After the Fire (Maeve Kerrigan)

by Casey, Jane

  ‘But—’

  ‘No.’

  Pettifer poked his head around the door. ‘Boss, the solicitor’s here.’

  ‘At last.’ She picked up her folder and walked away without another word to Derwent.

  ‘Did you really think she’d give you a shot?’ I asked.

  ‘If she wasn’t so full of herself, she’d have left it to me.’

  ‘Oh, I see. It’s her ego that’s the problem.’

  ‘She’s not a good leader. She likes the spotlight too much.’

  ‘Whereas you’re just a willing foot soldier.’

  He frowned at me. ‘That’s exactly it. I’m not in it for the glory.’

  ‘But you won’t admit that anyone else is capable of doing as good a job as you.’

  ‘That’s because I have long experience of people being shit at their jobs.’

  ‘You can’t say that about Burt.’

  A muscle flickered in Derwent’s jaw. ‘We’ll see.’

  For once I was squarely on Una Burt’s side. I hoped she’d prove him wrong. I went into the meeting room where there was a TV that linked to the interview room, and found a place to sit between Colin Vale and Liv. Derwent swaggered in, all attitude, and gave me a hurt look when he realised I wasn’t planning to sit next to him. I ignored it. I’d had enough of him taking advantage of other people’s better natures.

  The first half-hour of the interview made me want to drop my head into my hands and groan. Burt pawed at Griffin like a lion trying to coax a tortoise out of its shell; there was no subtlety to it.

  ‘Where were you on the 28th of November between midday and midnight?’

  ‘Were you on the Maudling Estate?’

  ‘Have you ever been on the Maudling Estate?’

  ‘Do you own a red baseball cap?’

  And like a metronome, without inflection, without surprise, the answer came back. No comment. No comment. As I’d suspected from the custody photograph he wasn’t the brightest guy but he knew enough to say nothing, and there was damn all we could do with that.

  I looked across at Derwent once. He was staring at the television screen with the kind of intensity that could melt glass. I gave him credit for one thing: it gave him no pleasure at all to be proved right when it meant we were getting nowhere.

  For God’s sake, Una, get it together.

  As if she’d heard me, she leaned forward. ‘Do you know a woman called Melissa Pell?’

  A frown: this wasn’t a question he’d anticipated. ‘No.’

  ‘Ever heard the name before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about Mark Pell?’

  He made eye contact with her for a second, with nothing but blank incomprehension. ‘No.’

  I glanced at Derwent to see what he thought. He was completely still, not blinking, barely breathing, like a sniper with the target in his sights.

  Burt opened a folder and took out the CCTV stills Colin Vale had collected for us.

  ‘This is you, isn’t it, Ray?’

  ‘No comment.’ But his eyes tracked down from the spot on the wall where he’d been staring so he could look at the images.

  ‘He knows it’s him,’ Vale said softly.

  Burt leaned forward and leafed through the images until she got to one from the eighth-floor camera. ‘This is you. And this is a woman named Melissa Pell. This is you attacking her and I’d like to know why.’

  The solicitor leaned in to see the images, her expression carefully neutral. She was a young woman, blonde and bubbly by nature, and I saw a reaction she couldn’t quite hide when she saw how the man came after Melissa Pell, the casual savagery that had left her unconscious.

  ‘Melissa was in hospital for days after this. She had some very serious injuries. That, straight away, is grievous bodily harm, and that’s you committing it.’

  ‘It’s not me.’

  ‘We recovered your DNA from the crime scene.’

  ‘It’s mistaken identity.’

  ‘It’s nothing of the kind. You are a career criminal and we’ve got you on camera attacking a defenceless woman. That’s enough to get you back in prison for a very long time, even without the rest.’

  He licked his lips. ‘The rest?’

  ‘You do realise, don’t you, Mr Griffin, that this is evidence that you were on the Maudling Estate?’

  No answer.

  ‘And you do realise that we’re looking for the person responsible for setting the fire that devastated Murchison House? Four people died, Mr Griffin. One of them was a little girl. Two of them were young women who were locked in a flat and left to die. That’s murder, pure and simple.’

  ‘The fire was nothing to do with me. I just—’ He bit his lip and shook his head.

  ‘You just what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  At a nod from Burt, Tom Bridges took over, his voice calm and matter-of-fact. ‘You work for Sajmir Culaj, don’t you?’

  Ray went as red as if he’d been scalded. ‘No comment.’

  ‘That’s a fact, though, isn’t it, because that’s why you went to prison last time. It’s been proved in court, so there’s no point in going no comment.’

  Griffin pressed his lips together, as if he was physically trying to restrain himself from answering.

  ‘Do you know what I know about Sajmir Culaj? I know he’s moved away from wholesaling drugs. I know what he makes most of his money from these days.’

  ‘Is that a question?’ the solicitor asked.

  Bridges frowned. ‘Let me put it a different way. Do you know where the money’s coming from, Ray?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Big money in moving people across borders, Ray. Make them pay to get into the country, make them work once they’re here. Slavery – that’s one word for it. Trafficking people. Women. Children. Using them as domestic servants. Using them as free labour. Using them for sex.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that.’ It was a mumble.

