by Gavin Smith
“Don’t matter who I am, youth, you wanna be lookin’ for that bastard. Like I said. Not fuckin’ right, them babbies dead and him out on the piss.” The man rocked on his heels and his hands fidgeted in the pockets of baggy shorts as if he were trying to tame a wayward ferret.
Slowey’s night had only just begun and was already getting longer.
“Oi, mouth.” Slowey shouted, and for a moment could hear only the generator churning. “Plenty of kiddies left round here can hear you.”
The man stared into Slowey’s eyes, spat into the gutter between them and allowed his shoulders to drop. “Keith Braxton, number nine, your boys know my name from years ago when I was a bad lad.”
He shot out a hand which Slowey grasped and shook firmly. “I’m DC Slowey. So what do you know, Keith?”
“Alright then, DC Slurry, still need to get him locked up though.”
“Top of my agenda, right after you tell me who he is and why I want him."
Harkness had squeezed his size thirteens into the largest fire boots McKay could find at short notice. The borrowed jacket chafed, its sleeves left inches of wrist exposed and the gloves and helmet were still sticky with the sweat of their previous occupant.
“I always wanted to be a fireman. The glamour, the big trucks, the hen parties, the chance to spend night shifts asleep. Why is this stuff so heavy?”
“We fill it with asbestos and lead for our special guests.”
“Don’t we need masks?”
“If it’s that hairy in there, you’re not coming.”
McKay ventured inside, mask at the ready, and Harkness kicked his heels, watching the occasional flicker of a torch beam from within while he tugged at the sleeves of the fire jacket and tried not to feel like a fat and badly outfitted stripper. He watched with approval as Slowey tamed a drunken buffoon using nothing more than a biro and a cheap suit.
“Right, you should live through it. Just don’t touch anything and don’t sue me. Oh, and still bring that.” McKay, emerging from the doorway, gestured at the respirator mask in Harkness’s hand. Rivulets of sweat had smeared the dirt on his face and he smelled like a lathered horse. “Don’t pass out in there, either.”
Harkness glanced at his watch and thought about making notes but the thick gloves made this impossible. He followed McKay’s footsteps precisely, memorising their route, conscious that it was bad form to disturb a crime scene with new and unnecessary footprints, sweat, skin cells and every other kind of impression the human body was capable of making. Yet fire had already made a good start on obliterating evidence and he needed answers now.
The heat embraced them, the floor and walls still radiating energy and turning the house into a kiln. Harkness instantly felt dampness blossoming from his armpits and creeping over his skin, and his breathing became ragged. Whatever had covered the floor in the hallway had been incinerated.
A shadow the colour of the void, empty and without lustre, formed a ragged ellipse from the interior surface of the door to the base of the stairs. The surrounding walls were striated, blackness giving way to grey and white charring, speckles of white emulsion visible through the soot on the ceiling.
McKay’s torch picked out a molten lump on the floor. “That was a smoke detector. Don’t know about this one but there were no batteries in the one upstairs.”
Harkness stooped and considered the molten object. He flicked his own torch up the staircase, picking out the blackened but intact profile of the other smoke alarm on the ceiling. Satisfied, he gripped his torch by its lamp and brought its blunt end down hard on what he took to be the battery compartment of the object. It disintegrated in shards of plastic fused with green and silver circuitry.
“Oh, for …..,” began McKay, training his torch on Harkness’s destruction. “You do know you get acid in batteries, don’t you?”
“Good point. Just as well it hasn’t got any.” Harkness pointed at the blackened and distended springs and contacts, nothing filling the space between them. “Interesting. Shall we continue?”
“Right, bog standard three-bed semi. Kitchen ahead of you, large living room to your left, conservatory at the back. Interior doors left open.”
The other rooms had been less thoroughly ravaged by fire. Here and there, the forms of furniture were recognisable: the skeletal springs of a sofa; the shattered screen of a TV like a mouthful of broken teeth; a high tidemark of burning where curtains had given the fire a conduit to the ceiling; a strand of colour from a carpet; a raised hand or half a smile still visible on fragments of photographs.
