The Burning (3 page)

Minutes seemed to pass before they arrived at the roundabout just shy of the bridge. Her relief at reaching the mid-point of the journey was short-lived – a dull orange glow sharpened into
illuminated letters on an electronic sign as they approached their intended exit: BRIDGE CLOSED. Now they would have to follow a diversion to the new Severn Crossing along a ten-mile stretch of
empty motorway that passed over the Magor flats. Staying as close to Ryan’s rear bumper as she dared, Jenny fought against a rising sensation of anxiety that was tightening the muscles
beneath her ribcage. ‘Toughen up, Jenny,’ she said out loud to herself. She was supposed to have left behind the symptoms that had dogged her for so many years. No panic attacks for a
year or more. No medication; only a little wine to lighten her mood at the end of a long day. She told herself she should have stayed at home. Most coroners would not have dreamt of visiting a
scene of death – the legal requirement to view a body
in situ
had been abolished more than thirty years ago – but despite having every excuse not to, Jenny had never quite
managed to quell a compulsion to take the feel of a scene of death herself.

A sharp and unexpected noise startled her. It was only the phone ringing through the loudspeakers, but her heart beat harder as she fumbled for the answer button located in the centre of the
steering wheel.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that you, Mrs Cooper?’ It took Jenny a moment to register that the voice belonged to Alison. Her officer had been signed off sick since her accident the previous summer. They
hadn’t spoken since early December, after Alison’s last visit to the consultant neurologist who had brought her back from the dead. She sounded excited, as if she had important
news.

‘Alison. How are you?’ Jenny said, covering her surprise. ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’

‘No. It was a complete pain. Couldn’t wait for it to be over.’ Alison had woken from a month-long coma the previous summer minus many of her former inhibitions. ‘I could
have murdered my daughter and her partner by Boxing Day.

You think old married couples snipe at each other – try sharing your flat with a couple of lesbians.’ Her frontal lobe – the part of the brain that controlled appropriate
social responses – had had a shard of bone driven through it. On the plus side, Alison seemed untroubled by the fact that a portion of her skull had been replaced by a metal plate. Nor did
she seem to regret that she had nearly killed herself by deliberately driving into the path of a car that had been aiming itself at Jenny. In fact, as far as Jenny had been able to tell, the whole
horrific incident remained a gaping blank in her memory.

‘Sorry about the call from DI Ryan,’ Jenny said. ‘He was given your number by his super. He can’t have known you were off work.’

‘Oh, he knows all right. Sam Abbott and I are old mates – we were at training college together. I expect he thought I’d be interested. I was also a DS on the original
Blackstone Ley case back when he was just a humble inspector.’

Jenny was confused. ‘Which case was this?’

‘You remember – the four-year-old girl who disappeared. Susie Ashton. About ten years ago.’

Ashton
. Jenny repeated the name to herself.
Blackstone Ley
. The village had sounded vaguely familiar when Ryan first mentioned it, but she hadn’t known why. But now she put
it together with the name Susie Ashton a host of images flooded into her mind: a small, fair-haired girl with pigtails and big, trusting eyes. Dignified, well-spoken parents hounded on their
doorstep by slavering journalists. Daily speculation that had grown more and more prurient and grotesque. Jenny had been working for the local authority as a child-protection lawyer at the time and
the case had hit a nerve. As she recalled, the mother had left the child playing in the front garden by herself for only a few minutes, during which time she had vanished forever. She remembered
the outrage and indignation that had focused on the quiet, unremarkable woman. After the initial round of sympathy, the newspapers had turned, hinting through increasingly vicious innuendo that she
was involved in the murder of her innocent child.

‘I do remember her. Yes. I just hadn’t put it all together,’ Jenny said.

‘We never found the bastard,’ Alison said, ‘but I bet we have now. That’s why he’s done it – guilt. I met Ed Morgan, interviewed him three times. Always
played the clueless country boy. He was out in the forest at the time, he said – by himself, of course. No alibi. I hate to think what he did to those girls before he set fire to the
place.’ She paused, then abruptly changed tack – another symptom of the head injury. ‘I’ve got a driving test tomorrow morning. With any luck, I’ll have my licence
back by lunchtime.’

