‘Where you parked?’
Tanzy pointed along the street at his Golf.
They walked side by side back to their cars. ‘How’s Claire doing?’
Byrd nodded. ‘She’s good. She’s getting really big.’
‘Must be coming up six months soon, is it?’
‘She calls it weeks. Twenty-five weeks. Roughly six months.’
‘See you back at the station. I can’t wait to tell Fuller all about this one.’
Byrd smiled and got into his car.
7
Tuesday Late Morning
Police Station
Byrd and Tanzy hung their coats on the back of their chairs at the rear of the long, rectangular office. The six rows of desks were split by a walkway down the middle, leaving two desks on either side of each row. Tanzy and Byrd were seated at the back on the left-hand side. Directly behind them was DCI Martin Fuller’s office.
No doubt he’d heard what had happened early this morning and would be expecting both Byrd and Tanzy to inform him as soon as they returned.
Byrd knocked on his door, waited for the usual ‘Come in’, and opened it. Tanzy followed. At the desk, they both took a seat on the empty chairs opposite to Fuller.
‘Morning,’ Fuller said.
He was a thick-set man with short dark hair and possessed a look of impatience about him. He wasted no time getting to the point and didn’t care if his peers liked him or not. Being a DCI was a job where you had to get on with things and manage people in a certain way. You had a lot of responsibility and things moved fast. He’d been the DCI for nearly five months, taking over the role after DCI June Thornton had gone. He ran things differently to how she had, but everyone in the office seemed to be getting used to his way. They didn’t agree with his methods but nodded and smiled. He had a scar on the right side of his face from a knife attack when he was only weeks into his training. It didn’t improve his looks, that’s for sure.
‘Tell me…’ he said to them.
Byrd sighed. ‘House fire, boss.’
Fuller waited, stared hard at them.
Byrd continued. ‘Looks like petrol was used. It wasn’t an accident.’
‘How many dead?’
‘Four. Father, mother, and two sons.’
It was Fuller’s turn to sigh. He looked down at the desk and stayed silent for a moment. The detectives waited.
‘I knew it wouldn’t last,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘What’s that?’ Tanzy asked him.
‘We’ve had three great months, three’—he held up three fingers—‘months. Darlington was on the rise. Our figures have been great compared to what happened a few months ago.’
Byrd felt his skin warming and decided to keep silent. It was all about the figures to Fuller. All about how his team weighed up against the other constabularies. God, it wasn’t a bloody competition and it bloody pissed Byrd off.
‘Anyway, what do we know?’
‘Fire was started at the base of the stairs. With the carpets being doused in petrol, it took no time for it to spread up the stairs. According to Hope and Tallow, and Harry Law, who also agreed, that the carpets had also been covered in petrol before the fire had started.’
‘So, whoever did it, had gone into the bedrooms whilst they were sleeping?’
‘Seems so,’ Tanzy said.
‘Jesus. Takes balls that.’
‘When I was there, I was speaking to a guy who called himself Roger Carlton. He was looking at the ceiling in the dining room and told me about the fire. Turns out, after speaking with Harry Law, that no one by that name works for the fire department. When we went to look for him, he’d gone. The back gate was open.’
‘How on earth did he just walk in?’ Fuller said, frowning, picking up his coffee and taking a sip.
‘We don’t know.’ Byrd this time, shrugging. ‘But we found something.’
Fuller waited.
‘Credit to DC Leonard. He found a camera at the end of the yard. We traced the wire back and found a little black box at the end of the kitchen. Fortunately, it doesn’t look like the fire had reached the kitchen. We’ve handed the box to Mac in DFU. He said he’d check it out straight away. We’ll head over when we leave here.’
DFU stood for Digital Forensics Unit.
‘Okay. What do we know about the victims?’ Fuller leaned back into his chair.
‘So far, not much. We need to do some digging.’
‘Forensics?’
‘Still at the house.’
Fuller nodded. ‘Keep me updated.’
