The Burning

by Jane Casey

  I hadn’t been concentrating for long when the fan clicked off. I looked up, outraged.

  ‘Turn that back on.’

  Rob was standing beside my desk, his finger over the off-switch, shaking his head. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Isn’t it time you went home?’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe. But I’d rather look through the files again.’

  ‘You know how to live, don’t you?’ He picked up a booklet of photographs from the third crime scene and flipped through it idly, and I couldn’t help but look as well at what was left of Charity Beddoes, twenty-three, the tall, beautiful post-graduate student at LSE, who owed her height and blue eyes to her English father and her hair and skin colour to her Nigerian mother. There was a narrative to the procession of images. The path that led into the copse where her body had burned. Charred bark and branches. A close-up of what might have been the edge of a footprint. Blackened skin. A twisted torso patched with the remains of her clothing. One leg, weirdly, that wasn’t damaged by the fire, brown and perfect from the middle of the thigh down to the foot, a long graze on the calf where she’d been dragged along the ground. It had happened, I knew without referring to the pathologist’s report, around the time of her death, though he couldn’t say for certain whether she’d been alive to feel it. But she must have felt something. Fourteen separate injuries to her skull and face – fourteen blows with an instrument similar to a claw hammer, according to the pathologist. Defence injuries to her hands and forearms where she’d tried to shield herself, though her hands were bound in front of her so she couldn’t fight back. Broken teeth. Broken bones. Nothing for her family to recognise, if they had wanted to see the body, and I hoped like hell they hadn’t. It would be no way to remember someone you loved.

  Rob cursed softly and threw the booklet onto the desk in front of me.

  ‘Let’s get out of here, Goody-two-shoes. You need a rest and something to eat. You look like shit.’

  ‘I only keep you around for the morale boost, you realise.’

  ‘I live to serve.’ He grabbed the back of my chair and spun it around so I was facing the door. ‘Come on. Up. Let’s go for a drink and a curry.’

  I stayed where I was. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I promised myself I’d read through the notes on the cases while I had the time to do it.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’ He ran his hand through his hair. ‘All right. I give in. I’ll let you do your reading. But I’m not letting you stay here. It’s too depressing. I’m taking these files away and you’re going home. I’ll come over with them later on and we can go through them together.’

  ‘Don’t boss me. I’ll go home when I’m ready and – Rob!’

  He’d scooped up the four folders and was heading for the door. ‘You’d better text me your address. Do you prefer Indian or Thai food?’

  ‘Rob, come on. Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘You’re right. It’s got to be pizza. Everyone loves pizza.’ The last sentence was delivered over his shoulder as he disappeared through the swing doors out of the incident room, leaving me sitting on my chair, opening and closing my mouth futilely. I had been outmanoeuvred. Hijacked. And I knew Rob well enough to know that if I wanted to see my files again, I’d need to go along with what he’d suggested. To be honest, I didn’t mind too much. It didn’t sound like a bad idea.

  Not then, anyway.

  The phone was ringing when I opened the front door but I couldn’t make myself run for it. I trudged up the stairs carrying my jacket and my shoes, which I had taken off as soon as I got inside. My bones were aching; I felt a hundred years old. As I reached the top of the stairs, the answering machine kicked in and I listened for a second to my mother’s voice, trying to gauge whether her hollow tone meant that there was something genuinely wrong or if it was her usual guilt trip.

  ‘Maeve. I was hoping to speak to you, actually. I wanted to have a word. But you’re not there.’ Long pause. ‘Maybe you’d call me when you get the chance.’ Another pause. ‘It’s nothing important. We just haven’t spoken for a while and your father was worried.’

  I snorted. Dad would not have been worried in the least.

  ‘I was speaking with––’ Bee-eep.

  I threw my jacket and shoes down on the sofa in the living room, then lifted the shoes off it again and pawed guiltily at the dust marks they had left on the purple suede. Who had a purple suede sofa, anyway? It was about eight feet long and vilely uncomfortable, but had been extremely expensive, Ian had told me, round about the time I put a mug of tea down on one arm and left a ring on it. I would have preferred something comfortable and saggy, something you could lie on while watching TV and eating chocolate. Something you could actually use.

