympathy. ‘Pull yourself together, then.’

  I heard his footsteps as he returned to Dr Early. I wiped my palms on my trousers and took a moment before I turned back.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It happens,’ Dr Early said, and her eyes were kind. It was another reason to be glad we weren’t working with her senior colleague, Glen Hanshaw, who was as bitter and unsmiling as he was knowledgeable. He was working less and less now, weakened by the cancer treatment that was keeping him alive. I’d never warmed to him but I liked Dr Early. She was a fast talker, quick to give her opinions, friendlier now that she’d got the measure of us too.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I can. There are a lot of things that should become clearer once we have the test results back. But I can be fairly confident about one thing. He definitely fell out of the building.’ She snapped off her gloves and dropped them into a yellow bin for medical waste. ‘He’s got multiple broken bones. We X-rayed his whole body, so you can have a look in due course. In the meantime it would be easier for me to tell you what he didn’t fracture.’

  ‘Not a surprise, is it? Assuming he fell from the tenth floor,’ Derwent said.

  I was thinking about what the pathologist had said, and what she hadn’t said. ‘Is that what caused his death?’

  She grinned. ‘And that was exactly the right question to ask. I don’t think it was.’

  Beside me, I was aware of Derwent straightening up, suddenly interested. ‘Go on.’

  ‘He was already dead when he fell.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I think he was strangled. I found bruising on his neck – I missed it at the scene because it was under his shirt collar, and anyway I think the ligature was something soft like a scarf or a pair of tights because there isn’t a clearly defined injury. I was suspicious because I’d have expected to find a lot more bleeding into the tissues around his injuries.’

  ‘There was plenty of blood at the scene,’ Derwent pointed out. ‘He was coated in it. So was the bin. Whatever was in him spilled out somehow.’

  ‘When you fall from that sort of height, you’re likely to bounce. Depending
on the distance you fall and the flexibility of whatever you land on, you can have a significant impact second time round. Sometimes people survive the first impact and die from injuries sustained the second time.’ The pathologist smiled. ‘Worth remembering if you’re ever falling from a high building. Try to land on your feet and fall forward, not back.’

  ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’ Derwent’s voice was dry. ‘But I don’t understand why two impacts would make a difference.’

  ‘That gives us two opportunities for the blood to be pushed out of his body by force. It doesn’t mean his heart was still pumping it through his arteries. When you look closely at the injuries, there isn’t the physical reaction I’d expect.’

  ‘Could he have died on the way down? A heart attack or something?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Maybe if he’d fallen from a plane he’d have had time for that. He was ten floors up. Definitely high enough for the fall to kill him but the actual descent wouldn’t have taken long at all.’ Dr Early pointed to Armstrong’s knees. ‘He has scrapes here that correspond to rips in his trousers, but again, there’s no bruising, no significant bleeding. I think someone shoved him out of the window and he got caught on the sill as he went.’

  ‘He was murdered,’ Derwent said. ‘Fuck.’

  I knew what he meant. A straightforward case, albeit with a high-profile victim, had just turned into a nightmare. Una Burt couldn’t have known it in advance, but she’d handed us a disaster wrapped in a scandal. If we didn’t solve it, the fault would be ours and ours alone.

  And we currently had absolutely no suspects.

  ‘Right, Kerrigan, give me the benefit of your famous intuition. Who did it?’ Derwent said.

  ‘The girlfriend? If she was a girlfriend.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He had two hundred quid in his back pocket.’ I turned to Dr Early. ‘Did you find anything else on him?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘There was that phone on the other side of the fence. I bet we’ll find it was Armstrong’s. I can see how he’d have needed that – he couldn’t afford to be out of contact for an hour or two. He brought what he needed to Murchison House and nothing more. So my guess would be that he needed two hundred pounds for whatever little meeting he had organised.’

  ‘Imagine someone so delightful having to pay for sex,’ Derwent said. ‘What about the wife?’

  ‘We’ll have to see. What about any right-thinking member of society?’

  ‘Definitely anyone on that estate who recognised him. Armstrong wouldn’t have had many friends there.’

  ‘So actually we have plenty of suspects,’ I said. ‘Everyone and anyone.’

  Derwent jammed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and groaned. ‘I should never have come to work today.’

  ‘What about the fire? Could they have set it to – to distract everyone? Or to provide a reason for him to have jumped?’ I was thinking it through as I said it. ‘Did he die before the fire started?’

  Dr Early shook her head. ‘He was alive for at least some of the fire. I found smoke staining in his trachea and particles of soot throughout his respiratory system, so he was breathing in smoke before he died. And I took his temperature when I arrived at the scene. It was cold out last night and we don’t know how long he’d been lying outside, but his temperature was only a couple of degrees below normal. He hadn’t been dead long.’

  Derwent’s shoulders dropped a millimetre or two. ‘What else can you tell us?’

  ‘I’ve swabbed him, taken nail scrapings – we just need to wait for the lab results to come back. One other thing for you to look for – whoever punched him in the face.’ She tilted his head so the light shone on his jaw. A bruise bloomed under the skin. ‘There was a lot of force behind it and it happened some time before he actually died.’

  ‘Could it have been a woman?’ I asked, thinking of the girlfriend.

  ‘It could, if she was big enough and strong enough. Most women won’t punch with a closed fist unless they’re trained to do it – if they box or if they’re really into self-defence classes. Women tend to scratch and gouge. They might resort to open-handed slaps, or they use an object to inflict a blunt or penetrating injury. But anything is possible.’