“Those windows have done well,” continued McKay. “Frames seem to have warped but nothing has shattered.”
Harkness moved through the lounge, the remnants of a glass coffee table splintering underfoot. Two large double-glazed frames dominated the room, matching in size the smashed windows he’d seen above. The inner panes had been stained yellow and brown, but the sealed units were intact. He tried both handles, finding them securely locked. It would be easy even with his bulk to exit through a window that size, assuming he could open it.
“I take it your boys smashed their way in upstairs?”
“Too right. Staircase wouldn’t hold a child. We’ve got a hammer for this sort of glass. If it’s like that Stellarglaze stuff they’re always selling in my neck of the woods, a fat man bouncing up and down it on won’t crack it, so forget using your bare hands or a bedside lamp. Bloody liability.”
“You mean the window wasn’t open.”
“I keep forgetting you’re a detective.”
Harkness gazed at the windowsill, seeing nothing but the blurred grain of wood turning to charcoal and fractured body parts from ceramic figurines fused into new and grotesque shapes. Nothing resembled a key or a nail where a key might be hung.
“Why don’t you and I go upstairs, Mr McKay?”
“I know you think I’m easy, Sergeant Harkness, but I don’t do this for all the cops.”
Back outside, Harkness watched McKay scale the ladder and pivot through the window with the nimbleness of someone ten years younger and five stone lighter. Nodding to the fireman assigned to steady the ladder and prevent actionable accidents, Harkness followed, eyes fixed on McKay’s. The ladder shimmied and skittered on the loose gravel below as he clutched and kicked the steps, causing cold sweat to prickle his brow and the vomit to surge into his throat. He was more than half-cut and on the verge of giving way to a fear that had nothing to do with falling ten feet onto a well padded fireman. He hauled his chest over the windowsill with the grace of a rutting walrus and McKay looped an arm under his and helped him the rest of the way.
“You look like shit. Sure you should be here?”
Harkness swallowed a lungful of air, brimstone and ammonia raking his palate and throat. He nodded and showed an upturned thumb, waiting for his thoughts to untangle.
“You just get your bearings then. And watch where you stand.”
The wide cone of McKay’s torch rotated slowly around the room, beginning at Harkness’s feet. Long slivers of glass lay on the carpet, jumbled with the broken frame of a chair, soil, stalks and fragments of a shattered plant-pot, and the varnished form of a defunct police truncheon.
A few hours ago, the room could have graced an estate agent’s brochure: beige carpet, fitted wardrobes and made to measure curtains, with no books, clothes or other domestic clutter in sight. A colossal family portrait dominated the room, a soft-focus, textured print of a stocky, well-groomed man, flashing his teeth in glee while his doting family looked up at him with studied smiles.
For half a second Harkness believed a hand was crawling from the shadow left by the king-sized bed which had been flung onto its side. He picked his way across the floor and swept his own torch across the square of cleaner carpet, chasing the shadow into another corner then breathing again. He couldn’t see the writhing ghouls of his imagination but for a moment heard them scream and retch and plead. Blood daubed the weave of the carpet, an impreci
se rendering of the fingers of a right hand clutching at life, a few feet from a drying burst of vomit. A teddy bear sat on its haunches, arms outspread, as if hoping to be found and needed again, one cream leg dark and musky with what might have been urine.
Harkness moved through the upper story of the house, trailing soot and crystals of broken glass from the heavy boots, looking intensely at each window then moving on to the next. When he reached the rear bedroom window, overlooking the roof of the conservatory, he paused.
“I think if there were window keys anywhere handy,” he said, motioning McKay to look more closely, “she’d have found them.”
On the locked handle, and printed and smeared elsewhere on the glass, could just be discerned the delicate whorls and ribbons of fingerprints, picked out in red.
Slowey left Braxton reminiscing with PC Jones about town-centre punch-ups. He seemed genuinely concerned that the old cell block at Beaumont Fee was to be relocated, as if he were an old soldier learning that the British Legion were to be turned into a supermarket. Braxton offered his new friend a cigarette, which Jones declined with visible pride.
