Losing Ground (8 page)

‘Dry land?’

‘Land he can buy that’s not in the flood plain. For houses. Made the committee here an offer for that patch over there behind the practice tee last year but they wouldn’t wear it.’

‘Land for building’s a bit scarce these days,’ offered Ned Phillips. ‘Even I know that, but at least they’ve got Tolmie Park now and there’s plenty of ground over there.’

‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ said Jock Stirling tightly. ‘Some clever dick had ideas one time about turning the park into one of those pay-and-play golf courses and the old building there into apartments for a Dormyhouse to give the golfers somewhere to stay.’

‘Really?’ Ned Phillips looked interested. ‘How did you feel about that?’

The professional held the club he had been polishing at arms’ length and regarded it for a moment before putting it back on the rack and selecting another. ‘No skin off my nose if they have an anti-elitist golf course over there. It wouldn’t ever have been a proper club like here. You know, with members and a committee and proper competitions and matches. That sort of thing.’

‘What happened?’

‘Oh, nothing came of it,’ said Stirling. ‘I expect they were held to ransom by the highwaymen.’

‘I don’t get it. What highwaymen?’

‘Highways authorities, then. The county surveyor and his underlings.’ Stirling sniffed. ‘The Highways Department always put their oar in on development. If it generates road traffic, then they don’t like it and it gets the thumbs down.’

‘Waiting for a sweetener?’ suggested the young man. ‘Or a back-hander?’

The golf professional shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who can say? I can’t.’

‘So what happened at Tolmie Park?’

‘The golf project went belly-up and the operator disappeared.’

‘Leaving the field wide open for Berebury Homes, I suppose?’

‘I wouldn’t know about that. I never heard a dicky-bird afterwards about a golf course there.’ He resumed his polishing of the club-head. ‘I suppose doing anything with it is better than doing nothing.’

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Ned Phillips.

‘Then you’re not one of those do-good types all against developing the countryside – oh, no, of course you’re not. Couldn’t work for that outfit if you were, could you?’

‘Not easily,’ said Ned Phillips.

The next visitor to arrive at Tolmie Park was also female and also wearing a hard hat. There the resemblance to the chubby Melanie Smithers, the conservation officer, ended. This woman was tall and willowy and as far as Detective Inspector Sloan could see under the hard hat, ash blonde. She was wearing white overalls and walked with the panache usually associated with the fashion catwalk.

She swept past Crosby with a winning smile, calmly lifted the tape clearly reading ‘P
OLICE
– D
O
N
OT
C
ROSS
T
HIS
L
INE
’, and advanced towards Sloan.

‘Colleen Murphy,’ she murmured in a soft Irish accent. ‘Calleshire Fire Service.’

‘Ah, miss…that is, madam…’ he started to respond as she approached.

‘Doctor,’ she corrected him sweetly. ‘Fire Forensics Investigator.’ She gazed at the charred site. I’m told Sub-Officer Burton should be around.’

Sloan pointed to Charlie Burton, just coming into sight round a corner of the wrecked part of the building.

‘Dear man,’ she murmured.

Unclear whether she meant Charlie Burton or himself, Sloan nevertheless felt curiously uplifted.

‘Unaccidental fire,’ said Burton briefly. ‘Window forced on the far side. Slight smell of accelerant when we arrived but you never can tell exactly which one.’

She flashed him a little smile. ‘Never. Were there any witnesses?’

‘One,’ said Burton, ‘who has so far chosen to remain anonymous.’

‘Dear, dear,’ said Dr Murphy. ‘That won’t do at all. And the building empty, you say?’

‘Everyone says so. Waiting for final planning approval, I understand,’ said Burton.

Dr Murphy cast her gaze over the jumble of burnt wood and fire-blackened bricks. ‘Where would you say the seat of the fire was?’

‘Point of origin thought to be in the outer corner of the ballroom here,’ replied Burton, jerking a thumb in that direction. ‘It’s the most damaged part.’

‘Furthest away from the main part of the building,’ mused Dr Murphy, turning and looking the other way, ‘and the double doors leading to the old part, scorched but still closed.’

‘Still locked, too,’ said Charlie Burton.

‘So someone didn’t want it to spread too far,’ she concluded aloud.

What Detective Inspector Sloan concluded was that brains and beauty could sometimes go together.

‘Whether they did or not, we contained it within the hour,’ said Burton.

