Liar Liar: DI Helen Grace 4 (A DI Helen Grace Thriller)

by M. J. Arlidge

  Helen stepped aside as the boy was wheeled past. He looked in a terrible state, covered in dirt and blood and in the grip of some kind of fit. As he sped by, Helen was suddenly struck by the diabolical nature of this latest crime. Their arsonist presumably knew who lived here, knew that a vulnerable boy like Ethan would struggle to escape such a savage fire. And yet this thought hadn’t stilled his hand, hadn’t occasioned any second thoughts. It almost beggared belief, but it was true. If she hadn’t known it before, Helen knew it then – this killer’s cruelty knew no bounds.

  89

  Her heels made a harsh, repetitive clicking sound as she ran towards the hospital entrance. Michael was paying the cabbie, but she hadn’t waited for him. Her head was spinning, her mind full of awful possibilities, and now she just wanted to know.

  Without thinking, she ran straight into the A&E department. The automatic doors opened obligingly for her and as she hurried inside, that familiar hospital smell hit her. Disinfectant warmed up by the overactive heating system and sprinkled with a little urine. She hated that smell and she hated hospitals. God knows she’d spent enough time in them and more than enough time in A&E over the last few years. Because of his condition, Ethan was clumsy and accident-prone so Jacqueline had spent too many hours slumped on these grim plastic seats, surrounded by the drunk and the disorderly.

  She generally forced Michael to accompany her on these visits – scared of the shambling drunks and paranoid care-in-the-community types that littered the emergency department – and she was glad when she found him by her side now. Her nerves were spiking wildly, as they had been since she’d pulled out her phone to call a cab, only to find she’d missed numerous calls. She’d only made it through the first two messages, before she’d grabbed Michael and sprinted from the restaurant, leaving the bill unpaid. Their first instinct had been to head home, but, on hearing that Ethan had been taken to South Hants Hospital, they diverted there instead. There was still no word as to the fate of Agnieszka – that was something Jacqueline didn’t even want to think about.

  Gripping her husband’s hand, Jacqueline marched up to the first nurse she could see and collared him.

  ‘Our son was brought in this evening. Ethan Harris.’

  For a moment, the nurse looked blank.

  ‘You’ll need to go to reception. All admissions –’

  ‘There was a fire. At our house in Lower Shirley. My son was there – they just brought him in.’

  Immediately, she saw the nurse’s expression change and it made her feel sick. Suddenly he knew exactly what she was talking about and looked worried and concerned.

  ‘Of course. You’ll need the burns unit. Let me take you there now.’

  He walked briskly and they matched his pace, though Jacqueline felt nauseous and short of breath. Both she and Michael must have had the best part of a bottle of wine each and the alcohol was now making its presence felt. All pleasure had evaporated long ago: now she felt dehydrated and washed out. What on earth were they doing, drinking, laughing, joking, when their bloody house was on fire?

  She looked at her husband, but his gaze was fixed resolutely forward. She had heard about the recent fires of course, but to her shame had thought they were other people’s problems – people with less money and more issues perhaps. It was embarrassing to admit that, but it was true. Even now, she hoped and prayed that their fire had nothing to do with these arson attacks. Faulty wiring perhaps, a hob left on. It wouldn’t be excusable, especially if it turned out to be Agnieszka’s fault, but she didn’t want to be part of that other thing. She and Michael didn’t have any enemies, there was no one out there who would want to harm them. He was a psychiatrist and she was a bloody architect, for God’s sake.

  And yet something inside her knew. Knew that they were getting sucked into something bigger than them. And that this was just the start of their misery.

  90

  ‘Are you absolutely sure?’

  Helen’s tone was abrasive and aggressive. She would never usually talk to one of her officers in that way, but she forgave herself tonight. Too much had happened tonight for her to pussyfoot around important issues.

  ‘One hundred per cent,’ DC Lucas replied evenly, choosing to ignore Helen’s rudeness. ‘He hasn’t moved a muscle.’

