The Burning (43 page)

Jenny sighed and texted him back. ‘I’m fine. And yes, he is.’

As she went to slot the phone back in her pocket, Michael texted back – he must have responded instantly. ‘Good. I’m here. M.’

Alison was already waiting on the pavement outside 15 Janus Avenue, between the grubby heaps of melting snow, a small rucksack slung over her shoulder. A short, irritable man
wearing a camel-coloured coat climbed out from a white Mercedes as Jenny approached.

‘This is Mr Hoskins – the owner,’ Alison explained as Jenny joined them.

‘I thought the police had already searched that flat,’ Hoskins said, not troubling himself to say hello.

‘I’m the coroner, Mr Hoskins. My inquiry is quite independent of the police.’ She handed him one of her business cards.

He gave it a cursory glance, unimpressed. ‘His brother’s coming to clear the place out tomorrow. Couldn’t it wait till then?’

‘No,’ Jenny answered coolly. ‘I won’t need to detain you – just as long as you can let us in.’

‘And leave you alone to wreck the place? You must be joking.’ He stomped bad-temperedly to the front door.

Hoskins stood with his arms crossed indignantly over his belly as Alison and Jenny began their search of the four rooms, which seemed to have remained untouched since Jenny’s initial
visit. Jenny went into the bedroom to look through the cupboards and drawers, while Alison went into the bathroom.

‘What are you looking for anyway?’ Hoskins demanded.

‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather not say,’ Jenny said.

‘Not drugs, is it? That’s all I need. Have you any idea how hard it is to let a flat where someone’s topped themselves? You can’t hide a damn thing these days –
it’s all on the bloody internet.’ He called through to Alison. ‘Hey! What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Unscrewing the bath panel. I’ll put it back.’

‘Damn right you will.’

Jenny resisted the urge to slap Hoskins down, reasoning that sooner or later Alison was bound to oblige, and set about searching Daniel Burden’s meticulously organized bedroom. He may have
become a man, but no man Jenny had ever met kept his belongings as neatly. Right down to his socks and underwear, everything was ironed and folded. She went through a chest of drawers, searched the
wardrobe and under the bed, but didn’t find so much as a stray button. The habits he had learned in the Navy had clearly stayed with him: his sense of wellbeing seemed to have been intimately
linked with external order. It was the same in the kitchen. Everything in its place; utensils and crockery gleaming. No superfluous items and scarcely a personal touch. After inspecting one
spotless cupboard after another, Jenny couldn’t help but feel that Burden’s obsession with tidiness was more than just a habit: it was as if he’d been consciously trying to erase
all traces of himself. The rented flat was merely a space he occupied; a temporary way-station on his journey to becoming his true self.

Having drawn a blank, Jenny joined Alison in the sitting room, where she was down on her hands and knees behind the sofa, which she had pulled away from the wall.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Hoskins said. ‘This isn’t going to take much longer, is it? I’ve got to be somewhere.’

‘Please?’ Jenny said, as she stepped past him. She was rapidly becoming impatient.

He snorted and turned into the hall.

Jenny tried not to look at the mini-gym from which Burden’s body had been hanging, and turned her back to it. ‘I can’t see anything that looks like a hard drive.’ Jenny
said.

‘You wouldn’t have,’ Alison said confidently.

‘Oh?’

‘This is the only partition wall in the place. It’s going to be in here. Yes!’

Jenny looked behind the sofa and saw that Alison had removed a small plastic cap that sat at the bottom of a double electric socket.

‘USB port,’ Alison said triumphantly. ‘It’s behind here. I can see where he’s patched the plaster. Pass the hammer would you? It’s in the bag.’

Jenny glanced to the doorway. Hoskins had stepped into the bathroom. She fetched the heavy club hammer from Alison’s rucksack and handed it over.

‘He’s going to love this,’ Alison said, and swung it hard into the wall.