‘Well done,’ she said absently. ‘How long would you say it had been alight before you got here?’

Burton wrinkled his forehead in deep thought. ‘Best part of an hour at least.’

‘Presumably whoever had set it would want to be sure it had caught,’ put in Sloan diffidently, ‘before they rang you people.’

He was rewarded with a kindly smile from Dr Murphy. ‘That’s what we usually find, Inspector.’

Charlie Burton swiftly reasserted himself. ‘Then it mushroomed to the ceiling. That’s when the roof went.’

‘Just for the record,’ said Dr Murphy, producing a notebook the size of a powder-compact, ‘can you tell me about any fire alarms in this part of the building?’

‘There weren’t any in use,’ said Burton, adding pithily, ‘No one to hear them out here if there were.’

‘And electricity?’

‘Switched off at the mains,’ replied Burton. ‘First thing we checked.’

Dr Colleen Murphy then proved beyond any doubt that she was a child of her time by asking why the empty building hadn’t been vandalised long before now.

Detective Inspector Sloan, a policeman of his time, too, answered that one. ‘Gates too securely fastened for a car to get through in the ordinary way.’ The fire brigade’s bolt cutters would have made short work of them but that was something different. ‘And we’re really out in the sticks here. Your average yobbo wouldn’t fancy walking up the drive here. Too much like hard work.’

‘So no car wheel tracks to tell us anything,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Now, were there any casualties?’

‘Yes,’ said Burton, fire officer.

‘No,’ said Sloan, detective inspector.

She looked enquiringly from one to the other.

‘There were some remains…’ said Burton. ‘Bones.’

‘But thought not to be human,’ said Sloan.

‘Animal casualties, then?’ she said.

‘Perhaps,’ said Sloan. ‘And the pathologist says there were some broken shells – lobster, he thinks – under them.’

She turned and fluttered at him the longest eyelashes Sloan had ever seen. ‘Thermidor, you might say.’

‘Very probably,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘If that means cooked.’

‘A tramp’s supper?’ She raised an elegantly arched eyebrow.

‘Possibly.’ Sloan hurried on, ‘Our local preservation society, though, has a distinctly maverick member. He’s given to stunts – anything to raise the profile of an endangered building.’

The finely etched eyebrow went up further still. ‘By burning it down?’

‘No, no. But perhaps by buying time to assemble opposition. And by planting something like animal bones and shells for us to find to confuse matters.’

‘Away from the seat of the fire?’ she said, ‘to be sure you did find them?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And sending for us,’ put in Burton, putting his oar in with what Sloan considered quite unnecessary vigour, ‘just in time for us to find them before the roof falls in.’

‘It’s been done before,’ said Dr Murphy. ‘Many times.’

‘Dr Dabbe says they’ll all have been calcined long before anyone could have got to them,’ said Sloan. Dizzy blondes weren’t supposed to be so knowledgeable.

‘So we’ll need a species specific microsatellite marker,’ she sighed.

‘But Dr Dabbe’ll be letting us know all he can,’ said Sloan, since as far as he was concerned Dr Murphy might have been speaking in tongues.

‘And us, too, all in good time, I’m sure.’ She gave both men a dazzling smile. ‘Now, what you need to watch out for are two fellows calling themselves loss adjusters and loss assessors. They’re like Kilkenny cats together and they’ll each want access here before the other and you’ll be darlings, won’t you, and not let either of them on site until I give the word.’

‘Right,’ said Burton before Sloan could speak.

‘Certainly not,’ said Sloan stoutly.

Dr Colleen Murphy turned round and indicated Detective Constable Crosby, still guarding the entrance to the fire-damaged site. ‘Now, do you think that the dear boy over there would let my two assistants through that barrier of his? I can see that they’ve just arrived.’

This time the glow did not extend to Detective Inspector Sloan.

‘Well?’ said Jeremy Stratton, the planning officer, when Melanie Smithers arrived back, hot and dusty, at the Berebury Council offices. ‘Tell me all. Who’s done what exactly?’

‘Someone’s set the Victorian bit alight,’ said the conservation officer, wrinkling her nose, ‘that’s for sure, but I couldn’t get near enough to see if the ballroom had been obscuring a cross-wing on the older part.’

He smiled faintly. ‘We all have our priorities.’

She flushed. ‘Don’t be beastly. The fire hadn’t got that far anyway.’

