Smoke Alarm

by Priscilla Masters

  Yet, as she studied the shape on the carpet, she knew that something about that theory wasn’t working. She scanned the landing, pictured the old man’s body stretched out, in his dressing gown and slippers and apparently with a cigarette lighter in his pocket. Her eyes were drawn to another door at her side. ‘And the second floor?’

  ‘Up here.’ Paul Talith had climbed the stairs to join his boss. He pushed open the door and led the way. The stairs were boxed in with wooden planks behind the thick, pitch pine door. Badly scorched and blistered on the outside but intact. And while the inside also showed signs of fire damage it had held back the fire. Pitch pine contains a great deal of sweet sap and the heat had made this trickle down the wooden panels before cooking it as hard and black as basalt. Reaching out, Martha could still feel the heat retained in the wood. It was now more than fifteen hours since the fire at Melverley Grange had been extinguished and the surfaces still felt warm. But the door had done its job, acted as a firebreak and this, and the rope ladder, had saved Jude’s life. Martha frowned. But having escaped he had then returned to the house to try and rescue his family? She was curious and wondered what he was like, this heroic teenager. She touched the door again. If the fire had reached beyond it and Jude Barton had not had the foresight to keep a rope ladder in his room he would have had no route of escape and would have died with the rest of his family. The staircase would quickly have become impassable and the sheer height of the house made it too high to jump without sustaining serious or fatal injury. Jude Barton had had a very lucky escape, which led Martha to wonder about the rope ladder. It seemed odd for him to have one. Had the boy half expected something like this? She filed the question away with all the others. In time she would ask them all. And get answers.

  ‘Shall we climb?’ Alex invited then stood back politely, allowing her to walk up the narrow stairs ahead of him, their footsteps making a hollow sound. There was no stair carpet, only the painted wood of the treads.

  There were five rooms on the top floor, two to the right and two to the left either side of a central bathroom. The two rooms on the right were patently only used for storage, suitcases, boxes of books and unwanted furniture, while Jude had occupied the two rooms on the left. Apart from the lingering smell of the smoke there was no evidence of the fire that had raged in the floors below leaving devastating carnage. Up here was relatively normal. The rooms on the left were much as you would expect a teenage boy’s room to be: untidy, clothes and belongings everywhere, a computer, Xbox, an unmade bed, posters on the wall of robotic super heroes. The bathroom was the same. Spicy deodorant still scented the room, overlying the smoke, but the towels were on the floor, the shower tray lime-scaled, hairs blocking the plughole. It was an all too familiar sight to Martha. Sam, her son, had much the same attitude to bathroom hygiene. ‘What’s the point, Mum, it soon gets messy again,’ and ‘it can’t be really dirty – I only wash in it.’

  Inwardly she smiled and Randall picked up on it. His own eyes twinkled as he looked at her. ‘Are all teenage boys the same, do you think, Martha?’

  She laughed but ill-advisedly used the opportunity to probe. ‘Yes,’ she said with a chuckle, adding light-heartedly, ‘Don’t you have any children, Alex?’

  She regretted the question in the same instant that the words were out of her mouth. His face froze, shoulders stiffened and he looked away quickly, though not quickly enough. She had seen a look of intense pain cross his face, like a quick, black cloud over the sun. Silently she chided herself. Big mistake, Martha.

  ‘No.’ He answered the question shortly. ‘Not anymore.’

  It was an odd answer. Martha took a surreptitious look at him but he kept his eyes away and volunteered nothing further. It underlined the fact that while her friendship with the tall detective might have grown it was still primarily a professional relationship which might develop into a closer friendship using slippery stepping stones to find a way to cross a deep river. It would be only too easy to fall in. And the water was ice-cold. Quite inhospitable. She did not want to fall in. So she concentrated on the job in hand, examining the boy’s rope ladder, noting the steel ring screwed into the wall. It was a professional job. She tugged at it. There was no give. It was firmly anchored. This, then, had kept the boy alive although, she supposed, it was just about possible that the door at the bottom of the stairs would have kept the inferno away long enough for the firemen to effect a rescue. Fire engine, tall ladder, dramatic rescue. A Boy’s Own dream. But instead Jude Barton had descended a rope ladder. Equally dramatic. She must find out the circumstances of his descent. She took a last look around his room before following the others back downstairs.

