by James Oswald
‘I had a feeling you’d be along soon. Tell me what you think about this, then.’
McLean had been concentrating on the peripheral details and somehow had managed to miss the white boiler-suited figure of the city pathologist. There was no sign of his assistant, which was just as well since there was barely room for the both of them.
‘No Doctor Sharp?’
‘Alas, no. Tracy’s gone to help Tom MacPhail with another case on the other side of town. They told me this was a house fire, so I thought I’d be safe enough coming on my own. Wasn’t exactly expecting this.’
McLean edged closer until he could see the figure sitting in the chair. As he did so, he noticed a pair of discarded work boots placed in front of a low table. A laptop computer sat open and facing the chair, as if whoever had been sitting in it had been watching something on the screen. Given that there was no telly in the tiny living room, this was most likely the case.
Other details came to him as he scanned the scene. The chair was upholstered in some dirty brown cloth material, clearly treated with fire retardant as it hadn’t burned much. Directly above it, a greasy black smear of soot looked like the kind of mark a candle makes when placed under a shelf without thought. Only this spot was much larger than any candle could leave. Something lay on the arms of the chair, and then, as McLean took another step closer, it all resolved into a horrific whole.
‘Dear God. What happened to him?’
Stephen Whitaker had not discarded his work boots when he had sat down to watch something on his laptop computer. He was still wearing them. The misshapen somethings lying on the arms of the chair were, in fact, his arms, hands clenched around the soft fabric as if he was hanging on for dear life. If that had been the case, it hadn’t worked, as he was very dead. That was, if he was indeed Stephen Whitaker. Apart from short stumps of legs and shorter stumps of forearms, there wasn’t really much of him left to identify.
‘I really don’t know, Tony. It looks like spontaneous human combustion, but in all my years in the job I’ve never encountered an actual case of it. Never had a colleague mention they’d seen it either. I’d thought it was just an urban myth. Something from the Fortean Times.’ Cadwallader waved an open hand at the blackened and grisly remains. ‘Not real.’
‘Could it have been staged?’ McLean knew the answer before he even asked the question, but it needed to be voiced anyway.
‘That’s your department. And the forensics team. I’d say no, though. Everything about the body points to it being burned here. I just don’t understand how it can be like this, but no damage anywhere else in the room.’
McLean crouched down to peer under the chair. A dark circle of burning matched the one on the ceiling above, as if a bolt of pure energy had descended from on high, spearing through Mr Whitaker on its way down into the earth. That couldn’t be what had happened, of course. Otherwise the neighbour who’d called it in would have had a different story to tell.
‘You’ll let me know when the PM’s going to be?’ He backed away from the burned remains, taking one last look at the minimalist living room.
‘Of course. Probably won’t take long, though. There’s not much of him left to examine.’
McLean found DC Blane back out on the street, chatting with Amanda Parsons, the senior forensic technician who also happened to be DS Harrison’s flatmate. Of Sergeant Gatford there was no sign, but a fresh-faced uniformed PC had taken over manning the cordon, so it was possible the old copper had sloped off for a cup of tea.
‘You get anything useful from the neighbour?’ he asked after he’d struggled out of the white overalls. The air was cool in the shade of the tenements, a brisk wind blowing in off the Forth and thankfully taking the stench of burned meat away with it. Down in the basement had been stifling, but now the damp sweat on his back and neck made him shiver.
‘Not much, sir. Seems Whitaker kept to himself most of the time. He’s not been living here long, either. Only moved in a couple of months ago. According to Mrs Collings there.’ Blane nodded his head at the front window of the ground-floor flat, where an old lady stood and stared out at the proceedings. She caught his eye and gave him a cheery wave. ‘As she tells it, Mr Whitaker’s marriage was on the rocks and he’d moved out of the family home.’
‘Do we have the address?’
‘Not yet, sir. I’ve asked Jay— DC Stringer to run it down. And where he worked, too. Mrs Collings thought he had something to do with the new construction up at St James.’