  Helen stepped forward and looked through the grimy windows of the internet café. She had hung back out of sight, not wanting to compromise Lucas’s surveillance operation, but now she had to see for herself if he was really in there. Her heart sunk when she saw that he was. According to Lucas, Richard Ford hadn’t once got up from his monitor, tapping away on the keyboard as though his life depended upon it.

  ‘What time did you both arrive here?’ Helen continued.

  ‘Around eight p.m.?’

  ‘And he was never out of your sight? You didn’t go to the loo, for a cigarette …’

  ‘Come on, boss.’ Lucas’s tone was less forgiving this time – she clearly didn’t enjoy having her professional competency called into question.

  ‘So what’s he been doing?’

  ‘See for yourself,’ Lucas replied. ‘ Just … that. I wanted to get round the back of him to see what he was typing, what he was looking at, but I couldn’t without massively flagging my interest in him, so …’

  Helen nodded at Lucas and considered her next move. Richard Ford was such a good suspect – he fitted the general profile in almost every way. And yet he hadn’t moved a muscle tonight. A thought suddenly grabbed her and Helen now found herself striding past her colleague and into the café. Lucas was unsure whether to stay outside or follow, but in the end chose the latter. She wasn’t sure what was about to happen, but she knew she didn’t want to miss it.

  Helen was making straight for Ford. Such was the speed of her approach that he barely looked up until she was upon him.

  ‘What the hell do you want?’

  His right hand moved quickly towards the keyboard but Helen grabbed it, twisting it sharply, pulling Ford away from the terminal. He yelped in pain and stumbled backwards off his chair, Helen’s sudden momentum catching him completely by surprise.

  ‘What are you doing, you mad bitch?’ Ford said, picking himself up off the floor.

  It was a rash move, especially in front of the handful of witnesses who were still haunting the internet café at his late hour, but Helen knew she had no choice. She had to see what he’d been doing.

  To her surprise, the website for Sussex Fire and Rescue Service was up on his screen.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘What do you think it is? I’ve got to work, haven’t I?’

  Ignoring him, Helen pulled up his recent search history. Kent Fire and Rescue, Devon and Cornwall Fire and Rescue, job vacancies, training opportunities, nothing incriminating at all. Then she noticed a minimized Word document at the bottom of the screen and pulled it up. Immediately, Richard Ford lunged forward, trying to wrestle the mouse from her grasp.

  ‘Can’t you give me a moment’s peace?’ he pleaded. ‘Can’t you leave me a shred of dignity?’

  It was his resignation letter.

  ‘You don’t let up, do you?’ Ford continued, incandescent with rage and embarrassment now. ‘My life is in bloody tatters and even now you won’t just … let me be. I’m finished in this town and you want me tarred and feathered. You won’t be happy until you’ve set the lynch mob on me, will you?’

  His Southampton accent pinged through loud and clear as his voice rose, which made Helen feel all the more ashamed. Ford was clearly a strange, unpleasant man, with a peculiar fascination with fire and yet … he was also a successful, well-trained firefighter who’d been helping keep his home town safe since the day he was old enough to join the Service. And Helen had effectively exiled him from Southampton. In some ways she’d had no choice, she’d had to pursue every lead with the utmost vigour, but it was still a bad outcome for everyone concerned.

  ‘I thought …’

  ‘We all know what
you thought,’ he spat back, his face puce with anger and shame. ‘But I’ve done nothing wrong.’

  Helen suddenly became aware of the other people in the café – their faces turned towards her, drinking in the drama.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated and headed for the exit.

  It was an ignominious retreat, with Lucas scurrying to keep up with her, but there was no point making the situation worse by arguing further. The damage had been done. Helen had never felt so foolish or misguided, ruining an innocent man’s life while letting the real perpetrator continue his reign of terror unchecked. Where, Helen wondered, would this end? And what would it take to stop their perpetrator killing again?

