Playing for the Ashes

Martin tightened his fingers against the window-sill. He felt a splinter dig into his palm. He said, “Oh Majesty Majesty Gabriella Miss Miss,” and plunged one hand frantically into his pocket, looking in vain for something that he could use to jemmy the casement open. All the time his eyes were fixed on that chair.

  It stood at an angle at the foot of the stairs, facing into the dining room. One corner of it abutted the wall underneath the window that had been too dirty to look through. Only now Martin saw from his position on the other side of the house that the window wasn’t dirty at all in the conventional sense. Instead, it was stained black from smoke: smoke that had risen in an ugly dense cloud from the wingback chair, smoke that had risen in the shape of a tornado that blackened the window, blackened the curtains, blackened the wall, smoke that left its mark on the stairway as it was sucked upwards towards the bedroom where even now Miss Gabriella, Miss Sweet Gabriella…

  Martin shoved himself away from the window. He ran across the lawn. He clambered over the wall. He dashed down the footpath in the direction of the spring.

  It was shortly after noon when Detective Inspector Isabelle Ardery first saw Celandine Cottage. The sun was high in the sky, casting small pools of shadow at the base of the fir trees that lined the drive. This had been sealed off with yellow police tape. One panda car, a red Sierra, and a blue and white milk-float were lined up on the lane.

  She parked behind the milk-float and surveyed the area, feeling grim despite her initial pleasure at being called out on another case so soon. For information gathering, the location didn’t look promising. There were several houses farther along the lane, timber-framed with peg-tiled roofs like the cottage in which the fire had occurred, but they were each surrounded with enough land to give them quiet and privacy. So if the fire in question turned out to be arson—as was suggested by the words questionable ignition scrawled at the bottom of the note Ardery had received from her chief constable not an hour ago—it might prove unlikely that any of the neighbours had heard or seen someone or something suspicious.

  With her collection kit in hand, she ducked under the tape and swung open the gate at the end of the drive. Across a paddock to the east where a bay mare was grazing, half a dozen onlookers leaned against a split chestnut fence. She could hear their murmured speculation as she walked up the drive. Yes, indeed, she told them mentally as she passed through a smaller gate into the garden, a woman investigator, even for a fire. Welcome to the waning years of our century.

  “Inspector Ardery?” It was a female voice. Isabelle turned to see another woman waiting on the brick path that led in two directions: to the front door and round towards the back of the house. She’d apparently come from this latter direction. “DS Coffman,” she said cheerfully. “Greater Springburn CID.”

  Isabelle joined her. She offered her hand.

  Coffman said, “The guv’s not here at the moment. He rode with the body to Pembury Hospital.”

  Isabelle frowned at this oddity. Greater Springburn’s chief superintendent had been the one to request her presence in the first place. It was a breach of police etiquette for him to leave the site before her arrival. “The hospital?” she asked. “Have you no medical examiner to accompany the body?”

  Coffman gave her eyes a quick rise heavenward. “Oh, he was here as well, graciously assuring us that the corpse was dead. But there’s to be a news conference when they i.d. the victim, and the guv loves that stuff. Give him a microphone, five minutes of your time, and he does a fairly decent John Thaw.”

  “Who’s still here, then?”

  “Couple of probationary DCs getting their first chance to suss things out. And the bloke who discovered the mess. Snell, he’s called.”

  “What about the fire brigade?”

  “They’ve been and gone. Snell phoned emergency from next door, house across from the spring. Emergency sent the fire team.”

  “And?”

  Coffman smiled. “Luck for your side. Once they got in, they could see the fire’d been out for hours. They didn’t touch a thing. They just phoned CID and waited till we got here.”

  That fact, at least, was a blessing. One of the biggest difficulties in arson investigation was the necessary existence of the fire brigade. They were trained to two tasks: saving lives and extinguishing fires. Intent upon that, more often than not they axed down doors, flooded rooms, collapsed ceilings, and in the process obliterated evidence.

  Isabelle ran her gaze over the building. She said, “All right. I’ll take a moment out here, first.”