‘OK. Keep digging. I want a full profile by shift end.’
DC Blane nodded and pulled out his airwave set. McLean knew the constable was a better detective in front of a computer than out in the field, but there were a few more things to cover before they could head back to the station.
‘Anything to report yet?’ he asked Parsons. Her face mask hung around her neck, and she had pulled back the hood attached to her protective overalls, wayward blond hair fluttering in the breeze.
‘We only just got here, Tony. I mean, Detective Chief Inspector, sir.’ Parsons pulled herself to attention, but stopped short of snapping an insolent salute.
‘It’s just detective inspector, Manda. Didn’t Janie tell you?’ McLean didn’t wait for an answer to that. ‘And I meant first impressions. Is it going to be a hard scene to process? Do you think you might find anything to explain what happened?’
‘Umm . . . you went in and saw the body, right? Or what’s left of it, anyway. I’ve been doing this job almost six years and I’ve never seen anything like that. I don’t even know where to start.’ Despite her complaint, Parsons began to count on her fingers. ‘I mean, there’s no obvious sign of any accelerant, nothing to suggest how the fire even started. From what I remember of training, you need a fierce old heat to burn a human body, and yet a stack of girlie mags on a table just a few feet away didn’t catch fire. The pages weren’t even crisped, more’s the pity. The ceiling should have burned through and set the whole tenement alight, but nobody even noticed there was a problem until Mrs Collings there couldn’t put up with the stink any more. It makes absolutely no sense at all.’
‘Angus reckons it could be spontaneous human combustion.’
Parsons ran a gloved hand through her hair, perhaps forgetting where she had been and what she had been doing there. When she spoke, the sarcasm was as marked as it was uncharacteristic. ‘Really? I guess all his many years of experience haven’t been completely wasted then. Human? Tick. Combustion? Tick again. Spontaneous?’ She said no more.
‘OK. I get the picture. I’ll leave you to it, shall I?’
‘Unless you’ve a good idea for getting him out of there in one piece.’
McLean didn’t, so he left Parsons to her job and walked back to his car. DC Blane was hunched beside it, airwave to one ear, finger in the other as he tried to hear whatever was being said at the other end. The wind had picked up now and was whistling down the narrow street, accelerated by the tall buildings on either side. McLean unlocked the car and climbed in, thinking Blane would do the same to get away from the noise, but he’d started the engine and cranked up the heater before the detective constable joined him.
‘That was control, sir. They’ve been on to the council. Got another address for Whitaker. I’m guessing that’s the family home he moved out of. He’s still on the register for council tax there, but there’s another person registered at the address too, Miranda Whitaker. Must be his wife?’ Blane had the good sense to make it a question.
‘Don’t guess, find out.’ McLean checked his mirror and then indicated before pulling out of the parking space. ‘Then you and Harrison can go have a chat with her.’
16
Up the hill towards Liberton from the Cameron Toll shopping centre and Inch Park, the housing estate was a twisty mess of cul-de-sacs and circles designed to confound even the most well-developed sense of direction.
It had been built long before the advent of Sat-Nav, and Janie Harrison could only imagine that the planners involved had suffered miserable childhoods. It didn’t help that all the houses looked the same, making it almost impossible to tell whether they had been down any particular drive once or half a dozen times.
‘Not the most inspiring of places,’ she said as she leaned over the steering wheel and peered out through the windscreen. The pool car she’d managed to grab wasn’t as nice as the boss’s Alfa, but it was a lot quieter. One of the new additions to the fleet, a boxy little Nissan, it ran on electricity and was surprisingly fun to drive. It seemed to have a decent range too, if the numbers on the screen built into the dashboard were anything to go by. How long it would last when a forgetful constable left it parked up overnight without plugging it in was something they would no doubt find out soon enough.
‘Doesn’t look much, no. But these houses are a lot bigger than the shoeboxes they’re throwing up nowadays. Friends of mine rented one when they were at Uni.’ DC Blane had pushed the passenger seat so far back he was practically looking out the rear window.
