A Good Death

by Chris Collett

  ‘With that?’ said Jesson.

  Docherty feigned hurt. ‘Size isn’t everything. Sure, it’ll be a long job, but it will be thorough.’

  ‘And what are you looking for?’ asked Jesson.

  ‘Every fire creates a pattern based on the structure and availability of fuel. My job is to reconstruct the sequence backwards from when the fire started, to establish how exactly it started. We take a scientific approach, setting out to prove that the fire was started deliberately and testing the evidence within a radius of error. That way if there is a criminal offence that goes to court, I know I’ll have addressed any factors the defence could throw at us. It’s a bit like archaeology in that sense.’ Docherty was in his element, Jesson gazing at him with something close to admiration, and Mariner wasn’t sure who was enjoying this conversation more.

  ‘You’ve talked to Mrs Shah?’ Docherty asked Mariner, who deferred to Jesson.

  ‘Yes, and her initial reaction is that the fire was a deliberate attack,’ she said.

  ‘She may be right,’ said Docherty. ‘But it’s too soon for me to confirm that.’

  ‘She reports hearing a crashing noise that might have woken her,’ Jesson said. ‘Someone breaking a window maybe?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Docherty. He walked them over to the ground-floor windows, blackened and broken, the UPVC frames almost buckled beyond recognition. ‘Some of these have shattered in the fire.’ He ran his finger along one, close to what remained of one of the window panes. ‘These wavy lines suggest thermal cracking, caused by the heat. What Mrs Shah might have heard was them being blown out. We’ll keep it in mind, though, and see what else we come up with. All I can say for certain at this stage is that the seat of the fire was somewhere in that downstairs room.’ He indicated the converted garage. ‘But it’s going to take time to wade through all the debris in there.’

  ‘We should leave you to get on then,’ said Mariner.

  Docherty nodded. ‘I’ll let you know when I can walk you round the least damaged areas.’

  ‘He seems to know what he’s talking about,’ said Jesson, as she and Mariner walked back to their car.

  ‘Yes,’ Mariner agreed. ‘We may not get answers very quickly, but I think we’ll be able to rely on their accuracy. Nice-looking bloke too, isn’t he?’ he added, watching Jesson turn an interesting shade of pink.

  ‘I didn’t really notice,’ she lied.

  By the time Mariner got home that evening it was late, but before doing anything else, he called Suzy. ‘How was the first day?’

  ‘Good.’ She sounded upbeat. ‘Except that I already feel so old. Most of the other researchers are in their mid-twenties and straight out of university.’

  ‘Well, they’re probably there because they can’t get proper jobs,’ said Mariner.

  ‘Charming,’ said Suzy, affronted.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do,’ she conceded.

  ‘So are you managing to cope with all these bright young things?’

  ‘Actually, most of them are frighteningly capable,’ said Suzy. ‘And certainly full of self-confidence. I don’t think I was so sure of myself at that age. But some of them are quite sweet. And thank God for Rosalind.’

  ‘Rosalind?’

  ‘The only member of the team who’s anywhere near my age, who I have something in common with, and who isn’t surgically attached to a smart phone. She’s lovely, though unfortunately only part-time – she cares for her husband who has some kind of illness – but on the days she is around she will be a breath of fresh air. How did you get on with Manor Park?’

  Mariner told her about the letter that had arrived that morning.

  ‘So your fears about Manor Park were unfounded,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, now we just need to find out what’s wrong with Jamie,’ said Mariner. ‘It’s funny. Jamie’s never ill and it’s never really occurred to me that he would be.’

  SEVEN

  On Tuesday morning Mariner and Jesson returned to the Queen Elizabeth hospital, this time to the basement, for the post-mortem on what remained of Soltan Ahmed. It seemed to Mariner that he spent an inordinate amount of time in this mortuary, and by now he had his own routine for getting ready. Stuart Croghan was there waiting for them. The body on the gurney was not a pretty sight, as there was not much of the old man left, and though the overwhelming smell of the examining room was chemical, Mariner thought he could also detect another more human odour, real or imagined, through his surgical mask. ‘So what’s the story?’ he asked.

