Smoke Alarm (19 page)

He grinned. ‘I know you, Martha. And I wouldn't trust you as far as I could throw you.'

‘I'd better lose weight then so you'll be able to throw me further.'

They both laughed at the weak and silly quip. Then looked around them and sobered up instantly. The sooty blackness gave their surroundings a look of hell. The work of the devil, everlasting flames, purgatory and all the other horrors that religion can throw at you. Behind their natural revulsion crept a sense of doom, of destruction, burning martyrs and the Spanish Inquisition.

Martha voiced both their feelings. ‘What an awful sight,' she said. ‘How completely awful to die like this, terrified, disorientated.' Disorientated? But Christie Barton had made it to the door. And her daughter to the only place of safety she could imagine. They had not been so disorientated. Merely trapped.

This room was still patently smoke-wrecked, the windows cracked and stained. Even the winter sunshine couldn't penetrate the blackened windows. And everywhere the pall of smoke seemed still to be present. The air was not quite clear and clean but had remained hazy, whispering secrets it had witnessed. Hell itself, in the form of smoke and water, had crept in under that door, like the serpent of Genesis, slithering poisonously towards its victim. Martha took a last look around, conscious still that something was gnawing away at the back of her mind like a persistently hungry rat. She frowned. What on earth was it?
What was here?
She took in the bed between the two chests of drawers, the windows, the curtains, melted and scorched, the layer of wet, oily char that lay over all. A white space where a picture had been removed.

What did it all mean? And now a new question was hammering in her mind. What contribution had Monica Deverill been about to make before she vanished?

Next they entered Adelaide's room, where the poor child had cowered. Pink wallpaper stained with soot. This time Martha couldn't help but imagine Sukey in this situation and found the room unbearably poignant and painful. It almost moved her to tears. She had to leave.

Alex was watching her curiously. ‘Found what you were looking for?'

She took a last sweep around the girl's room. ‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I just don't know. Except . . .' He paused, waiting for her comment. ‘It's all here, Alex. It has to be.'

‘Do you want to go up there again?' He indicated the door which led to the attic stairs and she nodded. Three people had died in this house. She had a duty to find out the truth.

The rooms still held a vague scent of smoke but it was not pungent and overpowering as it had been on the first two floors. She seemed drawn to the hook from which had hung the rope ladder. ‘Interesting,' she said. ‘It must have been quite a drama, a boy climbing down a rope ladder through the smoke, escaping from a burning house where his mother and sister were trapped. On that night the rope ladder could only have been used at the back of the house.'

Again, wondering what exactly she was getting at, Randall made no comment but simply waited for her to continue. ‘The rope ladder could only have been used at the back of the house.'

Randall's eyes narrowed.

She studied the beam in more detail, noted that the screws had been inserted recently. They were sharp and shiny. ‘And it has been put in recently.' She peered round the room. Jude obviously hadn't returned to collect his belongings. It was all still here: computer games, a TV set, random clothes scattered around the place, books, DVDs. In here there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was a typical teenage boy's room. Except the teenage boy was still exiled. ‘I take it the Bartons, father and son, are still in the private hotel?'

‘And likely to remain there for some months. It may well be a year before Melverley Grange is habitable again.'

Poor house, she thought and wondered whether father and son would ever be able to bear living here again. It would always be a blighted home and for the boy a terrible memory. They descended the stairs and out into the welcome crisp air of a March day. Martha felt relief to escape the atmosphere of the ruined house.

‘S
hall we move on to Sundorne?' Martha asked shakily and took up her seat in the front of the police car. She was quiet as Randall drove but minutes later as she was chauffeur driven through frosty Shropshire countryside her mood lightened. ‘Oh, what it is to be chauffeur driven,' she murmured, enjoying the luxury. The journey was relaxing. Randall was a careful, smooth driver. Twenty minutes later they had reached Battlefields roundabout, entering the town from the north-east, passing Tesco's superstore on the right-hand side. Just past Morrisons Alex Randall turned down a side street and pulled up outside another house wrecked by fire, this time a neat semi. But the destruction was even worse than the damage affected at Melverley Grange. If Monica Deverill had been inside when the fire had torn through her home she could not have survived. It was a much smaller, more modest house than the Grange and a higher percentage of it had been completely destroyed. The roof had fallen in, the joists now blackened ribs bared to the sky. Even the house that joined Monica Deverill's had suffered extensive damage too. It was probable that both would have to be demolished. Two families would lose their homes.

