by Adam Maxwell
Roach picked up his tea and sipped it. It still tasted like piss.
“Well, I’ll have to confiscate the money,” said Roach. “And I’ll need to charge you for being in possession of counterfeit currency…”
“What?” Lucas nearly dropped his coffee.
Roach shrugged. “I appreciate you bringing the money to my attention and you have my word I’ll look in to it.” He stood up purposefully.
Lucas melted into his chair a little further and Roach tensed up at the sight of him relaxing.
“I’m a professional gambler, mate,” said Lucas. “I can tell with ninety-nine per cent accuracy when someone’s bluffing. Note the use of ‘professional’ and not ‘criminal’.”
Roach decided not to bother responding to that. He stared at Lucas and waited for him to talk. Sure enough, Lucas needed no encouragement.
“It’s all good, anyway,” Lucas continued. “There’s more. I’m not finished yet. But if you are… off you toddle.”
Lucas picked up his coffee and Roach could feel himself getting angry. He sat back down and steepled his fingers. “It’s late. I want to go home. Let’s assume that I’ll get home earlier if I don’t charge you.”
“Let’s.”
“And let’s also assume that I’m tired of you playing whatever game you’re playing. Finally, we’ll assume that, to avoid the aforementioned charges, you are going to tell me what you know clearly and concisely. Right now.”
Lucas had been watching Roach closely. The whites of his eyes had a red tinge to them. Not so much you’d think it was a medical condition, probably more likely as a result of working too many nights. He had a lean, hungry look about him. It was time to stop pissing about.
“Elias Croft,” said Lucas.
“I’m listening,” said Roach. He’d known Lucas was moving up in the world but to have it confirmed from his own mouth and to such a high level wasn’t something he’d expected.
“He’s going to…”
“Burn down his nightclub?” asked Roach.
“What?” Lucas’ brow furrowed in confusion. “How did you know?”
In the last couple of weeks, Roach had lost count of how many times Elias Croft was about to burn down his nightclub. Well, that wasn’t strictly true, he hadn’t lost count. The count was seven. But the point was that it hadn’t happened after the first tip-off and it had continued not to happen for the subsequent six. He had no reason to believe anything was about to change.
Elias Croft was certainly a criminal. Hell, he was big enough to buy his way out of almost any charges Roach might throw at him. But he was also heavily invested in his club. All the way to the hilt. So burning down his own house wouldn’t serve any purpose that Roach could discern, other than putting himself out of business. Unless it was an insurance job, of course.
“I’m a Detective Sergeant, Mr Vaughan,” said Roach, as patronisingly as he was able. “Knowing things is my job and it’s a job I’m very good at.”
Lucas muttered something underneath his breath.
“Sorry, could you repeat that?” demanded Roach.
“So you know when he’s going to do it, yeah?”
“What?” asked Roach impatiently.
“I’ll take that as a no,” said Lucas. “Tonight. Trust me, there’ll be a burning building and his pockets will be stuffed with these.” He tapped on the forged notes on the table.
“I don’t,” Roach stated simply.
“Don’t what?” asked Lucas.
“Trust you. In fact—”
There was a knock at the door. Roach drummed his fingers on the table in annoyance. Lucas craned his head around to find out who was interrupting them and saw an older man wearing a thick pair of black-rimmed glasses.
“I thought you’d want to know…” said the man. “the Palace… Elias Croft’s place—”
“Yes?” demanded Roach, knowing exactly what was coming.
“It’s on fire.”
three
The nightclub toilets were plunged into the soulless darkness of an oubliette. The fire alarms having now completely given up the ghost, all that could be heard was the movement of the drunk woman in the end cubicle. Then the emergency lighting kicked in and bathed the place in an unnatural green light. A minute of silence passed before the woman stepped back out of the cubicle.
It was the same woman. Same bobbed hair. Same height. Same build. But she was different.
