After the Fire (24 page)

Claudine lifted her chin. ‘We’ve told you what we know. Now I’d like you to leave.’

‘If you think of anything,’ I said, slightly hopelessly, ‘here’s my card.’ I held it out. None of them moved to take it. A hand came from behind me and snapped it out of my fingers: Claudine’s bodyguard. I had forgotten him, which was unwise, and I hadn’t heard him move, which was unsettling. Derwent would have been livid with me, and rightly.

‘Mrs Cole asked you to leave,’ he said.

‘I’m going.’

He was standing much too close to me, so close I could see the fine grain of his skin. There was something strange about his eyes behind the glasses and it took me a moment to realise what it was: he had no eyelashes. He jostled me as I stepped past him, hard, and I could have arrested him for it if I’d wanted to, for assault on a police officer, if I’d been being aggressive. If I wanted to leave them feeling intimidated and violated, all over again. I put my hand to my belt where my baton sat, my sleek extendable Asp, snug in its holster. I flicked open the Velcro on it so I could take it out quickly, but I left it where it was.

And I was right to wait. One shove was enough to relieve his feelings. He stood, breathing hard through his nose, holding himself back with what looked like a tremendous effort.

I walked out of the flat, feeling the air crackle with hostility as I went. I didn’t blame them for hating me. I represented the Metropolitan Police.

For once, I wasn’t proud of that.

I REALLY DIDN’T
want to spend any more time on the Maudling Estate than I had to. In my mind I was already back in the office as I ran down the stairs and out across the car park. But I stopped beside the car, looking up at Murchison House, thinking about what a good opportunity it was and how turning my back on it was cowardly at best, unprofessional at worst. I squared my shoulders and went into Murchison House, ducking under the police tape. Somewhere high above me there was the sound of hammering. Otherwise the building was as silent as a tomb. My heels sounded too loud on the concrete floor as I ran up the stairs, counting off the floors. On the eighth floor I stopped to get my breath back and to look at a stain on the wall: dried blood, I thought. It was about five feet off the ground, and there was a further smear on the door that led into the hallway. I pushed it open carefully, and stepped inside. The hall was dark, lit only by the open staircase at one end. I took out my torch and flashed it around, seeing a dry and flaking substance on the ground. I squatted down beside it and caught a whiff of old vomit that made me turn my head away. This was where Melissa Pell had been attacked, I thought, standing up again. This was where she had been sick after her eye socket was fractured, an injury so painful that she’d passed out almost immediately. If the SOCOs hadn’t photographed this scene, they needed to.

I went back into the stairwell and further up, reading the usual graffiti on the way. Long dark streaks marked the places where water from the firemen’s hoses had poured down the walls and steps, as destructive in its own way as the fire. It felt as if the building was about to be demolished, the charges laid, the fuses lit. The hammering got louder the higher I went and I was ready to explain myself to anyone who challenged me, but there was no one on the tenth floor when I leaned into the hallway and looked up and down. Someone had swept a path down the middle of the corridor but I still walked with care, on tiptoe, missing my boots as the sludge that still covered the ground seeped into the leather of my shoes. The wind whined through the devastated flats and I shivered.

The door to flat 103 was open. I walked in, imagining what it had been like before the fire. An empty room. A bedroom with a double bed in it. No pictures on the walls. Nothing personal. A blank space to be filled with a secret fantasy. I crossed to the window, debris and glass crunching under my feet. Someone had put a piece of plywood across the gaping hole, leaving a gap at the top and the bottom. I peered over it, at the yard where Armstrong had landed. They had taken the broken bin away. From up here, the fence for the industrial estate looked close. I frowned, thinking about the physics of throwing a small, comparatively heavy object from a height. It didn’t look as if Armstrong had thrown the phone very far at all. If it had been further away from the fence, it might never have come to light. A broken mobile phone wouldn’t mean much to whoever found it outside their factory unit, if they found it at all.

Armstrong had been tall. I remembered his body as it lay on the slab in the morgue. He’d looked fit for his age, softer than a young man but still muscled. I couldn’t see him being so feeble about throwing away his phone if that was what he was determined to do.

