A Good Death Read online

  After a few minutes, Salwa and a woman she introduced as her sister-in-law, Ettra, appeared. The delay was explained by the tray Ettra carried, bearing cups of mint tea and a plate of unleavened bread, which were passed to Mariner and Jesson as if they’d been requested. Mariner was neither hungry nor thirsty, and guessed that Jesson felt the same, but refusing hospitality would have unsettled their hosts, so he smiled thanks and took a sip of the tea and bit into the dense, dry flatbread, which he had to chase around his mouth for a couple of minutes before he was in a position to speak. He was grateful to Jesson for exchanging a few pleasantries while this was going on.

  ‘We need to talk to the children,’ he said eventually, ‘perhaps with their aunt here?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Salwa went to fetch them and they came in; Athmar shyly, sitting close to her aunt on the opposite side of the room, while Yousef bounced down on to the sofa and didn’t look as if he would stay in one place for long.

  ‘Hello again,’ said Jesson, smiling warmly. ‘This must be nice, staying at your auntie’s house.’

  ‘Too many people,’ said Yousef, with a slight frown, already sliding off the sofa, impatient to get this over with.

  ‘Well, we won’t keep you long, we just need to ask you about the fire at your house,’ Jesson went on. ‘We’re trying to find out how it started and there might be something important you remember that can help us with that. Is that OK?’

  There wasn’t much indication that Yousef had even heard her, but Athmar nodded silently, obediently.

  ‘Are the fireman there?’ asked Yousef.

  ‘Yes, they’re having a good look too, to see if they can find any clues,’ Vicky told him. ‘Tell me about what you did on Saturday.’

  ‘We went to play with our cousins,’ said Athmar, her voice so small at first that they had to lean in to catch everything she said. ‘Then we came home, and it was just Mama and Grandpa. We had our tea and watched TV.’

  ‘What did you watch?’ asked Jesson.

  ‘Doctor Who was awesome!’ Yousef announced. ‘He was getting attacked by the Zygons.’ He was off the sofa now and acting out the drama, swiping at the air with an imaginary weapon.

  ‘And what about later, when you went to bed?’ asked Jesson. ‘Did you see anything or hear anything different?’

  Athmar shook her head again, and Yousef didn’t appear to have even heard Jesson’s question, but then he said suddenly: ‘Mama woke me up and there was a funny smell. She said we had to get out of the house, so we climbed out of the window!’ He gave Mariner a ‘how cool was that’ look.

  ‘What kind of smell was it? You mean the smoke?’ Jesson asked carefully.

  ‘No, not like that.’ Yousef wrinkled his nose. ‘Like the car.’

  As he spoke they all became aware of a commotion that seemed to begin outside on the street, before spreading into the house. There was a loud and prolonged, and what seemed at times heated, conversation in Arabic that Mariner and Jesson didn’t understand, though Mariner thought he caught the odd English word, including the name ‘Radford’. The two children were instantly alert to the disturbance, and consequently distracted from any further questions. Their aunt’s reaction was more guarded.

  ‘What’s—?’ Mariner was about to go and investigate, when another small child burst into the room and jabbered something in Arabic. Ettra immediately stood up, wringing her hands, her face an unreadable mixture of surprise and relief. ‘It’s my brother,’ she said. ‘He is back.’

  ‘Good timing,’ murmured Mariner, catching Jesson’s eye. Seconds later Mustafa Shah walked in, hand in hand with his wife. The two children rushed at him and he scooped them up, Yousef climbing all over him. Shah nodded an acknowledgement to Mariner and Jesson over his son’s head before returning his attention to his children. After several minutes of responding to their chatter, he sent them off to play. Ettra went after them, and they didn’t stop her. All the time Salwa Shah held on to her husband. She looked as if she had been crying. As the children scampered off, Mustafa Shah fully took in the presence of the two strangers. In his mid-forties, he was tall and good-looking behind rimless glasses and he wore collarless kameez with a cream linen suit that was creased from travelling.

  ‘That’s a great welcome,’ Mariner smiled. ‘How long have you been away?’