  The phone rang again.

  ‘Maeve? It’s your mother. Your machine cut me off.’ Aggrieved to the power of ten. Maybe if you didn’t leave ten-minute messages, you’d get to the end of what you wanted to say before the machine ran out of patience. ‘I was saying, I was speaking with your auntie Maureen. Denise is pregnant, due in May. Of course, she said she was delighted about it – what else could she say? No word of whether Denise and Cormac will be getting married. I thought you should know, though. Ah, it’s a blessing really. Maureen will love being a grandmother. She was asking for you, but I told her there was no sign of anything like that on the horizon. With your job I don’t know how you’d fit in a baby anyway. As I told Maureen, I never seem to be able to get hold of––’ The machine beeped again, and blessed silence fell. I rolled my eyes and wandered back out of the living room as the phone started to ring again. There was no way I was going to answer it. Much better to leave her to ramble on.

  I would call her, I promised myself, tomorrow, though I hoped she wasn’t going to have another go at me about being a policewoman. I’d been in the job for five years and she still wasn’t used to the idea, not least because I had a slew of cousins back in Ireland who had very little time for the British authorities. I didn’t think any of them were actually in the IRA but they were committed nationalists, the kind of people who knew all the words to ‘A Nation Once Again’ and could list the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation in order off the tops of their heads. Mum had kept my choice of career quiet for as long as she could, hoping I’d change my mind, and she still tended to avoid talking about it within the extended family. I had schooled myself not to mind, but it still got to me occasionally. There’s nothing like making your parents proud.

  In the kitchen I went straight to the kettle and made myself a mug of tea, downing half of it before I noticed the note stuck to the fridge door, in Ian’s tight, hard-to-decipher writing. Your mother rang. Call her. The second sentence was underlined. Poor Ian. She didn’t like him much – didn’t like the fact that we were living together, or that he wasn’t a Catholic. It made it worse that he wasn’t committed to any religion, in fact – she could have come to terms with a Prod. But the godless and my mother would never see eye-to-eye. I wondered briefly what they had found to say to one another. One of Mum’s major gripes was that Ian never said anything to her when he answered the phone; he would practically throw it at me when he heard her voice on the other end. The soft Donegal accent that she hadn’t lost in thirty years of living in England sometimes disguised the spikiness, but you always had to watch out for it. She could skewer you with a well-turned phrase. I shuddered. No, I definitely wasn’t strong enough for her tonight.

  I had a shower, hoping it would revive me. I must have taken longer about it than I’d thought because the doorbell rang before I could get dressed. I wrapped a towel around me and padded down the stairs to answer it, wishing that the towel was a little bit longer.

  It was fair to say that Rob didn’t mind. He pursed his lips in a soundless whistle when I opened the door to find him balancing two pizza boxes on one hand. He had the folders under one arm, and a bag containing two six-packs of beer in the other hand. It was strange to see him out of context, and I found myself staring at him as if I didn
’t know him for a second, at the wide shoulders and the clear blue eyes that were scanning me from head to toe.

  As soon as he spoke, the spell was broken. ‘Nice outfit. That is not going to help me to concentrate on the case, though.’

  ‘Drop dead.’ The pizza boxes were in serious danger so I rescued them and led the way back up the stairs, hoping that the view he was getting wasn’t too revealing.

  ‘Huh.’ He stopped at the door to the sitting room and looked in with frank interest. ‘I wouldn’t have thought of you as the interior-design type, Maeve.’

  It was the sort of room that Ian’s friends adored – big, full of statement furniture and what Ian’s interior designer called found objects on the walls, which to my mother (and to a lesser extent, me) looked like junk. I looked around, trying to see how it looked to Rob. Pretentious, probably. The purple suede sofa looked especially gaudy.