If he’d thrown it away himself, of course.

I took out my own phone and left a message for Kev Cox, aware of how loud my voice sounded in the hush of the abandoned building. The problem with Armstrong was that no one would admit knowing anything. The man was toxic, in death as in life. At least the phone couldn’t lie to us.

When I’d hung up I looked out again, at the long drop. All too easy to imagine Armstrong’s body tumbling through the air, a dead weight falling to a shattering impact. My knee nudged some broken glass from the window frame over the edge and it bounced and skittered down the building. It was before noon but the November light was flat, lifeless as dusk, and the glass fragments disappeared into the gloom. The effect was hypnotic. I caught myself leaning too far forward, off balance, and pulled back before I tipped over the edge.

And heard something behind me. It was a shift in the air, a whisper of movement that had no obvious source when I whipped around. The scorched room was empty, the doorway beyond it blank. I listened, eyes wide, my heart thumping. The hammering had stopped. The wind keened. I breathed as shallowly as possible. My phone was in my hand but I swapped it for my radio. I had access to the full might of the Met with one touch of the emergency button that way, and a GPS location for anyone who responded, which would be everyone. My other hand went to my belt, looking for my Asp, and found air. I looked down, unable to believe it. I’d had it earlier. I thought back to the car, to Mrs Cole’s flat, to walking up the stairs in Murchison House. It had been on my belt then, hadn’t it? I remembered the weight of it. Or I was imagining that I remembered it. The images spooled in my mind: crouching down on the eighth floor to look at the pool of dried vomit, or off balance as Claudine Cole’s bodyguard knocked into me, when I’d opened the Velcro that kept it in place. And he’d backed off suddenly – too suddenly? Because he had got what he wanted?

And yet it didn’t matter where or how I’d lost it. It was gone.

I took out my torch instead, a heavy one with a rubber grip. It wasn’t standard Met issue. Like most police officers, I upgraded my kit whenever it was necessary, because what the bosses deemed good enough was hopelessly inadequate on the street.

And I was feeling fairly inadequate myself. I had been a decent response officer in my time but I was out of practice. I was also lacking in the basic amenities such as CS spray or, better yet, a Taser. I crept across to the doorway, moving as quietly as I could, testing each place I put my feet before I trusted my weight to it. I kept my thumb on my radio’s red button. When I reached the doorway I listened again, then peered around the frame as slowly and cautiously as I dared, half-crouching, ready to defend myself.

The room was empty, as it had been before. Nothing had changed. Nothing moved. The door stood a couple of inches ajar, showing me a sliver of empty hallway outside. I eased myself upright, feeling stupid, breathing again. There was nothing to fear here except shadows. I shoved my torch into my bag and headed for the door. I reached out to pull it open, and my fingers just grazed the latch before it jerked out of my reach and slammed shut. The wind, the logical part of my mind told me as terror caught in the back of my throat. I scrabbled for the latch, my nails dragging through the soot that coated the back of the door, leaving white furrows in the grime. The latch turned in my hand but the door didn’t move; it didn’t shift so much as a millimetre when I tugged on it.

Locked.

Stuck
.

Deliberate.

Accident
.

I could have argued with myself all day and it wouldn’t have made any difference. It really didn’t matter how it had happened. The result was the same. I was trapped. I put my ear to the wood, trying to hear if anyone was moving around outside. All I could hear was my own blood shuttling around my body at a pace too rapid for comfort. The glass in the peephole was dirty brown from smoke damage and there was no way to see through it, to see who was standing on the other side of the wood, if anyone.

I stood for a second, trying to calm my racing thoughts. If someone had locked me in –
if
– they wanted me in here, on my own, unable to escape. If they’d wanted to attack me, they had their choice of locations. There were plenty of places to lurk in the deserted tower block, many of them out of earshot of help. So an attack wasn’t the ultimate goal.

So I should calm down.

And I should get the hell out of flat 103.

But in case it was an accident, I’d try to do it without using my radio. I didn’t want to call for help because I’d wandered into an unsafe building unannounced and got stuck. Derwent would never let me live it down. I’d be buying doughnuts for the team for ever, the price paid for rank stupidity at work.