If there had been anyone there to notice, they would have seen that her outfit had changed. She no longer wore the Friday night short skirt and low top. These had been replaced with an almost ninja-like black trousers and hoody combo. The heels were gone too, replaced by dark sneakers. More than that, if anyone looked closely, they would have seen her whole demeanour shifted. The drunkenness, if indeed that was what it had been, was gone. Evaporated from her system, or perhaps a disguise she had shed. But no-one was left to notice the transformation. And no-one was there to witness her shove the remnants of her previous outfit behind one of the toilets. Which was probably just as well, since that’s exactly the sort of thing the police would be looking for later.
The woman walked over to the wash basins and looked at herself in the mirror. Spotting some of the ‘vomit’ at the corner of her mouth, she turned on the tap and splashed her face with cold water. This woman was not some straggler from a hen night gone awry. This was Violet Winters and she was in attendance at the Tulip Street Gin Palace on business. And part of that business involved burning the place to the ground.
Violet turned around, jumping slightly as the fire alarms kicked back in, their sirens wailing louder than before. Zoe had said that such an old system might be temperamental. She strode purposefully to the door and opened it with cat-like stealth. Peering out into the wider club, she was pleased to find it apparently deserted. Things were progressing exactly as they should. As she hurried through the empty bar and towards the dance floor, Violet scanned the place as best she could. The club’s lightshow had synchronised with the ear-splitting howls of the fire alarm, but at first pass the coast seemed clear.
She jogged in the direction of the cloak room. There was movement outside, partygoers eager to get back and resume drinking, so she picked a careful route through the club to remain unseen. She didn’t want some over-eager fireman rushing in and gathering her in his arms.
The cloakroom was visible through a rectangular hole cut into the wall. The opening started at waist height and reached around six feet off the ground. Violet vaulted over it and landed in a crouch, listening and waiting. There was nothing to be heard but the wailing of the alarm. Rows of rails hung with all manner of coats and bags, each one neatly tagged with a number. She ignored all of them in favour of a black backpack, lurking malevolently in the far corner. She picked it up and gave it a shake. It clinked with cans of something. Good. No-one had been messing with her stuff.
Violet unzipped the main section of the backpack and pulled out a bandolier. Instead of the bandolier containing bullets, it was filled with what looked at first glance to be large cans of deodorant. She removed one can from its home and plucked the wire safety ring from the top. The safety clip sprang off and Violet stared at it. Katie had shown her what she needed to do, but this was the first time she had actually set one off. With a spurt of fire, the grenade came to life and thick white smoke poured from its base. She lobbed it into the corner of the cloakroom and vaulted out through the window. There was a lot more smoke than she’d expected, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It poured out through the small window and into the main area of the club.
That should stop anybody who wasn’t wearing a uniform and breathing apparatus from coming in for the moment. Violet jogged to the other side of the club, making her way to an unobtrusive door displaying yellow warning signs. She tried the handle, only to find it locked.
Grinning, she dropped the bandolier and the backpack on the floor and knelt down, unzipping one of the outside pockets of the bac
kpack and extracting a small leather pouch. Violet reverently placed the pouch on the ground, opening it slowly. She glanced at the lock before selecting a lock pick and tension wrench. Holding them with the tips of her fingers, she went to work on the lock. The tool in her right hand was nothing more than a thin piece of metal with a few jagged points in the end. In her left hand was another, this one straight with a right angle bend at the end. With practised precision she worked the lock until, a few moments later, there was a click.
She opened the door to the cupboard and the emergency lighting glinted off the words ‘flammable substances’. Violet grabbed two large plastic containers, took a deep lungful of air, and ran into the smoke flooding from the cloakroom.
The whole entrance hall was now filled and the grey of the smoke had acquired an unnatural green tinge from the emergency lighting. It covered her movements as she unscrewed the caps on the two bottles. Picking up the first, she liberally doused the carpets in front of the doors and the sofas around the edges of the room, before leaving a trail of liquid back to the cloakroom and throwing the first bottle through the opening.
