A Question of Guilt (2 page)

And then fate took a hand.

It was a wet February day when rain was pouring down relentlessly from a leaden sky. The gusting wind threw it in angry flurries against the windows and roared like a dragon in the chimneys. Last year's leaves lay in sodden piles in the farmyard, mixed with filthy bits of straw and silage and the gateway leading to the lane was ankle-deep with churned-up mud. There was no way I could take my usual constitutional – a short walk to exercise my leg and try to get some strength back into the muscles – and I was feeling even more fed up than usual.

By four o'clock it was almost dark outside, hardly surprising, since it had not been properly light all day. It was warm and bright in the kitchen, though, where I was helping Mum prepare the vegetables for supper. The Aga emitted a comforting glow and the hidden lighting Mum had had put in when they were redecorating a couple of years ago supplemented the big old central fitting that had been there, I sometimes thought, ever since the farm house was built, and which I imagined had once supported an oil lamp.

The small digital radio on the window sill was tuned to the local news programme, but I was only half listening. I'd been away from Stoke Compton so long that the items really struck no chords with me at all, and I found it hard to summon up any interest in road works on the bypass, or a traffic light failure in town. I was far away, in a world of my own.

It was my mother's voice that caught my attention.

‘You have to admire that woman, don't you?'

‘What woman?'

For a moment, Mum didn't answer; she was clearly listening intently to the broadcast, and, curious, I began listening too.

‘I'll never stop fighting for Brian. I'll never give up as long as he's in jail for something he didn't do, while the real culprit is still out there walking free.' There was fervour and determination in the disembodied voice, a fervour that rang out over the air waves. ‘Brian is innocent. I know that as surely as I know anything!'

‘What was all that about?' I asked as the interview concluded.

‘That was Brian Jennings' sister. The chap that started that terrible fire in the High Street – you remember.'

I scraped a satisfyingly long ribbon of skin from a carrot with my vegetable peeler. ‘Vaguely.'

‘Oh, you must remember! It was a terrible to-do.'

I stripped another peeling from the carrot. ‘Mum, I've covered dozens of fires. After a while they all blur into one.'

‘Well, you should remember this one!' Mum sounded a bit put out. ‘Two girls almost burned to death in your own home town! And I'm surprised you haven't heard about the campaign Brian Jennings' sister is running to try and get the case looked into again. She's often on the radio, trying to get someone to listen to her. She's even got the local MP involved, I think, but it doesn't seem to be getting her very far.'

The first little prickle of interest stirred somewhere deep inside me, a sensation I hadn't felt in months.

‘She thinks he was wrongly convicted?'

‘That's what she thinks. I suppose she would, being his sister. And she says she won't rest until justice is done. Like I say, you've got to take your hat off to someone who just refuses to give up, whether they're right or wrong. It can't be easy for her, taking on the powers-that-be as she has.' Mum cocked an eyebrow at me. ‘Have you finished those carrots?'

‘Last one.' I chopped the carrot into roundels and scooped them into the casserole. ‘There you go.' I wiped my hands on the big navy-blue cook's apron I'd borrowed from its place behind the larder door, and perched on one of the high kitchen stools, looking at Mum quizzically.

‘Tell me about the fire, then. What the story was. I know you think I should know, but just refresh my memory.'

‘Let me get this in the oven, and then we'll have a cup of tea and tell you all about it.'

Mum was smiling faintly. I think she was pleased and relieved that at last I was actually taking an interest in something!

The terrible fire started late at night, in an electrical-appliances shop in the High Street, apparently the result of petrol-soaked rags being pushed through the letter box, and had quickly become an inferno. Two girls who shared the flat above the shop had been lucky to escape with their lives. They had been in bed and asleep when the fire started, and if it had not been for a baker on his way to work raising the alarm and managing to get a ladder up to one of the rear windows, the fire would almost certainly have had the most tragic consequences.