  ‘Just a few days,’ said Shah. His tone was relaxed but he was studying them carefully.

  ‘These are police officers,’ said Salwa. ‘They’ve come to ask some questions about the fire.’

  ‘We could come back later,’ Mariner offered, being deliberately tentative; there were lots of reasons why he would prefer to proceed now.

  ‘You should eat and get some rest,’ Salwa interjected, putting her hand on her husband’s arm. ‘You’ve had such a long journey.’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ said Shah, sitting down. ‘I want to know what happened; why your father died. And if there’s anything I can do to help—’

  ‘We’re very sorry for your loss,’ said Mariner.

  ‘Thank you. I feel bad that I wasn’t here. I keep thinking that if I had been, perhaps it wouldn’t have ended this way.’

  ‘The fire took hold very quickly and was fierce,’ said Mariner. ‘Even if you had been in the house it’s unlikely that you would have been able to do anything more.’ He didn’t know if that was strictly true, but there seemed little sense in Shah berating himself for something that could not be rectified.

  ‘I thank God that you and the children are safe,’ Mustafa Shah turned to his wife. ‘But I’m so sorry about your father.’ He lifted his wife’s bandaged hand to his lips, and her eyes filled with tears. He slipped an arm around her, hugging her close. ‘Hush, I know,’ he soothed.

  Mariner and Jesson sat still and quiet, observing the scene, trying to remain unobtrusive. Only when he had comforted his wife did Mustafa Shah address himself to them.

  Without the need for communication, there was a tacit understanding that Mariner would now take the lead in questioning. It was an assumption, but based on many years of experience, that Mustafa Shah would respond better to a male. Mariner began with more formal introductions, and he and Jesson showed their identification once again. ‘We need to ask you some questions about the house,’ he began. ‘Did you make the alterations to the building?’

  ‘Yes,’ Shah sat back a little. ‘We built the bedroom on top of the garage first of all, so that my father-in-law could come to live with us. Salwa is an only child. A little later, when we needed more space, we made the garage into an office.’

  ‘And that was what it was used as; an office?’ Mariner checked.

  Shah cast a look at his wife. ‘That was the idea, but it didn’t quite work out like that. You know how things accumulate. We began to put more and more things in there, and so it has become a store room, and the chances of being able to work in there …’ He let them draw their own conclusions.

  ‘The fire investigator has said that there seemed to be mostly paper?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Shah. ‘There are boxes of documents and papers, from my and my father-in-law’s businesses. The premises are small, so there is nowhere to keep anything.’

  ‘Was there anything of value?’ He seemed to be taking it very calmly. ‘Most people these days would have a computer—’

  ‘We hadn’t got that far,’ said Shah. ‘It never became a proper working space. Most of the documents brought here were no longer needed. The plan was to sort through them and destroy most of them and create an archive for any that might be important. You know how it is, I hadn’t started to do that yet.’

  ‘What kind of business are you in?’ Mariner asked.

  ‘Soon after they first came to England, Soltan and some of his friends founded the Yemeni Advice Centre in Sparkhill. Perhaps you know it? It’s a kind of drop-in place for people from the Yemeni community. I qualified as an accountant so mostly I act as a financial advisor, but the nature of people’s problems is ver
y varied, so I help people with all kinds of things; often people who are newly arrived here.’

  ‘And when you did the conversion on Wellington Road, who did the building work for you?’ Mariner asked.

  ‘My friend Adil Tariq. He is a builder by trade. In our community that is often how it works. You help a friend and he will also help you.’

  ‘Did Mr Tariq do the wiring too?’

  Shah thought for a moment. ‘I think he had someone, a specialist, come in to do that.’

  ‘Yes, you remember,’ said Salwa. ‘The young man.’

  ‘The fire service found some irregularities,’ said Mariner. ‘The work doesn’t conform to safety standards.’

  Perhaps because he was tired and jet-lagged, Salwa Shah understood before her husband did. ‘So the fire might have been an accident?’ she said hesitantly. ‘There was a problem with the electricity?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Mariner said.