‘You’ve been here before then?’ Janie asked, as she indicated to turn down yet another street with no obvious street sign.
‘Not for a while. But I crashed a couple of times. It’s fine and handy for the King’s Buildings.’
Janie tried to keep the exasperation out of her voice. ‘So you know your way around then, Lofty, so how the hell do we get to Cairn Close?’
Blane sat up a little straighter, his head brushing the roof lining. ‘Sorry. Thought you knew where you were going.’ He pointed to an opening between two houses that might have been a road. ‘It’s up there.’
Janie muttered under her breath, but followed the directions, and soon enough they were sliding into a parking space in front of an anonymous semi-detached house. Much like the others in the close, it was harled in grey-brown pebble-dash render, with dark brown frames to the windows and a matching front door. If the estate’s planners had intended the houses to have front gardens, that wish had long since given way to two-car family lifestyle. Number Twelve was fronted by an uneven patch of tarmac with dead weed poking through plentiful cracks. An elderly Volvo estate had been backed in tight to the wall that marked the boundary between the two halves of the semi-detached house. Judging by the patina of dirt, the faded paintwork and the flat tyre, it hadn’t moved anywhere recently. Janie pointed at the number plate. ‘Run that when we get back to the station, aye?’
Lofty nodded, pulled out his notebook and was in the process of writing when the front door opened wide. A woman not much older than Harrison herself stood in the doorway, a small child apparently welded to her hip.
‘What youse want? If you’re here to sell Jesus, I’m no’ buying.’
‘Detective Sergeant Harrison.’ Janie held up her warrant card with one hand and pointed at Lofty with the thumb of her other. ‘My colleague, Detective Constable Blane. Would you be Miranda Whitaker?’
The woman took a step forward so that she could see the card. Janie gave her all the time she needed to read it. They were bearing bad news of a sort, nothing to be gained from antagonising her.
‘Aye,’ she said, after a moment.
‘Could we possibly come in?’
The inside of the house lived up to the low expectations of the exterior, although Lofty had been right about the generous size of the rooms. Miranda led them through a hallway that would have been wide had it not been for the baby buggy and other detritus cluttering up the space. Open-tread stairs in a dark stained bare wood climbed up to the first floor, and someone had made a makeshift gate at the bottom to stop the toddler exploring. It reminded Janie of her gran’s house. All very chic and fashionable in the seventies perhaps, but not exactly practical for modern living.
‘Will this take long? Only I’ve tae get Senga down soon or she’ll be a right pain later on.’ Miranda hefted the child to her other side. Janie wasn’t much of the mothering type, but even she thought the little girl looked a bit dopey. Wide eyes stared at nothing in particular, and she sucked continuously on a rubber teat. Maybe she’d just had a feed.
‘How old is she?’ It seemed the thing to ask, even if Janie didn’t think it would pertain much to their investigation.
‘Eighteen months, good as. Been out twice as long as she was in.’ Miranda smiled at her own joke, then turned serious again. ‘Come on through and sit down. Youse wanting a coffee?’
Tempting though it was, Janie declined. They went through into a slightly less cluttered living room that looked like it hadn’t been redecorated in fifty years. Lofty sat first, no doubt aware that his size could be intimidating. Janie waited for Miranda to settle with her child into a large armchair, then perched on the arm of the sofa so her head was at the same height as her colleague.
‘Your child’s father, Stephen. You’re separated now, yes?’
Miranda joggled young Senga on her knee, the child no more animated than a doll. ‘Steve? What’s that bastard done now?’
‘There was a fire at his tenement last night. I’m sorry, but he didn’t survive.’
The silence that fell on the room lasted a long time. Somewhere a clock ticked, and the soft shush shush shush of Miranda’s foot on the carpet was the only other sound. She didn’t look shocked, or even sad. Something else entirely spread its slow way across her face.
‘He’s dead?’ she asked eventually. Then without waiting for an answer added: ‘Well thank fuck for that.’
