A Rush of Blood

Forty-six

Mario McGuire winced, his disposable tunic rustling as he stepped into the ruined house, joining two people who stood beside what was still recognisable as an Aga cooker. ‘Do they all smell as bad as this the day after?’ he muttered.

‘This is mild,’ Frances Kerr told him. ‘At some scenes we’d still be wearing breathing apparatus the day after.’

‘How did you get into this business?’ the head of CID asked.

‘I chose it,’ she replied, ‘out of necessity. I was a firefighter, station officer rank, but I hurt my right shoulder at an incident. It left me with a permanent weakness that would have made me a liability on operational duty. Normally that would have been it, but the fire service is very aware of the need to be seen as an equal opportunity employer. That might be why I was offered the chance to retrain for this side.’

‘Crap,’ said ADO Hartil, cheerfully. ‘You have to do a pre-entry qualification before you get anywhere near training as an investigator. Frances was top of the class by a mile.’

‘Shut up, Joey,’ she told him. ‘Don’t build me up before I’ve found anything definite.’

McGuire glanced at her. ‘What have you found so far, then?’

‘Nothing beyond first impressions last night.’ She pointed to a burned-out metal box that sat against the wall next to the door that had led into the big dining kitchen from the hall. ‘That was a wine cooler,’ she said. ‘Its cable was frayed right through, as if it had been trapped under one of its feet at some point. That thing on the wall next to it was a rail. There’s what’s left of some kind of fabric around the cable, leading to the possibility that a tea towel fell on to it, and was ignited. Whatever it was, that’s where the fire started. The place was carpeted, the flames would have spread very quickly along the floor, and in a kitchen there’s all sorts of stuff to fuel it. The exit into the hall would have been cut off right away, and that would have left the door to the conservatory as the only escape route.’ She moved towards it, stopping halfway beside a pile of black cinders. ‘This was a table. I found two plates, wine glasses, a bottle, and cutlery among its remains. The plates had food burned into them, and there was a casserole dish in the oven with what was left of a moussaka. It looks as if Mr and Mrs Gerulaitis were at their dinner when the fire started, probably behind them.’

‘Wouldn’t they have smelled the smoke right away?’

‘I’m not sure there would have been a lot of smoke, not at the start. But as I said, the fire would have spread very quickly. Whatever alerted them, the only way out was that door, that locked door. We found the key eventually,’ she added, ‘in a kitchen drawer.’

‘So why didn’t they find it? That part of the floor was tiled. Couldn’t they have reached it?’

‘Panic, Chief Superintendent,’ said Joey Hartil. ‘That’s what people do when they’re trapped by a serious fire. Panic’s a major cause of death in these situations. It makes people overlook the obvious, it makes them jump out of high windows when they’d have been all right if they’d stayed calm and waited for us.’

‘So the poor bastards were caught between a locked door and a hot place.’

‘Colourfully put,’ Frances Kerr conceded, ‘and accurate, until they were eventually consumed by the hot place. That’s my theory, anyway; it’s what the scene’s telling me.’

‘Gerulaitis wasn’t a wee bloke. Couldn’t they have smashed their way out?’

The investigator shook her head. ‘Obviously not, not without one of your rams, at any rate. This is a well-built house; its doors and windows were designed with security in mind. If they’d been able to reach the window beyond the food prep area, they might have got out that way. But they couldn’t, poor people.’

McGuire frowned. ‘Earlier on you said you hadn’t reached any definite conclusions, but you sound pretty certain to me.’

‘Och, I am, really. We’ve just got one or two more things to do and then I’ll be able to turn in a report.’

‘Such as?’

‘I need to go over the outlying areas of the fire, that’s one. Then there’s the dogs.’ She looked at Hartil. ‘How are we getting on with that, Joey?’

‘We should have them this afternoon.’

‘What bloody dogs?’ the head of CID asked, puzzled.

‘The Central Scotland brigade has a couple of dogs,’ Kerr explained.

‘They’re specially trained to sniff out accelerants at fire scenes. We’ll run them through here as a matter of routine, to save us having to do it later when the insurance assessors arrive on the scene. Those boys are worse than juries; they want everything beyond even an unreasonable doubt before they pay out.’

‘That’s all? You’ll be able to give me a formal report by the end of the day?’

‘Yes.’ She gazed at McGuire, her brow furrowed. ‘But why you? You’re CID, top man in CID at that.’

‘Let’s just say,’ he replied, ‘that we’ve got a file on Mr Gerulaitis that needs closing.’

‘Understood, but this is an accidental death.’

‘Understood also.’ He grinned. ‘Maybe I’ve been a cop for too long, Ms Kerr; but when I encounter an accident that’s as damn convenient as this one, my nerves start to jangle.’

‘Let me put them at ease, then, as soon as I can.’

‘You do that. Meantime, I’m going to attend the post-mortems on the pair of them, if only to make sure that they really were Valdas and his wife. I’m a bit of an unreasonable doubt man myself.’