After the Fire (Maeve Kerrigan) Read online

  A short pause. Then, ‘What for?’

  ‘Murder.’ I looked at the bed, where Mrs Hearn was shaking her head slowly and trying to talk. ‘Actually, make that attempted murder.’ On the floor, Debbie Bellew snarled and fought. I touched my face, where it hurt, and my fingertips came away red. ‘And assault on a police officer. Let’s stick that one on the charge sheet too.’

  I had a brief reunion with the police constable who’d been guarding Mrs Hearn: he was one of the response officers who turned up to transport my prisoner to the nearest police station.

  ‘I don’t believe it. All that time waiting for something to happen, and the second I leave it all kicks off.’

  ‘Which suggests you were doing a pretty good job,’ I pointed out, as Una Burt came to stand beside me, looking shattered.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Her name is Debbie Bellew,’ I said. ‘She’s the mother of one of the fire victims.’

  ‘What was she doing here?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Good thing you happened to come along today.’

  ‘Yes, it was.’ I said it soberly. It was just luck that Mrs Hearn had survived; luck, and a determination to cling to life that I admired. It wasn’t as if she had all that much to look forward to, in my view, but she was a fighter, and she hadn’t given up yet.

  Derwent appeared in the doorway, scowling darkly. He paused to take in the whole scene: the response officers, the prisoner, the milling medical staff who were now pretty much just gawking, the dressing on my face.

  ‘I leave you on your own for five minutes, Kerrigan. Five minutes.’ He bit his lip, which could have been concern, if I was thinking the best of him. ‘What’s under the bandage?’

  I unpeeled the tape to show him: three scrapes that a nurse had cleaned quickly, but more thoroughly than I could have wished.

  It wasn’t concern that had him biting his lip after all. He’d been trying not to laugh. It broke out on his face as a wide, wide grin. ‘Did they give you one of those cone collar things to stop you scratching at it?’

  ‘Ha ha,’ I said acidly.

  Una Burt frowned at Derwent. ‘Where did you spring from? Where were you?’

  ‘I was just—’ he broke off as Mrs Hearn made a low, groaning sound. They had propped her up against some pillows, at her request, and a nurse sat beside the head of the bed, watching her carefully. She looked frail, and bruised, and above all confused. ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘For someone who just nearly died,’ Burt said tartly. I wondered if she’d noticed his neat sidestepping of the question about where he’d been when I needed him. I had noticed it and filed it away for a future discussion.

  ‘Who – who is she? What did she want with me?’ Mrs Hearn’s voice was slurred at the edges but she was coherent.

  ‘It’s your neighbour from flat 101,’ I explained.

  Debbie gave a wail that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. She was writhing in distress.

  ‘Take her away,’ Una Burt said to the uniformed officers. ‘See if you can get her assessed by someone in mental health before you take her to the police station, though. I don’t want her having to come back here to be sectioned if this is where she needs to be.’

  ‘No. Not yet.’ Mrs Hearn squinted across the room. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Debbie.’ She twisted her body. ‘Let me go. I have to go.’

  ‘I saw you.’ Mrs Hearn nodded. ‘Before the fire.’

  ‘No!’ Debbie screamed the word, then started sobbing. ‘I have to go. Take me away. I don’t want to be here any more.’

  ‘You saw her?’ I was concentrating on Mrs Hearn. ‘Where did you see her?’

  ‘On my television. In the hallway.’

  ‘Debbie went out to do some shopping,’ I said to Una Burt. ‘That’s why she wasn’t in the flat.’

  ‘Shopping.’ Mrs Hearn nodded. ‘But she stopped on the way.’

  ‘Shut up. Shut up.’ Debbie was shaking her head. Her limbs were trembling. ‘Shut up.’

  ‘She was in the cupboard. The storage whatchamacallit in the hall. I saw her.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Una Burt demanded.

  ‘Oh yes. I wondered, you know. Strange place to be.’

  ‘What was she doing in there?’