  When they had finally returned to the hall Alex asked her: ‘Seen enough, Martha?’ She noted a stiffness in his manner now, a distance in his voice and she sensed his resentment that she had stolen an unauthorized peep into the life he so zealously protected from outside view.

  She retreated into formality. ‘Almost, Alex, thank you. I’d just like to have a quick word with one of the firemen and then I really should get back to the office.’

  He obviously felt constrained too. ‘I’ll get one of the officers to drive you,’ he offered. ‘I need to do some more work here.’ He was avoiding her eyes, she noticed. She wanted to apologize for storming his castle but knew it was best to say nothing more. What was it her mother was always saying? Least said soonest mended. Her Irish mother had a phrase for all occasions. But even though the phrase was a cliché Martha was well aware that words would not heal the rift that had opened between them. Better then to stay quiet than make any attempt to smooth it over with words.

  She found Colin Agnew outside the property, inspecting the damage around one of the downstairs windows. Martha introduced herself and regarded the devastation alongside him. ‘How long do you think the fire had been burning before the alarm was raised?’

  ‘Well over half an hour,’ Agnew responded. ‘It had really taken hold.’ He looked at her. ‘It took us two hours to get it under control. There were six fire engines all pouring water into the place. And one of the clocks on the mantelpiece of the downstairs sitting room had stopped at just after eleven.’

  Martha almost burst out laughing. ‘Oh, don’t give me that old mushroom,’ she teased. ‘“The clock stopped at –” It’s always a fake.’

  ‘Well, it would fit in with the damage and everything else,’ Agnew said, standing his ground.

  ‘OK.’ Martha turned to go then stopped. ‘Oh, and the rope ladder?’

  The fireman nodded. ‘Still attached to the wall.’

  Alex had moved behind her, watching her very carefully indeed. So hard that one would have thought he was trying to divine her thoughts, poach them and take them for his own, but in reality he was probably wondering where her line of reasoning would take her.

  Her mobile phone rang then. It was Mark Sullivan, the pathologist. ‘Hello, Martha,’ he said. ‘Sorry to call your mobile. I did try the office but Jericho said you were out.’ He chuckled. ‘Naturally he wouldn’t tell me where you were. He protects your privacy with admirable zeal. Where are you?’

  ‘At the scene of the fire,’ she answered. ‘I thought I should take a look.’

  ‘I was wondering about the post-mortems,’ he said. ‘Will you want to attend?’

  ‘It depends, Mark. When were you thinking of doing them?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Then, no. Sorry, Mark, I can’t make it. Prior engagement. Perhaps you’d drop by my office on Monday morning and run through your findings?’

  ‘Sure. See you then.’ And he ended the call.

  PC Gethin Roberts drove her back to her office. She couldn’t resist asking him about his dramatic rescue. ‘Are you all right, Constable?’

  ‘Slight burns to my hands,’ he said, indicating a bulky dressing on one of them. ‘Apart from that I’m fine.’ His eyes slid across to her. ‘Bit shaken up, to be honest.’

  ‘It was very bra
ve of you.’ She hesitated. ‘Jude, the boy, he escaped using his rope ladder. How come he went back in to the house?’

  ‘He wanted to try and rescue his mum and sister.’

  ‘And grandfather?’

  ‘He only said his mum and sister. But then he was in shock. His clothes were alight. He was hysterical. He must have been in a lot of pain. He was babbling on about his mum and sister but didn’t mention his grandfather. Mind you, there was so much noise, shouting and confusion that he might have done and I just didn’t hear him.’

  They’d reached her office. ‘Thank you, Gethin.’

  The PC blushed.

  ‘I hope your hand isn’t too painful?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘And that it gets better soon.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  She closed the door.

  Martha spent the rest of the afternoon doing paperwork, dictating letters and signing forms, but her mind kept drifting back to that smoke-blackened house, the sad sight of the three bodies, the destruction of the rooms in which the two women had been locked, the thought of Adelaide cowering underneath her bedclothes, her mother desperately trying to escape. And the boy, Jude, shimmying down the rope ladder like a superhero. The rope ladder itself, which he had thought to acquire as his escape route. Why?