  ‘What do you know about flat 113 in Murchison House? What do you know about the women who were living there? They died there, Ray, didn’t they?’

  Ray’s eyes started watering. He sniffed, blotting them with the back of his wrist.

  ‘You were at your mum’s house, Ray. Hiding. You knew someone was coming for you – you just didn’t know if it would be the police who got to you first or if it would be Culaj’s guys. You’re probably quite glad it was us.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because you’ve got a big problem, haven’t you?’ There was nothing aggressive in the way Bridges said it; they could have been friends talking in a pub. ‘You were supposed to look after those girls and they ended up dead. Culaj isn’t going to be very happy with you. If I were you, I’d start talking, even if it means you’re going to end up in prison for a bit. Let’s face it, you’re going anyway for the attack on Melissa Pell. Prison looks like the safest place you could be until Culaj forgets about you.’

  Ray blinked miserably. ‘It was an accident. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.’

  ‘That’s done it,’ Colin said beside me. ‘Got the bastard.’

  ‘What wasn’t, Ray? What happened?’ Bridges asked. ‘Did you start the fire?’

  ‘No. Absolutely not. That was nothing to do with me. I was just supposed to go and make sure the girls were all right.’

  ‘The girls?’

  ‘In flat 113. They weren’t allowed to go out on their own. Sometimes they needed food or whatever. I didn’t have anything to do with them working. I just called in now and then, when Sajmir asked me to. He didn’t like having the same people going too often because the girls would try to get friendly with you and he didn’t want that. I wasn’t supposed to talk to them.’

  ‘How many girls were there?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Three. Are you sure?’

  ‘One black, one blonde, one brunette.’

  ‘Names?’

  He shrugged, his face completely blank,
and I felt utterly furious that he hadn’t even wondered if they had names, let alone what the names might have been.

  ‘Do you know anything about them? Where they were from?’

  ‘The black girl was African.’

  ‘Africa’s a big place,’ Bridges said. ‘Narrow it down for me, fella.’

  ‘I don’t know. Sorry. The other two were from Russia.’

  ‘Definitely?’

  ‘That’s what I thought. They sounded like it.’

  Derwent was shaking his head slowly, unimpressed. Bridges clearly felt the same way, because he abandoned the attempt to find out anything about the girls.

  ‘So were you there when the fire started?’

  ‘I was in flat 117. Sajmir used that one as a kind of office. I was just hanging around, you know. Watching a bit of telly. I didn’t have anywhere else to be. I wasn’t in a hurry to go and see the girls. Then the alarms started going off.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I rang Sajmir. I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That I should get the girls out.’ Ray closed his eyes, breathing hard. ‘I tried.’

  ‘You can’t have tried very hard,’ Una Burt said coldly. ‘They burned to death.’

  ‘That wasn’t my fault.’ He was crying again, openly this time. ‘I opened the door and the one with fair hair rushed me. She kneed me in the bollocks and then she ran. I shut the door on the other two to chase after her. I didn’t mean to lock them in. I thought I’d be able to get back to them. I was afraid of what Sajmir would say if I just let her get away. I thought I could get her back and then collect the other two and we could all go to one of Sajmir’s other houses together. I didn’t want to get in trouble.’

  I could imagine it all too clearly: Ray panicking, the smoke filling the air, the situation spiralling out of control as the girl made her break for freedom. Ray could really only handle one problem at a time. Chasing after her must have seemed like the logical thing to do. But he’d left the other two girls to die in horrible circumstances, in terror, in pain. He’d condemned them to a death no one would ever wish on their worst enemy.

  ‘So you ran after the missing girl,’ Bridges said. ‘Did you catch her?’

  He shook his head. ‘I thought I had. I thought it was her.’ He tapped the picture that was still in front of him: Melissa with her fair hair hanging down. ‘I caught up with her and I roughed her up a bit. I didn’t hit her hard or anything. It was just to teach her a lesson and make her behave.’

  I risked another look at Derwent, who was completely still except for a thumb that tapped on the desk in front of him. Una Burt had made the right choice, I thought. Maybe Derwent thought it too. Bridges was objective, and calm, and highly effective. Derwent was likely to be none of these things in a room with the man who had fractured Melissa Pell’s eye socket.

  On the screen, Ray Griffin sighed. ‘But then I realised it was the wrong girl. By the time I got down to the ground floor, there was no sign of the one I was looking for. And then I went to go back up but the firefighters had already arrived and they stopped me. I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘You didn’t think of telling the firefighters about the two women you’d locked into their flat?’ Una Burt’s voice dripped with hostility. ‘Or the one you’d left unconscious on the eighth floor?’

  ‘I thought they’d find them.’ He squeezed his eyes shut. ‘I never meant for anyone to get hurt. I thought it was going to be all right. And then I realised I’d fucked it up. The blonde girl ran away. The other two died. I hurt this woman and I didn’t even mean to. But it was all just an accident. A mistake.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’ Derwent got up and walked out of the room, as if he couldn’t bear to listen to any more.

