Peter Robinson - Playing With Fire

“Cozy,” he said.

“It’ll do,” said Banks. “Tea? Coffee?”

“Coffee, if you’ve got some. Black, plenty of sugar.”

“I’ll ring down.” Banks ordered two black coffees. “Anything new?”

“I’ve just come from the lab,” Hamilton said. “We carried out gas chromatograph tests this afternoon.”

“And?”

Hamilton took two sheets of paper and a videotape from his briefcase and laid them out on Banks’s desk. The sheets of paper looked like graphs, with peaks and valleys. “As you know,” he said, looking at Banks, “I took debris samples from a number of places, especially on boat one, Tom’s boat, the main seat of the fire. I don’t know how much you know about it,” he went on, “but gas chromatography is a relatively simple and quick process. In this case, we put the debris in large cans, heated them and used a syringe to draw off the headspace, the gases given off, and we then injected that into the chromatograph. This” – he pointed to the left graph – “is the chromatogram we got from the point of origin.” He then pointed to the graph beside it, which, to Banks, looked almost identical. Both showed a series of low to medium peaks with one enormous spike in the middle. “And this is the chromatographic representation of turpentine.”

“So we were right,” Banks said, studying the chromatograms. “What about the other boat?”

“Apart from the streamers I noted on my initial examination,” Hamilton said, “there are no other signs of accelerant. Anyway, that’s the physical evidence so far. Turpentine is your primary accelerant. Its ignition temperature is 488 degrees Fahrenheit, which is quite low. As we found no evidence of timing or incendiary devices, I’d say someone used a match.”

“Deliberate, then?”

Hamilton looked around, as if worried that the room was bugged, then he let slip a rare smile. “Just between you and me and these four walls,” he said, “not a shred of doubt.”

The coffee arrived and both remained silent until the PC who delivered it had left the office. Hamilton took a sip and lifted up the videotape. “Want to watch a movie?” he asked.

Videotaped evidence and interviews were so common these days that Banks had a small TV/Video combination in his office. Hamilton slipped the tape in and they both got a driver’s-seat view as the fire engine raced to the scene.

Most engines, or “appliances,” as the firefighters called them, were fitted with a “silent witness,” a video recorder that taped the journey to the source of the call. It could come in useful if you happened to be really quick off the mark and spotted a getaway vehicle, or arrived at the scene and got a picture of the arsonist hanging about enjoying his handiwork. This time, there was nothing. The fire engine passed a couple of cars going the other way, and it would probably be possible to isolate the images and enhance the number plates. But Banks didn’t hold out much hope they would lead anywhere. The fire was well under way by the time Hurst called it in, and the arsonist would be well away, too. It was an exhilarating journey, though, and Hamilton ejected the tape when the appliance came to a halt at the bend in the lane.

“There’s one thing that bothers me,” Banks said. “The boy, Mark, described the artist’s hair as brown but what little of it we saw on the boat was more like red.”

“Fire does that,” said Hamilton.

“Changes hair color?”

“Yes. Sometimes. Gray turns blond, and brown turns red.”

“Interesting,” said Banks. “What about Tina? Could she have survived?”

“If she’d been awake and aware, yes, but the state she was in… not a chance.”

“The way it looks, then,” said Banks, “is that the artist on boat one was the primary victim, yet some small effort had been made to see that the fire spread to boat two, where Mark and Tina lived. But why Mark and Tina?”

“I’m afraid that’s your job to find out, not mine.”

“Just tossing ideas around. Elimination of a witness?”

“Witness to what?”

“If the arsonist was someone who’d visited the victim before, then he might have been seen, or worried he’d been seen.”

“But the young man survived.”

“Yes, and Mark did see two people visit Tom on different occasions. Maybe one of them was the killer, and he had no idea that Mark was out at the time. He probably thought he was getting them both, but he was in a hurry to get away. Which means…”

“What?”

“Never mind,” said Banks. “As you said, it’s my job to find that out. At the moment I feel as if we’ve got nothing but assumptions.”

Hamilton tapped the graphs and stood up. “Not true,” he said. “You’ve got confirmation of accelerant usage in a multi-seated fire.”

Hamilton was right, Banks realized. Until a few minutes ago, all he’d had to go on were appearances and gut instincts, but now he had solid scientific evidence that the fire had been deliberately set.

He looked at his watch and sighed. “Dr. Glendenning’s conducting the postmortem on the male victim soon,” he said. “Want to come?”

“What the hell,” said Hamilton. “It’s Friday evening. The weekend starts here.”

“Do you know that it takes about an hour or an hour and a half at between sixteen and eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit to cremate a human body?” Dr. Glendenning asked, apropos of nothing in particular. “And that the ordinary house – or, in this case, boat – fire rarely exceeds twelve hundred? That, ladies and gentlemen, is why we have so much material left to work with.”

The postmortem lab in the basement of Eastvale General Infirmary was hardly hi-tech, but Dr. Glendenning’s experience more than made up for that. To Banks, the blackened shape laid out on the stainless-steel table looked more like one of those Iron Age bodies preserved in peat bogs than someone who had been a living, breathing human being less than twenty-four hours ago. Already, the remnants of clothing had been removed to be tested for traces of accelerant, blood samples had been sent for analysis, and the body had been X-rayed for any signs of gunshot wounds and internal injuries. None had been found, only a belt buckle, three pounds sixty-five in loose change, and a signet ring without initials engraved on it.

“Thought you wouldn’t know that,” Glendenning went on, casting an eye over his audience: Banks, Geoff Hamilton and Annie Cabbot, fresh from the scene. “And I hope you appreciate my working on a Friday evening,” he went on as he examined the body’s exterior with the help of his new assistant, Wendy Gauge, all kitted out in blue scrubs and a hairnet. Glendenning looked at his watch. “This could take a long time, and you also probably don’t know that I have an important dinner engagement.”

“We realize you’re a very important man,” said Banks, “and we’re eternally grateful to you, aren’t we, Annie?” He nudged Annie gently.

“We are, indeed,” said Annie.

Glendenning scowled. “Enough of your lip, laddie. Do we know who he is?”

Banks shook his head. “All we know was in the report I sent you. His name’s probably Tom, and he was an artist.”

“It would help if I knew something about his medical history,” Dr. Glendenning complained.

“Afraid we can’t help you,” said Banks.

“I mean, if he was a drug addict or a drunk or on some sort of dodgy medication… Why do you always make my job so much more bloody difficult than it needs to be, Banks? Can you tell me that?”

“Search me.”

“One day I probably will,” Glendenning said. “Inside and out.” He scowled, lit a cigarette, though it was strictly forbidden, and went back to work. Banks envied him the cigarette. He had always smoked at postmortems. It helped to mask the smell of the bodies. And they always smelled. Even this one would smell when Dr. Glendenning opened him up. He’d be like one of those fancy, expensive steaks: charred on the outside and pink in the middle, and if he’d got enough carbon monoxide in his system, his blood would look like cherryade.