  91

  Emilia had been up all night and she was dog-tired. This story was a good one, but did this guy really have to strike every night? Getting testimony from witnesses and emergency service personnel at one major fire was hard enough, but to have to do so from three fires, in the small hours, three nights running? This guy just didn’t let up.

  Emilia drained her last drop of coffee. It was 7 a.m. and the office was starting to fill up. Her colleagues all stopped to chat, aware that Emilia had been at her desk since 4 a.m. working up her copy for the next day’s edition. Emilia was a child of the Twitter generation – her live feed keeping colleagues, fans and friends bang up to speed with what she was doing at any given moment. It was a brilliant way to disseminate breaking news, but also a fabulous vehicle for self-promotion. As she’d sat in the lonely office through the night, she’d made sure to keep the Twittersphere in the loop about developments, so the world could marvel at her investigative zeal and her bosses (and more besides) could see how committed she was. Privately, she hoped that someone in London might take notice and drop her a line.

  But that was the future. Her priority now was creating a detailed four-page spread about the Southampton arsonist’s ‘Reign of Terror’. The police hadn’t confirmed it yet, but it was strongly rumoured that a young woman had died in tonight’s fires, bringing the killer’s total to four victims in three nights. That was pretty good going by anyone’s standards and confirmed his status as a prolific serial killer. If he kept going at this pace, he might exceed them all.

  Reading between the lines, the police still had no clue who their arsonist was. Everyone – police, public, even Emilia herself – had expected this guy to slow down, but he hadn’t and it now prompted an interesting question. If they couldn’t catch him, then how could they stop him? Her editor had leapt on the idea of a city-wide curfew and Emilia had been happy to run with it. She didn’t necessarily believe it would happen, but it raised some concerns about human rights while simultaneously highlighting the police’s lack of progress. Secretly, Emilia hoped the city authorities would go for it – it would be incredibly dramatic and would ensure that the world’s attention would be on Southampton for a short period of time. Not since the Boston manhunt had anything so draconian been floated.

  She had almost finished typing when her mobile rang. She always put her number and Twitter handle by her byline, so was constantly receiving phone calls from snitches, crooks and chancers on the make. The caller ID flagged the number as ‘withheld’, suggesting the caller was either important or very shady, so scooping up her phone Emilia hurried to the ladies’ loo – it was the only spot in this place where you could get a modicum of privacy.

  ‘Emilia Garanita.’

  ‘Emilia, it’s Adam Latham. I’m the Chief Fire Offi—’

  ‘I know who you are, Adam. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I hear you’ve been talking to a number of my officers tonight. About the latest fires –’

  ‘Everything I did was strictly legal and above board and I don’t appreciate being call—’

  ‘I haven’t called to bollock you, Emilia. I’ve called to help you.’

  There was a pause, as Emilia took this in. Behind her, the ancient cisterns murmured quietly to themselves.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I want to talk to you off the record about Helen Grace. I can trust you to be objective in your attitude to her, can’t I?’

  ‘We only print the facts here, Adam.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it. I obviously don’t want to be named or quoted, but I want to give you the inside track on Grace’s handling of this case. It’s my firm belief that her bungled approach has endangered the public and cost lives. And I’d like to give you the details.’

  Emilia sat down on the nearest loo seat and pulled the door to. So Latham wanted to do a hatchet job on Helen. She was happy to listen – finally she would have the inside track on the investigation and potentially a scapegoat too.

  Emilia smiled to herself. This juicy story had just got a lot juicier.

  92

  Jacqueline Harris stared through the glass window at her son and felt a sharp stab of guilt. Ethan had never been an easy child and she had spent less time with him than she should have – hiring help to allow Michael and her to pursue their professional lives unchecked. But now, when she really wanted to be with her son, to reassure him that everything was going to be fine, she couldn’t.

  The doctors had asked her to leave the room while they carried out further tests. Why hadn’t she spent more time with him? Why had she been so preoccupied by work? If she had lost him, she would never have forgiven herself. Things would be different now, she vowed.

