He took the facemask and hooked it around his ears. ‘I’ll see you in there,’ he said, stepping up into the house.
3
Tuesday Early Morning
Napier Street, Darlington
Tanzy could smell it inside the hall. He couldn’t describe it but gagged in his mask. He moved forward, his feet slowly crunching on the black, crispy floor below, then glanced along towards the stairs that had been scorched to charcoal.
Upstairs, he heard voices, and immediately recognised Byrd and the crime scene manager, Tony McCabe. He moved closer to the base of the stairs and, to his right, stopped at the living room. The fire had barely touched it. The leather sofa against the wall looked new, the carpet, albeit a small area near the door, was untouched. Moving on, the next room was the dining room. He popped his head in to have a look. Everything a foot below the ceiling was as it should be. Two chairs positioned near the wall to the right, a desk housing a flat-screen monitor and computer in the right alcove, and a rectangular dining table with six chairs neatly tucked in around it. Everything within a foot of the ceiling was black. The flames must have burnt the ceiling and protruded through but spread no further.
There was a crunch to his left. He looked to see a fireman walking in from a door on the other side, presumably from a kitchen, judging by the house’s layout.
‘Hello,’ the fireman said with a coarse voice, which Tanzy guessed was either from smoking or entering countless burning buildings. He stood short and stocky, had a thick moustache. Even though the fire station was situated next to the police station, Tanzy didn’t recognise him. Not that they mingled with the fire department much.
‘Hey,’ said Tanzy. ‘Bad one, eh.’
‘No kidding.’
The fireman stopped and looked up at the ceiling for a moment, analysing something only he understood.
‘I’m DI Tanzy.’
‘Roger Carlton,’ he replied, extending his hand.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Just damage really.’
‘Did it make it through there?’ Tanzy asked, pointing behind him to the kitchen.
He continued to stare at the ceiling but knew where Tanzy meant, and said, ‘No.’
Tanzy wasn’t an expert on fires, and wasn’t qualified enough to investigate one, but he understood the basics. ‘Where was the origin?’
The fireman looked at him. ‘The stairs. I’ll show you.’ Tanzy stepped back into the hallway, allowing him to pass through the door.
‘The stairs is where it started,’ he began, then lowered a little, pointing to the third step. ‘See this.’
Tanzy leaned forward. The step was jet black and brittle.
‘I believe this is our point of origin. I don’t know if you can smell it but petrol has been used here. See how the third one differs from the second? And how it almost trails up the stairs in a kind of snake motion. The burning is different on the walls compared to the carpet, and that’s not just because of the difference in materials either.’
Tanzy nodded. ‘Okay.’
‘Nasty work,’ Roger said. He stood up and returned to the dining room.
‘Thanks for the help.’
Tanzy very slowly moved up the stairs, one at a time. The paint on the walls and skirting boards had been fiercely stripped, leaving ashy plasterboard, crispy flaking paint, and exposed shrunken wood.
The higher he went, the smell worsened. It was a mixture of burnt wood, paint, used petrol, and human flesh. He’d smelled burnt skin before; it was one of the worst things he’d ever smelt.
When he reached the top, he turned right, stepping up a couple of steps until he reached the landing. It was a different scene. The carpet up here had vanished, leaving exposed wooden floorboards with holes dotted around where the petrol had helped the fire burn. The walls had been stripped of plasterboard, exposing singed brickwork, copper pipes, and curled up electrical wiring. The house, Tanzy guessed was probably built in the 1930s. The solid structure no doubt would have acted as a barrier against the fire compared to modern-day stud walls, but evidently, it hadn’t been enough.
Up ahead, there were three rooms. All doors were open.
He moved along the landing and stopped at the first door on the left. Inside, the smell was horrendous. A few feet from the door, inside the room, stood Tony McCabe and DI Max Byrd, pointing to various parts of it. They seemed to have become accustomed to the smell, their face masks lowered under their chin.
‘Hey,’ said Tanzy, standing at the burnt doorframe.
