by Adam Croft
‘You don’t really care unless you get fed, do you? Sometimes I think life would be a lot easier if I was a cat.’
Wendy had got used to living alone. She’d done so for years, and there’d never been any sign on the horizon of it being otherwise, other than an ill-fated romance with a local accountant, Robert Ludford. That had ended in tragedy and heartache, with both her lover and her unborn child losing their lives within a short period of time.
If she was completely true to herself, she had hoped a relationship with Xav might have been on the cards, but that had very definitely been halted in its tracks recently.
Wendy and Xavier Moreno, a civilian IT expert from police headquarters at Milton House, had been attempting to develop a relationship for quite some time. After ending up sleeping together following too much wine one night at Wendy’s, they’d tried to do things properly — dates, restaurants and everything. But, as it always did, work had got in the way on more than one occasion and Wendy had let Xav down. They’d barely spoken in a couple of months, and she’d thought things had been left on bad terms.
She took another swig of wine and went to reach for the bottle to give herself a top-up, but stopped when she noticed her mobile phone vibrating on the coffee table. The screen showed Jack Culverhouse’s name as it danced across the surface. Why was he calling her at this time of the evening? She wasn’t on call tonight. That didn’t tend to mean much at all, though. When Jack Culverhouse wanted you on his team, you didn’t have any other options. Being as short-staffed as Mildenheath CID was, they were generally fine to rotate their on-call hours, but when a major case came in it was all hands to the pump. This, then, could only mean one thing.
Wendy took a deep breath and answered the call.
4
Jack Culverhouse always did a great job of looking pissed off when his downtime had been disturbed by virtue of being the on-call DCI when a new case came in, but in reality he was pleased to have the distraction. His personal life certainly wasn’t boring or empty. Quite the opposite. It was a car crash.
Once again, Emily would likely wake up and find her dad gone, back into work again for another case. He wondered how long he could carry on doing this. He’d already lost her once, his wife taking off with her when Emily was a toddler, citing Jack’s obsession with work as her reason for leaving. Although Emily was now in her teenage years and seemed much more forgiving of his lifestyle than her mother had been, there was a definite underlying anger that he needed to help heal.
He poured the hot water from the kettle onto the instant coffee granules, then added some cold water from the tap. He was going to have to drink it quickly.
‘Knight. We’ve got a juicy one. Fire over at Little Walgrave. Arson, they reckon. Just had the call to confirm. It’s closer to yours, so get your skates on and I’ll meet you over there. I’ll be a few minutes behind.’
He heard Wendy sigh as he took a swig of coffee. ‘I’m not on call. Do you really need to be bringing people into the office for an arson? The duty team can deal with that.’
‘I wish it could,’ Culverhouse replied, knowing that the Chief Constable, Charles Hawes, would be even more mindful of budget restrictions and overtime bills than anyone, ‘but that’s not the full picture. It’s a residential address.’
He could almost hear Wendy looking up at her clock, noticing the time and realising what that meant.
‘Shit. Are there bodies?’
‘I don’t know. It’s not clear yet. It’s still early days so I don’t think they know what’s gone on. All the fire chief said was that it was immediately obvious it was an arson attack. No possibility of an accident. So either way we’ve got a crime scene. But apparently one of the neighbours came over and told them there was one guy living there on his own. At this time of night, I imagine he would’ve been in there, yeah.’
In cases of arson, it was always vital that the police acted quickly. Often, arsonists would either hang around or return to the scene to watch their work in action. You could almost set your clock by it. And with fire, the great destroyer, actively attempting to eradicate the evidence, it was crucial that the emergency services worked together to salvage what they could and act whilst the scene was fresh.
He heard Wendy sigh from the other end of the phone. ‘Can you pick me up at least? I’ve had a drink. Only had a glass or so, but I’m not going to risk it.’
