The Burning

by Jane Casey

  ‘Oh. Right. Thanks for letting me know.’

  ‘I’ll tell you if I hear anything.’

  ‘Very kind,’ I said, not managing to sound anything other than embarrassed. Godley took out his phone and called the commissioner’s staff officer to bring him up to date. I stared out of the window at the streets, wondering if everyone on the squad had worked out how I felt about her, wondering if they’d known it before I did.

  *

  Selvaggi’s home turned out to be a modest Victorian house in the middle of a terrace. Deceptively narrow, it went back a long way, which explained how there was room for him, his parents and his three sisters to live there. Skylights in the roof were a giveaway that they had done a loft conversion and it was there, Kev Cox told us, that Selvaggi lived, in what was effectively a self-contained flat.

  ‘We’ve moved the family out already. They weren’t pleased, needless to say, but they’ve gone to stay with relatives in Carshalton.’

  The house was uninhabitable already. Kev had arranged for tarpaulins to be hung on frames in front of the windows on the ground floor, and screened off the family car that was parked in the street nearby. Like the rest of the search team, Kev was wearing a white hooded boiler suit and blue gloves. Godley and I ducked behind the tarpaulins to change into paper suits and gloves before we went into the house – there was no way we’d be allowed across the threshold if there was the least chance of us compromising any evidence. The neighbours had been busy getting in touch with the press, and a helicopter whined overhead, filming the search that was going on in the small garden. A cordon was in place at either end of the street so we didn’t have to worry about the media getting too close, but every resident within eyeshot of the house was recording anything they could see. It would all be on the news channels before too long. Riveting it wasn’t, as far as I was concerned, but the news that there had been an arrest was sensational stuff and they needed some sort of visual entertainment to go with the reports. Kev, his face crinkled with tension, was trying to sort out tents to cover the search areas in the garden so he could work unobserved. Godley and I left him to it, stepping gingerly in through the front door, anonymous in our hooded suits and masks.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  The voice belonged to Kev’s second-in-command, Tony Schofield. He was tall and gangling and not normally forceful, but Kev seemed to have given him the job of keeping the crime scene under control.

  ‘Superintendent Godley and DC Langton,’ Godley said with just a trace of impatience. ‘Kev knows we’re here.’

  ‘Sorry – I didn’t know – I mean—’ Schofield’s eyes were wide with horror. ‘I thought I’d better check.’

  ‘Quite right. Can you show us around?’

  ‘Of course.’ He scrambled to put down the box he was carrying and gestured into the front room. ‘We’ve started down here but to be honest we’re not expecting to find that much. It looks as if he kept most of his things in his room upstairs.’

  ‘The loft conversion? Let’s start there.’

  From the hall I could see into the kitchen where officers were opening every jar and checking every container in the freezer. It looked like it had been a tidy house before we’d got there. Mrs Selvaggi was not going to be pleased when she got home, whenever that might be.

  I followed Schofield and Godley up the stairs to the second floor. There was just enough room for all three of us to stand upright in the centre of the room, but the ceiling sloped down sharply. There was a single bed, a chest of drawers and a few built-in shelves, but most of the storage was in cupboards built into the eaves. The doors hung open, showing where the search team had swept through the room like a tornado. It felt cramped in there but it was private, away from the rest of the family, and there was even a small bathroom with a shower in it.

  ‘He lives up here, pretty much. Eats here. Sleeps here. Spends a lot of time here during the day. Keeps to himself, according to one of his sisters. They don’t even know if he’s in the house a lot of the time. He spends hours at the gym in the health centre too – lifts weights. He doesn’t have a job, officially – just a bit of casual carpentry for cash-in-hand and pocket money from the family business when he does deliveries. We found his work boots and tools. They’ve gone off to the lab.’

  ‘What else?’ Godley sounded edgy. We had caught him in the act but juries were unpredictable; we needed more evidence that he couldn’t explain away.