If Monica was still alive.

Detective and coroner stood and regarded the sight, then looked back at one another. This felt somehow strange. Not merely tragic. It was lacking an explanation. Where was she? She had to be somewhere, didn't she? People didn't simply disappear, did they? And where was her car? As they walked up the drive Martha's feeling of disquiet intensified. This felt supernatural, other-wordly. Even this act of simply walking up the drive seemed to represent the spookiness of a sequence in a horror film, the eye sneaking up on the unsuspecting victim, the wrecked house waiting and watching. Martha shivered and Alex Randall noticed. ‘The atmosphere,' he commented. ‘It's getting to you, isn't it, Martha?'

She nodded. ‘I just wish I knew what was going on, and what's happened to her. Even if she'd written a confession to starting the Melverley fire and turned up dead it would feel less threatening.'

Randall nodded in agreement.

‘So we're still left with the major questions,' she said. ‘We still don't have a clue who set this fire or what Mrs Deverill had been about to tell you about the arson attack on Melverley Grange.'

‘Million dollar questions,' he said grimly. ‘I just hope we get some settlement on this.'

And Martha could not help but agree.

The fire chief was standing outside the house and they fell into step with him as they approached what had been the front door. Hard hats again and they were inside. The three of them stood in the hall and looked up. It was like the house at Melverley but worse. Overhead parts of the roof still hung on blackened beams. But where the roof had caved in the clear blue sky of a winter's day was visible. The effect was of a broken patchwork, gleams of cold blue air flooding the stricken property with light and softening the smell of the smoke so although the building had been worse affected than Melverley Grange the atmosphere inside was less claustrophobic. Martha looked at the broken steps of the stairs and Will Tyler, fire chief, voiced her thoughts. ‘I wonder which bedroom she normally slept in.'

Martha looked up. Then back down again. It wouldn't have made much difference.
All
the bedrooms had been destroyed.

Even to her untrained eye she could see that it simply wasn't safe to explore the house. The front room had been completely destroyed. And much of the furniture from the bedroom above lay skewed, on its side, as the joists beneath them had collapsed. Even as they stood and stared there was an ominous creaking above and an impression of a release of latent heat.

The forensic team, two men from Birmingham, specialists in malicious fire damage, were still taking samples and labelling them carefully. Martha watched them with the fascination and respect she always felt for a professional doing his – or her – job. She spoke to them. ‘Can you be quite sure that Mrs Deverill isn't here somewhere? Maybe lying underneath some of the furniture?'

‘She isn't here,' Tyler said. ‘Even when fire damage is as extensive as this is a human body is quite easy to spot.'

She turned her head. ‘So what
have
you found?'

‘Same as before,' Tyler responded. ‘Petrol-soaked rag through a broken window.'

‘We think she must have slept in the front bedroom,' fireman Colin Agnew put in gloomily. ‘It's the worst affected.' And as though to underline his certainty he repeated, ‘She definitely isn't anywhere.'

As the staircase was unsafe a ladder had been placed against an external wall and Agnew climbed it, making running commentaries to the detective inspector from above, talking him through events. ‘The front bedroom has all but been destroyed. Most of the joists . . .' He demonstrated by putting his weight very gingerly on a heavily scorched floorboard, ‘have been burned. If not right through, then severely weakened. It was quite a blaze. Took hold quickly. And the gas fire and cooker didn't help. They exploded and took the fire to another dimension.' He grinned down at them. Even on the ground floor Martha and Alex were walking very gingerly, feeling the floorboards move under their weight and listening for that terrible sound of splintering which would herald the floor completely giving way. Above them they could see the bed was still in the centre of the room, dipping down towards them. Agnew drew their attention to the bedding, badly charred. But they knew it was empty. The watchers all knew that she was somewhere else, dead or alive, free or a prisoner but she was not here. They watched Agnew move through the rest of the room, stepping around the perimeter and avoiding the centre which was about to cave in completely. Even as they watched the bed slipped a little farther towards them and they withdrew.

