‘What are those?’ Shari asked him. ‘CCTV?’
‘Every camera in the neighbourhood,’ he replied smugly.
Shari was impressed. ‘Wow. Must have taken you all day to collect those.’
‘Two hours,’ he replied. ‘I employed a small army of PCSOs to do the ground work.’
‘Well, good luck watching it all.’
Ryder grinned. ‘Oh, don’t worry. The afternoon shift of PCSOs is going to do all that for me.’
It was a PCSO called Emily who spotted the interesting footage. Three of them had been working on it, but it was Emily who laid her hand on the vital piece of evidence that would thrust the two separate investigations into a new dimension.
There was a car leaving the scene, ten minutes before the 999 call had come in about the most recent fire. There was no footage of the streets directly outside the building in question, but two streets away a private security camera spotted a car driving away. Not only was it suspicious because it was the only car on those snowy back streets all evening, but because its path must have taken it past the building.
‘Well done Emily for looking for cars as well as people,’ Ryder told the young woman, casting a disparaging look at the other two PCSOs sat nearby.
It was impossible to see the registration number of the car, but when Shari saw it she couldn’t believe her eyes. It was a red 4x4 – the type owned by Malcolm Swan.
‘That’s interesting,’ Ryder told her, ‘because guess who owns the building.’
‘Swan?’
Ryder nodded. ‘The man owns six buildings and three of them have been involved in fire over the last week.’
Shari stared at him wide-eyed. Was Malcolm Swan really behind the fires? Was it an insurance job like she had originally suspected?
‘Okay team,’ Abbott yelled from across the room, ‘panic stations. The fire brigade say they’ve found two bodies.’
‘Where?’ Shari asked.
‘Inside yesterday’s building, of course.’
All four exchanged worried, weary looks.
Shari and Andy stopped at the scene of the latest fire to drop Emily and her colleagues off. Despite their hard work scouring the CCTV footage for Ryder, all resources were needed to man the three scenes still open and PCSOs were easy scene fodder.
Shari couldn’t help herself taking a look. The fire chief and the CSI boss were talking to her, explaining what they had found in their usual efficient, nonchalant way. Yet Shari couldn’t focus on them properly. Instead she found herself staring mesmerised in the scorched black rubble of the building, her shoes wet from the hose-water and ash at her feet that had mixed to form a thick, black slush.
In front of her were the two bodies, lying like foetuses side by side, shrunken and small like those of little children. They were black completely, not an ounce of flesh looked to remain. There was no distinguishing between clothing, hair, nails, bones... there was simply a dreadful, all-encompassing blackness. And the longer Shari stared at them the less black they looked. Instead it almost appeared like there was nothing there at all – like two human-shaped cuttings had been taken from the universe to leave behind a grim, horrific void.
‘You can probably already tell,’ the fire chief told her, ‘that the manner of death is consistent with being exposed to extremely high temperatures for a very long time.’
Shari turned away. Despite being in a shell of a building, exposed on three sides to the elements, she suddenly felt like she needed some air, and went back outside to breathe.
‘You okay?’ Andy asked her.
‘I’ve got a bad feeling its Irene and Doll,’ she said sadly.
‘Well, if that pimp has got it right, they probably deserved to go out like that.’
Shari shook her head. ‘We don’t know anything about them. They might have been exploiting kids on the street, or they might just have been two down-and-outs.’
She gritted her teeth. ‘Let’s get that posh twat in Cheshire.’
An arrest request was sent to Cheshire Police and Malcolm Swan was taken into police custody shortly before sunrise the next morning.
The evening before, however, Shari had to return home and get some rest, but she went reluctantly, as if her shift ending was a huge inconvenience to her. An hour and several traffic jams later, she arrived home in Chorlton, only to be greeted by the sight of Dan’s white Mercedes, parked as usual blocking her driveway.
Incensed, Shari got out of her car, went immediately to his front passenger-side wheel, and unscrewed the dust cap. She then pressed the pressure-valve, making sure no one could see her, until the hiss of air had gone on for long enough and the car was sagging ever so slightly on the plane of its axis.
Next she stormed into the house like a hurricane and found Dan and Anna arguing in the living room. Without hesitation, Shari grabbed him by the shirt collar and yanked him to his feet. Despite his protestations, she dragged him like a naughty school boy to the hallway and opened the front door.
‘Get the fuck out of my house,’ she bellowed, ‘or I’ll lock you up.’
‘For what?’ he asked, puzzled.
‘I’ll make something up,’ she snarled, ‘but believe me, you don’t want to know what.’
Ten
Malcolm Swan was trembling with fear in the interview room. Shari and Ryder interviewed him, and it was the latter who took the lead on the questioning. He pushed Swan hard, prodding him with sharp questions vigorously like a child poking a stick at a dying animal at the side of a road. Swan reacted by blurting out disjointed sentences in an increasingly quivering voice.
He denied being at the scene a couple of nights previous, and in fact added that he hadn’t been to Ancoats in a few weeks. Ryder pushed him angrily, telling him that they had footage of his car driving around the cobbled backstreets two nights ago, and eventually the developer relented, shaking as he admitted he had lied.