  ‘Very little that you hadn’t already worked out for yourself,’ said Croghan. ‘Mr Ahmed died of smoke inhalation and suffered multiple burns; in that order, which may be some small consolation for the family. The old man’s dental records check out – he is who we think he is, which always helps.’ Croghan picked up a clipboard. ‘Toxicology is likely to be inconclusive, but we might get some trace elements. I’ll do what I can. I understand he’d been unwell and was taking over-the-counter medication to help him sleep.’

  Jesson confirmed that, and when he’d shown them what he could from the body, Croghan took them over to the scene photographs, so that they could see how the body was found; Ahmed appeared to still be lying in his bed, which had half fallen between the two floors, coming to rest on the huge pile of material below. ‘That he was still in bed might not mean anything,’ said Croghan. ‘If the smoke got to him first he wouldn’t have had the chance to move.’

  ‘The family are pressurising us to release the body,’ said Mariner. ‘They want him taken back to the Yemen for the proper funeral service as soon as possible.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Croghan. ‘As far as I’m concerned there’s no reason why we shouldn’t let him go. We’re unlikely to find anything in the examination of Soltan Ahmed that’s going to tell you who or what started that fire. I’m afraid you’re going to have to find the answer to that at Wellington Road.’

  And now they could start; when they got outside into the fresh air Mariner found a couple of missed calls from Gerry Docherty to say that they could make their initial tour of the house. Thanks to this small step forward, Docherty was in good humour today as he equipped them with gloves, overshoes and safety helmets, taking extra care in checking Vicky’s, before they went in to the blackened shell that had once been a family home. Mariner had been inside many of these houses before; there were whole streets of them across the city and their porches often featured stained glass and ornate tiles, but here any kind of decorative extravagance had been obliterated by the flames. It may just have been his imagination, but Mariner even thought he could still feel a slight heat coming off the walls.

  ‘The crew had to force entry,’ Docherty told them, pausing at what was left of the solid wood door, which now hung limply from its hinges. ‘It was locked from the inside as you’d expect.’ As they stepped into the hall everywhere was charred black, reminding Mariner of a badly painted fairground ride, and what remained of the carpets squelched underfoot, sodden by the thousands of gallons of water pumped in via high-pressure hoses. White artificial light was cast by arc lights and they bypassed a couple of forensic technicians, white-suited and almost entirely hidden behind their masks and goggles, going about their work.

  Part way into the hall, Docherty opened the door to an understairs cupboard: ‘And here we start with something interesting already,’ he said. The beam of his torch picked up the electricity mains fuse box and meter. ‘One of the first priorities when we get in is to isolate the electrics, but this is a real Heath Robinson set-up. The place should have been rewired years ago and there’s no evidence of any certification for the additional wiring that was done to the garage conversion, or new bedroom, from this junction here. I doubt that whoever did it had anything in the way of formal qualifications, and it could even be that Mustafa Shah did it himself. It’s one of the first things you’ll want to ask him about when he gets back.’

  ‘So
it’s possible that we could be looking at an accident?’ said Mariner.

  ‘Thanks to this little lot, I wouldn’t want to rule it out,’ said Docherty. ‘The downstairs room seems to have been crammed with papers, and if there was a source of ventilation, however small, an electrical overload could easily have smouldered then caught.’ Ignoring the door to the garage conversion, he walked them further into the hallway, where they came to a remarkable delineation. The rooms at the back of the house, and to the right, seemed to have been barely touched by the fire. Jesson commented on it.

  ‘It’s not uncommon,’ said Docherty. ‘A fire’s always going to burn upwards, unless there’s something in the way to block or divert its path.’ From there, he led the way up the smoke-stained stairs, the walls slick with foam residue, to the first floor and a fire door that opened on to the bedroom. It had a brass handle; the one that had seared into Salwa Shah’s palm. With a gloved hand, Docherty pushed it open and they overlooked the devastation that was what remained of the bedroom immediately over the garage. The floor had gone, but such was the density of material in the room underneath, the collapsed debris had not travelled far. They could have stepped out and walked across the sooty roof tiles that littered the surface, finding their way by the eerie daylight breaking through the gaping holes in the roof. To one side, the melted edge of a synthetic carpet hung over charcoal stumps of floorboards and the smell up here was the bitter stench of melted plastic. ‘The old man was sleeping up here, but we recovered his body from over there, where those markers have been placed,’ Docherty told them. ‘We can only hope that he didn’t know much about it.’