‘Right. Good luck with that,’ Jenny said distractedly, scarcely noticing Ryan’s lights fading altogether from her view. Her thoughts were suddenly focused on the realization
that she was dealing with far more than a suicidal man who had taken his family with him. The Gloucestershire police had been castigated for their failure to solve the Susie Ashton case; Blackstone
Ley held bad memories and the potential for many ugly column inches. It wouldn’t have been Superintendent Abbott’s decision alone to close the criminal investigation and pass the file
as quickly as he could to the coroner: she had no doubt that it could only have been done with the chief constable’s approval.

‘You know what that means, don’t you?’ Alison said.

Jenny didn’t answer.

‘Are you still there, Mrs Cooper?’

‘Yes?’

‘I can come back to work.’ Jenny only half registered her words. ‘I can’t wait. You know your life’s come to a dead end when you end up playing internet bloody
bingo all day.’

‘Oh. Right . . .’ Jenny floundered, finally realizing what Alison had said. ‘We should talk about this. You might need to have an assessment.’

‘Sod that, Mrs Cooper. There’s nothing wrong with me. You’re my employer – it’s up to you whether you think I’m fit for purpose. If I’m no use, you can
kick me out again.’

Jenny struggled for an answer. ‘What are we – Wednesday? Why don’t you come in Friday morning? We’ll talk then.’

‘I’ll be there at nine. You know the locals were all lying for each other?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Jenny had lost her thread, still absorbed with thoughts of the chief constable.

‘At Blackstone Ley. Keep up. Someone there knew about Ed Morgan, I’d bet my life on it.’ Alison rang off abruptly without a goodbye.

Ryan’s lights had vanished. Jenny found herself alone, floating in white space with no idea what lay ahead.

The fog hung heavily all the way along to Magor and over the river, then, for no discernible reason, began to disperse as Jenny made her way north-east along the southern shore
of the estuary, allowing her glimpses of the fields beyond the hedgerows that lined the network of lanes linking the farms and villages of South Gloucestershire. She drove through the deserted
market town of Thornbury and headed a further five miles through frozen countryside. She was only thirty minutes from the centre of Bristol, but this was a landscape, sparsely dotted with stone
cottages and Georgian farmhouses, that hadn’t altered in decades. A piece of old England suspended in time.

A left turn off the main road took her a little over a mile over a hill and down a steep lane into the tiny village – if it could be called that – of Blackstone Ley. A dozen or so
houses were positioned haphazardly around the outside of several acres of rough common set at the foot of a densely wooded hillside. Some were quaint cottages, others were twentieth-century
additions. A squat medieval church with a square Norman tower stood at the far end. Denuded of the families of agricultural labourers who at one time would have worked the surrounding land, the
community was now too small to sustain a pub or a shop. Continuing around the edge of the common, Jenny spotted a cluster of cars and vans next to the burned-out shell of a two-storey house.
Alongside them stood a large bright-yellow caterpillar-tracked vehicle with a three-pronged metal claw at the end of a long hydraulic arm. As she drew closer, she saw Ryan emerge from a group of
detectives and forensics officers dressed in their distinctive blue paper overalls. He waved her over, directing her to park her Land Rover on the verge behind his Toyota.

Ryan came up to meet her as she stepped out from the comfort of her car into the piercing cold. ‘Got here just in time. Held them off for you. They’re just about to lift the human
remains if you’re interested.’

‘Thanks. That’ll be a treat.’

Ryan glanced over his shoulder. ‘Hold on a moment.’

Jenny followed his gaze and saw two female police officers, one in uniform, the other in plain clothes, with a slightly built woman huddled in a bright-pink hooded anorak. They were leading her
away from the house towards a squad car.

‘Is that the mother?’

Ryan nodded. ‘They wanted her to confirm a few things about the layout. She volunteered.’

Kelly Hart’s face was hidden beneath her hood. Her hands were clasped tight under her folded arms. She wore jeans that hugged slender legs and pink trainers that matched her coat. The
women police officers shepherded her into the back seat of the car and drove her away. As they passed, Jenny briefly caught sight of Kelly’s face as she pulled down her hood and wiped her
eyes with the back of her hand. She was unusually pretty, even in the depths of grief.

