Smoke Alarm

by Priscilla Masters

  ‘She is currently missing.’

  Barton’s frown deepened. ‘What do you mean, she’s missing?’

  She let the question ride.

  ‘You mean that she wasn’t burnt to death.’ He spoke the words cruelly.

  She could have corrected him, pointed out that neither his wife, daughter nor father had ‘burnt to death’. She had already informed him of the results of the post-mortem. They had died of smoke inhalation. Mark Sullivan had told her that the actual fire damage to their bodies had been minimal. Christie Barton’s legs had been burnt by the nylon melted in the heat. It was a different image from that of a charred corpse.

  She watched them leave, after a very formal goodbye, still sensing their anger but also with a feeling of frustration.

  She didn’t believe they were being entirely honest with her.

  FOURTEEN

  It was after they had left and she had heard their car drive away that she began to analyse what had been said. The old man had been a fireman, concerned with safety enough to advise his grandson to put in a fire escape of sorts, a rope ladder. He had been right about the narrow staircase boxed in behind the door. Fire streaking up that would have meant certain death for the boy. She wrenched her mind away from that and focused on another word.

  Stories.

  The old man had told his grandson stories. How much was true and how much fantasy? Had he really driven a tank across the desert as a teenager? Had he really saved all these people’s lives as a fireman?

  Alzheimer’s sufferers in general do not make up stories or fantasize. They are beyond boasting to impress their listener. They simply want to revisit the past. But it is a real and truthful past, not a place invented to impress. They don’t seek status by boasting but recall the truth with a clear mind and without embellishment. Usually.

  Martha was cross with herself. She felt she had just missed an opportunity. She should have asked him outright and in more detail about these stories. She felt she would instinctively have known what significance they would have had. And more importantly, what bearing they might have on recent events.

  And now she was wondering. Besides tales of the Second World War what other stories had William Barton related to his impressionable grandson? She leaned back in her chair, needing to think, to clarify this new information, sort it and use it. The whole thing about William Barton setting fire to the house previously made a lot more sense now. He had simply been reliving the past. Putting himself into the part of hero. And who would know better than an ex-fireman how to set a fire? But at the same time it gave someone else an opportunity to shift the blame for any fire back on to William Barton. And Barton senior was dead. He could not defend himself. Martha sat, frowning into the distance. Something was still nagging at her. And now there was the added complication of the missing nurse. She felt a great temptation to ring DI Randall and tell him this latest little nugget of information. But when she rang the station she was told he was out. And she didn’t want to tell anyone else. She looked out of the window. It was late afternoon but the weather was fine and dry and in a sudden burst of energy she needed to walk. Telling Jericho that she was going out for an hour she took her car to the bottom of Wyle Cop, parked in the NCP and walked up the hill. It was a steep hill, lined with shops, most of them still with the crooked black and white facades they had worn for centuries.

  And then. Halfway up the hill she was standing outside the antiques shop with a For Sale or To Let sign over it. She stopped dead. Finton Cley saw her through the window and came out. She looked up at the board then back at him for an explanation.

  ‘Time to move on, Martha Gunn,’ he said equably. ‘I’ve spent enough time here living in the past. I need to get on with my life.’

  She read the pain behind his eyes and nodded. ‘It is a good thing to do that,’ she said. ‘I wish you luck, Finton.’ Then she smiled mischievously. ‘I don’t suppose you’re having a closing-down sale, are you?’

  His eyes, too, were merry as he shook his head. ‘I said moving on,’ he said. ‘Not giving up.’

  ‘So where to, Finton?’

  ‘New York,’ he said surprisingly. ‘It’s been on my mind forever. I have a friend over there who already has an established business. I was in school with him. He’s been trying to get me to join with him for years. I want to go.’ He glanced behind him. ‘I can ship this stuff out and will have a good start.’

  ‘And your sister?’

  ‘Comes with me.’ His chin was firm. ‘I couldn’t possibly leave her behind.’