Fear of embarrassment was probably going to get me killed one of these days.

I started to rap on the door with my hand, then switched to the base of the torch, swinging it as hard as I dared against the wood. There were people in the building, I knew. People who wouldn’t mock me for getting locked into an unattended crime scene.

No matter how hard I listened, I didn’t hear the sound of the cavalry arriving. I hurried over to the other side of the flat to look out of the window. Down below – far down below – a hard-hatted builder with a plank over his shoulder was walking through the bin yard. I leaned out of the window and yelled.

‘Hey! Up here! Bit of help, please?’

It took two or three goes to get him to look up, probably because builders were more accustomed to shouting at women than to having women shout at them. He tilted his hard hat back and stared.

‘I’ve got stuck in flat 103. The door won’t open. Can you get someone to let me out?’

Vacant staring. He couldn’t hear me, or he didn’t speak English, or he didn’t care.

I tried again, and this time I added, ‘I’m a police officer.’

Maybe that was what made him put the plank down and walk away, and maybe it wasn’t. Minutes passed, slowly. I paced up and down, slithering a little where the floor was uneven. The cold in the flat was starting to get to me, making me shudder. That and the fear, but I wasn’t admitting that to myself. More time passed and I scolded myself for assuming the builder had disappeared because he was coming to help me. Possibly he’d gone home.

A noise in the corridor made me whirl around, my heart thudding again. Safety or danger. Rescue or attack. I took up a position a long way back from the door, holding my radio and my torch.

‘Hello? Miss?’

‘In here,’ I called, not getting any closer to the door. ‘Can you help me?’

Something scraped on the outside of the door and there was a clatter, followed by a thud. The door burst open and the builder half-fell into the room. He was young, fair, and extremely surprised to find me standing in the burned-out flat.

‘Are you okay?’ His accent was strong, but I didn’t know where he was from: a couple of years ago Poland would have been a safe bet but he could have been from pretty much anywhere in Eastern Europe.

‘I’m fine.’ I held up my warrant card. ‘I’m investigating the fire here.’

‘Okay.’ He shrugged, obviously puzzled. ‘Well, now you can go. Door is open.’

‘Thanks. Thank you for helping me.’

‘Okay.’ A faint smile, but a wary one.

I walked out past him, into the hallway, but then paused. ‘The door … Did you see what was keeping it from opening?’

‘Stopped.’

I frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Someone put wood under.’ He pronounced it ‘voad’ and it took me a second to work out he was indicating the spar of burned wood that lay on the floor in the hallway.

‘This, you mean?’

‘Yes. Is under. Like this.’ He showed me, pulling the door closed and shoving the wood underneath so it was jammed in place. ‘No one can open with wood like this.’

I felt unease prickle over my skin. ‘So it was deliberate. Someone locked me in.’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Damn it,’ I whispered. ‘Okay. Thank you again.’

‘Okay,’ he said again, with a more confident smile. ‘Be careful.’

‘I will.’ I picked my way down the hall, into the stairwell, feeling anything but safe. Who had trapped me? Someone who wanted to tell me I was neither safe nor welcome on the Maudling Estate. Claudine Cole’s bodyguard? Someone else? Not my tormentors from before: they would have come into the flat and shut the door and taken their time with me.

And I hadn’t seen them once since I’d been investigating the fire. I needed to forget about them. They had almost certainly forgotten all about me.

I went down the stairs so fast I felt dizzy, counting off the floors one by one. Every sound that echoed through the building made me jump. I edged open the door to the hallway on the ground floor before I pushed it all the way back, in case someone was waiting there. I looked through the glass panel in the door that led to the car park too, peering out. There was my car, not far away.

Get in, drive off.

Think about who needs to know about this later.

I shoved open the door and ducked under the police tape again, striding towards my car with the key already in my hand. I checked my surroundings as I went, hoping that it looked casual. I was trying to spot any movement in the car park, anyone lurking in the shadows, but I didn’t want them to know I was looking. That I was running scared was not what I wanted to convey to anyone watching. A police car went past on the main road, the siren wailing, blue lights flashing, and I felt encouraged. Help wasn’t all that far away, if I needed it.