  ‘According to the pathologist the smoke got to him first,’ said Mariner.

  ‘Well that’s something,’ said Docherty.

  ‘Mrs Shah tried to open the bedroom door to get to her father,’ Jesson told him.

  ‘Even if she’d got to him, I doubt she’d have stood a chance,’ said Docherty. ‘Apart from the fire itself, it would have been pitch black and thick with smoke.’

  Jesson nodded. ‘So she did the only sensible thing and got her children out.’

  ‘They escaped through the back bedroom window along here,’ said Docherty. Closing the door on the ruin, he took them along to a soot-smeared door, which opened on to the back bedroom, the room that Mariner had entered on Saturday night. Apart from the smell, which was already in their nostrils, and partial muddy footprints, the room had hardly been touched by the fire, the carpet still cluttered by kids’ toys, one of which Mariner remembered kicking across the floor. ‘Mrs Shah was in here with Yousef and Athmar, safely behind this, when the fire started.’ Docherty knocked hard on the fire door, his knuckles leaving a row of smudged prints.

  ‘The boy had been having nightmares,’ said Jesson. ‘So his mum was in the habit of sitting with him while he went off to sleep and she’d fallen asleep beside him.’

  ‘Lucky for her that she did,’ said Docherty. ‘It meant they could quite easily get to safety.’

  While they were there, Docherty took them on a brief tour of the rest of the house. The parents’ room, like the children’s bedroom and the bathroom, was relatively untouched by the fire, and the bathroom was disconcertingly clean. Docherty had nothing more for them at this stage. He would carry on with his painstaking work. Meanwhile the witness statements and fire-fighter statements would help start to build the narrative of what had gone on here on the night of the fire.

  Restricted duties often meant a late start in the mornings, but Mariner was reassured to see Brown already at his desk, working, when he and Jesson arrived. The next thing he observed was that the constable was not in uniform, but wearing just a white T-shirt. He wondered if one of Brown’s health issues included a clothing allergy. It wasn’t entirely unheard of. He’d once come across an officer confined to desk duties because he couldn’t wear a hat. He was about to open his mouth to ask about this, when he noticed the regulation shirt lightly steaming on the nearby radiator.

  Brown blinked. ‘Bit of an accident with a coffee mug,’ he explained.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ said Mariner, hastily retrieving his own freshly brewed tea from the edge of Brown’s desk and placing it out of harm’s way on the window sill. ‘What have you got for us?’ he asked, as Vicky rolled up her office chair to join them. Brown turned back to his screen. ‘The fire was called in at one twenty-two a.m. by Mrs Putnam at 163 Wellington Road. Do you want to hear the 999? It’s pretty standard stuff.’

  ‘Not right now then,’ said Mariner.

  ‘When the fire service got there they found the fire had taken hold and acted straight away to extinguish it. Salwa Shah and the kids were found in the back garden, with a DCI Tom Mariner, who had helped them to safety.’

  Mariner tried to discern any mockery in Brown’s voice, but couldn’t.

  ‘Mrs Shah was in a state about her father, still inside the building, and had serious burns to her right hand, from where she had attempted to reach him. An attempt by DCI Mariner had also been unsuccessful. The fire crew now deemed the building unsafe, and no more rescue attempts could be made. Although after one in the morning, Mrs Shah was wearing everyday clothes.’

  ‘Which she explained by saying she had fallen asleep in the children’s room earlier that evening,’ said Mariner. ‘It’s in my notes from the interview yesterday.’