  In some ways, they had been extremely lucky. Ethan’s room was at the top of the house and though he had sustained scrapes and minor burns while being dragged from the blaze, they were superficial and would heal in time. He had of course inhaled a significant amount of smoke and that was what doctors were really concerned about, given that he already suffered from a mild form of brain damage, present since birth. Could this boy, who’d already been dealt a fairly tough hand, suffer yet more indignities? For all his physical problems, he was still bright and articulate – please, God, don’t let that be taken away from him too, Jacqueline prayed.

  Jacqueline heard steps behind her and turned to see a young woman in a smart suit approaching, a police warrant card held out for inspection.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Harris? I’m DS Sanderson.’

  ‘Jacqueline. And this is my husband, Michael.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘Good, I think. He’s awake, and alert, and seems to be passing all the tests fine. We want to get him discharged as soon as we can, but obviously that’s in the hands of the doctors.’

  ‘That’s great news.’

  Jacqueline nodded, suddenly ambushed by emotion. Had things turned out differently, she would have been at the police mortuary today.

  ‘We’ll need to ask Ethan a few questions.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You’re welcome to be present and if it gets too much for him at any point, we’ll call a halt. But he could be a vital witness to last night’s events, so …’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Michael Harris chipped in. ‘We understand. Can I ask about Agnieszka Jarosik? I’d like to be able to tell Ethan what her condition is.’

  Jacqueline Harris watched DS Sanderson closely. She saw a cloud pass across her face and knew immediately what the officer was about to say.

  ‘I’m very sorry, but she died of her injuries last night. The fire was too fierce in the basement for the emergency services to get to her.’

  Jacqueline turned to Michael. He looked as sick as she felt, but reached out his hand to take hers.

  ‘Will you need us to identify her? She’s from Poland and doesn’t have any family over here,’ Michael said, trying to sound as business-like as possible.

  ‘Thank you, but that won’t be necessary. We have other ways in which we can identify her without putting you through that.’

  Jacqueline shut her eyes. That could only mean one thing – that Agnieszka had been so badly burnt that a visual identification was impossible. An image of her charred corpse now shot into Jacqueline’s
mind, turning her stomach. None of this felt real but it was happening nevertheless. As Jacqueline stood there, dutifully answering the officer’s polite questions, she had the feeling that the axis of their world was shifting. Their home had been destroyed, their son injured, their nanny murdered. They had now become the news story – the collateral damage of someone else’s insanity.

  93

  Smoke rose gently from the ashes. Only the shell of the building now remained – everything inside it had been consumed by the fire. Twenty-four hours ago this had been an expensive terraced house in the one of the most desirable parts of the city. Now it was a smouldering wreck and, worse still, a murder scene.

  The body of a young woman had only recently been removed from the scorched basement flat. The fabric of the building was still impressively hot and Helen had to wear protective boots, as she carefully traversed the site with Deborah Parks. The latter had been on site for a couple of hours already, braving the unpleasant atmosphere and risk of falling debris, in order to try and gain an understanding of what had happened last night.

  ‘Our arsonist is developing his or her MO,’ Deborah said, after the formalities had been concluded.

  ‘In what way?’ Helen asked, alarmed by Deborah’s concerned expression.

  ‘The seat of the fire was here,’ Deborah answered, gesturing towards an area in the middle of the small, basement living room. A partially melted TV stood nearby, surrounded by the remnants of charred furniture. ‘The smell has cleared now that we’ve ventilated the site, but when we first arrived, we had to wear these,’ she explained, tapping her mask. ‘The aroma of cyanide oxide was still very strong.’

  ‘Burning foam?’

  ‘This leather sofa – or what remains of it – would have been stuffed with polyurethane foam. Highly flammable and highly toxic.’

  ‘Is that what would have killed Agnieszka?’

  ‘Nothing so pleasant, I’m afraid,’ Deborah said, pulling a face. ‘We found a melted paraffin container about five yards from the sofa. My suspicion is that your arsonist entered via the back door and poured the paraffin directly on to the sofa before setting light to it.’