Byrd glanced his way. ‘Hey, Ori.’
Tanzy absorbed the room, which was black from floor to ceiling. Everything inside had been burnt, including the large body of a male lying in the middle of the floor and a smaller body curled up below the window at the far end of it. The sun shining through the window showed them how the flames had heavily scorched the window too.
‘They had no chance, did they?’ Tanzy noted.
Byrd looked his way and shook his head sadly. ‘No.’
Tanzy stepped inside further. ‘Father and son?’
‘Looks that way,’ McCabe replied, then he looked over to the boy in the corner. ‘He’s probably no older than ten. Imagine the pain they endured.’
‘Unimaginable.’ Tanzy exhaled heavily, gazing around at the sea of ash-coated items: single bed, table, chair, television, games console. If not for the shape, they’d be unrecognisable. ‘Just the father and son?’
Byrd looked his way. ‘No. Come this way.’ He stepped around Tanzy out onto the landing, then took a left into the front bedroom. In the corner, were two figures crouching down holding each other. They resembled black mannequins you’d see in a shop window, apart from the skin being shiny and smooth, it was crispy and rough.
‘Jesus. The whole family gone like that.’ Tanzy looked down for a moment. ‘Who the hell did this to them?’
McCabe walked in. He was short but stocky, had shoulders like boulders. His younger years spent boxing hadn’t helped his looks but certainly had given him that rough, don’t-take-shit-from-anyone attitude. ‘Some evil bastards. I heard the origin was at the bottom of the stairs. My guess is that the father heard something and went out onto the landing. Then someone lit the stairs and he went into his son's room. The other child came out of his room and came in here with mum. Judging by their windows, it would have been impossible to get out. Same story in there, the only way to get out would be to break the windows.’
The windows looked like they only opened from a small area at the top. There’d be no way to climb up and safely get down.
‘Why didn’t they try?’
McCabe shrugged. ‘Maybe they didn’t have time. We’ll leave that up to the investigator to determine the spread of the fire.’
‘Do we know who the family are?’
Byrd nodded. ‘Yeah. According to a neighbour, the husband was Danny Walters. The wife was called Jessica. And their two sons were Mark and Peter. They were eleven and seven.’
Tanzy didn’t say anything, instead looked down sadly at Jessica and one of the boys.
They spent a few minutes in the room, then turned, and made their way downstairs. Coming through the door was the familiar face of Harry Law, the senior fire investigator.
They shook hands, a professional courtesy. Byrd and Tanzy had worked with him on previous occasions, but unfortunately, it was under similar circumstances.
‘Apparently, the origin was right here,’ Tanzy said, pointing to the third step behind him.
Law frowned and looked past him to the step. ‘It is. How do you know that?’
‘One of your men told me before I went upstairs. The guy with the moustache. Carlton.’
‘Carlton?’ Law asked.
‘Roger Carlton. He was showing me before.’
‘We don’t have anyone here named Roger Carlton.’
It was Tanzy’s turn to frown. ‘If he’s not in here, then he’s outside. He was here only minutes ago.’
They checked the dining room and the kitchen and found both of them empty.
‘I’ve been outside talking with forensics,’ Law said. ‘No one has come out.’
‘If he didn’t go out the front, then he’s gone out that way,’ Byrd said, pointing through the French doors that led into the small, narrow yard.
Tanzy and Law came back from the kitchen and looked out the window. At the end of the yard, the back gate was wide open.
4
Tuesday Early Morning
Napier Street, Darlington
The man who called himself Roger had seen what he wanted to: what he was looking for wasn’t there.
He’d heard someone walk through the door and stop at the base of the stairs. He thought it would be better to leave the kitchen, pretend he was looking at something on the dining room ceiling.
Good job he did.
A detective by the name of Tanzy had started speaking with him, asking him about the fire. If he hadn’t been responsible for pouring petrol on the stairs and landing, then igniting them, he wouldn’t have been able to tell him where the point of origin was. He didn’t know as much as a fire investigator, but he believed the detective bought the story.