  “Shall I—”

  “Alone, please.”

  Coffman said, “Quite. I’ll leave you to it,” and strode off towards the back of the house. She paused at the northeast corner of the building, turning back and pushing a curl of oak-coloured hair from her face. “The hot spot’s this way when you’re ready,” she said. She began to raise an index finger in comradely salute, apparently thought better of it, and disappeared round the side of the house.

  Isabelle stepped off the brick path and crossed the lawn, walking to the far corner of the property. There she turned back and gazed first at the cottage and then at the grounds that surrounded it.

  If arson had been committed here, finding evidence outside the building wasn’t going to be easy. It would take hours to conduct a search on the grounds because Celandine Cottage was an amateur gardener’s dream: hung on the south end by wisteria just coming into bloom, surrounded by flower beds from which grew everything from forget-me-nots to heather, from white violets to lavender, from pansies to tulips. Where there weren’t flower-beds, there was lawn, thick and lush. Where there wasn’t lawn, there were shrubs in bloom. Where there weren’t shrubs, there were trees. These last provided a partial screen from the lane and another from the nearest neighbour. If there were footprints, tyre prints, discarded tools, fuel containers, or matchbooks, it was going to take some effort to find them.

  Isabelle circled the house carefully, moving east to northwest. She examined windows. She scanned the ground. She gave her attention to roof and to doors. In the end, she made her way to the back where the kitchen door stood open and where, under an arbour across which a grapevine was beginning to unfurl its leaves, a middle-aged man sat at a wicker table, with his head sunk into his chest and his hands pressed together between his knees. A glass of water stood, untouched, before him.

  “Mr. Snell?”

  The man lifted his head. “Took the body, they did,” he said. “She was covered up all from head to toe. She was wrapped up and tied down. It looked like they’d put her in some sort of bag. It’s not proper, that, is it? It’s not quite decent. It’s not even respectful.”

  Isabelle joined him, pulling out a chair and setting her collection kit on the concrete. She felt an instant’s duty to comfort him, but making an effort at compassion seemed pointless. Dead was dead no matter what anyone said or did. Nothing changed that fact for the living. “Mr. Snell, were the doors locked or unlocked when you arrived?”

  “I tried to get in when she didn’t answer. But I couldn’t. So I looked in the window.” He squeezed his hands together and took a tremulous breath. “She wouldn’t have suffered, would she? I heard one of them say the body wasn’t even burnt and that’s why they could tell who it was straightaway. Did she die from the smoke, then?”

  “We won’t know anything for certain until a postmortem is done,” DS Coffman said. She’d come to the doorway. Her answer sounded professionally cautious.

  The man seemed to accept it. He said, “What about them kittens?”

  “Kittens?” Isabelle asked.

  “Miss Gabriella’s kittens. Where’re they? No one’s brought them out.”

  Coffman said, “They must be outside somewhere. We’ve not run across them in the house.”

  “But she got herself two little ’uns last week. Two kittens. From over by the spring. Someone’d dumped them in a cardboard box next to the footpath. She brought them home. She was caring for them. They s
lept in the kitchen in their own little basket and—” Snell wiped the back of his wrist against his eyes. “I got to see to the milk delivery. Before it goes bad.”

  “Have you got his statement?” Isabelle asked Coffman as she ducked beneath the low lintel of the doorway to join the DS in the kitchen.

  “For what it’s worth. Thought you might want to have a chat with him yourself. Shall I send him off?”

  “If we’ve got his address.”

  “Right. I’ll see to it. We’re in through there.” Coffman gestured towards an inner door. Beyond it, Isabelle could see the curve of a dining table and the end of a wall-sized fireplace.

  “Who’s been inside?”

  “Three blokes from the fire brigade. The CID lot.”

  “Crime team?”

  “Just the photographer and the pathologist. I thought it best to keep the rest out till you had a look.”

  She led Isabelle into the dining room. Two probationary detective constables stood on either side of what was left of a wingback chair positioned at an angle at the base of the stairway. They were frowning down at it, each of them a picture of contemplation. One looked earnest. The other looked offended by the acrid smell of incinerated upholstery. Neither could have been more than twenty-three years old.

