Текст книги "Liar Liar"

Автор книги: M. J. Arlidge

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

45

‘Do you have any leads?’

Detective Superintendent Jonathan Gardam had not met Emilia Garanita before. But he had heard a lot about her. Helen Grace had given him chapter and verse, as had Hampshire Fire and Rescue’s Chief Officer, Adam Latham, who now sat beside him, fielding questions from the press. The major tabloids were represented at their briefing today, but Emilia Garanita was not going to let them bully her or hold her back. Watching her as she tried to lead the questioning, Gardam had the distinct impression that this represented an opportunity for the ambitious young journalist to shine on a bigger stage.

‘Are you making any progress?’ Garanita persisted. Gardam paused, taking a moment to drink in all the small details of this local curiosity – the facial scarring, the dyed hair, the fuck-you attitude – before replying:

‘DI Grace and her team are pursuing a number of leads and we have pulled in every officer available to help with our enquiries. There is currently a greater police presence on the street than at any time in the last five years.’

Gardam let this register. He wanted every journalist to note this surge in manpower. Moreover, he wanted their arsonist to take heed of this when it was reported later today. When you’re struggling for concrete leads, prevention is often as good as detection. He wanted to make the arsonist think twice before carrying out further attacks.

‘And we’re confident that progress in the investigation will be swift. Alongside this, we have been liaising with our colleagues in the Fire and Rescue Service who have now drafted in extra fire response vehicles as well as additional firefighters from neighbouring forces.’

‘We are now confident,’ Adam Latham added, overlapping with his police colleague, ‘that we can deal with any emergency quickly and effectively, however complicated the situation may be.’

Another tacit warning to the arsonist. They had more police, more firefighters, more resources. Diversionary fires would be of little help to him now. Privately Gardam wondered how he would react to this challenge. Would he back down or respond in kind – upping his game as they upped theirs?

‘I’ll ask the question again – do you have any suspects?’

Garanita was a dog with a bone, revelling in her self-appointed duty of holding the police to account. Gardam had heard that the Southampton Evening News had been going gently on them for a while – thanks in part to a temporary truce between Garanita and Helen Grace – but that respite appeared to be over now, as Southampton’s pre-eminent crime reporter sniffed a juicy new story.

‘There are several persons of interest whom we are trying to trace, but chief among them is a man seen running from the scene of the Bevois Mount house fire at around eleven twenty-five p.m. last night. You are being handed printed images of the CCTV still now and we would urge your readers, your viewers, to take a good look at it. Do they recognize this man? If so, we would ask them to get in touch via the special incident hotline, which is manned twenty-four hours a day, so we can eliminate him from our enquiries. In the meantime, I would ask the public to remain calm and take sensible precautions, especially after dark.’

‘So lock your doors and sit tight. Is that the best you can do?’

‘It’s the sensible thing to do. I appreciate that these attacks have caused alarm, but the best thing the public can do is be vigilant, be sensible and let us go about our business.’

‘In the police we trust?’

‘Exactly, Emilia. As you know, DI Grace has an exemplary record in running investigations of this scale and complexity. And I have every confidence in her,’ Gardam responded forcefully, pausing a little for effect before concluding:

‘She’s delivered before and I’m sure she’ll do so again.’

46

Enveloped in a sterile suit, Helen climbed the ladder to the first floor. The fabric of the house was so unstable that a temporary scaffold and gantry had been erected to help the fire investigation officers navigate the gutted property safely. Cresting the ladder, Helen found Deborah Parks already hard at work in what had once been the master bedroom. It was a profoundly depressing site – the place looked like it had been bombed – and Helen’s feelings of anxiety were only amplified by the insistent thrumming noise of the plastic sheeting which now covered the shattered main window. The wind was strong today, rattling the temporary covering vigorously and ensuring that everyone working on site was chilled to the bone. Last night temperatures in here would have topped 600 degrees Celsius, now it was touching freezing.

Swallowing down her anxiety, Helen navigated her way along the walkway of planks towards Deborah. The Fire Investigation Officer rose as she approached, nodding soberly at her. Deborah was a scientist first and foremost, but she was also a mum to three boys and Helen knew from experience that she always felt the human cost of the tragedies she investigated. In many ways their lives were pretty similar – both spent their working lives immersed in the worst things that human beings could imagine or endure.

‘Your victim was found here, bang in the middle of the room. It’s very likely the smoke and the panic got to her and she just froze. You often see that in these situations. House fires are things that happen to other people. When it happens to you, people lose their wits, their sense of direction, everything.’