  Salwa said something sharply in Arabic to her husband, to which he responded equally curtly. Mariner didn’t understand the words but he felt sure it was along the lines of: I told you we should have got a proper builder. ‘We won’t know for sure until the fire investigators have finished their work,’ he said. ‘There would have been a need for ventilation. Did you ever leave windows open in that room?’

  ‘Not open,’ said Salwa. ‘But one of the windows at the back of the house, it doesn’t fit properly. There is always a draught. We were going to get it fixed.’

  ‘The more positive news,’ said Mariner, ‘is that we should be able to release Mr Ahmed’s body quite soon.’

  ‘Thank you.’ It was Mustafa Shah who spoke but they both looked glad of that. It seemed a reasonable point at which to end the interview.

  ‘Will you be staying here for the moment?’ Mariner asked as he and Jesson stood up to leave.

  ‘We don’t have anywhere else to go,’ said Mustafa Shah.

  ‘When will we be able to go back into the house?’ his wife asked. ‘We need more clothes, and the children would like to have some of their toys.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mariner. ‘Until we know exactly how the fire started, and can be sure about how your father died, it has to remain a crime scene. But if you can put together a list of the things you need, DS Jesson can go and get them for you.’

  ‘I’ll do it now,’ said Salwa. ‘You can wait a few minutes?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mariner.

  Mustafa Shah got up to go and shook hands with them before leaving the room. ‘And when was it that you flew out to Sana’a?’ Mariner asked, before he went.

  ‘It was the weekend before last,’ said Shah. ‘The third.’

  Salwa returned in just a few minutes with a list of about twenty items for Jesson to collect. ‘I think that is all,’ she said.

  ‘You can always let me know if there’s anything else,’ said Jesson.

  ‘But we will be able to go back eventually?’ Salwa wanted to know.

  ‘As long as the structure is safe,’ said Mariner. ‘But it will need a lot of work before you can use that part of the house. We need to have details of insurance policies for the property too. Can you pass them on to my officers as soon as possible?’

  ‘That might be difficult,’ said Salwa. ‘The papers and the details were in the room, I think. But now he is home, my husband will be able to help. We have a good policy.’

  ‘And is that why you had installed the new fire doors?’ Mariner asked. ‘Sometimes it’s a requirement.’

  She gave a wan smile. ‘The doors in the house were in poor condition and needed to be replaced. We thought fire doors would be the best.’

  ‘Not many people would want to go back and live in a house where a close relative has died,’ said Jesson, as she and Mariner drove away a little later.

  ‘Except the Yemen is a poor country,’ said Mariner. ‘I imagine the Shahs came over here with very little. They have to be pragmatic. But the installation of fire doors might also mean a recently taken out insurance policy, and that might be significant.’

  TEN

  Returning to her car in the Tesco car park, Millie felt the buzz of satisfaction that accompanies a restored identity, any doubts she may have had about coming back to work, all but dissipated. She was beginning to feel normal again. From Five Ways she headed back to the south of the city feeling more confident of what she had to do.

  Mariner had intimated to her that the Boswells were wealthy, and nothing said it more than the house that Sam Fleetwood and his fiancée were moving into. It was an imposing detached, built of pale Peterborough brick, and in another league to Sam’s tiny bachelor flat. As Mariner had warned her, it was in the process of being renovated, and still very much a work in progress judging from the three different sizes of workman’s van on the drive. On this warm spring day both front door and double garage were wide open, with the sounds of construction emanating from within.

  ‘Hello?’ Millie called out as she walked into the hall, breathing in the dusty, paint-infused air. The interior had been completely gutted and replaced with all mod cons, including a sleek glass- and-oak staircase that rose up from the centre of wide hallway to a galleried landing.

  A young man in overalls stomped out of one of the rooms in paint-spattered overalls and a woolly hat pulled down over wires trailing each side of his chin. ‘Who’s ’ad my fuckin’ lighter?’ he yelled at no one in particular. Seeing Millie, he stopped short.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for Sam Fleetwood?’

