Substantial Threat (7 page)

‘JJ's old lady,' interjected Henry. He knew Carrie, too.

‘Yep.'

‘Okay – hypothesis?'

‘Fire gets started somehow. They get trapped, JJ jumps for his life to escape being burned to death, she bottles out and gets fried. How about that?' He sounded doubtful.

‘Sounds okay, so why the hesitation?'

‘Paramedics arrived and found the body here and only then did they notice the flames up above, so it doesn't look like he jumped to escape the flames, because it seems they came after the jump.'

‘Suicide?'

The local detective shrugged. ‘Could be.'

‘But you're not convinced.'

Rik scratched his head and screwed up his facial features. ‘Mm, could be. But why is she dead? Did he kill her after some domestic or other, or some suicide pact, or what? Did he set the place on fire, then jump? . . . Dunno. Some things don't add up, Henry.'

Henry patted him on the shoulder in a terribly patronizing manner and smiled in a fatherly way. ‘Let's go and have a chat with the fire people.'

‘Home Office pathologist is up there, too. Professor Baines . . . I thought it wise to get him in early.'

Henry smiled at the prospect of bumping into Baines.

They were each given a new (stolen) pay-as-you-go mobile phone just in case they needed it for the job. They would be disposed of later, along with their clothing.

Ray switched his on and waited for it to register, then keyed in a number, but disguised his own number by putting ‘141' in front of it first. He put the phone to his ear and eyed Marty and Crazy as he waited for the connection. They were alone in the house now, the Supplier having left a few minutes before. They were drinking water from plastic bottles.

‘Me,' Ray said when the call was answered. He listened intently for a few seconds, said ‘Thanks' and ended the call. ‘It's on,' he said to his two companions.

Crazy stayed outwardly calm. Ray knew that inwardly he would also be calm, because despite his nickname, Crazy loved action, thrived on it.

Marty twitched nervously, making Ray wonder – and not for the first time – whether or not to ditch Marty from the big scheme of things and promote Crazy into his place. He knew it would mean killing Marty if he did that, but such was the way of the world.

‘Your call now.' Ray nodded to Crazy.

Crazy tapped a number into his mobile, had a short conversation then announced, ‘Be here in ten minutes.'

Henry and Rik Dean met the chief fire officer at the front door of the fourth-floor flat. His name was Grant, a large, gruff man who did not really like the police but did not allow this to detract from his professionalism. Henry knew Grant of old, they had once put a serial arsonist away for twelve years by working closely together.

Grant had been inspecting the scene of the fire. He had been a firefighter for as long as Henry had been a cop and he knew what he was talking about, so Henry listened carefully as they walked into the flat.

‘The fire was very much contained in the living area due to the living-room door being closed,' Grant explained. ‘Closing doors is a simple but effective way of holding back a fire.'

‘I'll remember that,' Henry said.

Grant gave him a stern look which cracked into a little smile.

The living room was a blackened, burned, charred mess. Everything had been touched by flames. The walls were black, the TV had melted where it stood and the furniture was completely destroyed with the exception of any metal parts, such as springs.

Henry stood on the threshold, not wanting to enter and disturb evidence. He let his eyes wander. At first glance he could not distinguish a body. He looked harder and saw the outline of what had once been a living, breathing human being among the charred debris of what had once been the settee.

He gasped. Though death was his trade, it never failed to touch him somewhere inside. He could be as cold and clinical as anyone while dealing with it, but he was unable to ever quite detach himself from the thought that he was dealing with something that had once been alive.

A firefighter was still dousing down the mess which smouldered with the possibility of re-ignition. This was okay and necessary, but it didn't half destroy evidence. Henry winced at the thought.

‘Had a good look,' Grant, was saying. ‘It was an extremely hot fire because of the foam in the settee, which was also the seat of the fire. Until everything has been doused down, I can't say for sure, but I'll lay my career on it being a discarded cigarette underneath the settee. Caught hold of the rubbish underneath, then whoosh!' Grant's hands explained his words with an explosive gesture. ‘They don't put this sort of filling in furniture these days. It was a very old piece, to say the least – and she was lying on it, poor bugger.'

