A Good Death Page 3

  Suzy had been woken by the phone too. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to go down there,’ said Mariner. ‘You can stay, though,’ he went on as she started to push back the duvet. ‘I just need to check in with Fire Investigation to see what’s going on. I should be back in a couple of hours.’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ said Suzy. ‘I’d like to get back to Coventry. I’ve got some sorting out to do for tomorrow. I’ll jump in the shower after you’ve gone and I can get the train back.’

  ‘That’s optimistic,’ said Mariner. ‘It’ll take you all day. Wait for me. I won’t be long and I can drop you back afterwards.’

  This time, instead of crossing the canal, Mariner walked round on the roads, the half-mile or so to the scene. No point in taking his car and adding to the inevitable vehicle jam. From this side he could see Wellington Road for what it was: one in a whole network of solid, semi- and detached houses built between the wars to accommodate Birmingham’s burgeoning middle classes; typical three-bedroom properties with neat front gardens overlooked by bay windows. What remained of number 104 was a square detached that rubbed against its neighbours, and in daylight he could see the adjoining garage which had, at some point after the original construction, been converted into further living accommodation, with another bedroom added on top. It was on this side of the house, to the left of the front door, where most of the damage had been done, and while the rust-bricked walls still looked sound enough, they enclosed a charred shell. Blackened and broken windows were surrounded by a residue of soot, and light shone through the ribs of the roof joists. Wisps of white vapour rose in places and there was enough smoke in the air to catch in Mariner’s throat, prompting a fleeting flashback to the events of last night.

  The narrow street was blocked by assorted vehicles, including three fire tenders, from which a tangled mass of yellow hoses snaked across the pavement and into the garden. Showing his identification to the uniform standing guard, Mariner crossed the outer cordon of blue police tape and immediately caught sight of a familiar figure standing head and shoulders above everyone around him. Sergeant Ralph Solomon had come a long way since Mariner’s first encounter with him as a wet-behind-the-ears constable, when he had stumbled upon a particularly grisly murder. Today it looked as if he was supervising the other uniforms in the preliminary investigations. Seeing Mariner, Solomon broke away from the small group behind one of the squad cars and strode towards him exuding the confidence of an officer who has everything under control. It was essential. Fire investigations were notoriously complicated. Whilst the fire service had responsibility for establishing the cause of the fire, the police were expected to investigate any potential criminal offence; in this case arson, manslaughter or even murder. Both agencies in turn would rely heavily on input from the newly privatised forensic service. Solomon would be overseeing the house-to-house, and interviews with any other witnesses, making sure that his officers were asking the right questions, so ensuring that all possible information was gathered

  ‘Morning, sir,’ said Solomon, his gaze lingering on Mariner’s face.

  ‘I know,’ said Mariner. ‘I only live across the canal. I was here last night, but couldn’t do anything. I’ll need to give you a statement at some point. But broad brushstrokes; what do we know so far?’ He framed his question carefully, knowing that he could easily stand here for an hour while the meticulous Solomon recounted every detail at length.

  ‘The emergency call was logged at just after one-twenty in the morning,’ said Solomon, without even consulting his notes. He turned towards the street. ‘One of the neighbours across there at number 163, a Mrs Putman, called it in when her teenage son saw the flames coming from the ground-floor window.’

  ‘Thank God for nocturnal kids,’ said Mariner.

  ‘The fire crew was late getting here because of vehicles parked on a neighbouring street,’ said Solomon. ‘They couldn’t get through.’

  ‘I thought they were never going to turn up,’ said Mariner.

  ‘I understand you got Mrs Shah and her two children out through a first-floor back window?’ said Solomon.

  ‘We helped them down, that was all,’ said Mariner.

  Solomon paused a moment. ‘I’ve currently got a couple of lads interviewing witnesses house-to-house.’

  ‘And the firefighters?’ asked Mariner.