He had been driving around that night, he told them, but only to assess his buildings and try to re-envision his plans for the area. His solicitor advised him to answer “No comment” to everything after that, and he did so.
At the end of it he was dripping with sweat and led back to his cell. Ryder was smiling.
‘I think we got the right guy,’ Shari said, ‘but we haven’t got him yet.’
Ryder shook his head. ‘He’s in it up to his balls, but he’s not the arsonist. A rich guy like him doesn’t get his own hands dirty. Follow me.’
He led her back to the custody desk and had a quiet word with the sergeant there. Moments later he was handed a brown paper envelope containing Malcolm Swan’s property – car keys, wallet, cash and, most importantly, his phone.
‘We’ll need a...’ Shari began, anticipating what her superior was about to do, and reminding him that they needed official permission to do so.
‘Ssh,’ Ryder said, softly, tossing her the phone. ‘Here’s a big clue.’
Shari didn’t waste the chance. She copied all of Malcolm’s contacts from his phone book into her personal phone. A quick scan of his pictures and his notes revealed nothing incriminating, so she plopped the phone back in the envelope and handed it back at to the custody sergeant.
She then went upstairs to the office, made herself a coffee, and searched through his contacts. Most of the numbers were first names only, as one might expect, and there were quite a few numbers for the many businesses Swan had contacted over his many years as a developer. In all, there were about four hundred different numbers.
Only a handful were suspicious straight off the bat: one called “Bromley Fire Solutions”, one labelled simply “x”, one called “Ziggy Stardust”, and another called “Susu”.
Shari lifted the office phone receiver and began dialling.
‘What you doing?’ Andy asked her.
‘I’m going to try some of these numbers in Swan’s phone,’ she replied, ‘see which one isn’t legit.’
Andy laughed aloud. ‘Right. That’ll take you f
orever.’
‘I don’t care,’ she replied.
By the end of the shift, Shari was still sat by the phone. A mixture of cold calling and internet searching had only proved that all of the numbers she had been through were genuine. So far she had spoken to Malcolm’s wife, his daughter at university, his mother and his estranged brother, his stockbroker, his golf partner, his squash partner, several secretaries of building firms, plumbers, electricians, groundwork teams and so on. She had discovered that “Bromley Fire Solutions” was a small showroom selling posh fireplaces for homes, that “x” was only half a phone number, and that “Ziggy Stardust” tried to sell her cocaine. “Susu” was the name of an escort Malcolm liked to hook up with when he went to Dubai.
And after all that, Shari hadn’t found a single thing out of place.
She was ready to give up on the last half dozen – the laws of probability and diminishing returns weighing heavily on her mind – but she decided to plough through them just for the sake of being thorough. Besides, it had gone dark outside again, so what was the rush?
She came then to a contact labelled “Young, Dante” which she feared was some kind of exotic dancer, but which had been disconnected when she tried to ring it. A stern female robotic voice informed her that this number was no longer in use. Shari slammed the phone down and prepared to move on.
But then something stopped her. Instead she typed the name Dante Young into her desktop computer. One result was found. It was a black male, twenty nine years old, with an address in Liverpool and a history that included assault and arson. Unfortunately, there was no picture of him on the computer, which was not unusual despite all of his arrests, because she only had access to the Greater Manchester Police system. Merseyside would have their own system, and more than likely a picture of Mr Young too.
Shari emailed a contact she had at Merseyside and asked for a picture. Then she went back downstairs to the custody suite to ruffle some feathers. With Ryder long since gone home for the day, she felt at liberty to step in his shoes and do what she thought he might do in this situation.
She took another look at the phone in the brown envelope, finding his text messages now. Sure enough, there in Swan’s phone, was a conversation with Dante Young, the last few messages of which had not yet been deleted:
SWAN: answer your fucking phone
DANTE: wot u want?
SWAN: we need to talk. Police have been over to mine asking questions.
DANTE: so?
SWAN: im shitting myself.
DANTE: don’t no what ur talking about. Delete my number.
SWAN: It was only supposed to be one job. Now they r telling me theres been a murder.
DANTE: this relationship is over
SWAN: i need your help
SWAN: please answer the phone!!!
Eleven
The next day, Shari had no luck following up her enquiries into this Dante Young. She was still waiting for information from Merseyside Police and all of his contacts in Manchester had apparently moved away.
Then came the weekend – two days off work that Shari could barely handle. She spent her time twitching, unable to settle down, fidgety and irritable. On the Sunday she went into the city with Anna to do some shopping but couldn’t stop herself staring at every black male that walked past, wondering if it might be the suspected arsonist she was after.
At one point she even encouraged Anna to walk with her over to the small retail park by the canal at Ancoats, near to where she had first met Irene and Doll. What was she hoping to find? A man stood in the shadows starting fires?
An entire week passed by with no luck. Dante Young had disappeared from the face of the planet, and with no mug-shot or current address or phone number, they had nothing else to go off. Malcolm Swan had since been released on police bail, his passport confiscated and Ryder busy trying to compile a file against him for charging.
All he needed was proof. The missing element to the puzzle – Dante Young.