  On the television screen, Ray Griffin was still talking, as if he couldn’t stop, now that he’d started. As if explaining it would make it all right.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault. You have to believe me. None of it was my fault.’

  Chapter 29

  ‘PLANNING ON GOING home soon?’ Derwent stood by my desk, jangling his car keys.

  I checked the time: later than I’d thought. ‘In a while.’

  ‘I’m going now.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘So I can give you a lift.’

  ‘Why?’ If I sounded suspicious, it was because I was.

  Derwent blinked at me, innocent. ‘Because we’re going to the same place, and it’s freezing out, and whatever you’re doing can probably wait until tomorrow.’

  It was a peace offering, I realised, because he’d behaved like an arse all day. And he was right; I wasn’t doing anything urgent. Ray Griffin had gone through the CCTV images with Colin Vale and identified the fair-haired girl for us, so at last we had a face to look for, and a description, and we’d circulated the image as widely as we could even though we were days too late: ports and airports, police and hospitals. She was our best chance of identifying the dead girls, and prosecuting Sajmir Culaj as well as Ray Griffin. More than that, she was on her own, running for her life with nothing more than the clothes she stood up in. Finding her was a priority. But I wasn’t going to be able to do that from my desk. And I needed to get some rest.

  I pushed my chair back.

  ‘Okay. Thanks.’

  He twirled his car keys around his finger. ‘Good. I’ll see you downstairs. Don’t keep me waiting too long.’

  Leopards, spots, etc. I rolled my eyes behind his back and got on with packing my bag.

  Derwent was waiting in the car park behind the office, his coat collar turned up against the cold.

  ‘You weren’t wrong about the weather.’ I ran across, shivering, and opened the passenger door to put my things in the foot well. ‘Why aren’t you in the car?’

  ‘I want a word. Is your phone in your bag?’ I nodded and he slammed the door shut. ‘Just in case Swain is listening.’

  ‘Talk fast.’ I was jumping from foot to foot, trying to stay warm. The temperature had dropped like a stone, the sky bright with stars even in central London.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about what happened earlier, with Bridges.’

  I frowned at him. ‘You were out of line. There was no need for it.’

  ‘I was trying to look out for you.’

  ‘By giving everyone on the team the impression that we’re shagging? You didn’t have to yell about it.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He didn’t look all that bothered and I felt myself getting angrier. He had no idea of the implications of what he’d done.

  ‘It’s all right for you. You don’t have anything like a good reputation. Sleeping with me would be a massive step up for you.’

  There was a glint in his eye. ‘I’ve been congratulated more than once today.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’ I was trembling and I couldn’t tell if it was pure rage or the cold. ‘You know what people are saying about me. You know the conclusions they’re drawing. You know what they’ll be calling me behind my back.’

  ‘When this is over, I’ll explain it was nothing.’ He said it carelessly, as if it was that easy.

  ‘No one will believe you.’

  ‘You’re worrying for no reason.’

  ‘You just don’t realise that there’s a different set of standards for women. You get a pat on the back and I get judged. You’re my boss, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, and this time he sounded more like he meant it. ‘I just wanted to get rid of Bridges for you.’

  ‘He was being pleasant. And if he had been trying to flirt with me, I would have been capable of dealing with it by myself. It was none of your business.’

  ‘You need looking after, Kerrigan.’

  ‘Not by you.’

  ‘Who else is going to do it? You’ll never ask for help. You’re like a feral cat. You don’t know how to trust anyone.’

  ‘Trusting people is a quick way to get hurt.’

 
Derwent whistled. ‘And people say I’m a cynic. Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘I trust you to cause trouble.’

  He grinned. ‘That’ll do.’

  I’d had enough. ‘Can we get into the car now?’

  ‘Not yet. We need to talk about Swain.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘We need to push him further. Make him angry. Make him reckless.’

  I frowned. ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘I have a few ideas.’ He leaned against the car. ‘Look, just go with it. Pretend it’s undercover work. Whatever happens, it’s not personal. What we’re doing is a means to an end.’

  ‘What are we doing?’ I asked, wary.

  ‘Wait and see.’ There was a spring in his step as he went around to the driver’s side of the car.

  It was a bad sign, if ever I’d seen one.

  Derwent parked in the car park underneath the apartment building, where there was no mobile phone reception at all.

  ‘Right.’ He looked at me sideways. ‘Ready?’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To have some fun.’

  And that was all I was getting. I followed him into the lift and up to my floor, where he stood back to let me open the door. He’d taken out his phone and he nodded to me to do the same. Then he pushed me into my bedroom.

  ‘What—’

  ‘Shhh.’ He took my phone out of my hand and put it on the table by the bed, covering it so the camera was out of action. I put my hands on my hips and frowned at him.

  He winked. Then he started to unknot his tie. ‘I’ve been thinking about this all day.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I know you’ve been thinking about it too.’ The pitch of his voice had gone down. He sounded not entirely like himself, or at least not as I usually heard him. And despite myself, I felt it in the pit of my stomach. He raised his eyebrows expectantly.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Yes. Of course.’

  His widest grin. He shrugged off his coat and tossed it onto a chair from a distance. Then he kicked off his shoes and let them fall to the floor.