  She put her hand on his arm. ‘Then good luck,’ she said with sincerity.

  She continued right to the top of Wyle Cop, stopping at Appleyards, the Deli, where she bought some Comté cheese and olives and peeped in the window at the shop opposite which had a window display of antique jewellery then wandered back down ‘the Cop’, eyeing up the window of Oberon and wondering whether Sukey would like one of the charm bracelets that were currently popular. The twins’ birthdays were looming. Sam had already asked for an exercise bench.

  She returned to the NCP. It was getting dark now. Lights were being switched on. It was time to return to the office, tidy up the day’s paperwork and go home. But the encounter with Finton Cley had unsettled her. His father’s death had been one of her early cases and the knock on effect of her suicide verdict had been brought home to her – rather forcibly – by Finton, who had played some bizarre and occasionally macabre, even threatening, tricks on her. Initially she had been intrigued and then disturbed. But when she had understood who was behind these events and why, it had made her even more aware of the nature of her work and the impact of her verdicts on the victims’ families. It had been his Message for Martha, a hint manifested by the depositing of the Adam Faith record on her doorstep. And now? She had thought she had always been fully aware of the effect of violent death on its survivors. Now she was even more so. So Finton Cley’s tricks had achieved their desired effect.

  Just as she arrived at her car her mobile phone rang. It was Simon Pendlebury who, once he’d greeted her, cut straight to the chase without preamble, as was his way. ‘Can I persuade you to have dinner with me again, Martha? Fairly soon?’ There was urgency in his voice.

  She agreed to have dinner with him on the Friday, climbed into the car and sat, hands on the wheel, reflecting. Simon Pendlebury, widower, wealthy, attractive. So why wasn’t she jumping up and down for joy at the dinner invitation? And what was the urgency? Was he feeling the same desperation that she was?

  Ah. Who knew? She leaned forward, turned the ignition and put the car into gear. Time to go home.

  Back at the station DI Alex Randall was holed up with a few of his officers, Gethin Roberts, Paul Talith, Gary Coleman and WPC Lara Tinsley. It was meant to be a brainstorming exercise but so far there hadn’t been much evidence that any one of them had a brain. And there were no storms in sight. There had still been no sightings of either the missing nurse or her car and the case felt dangerously close to limbo, the doldrums, or any other place where absolutely nothing happened. Sometimes Randall felt he lived in these very places.

  Like Martha herself DI Randall was tempted to pick up the phone and brainstorm with the coroner but that was not the way it was done. His mouth twisted with frustration. Something needed to happen. They needed a break. The problem in the police force was that you could not force the pace in an investigation. One had to hope that any vital piece of evidence or a statement from a member of the general public didn’t get lost in the gigabytes of information that soon surrounded any major investigation. One could only go so far and all the time new cases would continue to arrive, each one of them distracting you. Crimes did not tidily wait for the previous one to be solved to present themselves. Positive crime solution figures were what the politicians wanted but these statistics did not always reflect the severity of the crime or the complexity of the investigation.

  Randall gave a loud sigh. And now it was time to go
home. Sometimes he felt like Sisyphus. He spent all day rolling a boulder up a hill only to find in the morning it had rolled all the way back down again. He knew what Sisyphus had done to warrant the punishment. He was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, a cheat and a murderer. But what on earth had he done?