Byrd and Tanzy stood up, left the office, and sat down at their desks. According to a neighbour, they obtained the name Danny Walters and searched that first. Several results came up, so they narrowed the search to Darlington. There was only one. He was forty-one years old.
A little later, after several cups of coffee, they’d built up a profile for him. He worked at B&Q as a customer service assistant and had no previous criminal convictions. He was a straight shooter, according to the facts.
‘Why him, though?’ Tanzy asked, looking at the same info on his screen. ‘No previous trouble. Did a level six diploma in Business Management and used to work in the engineering sector as a commissioning engineer. He seems pretty normal.’
‘They always do, Ori.’
They continued to dig.
‘How are Pip and the kids?’ Byrd asked.
‘Good. She hasn’t touched a drop for six months now. She received her badge last week and came home with the biggest smile on her face. She’s feeling much better about herself and life in general.’ Tanzy’s wife, Pip, had had issues with drinking and had constantly been hitting the bottle over the past few years. She says it’s down to her father, the way he used to treat her and her mother. Violence. Sexual abuse. The stories weren’t pleasant.
‘The kids are great too. Jasmine will be eleven soon, still knows everything. And Eric is loving his Lego. Should have seen the tower he built for me last night. Told me he wanted to put it beside my bed so I could wake up to it every day.’
Byrd smiled. ‘Kids, eh.’
‘You’ll soon find out, Max.’
‘I will. It won’t be long.’ Byrd clicked his mouse a few times, then asked, ‘How’s the judo going?’
‘Good. They’re coming on.’ By ‘they’ he meant his students.
Tanzy had done Judo since he was six years old. Recently he’d started tutoring at the Dolphin Centre with beginner classes but now helps with some of the advanced classes, too. At six foot two, weighing barely twelve stone, with a six-pack that every man envied and most women desired, he was a hit with the ladies. His short – almost bald – hair took no maintenance and trimmed goatee enhanced his beautiful narrow face.
Byrd, however, wasn’t possessed with such looks. His hair was much longer – which looked like it hadn’t been brushed today – and he was clean-shaven. Months ago, you may have said Byrd was overweight, and if he was being honest with himself, he’d agree, but he’d continued to play football with his friends twice a week and started taking care of himself. The two stones he’d lost a few months ago had stayed off, and he was feeling fit again. He’d never had the six-pack that Tanzy had, nor did he care, but settled on being content.
‘You fancy it?’ Tanzy asked him.
‘Judo isn’t for me, Ori. I’ll stick to football.’
Tanzy threw a smile his way, knowing it was a previous topic they’d discussed.
On the desk next to Byrd, the phone rang. He picked it up.
‘It’s Mac. I’ve had a look at the camera footage from Napier Street.’
‘Anything interesting?’
‘You need to see this.’
8
Tuesday Afternoon
Police Station
Byrd and Tanzy immediately went to see Mac, who was waiting for them at his desk. He had positioned two chairs for them in front of his computer screen.
Mac was approaching the age of
forty. He’d been doing digital forensics for nearly twenty years; there was no one in the force as good as him. Due to the nature of his job, which involved sitting at a desk for most of the day, he’d put on weight. They often had seen him eating chocolate bars or noticed empty crisp packets on his desk.
Without a word, the detectives sat down and pulled themselves in. Byrd noticed the black box they had retrieved from the kitchen earlier that morning on the desk next to his keyboard with a wire plugged into it from the computer.
‘Watch,’ Mac said, clicking several times.
On the screen, there was a date. Today’s date. He took the mouse, clicked on the time bar at the bottom, and dragged it just past eight am. The camera had the ideal view of the French doors that led to the dining room and the back door leading to the kitchen. A minute later, the man who called himself Roger Carlton stepped out quickly and headed towards the gate then vanished.
‘Go back,’ Byrd said. ‘Pause it on his face.’
Mac did. Byrd looked at Tanzy.