As responses went, it wasn’t quite the one Janie was expecting. She’d done more than enough death knocks in her time, and the responses were usually much the same. Shock, surprise, denial, anger. She’d never encountered relief before, at least not worn so openly.
‘Did he suffer?’ Miranda asked, then shook her head. ‘Doesn’t matter, really. He’s dead and that’s the end of it. Thank fuck.’
‘How long has it been since you separated?’ Janie asked.
‘Not long enough. Four months? Maybe five? Still waiting on the divorce to come through, but at least he’s out of the house.’ Miranda paused a moment, then her face lit up. ‘Guess I won’t be needing the divorce after all. Won’t be a trial either.’
‘Trial?’ Janie glanced across at Blane, who was doing his best to be unobtrusive. He shook his head and shrugged, no more clued up than she was. That was unlike him.
The brightness disappeared, replaced by anger. ‘You don’t know?’
‘I . . . No. I’m sorry. It only happened this morning.’
‘Unbelievable.’ Miranda shook her head slowly for a moment, then stared straight at Harrison. ‘I caught him abusing our wee girl. Playing with her like she was . . . and she was barely three months . . .’ Her face screwed up in utter disgust. ‘Oh, he tried to deny it, but then I found stuff on his computer. That’s when I called you lot. You should’ve locked him up and thrown away the key, but that fucker of a lawyer pops up and the next thing he’s got bail. At least they stopped him coming round here, but . . .’
She stopped speaking, partly because she appeared to have run out of words, partly because the child had finally picked up on her mother’s agitation and begun to sob. Not the full-throated someone’s trying to kill me wail that Janie associated with small infants, but distress nonetheless.
‘Hey, hey, little one. Daddy won’t hurt you ever again, my sweetheart.’ Miranda hugged her daughter close, one hand gently stroking the infant’s wispy hair. In moments the child had calmed.
Janie stood up, one hand going to her pocket. She pulled out a card, aware that it still identified her as Detective Constable Harrison. It didn’t matter, the numbers were the same. ‘I’m sorry. We should have known about Mr Whitaker’s . . . situation before we came here. I’d offer my condolences, but I don’t think you’d want them. If you need anything else though, give me a call.’
&
nbsp; She slid the card on to the coffee table. DC Blane was already through the door and into the hallway.
‘We’ll see ourselves out, Mrs Whitaker. Thank you for your time.’
Janie was halfway to the door before the woman spoke.
‘It’s Miss Keegan. There’s no Mrs Whitaker any more.’
‘Well that was a bit bloody embarrassing.’
Janie sat in the passenger seat this time, staring out at the identikit houses as DC Blane drove slowly away from Miranda Keegan’s address.
‘Sorry, Janie. I should have done a proper background on him.’
‘Don’t sweat it, we all make mistakes. Still embarrassing, finding out from her like that.’
‘Do you think it makes a difference to the case?’ Blane hunched over the steering wheel, elbows out at awkward angles as he tried to fit into a space not built with him in mind. Janie should have offered to drive, but he’d insisted it was his turn.
‘What do you mean? Do I think she somehow torched her ex?’ She shook her head. ‘No. She was genuinely surprised to hear he was dead. Elated, sure, but surprised.’
‘We’ll still have to get her in for an interview. Look into her background.’
‘Like we looked into her husband’s?’
‘Aye, well. Like I said. Sorry about that.’
‘She didn’t strike me as the vengeful type. Not the way you said her husband died.’
‘I didn’t see it, but from what the forensics team said, it was weird. Like he’d burned from the inside out, and the fire had barely touched anything else. Don’t see how anyone could do that, even if they were angry.’
‘Well she was certainly that. But you’re right. The way he died, Whitaker. That doesn’t square with vengeful wife. She’d have stabbed him in the bath or poisoned his food or something. What happened to him is too . . .’
‘Complicated?’ Blane offered.
‘I was going to say bizarre, but that too.’