‘There was never any doubt but that the fire was started deliberately and eventually Brian Jennings was in the frame,' Mum said, sipping her tea. ‘To begin with everybody assumed it was down to yobs – they were always smashing up the bus shelter or putting a brick through one of the shop windows, that sort of nonsense. Most of the shops in the High Street had got those metal security blinds, but not that one. All he had was a row of concrete bollards to stop ram raids. I think he was struggling, to tell the truth.'

‘So perhaps he started it himself, for the insurance money,' I suggested.

‘That was another theory that was going around, of course,' Mum said. ‘I never did believe it myself, though. He wouldn't risk it – not when he knew there were two girls asleep upstairs.'

‘People do awful things if they're desperate,' I said. I'd come across quite a few instances of unbelievable ruthlessness in the course of my career.

‘Well, it wasn't that, anyway,' Mum said. ‘It turned out he'd let his insurance lapse – couldn't afford to keep up the payments. The fire ruined him – the shop never reopened, not as an electricals store anyway. It's a café now. Very nice, too, they say. They do quite a trade on a Saturday, coffee and cakes, and toasted sandwiches. It's one of the girls who used to rent the flat upstairs that's got it, funnily enough. You'd think she'd have wanted to get as far away from the place as possible, wouldn't you? I know I would, if I'd had an experience like that . . .'

‘Mm, yes.' I shuddered, imagining how terrifying it must have been for them. ‘But what made the police think it was this Brian Jennings and not the yobs? And what on earth possessed him to do something like that?'

Mum shook her head. ‘Who knows? He was a strange one, by all accounts, a real loner, and he'd had a crush on one of the girls for ages. It was a case of “if I can't have you, no one else will”, I think. They found a lot of stuff in his flat, strange stuff, you know what I mean? Pornography, lots of photographs of Dawn that he must have taken with a long-lens camera – and she reckoned he'd been stalking her, hanging around outside, just watching the place, and following her if she went out. I think a couple of witnesses said they'd seen him lurking about on the night of the fire, which put the police on to him. But the final nail in his coffin was when they found traces of petrol in the pocket of his jacket. They had him up in court, and he was found guilty. Arson and endangering life, I think it was. He got put away for a good long time.'

‘But his sister maintains he's innocent?' I said.

‘She does. Poor soul, she's put her life on hold trying to get the case looked at again. She's given up everything, from what I hear, to fight to prove his innocence, and like I say, it's all been for nothing.'

I sipped my tea, but prickles of excitement were darting in my veins as if it were champagne and my brain had gone into overdrive.

It was so long now since I'd been able to go after a story, I'd almost forgotten the adrenalin rush, the singing anticipation. But I was feeling it now.

I didn't know if this Brian Jennings was guilty or not; it could very well be that his sister's love and loyalty was misplaced. But her fight for ‘justice' was a compelling story, and who knew what I might discover if I did some digging into the facts? For the first time in months, I had something other than my own aches and pains to think about. It was a great feeling.

I could hardly wait to begin looking into the case, but, before speaking to Marion Jennings, I needed to have all the information that was out there at my fingertips and decided the best starting point was probably the local newspaper office, where it was sure to be archived. I might have been able to discover most of the facts by going online, but Dad was busy on the computer, bringing his accounts up to date, and in any case I thought I'd get more of a feel for things if I could chat to the reporter who had covered the case. Even if he or she was busy, the girls in the office would probably be able to fill me in on most of the background; the premises occupied by the
Stoke Compton Gazette
were practically next door to the shop that had been petrol bombed.

‘There's no chance you're going into town today, I suppose, Mum?' I asked, as we shared a cup of coffee in the kitchen.

‘You mean
you'd
like to go into town?' Mum gave me a straight look, but the corners of her mouth were turned up into a half smile.

‘Well . . . yes . . .'

‘I usually do my supermarket shop on a Friday . . .' This was Wednesday. ‘But if you give me half an hour to check the cupboards and see what we need, I don't suppose there's any reason why I shouldn't do it today.'