  ‘Huh.’ He snorted. ‘Ted! When’s the last time we saw the tosspot?’ Without waiting for the answer, and still muttering under his breath, he clumped past her and out into the front garden, pulling a tobacco tin from his pocket as he went.

  An older man popped his head out of a nearby doorway, plasterer’s trowel in hand. ‘All right, bab?’ he said. Millie repeated the question and Ted’s mouth turned down as he thought. ‘Mr Fleetwood hasn’t been here for a few days. Last week sometime – Thursday, I think it was. He turned up just as we were leaving.’ He ducked back behind the wall.

  ‘Your friend doesn’t seem to think much of him,’ Millie observed, following him back into what turned out to be an enormous living room.

  ‘Yeah, well, he caught Robbie smoking in here, didn’t he? I told him not to, but he thought he knew better. They haven’t really hit it off since then. It doesn’t help that Mr Fleetwood takes it upon himself to drop by unannounced sometimes, like he’s trying to catch us out.’

  ‘This is going to be quite something,’ Millie said, stepping back to admire the room. It must have been more than thirty feet deep, running from the front to the back of the house, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over decking and the back garden.

  Ted had got back to his plastering. ‘You can say that again,’ he said, smoothing over a patch. ‘No expense spared for the gaffer.’

  ‘You work for Mr Boswell?’ asked Millie.

  ‘Have done for twenty-five years or more.’

  ‘What’s he like as a boss?’

  ‘He’s all right,’ said Ted. ‘Likes things done properly.’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘Oh, especially this. She’s his ray of sunshine all right. Nothing’s too good for her.’

  Millie walked the length of the room towards the back of the house, her shoes crackling as they stuck to the heavy-duty plastic that covered newly sanded floorboards. More polythene was wrapped around a couple of large, bulky objects; brand-new items of furniture, she deduced from the attached department store labels. The windows at the far end of the room turned out to be patio doors, partly open to let in the air, so Millie stepped outside and was startled to see what at first glance looked like a strip of snow at the bottom of the garden, before realising that it was actually the afternoon light reflecting off an expanse of water. The long lawn ran down to what was a small private lake, about the size of a couple of football pitches.

  Ted must have s
ensed her reaction. ‘Comes as a surprise, that, doesn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘I had no idea it was here,’ said Millie.

  ‘Me neither, until we came to do this job,’ said Ted. ‘And I only live over Primrose Hill. That’s a nature reserve on the other side, you know.’

  Stepping off the decking, Millie walked the fifty yards or so down the lawn and looked out across the water, a tranquil wildlife oasis right in the middle of suburbia. Two-thirds of the circumference of the lake was bordered by gardens similar to this one, and a couple of the neighbouring houses even had short wooden jetties with rowing boats moored to them. On the far side, what Ted had called the nature reserve, was a wilderness of trees and reed beds. A heron stood poised on the edge of the water on one leg, watching and waiting for a vulnerable fish, and completely untroubled by Millie’s presence. It crossed her mind that dredging that expanse of water would be a major operation and commitment of resources. But she was getting ahead of herself; there was no reason to think it should come to that. She went back into the house. ‘I wouldn’t mind that view at the end of a busy day,’ she said to Ted, as she passed him and made for the staircase. ‘Do you mind if I take a sneaky look while I’m here?’

  ‘Who did you say you were, bab?’ Ted stopped what he was doing.

  ‘I’m Millie, a friend of Gaby and Sam’s,’ Millie said confidently. For some indefinable reason, she was reluctant to produce her warrant card in here. Instead she held up the house keys. ‘Gaby gave me these and told me to have a look round if Sam wasn’t about. You can give her a call if you like.’

  ‘Nah, you’re all right,’ said Ted, satisfied with the explanation.

  Whilst the ground floor of the house was still being worked on, upstairs looked almost finished, the polished wood floors exposed and the master bedroom complete with super king-sized bed, his and hers walk-in wardrobes, and a luxurious en suite wet room. Although bone-dry now, there were some indications that the shower cubicle might have been used, in the form of a couple of dark hairs on the edge of the plug hole.