There was a hurried toilet flush and Hoskins emerged red-faced from the bathroom, tugging at his zip. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘Smashing a hole in the wall – what does it look like?’ Alison said from amidst a cloud of dust.

Hoskins’s cheeks puffed up like red balloons as with another big swing the several fist-sized holes she had made became one large one. ‘Now, listen here—’

‘Got it!’ Alison reached through the hole she had punched through the plasterboard and brought out a small black box with two cables attached.

Jenny couldn’t help herself: ‘Don’t worry, Mr Hoskins, by the time we move the sofa back you won’t even notice it’s there.’

When Jenny had finally calmed the irate landlord down and packed him off with a promise to make good the damage, Jenny resolved that her first priority must be to get the
contents of the hard drive copied and safely uploaded to an online storage facility as soon as possible. It wasn’t safe to take it to the office, and Jenny was feeling superstitious enough
not to attempt to drive it all the way home across the Severn Bridge and along the twisting roads of the Wye Valley without having secured the data first. Opting for safety in anonymity, they drove
the short distance to the McDonald’s restaurant at Stoke Gifford. It wasn’t glamorous, but it had free Wi-Fi, and by running Jenny’s laptop on battery and using its power lead to
get the hard drive up and running, Alison was able to hook them together with a USB connector she had picked up at Burden’s flat. While Jenny filled her aching stomach with a tasteless
portion of fries, Alison managed to access the contents.

A list of several hundred files scrolled up the screen. It was immediately apparent that this was the repository of Burden’s entire digital life. A glance at the file names revealed that
here was stored everything from emails to games to favourite music and movies.

Jenny felt briefly overwhelmed at the extent of the material, but Alison quickly homed in on a file named
Idencofit
and clicked it open. The program was huge and took several minutes to
load. Once running, Alison navigated her way through to a sub-file that Jenny was sure she would never have found by herself, which contained the details of the most recent searches. Two rows of
thumbnail photographs came up. Of the twenty or so images, six were headshots of Kelly. The first was a plain passport photograph of the type taken in a pay-booth. The rest had clearly been cropped
out of pictures taken in several different locations. Two looked as if they may have been taken outside the house at Blackstone Ley, and one image showing Kelly in a low-cut blouse with an array of
bottles behind her appeared to have been captured in the bar where she worked.

Alison clicked on the passport photograph, selected the ‘matches’ option from the pop-up menu and a split second later the stored results appeared on the screen.

Jenny froze, her cup halfway to her mouth. Tens of photographs spilled onto the screen, all of different sizes; all harvested from the internet. Every last one was from a newspaper or magazine
and they all featured one of two shots. The first was a posed school portrait of a beautiful, olive-skinned schoolgirl in neat blue blazer, and the second was of the same girl a year or two older,
sandwiched between two much larger female police officers.

Alison clicked on the clearest rendering of the second picture and opted to visit the web page from which it was drawn. Another window opened, displaying an archive article from the
Gibraltar
Chronicle
, dated 13 April 1998. The headline above the picture declared: ‘GIB GIRL NOT GUILTY OF MURDER’.

Jenny’s eyes skimmed over the text below:

‘That’s Kelly,’ Alison said, stating the obvious. ‘From Gibraltar. That must be where she gets her looks from. Two girls.’ The symmetry between
the events of Kelly’s past and present seemed almost too horrible to remark upon. The food lying in Jenny’s stomach had turned to acid. ‘Fifteen yeccan find a picture of Doyle . .
.’

Alison brought up a search engine and entered his name. Amongst the many irrelevant references to different Liam Doyles, numerous reports of his conviction for double murder were returned. She
worked through them all, but none carried a photograph. Being technically a juvenile at the time of his sentence, he had been legally protected from having his image published, and back at the dawn
of the internet such rules, which nowadays were routinely flouted, were capable of being enforced.