Slowey underlined the name of Dale Murphy in his notebook. He’d established that there was no record of him on PNC and put out his basic description on the radio, although he doubted anyone would stumble across him.
Morse was helping an ambulance to extricate itself from the narrow street, so far with the loss of only one wing mirror. From another, a green-suited paramedic toting a clipboard emerged, followed by the slight figure of a woman draped in a red blanket and clutching it to her chin with trembling fingers. Slowey would gladly have shared some of the night’s heat with her.
“Morning. You the police, then?”
“It’s the suit and the stubble, isn’t it? And I bet you think we’re all getting younger.”
“This is Marjorie from number twelve. Husband and son have gone to County to be checked over. They’ve all breathed in a bit of smoke but Marjorie declined to come with us. Wanted to talk to you instead.”
Slowey glimpsed at the paramedic’s clipboard with its duplicate sheets of disclaimers underscored by the woman’s feathery signature. She seemed to be staring at her home, its façade almost unchanged but for the bruises of scorched plasterwork, a corruption inherited from its conjoined and leprous twin.
“Marjorie,” announced Slowey, striding forwards and finding his pantomime voice, every syllable flung out with painstaking cheer. He ducked and pursed his lips, seeking out her eyes between the blanket and her tangled bob of grey hair. “I’m DC Slowey. Why don’t you and I find a nice spot for a cup of tea and a chat?”
The woman raised her chin above the blanket and turned her eyes to Slowey, taking long, shallow breaths and swallowing as if in search of her voice. Slowey was reminded of a tortoise venturing from its shell after a long and bitter winter.
“Now Marjorie, are you sure you won’t go to the hospital with this gentleman here. We’ll make sure your house is looked after.”
“Young man,” she said, flint now in her eyes, “I’m a trained nurse so I know there’s nothing whatever the matter with me. Now, I’ve made up my mind to stay and I’ve got some clearing up to do.”
She shrugged off the blanket, folded it precisely and handed it to the paramedic who raised his eyebrows at Slowey, clicked his pen and walked away. Even without the blanket, she remained stooped, shoulders gently rounded under some weight only she could feel.
“Let’s start again. I’m Ken Slowey and I’m investigating this fire.” He offered his hand, which she took and shook briskly before clasping her hands together firmly at her waist, denying them the chance to flutter away.
“I made the phone call. I assumed you wanted a statement from me. I can’t tell you much but I know these things are important. I could hear them thumping around through the walls you know, so I dialled 999 and here you all are.” She spoke in breathless bursts, meeting his eyes fleetingly and sniffing away tears.
“And I’ve been told not to go back into my house until it’s been declared safe,” she continued as Slowey opened his mouth to think.
“Is there a neighbour you’re on good terms with?”
Her jaws worked beneath skin that was slack and lifeless in the harsh light. She produced a crumpled handkerchief from the sleeve of a black and gold cardigan, thrown on in a hasty ensemble with turquoise tracksuit bottoms and pink slippers.
“No, I don’t think so,” she said.
She remained adamant she didn’t need to be taken anywhere, nor should anyone be summoned to look after her. She didn’t want food, tea, sleep or shelter. She certainly didn’t want to hear the sincere murmur of sympathy that professionals of Slowey’s ilk reserved for those they found wretched and pitiable. She conceded that she could summon her daughter if need be, but wasn’t to be dispensed with until she had said her part. At a time convenient to her, she might accept a lift to the hospital to make sure the staff were caring for Jeremy and Anthony by her standards rather than theirs. Didn’t he have a car they could talk in? She’d like to see where her rising council tax payments were going.
“Where should I begin?” she mused, once Slowey had scooped the fallen sun visor, fast food wrappers, dried chewing gum and crumpled statement paper from the passenger seat of the Fiesta.
“Well, I can guide you up to a point, but it’s better if the account comes from you with a minimum of prompting. Certainly makes the lawyers happier.” Slowey did his best not to patronise, imagining he was telling off one of his kids for a lapse in table manners while convincing them they really were old enough to know better.