She pressed herself against the wall next to the window, finding a spot where the air wasn’t entirely polluted with the smoke, and heaved another breath. She really should have thought about bringing a mask of some description. Still, no time for regrets… onwards and upwards. She grabbed the second bottle and drizzled a trail, zigzagging this way and that, leading all the way to the dance floor, at which point she dropped the almost-empty container and reached into her pocket.
Violet didn’t own a lucky lighter. She didn’t smoke. But Lucas had given her his Zippo. She flipped open the lid and tried to click her fingers to make the flame jump to life the way they did in the movies. It didn’t light. She tried again and again, but the Zippo failed to flame. She glared at it, before carefully using her thumb to turn the wheel. This time a large flame sprang from its top. This she lowered towards an area of carpet she had doused with the accelerant, being especially careful not to burn her fingers as she did so. It caught with a wumph and, as she had hoped, wound its way off along the path she had lain.
She waited for a second, staring, entranced by the flames dancing away from her, until she was sure that the fire had caught. No-one, uniformed or otherwise, was getting in or out of the club without a fight.
The smoke from the fire mingled with the smoke lingering from the grenade and caught the back of Violet’s throat. She coughed and moved towards the store cupboard once more. Grabbing another of the large plastic containers, she quickly doused the bar and DJ booth before making a miniature pile of the accelerant bottles in the middle of the dance floor, turning the puddle into a pond.
She took a moment, running through the layout she had studied for weeks before. Violet knew she didn’t have long before the fire took hold, but she had time to cover her tracks. Picking up her backpack and bandolier she quickly locked the store cupboard. As far as anyone knew, the owner of the club was the only person with the keys and as far as any future fire investigators were concerned, she intended to keep it that way.
The last point on her dance floor agenda were the fire doors. She jogged over to check them and, just as her research had suggested, they were chained shut. Violet shook her head as she gave the doors a rattle to be sure the locks were secure, but the thickness of the chains weren’t giving in to anything short of a small tank.
Perfect.
Why Elias Croft needed to chain shut the fire doors remained a minor mystery to Violet. She presumed it was because this was the most vulnerable entry point and he wanted to make it as difficult as possible for any other criminal to break in to his establishment. It did, however, seem a little reckless to keep them locked at peak times with a full club. And besides, there was every chance a stunt like that would invalidate an insurance claim. After all, who knew when the place might suddenly go up in flames?
Violet plucked another smoke grenade from the bandolier, pulled the pin and rolled it towards the fire door. She did this another couple of times, until the whole of the right-hand side of the dance floor was gushing smoke. Then she picked her way past the pile of accelerant bottles, careful not to step in any of the dangerous liquid. Dodging past the end of the bar, she pushed open a door marked ‘staff only’. Finally standing in the doorway, Violet reached into her backpack and, after some rummaging around, fished out an old-style book of matches. On the cover, embossed in large, elegant gold letters, was a name. And that name was Elias Croft. Flicking the Zippo once more, she flipped out the cardboard hood of the matchbook, held it for a moment to let it catch and then threw it at the bar. It was more of a symbolic gesture than planting actual concrete evidence of his involvement. In fact, it would probably burn up once the fire took hold but every little clue helped paint a picture.
It caught in an instant, and she stepped through the door just in time, the backdraft from the fire slamming it shut and hitting her in the shoulder.
It was time to go upstairs.
There’s an expression up north. ‘All fur coat and no knickers.’ Violet’s grandmother often said this should have been Kilchester’s motto, and this was aptly demonstrated in the Palace. Paint peeled from the brick walls illuminated by a single, bare lightbulb. The original parquet floor was smashed through to the floorboards where the bins had been dragged back and forth over them. A second, chained fire door lurked in a corner, this one so unused someone had painted it shut. Tiles from the drop-ceiling that had been installed to disguise the grandeur of what was above were water stained or missing, leaving an inverted chessboard of ghostly voids.