Culverhouse shook his head, knowing she couldn’t see him. Back in his day, there would have been no doubt about a CID officer dropping everything to attend the scene of a crime. There was a passion, a hunger to get justice at all costs. Nowadays that’d all been eaten away by red tape and bureaucracy. Had it been him twenty years ago, he would’ve jumped in a cab — hell, he would’ve sprinted over hot coals — if it meant getting to the scene and starting to oil the wheels of justice. Now, though, things were different. There were budget cuts and Working Time Directives. Jack Culverhouse didn’t give a shit about any of that. All he wanted was to catch the people responsible for the crimes that plagued Mildenheath. And he was still willing to do that at all costs.
‘Right. Well get your fucking shoes on and wait on the road. I’m not sitting in the car while you fanny around with your high heels.’
Jack Culverhouse ended the call, put his phone back in his pocket and downed the rest of the mug of coffee.
It was going to be a long night.
5
Culverhouse’s car swept past the cordon and up the long driveway as Wendy looked out at the house in front of them. Although it had been largely gutted by the inferno, which the fire officers were still trying to put out, she could see that it had clearly been a huge, very impressive building.
It was all clad in white — most of which had now turned to black — and Wendy reckoned the front face of the house must have a good dozen or so windows. What was left of them, at least.
There was a large burgundy red car on the driveway. A Bentley, she thought, although she didn’t usually pay much attention to cars. She could certainly admire the sleek curves and style of this model, though — if she had been made of money. There wouldn’t be much left of this car very shortly. Even from a distance, she could already see the paintwork starting to blister and bubble from the heat, and the windows closest to the house were blackened.
Whoever owned this house was not only a very wealthy individual, but had clearly done something to upset somebody. Wendy was no expert on fire damage, but she doubted whether anything would be left of the house once they’d put out the flames.
Although they’d already made good progress up the driveway, they were stopped at a cordon a good fifty yards away by the Watch Commander, who introduced himself as Matthew Leeman.
‘This is one of the most blatant arson attacks I’ve seen,’ he said, shaking Jack and Wendy’s hands. ‘We can’t get any closer at the moment, but you can smell the accelerant from here. We’ll know more once the blaze has died down, but it looks to me as though the core is at the front of the house, by the front door.’
Wendy had to admit that she couldn’t smell anything other than the smoke that occasionally drifted over, but deferred to Leeman’s greater knowledge and experience.
‘How long do you think it’ll take to put it out?’
Leeman shrugged. ‘Impossible to say. House fires don’t usually take too long, but this a big house. And whatever’s in there, it’s burning well. Whoever started this fire wanted to make damn sure it did as much damage as possible.’
‘Not kids then?’ Culverhouse asked.
‘I wouldn’t say so. It’s not my job to come up with a list of suspects, but it doesn’t look like kids messing about to me. Whoever did it would’ve had to come all the way up the driveway, risk being seen doing it, pour God knows how much accelerant through the letterbox and get away without anyone seeing them. Kids set fire to fly-tips and old sheds, not bloody great mansions.’
‘Has there been anyone hanging around?’
&n
bsp; ‘Not that we’ve noticed. Although you could easily hide away in the trees over there without being seen. Thermal imaging might help.’
Culverhouse snorted. ‘Yeah, I don’t think there’s much chance of me being given authorisation to put a chopper in the air though, do you?’
The police helicopter equipped with thermal imaging equipment would cost a couple of thousand pounds an hour just to put it in the air, and policing budgets were already extremely tight.
‘Plus you’ve got the fire throwing out all sorts of heat,’ Wendy offered. ‘We should at least ask, though. They can only say no.’
‘I’ll ring it through. Can’t see it doing much good, though,’ Culverhouse grunted.
While Culverhouse walked off to make the call, Wendy thought it would be a good opportunity to ask the Watch Commander some more questions. She’d never attended an arson attack before — not something like this, anyway. She’d been called out to small fires in garages when she was a uniformed PC, but this was something entirely different. Besides which, there was nothing either of them could do at this stage apart from watch the fire crews tackle the blaze.