  Mrs Hearn blinked slowly. ‘I don’t know, dear. I couldn’t see.’

  I turned to look at Debbie, at the tears that streaked her face. ‘Mrs Bellew … were you in the cupboard?’

  A storm of sobbing was my answer.

  The smoke alarm had been disabled.

  Something had started a fire in or near the store cupboard, a space full of chemicals and flammable material.

  Debbie had been haggard with worry about the cause of the fire.

  Debbie had tried to find out what we knew about how the fire started.

  Debbie had tried to divert attention from herself by hinting about her husband’s business.

  Debbie had worked out there was one possible witness to what she’d done.

  I had told her there was one possible witness to what she had done.

  ‘Were you smoking in the cupboard?’ I asked.

  ‘I can’t …’

  ‘Mrs Bellew, tell me the truth. Were you smoking in the cupboard?’

  ‘No.’ It sounded weak and she knew it. ‘Maybe. I put it out, though. I made sure it was out. It couldn’t have been me who started the fire. Not me. I was careful. I was careful.’

  Between one thing and another, it was hours before I was finished with Debbie Bellew. It made me tremendously sad to have to take her to the local police station and sit with her while we waited for a solicitor, and then to interview her about what she’d done the night of the fire. I spoke to Andrew Harper, the fire investigator, who confirmed that an unattended cigarette and the cleaning products in the cupboard could have caused a fire that should have been easy to put out, if it hadn’t gone on for long enough to spread inside the building’s ventilation system.

  ‘Get as much information from her as you can about what was in the cupboard and where she put the cigarette when she had finished smoking it. We can create a similar set-up at headquarters and work out what went wrong.’

  ‘To stop it from happening again.’

  ‘In an ideal world,’ Harper said. ‘But you can’t account for circumstances. People will always make mistakes. Accidents will always happen.’

  It was true. And you could go mad, I thought, if you were doomed to go back through the ifs of this case for ever, as Debbie Bellew undoubtedly would. Four people had died but if the smoke alarm had been working, or if Debbie had noticed her cigarette wasn’t out, or if she’d waited until she got to the car park, or even if the lift had been working in the first place none of it might have happened. One action in the chain of events led to another and the consequences, for Debbie and her family, for the girls we knew as Elizabeth and Maggie, and for Geoff Armstrong, had been catastrophic.

  And Debbie knew it. She’d thought about little else since the fire. Now she was grieving for her daughter, and suffering the added burden of guilt and shame. But that didn’t excuse what she had tried to do to Mrs Hearn. It didn’t begin to excuse it.

  I dragged myself out of the police station and took a taxi back to the office to dump the paperwork. The lights dazzled me through the sleet that battered the taxi’s windows. The streets were empty, glassy with rain. Debbie would be in court the following morning, a first appearance to remand her in custody. I wanted to be there. I was superstitious about not going to court. It was too easy for everything to go wrong when your back was turned.

  I felt like death as I walked into the building, heading for the lift rather than the stairs. I was too tired to walk straight, let alone climb stairs. My face hurt. My feet hurt. I was freezing, too, because Elaine Lister’s blood had done for my jacket and I’d left my coat in Derwent’s car. A thin blouse was not enough clothing to keep out the cold on a chilly December n
ight.

  The place was deserted, the lights mostly off. A cleaner was vacuuming in Una Burt’s office. He was a sad-eyed man who didn’t even glance in my direction, or at the boards that lined her room, or the pictures and maps and notes that covered them. Incurious, because it was in his interests not to see what we saw every day. We could have been selling insurance, as far as he was concerned. An office was an office. And the fact that it was filled with other people’s nightmares wasn’t his problem.

  I left my things on my desk and stretched, feeling my joints complain. Too much sitting. Too much stress. Too many sudden movements.

  Too many fights.

  What I needed was a drink, and someone to hold me, and talk me down from the unhappy, uneasy ledge I’d clambered onto in the course of the day. My nerves were raw, my mind buzzing even though I was tired. I needed peace. I needed comfort.