He left the alley behind Napier Street and took a right - still dressed in the uniform he’d found on eBay and walked towards Duke Street. He crossed the road and glanced behind him.
No one was running out of the alley frantically looking for him. He was safe, for now.
He took a left into East Raby Street and saw his car parked up ahead. The street was quiet. It was before eight. He imagined the people inside the houses as he passed them, just waking up to another normal day, the kids off to school, the parents off to work, all eating their cereal around the table with their heads over their iPads, not knowing what had happened last night only a few streets away. They may have heard the fire engine late last night, but people only care about that for a moment, until the lights pass and the sounds fade away before it returns to normal. The media would be there, with their eager reporters and happy snappy photographers. He couldn’t wait to see it on the news later.
He used a fob from his pocket to open the car and got inside. Once there, he took off his helmet, placed it on the seat next to him. He then carefully took the fake moustache off his upper lip and dropped it in the passenger footwell.
He started the car, put the gear in first, and edged out, making his way to the bottom of the street, where he took a left and went back up Duke Street. At Larchfield Street, he went right, idling along until he reached Napier Street and slowed to a crawl, looking down at the sea of police and firemen beyond the small crowds of people. Amongst the people standing near the door, he spotted the detective who he’d spoken to in the dining room, looking confused.
He smiled, looked forward, and whispered, ‘Fire, fire, fire,’ over and over again until he arrived home.
5
Tuesday Early Morning
Napier Street, Darlington
Outside the house, Tanzy and Byrd asked DC Tiffin, the first one on the scene and first responder, if anyone with the name ‘Roger Carlton’ was on her list.
She frowned, looked down at the paperwork.
'No, he’s not here.’
The fire superintendent, Harry Law, walked out of the house a moment later.
‘No, he’s not on the list. He didn’t come in the front way,’ Byrd said to him.
‘Why was he in there?’ Tanzy said to no one in particular.
A few moments later, they heard footsteps behind them. They turned to see Emily Hope and Jacob Tallow, the two senior forensics, dressed in their white disposable coveralls and face masks. They both took off their masks, relieved to finally breathe some clean air.
‘How’s it going?’ Byrd asked them.
Harry Law, a tall, overweight man, with a goatee - the kind you would see standing outside of a pub as a bouncer you wouldn’t want to mess with – turned towards the senior forensic officers, interested in their answer. From the years he had been doing it, he had seen his fair share of fires and the damage they had caused. Seldom had he walked into something like this: a family of four burnt to a crisp. It was tragic, to say the least.
Hope sighed, looked towards Tallow, who met her gaze then looked back at Law and the detectives. Tallow knew Hope didn’t want to discuss it with Byrd and Tanzy.
‘I think you know roughly what happened,’ Tallow started, ‘but from what we’ve seen so far’–-he looked towards Law—‘I’m hoping you guys can tell us, that Danny Walters was affected first, probably on the landing, judging by his position in the back bedroom. I think he spotted the fire and went in to save his son, then died halfway across the bedroom from the pain, more so that his body giving up.’
It was a known fact that when the body endures something excruciatingly painful, it shuts down. In medical terms, it’s called Vasovagal Syncope. The brain tells the body it can’t cope with it, momentarily shutting down. In this case, the smoke would have helped quicken the process.
‘The fire took the whole room and got to his son who'd hid in the corner. I noticed scratches on the window where he’d clawed at it. He probably wasn’t strong enough to break the glass.’
Byrd winced, imagining the scene in his head.
‘The mother and other son found in the front bedroom tried to stay out of it, but I think, judging by the markings on the floor, that both bedrooms had been covered in petrol beforehand.’
‘How can you be sure?’ Tanzy asked.
‘I’m not one hundred percent, and I’m no fire expert, but the carpet in the smaller front bedroom is different. You see, a material burns differently when there is something flammable on it. If this is the case, and both rooms were doused in petrol, they didn’t stand a chance.’