Ryan led the way through the parked vehicles and past police officers who were sharing a joke with three men Jenny recognized as local undertakers.

‘Where’s the mother staying?’ Jenny asked.

‘They’ve got her a flat in Bristol,’ Ryan said. ‘We’re trying to keep the press off her back for now. You know what those vultures are like.’

They arrived at the front of the house. There was an open gateway in a low brick wall and a short, concrete slab path leading to the ruin. Only the rear and right-hand walls still stood; both
were stained black with soot. Three white plastic sheets weighted down with orange cones were arranged in a row on the churned-up patch of lawn at the left side of the house. Nearby was a pile of
scorched metal wreckage.

‘Sure you want to see them?’ Ryan asked.

‘Maybe I’ll wait,’ Jenny said, the acrid smell of charred timber catching in the back of her throat.

She peered at the heap of bricks and tiles, then picked her way across the muddy garden, passing the plastic sheets covering what she guessed were nothing more than blackened skeletons.

‘Big place for a council house,’ Jenny remarked.

‘Not bad at all,’ Ryan said. ‘But you’d have to stick living next to those woods. I wouldn’t sleep at night.’

Jenny pointed to the heap of metal. ‘What was that – a gas tank?’

‘For the central heating. Set too close to the property. Went off like a bomb, witnesses said.’

Jenny’s eyes travelled over the unkempt garden. A child’s ride-on tractor lay on its side next to a rusting swing. A deflated football was decaying in a clump of weeds. Glancing back
at the side wall of the house she noticed several large, rectangular, light-coloured patches on the brickwork. She stepped closer, realizing that the discolouration had been caused by chemicals
used to scrub off graffiti.

‘Have you seen this?’

Ryan wandered over and joined her.

‘What do you know about it?’

Ryan shrugged. ‘First time I’ve seen it.’

The outlines of the crudely daubed letters remained ghosted in the pits of the bricks:
FUCK OFF NIGGERS
.

‘Why that, I wonder?’ Jenny said.

‘Kelly’s ex-husband was a black guy. The daughters took after him in looks. People round here don’t get about much.’

‘The family must have reported it. There has to be a record somewhere.’

‘I’ll look into it,’ Ryan said, glancing back over his shoulder at his restless colleagues, now anxious to get the job done and go home to their families.

‘I need someone to take a picture. This is evidence.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Ryan said, as if hoping she might change her mind.

‘You’re not knocking anything down till it’s done.’

He looked at her as if he were about to give her some words of advice, then seemed to change his mind. He headed back to the gate, calling out to ask if the photographer was still there.

Jenny already knew his problem. Somewhere there’d be an entry on a file that said Kelly and her family had been racially harassed, and the chances were the police would have done nothing
meaningful about it. It was the sort of nugget that would make for news copy of just the kind they were hoping to avoid, which made it even more important that she herself didn’t overlook
it.

She walked around to the rear of the house and found a long stretch of lawn, a little wider than the house, that backed onto woodland covering the hillside rising up behind this side of the
common. Jenny registered for the first time that the three sides of the property that didn’t face onto the road were bordered by a head-high post-and-wire fence with a single strand of barbed
wire running along the top. She recognized it as the type of fence that the Forestry Commission erected to keep deer from newly planted saplings, except that to her knowledge Forestry fences
didn’t tend to incorporate barbed wire.

Jenny turned at the sound of voices and saw Ryan giving instructions to a police photographer, telling him to make sure he got clear shots of the faded graffiti.

Leaving him to it, Ryan came and joined her.

‘Certain you don’t want to look at the bodies? Last chance. They’re about to go in the van.’

‘I’ll leave it till the morgue,’ Jenny said, preferring to avoid any disturbing sights that could wait until another day.

Ryan called over to his colleagues out in the lane. The undertakers pulled on facemasks and, carrying a pair of hand-held stretchers, went with two forensics officers to gather up the
remains.

‘What do you make of this fence?’ Jenny said, turning her back on the scene. ‘And if he’s gone to all that trouble, why does it only run around three sides?’