  ‘On those shelves’ – Schofield pointed – ‘he had true crime. Lots of material about serial killers, specifically ones who killed women – two about the Yorkshire Ripper, a few about the Wests, one about the Suffolk Strangler, one about the investigation into Rachel Nickell’s murder, and then a few about foreign killers – Bundy, the Green River Killer, Andrei Chikatilo, Ed Gein, the Hillside Strangler, Charles Manson.’

  ‘All the top names,’ Godley commented.

  ‘You’ve got to aim high,’ I murmured.

  ‘I suppose he was looking for tips,’ Schofield said seriously. ‘He had a set of memoirs by an FBI profiler and a book about forensic investigation too. He’d done the research. How to do it and how to avoid getting caught. Looks like he should have spent longer thinking about the second part. He had a few books on the occult, too. Aleister Crowley and that kind of thing. Amateur Satanism.’

  I was getting bored with the discussion of Selvaggi’s reading habits. ‘What else?’

  ‘Under the mattress we found a collection of porn magazines and a few adult DVDs, mostly with an S&M theme – bit more specialised than your usual top-shelf material, I’m led to believe. In this drawer here,’ and he indicated the bottom one in the small chest of drawers by the bed, ‘there was a cardboard box with women’s jewellery in it.’

  ‘The missing jewellery from the victims?’ Godley asked.

  ‘I couldn’t say. But it’s gone off to be photographed and examined for DNA. We checked with the sister before she went and she said it didn’t belong to her or her sisters or her mother, as far as she knew, but we’re getting that confirmed.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I observed. ‘Anything that ties him to the other victims is what we need.’

  ‘Might be able to help you out there.’ Schofield’s eyes were bright above his mask. ‘In that cupboard behind you, right at the back, there was a plastic bag containing a shirt, complete with bloodstains, and two hammers. Looking at one of them, we could see staining that was almost certainly blood, and a couple of longish hairs still attached. I’d like to see him explain that.’

  ‘I would too.’ Godley sounded pleased, but also weary, as if he’d finished a marathon at long last. ‘Thanks, Tony. Is there anything else?’

  ‘We’re checking the shower trap and waste pipes from the bathroom in case he washed off any other evidence. Other than that, it’s just a case of going through the property and making sure we haven’t missed anything.’

  ‘Good. Keep up the good work,’ Godley said.

  Schofield nodded. ‘If there isn’t anything else …’

  ‘You get on with what you were doing. Thanks for the tour.’

  He scuttled off back down the stairs and Godley looked at me. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think even the most suspicious juror should be convinced by the hammer and the jewellery. Some of it is totally circumstantial, like the porn and the true crime. I’m pretty sure some of the team have similar libraries at home. But Dr Chen will be all over it.’

  ‘It’ll give her something to do while she’s trying to think of reasons she got the profile wrong.’

  ‘How right you are.’ I looked around the room, at the cupboard doors hanging open, the stripped bed with its mattress askew, the empty shelves. It was all so pathetic, so meagre. ‘From nothing to murder in one step. No previous offences. How does that work?’

  ‘Maybe he just didn’t get caught. Or maybe he could imagine enough to keep himself happy.’

  ‘And then he reached a point where imaginin
g wasn’t enough.’

  Godley straightened up incautiously and banged his head. ‘Ow. Right. Let’s get back. We’ll see what Pettifer can do with the new evidence. I’m betting we get a confession by midday.’

  The superintendent was out by an hour and ten minutes: Selvaggi confessed to all four murders at 10.50 precisely. I had slipped out for a bit of breakfast (coffee and a bacon roll that I abandoned after one stomach-churning mouthful) and I got back just in time to see him cave in. His solicitor had moved her chair back during the preceding hours of questioning and the gap between them was now noticeable. She was taking notes in red pen as if her life depended on it, her concentration focused on the pad in front of her rather than her client. Judd was still leaning forward, every muscle tensed, but Pettifer was relaxed in his chair, calm, encouraging Selvaggi to trust him.

  ‘Tell us about the first murder. Nicola Fielding.’

  ‘Back in September,’ Selvaggi said with a faraway look in his eyes. His voice was quiet. ‘It was a warm night. Nice night for a walk.’ He gave a little high-pitched giggle. ‘That’s what she said. I just saw her and stopped. You know. Chatted for a while. I’d done that before a few times. Stopped, I mean, if I saw a girl on her own.’