‘Why didn't she get off, try to escape?' Henry asked.

‘Drink? Drugs? Who the fuck knows?' said Grant. ‘Post-mortem'll tell you that, no doubt.'

‘Would you say the fire was accidental or deliberate?' Rik Dean asked Grant.

There was no hesitation in Grant's response. ‘Accidental. You don't start a deliberate fire by discarding a cigarette and hoping it'll burn a house down.'

Henry turned up his nose doubtfully. That was unless you were a very tricky person, he thought to himself.

‘Still doesn't add up,' said Rik. ‘Why did JJ go out of the window?'

‘Do we know for sure he went out of this window?' Henry put in. ‘At the moment it's only an assumption.'

‘Yeah . . . but . . .' Rik protested.

‘I know, I know.' Henry raised his hands. ‘This is his girlfriend's flat and it's more than odds on he did go from here, but it's not a racing certainty as yet, not until we get our house-to-house teams to knock on every door in this building.'

Rik accepted this. ‘I'll get a couple of guys on to that now.'

‘Good idea.'

‘And I'll go and clean up,' said Grant.

They left Henry standing alone by the door of the living room. He was still amazed by the devastation that fire could bring in such a short time. It was still an assumption that the body on the settee belonged to Carrie Dancing, but he was pretty certain that subsequent examination would reveal that to be the case. Henry liked to deal with facts as opposed to supposition whenever possible. He knew that assumptions did have to be made, particularly in the early stages of an investigation into a suspicious death. The trouble was that assumptions tended to have fangs which had a nasty habit of biting you where the sun don't shine.

He sniffed. He could smell charred flesh. It turned his stomach, making him feel queasy. It was one of those aromas that once inhaled never purged.

Suddenly he was whacked between the shoulder blades. He staggered a couple of steps from the unexpected blow and spun to face his unknown adversary, ready to fight.

‘Jesus!' he said, fists raised defensively.

It was just as well he did not lash out, otherwise he would have punched a Home Office pathologist into next week.

‘Henry, you slimy old twat.' Professor Baines beamed. ‘Back in plain clothes? I knew that uniform business would not last.' He was referring to Henry's recent short but sharp time as a uniformed inspector.

‘Yeah, I'm on the SIO team now,' said Henry, trying to rub his back from the friendly, but hard blow delivered by Baines.

‘Oh, that's handy.'

‘Why?' Henry asked suspiciously.

‘Well, not being one to jump to conclusions . . . but I'm pretty sure this female was dead before the fire cremated her.'

The van arrived on time and drew up in the alley at the back of the terraced house. The driver stayed behind the wheel. He did not sound the horn, just waited with the engine ticking over smoothly. He was not being paid to do anything else.

The three men left the house quietly, walked smartly across the back yard, through the gate and climbed quickly into the back of the van. Ray banged the side of the van and the driver let out the clutch gently and drove away.

A couple of minutes later another vehicle arrived at the back of the house. The man driving it parked in the alley, let himself into the house and collected the three bags of clothes which had been left in the front bedroom. He carried them to the car and threw them into the boot.

Before leaving he checked the house was locked and secure. It would not be used again.

‘Let's assume that JJ and Carrie were at the flat,' Henry said. He was sitting on a low wall some distance away from the block, Rik Dean next to him. Both were sitting on their hands like little lads. They were going through the hypothesis stage of the enquiry, that stage when there were few facts available to them beyond a scene of crime as yet unexamined, and two bodies, neither of which had been post-mortemed. ‘So they have a barney, JJ kills her and then, in remorse leaps to his own death from the window . . . and just by accident, the flat catches fire from a discarded fag.'

They pondered this for a while before turning to each other and going, ‘Naaah!' simultaneously.

‘I've known JJ for a long time and he's really nothing more than a sad old junkie who wouldn't hurt a fly. He's been knocking around with Carrie for donkey's years. They doted on each other in a sort of hippyfied way. I know that anyone is capable of murder, but I can't see him whacking her, but I could be wrong. It just doesn't seem to fit.'