  What I needed was Rob.

  What I got was a clatter as Mal Upton pushed open the door and knocked over the cleaner’s mop. He stared down at it, surprised. ‘How did that get there?’

  ‘I think someone knocked it over,’ I said.

  He made heavy weather of picking it up again and sticking it in the bucket so it was balanced. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I just finished dealing with Debbie Bellew. Your turn.’

  ‘Getting things done,’ he said vaguely. ‘I was just going.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Can I give you a lift home?’ His face was comically earnest, and hopeful, but at the same time I sensed he was braced for disappointment.

  ‘That would be brilliant.’

  ‘Really?’ He beamed. ‘Great.’

  ‘I can’t invite you in,’ I said, recalling a little too late that Derwent would be there.

  He leaned on a desk, dislodging a stack of files that slid across the surface like a fan opening. ‘I was just offering you a lift.’

  ‘I know.’ I thought about trying to explain that I’d been being friendly instead of treating him like a free taxi service but I was too tired, too worn out. I picked up my bag. ‘Are you ready to go?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He reached over and grabbed his coat, which got stuck on the arm of his chair and a few seconds of awkwardness and swearing passed, while I tried to pretend I hadn’t noticed.

  We went down the stairs to the car park and I was half asleep as I walked over to his car, yawning widely and uninhibitedly. At least Derwent kept me awake, I thought, even if that was because it was hard to sleep when you were dancing on a razor blade. Mal was peaceful. Unchallenging. Quietly adoring.

  I needed to learn how to put up with that.

  Mal drove to the exit and tapped in his code in to open the gate. He let his car roll forward as the gates started to move. It was a VW Golf; it didn’t need a lot of space. He judged it perfectly, flashing through the gap while the gates were bare inches from the car, and he glanced at me, and grinned, and the side of the car caved in. The side pillar went, the windscreen exploded, the car crumpled like paper, the airbags blew and I was swinging sideways, weightless in my seat, knowing I’d land soon and that when I did, it would hurt. The seconds stretched for hours. I looked beyond Mal, trying to work out what was happening, squinting against the lights of the car that had crashed into us. It was a Range Rover, a tank that had a weight and height advantage over us, and the engine roared as it drove Mal’s car sideways, swung it around and slammed us into a brick wall. The front of the VW disintegrated, effectively, with a sound like the end of the world, and we came to a stop.

  The Range Rover’s engine noise changed as the driver put it into reverse. It moved back, metal grinding on metal, and Mal’s car juddered as it released us like a cat bored with a dead mouse. I felt deafened, numbed. I could smell something acrid and chemical, something that made me think we should get out of the car and not waste any time about it. Somehow, I couldn’t coordinate undoing my seatbelt and trying the door. It was easier to wait for someone to rescue me. Someone would come.

  Mal was silent beside me. I tried to look at him but my head weighed a hundred tons and it wouldn’t move, and besides, I was so tired.

  My door opened and a man leaned in, undid my seatbelt, slid a hand under my knees and behind my back, and lifted me out.

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said, when I manifestly wasn’t, and my rescuer ignored me. He carried me a short distance as the icy rain stung my face and hands, and then I was inside a car, on the back seat, sheltered. Safe. The car door shut.

  Rescued.

  I looked out of the window at the heap of incomprehensible metal that the VW had become, and missed the moment that my rescuer climbed into the driver’s seat of the car. The outside world began to move, the misshapen wreckage disappearing into the darkness, and I looked down at my hands, at the cable tie that was cutting into my wrists, and then I looked at the back of the driver’s head and I knew him.

  I knew him.

  It wasn’t rescue, after all.

  Quite the opposite.

