M. Arlidge - Liar Liar

The footage was coming to an end now, but his pleasure was not. So flipping the footage back to the start, he settled back in his easy chair, undid his fly and slipped his hand inside his trousers.

‘Do you have any leads?’

Detective Superintendent Jonathan Gardam had not met Emilia Garanita before. But he had heard a lot about her. Helen Grace had given him chapter and verse, as had Hampshire Fire and Rescue’s Chief Officer, Adam Latham, who now sat beside him, fielding questions from the press. The major tabloids were represented at their briefing today, but Emilia Garanita was not going to let them bully her or hold her back. Watching her as she tried to lead the questioning, Gardam had the distinct impression that this represented an opportunity for the ambitious young journalist to shine on a bigger stage.

‘Are you making any progress?’ Garanita persisted. Gardam paused, taking a moment to drink in all the small details of this local curiosity – the facial scarring, the dyed hair, the fuck-you attitude – before replying:

‘DI Grace and her team are pursuing a number of leads and we have pulled in every officer available to help with our enquiries. There is currently a greater police presence on the street than at any time in the last five years.’

Gardam let this register. He wanted every journalist to note this surge in manpower. Moreover, he wanted their arsonist to take heed of this when it was reported later today. When you’re struggling for concrete leads, prevention is often as good as detection. He wanted to make the arsonist think twice before carrying out further attacks.

‘And we’re confident that progress in the investigation will be swift. Alongside this, we have been liaising with our colleagues in the Fire and Rescue Service who have now drafted in extra fire response vehicles as well as additional firefighters from neighbouring forces.’

‘We are now confident,’ Adam Latham added, overlapping with his police colleague, ‘that we can deal with any emergency quickly and effectively, however complicated the situation may be.’

Another tacit warning to the arsonist. They had more police, more firefighters, more resources. Diversionary fires would be of little help to him now. Privately Gardam wondered how he would react to this challenge. Would he back down or respond in kind – upping his game as they upped theirs?

‘I’ll ask the question again – do you have any suspects?’

Garanita was a dog with a bone, revelling in her self-appointed duty of holding the police to account. Gardam had heard that the Southampton Evening News had been going gently on them for a while – thanks in part to a temporary truce between Garanita and Helen Grace – but that respite appeared to be over now, as Southampton’s pre-eminent crime reporter sniffed a juicy new story.

‘There are several persons of interest whom we are trying to trace, but chief among them is a man seen running from the scene of the Bevois Mount house fire at around eleven twenty-five p.m. last night. You are being handed printed images of the CCTV still now and we would urge your readers, your viewers, to take a good look at it. Do they recognize this man? If so, we would ask them to get in touch via the special incident hotline, which is manned twenty-four hours a day, so we can eliminate him from our enquiries. In the meantime, I would ask the public to remain calm and take sensible precautions, especially after dark.’

‘So lock your doors and sit tight. Is that the best you can do?’

‘It’s the sensible thing to do. I appreciate that these attacks have caused alarm, but the best thing the public can do is be vigilant, be sensible and let us go about our business.’

‘In the police we trust?’

‘Exactly, Emilia. As you know, DI Grace has an exemplary record in running investigations of this scale and complexity. And I have every confidence in her,’ Gardam responded forcefully, pausing a little for effect before concluding:

‘She’s delivered before and I’m sure she’ll do so again.’

Enveloped in a sterile suit, Helen climbed the ladder to the first floor. The fabric of the house was so unstable that a temporary scaffold and gantry had been erected to help the fire investigation officers navigate the gutted property safely. Cresting the ladder, Helen found Deborah Parks already hard at work in what had once been the master bedroom. It was a profoundly depressing site – the place looked like it had been bombed – and Helen’s feelings of anxiety were only amplified by the insistent thrumming noise of the plastic sheeting which now covered the shattered main window. The wind was strong today, rattling the temporary covering vigorously and ensuring that everyone working on site was chilled to the bone. Last night temperatures in here would have topped 600 degrees Celsius, now it was touching freezing.

Swallowing down her anxiety, Helen navigated her way along the walkway of planks towards Deborah. The Fire Investigation Officer rose as she approached, nodding soberly at her. Deborah was a scientist first and foremost, but she was also a mum to three boys and Helen knew from experience that she always felt the human cost of the tragedies she investigated. In many ways their lives were pretty similar – both spent their working lives immersed in the worst things that human beings could imagine or endure.

‘Your victim was found here, bang in the middle of the room. It’s very likely the smoke and the panic got to her and she just froze. You often see that in these situations. House fires are things that happen to other people. When it happens to you, people lose their wits, their sense of direction, everything.’

‘It must have been terrifying.’

‘The smoke would have been so thick in here that she wouldn’t have known which way was up.’

It was a horrific way to die. Terror, confusion and horror all colliding at the same time. Was this what their killer intended?

‘Any thoughts on why her body was so…’ Helen paused, not quite finding the appropriate word.

‘Carbonized?’

Helen smiled a brief thanks. It was hard to put into words what Denise’s body had looked like.

‘Oxygen basically,’ Deborah Parks continued. ‘There are massive scorch marks around the border of the bedroom door. The fire was started downstairs, rising upwards, consuming whatever it could. It met an obstacle at the door, which is solid and fire-resistant to a basic level. The heat built up -’

‘And then Denise opened the door as she tried to escape?’ Helen asked.

‘Probably. The frustrated fire would have gobbled up the fresh oxygen in the bedroom – these marks here show how the fire literally exploded into the new space.’

Deborah pointed to a number of long, livid scorch marks across the ceiling.

‘Denise may or may not have regained consciousness after that initial explosion. Either way, if she was motionless in the middle of the room, the fire would have consumed her, setting light to her nightclothes, her hair… If she was still conscious at this point, her body would have gone into a massive state of shock. Cardiac arrest, smoke inhalation, there are many things that might have spared her the worst.’

‘Please God.’

Deborah was already making her way across the gantry and down the ladder to the ground floor. Helen was glad of a moment’s respite from this narrative of destruction. She was used to being at crime scenes, of seeing unspeakable things, but this was different to anything she’d experienced before. Denise Roberts’s attacker was not human and there was no opportunity to escape, defend herself or fight back, as there would have been in a common murder scenario. Hers was an enemy that could not be beaten. Helen, who feared nobody, shivered slightly at the thought of what Denise had faced last night.