‘Unless someone else did it and pushed him out of the window,' Rik Dean suggested.

‘I like that. It's something we must bear in mind. Let's see how the PMs pan out tonight, but in the meantime let's be making some enquiries into JJ's current lifestyle. See what he's been up to recently.'

The next stage of the mission found the three men arriving at a large garage premises on the periphery of an industrial estate on the outskirts of Bispham, just north of Blackpool. The doors were already wide open and the van was driven in.

Here, they de-bussed with all their gear and transferred it to another vehicle which was waiting for them in the garage. It was a Golf GTi, stolen a couple of weeks earlier from south Manchester, given a new paint job and a set of number plates referring to a clean GTi owned by some poor soul in Derbyshire. Just enough work had been done on it to keep any inquisitive cop at bay for a few minutes at least. It had been stolen for a particular purpose and after today would be delivered to a scrap yard in Rossendale to be crushed into a square no bigger than a cardboard box.

Crazy slid into the driver's seat. He was the wheelman and wanted to get comfortable. He was wearing his latex gloves, pulled tight over his fingers, as were the other two. This would ensure that no prints belonging to them would be found in the car should the police somehow get to it before it became a cube of crushed metal. None of the men had been in physical contact with the car before today.

The garage owner, who ran a profitable sideline ‘ringing' stolen cars, gave Crazy the thumbs up and said, ‘It's a beast, this motor. It won't let you down.'

Crazy nodded.

‘Better fuckin' not,' murmured Marty loud enough for the man to hear. He got into the back seat.

Ray retreated to the far end of the garage, out of hearing, his mobile pressed to his ear. He had a brusque conversation, which ended as he slid his phone into his overall pocket and looked across at the others.

‘It's still on,' he said. ‘Let's go . . . we need to meet Pete.'

With a curt nod to the garage owner, Crazy reversed the GTi out of the premises and turned back towards Blackpool. Ray and Marty slid low in their seats, keeping their chins to their chests.

All three were now beginning to feel the tension.

Henry was in no particular hurry to move Carrie's body, but he did allow JJ's corpse to be moved once it had been photographed, videoed, and given a once-over by scientific support and the pathologist. The paramedics kindly offered to remove it to the mortuary and Henry ensured that a police constable accompanied them in order to provide continuity of evidence.

He let the experts do what they had to do in the flat after he had assessed the scene himself. He was not a hundred per cent convinced there would be much for the SIO team here, other than to lend a guiding hand. If the facts seemed to point to JJ having killed Carrie and then topped himself, it would be pretty much a paper exercise which could be handled locally.

‘You were close by when you got the call,' Rik Dean commented to Henry, more by way of small talk than anything else.

‘Mm,' said Henry. He told Dean why he had been so close and as he told him, something somersaulted into his memory. ‘You were involved in that investigation, weren't you?'

‘Yeah, just took a few statements, that's all.'

Henry frowned. ‘Did you interview Jacqueline, alias Jack, Burrows . . . you did, didn't you?' Henry now clearly recalled seeing Dean's name at the bottom of one of the statement forms in the file.

‘Yeah, yeah, I did.' Rik looked a tad uncomfortable for a passing moment.

‘What did you think of her?'

‘Er . . . who?' he asked dumbly.

‘Jack Burrows,' said Henry, almost spelling the name out.

‘Oh. Okay, I guess.'

‘Did she tell the truth?'

‘Er, I think so.'

Henry eyed Dean thoughtfully, not remotely happy with the response he was getting from the officer. He wanted something meaty, tangible, but all he was getting was the impression that Rik Dean did not want to discuss Jack Burrows. It puzzled and intrigued Henry at the same time.

They were standing on the walkway outside Carrie's flat, leaning on the balustrade overlooking the car park below. Out of the earlier chaos had emerged some sort of order. The fire service was now withdrawing having drenched the flat and probably destroyed any evidence the fire had not. The entrance to the crime scene was now being controlled by a uniformed PC, who was keeping tabs on everyone coming and going, providing people with overshoes and paper overalls, but mainly ensuring that as few people as possible entered the scene in the first place.