  “Inspector Ardery,” Coffman said by way of introducing Isabelle. “Maidstone Constabulary’s hot shot of hot spots. You two move back and give her some space. And try taking a few notes while you’re at it.”

  Isabelle nodded at the young men and gave her attention to what was obviously the point of ignition. She set her collection kit on the table, put the tape measure into her jacket pocket along with tweezers and pliers, took out her notebook, and made a preliminary sketch of the room, saying, “Nothing’s been moved?”

  “Not a stitch or a hair,” Coffman replied. “Which is why I phoned for the guv when I had a look. It’s that chair by the stairs. Look. It doesn’t seem right.”

  Isabelle didn’t agree with the sergeant readily. She knew the other woman was heading towards a logical question: What was the chair doing sitting at such an angle at the foot of the stairs? One would have to skirt it to climb to the first floor. Its position suggested its having been moved there.

  But, on the other hand, the room was also crowded with other furniture, none of it burned but all of it either discoloured by smoke or covered with soot. In addition to the dining table and its four chairs, an old-fashioned nursing chair and a second wingback stood on either side of the fireplace. Against one wall leaned a dresser holding china, against another a table covered with decanters, against a third a chest of drawers displaying porcelain. And on every wall also hung paintings and prints. The walls themselves had apparently been white. One was now scorched black; the others were varying degrees of grey. As were the lace curtains, which hung limply on their rods, crusted with grime.

  “Have you examined the carpet?” Isabelle asked the sergeant. “If that chair’s been moved, we’ll find its prints somewhere else. Perhaps in another room.”

  “That’s just it,” Coffman said. “Have a look here.”

  Isabelle said, “A moment,” and completed the drawing, shading in the pattern of scorching on the wall. She created a quick floor-plan next and labelled its components—furniture, fireplace, windows, doorways, and stairs. And only then did she approach the source of ignition. Here she made a third drawing of the chair itself, noting the distinct burn pattern in the upholstery. It was standard stuff.

  A localised fire such as this spread in a V, with the origin of the burn at the V’s tip. This fire had behaved in a normal fashion. Along the chair’s right side, which ran at a forty-five-degree angle from the stairway, the charring was heaviest. The fire had first smouldered—probably for several hours—then flamed through both upholstery and stuffing, eating its way upwards to the chair’s frame on the right side before dying out. On this same right side, the burn pattern rose in two angles from the flame source, one oblique and one acute, roughly forming a V. Upon Isabelle’s preliminary inspection, nothing about the chair suggested arson.

  “It looks like a cigarette smoulder if you ask me,” one of the two young detective constables said. He sounded restless. It was after noon. He was hungry. Isabelle saw Sergeant Coffman shoot the man a narrow-eyed look that clearly declared, “But no one’s asking you, are they, laddie?” He quickly adjusted his attitude by saying, “What I don’t get is why the whole place didn’t burn to the ground.”

  “Were all the windows closed?” Isabelle asked the sergeant.

  “They were.”

  Isabelle said over her shoulder in explanation to the constable, “The fire in the chair consumed what oxygen there was in the cottage. Afterwards, it died.”

  Sergeant Coffman squatted next to the charred armchair. Isabelle joined her. The fitted carpet had been a solid colour—beige. Beneath the chair it wore a heavy snowfall of black grit. Coffman pointed to three shallow depressions, each one by measurement two and a half inches from a corresponding leg of the chair. She said, “This is what I was talking about.”

  Isabelle fetched a brush from her collection kit, saying, “It’s a possibility,” and she gently flicked the soot from the nearest cavity and then from another. When she’d done them all, she saw that they were perfectly lined up with each other, the impressions the chair had made in its original position.

  “You see. It’s been moved. Pivoted on one leg.”

  Isabelle rested back on her heels and studied the chair’s position in relation to the rest of the room. “Someone could have run into it.”

  “But don’t you think—”

  “We need more.”