‘It must have been terrifying.’

‘The smoke would have been so thick in here that she wouldn’t have known which way was up.’

It was a horrific way to die. Terror, confusion and horror all colliding at the same time. Was this what their killer intended?

‘Any thoughts on why her body was so …’ Helen paused, not quite finding the appropriate word.

‘Carbonized?’

Helen smiled a brief thanks. It was hard to put into words what Denise’s body had looked like.

‘Oxygen basically,’ Deborah Parks continued. ‘There are massive scorch marks around the border of the bedroom door. The fire was started downstairs, rising upwards, consuming whatever it could. It met an obstacle at the door, which is solid and fire-resistant to a basic level. The heat built up –’

‘And then Denise opened the door as she tried to escape?’ Helen asked.

‘Probably. The frustrated fire would have gobbled up the fresh oxygen in the bedroom – these marks here show how the fire literally exploded into the new space.’

Deborah pointed to a number of long, livid scorch marks across the ceiling.

‘Denise may or may not have regained consciousness after that initial explosion. Either way, if she was motionless in the middle of the room, the fire would have consumed her, setting light to her nightclothes, her hair … If she was still conscious at this point, her body would have gone into a massive state of shock. Cardiac arrest, smoke inhalation, there are many things that might have spared her the worst.’

‘Please God.’

Deborah was already making her way across the gantry and down the ladder to the ground floor. Helen was glad of a moment’s respite from this narrative of destruction. She was used to being at crime scenes, of seeing unspeakable things, but this was different to anything she’d experienced before. Denise Roberts’s attacker was not human and there was no opportunity to escape, defend herself or fight back, as there would have been in a common murder scenario. Hers was an enemy that could not be beaten. Helen, who feared nobody, shivered slightly at the thought of what Denise had faced last night.

Descending the ladder, Helen found Deborah Parks crouching down by the bottom of the stairs. Helen joined her.

‘Your arsonist’s MO is pretty similar,’ Deborah outlined. ‘You can smell the paraffin for yourself and I found a charred packet of Marlboro Gold here. There’s no understairs cupboard, so the arsonist went directly for the stairs themselves, soaking the bottom three steps in paraffin before presumably lighting the delay device and leaving.’

Helen nodded, then said:

‘What are these things here?’

She was pointing at a handful of numbered forensic markers laid out by Deborah around the foot of the stairs.

‘Sodium flares,’ Deborah replied.

‘Matches?’ Helen queried.

‘Exactly. I’d expect to find them on the bottom step, where the delay timer was positioned, but there seem to have been a number of other matches scattered around the base of the stairs and on the floor.’

‘Was that to amplify the spread of the initial fire?’

‘Unlikely. There would be no point putting matches on carpet already soaked in paraffin – our arsonist would know that.’

‘So he or she was just clumsy?’

‘Or in a hurry. We think of these guys as being ice-cool, but they are human beings. Their victim was asleep upstairs but could have woken up at any moment. The arsonist would have wanted to be in and out of the house as soon as possible and when you rush …’

Helen nodded. It was a disturbingly human moment in the midst of a horribly premeditated crime.

‘Other than that it’s pretty much a carbon copy of Tuesday night’s fires. There’s more work to do, but I’m ninety-nine per cent certain it’s the same perpetrator.’

‘Any idea how they gained access?’

‘Looks likely it was via the back door. The front door had the chain on and as yet I’ve found no broken windows or other obvious means of access. The back door was unlocked when we arrived. You’d have to ask family members if the back door was left unlocked as a rule –’

‘Or whether someone unlocked it on their way out.’

If the fire had been started by whoever shared Denise’s bed last night, then it would make sense that he would exit via the more hidden back door to effect his escape. But they were still no nearer finding her mystery lover, so it was all supposition. Perhaps she was just careless of domestic security? Or perhaps just this one time she forgot?

‘Anything else that leaps out at you?’ Helen said, as she made her way to the back door.

‘Nothing tangible yet in terms of our perpetrator. The safety boys putting up the scaffolding disturbed the site anyway, so it would be hard to prove in court that any evidence hadn’t been cross-contaminated or brought in by them.’

Helen swore – that was all they needed.

‘My feelings exactly,’ Deborah returned before moving off to continue her work. ‘I’ll call you when I’m done.’

Helen thanked Deborah and went out through the back door. She did a quick tour of the garden, but, finding nothing of interest on the hard ground, turned to look back at the house. She shivered as she took it in – a modest, family home had been desecrated by fire, turned into a grim curiosity for local youths who lined the streets now, camera phones raised in approval. Denise Roberts hadn’t had many breaks in life, but the cruellest blow had been saved for the very end.