  ‘I’ll start gathering statements from them when I can.’ Their evidence would be vital in determining the origins and progression of the fire. Mariner saw what he saw, but he was no expert. The firefighters’ accounts of the colour of the smoke and where it came from, the position of doors and windows, the state of the building, what, if anything, was moved and what – hose reel or main jet – was used to extinguish fire, would all provide valuable clues that would allow them to establish how the fire started and whether it was accidental or deliberate. Solomon would also need to determine the number of personnel going into the building, and what might have been done to isolate electrics and gas.

  Solomon pointed to a man who, but for the skin colour and cropped fair hair, could have been his twin, well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders. In full fire kit, he stood in the front garden of the property, his back to them, while he surveyed the building. ‘That’s Gerry Docherty, the fire investigation lead. He’ll tell you more about what’s going on inside.’

  ‘What’s he like?’ asked Mariner.

  ‘Seems like a good bloke,’ said Solomon. ‘Relaxed, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Good,’ said Mariner. These days, inter-agency working was as much as anything about money. The Fire Investigation team had a service level agreement with the police to provide three hundred man hours per year, over and above which there would be an additional charge. Given the central role of FI in this kind of incident, the last thing they needed was a jobsworth who was going to log every last second.

  Mariner had to be signed in to the inner red fire cordon by another uniform before he could approach Docherty to introduce himself. No doubt a former fire fighter, Docherty had an air of competent calm about him. The two-way radio he carried, crackled intermittently as they talked.

  ‘Where are we up to?’ Mariner asked, knowing that the fire scene would be treated like a crime scene until proven otherwise.

  ‘I haven’t managed to get in yet,’ said Docherty. He and Mariner moved a little nearer to the house. ‘As you can see we’ve got a high level of collapse – the roof has caved in to the first floor and the weight of all that has taken it through to the ground floor.’ He waved his radio towards the outer wall on the left-hand side of the building. ‘That gable end is looking a bit wobbly so I’ve got a couple of guys in there right now assessing stability. We’ve got a confirmed fatality in there, but the body is partially buried and precariously placed, so we haven’t been able to get near it to begin recovery.’

  ‘Mrs Shah’s father,’ said Mariner.

  Docherty nodded. ‘Sixty-six-year-old Soltan Ahmed. Once I’ve got the all-clear I’ll let the forensic team and photographer in to do what they need to whilst the body is in situ. Then after it’s recovered, we can start the proper analysis. We had a hell of a game getting here,’ Docherty went on. ‘We couldn’t get the tenders past parked vehicles on the access roads.’

  ‘Do you think it was deliberate obstruction?’

  Docherty shook his head. ‘Just a couple of pillocks who’d parked badly. These narrow streets aren’t designed for all the cars we have these days. There’ll be an internal investigation into that too.’

  ‘For what it’s worth, I don’t think it would have made any difference,’ said Mariner. ‘God knows what there was in that downstairs room, but it went up like a tinder box.’

  Docherty nodded agreement. ‘There must have been something in there to generate the level of heat. These houses are pretty close together, and that one,’ he nodded towards the building a few doors down with a noticeboard in the garden, ‘is a nursing home for the elderly, so one of the priorities was to
stop it from spreading to the properties on that side. You found Mrs Shah?’

  ‘Just guided her and the kids down over the flat roof and into the back garden. She was dazed and in shock and obviously distraught about her father.’

  ‘How was she dressed?’ Docherty asked.

  ‘She was wearing day clothes, so she hadn’t been in bed when it started. It might be significant, but at that time of night there might also be a rational explanation.’

  Docherty noted it with a nod. ‘Was there anyone hanging about who shouldn’t have been?’ he asked. For some arsonists the thrill they got was from standing back and watching the chaos they caused.

  ‘Not that I noticed. There was a lot going on,’ said Mariner, in a study of understatement. ‘A couple of our uniformed officers turned up pretty quickly to manage the audience, so they’ll know more about that.’