‘I wasn't really thinking of going to the supermarket,' I said.

‘No, I know you weren't. But if I dropped you off in town, did my shopping and popped back to pick you up . . . How long would you need?'

‘How long does it take you to do your shopping?'

‘A couple of hours, usually.'

‘That would be great.'

I still hated being dependent on other people, even my mum, but I wasn't going to think about that now.

‘OK,' Mum said, and then, as if she'd read my thoughts, she added: ‘You'll soon be able to drive yourself again. And your dad's car is an automatic. You'd better start wheedling your way into his good books.'

My spirits lifted another notch. She was right. I probably could manage an automatic. And though Dad could be crusty, and he'd always been fiercely possessive about his car, I could usually twist him round my finger.

‘Not this morning, though,' Mum said with a smile. ‘He's never in the best of tempers when he's got to do the accounts, and he wouldn't thank you for interrupting him.'

She found a pencil and one of the envelopes discarded from the morning's mail and began opening cupboards.

‘Go and get ready, Sally. This won't take me long.'

The rain had stopped overnight, but the sky was still grey and leaden, and the air felt cold and clammy. As Mum drove slowly up the track that led to the lane beyond, the wheels sunk into patches of thick mud and splashed through puddles. The lane was not much better; a delivery van came up behind us, tailgating in his impatience to overtake, and splattering grime all over the rear windscreen of Mum's little hatchback.

‘White-van man,' I said, through gritted teeth. ‘I didn't know they'd infested the country too.'

‘Oh yes.' Mum shook her head as the van finally took his chance and roared past. ‘I just hope we don't round the corner and find him crashed into a tractor or a hedge cutter.'

‘Or some innocent motorist coming the other way.'

‘He's headed for trouble in these winding lanes, that's for sure,' Mum said.

But this time, it seemed, white-van man had got away with it. We didn't see hide or hair of him again, and soon we were approaching the outskirts of Stoke Compton.

‘Where do you want me to drop you?' Mum asked.

‘The High Street would be good.'

As we turned into it, Mum nodded her head to the left.

‘That's where the fire was; like I said, it's a café now.'

I looked in the direction she was indicating and saw a large plate-glass window bearing a bright, arched logo –
Muffins.

‘They put tables and chairs outside on the pavement in the summer,' Mum said, but I was looking up at the windows above the café frontage, small casements, and the dark, funnel-shaped stain still evident on the grey stone of the wall.

For all that I'm a seasoned reporter, used to remaining uninvolved no matter how traumatic the scenario I'm faced with, a small chill prickled over my skin. Perhaps because this was my hometown, the place where I'd grown up and always felt safe; perhaps because I was going soft. It was a year now since I'd had to deal with the harsher side of life – apart from my own problems. I hadn't had to attend road accidents where people were trapped in cars, I hadn't been standing on the bank when bodies were pulled out of the river, I hadn't had to try to interview grieving relatives or horribly mutilated soldiers wounded in Afghanistan. This was nothing compared to some of the stories I'd covered in the past. Just a fire – nobody had died. And yet it was getting to me.

Fire has always frightened me, I must admit. There is something about the relentless roar of flames and clouds of thick black smoke, the crash of falling masonry and roofs caving in, the awesome power of a blaze that has really taken hold, that gets to me on a very primitive level. And afterwards, the charred devastation, dripping water, the smell . . . it frightens me and also fascinates me. But even so . . . it was weird that I was reacting so strongly to the scene of a fire that happened five years ago. I really needed to toughen myself up again!

Mum pulled into a space by the kerb.

‘Will this do?'

‘Fine.'

‘I'll see you here then – or as close to here as I can get.' She checked the dashboard clock. ‘Midday – OK?'

‘OK.' I opened the car door and got out, holding on to it while I retrieved my crutches from the rear seat. Managing without crutches was something else I was going to have to get used to, but this morning, not being sure how long I was going to be on my leg, or how far I would have to walk, I'd brought them with me.