There was only one, tiny glimmer of light in this whole awful story. She had argued with her son and had probably regretted it subsequently, as parents were wont to do. But in doing so she had done him the greatest service a mother can do for her child. She had booted him out of the house to serve her own interests last night, but in doing so she had ended up saving his life.

47

Callum Roberts stared straight ahead as he walked along the gloomy, forbidding corridor. He refused to look at the police officer – DS Sanderson – who kept pace with him. He knew that if he did so, she would start to work on him again, trying to dissuade him from doing this. This was hard enough as it was without her chipping away at him, eroding his determination and preying on his fears. And he knew that if he allowed himself to falter, then he wouldn’t take another step.

They had all urged him not to view his mother’s body. They had identified her from DNA and dental records, so there was no need for him to be here in this sterile, lifeless place. Callum had seen police mortuaries on TV crime shows but he now realized how fake those versions were. The real deal was washed out, soulless and just … dead.

Sanderson seemed to have given up trying to talk him down now and walked mutely beside him. Which was fine by him. He had been irritated by her presence at first, but as they approached the doors to the body storage area, he was suddenly glad to have her with him. He had no idea how he would react once he was in there.

Why was he here? Did he really believe that it wasn’t his mum in there? The DNA tests had proved it was her and yet he still had to see. He couldn’t logically say why, but he did.

They had euphemistically hinted at the state of his mother’s body, then when he’d refused to play ball, the gloves had come off and they’d described in concise but graphic detail what remained of his mother. Even so he’d refused to be put off. He knew instinctively that refusing to see her now would be the grossest betrayal of all.

Why had he been such an idiot? So ungrateful? So hostile? Sure his mum had messed up plenty of times and was a doormat, with terrible taste in men. But she had raised him single-handedly when other lesser women might have abandoned him to his fate, fobbing him off on a relative or putting him into care. And in the early years they had got on well. She was a relaxed parent, happy to have a laugh and a joke. And she doted on him, often going without so that he could go on school trips, have birthday parties, even the odd holiday. He had never missed having a dad, which had to mean something, didn’t it? She even came with him when he got his first tattoo, advising him on where to have it and what to go for. She looked after him afterwards, making sure that the tattoo didn’t get infected, giving him hot Ribena and powdered paracetamol to dull the pain in his throbbing arm. She wasn’t the best of mums, but she was very far from being the worst.

‘This is Jim Grieves. He’s our Senior Pathologist.’

Callum suddenly found himself shaking hands with yet another stranger. He never shook hands – who the fuck did? – and yet he seemed to have been doing nothing else for the past few hours. Shaking hands with medics, police officers, fire investigators and now the pathologist who’d been prodding and probing his mother’s body.

‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ the man was saying. He was a big guy with a gruff manner but kind eyes. Callum couldn’t think of what to say in reply, so nodded briefly. He wasn’t here to chat.

They walked on to the body storage area. ‘Body storage area’ – how the hell had he ended up here? It was a nightmare, a living bloody nightmare. The man was talking again, but he couldn’t hear a single word, his conversation drowned out by the clamouring panic within him. Suddenly he wanted to be anywhere but here. He wanted to turn and run, run, run …

‘Are you ready?’ the pathologist said, sounding like he was repeating the question for a second time. Callum snapped out of it, nodding and smiling at his interrogator. Why had he smiled? What was there to smile about?

They were standing by a long metal table – he knew they called them ‘slabs’ but couldn’t bear to think of them like that. With one last look at him, the pathologist leant forward and lifted the sheet.

Immediately, Callum’s arm shot out, grabbing at the sleeve of the policewoman who still flanked him. He didn’t know what he had been expecting, but not this. This wasn’t his mum. She didn’t even look human. This was an abomination.

Letting go his grip, he turned and ran to a nearby sink, vomiting hard into it. Once, twice, three times as the horror of what he’d just seen forced its way out. Afterwards, gripping the cold metal rim, he hung his head, trying to steady his breathing, to calm his thundering heart. Up until now it had seemed horrific but unreal. Now the full devastation of last night was making itself felt. And he knew in that moment, with piercing clarity, that his whole life had been reduced to ashes.

48

Blog post by firstpersonsingular.

Thursday, 10 December, 15.00

Have you ever burnt yourself? I mean properly. Like holding the palm of your hand over a flame and letting the fire eat your flesh. You should, it’s good.