  And when her mind drifted from this it was to relive the mortifying embarrassment she had felt when DI Alex Randall felt obliged to answer her probing and intrusive question. Even now she felt hot with embarrassment at the thought and wished her brain would erase that particular memory.

  Eventually, although the rest of the day dragged, like all Friday afternoons, she finished her work and was ready to leave.

  Saturday, 26 February, 9.30 a.m.

  This Saturday was Martha’s morning for the dreaded visit to Vernon Grubb, who had a hairdressing salon in the centre of town, along a narrow street bordered with ancient and crooked black and white buildings. She parked in the Raven Meadows multi-storey car park and walked out into Pride Hill. The salon was also black and white but that was where history ended and contemporary art began. Inside Vernon Grubb’s salon was more like a space station, white shiny surfaces and stainless steel, plenty of electronic devices that bleeped and alarmed. Vernon Grubb greeted her with a disapproving ‘tsh tsh’ at her hair, throwing a black nylon cape over her shoulders and leading her straight to the mirror to confront herself. He was nothing like the cliché of a mincing, slightly effeminate male hairdresser: tattoos, gold jewellery and polo-necked shirts, but had the bulging biceps, meaty thighs and general bulk of a rugby prop forward. One day, Martha had long ago decided, she would pluck up the courage to ask how a man who would have looked more at home in the front of a rugby scrum had taken up – of all professions – hairdressing. However, so far, she had not dared to risk it. Grubb could be quite outspoken and very unpredictable. So she was left to puzzle as he lifted tress after tress, strand after strand of her thick and unruly red-gold hair, tutting and scolding at the way she managed it. Or according to him, mismanaged it. True, she could never quite dry it as neatly or silkily as Vernon himself, but she bought pounds’ worth of conditioners, serums and sprays from him, and expected at least some allowance for that.

  It made it worse that Vernon Grubb was a broad Geordie. ‘It’s time you took your hair more seriously, Martha, pet,’ he scolded her. ‘It’s your crownin’ glory, you know. People’d kill to have such a red.’

  ‘People would kill,’ she remarked acidly, half turning her head to his increased disapproval, ‘not to have hair this colour and so naturally untidy. Especially in my job.’ She eyed him in the mirror balefully. ‘Can’t you do something, Vernon? Dye it or something? Black, maybe? I’d love to have black hair.’ She looked at her reflection and pictured herself with black, straight, shining Cleopatra hair, but was dragged back to reality by Grubb.

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Martha Gunn. Black hair? You’d look like the witch of Endor.’

  ‘Well, at least tone it down.’

  ‘There is such a thing as a criminal offence,’ he said severely, folding his arms and scowling, ‘even in the hairdressing world.’ But his good humour had returned. He was smiling again as he talked, displaying the gap between his front teeth. ‘And to start messing around with your hair would be one of them.’ His lips pressed together in a Presbyterian grimace and he folded his arms, scissors poking out of one hand, comb from the other. ‘I’ll not do it. And that’s that. So you can just stop asking.’

  He’d subdued her very brief and weak rebellion. She tucked the cape tighter round her shoulders, settled back with a sigh and said, ‘Oh, do what you like then. You always do anyway.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Gunn.’ Vernon looked smug. ‘Now then, just let me tuck this towel around you. Good. Now, lean back.’

  Expert hands took over then, shampooing, massaging the scalp, a dripping walk back to the chair and the scissors snipped their way into action. At the end of it Martha looked at herself in the mirror and approved, even giving herself a slightly smug smile. ‘Why can I never get it like this myself?’ she asked.

  Vernon looked even more smug. He whipped the wrap away. ‘Going anywhere nice tonight then, Mrs Gunn?’

  She eyed herself in the mirror and caught the light dancing in her eyes. ‘Certainly am,’ she said.

  ‘And are you going to tell me where?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Or who with?’

  Another shake of the head. She stood up, said goodbye to both reflections in the mirror, the fantasy lady with black tresses and a slightly excited middle-aged woman.