On Friday morning, DC Ben Bennett returned to work after nearly two weeks of sickness. He never explained the reason he had been off, and nobody asked him either. He expected a bit of fanfare about his return, but instead found an office full of tired, frustrated people.
He was also surprised to find that Shari and Andy were now working together. He had expected that maybe the old fart Barry Croft might be working with her on some boring old fraud cases, while Andy and Ryder would be handling the fires he had heard about on the news. He couldn’t admit it then, but he was jealous.
‘Got a new partner?’ he asked Andy in the kitchenette a little later. ‘She driving you mad?’
Andy shrugged. ‘Not really. She works twice as hard as me, so I have to do half the work. And she’s full of energy – a lot more than Barry. At least she isn’t counting the days ‘til her retirement.’
Ben smiled. ‘Yeah, but she can be a bit of a prude, can’t she...’
Andy frowned. ‘Not really mate. We went out for drinks after work last night... was a good laugh.’
‘You went out for drinks?’ Ben asked him, barely hiding his complete shock.
‘She had a mulled wine - went straight to her head!’
With that Andy walked off chuckling to himself, leaving Bennett stunned and unsure what to do next. He felt the noose of jealousy tighten around his neck as he thought back to all the times he had invited his new partner out for friendly drinks after work and she had turned him down.
‘Shit,’ he whispered to himself.
‘What’s shit?’ Shari asked, appearing from the office.
‘Nothing,’ Ben replied, smiling meekly. He watched her fill the kettle and clean her cup and then went back to the computer to think about how beautiful she looked.
The end of the shift on Friday came too quickly. This entire week had shown hardly any progress apart from to eliminate any other avenues of enquiry and suspicion. They had Malcolm at the scene of the latest fire, and had suspicious texts in his phone to a man with a history of arson.
Inspector Abbott huddled them together to run through it all.
‘Why kill the three homeless people?’ Andy asked no one in particular. ‘That’s the real sticking point.’
‘I think we have to assume that they were collateral damage in some deliberate fires,’ Abbott told him. ‘The only one with a motive to do them harm is the pimp, and his motive is weak. It’s safe to assume that Gravy Davy and the two women were just sleeping in the wrong buildings at the wrong time.’
He looked at Ryder for reassurance, but the sergeant looked at Shari.
‘What do you think?’ he asked her.
Shari thought for a long moment. There was no other reasonable, probable cause. As a police officer and a detective she was constantly told to use common sense – to work in a world of facts, evidence and realism. There was a chance every crime in the world was being committed by shape-shifting aliens leaving no trace behind, but that was both unreasonable and improbable, and therefore not worth considering.
‘It’s the only rational answer I can think of,’ she finally agreed. ‘But without more evidence coming to light, we need a confession. I’d like to stay on a few hours tonight to see if I can find Dante Young.’
Ryder looked at Abbott, who shrugged. ‘Not on your own, but if Andy doesn’t mind, you can both stay on.’
Albrighton nodded. ‘Okay, let’s do it.’
Twelve
‘This was a stupid idea,’ Albrighton moaned as he got out of the car on Redhill Street by the canal and began to push it.
The car was stuck in snow, and it was no good leaving it where it was because the snow was still falling and it was only going to get worse. As he pushed and Shari worked her foot down on the acceleration, a couple of young lads passing by stopped to give them a hand. With their help, the car pulled free. Andy thanked them and got back in the car.
‘We’re supposed to be undercover,’ he moaned again, ‘not drawing attention to our
selves.’
Shari smiled. ‘I’m going to park somewhere else.’
‘Ben was asking about us,’ Andy suddenly said.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, surprised and embarrassed at the same time.
‘I told him we went out for drinks last night - you should have seen his face!’
Shari blushed. ‘I wish you hadn’t told him.’
‘Why not?’ Andy asked. ‘We had a good laugh, didn’t we?’
Shari smiled despite all her efforts. ‘Yeah, we did.’
‘How about we get some food?
‘Sure,’ she said, ‘chippy?’
‘Not now,’ Albrighton laughed. ‘I mean next week sometime. How about we go for a meal?’
Shari felt like her blushing would set her face on fire and she pretended to be too busy concentrating on her driving to answer. She quickly took a right turn off the main road into the retail park car park.
‘Look...’ Andy said softly.
Shari waved her hand. ‘No, it’s okay. I think it’s good idea, really. I don’t mean to be a killjoy, it’s just...’
‘No,’ Andy urged her, ‘look!’
He was pointing out of his window, where the distinct white BMW of Roman Korczak was parked up outside of a gym. Korczak was in the driver’s seat talking to someone at his window. It was a black male, around thirty years old.
‘It’s Dante!’ Shari said, excitedly. ‘It has to be.’
‘Easy!’ Andy told her as she pulled up. ‘We’ve got no idea who this guy is. It could just be a punter, or Roman’s mate. Let’s not go charging in there.’
Shari agreed, but as soon as they were out of the car, she sped up as if possessed.
‘Roman!’ she shouted as they approached.
Korczak saw her and rolled his head and eyes back.
‘Get out of the car Roman,’ Andy told him. ‘I want to talk to you.’
The Fire In the Snow Page 5