  She moved closer to the chair. She examined the point of the fire’s origin, an uneven carbon wound from which bled wiry lengths of kindled stuffing. As was the case in so many smouldering fires, the chair had burnt slowly, sending up a steady, noxious stream of smoke as a glowing means of primary ignition—like an ember—had eaten through upholstery to the stuffing beneath it. But true to the smouldering fire as well, the chair had only been partially demolished, because once complete ignition occurred, available oxygen had already been eaten and the fire died.

  Thus, Isabelle was able to probe the carbon wound, delicately moving aside charred fabric in order to follow the descent of the ember as it sank through the right side of the chair. It was painstaking work, a wordless scrutiny of every centimetre by light of a torch, which Coffman held steady over her shoulder. More than quarter of an hour passed before Isabelle found what she was looking for.

  She used the tweezers to pull the prize out. She gave it a satisfied scrutiny before she held it up.

  “Cigarette after all.” Coffman sounded disappointed.

  “No.” In contrast to the sergeant, Isabelle felt decidedly pleased. “It’s an incendiary device.” She looked at the detective constables whose expressions awakened with interest at her words. “We’ll need to start outside with a perimeter search,” she told them. “Use a spiral pattern. Look for footprints, tyre prints, a matchbox, tools, containers of any kind, anything unusual. Chart it first. Then photograph and collect it. Understand?”

  “Ma’am,” one said as “Right,” said the other. They headed for the kitchen and from there outside.

  Coffman was frowning at the stub of cigarette that Isabelle still held. “I don’t get it,” she said.

  Isabelle pointed out the scalloped condition of the cigarette’s casing.

  “So?” Coffman said. “Still looks like a cigarette to me.”

  “That’s what it’s meant to look like. Bring the light closer. Keep as clear from the chair as you can. Fine. Right there.”

  “You mean it isn’t a cigarette?” Coffman asked as Isabelle continued to probe. “It’s not a real cigarette?”

  “It is and it isn’t.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Which is, of course, the arsonist’s hope.”

  “But—”

  ?
??If I’m not mistaken—and we’ll know in a few minutes because this chair’s going to tell us—what we’ve got is a primitive timing device. It gives the fire raiser four to seven minutes to be gone before the actual flames begin.”

  Coffman jiggled the torch as she started to speak, caught herself, said, “Sorry,” and redirected the light as before. She went on with, “If that’s the case, when the flames did begin, why didn’t the entire chair go up? Wouldn’t the arsonist have wanted it that way? I know the windows were closed, but surely the fire had enough time to go from the chair to the curtains and up the wall before the oxygen ran out. So why didn’t it do that? Why didn’t the windows break from the heat and let in more air? Why didn’t the whole blooming cottage go up?”

  Isabelle continued the process of delicate probing. It was an operation not unlike taking the chair apart a single strand at a time. “You’re talking about the speed of the fire,” she said. “Speed depends upon the chair’s upholstery and stuffing, along with the amount of draft in the room. It depends upon the weave of the fabric. And the age of the stuffing and how and if it’s been chemically treated.” She fingered an edge of the singed material. “We’ll have to run tests to get the answers. But there’s one thing I’d lay money on.”

  “Arson?” Coffman said. “Meant to look like something else?”

  “That’s what I’d say.”

  Coffman glanced at the stairway beyond the chair. “That makes things real dicey, then.” Her words were uneasy.

  “I dare say. Arson usually does.” Isabelle brought forth from the bowels of the chair the first sliver of wood that she’d been seeking. She dropped it into a collection jar with a gratified smile. “Excellent,” she murmured. “As lovely a sight as you can hope to see.” There would be, she was certain, at least five more wooden slivers buried within the charred remains of the chair. She went back to her probing, separating, and sifting. “Who was she, by the way?”

  “Who was who?”

  “The victim. The woman with the kittens.”

  “That’s the problem,” Coffman replied. “That’s why the guv’s gone to Pembury with the body. That’s why there’ll be a news conference later. That’s why it’s all so dicey now.”