  ‘Firefighters had things under control by two-forty a.m.,’ Brown continued. ‘Apart from our man in the hoodie, yet to be identified, no one else has been reported as behaving suspiciously in the area before or during the fire. And all the onlookers our guys spoke to appear to have been neighbours, coming to be nosy. According to everyone along the street we’ve spoken to so far, the Shahs are a “nice family”.’

  ‘Mrs Shah told us they’d previously been the target—’ Jesson began.

  ‘Yes, previous incidents, I was coming to that,’ said Brown, pushing up his glasses. ‘I had a few spare minutes, so I trawled back through incident reports for anything linked with Wellington Road. Soon after the Shahs moved in, there were a couple of what were logged as racist incidents. But the trouble seems to have died down since a particular family moved out of the neighbourhood.’

  ‘What exactly are we talking about?’ asked Mariner.

  ‘There were complaints of verbal abuse made by the Shahs in July and September last year, but by far the most serious is what looked like a thwarted arson attack in October. The Shahs heard noises at around midnight on the twenty-seventh, and it seemed that an attempt had been made to start a fire in their porch. Because the floor is tiled and there was nothing in there to ignite, it fizzled out before any damage was done. A couple of suspects were brought in for questioning, and the main person under suspicion was Jordan Wright, a nineteen-year-old who lived a little further along the street, due to a dispute between him and Mr Ahmed, though it wasn’t clear what this had been about. Wright had an alibi for the night in question, and as there was no other evidence, like the fire, it didn’t go anywhere.’ Despite initial impressions, the constable seemed to have achieved a lot in a relatively short time.

  ‘That’s a good start, well done,’ said Mariner.

  Brown blinked at him. He looked as if no one had ever said that to him before and he didn’t quite know what to do with it. ‘It might just be worth seeing what the Wrights were up to last Saturday night,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to find out about insurance policies. And—’ He hesitated.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m guessing that you’ll want confirmation that Mustafa Shah was out of the country?’ said Brown. ‘If we can get the dates, I can request the flight manifests.’

  ‘Shit, yes, I should have asked Salwa about that,’ said Jesson. ‘I’ll give her a call.’

  It had been a long day. Mariner’s head was pounding and even after an afternoon in the office, catching up with paperwork, the residue of smoke damage still lingered in his throat and nostrils and clung to his clothes when he got home. He needed so
mething to eat and then an early night, but first a shower. As he stepped under the jet of water he was vaguely aware of chiming in the background and he emerged some time later to hear his mobile going again. By the time he located it, the ringing had stopped, but he saw that there were four missed calls all from the same unfamiliar number. He returned it, hoping somebody wasn’t about to try selling him solar panels.

  ‘Hello,’ he said cautiously. ‘I believe you’ve tried to call me?’

  ‘Is that Tom?’ It was a woman’s voice, relieved.

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘This is Gaby Boswell. We met at Charles and Helen’s party on Saturday, and at the site—’

  ‘I remember,’ said Mariner. ‘How did you get this number?’ he asked, more irritably than he’d intended.

  ‘You gave it to me,’ she reminded him. ‘It was on the card with your girlfriend’s email address?’

  Of course it was. ‘So what can I do for you?’ Mariner asked, towelling his hair.

  ‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s just that Sam’s sister Fiona suggested we ought to do something. If Charles wasn’t away I would have talked to him.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘It’s Sam, my fiancé. He seems to have disappeared.’

  ‘OK.’ Mariner stopped towelling. ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Same as you. On Saturday afternoon when we were leaving Charles and Helen’s celebration. We said goodbye and I went home with Dad. I haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘Where did Sam go from Charlie’s house?’ asked Mariner, remembering how he’d been that afternoon and the apparent tension between future father- and son-in-law.

  ‘He was going to our house; the one we’re moving into after we’re married. The bedrooms are almost finished so he went to start sorting out the furniture. We bought some flat-pack stuff and he was going to assemble it. Dad’s men would have done it as part of the refurb, but Sam insisted on doing it himself. Some man thing about getting more involved, I think. So he went off there and I went home with Dad.’ She was talking fast, not pausing to draw breath.