  ‘Nothing to do with me. It’s all Ian’s.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Mmm. He got some designer to choose all the furniture and decorate it. You’re supposed to think wow.’

  ‘Wow,’ Rob deadpanned, sounding anything but impressed. ‘What belongs to you in here?’

  Just for a moment, I couldn’t see anything. ‘This and that,’ I said lightly, though, because I didn’t want to examine the ramifications of not actually having any possessions in the main room of the flat where I lived.

  ‘What about that?’ He pointed up at an African mask that hung on one wall. It was about eighteen inches long and brutally ugly.

  ‘It cost a fortune. The designer found it in a flea market in Paris.’

  ‘I think it’s looking at me.’

  I was getting bored and my towel was slipping. ‘Do you want to sit down or what? I’ve got to get dressed.’

  He shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘I’m sort of scared to. What if I drop my pizza or knock over my beer?’

  ‘Then Ian will kill you and there’s nothing I can do to protect you.’

  ‘Where is Ian anyway?’ He looked around as if he expected him to materialise from behind the curtains.

  ‘Out. Cinema. Not due back for ages yet.’ I blushed as I said it, realising that it sounded as if I was calculating the time I would have alone with him. And my towel had slipped again. I hauled it back into place firmly. ‘Look, put down the files. We’ll eat in the kitchen first.’

  ‘Good idea.’ Rob propped them up against the doorframe and followed me to the kitchen. I put the beer on an empty shelf in the fridge.

  ‘See if you can detect plates and napkins while I’m getting dressed.’

  ‘Will do.’ He was prowling around the room, looking at everything, probably missing nothing. Feeling exposed in a way that had nothing to do with being almost naked, I hurried off to get dressed, putting on jeans and a T-shirt in record time.

  He was still standing when I came back, but he had opened one of the boxes and was chewing as he looked around. He surveyed me briefly. ‘I preferred the other look, but that’ll do.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Can you sit down at the table? You’re dropping crumbs.’

  ‘Mmph.’ He headed to the fridge and pulled out two beers instead, handing me one of them. ‘Did you call your mum?’

  ‘What? Oh. No.’ I reached over and ripped the note off the door, balling it up. ‘It wasn’t important.’

  ‘Bad daughter.’ He wandered around the room. ‘What’s with the mugs? Does this place double as a kindergarten?’

  I didn’t bother to look; I knew what he meant. One wall of the kitchen was covered in shelves where twenty-six brightly coloured mugs were arranged, each decorated with a letter of the alphabet. The kitchen units were bright red. The walls were cream. The effect was, Ian’s friends thought, stunning, but then they didn’t mind sitting on the vilely uncomfortable wire chairs that were ‘genuine mid-century antiques’ around the 1950s diner table that took up the middle of the room. If you weren’t into that sort of thing, it was all a bit bright. I would have preferred something cosier myself. But, as Ian had informed me on more than one occasion, I didn’t know anything about style.

  ‘Do you ever use the mugs to leave each other messages?’

  ‘Not really.’ I didn’t dare to disturb them. And I didn’t think Ian would find it funny if I did. Not that I was going to say that to Rob. ‘It’s hard to think of sentences where you can only use each letter once.’

  ‘Right.’ He didn’t sound convinced, and I had an uncomfortable feeling that he knew what I had been thinking. I busied myself with hunting through drawers for a bottle opener. I was sure we had one somewhere, but looking at the tangle of whisks, ladles, peelers and other odd bits of kitchen cutlery that had knotted themselves together, I gave up.

  ‘Have you got a bottle opener?’

  ‘On my key ring.’

  ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’

  ‘Because I’m always prepared.’ He came over and took the beer out of my hand to open it for me.

  ‘Because you wouldn’t let anything stand between you and a nice cold beer.’

  ‘That too.’ He pulled out one of the chairs with a flourish. ‘Take a seat, madam, and dig in before I eat the lot.’