  Monday, 28 February, 8.45 a.m.

  Monday, as always, came around far too fast but the day brought its compensations. Today felt like the first real day of spring. Already the trees were beginning to burst through their winter drabness. They were almost green. One felt convinced that spring really was ‘just around the corner’. Bulbs were poking up through the soil to be greeted by a jolly sun beaming benevolently down on them. Anticipation, Martha thought as she drove round the ring road towards Bayston Hill, was so often better than arrival. How many summers were a disappointment? But spring? Never.

  She parked in her usual spot and pushed open the front door. Jericho was waiting to ambush her in the hall. ‘Nice weekend, Jerry?’

  ‘Very nice, ma’am,’ he answered in his slow, Shropshire burr. ‘Quiet, just with Mrs Palfreyman and myself, but very pleasant for all that.’ He could hardly avoid adding the nicety, ‘And you, Mrs Gunn?’

  ‘Very good, thank you.’ She could have said so much more now that Sam, her son, had moved back in with them: that he was on loan from Liverpool to play for Stoke City and her Sunday had been spent watching him play and cheering on his side. That almost as soon as Sam had walked in through the door, Agnetha, the au pair, had tearfully left, returning to her home land of Sweden to be married in a couple of months’ time and that she, Martha, had finally, finally given up her grieving for Martin’s death from cancer when the twins had been only three years old, and that she had finally dumped her normally sensible, practical, middle-aged ‘mumsy’ role to go out on a date. A proper, romantic, dinner date. She could still feel her toes tingling with the remembered anticipation. The only problem had been that the ‘date’ had been with her old friend – or rather, the widower of her late friend – Simon Pendlebury. And although the evening had been pleasant – very pleasant, Simon being an urbane, amusing and polite character – it had not been the toe-tingling, breathless experience of her early dates with Martin. When she had got home on Saturday night she had undressed and felt numb and a little depressed as she climbed into bed. It wasn’t the same.

  Dr Mark Sullivan had made an appointment through Jericho, the guardian of her gate, and appeared at 10 a.m. He’d brought with him the notes and pictures of the three post-mortems he had had to perform on Saturday. He walked in, a man of medium height and unremarkable appearance, blue eyes behind
glasses, hair brown. He was a few years younger than her. ‘Basically,’ he said, ‘they all died of smoke inhalation with varying degrees of burns. As you’d expect seeing as her bedroom was directly over the seat of the fire, Mrs Christie Barton had the most severe burns, most sustained post-mortem. There is very little inflammation around the sites which were basically hands, forearms, and legs. She was otherwise healthy as was her daughter, Adelaide. The old man had some heart disease and a little underlying fibrosis of the lung but he too died of smoke inhalation. He also had some ischaemic changes in his brain. I understand he had a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. I’m waiting for the results of a brain scan he had about a year ago.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Martha looked sharply at the pathologist. ‘No other wounds, Mark?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head.

  ‘OK.’ She looked at him and marvelled at the change the last twelve months had wrought in him. Mark Sullivan, a brilliant pathologist, had had a serious and fairly obvious drink problem as well as a reputedly wretched marriage. But now he was a different man. Not half drunk most of the time, with shaking hands and bloodshot eyes but clear-eyed, steady-handed and best of all sober. ‘You’ve changed,’ she commented.

  Surprisingly Mark Sullivan took this as an invitation to sit down, smiling, and confide. ‘I had to,’ he said bluntly. ‘Otherwise . . .’ He didn’t enlarge but stayed sat down, still smiling at her.

  ‘Well, I’ve noticed,’ she said. ‘And it’s a welcome sight, I can tell you, in a doctor with your talent.’

  ‘It was a big change,’ he said. ‘I was drinking too much.’

  She deliberately didn’t respond but now Mark Sullivan had begun to open up he seemed anxious to continue.

  ‘Like most people I was drinking for a reason.’

  Again she made no response but watched him.

  Sullivan ploughed on. ‘My wife and I – we’re divorced.’ He smiled now. ‘Take away the reason why you’re drinking too much and everything else falls into place.’