  Martha, meanwhile, while driving home, had been struck by a thought and was now dancing with her own demons. Something else was triggering her interest. A new angle. For some reason her mind had homed in on the keys to the two women’s rooms. Because of the women’s fate they had made the assumption that Adelaide and Christie had been locked in their rooms. That while Adelaide had cowered beneath her bedclothes, presumably because she was frightened of the fire, Christie had been frantically trying to get out when the blaze had taken hold. But to try and escape their rooms would have propelled them into the heat and the smoke which would have been funnelled up the staircase. Would they have realized that in their state of confusion and panic? And now, for some reason, her mind was asking another question completely. What if the reverse was true, that far from being trapped in their bedrooms they had been sheltering from some perceived danger outside, terrified of something or someone who was in the house and their place of safety had been their bedrooms? Had they locked themselves in rather than out? Was there evidence whether the doors had been locked from the inside or the outside? The truth was that the evidence was unclear. The doors had been both damaged by the fire and forced open by the forensic crew. The keys had dropped to the floor and landed in a pile of rubble. If they had locked themselves in what had they been so frightened of? Had it been the fire? What had happened earlier, prior to the blaze? It had been early. Not like the dead of night when they would all have been deeply asleep. What had they been individually protecting themselves from? If they had been . . .

  Unable to stop herself she picked up her mobile phone and connected with Colin Agnew, Fire Chief.

  He saw what she was getting at instantly. ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ he said slowly. ‘I simply made the assumption that they were locked in and couldn’t get out – not the other way round. Why lock it? A locked door wouldn’t keep a fire out. They would have to have been fearful of something else.’ He paused. ‘Something more like a threatening human presence.’

  Martha needed to check. ‘You’re sure the doors were locked?’

  ‘Yes. The bolt of the lock was still shot back on the inside of the doorframe. There’s no doubt about it even though the damage to the doors, both doors, was quite extensive and the keys were found on the floor. It’s possible,’ he said after some thought, ‘that having to axe through the door meant that the keys would have fallen. But,’ he added then, ‘I can understand why they would cower behind their doors when there was a fire outside, on the landing, but not lock them?’

  ‘It must have felt safer that way.’

  ‘But the damage was worse in their bedrooms than outside.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have known that. They would have been confused – disorientated.’

  By his silence she could tell he was thinking.

  ‘One more question, Colin. Did any of your personnel actually see Jude Barton climb down the ladder?’

  ‘Inspector Randall asked me that. I’ve questioned everyone who was at the Melverley fire. They were all concentrating on the front of the house where the fire was worst. No one saw the boy descend. Only the ladder, hanging there. And then of course, PC Roberts . . .’

  ‘Mmm. Thank you.’

  ‘Any time, Coroner.’ Even as she ended the call another picture seemed to drop in front of her vision. Neither of the women had tried to get to their windows. Both Christie and Adelaide’s rooms were on the first floor, a gravel pathway beneath them. The evidence was that Christie had approached the window before the door. Why hadn’t she exited through the window? Had the flames beaten her back? Had she tried to reach her daughter? The fire had been well underway before the fire engines had arrived. The image that now impressed itself into her mind was of Adelaide cowering under her bedclothes, terrified not only by the fire but perhaps by another threat, something outside her door and Christie, breath held, also listening at the door. Maybe not confused and disorientated then – simply terrified.

  Alex Randall, in the meantime, was not concentrating on the Melverley fire but on the missing nurse. With the other officers they reviewed all they knew so far. He turned back to the whiteboard.

  Credit cards not used, mobile phone switched off; the car had become invisible, her two sons frantic. No friends or family had seen or heard from her for two weeks. Her passport hadn’t been used. Ergo she was still in the country either dead or alive, free or a captive. Her house had been burnt down in the same way as Melverley Grange. Randall felt frustrated. It was sitting there. What?

  Nigel Barton denied ever having met the nurse and yet . . .

  There must be a connection. There must be.

  Sergeant Paul Talith was watching him, waiting for a response, some direction. At last Randall looked up and Sergeant Paul Talith spotted a spark in those hazel eyes. Enough to prompt him. ‘Sir?’

  Randall looked at him. ‘We have to find the connection between William Barton and Monica Deverill,’ he said slowly. ‘And the best way to do this is to speak again to her two sons.’ He knew that many of Monica Deverill’s friends had been interviewed by local police forces up and down the country. All had drawn a blank. But who knew her best? Her sons.