‘Bad luck.’

‘It’s all very well for you, Jeremy,’ she responded hotly, ‘with your one-man crusade to meet all government house-building targets with the least possible bother to all concerned but let me remind you some of us have other things to consider.’

‘So presumably had the fire-raiser.’

She frowned. ‘That’s what’s so funny. You see, Berebury Homes aren’t planning to do anything they shouldn’t for the old house conservation-wise.’

‘Bully for them.’

‘We haven’t had to object to anything in our department.’

‘That’s suspicious for a start,’ he said sarcastically.

‘Don’t be like that, Jeremy. We’ve always found them very…well, very cooperative.’

‘I should say that makes a change, too.’

‘Yes, it does,’ she admitted, ‘but we at conservation aren’t the stumbling block anyway, are we?’

‘No,’ said Jeremy Stratton immediately, ‘but we at planning are. Seeing as it’s a greenfield site they want to develop and not one in the local plan. I wouldn’t put it past them to argue that the estate is just a garden and therefore a brownfield site.’

Melanie Smithers sighed. ‘No, but large brownfield sites aren’t all that thick on the ground any longer, more’s the pity.’

‘You can say that again, my girl.’ Jeremy Stratton jerked his thumb in the direction of his own office. ‘Every patch of waste land that I can find that isn’t in the flood plain has got its new houses…’

‘It’s awful little boxes,’ said the conservation officer.

‘…on it already and now the developers’ land banks are running low, too.’

‘So that only leaves the greenfield bits like Tolmie,’ she said, adding without heat ‘and by the way I’m not your girl.’

‘And the flood plain. Don’t forget the flood plain, although it isn’t popular with everyone. The insurance companies for starters.’

‘Which should make enabling development for Tolmie Park good news all round,’ she said.

‘But especially for Berebury Homes,’ said Jeremy Stratton. ‘They wouldn’t stand a cat’s chance in Hell of building in those grounds otherwise.’

Melanie Smithers might have been young and inexperienced but she wasn’t silly.

‘Which makes the fire there funnier still, doesn’t it?’

‘Well, sir,’ temporised Detective Inspector Sloan in response to another urgent demand for a progress report from Superintendent Leeyes, ’so far all we’ve got is a sort of a go-ahead from the fire brigade.’

‘Called their dogs off, have they?’

‘Not quite, sir, but they’ve turned their hoses off,’ said Sloan.

‘Comes to the same thing,’ snorted Leeyes.

‘Which means that they’ve more or less left the field free for us.’

‘Keep me in the picture, Sloan,’ said Leeyes. ‘I’ll be in my office.’

Resisting a strong impulse to respond to this, too, Sloan turned back to the fire officer at his side. ‘You were saying…’

‘That there’s one thing I can tell you for free,’ said Charlie Burton as Dr Murphy went over to greet her assistants.

Sloan maintained a commendable silence. He wanted to know more than one thing, much more.

‘And that’s that we were meant to put this fire out before it had spread too far,’ said Charlie Burton.

This was something that Sloan had already worked out for himself. So, no doubt, had Dr Murphy.

‘If,’ said Burton, ‘we hadn’t had that three nines call from the telephone box the whole place would have gone up in smoke before anyone knew there was a fire there.’

‘Talking of smoke,’ said Sloan, ‘surely that would have been seen from the road sooner or later?’

‘You must be joking,’ said the fire officer. ‘No one would have seen anything from the road until the building here was practically a burnt-out wreck.’

‘Which, oddly enough,’ murmured Sloan pensively, half to himself, ‘doesn’t seem to have been what the arsonist had in mind.’

Charlie Burton jerked a thumb. ‘Remember, when that pile was built the distance from the gate to the house was what mattered to snobs like the Filligrees. The longer the better if you wanted to keep up with the Joneses.’

‘You knew them, did you?’ said Sloan, straight-faced.

‘Not exactly,’ said the fire officer, shaking his head, ‘but my wife’s granny was a skivvy there when she was a girl. Before the war.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘Dunno. Died out, I expect.’ He pushed his helmet back on his forehead. ‘She used to talk about the grand parties they had there in the old days, although she’s really lost it mentally now. All the maids would have new outfits for a really big do.’

‘Other times, other days,’ said Sloan absently. ‘Tell me, does this fire have any of the hallmarks of an insurance job to you?’