‘That the guy you spoke with?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How tall was he?’ Byrd asked Tanzy.
Tanzy thought for a moment. ‘He wasn’t six foot. Maybe five, ten.’
Because of the yellow composite helmet he was wearing, they couldn’t see his hair properly but could tell it was long. The visor on the helmet was pushed up, shielding his eyes but the moustache stood out like a sore thumb.
‘Is that tash real?’ asked Byrd.
‘It looked real,’ said Tanzy.
‘Tom Selleck would be proud of that,’ Mac noted.
‘What time did you speak with him?’ Byrd asked.
‘Just after eight.’
‘Go earlier this morning, see what time he got there.’
Mac had already done this before calling the detectives and stopped the time at 7.49 a.m., then pressed play. Roger Carlton appeared on the camera a moment later, coming from the right where the back gate was. He walked up to the back door, pulled out a key, and opened it.
‘Where did he get the key from?’ Tanzy asked, confused.
Mac smiled, closed the video, then hovered his mouse over another file, and clicked open. ‘Watch this.’
They both frowned at the time and date at the bottom of the screen, indicating it was two days earlier.
‘What’s this?’ Tanzy asked.
Mac pointed at the screen. At 2.03 p.m. on Sunday, the back door opened, and a man stepped out with some kind of cleaning device. It was roughly two feet high and a foot wide. Most of it was made of see-through plastic. The liquid inside was black. The man stepped out and immediately Byrd and Tanzy knew it was Roger Carlton. He stood in the corner of the yard near the back door and pulled off the top of the unit, then picked it up and tipped the contents down the drain.
‘What on earth is he doing?’ said Tanzy.
‘So, he was there two days ago?’ asked Byrd, a deep frown lining his forehead.
‘It certainly looks like him,’ Mac said, with a shrug.
Roger turned and, before he went back into the kitchen, they got a view of his face. His moustache was clearly visible, and the thick mop of black hair too.
Mac scrolled the time back, and they watched it multiple times.
‘Why was he there cleaning the carpets two days ago?’ Tanzy asked, confused.
‘That’s when he must have taken the key,’ said Byrd. ‘Did Harry Law say what time they’d got to the house?’ The question was for Tanzy.
Tanzy nodded. ‘He said just after five. A call came in by a neighbour opposite. Said they got up to go to the toilet just after half four and had seen the flames through the front bedroom window.’
‘And Roger returned just before eight?’
Mac nodded. ‘There’s something else…’
The detectives waited.
Mac closed the video screen, found another file in the folder, and double clicked. The screen opened up showing the same shot of the back yard. The only difference was the date told the detectives it was two days before that. And the time was 8.13 a.m..
‘Friday? He was there on Friday, too?’ Byrd asked, noticing the date in the corner.
Again, Mac nodded, and focused back on the screen. A man, very similar to Roger Carlton, entered the screen from the right, and made his way to the back door. He then pulled out a small case, lowered to his knee, grabbed a tool from it and used it to open the lock. Once the door opened, he went inside for approximately seven minutes, then came back out. Similar to the Sunday and earlier this morning, he looked the same: the mop of hair and Magnum PI tache.
‘He’s got some balls, this guy,’ Tanzy noted, shaking his head.
Silence grew around them for a while.
‘So, no one, apart from you, saw him in there?’ Byrd said to Tanzy.
Tanzy shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Why?’
‘Surely, if one of the firemen had seen him, they’d have known he wasn’t one of them. It’s almost like he knew when to come back.’
‘He could have been around the front, watching them going in and out of the front door.’
‘It’s possible he knew they wouldn’t be in there at that exact time. And it's possible he knew who Harry Law was.'
‘But the question is,’ said Tanzy, leaning back a little, ‘is why he was there. What was he looking for in the kitchen? I don’t know how long he was in there, but when I stopped at the stairs, I heard him in there opening and closing drawers. Then he appeared in the dining room and started looking at the ceiling.’
Byrd frowned, thinking hard.