  ‘You did more than chat,’ Pettifer pointed out. What was different about this one?’

  ‘Nothing, really.’ He looked down at his feet. ‘Except I’d been thinking about it before I saw her. And I’d brought the stuff with me, you know. The things I needed. I was just going to talk to her but we were right beside the park, and I’d taken out the stun gun when I saw her. I was just going to hold it while we chatted, to imagine, like, what it might be like, and then I just did it.’ He still sounded amazed at his own audacity. ‘It was like something took over my body and I saw myself put out my hand with the stun gun in it. She didn’t even notice me do it. One minute she was telling me about her night, the next she was on the ground.’

  ‘You didn’t stop with her on the ground, did you? You moved her into the park and you beat her until she was dead.’

  ‘It was what I’d been wanting to do for ages. And I got to do it. And no one saw me.’ There was a strange mixture of shyness and triumph in his tone, as if he knew what he’d done was wrong but he was still proud of it.

  ‘Was it what you’d hoped it would be?’ Pettifer sounded genuinely curious. ‘When you planned it, I mean? Did it live up to your expectations?’

  ‘Killing her?’ Selvaggi stared across the table with eyes like stars. ‘It was better. Much better.’

  Nauseated all over again, I turned away. It was a solid case. He would plead guilty and get a whole-life sentence; there was no chance he’d ever see freedom again. Justice done.

  But I thought about what had been sacrificed to get that far, and somehow I couldn’t persuade myself it was worth it.

  Chapter Twelve

  MAEVE

  I stuttered back to life by the grace of God, with the help of the angels. Real-life angels, like the paramedics who kept me breathing through the siren-filled ride to hospital, the doctors who deliberated over me, and the nurses who kept watch over me during the critical hours when no one was sure if I’d survive until the morning. All the angels and saints in heaven, if you asked my mother, who took refuge in decade after decade of the Rosary, her trust placed in the Blessed Virgin Mary and the various ranks below her in the celestial hierarchy. Later, Dad told me that she had had everyone running scared, from Superintendent Godley down to Ian, who spent most of his time in the waiting room, out of range.

  I knew none of this at the time, of course. I knew nothing except the pain in my head and body, and the strange confusion that comes from waking up in the sensory deprivation of a hospital room with no real recollection of how you ended up there. I didn’t know what I was doing or what had happened to me, whether it was night or day, whether I would live or die, and mostly, I was too miserable to care.

  When I came back to proper consciousness for the first time, I opened my eyes to the sight of a doctor in surgical scrubs leaning over me. He had peeled back one of my eyelids to shine a bright light in my eye.

  ‘Ow.’ My voice was rusty with lack of use and thirst and I coughed a little, painfully.

  ‘Welcome back. Can you tell me your name?’

  ‘Yes, I can. Can you tell me yours?’

  ‘I’m going to need to hear it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Maeve Áine Kerrigan. Your turn.’

  He laughed. ‘Nothing wrong with you, is there?’

  ‘What is wrong with me? Why am I here?’

  ‘Do you remember what happened?’

  I wanted to answer him, if only to make him go away, but when I opened my mouth to tell him, there was nothing there. I frowned.

  ‘Take your time.’

  ‘I don’t need time.’ I plucked at the blanket that was spread over me, feeling a quiver of fear that spread from the pit of my stomach all the way up my spine. ‘I’ll think of it in a minute.’

  ‘Hmm.’ The doctor straightened up and took out a pen to make a note on my chart. I felt as if I had failed an important test.

  ‘My head hurts.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. You have a fractured skull.’

  ‘Oh.’

  That didn’t sound good. I closed my eyes again, trying to remember how and why that had happened to me. A car accident? I had been in a car; I remembered turning around to look at someone in the back seat. But it hadn’t been moving, I thought. That couldn’t be it.