  Talith stood up. In spite of his increasing bulk he hated inactivity. The time was six o’clock. But it felt later. Much later. It was a cold, dingy evening, the weather having lost the spark that had deceived them into believing that spring was on its way. But they all felt the urgency. They needed to press on. Talith volunteered to stay with the inspector who’d said easily and truthfully, ‘I’m in no great hurry to get home. I’m more anxious to get some answers in this wretched case.’

  So it was Randall and Talith who stayed. James and Gordon Deverill were located within minutes.

  How had the police managed without mobile phones? Randall mused, as he sat and waited for them to arrive. It took hours off locating someone, saved days of police time, hundreds of wasted visits to empty properties, waiting, waiting. But there was a downside to this useful little toy. Pay and Throwaway phones were a lifeline to those who wanted to remain anonymous. He toyed with his pen, wondering whether this last thought was significant.

  Straightaway Randall could see both Monica Deverill’s sons were really worried about her so he didn’t bother asking whether she was still missing but simply assumed it. James made a brave attempt at optimism but it was a transparently, almost pathetically thin one. ‘I suppose no news is good news?’ he said faux-cheerfully.

  In Randall’s more pragmatic outlook no news was exactly that – no news. No ruddy news at all. And as a result there was nothing good about it, he was tempted to growl. But the purpose of this interview was not to depress the brothers further but extract information – even information they might not have realized was relevant. And he knew exactly the tack he would take.

  ‘Can you think of any connection between your mother and Mr William Barton?’

  They looked at one another, puzzled. ‘No.’

  ‘He was a fire officer in the Shrewsbury force until his retirement about twenty years ago,’ Randall prompted.

  They still looked at him blankly.

  Randall felt like giving up. They weren’t being deliberately unhelpful. If there was a connection between Barton senior and the retired nurse they may well not even know it. He was going to have to think this one over.

  He tried again. ‘Do the names Yusuf Karoglan, Ben Hatton or Stuart Pinfold mean anything to you?’

  They looked uncertain. Not illuminated. Simply uncertain. Gordon Deverill frowned. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, before making an attempt at a joke. ‘They sound a motley crew. Who are they?’

  ‘Ex-employees of Mr Nigel Barton,’ Randall supplied. ‘We wondered
if any of the names was familiar to you?’

  Both sons shook their heads.

  ‘Did your mother have anything to do with the Shropshire Wildlife Trust?’ He was clutching at straws now.

  They looked at each other as though each was thinking the same thought. This detective’s finally flipped it. And shook their heads. ‘Oh.’ It was James who pursued this thread irritably. ‘And this has what exactly to do with my mother’s house being subjected to an arson attack and her having gone missing?’

  ‘The MO of the two fires was the same.’

  James kept coming. ‘So, based on this, you’re assuming our mother had some connection to the Barton family?’

  Slowly Randall nodded.

  Gordon’s shoulders went up to around his ears as he shrugged. ‘What?’ he challenged bluntly.

  ‘We don’t know.’ Randall wanted to give another deep, deep sigh but he glanced at Talith who was looking bored, gave an almost imperceptible shrug and resisted. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is what we are trying to find out.’

  The brothers looked at each other blankly.

  FIFTEEN

  Alex had a quick chat with forensics and another with Dr Mark Sullivan whom he just caught before he left for the evening, but no one seemed to have turned anything up. So he had only one real live lead to pursue – Jude Barton. He had never quite shaken off the feeling that Barton junior was keeping something back. It was something to do with the relationship between Jude and his grandfather. And he was wondering why Martha had asked whether anyone had witnessed the boy’s descent of the rope ladder. DI Randall had a healthy respect for the coroner’s instincts so when she asked a question he knew the answer might well be significant.

  Jude Barton, however, was a minor, still injured and he’d already interviewed him. There was no new evidence to justify interviewing him again and he was well aware that the press and Jude’s father might well interpret a further interview as harassment. He needed to tread carefully and he wasn’t hopeful. He switched his office light off.