So if she wasn't here, where was she? They all knew that people confused and disorientated by smoke can lose their way even in an environment as familiar as their own bedroom. There had been signs of this in Christie Barton's room in Melverley Grange. First she had headed for the window, not the door, her first mistake being to step out of the wrong side of her bed. People in the dark, in the dead of night, normally find their way from their bed to the bathroom. People disorientated by smoke do not. Tyler led them next to the kitchen which was at the back of the house and less badly damaged by the fire, though still a wreck with laminated cupboard doors melted and burned and the rubber floor tiles burnt right through. Martha could not resist opening the larder cupboard just in case. Maybe Monica had mistaken the door for an exit. Behind was not so badly damaged. Smoke had seeped in but she was not here. The shelves only held packets of food partly scorched and soot-stained. They could not find her. They
would
not find her. Was she playing a macabre game of Hide and Seek? As they progressed through rooms, opening cupboards, Agnew even shining a light into the downstairs shower cubicle, it felt like it. That the woman's presence was here but eluding them. It was Agnew who spoke up first, his voice both timorous and feisty, holding anger and frustration. ‘So where the hell is she?' His eyes turned to Randall. ‘There's been no sightings of the car?'

Randall shook his head, his face grim.

Martha felt a sudden flash of hope, a conviction that Monica Deverill was wherever her car was but safe. She smiled at Alex. Perhaps? But the warm feeling quickly chilled as she read his expression.

He stepped towards the back door. ‘We'll just take a peek inside the garage,' he said, ‘in case there's something there.'

Apart from checking for the car and a very superficial search the SOCOs had largely left the garage alone, concentrating their efforts on the house. They stared around a neat and empty space, a few boxes stacked neatly at the back, a chest freezer. It was obvious that Monica had sometimes garaged her car – there were oil stains and the garage was relatively clear, leaving plenty of room for it, and just as obvious that the vehicle was not here.

Randall did a cursory search, moved a couple of token boxes. Martha knew exactly what he would be looking for – a petrol can. One of those with a screw top and a long spout.

He didn't find one.

Their attention was diverted by a second police car pulling up and Sergeant Paul Talith and WPC Lara Tinsley climbing out. Or at least that's how Talith's awkward manoeuvres could better be described as he ‘eased' himself out of the car.

Even as Randall was greeting them the unpleasant thought Martha had voiced earlier was worming its way through her mind. The two fires had been started in the same way. Exactly. It was an unusual operandi and the results in each case had been catastrophic. Was it possible then that the
nurse
had, for some reason, burnt down Melverley Grange and then, in an attempt to disguise this, set her own home alight? Surely not. It had simply drawn attention to her. ‘The nurse and the Barton family,' she asked, frowning. ‘Was there any connection between them?'

Randall met her eyes with a gaze of his own which was hard to read. ‘Not that we've found out yet,' he said, mirroring her frown. Then he drew in a deep breath. ‘But it's early days yet, Martha. I'm confident all this will make sense finally.'

‘I suppose the fact that the car is missing points us in the direction that Mrs Deverill drove herself away from here,' she ventured.

Randall turned to her. ‘We can't make any assumptions yet, Martha. The arsonist could have taken it.' He paused. ‘Even with her inside, dead or alive. All we know is that her body is not in there.' He indicated the wrecked semi then added, ‘Anything's possible,' he said, ‘at the moment.'

‘If it was our arsonist he or she would have to have got the car key somehow,' Martha pondered.