  When I opened my eyes again, the doctor was gone. But in his place were my parents, one on either side of the bed. They looked tired and a bit crumpled around the edges. Dad was wearing a cardigan with the buttons done up wrong, and Mum’s hair had gone flat – most unlike her usual array of brown curls.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I sounded better, I was pleased to hear. Stronger. Less croaky.

  ‘You’re awake.’ There was an expression of pure relief on my mother’s face for an instant and I saw it mirrored by Dad when I turned my head.

  ‘How are you feeling, love?’

  ‘My head hurts, Dada.’ The childish name slipped out before I could catch it, but then I felt childish, like I wanted to be petted and soothed and looked after. Then I remembered. It was important to tell them what had happened to me. ‘I have a fractured skull.’

  ‘We know. The doctors told us. You’ve been in and out for the past thirty-six hours.’ Mum was back to her usual tartness, I was slightly relieved to see. I couldn’t be that ill. ‘They said they’d have to wait and see how things would turn out. There might be some degree of impairment, apparently.’

  ‘Impairment?’

  My father clicked his tongue in irritation. ‘Ah, Colette. Don’t upset her.’

  I turned to him. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Do you not remember?’ Dad looked at me worriedly and I made a special effort to recall, for him.

  ‘I was at work …’

  ‘Indeed and you were,’ Mum snapped. ‘Work. Do they pay you extra for putting yourself in danger? You should never have been there in the first place.’

  ‘It was a surveillance op.’ It was starting to come back. ‘I was in the car, watching.’

  ‘You ran to help another officer and you were attacked.’ Dad’s voice was gentle but his words still made me jump.

  ‘Who was I helping? What happened? Was it the serial killer who attacked me?’

  ‘You saved another policewoman from being killed. And yes, they think it was the fellow you’ve been looking for.’

  ‘Was he arrested?’

  ‘I think so.’ Dad sounded vague. ‘We haven’t seen the news. We’ve been here.’

  ‘Waiting to see if you’d be all right.’ Mum leaned back in her chair, as if she was exhausted. ‘Maeve, I’m sorry. I just don’t understand what would make you want to be a police officer. I never have and I never will. You’re a bright girl, you could have done anything. You still could. Have you thou
ght about teaching? Or what about becoming a lawyer? They’re always paid well.’

  Mum had been a doctor’s receptionist for thirty years. Dad had worked in insurance. My spirits plummeted at the thought of trying to explain to them what I loved about my job – especially in my current state – but I tried anyway.

  ‘There’s nothing like being a police officer, Mum. Especially a detective. I get to investigate the biggest crimes, the worst things that can happen, and if I do my job properly, the people who commit the crimes are taken out of society. It’s not even about justice being done – it’s about making sure that ordinary decent people don’t have to live in fear.’ And there was the adrenalin rush; mustn’t forget that. ‘It’s an important job. A really important one. It saves lives. If we’ve caught the Burning Man—’

  ‘He won’t kill anyone else,’ Mum finished tiredly. ‘But Maeve, he nearly killed you.’

  There was a little silence. All I could think to say was to point out that I was still here, despite his best efforts, and I didn’t think that would go down too well. Eventually I asked, ‘Is Ian here?’

  A look flicked between my parents. ‘He was here,’ Dad said, his voice carefully neutral. ‘He waited with us for a while. But he had to go.’

  ‘He said he’d come back tomorrow,’ Mum added.

  I stretched, feeling the drip pull in my arm. ‘He wasn’t too worried about me, then.’

  ‘He was worried enough.’

  If Mum was desperate enough to give Ian credit for something, she had to be serious about it. I hated to see her upset, but I’d fought hard enough to become a police officer in the first place. There was no way I’d give it up now.

  Always assuming that I didn’t have too severe a degree of impairment, obviously.

  The following day, I didn’t consciously wait for Ian to show up, but I was aware I hadn’t seen him yet as the day drew to a close. I had persuaded my parents to take the evening off and go home. There was nothing on TV that I wanted to watch, and my head still hurt too much for reading. I sat and thought instead, and reached some interesting conclusions. I must have drifted off, because I resurfaced to find Ian standing by my bed, watching me.