‘There. Look. She turned Queen’s evidence against him.’ Jenny pointed to a passage in a report of Doyle’s trial, which stated that Malia Sanders, as she then was, had
been a principal witness for the prosecution. She had told the court that while working as a regular babysitter for the two girls, she had become friendly with Doyle, who worked for the
pool-maintenance company. They soon fell into a sexual relationship which Sanders described as ‘intense and passionate’. On the night the girls died, she claimed Doyle had plied her
with marijuana and alcohol and that she fell asleep on the sofa and later woke to find Doyle gone and the girls dead. Panicking, she fled the scene before their parents returned.

Doyle gave no evidence in his defence. Instead his barrister argued that the prosecution had constructed only a flimsy circumstantial case, which could apply equally to Malia Sanders, whom he
described as a ‘devious and calculating young woman, hiding behind an innocent, doe-eyed exterior.’ The jury did not agree with him. Doyle was found guilty on a majority verdict and
given a mandatory life sentence with a recommendation that he serve at least fifteen years.

‘Sounds to me like she was in it up to her neck,’ Alison said. ‘No wonder they fixed her up with a new identity. There was no way she could have stayed in a small place like
that.’

Oblivious to the noise and clatter of the fast-food restaurant going on around her, Jenny clicked back to the images of the young Malia and stared at her perfect and ever-so-slightly melancholic
face. She was truly mesmerizing, though not in an obvious way; hers was a beauty that drew you closer and closer in, inviting you to seek her out; a dark well drawing you into its depths. Jenny
recalled Darren Brooks’s words –
Once in a man’s lifetime he’ll fall for a woman who is not of this earth
– and for the first time she began to understand.
There was indeed something darkly and diabolically enchanting about Malia Sanders, something that could touch even someone like her, who had never regarded another woman in that way.

‘What would Burden have wanted from her?’ Jenny said, thinking aloud. ‘She doesn’t have money – she lived in a council house.’

‘You can ask her at the inquest, can’t you?’ Alison said. ‘You won’t be so afraid of hurting her feelings now we know who she is. Do you think Ed knew? Or do you
think Burden
told
him?’ Alison turned to her, wide-eyed. ‘And Susie Ashton. What about Susie Ashton?’

Jenny had begun to have the same thought. Wherever Kelly went, death seemed to go with her.

‘J
ENNY
? W
HERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN
?

‘Here and there.’

‘Kelly’s gone from her flat. I can’t find her anywhere. Has she called you?’

‘All things considered, I’m not sure I’d tell you if she had.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Ryan strained to sound patient.

‘An officer running witness protection sleeping with his charge only days after she’s lost her family. Call me a prude, but it doesn’t feel quite seemly, let alone
ethical.’

She was met with silence. Unable to trust herself not to fly into a dangerous rage, she had pulled over into a layby used by overnighting truckers, just a short distance beyond the Severn
Bridge. She watched the passing traffic and tried to remain calm as she waited for Ryan – she couldn’t think of him as ‘John Wheelock’ – to respond. But the silence
stretched on. She had obviously surprised him. Floored him.

‘Well, look, I appreciate she’s an attractive woman, and I know you’ve a weakness for them, which you’ve even managed to turn to your professional advantage, but there is
a time to draw the line,
John
.’ Still no sign of life. ‘And I can also see why you and your super have been so keen to get it all swept up so quickly. You were meant to be
looking after her, keeping that ugly past from coming back to bite her. That didn’t go very well, did it? I haven’t got all the pieces, but I’m getting there. I’m even
prepared to bet it was you who put the pig’s head outside my house, just so you could cosy up a little closer.’

‘Who told you?’

‘I had a little help from someone who knows you by reputation, but mostly I put it together myself. You can expect a summons, of course. Maybe you and your super can share a
ride.’

‘You have no proof that anything improper has occurred between me and Kelly.’

Jenny waited while a big articulated truck rumbled past.

‘We’ll leave that for court, shall we?’