“I’m sorry, officer. Very rude of me to think aloud.” She raised her left hand to her forehead, flicked away a strand of hair, and gripped the seatbelt where it hung at her shoulder, still watching the two houses. “I mean, I meant it rhetorically.”
“Yes. Yes, I knew that.” Slowey beamed a deliberate smile at her and smoothed down an empty page of his notebook.
“Well, I know it was 1235, because I looked at the bedside clock. I don’t know how accurate that old thing is. It’s got glowing red numbers and it’s a Philips, don’t know the model number. Do you need to know that?”
Slowey shook the image of an antique teas-maid from his head, forced his face blank, his mouth into a straight line, taking in Marjorie’s demeanour: the flitting of her eyes, the flaring of her nostrils, the twitching of her mouth, the fluttering of pulse and windpipe in her neck, the way her left hand seemed to unconsciously pull on the seatbelt strap, drawing a dull metallic click from the inertia reel.
“I’d been reading so I wasn’t properly asleep and it was, I mean, it is ever so hot. Even with Anthony in the other room. And I don’t sleep properly anyway because he needs me at odd hours, with his condition. And even Jeremy is restless in this weather and he does get excited. I’m last to drop off and first up.”
She laughed, a flash of joy which faded like a snowflake on a barbecue. Slowey nodded and made his lips crinkle with appreciation, using the gesture to stifle a yawn triggered by a glance at the clock.
“Anyway, I don’t know which I noticed first or whether I noticed them all at the same time. I don’t think the smell of smoke by itself would have disturbed me. They both smoke like chimneys and they seem to have barbeques every other night in the summer and it gets through the windows and sometimes through the cavities in the walls.
“But there was a glow outside, like the sun was overhead, and a sound like the sea on a stony beach and smoke everywhere. We have good walls but I could hear them too, next door I mean, steps thumping up and down the landing, shouting and wailing.”
She paused, eyes reddening, failing to find the handkerchief in either sleeve. Slowey found a substitute on the back seat, tissues bearing the golden arches but clean enough. She touched both sides to her nose, failed to find a surface that didn’t smell of cooked meat, took the plunge and blew.
“The yelling wasn’t as loud as sometime
s. Didn’t hear a man. Anyway, what is it the fire brigade say? Get out, call out, stay out or something. I’m afraid I did things in the wrong order. I have a phone next to the bed you see, and I didn’t think it would work outside. It’s cordless but it’s very temperamental.
“My daughter bought it for me when we got burgled, oh, nearly five years ago now. And something might happen to Anthony. But you can’t walk too far away without it going all crackly. Not that you need to know all that.” She failed to find a smile to match the puzzled one worn by Slowey, and drew a deep breath.
“So I dialled 999 and they asked me which service so I said fire, of course, which was rude of me but I was a bit worried by then. I told the lady and she heard me coughing and wheezing because I’d walked into Jeremy’s bedroom and was trying to talk to him and tell him to calm down and help his mummy like a good boy but there were great thick ribbons of smoke coming through the brickwork and he wouldn’t listen at first but I had to answer the lady’s questions and she wanted the postcode of all things.
“So I told her while Jeremy helped me get his dad down the stairs – when I say helping, I mean leading, keeping out of the way, which is the same thing with him. We were making such a racket so I don’t know what the lady thought, but she said someone was coming and I should get everyone out and stay out.”
“There doesn’t appear to be too much damage to your lungs, Mrs Jennings.”
A frown flashed across her forehead and she allowed herself a smile that didn’t touch her eyes. Then she squinted as if searching for a thread she’d dropped.
“So there we were, the three of us, standing in the street half-dressed, Jeremy still happy and sad at the same time like he is when he’s overexcited, me fretting about Anthony with his breathing. We’d had to leave his oxygen inside, you see. Oh, my God! Perhaps I should have told the firemen. It could have exploded!”
She held her mouth open, her cheeks dappling.
“Well, the houses are still there so we shouldn’t worry about it now. I’ll mention it to the firemen in a little while. You were saying?”