  Up until that point the chuntering on Docherty’s handset had been indistinct, but suddenly there was an agitated shout: ‘Watch it, Dev! That looks a bit—!’ A loud reverberation preceded a cloud of billowing ash from the ground-floor window. Anxious eyes turned towards the building until the two fire fighters scrambled outside, pulling off their breathing masks. ‘Sorry, boss,’ the nearer of the two spoke to Docherty. ‘It’s too dicey in there. Tech Rescue will need to make it safe before anything else can be done.’

  ‘Shit!’ Docherty’s frustration was felt by Mariner too. It could take up to a day to clear areas for the technical team to make the building safe, which would mean a considerable delay. But it was unavoidable. The safety of personnel had to come first.

  ‘And if it can’t be fully secured?’ asked Mariner.

  ‘Then we’ll focus on recovery of the body, and any kind of forensic examination will have to be conducted outside using a reconstruction grid,’ said Docherty. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.’

  Docherty explained all of this to the combined police and fire crews, when he called the first of what would be many daily briefing sessions for everyone on-site; this one conducted on the lawn as a light drizzle began to fall. Mariner looked up at the overcast sky; this could be bad news too. Rain could hold things up further and contaminate the crime scene.

  FOUR

  Mariner could do no more here, so he headed home, leaving everyone else to do their work, his clothes and hair stinking of smoke. Suzy had made herself breakfast and been down to the newsagent’s for the Sunday paper. ‘How is it?’ she asked, getting up to put the kettle on. ‘They confirmed on the radio that the man inside died.’

  ‘It’s grim,’ said Mariner.

  ‘You couldn’t have done any more,’ Suzy tried to reassure him.

  ‘I know.’ But it didn’t stop him wishing he had. ‘And now we’ve got to cool our heels for a bit while the Fire Investigation team do their thing, and at the moment the building is unstable, so until that’s been addressed it’s a waiting game for all of us. But I suppose the good news is that it gives me plenty of time to take you back.’

  On a good day the drive back to Coventry took forty-five minutes, and today, apart from a bottleneck around the National Exhibition Centre, the traffic was slow but steady. The post-graduate block where Suzy had a room at the university was a 1990s creation, with flimsy walls that couldn’t keep out the murmur of TVs elsewhere in the block, or the ebb and flow of conversation as people walked along the corridor outside.

  As student accommodation went, the room was a decent size, with the usual utilitarian furniture, but right now most of the floor space was taken over by boxes and knee-high towers of books. And this was just a fraction of Suzy’s library; most of it remained in a nearby self-storage facility until she could find somewhere a bit bigger and more permanent to live. ‘Are all these necessary?’ said Mariner. ‘Most of them must be pretty much obsolete now that we’ve got the Internet.’

  Suzy gave him a look. ‘Not at all. There’s no substitute for the feel and smell of a proper book. They’re having a resurgence.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’ Mariner himself owned about half a dozen books, and those were mostly made up of photographs. He’d quite liked English while he was at school but these days the only reading he did was case files and policy documents at work, via a computer screen. Given that books played such an important part in Suzy’s life, it was strange that this lack of common ground didn’t really seem to matter. ‘You need to clear some space,’ he said. ‘If you’re not going anywhere just yet, I might as well have a go at those shelves.’ He reached over to one of the cardboard flat packs of bookcases that Suzy had bought a couple of weekends ago and started to pull open the packaging. DIY was hardly ever Mariner’s activity of choice, but it would be a solution to the clutter and keep his mind occupied for a while. ‘I can do that later,’ said Suzy, as he started to pull open the packaging of one of the bookcases.

  ‘I know,’ said Mariner. ‘But it’ll be quicker if we do it together.’ He swore as a heavy-duty copper staple pierced his thumb. The units were surprisingly straightforward to assemble and less than twenty minutes later, laying the first particle-board shelf on its frame, he picked up a couple of tomes the size of house bricks, and placed them on top. ‘I’m not sure that they’re going to be strong enough to take the weight of this lot,’ said Mariner. Particularly substantial, he noticed, were those written by Professor Gideon Wiley. ‘That doesn’t even sound like a real name,’ he said.