  I hadn’t realised how hungry I was until I started eating, but after the first couple of mouthfuls my appetite kicked in. Forgetting about the murders – forgetting about Rob, even – I devoted myself to my pizza wholeheartedly. All that I managed to say was an occasional muffled, ‘Oh God. This is so good.’ I ran out of steam halfway through the last slice, putting it back into the box with a sigh.

  ‘I ate too much but it was worth it.’

  ‘It’s put a bit of colour in your cheeks, anyway.’ He had finished before me and was watching me across the table, turning his empty beer-bottle around and around in quarter-turns.

  ‘Right. I suppose we’d better get on with it,’ I said abruptly, feeling unsettled all of a sudden. Back to business.

  He stood up and stretched. ‘Don’t sound so unenthusiastic. You’re the one who insisted on taking work home with you.’

  ‘Yes, but I can’t remember why.’

  ‘Because you want to be the best detective in the whole wide world,’ Rob singsonged. I ignored him and headed to the fridge for fresh beers, leaving the pizza boxes where they were. A little mess wouldn’t kill anyone. And I would probably have time to tidy it up before Ian got back.

  In the sitting room, we sat side by side on the sofa and I opened the files, fanning them out on the coffee table like a deck of cards, open on the first page where there was a photograph of each of the women who had died. Four queens and it was still a losing hand. Five, if you included Rebecca Haworth. She didn’t have a file yet but the details were fresh enough in my mind to recall the little we knew. I looked at the victims’ faces and swallowed, trying to quell the panic that was rising in me. He was out there, feeding off the memories of killing young women, building up to his next attack. We would never catch him unless we got lucky or he got careless, and so far neither seemed likely to happen. And every second brought another death closer. We had no more time to waste.

  ‘We don’t know the first thing about our murderer, so we need to start with the victims,’ I said, trying to sound positive. ‘What have they got in common, aside from the obvious?’

  ‘Take them in order.’ Rob started off, checking the file now and then to be sure of the details. ‘Victim one is Nicola Fielding, twenty-seven, killed in the early hours of the eighteenth of September, a Friday. Her body was found in the south-west corner of Larkhall Park, less than half a mile from where she was living in Clapham. Blue eyes, long brown hair, dressed to kill, or be killed, in heels and a very short skirt. But Nicola was a good girl; she was out on her best friend’s hen night at a nightclub in Clerkenwell. It was unusual for her to be out late. She was originally from Sunderland. For the last year or so she had been working as a nanny for a couple named …’

  ‘Cope,’ I supplied. ‘Daniel and
Sandra. She looked after their two children aged three and five.’

  ‘And the Copes were devastated, not unreasonably. We had a look at Mr Cope but he’s in the clear.’

  I took over. ‘We know that Nicola didn’t catch the last tube, which she’d planned to do. She got the night bus instead and got off on the Wandsworth Road at two thirteen a.m. It was a ten-minute walk from there to the Copes’ house, where she lived in a self-contained apartment in the basement – one of the perks of the job.

  ‘All that we know about what happened next is that at some point between the bus stop and the Copes’ house, she encountered our murderer. Approximately forty-three minutes after she got off the bus, a passing motorist spotted a fire burning in Larkhall Park and phoned the fire brigade. The responding unit discovered Nicola’s body. She had been incapacitated with a stun gun and beaten to death with a blunt instrument, which the pathologist suggested was most likely to be a hammer.’

  ‘Available from all good DIY and hardware stores, and essentially untraceable.’ Rob leafed through the file until he found a map of the area. ‘The park isn’t on the most direct route from the bus stop to her home. But we don’t know if she walked there or if she was driven.’

  ‘It’s a CCTV black spot,’ I said, thinking without enthusiasm of the hours I had spent scrolling through footage we’d pulled in from local businesses. I had watched it until my eyes crossed, until I saw fuzzy black-and-white images of cars in my sleep. I could remember some of it literally frame by frame. ‘I didn’t pick her up on any of the cameras. And we’ve managed to trace the majority of the cars that were seen in the area. They’ve also been cross-referenced against the footage from the other crime scenes without finding any matches.’