Byrd looked towards Law. ‘Does that sound right? Would you also say that the bedrooms had been covered in petrol?’
Law nodded. ‘I agree with your colleague here.’
‘So, so-called Roger Carlton walked into the house,’ Byrd said, ‘went into their bedroom, covered the carpets in petrol without waking anyone up?’
Law and Hope and Tallow all shrugged, not sure if that would be possible.
Byrd looked at the floor, then back to Tallow. ‘Are there signs of a break-in?’
‘We haven’t got around to that yet,’ he explained. ‘We need to check the windows and the doors.’
‘Guys, have a look out the back,’ a voice said behind them.
They turned and standing in the hallway was DC Leonard.
‘When did you get here?’ Tanzy asked him.
‘Minutes after you did,’ Leonard said.
‘What have you found, James?’
‘Come and have a look.’
6
Tuesday Early Morning
Napier Street, Darlington
DC Leonard led them down the hall, through the dining room, into the kitchen, then through the back door into the narrow yard. It was a nice little space, with plant pots along the wall to the right and a trellis on the wall half-covered with a green plant growing through it. The sun was rising strongly from the east, hitting the yard from the left, brightening it up.
He walked halfway down the yard and stopped.
Byrd, Tanzy, Hope, Tallow, and Harry Law stopped behind him, wondering what he’d found that was so important to show them.
‘What is it?’ Byrd asked, unsure what he was about to be shown.
Leonard pointed at the far corner of the yard. Everyone looked. There were three bikes locked up under a slanted roof which had been built purposefully to keep them dry during wet weather.
‘What are we supposed to be looking at?’ Tanzy asked him.
‘You see it?’
Tallow nodded. ‘I can. The camera just under the roof?’
Leonard nodded. ‘Yes.’
Tanzy stepped forward looking around for the wire coming out of it. It didn’t take him long to see it trail across
the wall at the back until it hit the brickwork and went through into the house.
‘We’ll be able to see Roger Carlton leaving if it still works,’ Tanzy noted, remembering the back gate open earlier.
‘Good spot,’ Byrd praised him.
Byrd and Tanzy stepped back into the kitchen and looked down, trying to spot a wire coming in a similar height. The further they went, the more their frowns deepened.
‘Where is it?’
Tanzy shrugged.
At the end of the kitchen, there was a closed door. Tanzy opened it, revealing a small bathroom that made him feel claustrophobic. You couldn’t even swing a cat. The toilet was on the right, a small basin opposite, and a narrow, short bath against the far wall, with minimal floor space. Up on the wall to the right, he saw a wire enter through the plasterboard. It had been painted over with the same colour as the walls.
‘There.’
They followed it along the wall’s width until it dropped vertically, then a metre off the floor, it went through to the kitchen. Tanzy backed out and looked in the corner of the worktop. There was a small black electronic box, roughly the same size of a wireless router. It was plugged in but there was no power.
‘It’s dead,’ Byrd said, noticing the plug was on but the green light wasn’t.
‘The DB is probably under the stairs. Will have been destroyed in the fire.’
Byrd’s brows furrowed to the centre of his forehead. ‘The DB?’
‘Distribution board. The main electrical box.’
‘If we took it, we could give it to Mac. He’d be able to get it going or at least find out what happened before the fire.’
Tanzy nodded and met with Leonard and the forensics. ‘We’re gonna head back, see what’s on here. If Roger Carlton or whoever he is, left through that gate, then we need to get a better look at him. See if we can identify him.’ He looked at Tallow. ‘You guys be okay?’
Tallow nodded. ‘We’ll be here most of the day. There’s loads to do.’
Byrd and Tanzy both knew what was involved in forensic work and would catch up with them later back at the station. As they left through the front door, DC Tiffin signed them out. Byrd took off his mask and held it in his hand.
No One's Safe: DI Max Byrd & DI Orion Tanzy book 3 Page 2