  Chapter 33

  THE RANGE ROVER proved one thing: if you wanted a car that could annihilate another vehicle in a crash and then drive away, it was worth the money. It passed through the empty streets at a reasonable pace – not fast enough to ping any speed cameras or attract the attention of a traffic car, but quickly. I tried to keep track of our route but there were few enough landmarks as we went north and out through the endless, featureless London suburbs. All I could tell was that Chris Swain had a destination in mind and knew his route well enough not to need a map, or sat nav, or anything that might have given me a clue about where we were going and where we might end up. London was huge, epically sprawling, and yet it didn’t seem long at all before we were out of the reach of the orange streetlights, cutting through darkness on what looked like country roads. He wasn’t using the main roads, I realised, with their ANPR cameras and CCTV and other drivers. He was effectively invisible on the narrow lanes that ran parallel to the major routes, the old highways that had been superseded by multi-lane motorways.

  I sat still in the back of the car, my eyes half-closed, as if I was barely conscious. I didn’t try to talk, or escape. The cable ties were impossible to break and I had nothing to cut them. I was thinking as fast as my sluggish brain would allow, thinking about whether I still had my phone in my pocket or if I’d dropped it into my bag – my bag which was probably in the wreckage of Mal’s car. I couldn’t remember, and it seemed terribly important even though I was miles away from being able to call for help.

  What I mainly thought about, however, was Chris Swain and what he was planning to do with me. I thought about what I knew about him, and how I might use that against him.

  I thought about what I might do to survive.

  After a stretch of time that I couldn’t quite measure, the car slowed, turned down a side lane and bumped along an unpaved track for a hundred yards or so, to an open gate. He drove into an unlit space beside a low building, the wheels bumping over cobbles.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked, and was ignored.

  He got out, locking me inside the car, and disappeared into the building. A security light came on, flooding the yard with white light that made me squint. It went out once he went inside but it had done its work: I had no night vision at all now. It was like being blind for a few seconds. I felt a bubble of panic rise up from the pit of my stomach, from the part of me that wasn’t rationalising and planning and considering – the part of me that knew I was in danger. Panic was unproductive.

  Fear was not my friend.

  Light leaked out from behind the curtains and I got a better impression of the building: a low farmhouse, one storey, a simple, small house. The door opened and he was briefly silhouetted against the light: he was bigger than I remembered, as if he’d been putting on muscle. He had a full beard now and it blurred the outline of his face, hiding the weak jaw I remembered. He started to cross the yard and the light came on again. This time I was expecting it, and I shi
elded my eyes so I could watch him. His hands were empty. He moved with absolute confidence towards me and I waited because I didn’t have much of a choice about it.

  The door lock clicked and he pulled it open. The cold air took my breath away. It smelled of farmland, of animals and grass. We had to be somewhere in Hertfordshire or Bedfordshire, I thought, but I wasn’t sure and anyway, it didn’t matter. He reached in and I held my hands out of the way to let him get at the seatbelt release, cooperating. I wanted to get into the house. I had a better chance in the house to put some space between me and Swain. He let the seatbelt zip back into its holder and took my wrists in his hands, just above where the cable ties cut into them.

  ‘No fighting.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘And no shouting. There’s no one to hear you, but it bores me.’ His voice was flat. Unemotional. He should have been excited, or edgy, but he wasn’t. Dead calm.

  I looked into Chris Swain’s eyes and I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that his intention was to kill me. Whatever happened before that, it would end with my death. I could fight. I could try to run. I could cooperate. I could do whatever he wanted and play whatever games he liked.

  He would kill me in the end.

  He drew me out of the car and got behind me so he could walk me over to the door. I dragged a little, limping, looking around at the barns that formed two sides of the yard. They seemed to be empty, unused. It looked as if Swain was operating alone, which didn’t surprise me. He wasn’t the kind to share. At least that meant I only had him to deal with, though. He was quite enough on his own. He kneed me in the back of the thigh.

  ‘Hurry up.’

  ‘It’s my leg,’ I said. ‘I must have hurt it in the crash.’

  He clicked his tongue in irritation and I stopped feeling scared for one glorious second of pure rage. That took me inside the house, where I stopped. It was just as cold inside as in the yard. I looked around at the big brick fireplace, the faded sofas, the dried flower arrangements in the window.