‘How much of your job’s actually taken up fighting fires then?’ she asked.
‘Not much of it, thankfully. Although you always remember it when you do. Most of it’s about drills, training exercises, talks in schools, risk assessments, paperwork...’
Wendy chuckled. ‘Sounds familiar.’
‘Plus we’re now paramedics, apparently,’ Leeman jibed, referring to the fact that the current UK government had suggested that fire officers be given extra medical training so they could double as paramedics, allowing politicians to cut the NHS budget even further.
‘I know the feeling. Wouldn’t ever think of doing another job, though, eh?’
‘Oh I’m tempted sometimes, don’t you worry. But no. I don’t think anything else would give me the variety, unpredictability and levels of addictive stress the fire service gives me.’
‘Maybe you should try the police,’ Wendy said, only half-joking.
A couple of minutes later, Culverhouse returned.
‘The Chief Constable’s wife must’ve been feeling fruity last night. He’s just given authority to put Hotel Oscar Nine Nine in the air. Christ knows how long that’ll be, though.’
Remarkably, the county didn’t have its own police helicopter. Up until recently the force had its own chopper, but the introduction of the National Police Air Service in 2012 meant that many helicopter bases were closed. The county had agreed to close its own at a local RAF base on the understanding that its air support would then be provided under NPAS by the Metropolitan Police in London, only to later discover that the Met had rejected NPAS and continued to operate its own air support service. As a result, incidents given air support had dropped by up to 90% in some areas. Regardless, many officers still referred to the service by the previous force helicopter’s call-sign.
‘And in the meantime?’ Wendy asked, both of Culverhouse and Leeman.
‘In the meantime,’ Leeman replied, ‘we wait.’
6
In the early hours of the morning, the team began to assemble in the incident room for Culverhouse’s first briefing on the case. There would be further briefings in which the members of the team kept everyone else updated on progress in their particular areas of investigation, but these were far less regular than they’d be in any other CID incident room.
The Mildenheath CID team was much smaller than others, and it also had the added advantage of being a good twenty miles from the county’s main CID offices at Milton House — a purpose-built concrete and glass monstrosity towards the north of the county. Being in charge of a small, satellite CID unit suited Jack Culverhouse down to the ground. It meant he could, largely, do things his own way.
‘Right. First incident room briefing for Operation Mandible, yada yada. People assembled et cetera et cetera. I’m DCI wassisface, you’re all minions. Got it?’
Culverhouse often found his disdain for process and bureaucracy difficult to hide, and at times of increased pressure that tended to make itself known even more so than usual.
‘We’re looking at a serious case of arson on a residential property in Little Walgrave. There may or may not be casualties. To be honest, the house is massive and the fire’s going to take a little while to put out. Never seen anything like it in my life. The fire officers won’t let us anywhere near it until they’ve made everything safe, and that could be a while yet. They reckon they’re starting to bring it under control, but whoever did this definitely wanted to make sure the whole place would be razed to the ground. It looks like they might have managed it, too.’
Culverhouse looked at Wendy, as if signalling that she should talk. Nice of him to warn me, she thought.
‘Yes. Well, the fire officers seemed pretty certain that this was a deliberate act of arson,’ Wendy said, standing. ‘So once we know a bit more about who owns the property we can start to look at reasons why someone might have wanted to do them harm. I’m not sure if we’ll be able to do that before morning, though. The house is pretty isolated. No neighbours nearby — closest house is about a hundred and fifty yards away — so at this stage everything is still pretty unknown. We should start to find all that out soon enough, but at the moment the focus is on letting them put out the fire, so everything else is a bit up in the air.’
‘So why have we all been called in at stupid o’clock?’ Detective Sergeant Frank Vine asked.
Culverhouse gave him an icy stare that told Frank everything he needed to know.