The one piece of grandeur that remained was a wide staircase that stretched upwards, turning to a landing before doubling back on itself above Violet’s head. She made a beeline to the recycling bin, which sat alongside its siblings under the stairs. Grabbing the rim, she hefted it forward then dropped to one knee. Dipping once more into her backpack, she pulled out a litre bottle filled with a dark, viscous substance. Crudely constructed electronics with exposed circuit boards and protruding wires covered the bottle. Violet placed it carefully under the stairs, in front of the recycling bin.
As she stalked away there was a buzzing in her pocket. She plucked out her mobile phone as she took the stairs two at a time.
Lucas:
gave roach information. hes on way better be ready. might of got more info than i intended sorry
Violet smirked, taking a moment to pause on the landing. Lucas had played his part. She stood and stared at the peeling paint for a moment. She had time.
That doesn’t say much for Roach, she thought. A drunken parrot with a vocabulary of less than twelve words could get more out of you than you intended.
She typed a few words but deleted them and instead just went with: OK.
Keeping her phone in her hand, she continued to climb the stairs, tapping open an app on her phone. A large, crudely drawn, red circle appeared in the centre of the screen. On it, scrawled in what appeared to be a child’s handwriting, were the words ‘Do not press this button’.
Violet peered over the bannister into the stairwell. Then she pressed the button.
Far below her the bottle exploded, leaving the base of the stairs hanging like a pair of tattered curtains. A split second later and the bins blazed, fire seething angrily upwards, catching the paint on the walls too.
Violet smiled. Soon flames would engulf the only way in or out, trapping everyone above ground level. Everything was going to plan.
four
Despite the cold night air, crowds of Palace clubbers had continued their party on the street outside. The initial hopes that it had all been a fire drill had faded and now the patrons of the neighbouring pubs and restaurants were spilling out to join them, drawn by the spectacle. Punters gathered around the burning building, snapping pictures of the orange licks of flame, as if it was no more than a family bonfire and fireworks display. Enterprising landlords dispatched their more nub
ile bar staff to sell overpriced bottles of imported piss, so the party continued, blocking the paths, blocking the street beyond and reaching almost as far as the doors of the nightclub.
Detective Sergeant Roach rode in the passenger seat in silence. His partner, the inscrutable Detective Sergeant Addison Scarfe, wasn’t a great talker. Except when he was. He also wasn’t a great partner. Except when he was.
The problem was that, despite the two men being the same rank, Scarfe was the senior officer. People always assumed it, usually because he was older, sometimes because he was white. Although Scarfe always wore a smart suit and tie, he had a permanent air of dishevelment. From the few remaining wisps of hair that framed his bald head to the loose, hangdog expression the sagging skin on his face created. From the salt and pepper beard, permanently somewhere between ‘forgotten to shave’ and ‘hipster’, to the shabby designer glasses he wore, there was a calculated dishevelment about him.
A dishevelment that wasn’t shared with his car. Roach sank into the abundant padding of the leather seat of the Mercedes, held in place by the speed at which his partner took the corner. The car let out a deep growl, as if an angry demon was trapped under the bonnet. Presumably the same demon to whom Roach would have had to sacrifice something’s flesh in order to afford the same car himself. An ambulance was already on the scene, parked up a safe distance from the club and the Mercedes came to rest on the opposite kerb. It was far enough away that the unfolding scene at the club wouldn’t immediately impede their exit, Roach reasoned.
“Looks like Vaughan was on the money,” said Roach conversationally. “You reckon Croft set fire to his own place?”
Scarfe raised a bushy grey eyebrow by way of reply. Roach knew what it meant but wasn’t ready to acknowledge it yet. It was still an investigation. Until it wasn’t.
“I think we can trust his word,” Roach lied.