‘This makes no sense to me,’ said Mac, raising his brows. ‘Why was he cleaning the carpets on Sunday?’
Byrd smiled.
‘What’s funny?’ Mac asked him.
‘He wasn’t cleaning the carpets at all. He was putting chemicals on them. He didn’t need to go into their rooms last night and pour petrol on the floor, because he’d already covered them in chemicals. Even though they may have dried, it would have made the carpets burn more fiercely.’ Byrd sighed. ‘This attack had been meticulously planned. We are dealing with someone very dangerous here.’
9
Tuesday Afternoon
Police Station
The detectives returned to their desks with the notes they had made. Mac had taken several screenshots of Roger Carlton leaving the house and a few from his time there on Sunday afternoon, emptying the contents of the cleaning device into the drain, and had emailed the images to both Tanzy and Byrd.
Back at their desks, they opened the images and had another look. Neither of them had seen him before nor did he look familiar. They both concluded that the moustache and his hair were both fake.
Byrd took the responsibility to email the best image of him to their media representative and included DCI Martin Fuller in the email. The faster they got this on the news, the quicker someone could get in touch with any information.
The time was ticking on. Tanzy had phoned the senior forensics, but they had not picked up their lab phone. He decided to walk down. The lab would have been empty, was it not for the forensic trainee Amanda Forrest, sitting at her desk.
‘Hope and Tallow not back yet?’ Tanzy asked her.
She told him they hadn’t returned from Napier Street yet and would be a few more hours. He thanked her and went back to the office. Before he found his desk, DC Leonard called his name as he passed.
‘What is it?’ Tanzy walked over to Leonard’s desk.
‘I’ve done some digging on the name Roger Carlton. There are only fifteen people in the UK with that name. It shouldn’t be too long to narrow it down.’
‘Good,’ said Tanzy, standing at the desk. ‘Check everything. You know the drill. Social media and such.’
Leonard nodded and continued clicking and typing. Tanzy returned to his desk and told Byrd that Tallow and Hope were still not there. It was an extensive job analysing a crime scene from a forensic point of view. Everything t
ook time. Tallow and Hope were very meticulous and methodical in the way they did it and worked superbly together. It wasn’t always like that. When they were matched up, all they did was argue and disagree with each other. Most likely because they were opposites. Emily Hope was single, liked getting tattoos, drinking, and loud music. She took no shit and wouldn’t bat an eye if she upset anyone. Jacob Tallow was different. He led a quieter life, always had. He had a wife who worked at a local DIY store and was equally as bland as he was. However, his plain persona was almost a good trait because he didn’t waste time talking shit and got straight to the point. Everything was black and white. He focused on the facts and did his job as thoroughly as anyone. They shared a similar work ethic and had learned to enjoy each other’s company.
Usually, at the crime scenes they attended, Tallow would video everything before they started working. That way, they could watch the video later in the lab if they needed to. After that, they would do everything they’d been taught. In this case, finding four burnt victims in a house fire didn’t take much analysis of how they died. The bodies, however, because they had been involved in a crime, would be sent to the basement of the hospital where pathologists would look at them and think beyond the burns.
For the areas of the house that hadn’t been affected by the fire, such as the front door and back door, they’d check for fingerprints on the handles, footprints inside and outside the house, fibres of clothing that had fallen off the suspect, bodily fluids, such as sweat, urine, or blood, that may be found. It was a demanding process.
Byrd was typing up his report at his desk. Before DCI Fuller was in charge, DCI Thornton wanted everyone to write a report, whether you had just joined the force as a fresh PC or an experienced detective with twenty plus years under your belt. She said it helped her see how people thought and how they got their ideas on paper. Others thought it was a tactic to see if everyone’s story matched up, to make sure she knew exactly what was going on. When Fuller took charge, his superiors had told him it was something he would like to continue to do, to push the individual reports.
No One's Safe: DI Max Byrd & DI Orion Tanzy book 3 Page 3