‘In the meantime, I think we need to sit tight,’ Wendy said, trying to defuse the tension. ‘We can identify the homeowner from land registry records and we should get out and speak to any neighbours, too, even if they are hundreds of yards away. Someone’ll know who lives in that house and we can start to get ahead of ourselves a bit. PNC checks, known issues in their lives. You know the drill.’ The Police National Computer was often invaluable in finding out information about a person, should any police force in Britain have encountered them in the past.
Wendy had recently started to get more of an inkling of the pressures that were put on senior investigating officers from above. She knew Culverhouse wouldn’t be in the team’s good books for getting them up during the night when there wasn’t a whole lot they could do at this stage, but she also knew that the Police and Crime Commissioner would have Culverhouse’s guts for garters if he’d failed to react quickly and there were lives at stake.
The elected PCC, Martin Cummings, wasn’t Culverhouse’s biggest fan. The feeling was mutual. As far as Culverhouse was concerned, politics and policing didn’t mix, but unfortunately for him the government disagreed.
‘I’ll be keeping in touch with the bloke in charge at the scene,’ Culverhouse said. ‘He’ll be updating me regularly, and I’ll pass on those updates to you. But in the meantime there’s plenty we can be getting on with. If you’re really stuck, Frank, feel free to clean my office.’
Culverhouse gave Frank Vine another icy stare and headed into said office. Detective Constable Debbie Weston gave him a few seconds, then followed.
‘Guv, I was just wondering if I might be able to have a quick chat,’ she said, hovering by the doorway.
‘By all means.’
Debbie closed the door behind her. ‘I was hoping to speak to you over the next couple of days anyway, but seeing as we’re here, and as it’s the calm before the storm...’
Culverhouse folded his arms and leaned forward on his desk. ‘Spit it out, will you?’
‘Well, the thing is, my mum’s really not well. She’s been in the home for a few years now but she’s recently started to take a turn for the worse. I’ve been getting down there as much as I can, but it’s a good couple of hours each way and squeezing it in between shifts just isn’t feasible.’
‘Right. So what are you trying to say?’
Debbie sighed. ‘I’m trying to say would it be
possible to request a temporary transfer — a secondment — to a force closer to her? Just so I can see her as much as possible. To be honest, it might not be for long.’
Culverhouse could see from the look in Debbie’s eyes that this was upsetting her. She’d been the most stable and valuable member of his team for as long as he could remember, and had never had ambitions to become a sergeant. She’d been quite happy to get the work done to the best of her ability, and she’d proved to be the catalyst that unlocked an investigation on more than one occasion. She was, quite simply, his steadiest foot-soldier.
‘It’s not quite as easy as that,’ he replied, stuck between genuinely wanting to help Debbie and not wanting to lose her — even temporarily. Besides which, a few weeks working on the south coast would probably make her change her mind about coming back to Mildenheath. He wouldn’t blame her. ‘I could ask, but there are no guarantees. Far from it. An operational secondment would be one thing, but there aren’t any operational reasons to send you down to the south coast.’
Had Debbie been less loyal and more driven by career progression, there would have been a possibility of being sent on secondment to use her specialist skills. But on this occasion her modesty had been to her detriment.
‘I know, but I thought perhaps there might be something on compassionate grounds. If not, I completely understand,’ she said. ‘I mean, I guess I could use up some of my leave. Even if it’s unpaid. I could stay in a hotel down there and—’
‘On a Detective Constable’s salary? With a mortgage and bills to cover?’
‘It might not be for long,’ Debbie said quietly, the subtext clear to both of them.
‘Look, I’ll bend a few ears and see what I can do, alright? But there’s definitely no promises.’
Debbie smiled. ‘It’s just that... Being so far away, I feel...’
She got no further, before breaking down in tears in front of the DCI. Culverhouse, in his usual style, had no idea how to deal with this. Interpersonal skills really weren’t his bag.