  ‘I mean, this is Geoff Armstrong we’re talking about. The line of people waiting to punch him wasn’t short,’ Derwent pointed out.

  ‘Well, you’re looking for someone who was strong, probably right-handed, with big hands.’ She fitted her own fist over the mark on Armstrong’s jaw, showing a clear border of bruising. ‘Bigger than mine, anyway. But mine are tiny.’

  Derwent held his hand in the same place. ‘Not as big as mine. Kerrigan, you have a go.’

  I did as I was told.

  ‘Ah,’ Dr Early said. ‘That’s a lot closer. More or less right.’

  Derwent nudged me. ‘Man hands.’

  ‘Shut up.’ I leaned over to look at the body more closely. ‘Did he fight back?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’ She turned his hands over so I could see the cuts and bruises across his knuckles. ‘He might have. He might not. He could have got these injuries from fighting someone off, or from falling. I took scrapings from under his nails and I swabbed his mouth, his hands, his genitals – everywhere I could think that we might find DNA from someone he was with. You’ll have to wait to see if we get anything from that.’

  ‘He was fully dressed when he was found,’ Derwent pointed out.

  ‘Except for his shoes, one sock and his suit jacket.’ They both looked at me. ‘What? I noticed.’

  ‘He lost the shoes on his way down. Kev Cox found them in the bin yard. No one found the missing sock,’ Dr Early said. ‘I’d say he got dressed in a hurry. Maybe he couldn’t find it.’

  ‘Or someone dressed him,’ I suggested.

  ‘Mmm. I don’t think so. Have you ever tried to dress a dead body?’

  Derwent and I shook our heads in unison.

  ‘They’re awkward as hell. They’re heavy – the expression “dead weight” is absolutely accurate. A dead body won’t help you push a hand through a sleeve, or a leg through trousers. You get twisted seams. The clothes don’t sit right on the body. The waistbands are too high or too low.’ She shrugged. ‘I know it when I see it here in the morgue, basically. Armstrong wasn’t fully dressed but I’d lay money he put his own clothes on, cufflinks and all.’

  ‘So what do we know? He went to Murchison House for his regular meeting with a lady who was apparently black and possibly paid for. He took off at least some of his clothes. He would have known there was a fire because of the smoke and the alarms. He got dressed. He got into a fight with someone. He died. Then someone pushed him out of the window.’ Derwent looked down at him. ‘I almost feel sorry for him.’

  ‘Don’t waste your time feeling sorry for him. His troubles are over.’ I patted Derwent on the shoulder. ‘Ours are just beginning.’

  Chapter 14

  LIKE A LOT of politicians, Geoff Armstrong had lived in London – where he worked – rather than where his constituency was. Derwent pulled up on the quiet street in Hampstead and looked at the house. It was set back from the road: red-brick, double-fronted, immaculate gravel on the drive, clipped box trees by the front door.

  ‘Well, he wasn’t short of a few bob.’

  ‘Armstrong’s dad left him a fortune.’ I’d been reading up on him on the way over. ‘He inherited about fifty million pounds when he was twenty-three.’

  Derwent snorted. ‘And then had the cheek to lecture the rest of us about not relying on hand-outs.’

  ‘There’s nothing like being rich to make you unsympathetic to the poor,’ I said. ‘He believed in people standing on their own two feet. In his case, in handmade shoes.’

  ‘And he hated us because we’re part of the nanny state.’

  ‘We interfere with people’s privacy.’

  ‘Yeah, but they’re mainly criminals. And if they’re not,
what do they have to hide?’ Derwent shook his head. ‘Privacy is a privilege, not a right. If you can’t trust people to behave themselves, which you can’t, you have to keep an eye on them.’

  ‘That’s your view.’

  ‘Isn’t it yours?’

  ‘There must be a middle ground,’ I said.

  ‘Armstrong wasn’t interested in the middle ground. He wanted us to be weaker. He wanted to limit our powers, which are already fairly pathetic if you ask me.’

  ‘You just missed your calling. You’d have thrived in a police state.’

  Derwent grinned. ‘Sounds like heaven to me. As long as you’re on the right side.’

  ‘That’s the trick, isn’t it? Picking the right side.’ I looked sideways at him. ‘Are we going to sit in the car and talk politics or go and talk to the grieving widow?’

  He groaned. ‘This is going to be the most enormous ball-ache.’

  ‘All part of the job. At least we’re not breaking the news to her. The best thing about not being in uniform is not having to do the death message.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s tricky, isn’t it? Because we’ve got to ask her about her husband’s extra-marital activities, which she may not even know about.’

  ‘Go gently,’ I said. ‘Try not to blurt it out.’

  ‘I was thinking you could do the talking. Woman to woman.’

  ‘And I was thinking you were the senior officer and she’d wonder why you were standing around saying nothing.’

  He swore under his breath. ‘Get out of my car.’

  It was a woman in a fitted, knee-length black dress who answered the door. She had iron-grey hair cut in a perfect Vidal Sassoon bob: it was a deliberate choice not to dye it, not neglect. A complicated silver bracelet twisted around one arm; that was all the jewellery she wore apart from an ornate ruby engagement ring and matching wedding band. There was no expression on her face: I recognised the blankness of shock. She had strong features, heavy eyebrows: it was the sort of face that couldn’t be softened or made prettier with make-up, and she hadn’t tried.