I guess like me that you’ve probably been on suicide websites. I look at those things for hours. Always something interesting in the details and I just love the tone of those sites, don’t you? So sombre, so serious and so fucking DULL?!? Like it’s a training manual or textbook. This isn’t homework, friend, this is the final frontier. Not that I haven’t been tempted, but I wonder how many people would stop short if they just learnt to use their pain. Like I say, it’s good.

I first burnt myself when I was six. I stole my mother’s lighter, which made it all the sweeter. She thought I was trying to interfere with her smoking or just being a little shit, but I wanted something of hers to make its mark. Somehow it felt twice as good holding her lighter – with its stupid engraving – in my hand as I lowered my palm down, down, down on to the flame. I held it there, refusing to move. Exercising my power over it. Over my pain. Over my life.

A lot has happened since then. But the lesson I learnt stayed with me. There is so much that is random and cruel and pointless in life. So much shit to wade through, so many small indignities marching side by side with gross injustices. So much darkness that visits itself on you whether you want it to or not. But there are some things you can control. You can control you. You can control your feelings. And if you’re bright, you can control other people.

That is when you come out of yourself. When you become more than yourself. They thought you were worthless. You thought you were worthless. But then suddenly it all makes sense, you take control and for a brief tantalizing moment you know what it means to look God in the face.

49

It was time to call off the dogs. They had knocked on every door, canvassed every potential witness and passer-by within a mile radius of Denise Roberts’s house and had come up empty-handed. Charlie checked with Sarah Lucas that she was happy to move on, redeploying their manpower to the nearby high street in the hope of richer pickings, then called it in, galvanizing the uniformed sergeants into action. It had been a dispiriting few hours and Charlie wasn’t looking forward to telling Helen that their massive deployment of resources had yielded precisely nothing.

She was standing by the police cordon at the fire site. Last night and this morning there had been large crowds, but even these were starting to diminish now. This should have cheered Charlie – who needs these rubberneckers? – but in fact its effect was quite the opposite. Seemingly this terrible tragedy was worthy of a few hours’ attention, then the world moved on, seeking fresh entertainment. If only it was so easy for those left behind.

‘All right, girls, move along now. You’ve all got homes to go to.’

A small knot of teenage girls lingered by the police tape, chattering, shouting and occasionally taking snaps of the house. As Charlie called over to them, they turned, but made no move to leave. They went back to their chat, keeping a wary eye on the smartly dressed officer who seemed intent on intruding on their day. Watching them, Charlie felt a sudden spike of irritation and anger. This was somebody’s home, not a bloody shopping mall.

‘ Now, girls. It’s getting dark and there’s no reason for you to be hanging around here.’

Charlie had a sudden flash forward to what she would be like when Jessie was a teenager. Would Charlie have any credibility in her eyes as a successful career woman and authority figure? Or would having a policewoman for a mother be the ultimate disaster, a kind of social death that kept friends and boyfriends at a remove. Charlie was surprised to find that she was suddenly worried about this and chided herself for being foolish. There were bigger fish to fry right now.

‘Girls, I’m going to ask you for the last time to move on. I’m happy to drop you home in a police van, but I don’t think that would do you any favours, do you?’

Charlie was upon them now, raising her voice as she pointed them in the direction she wanted them to head in. There were a lot of cut-throughs and alleyways round here – even though there was safety in numbers, she would rather they made their way home along the high street.

‘She saw him,’ one of the girls replied tartly, her attitude to coppers shining through clearly.

‘Saw who?’

‘The guy what did this,’ the teenager answered, nodding towards the fire site.

‘Who saw him?’ Charlie asked, trying to keep the desperation from her voice.

‘Naomie,’ she said, pointing to another of her group. Naomie was mixed race, a little overweight and blushing to her roots. Blocking the others out, Charlie approached her.

‘Tell me what you saw, Naomie.’

The blushing girl seemed not to hear her, so Charlie pulled out her warrant card.

‘I’m DC Brooks. I’m working on this case and anything you can tell me would be very helpful.’

‘Tell her, girl. Tell the pig what you saw,’ the leader said, laughing.

In another situation, Charlie would have cautioned the little shit for that alone, but today she had to let it go.

‘Who did you see, Naomie?’ Charlie pressed. ‘I really don’t want to have to make this official, but I will if I have to. Please – tell me what you saw.’

Finally the gravity of the situation seemed to land home and the girl looked up. And as she did so, Charlie was surprised to see fear in her eyes.

‘I saw him.’