  ‘What will you do this afternoon?’ Suzy asked, passing him another of the books from the pile. ‘A walk?’

  ‘Jamie,’ said Mariner. Lying awake in the early hours he’d worked out that his last visit to Jamie had been five weeks ago. He thought this might be the longest it had ever been. When he’d first taken on guardianship he’d intended to see Jamie at least fortnightly, recognising the importance of that regular contact. And he’d mostly kept to that. But lately life, and staff shortages, had got in the way and gradually his trips out to Worcestershire had dwindled to three-weekly and then monthly. Now he couldn’t think about Jamie without feeling guilty.

  It was impossible of course to determine what, if any, difference any of these visits made to Jamie. Mariner had read once that dogs have no sense of time passing, between an owner leaving them in the morning and returning at the end of the day. He kind of hoped it was like that for Jamie too, but accepted that it could well be wishful thinking on his part. What he could be certain of was that Jamie would greet him with the same mild indifference as always, his interest largely governed by any snacks Mariner might have taken with him.

  ‘I do love you,’ Suzy said, as she hugged him goodbye a little later.

  ‘Not sure why,’ Mariner responded, his tone light. There was something in those words that unsettled him, as if she was actually trying to reassure herself too.

  She smiled. ‘It’ll be all right. It’s a phase, that’s all.’

  They both knew what she was talking about. She was always careful not to put him under pressure, but at the same time Mariner wished he could share her optimism.

  Suzy watched the tail lights of Tom’s car disappear round the corner and went back to her room. She had meant what she said, but things between them had definitely become less straightforward of late, in a way that she had never encountered in any relationship before. Tom had been candid with her almost from the start of their relationship, about what they euphemistically referred to as his ‘bedroom difficulties’, but they hadn’t surfaced until now, when suddenly, out of the blue, he couldn’t stay the course. Now the joke had worn to transparency. And medication hadn’t helped; Tom seemed to be one of the few who experienced side effects in the form of blinding and long-lasting headaches. ‘Never mind,’ she’d said cheerfully, ‘other ways to skin a cat.’ But it wasn’t the same; they both knew that. All this in itself was frustrating enough, but what made it worse was that they seemed to have reached a point where neither of them, intelligent, articulate adults as they were, seemed capable any longer of broaching
the subject. So not only were they now avoiding intimacy, they were also avoiding talking about it. In the past, while Suzy had always been sympathetic to friends or work colleagues going through relationship difficulties, she had at the same time invariably thought: why don’t you just talk to each other? Now she understood that it wasn’t always so simple. She was aware that the responsibility probably lay with her, and there had been opportunities on several occasions over the weekend to start the conversation, but each time she had ducked out of it. She didn’t know how long they could go on like this.

  The drive out to Jamie’s residential home was a pleasant one through rural Worcestershire, and as he drove Mariner put his mobile on hands-free to check in with Docherty. ‘Any developments?’

  ‘Not for you,’ said Docherty. Mariner could hear the disappointment in his voice. ‘Tech Rescue have only just got here and now we’re trying to make sure they don’t plough in and destroy evidence. It’s a nightmare; that downstairs room, where we think it started, is crammed with stuff anyway, and the collapse from above has compounded it. They’re in there now, trying to shore up the end wall, to stop that from coming down too, but without disturbing anything.’ He broke off momentarily, to speak to someone close by. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘It’s a big job, so by the time it’s been made safe it’s likely that the light will be starting to go. I don’t envisage being able to get in until first thing tomorrow morning. If that situation changes, I’ll let you know straight away.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Mariner too was disappointed. It would mean losing valuable hours. He terminated the call just as he was turning into the driveway of Manor Park. The rural location of the former manor house suited Jamie, and, he supposed, most of the other residents, perfectly. But all the same Mariner couldn’t help but view it as a throwback to the times of the big asylums, constructed outside of towns and cities to keep the inmates well away from the general population. It could hardly be helpful at a time when the words ‘disabled’ and ‘benefit-scrounger’ had become practically synonymous, stirring up antagonism all over again.