Dead and Buried

31

Fry remained silent — the best approach when someone like Mrs Wharton had decided to talk. All she needed was someone to listen. Let her thoughts run, and see where they took her. ‘So then we decided on a fire further off, to get the firemen out of the way,’ she said. ‘And we chose Kinder. To be honest, I can’t understand now how everything happened. When I think about it, I feel as though it was part of a nightmare. It all just got out of hand.’

Again Fry waited. But Nancy seemed to have dried up. She rocked slowly in her chair, suddenly resembling someone much younger. She was no longer the pub landlady with blonde streaks in her hair and a hard look in her eyes, but a young girl troubled by the terrible dreams she was trying to explain.

‘After the pub was closed,’ said Fry, ‘someone broke into the Light House to get at the records of the Pearsons’ stay.’

‘Yes.’

‘But Aidan Merritt had gone to do the same thing.’

‘Had he? That can’t be true, can it?’

‘Yes, we think so.’

‘No, you’re wrong. Aidan was eaten up with guilt and was going to betray us. He’d said something to his wife, Sam, which she passed on to us. She said he was rambling on the phone about betrayal and guilt.’

‘You might have misunderstood.’

Nancy went white, and sat down, trembling. ‘No, surely not.’

Fry leaned closer. ‘Who killed Aidan Merritt, Nancy?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

Well, that would come later. There was plenty of time. When Nancy Wharton realised she wasn’t going to be leaving here for another twenty-four hours at least, she might change her mind. Fry decided to backtrack a bit.

‘You said earlier that you told the children everything,’ she said. ‘Did you mean everything?’

‘You can’t keep secrets from kids of that age,’ said Nancy. ‘They know something is wrong, and they can get hold of the wrong end of the stick and blow it out of proportion in their own minds. It’s not fair to them, and it can cause a lot of problems. I know, because it happened to me when I was in my teens. My parents tried to keep me in the dark, never told me anything. They said they thought it was for my own good. But you know what? By the time they split up, I’d come to the conclusion it was all my fault. I worked out in my own mind that if they weren’t talking to me, they must be talking about me. I know it doesn’t make sense. But everything is so confusing and stressful at that age. Maurice and me, we agreed a long time ago that we wouldn’t be like that with our two. So we were as open as we could be about the trouble that our business was in.’

‘And about what happened that night?’

Nancy looked at her then, not understanding the question. Fry opened her mouth to ask it again, but changed her mind. Instead, she sat and gazed at Nancy Wharton, watching the expression on her face alter. It was as good as an admission. But it was one Fry hadn’t been expecting.

‘You didn’t need to tell them,’ said Fry. ‘Because they were right there, weren’t they? They were there when the Pearsons were killed.’

Nancy’s mouth was shut like a trap, as if she was determined to prevent any words spilling out. But she couldn’t control her expression. She hadn’t learned to do that, not even after those two years of keeping her secret.

‘Your son, Eliot,’ said Fry. ‘He’d been drinking, like his father. But he wasn’t used to the alcohol, not the way Maurice was. A big lad, Eliot. And angry, too. But his father would do anything for him — anything, right down to taking the blame for the murder of two guests.’

‘You’ll never get the evidence,’ said Nancy, with a bitter smile.

Fry stared at her, trying to analyse the meaning of what she was saying.

‘But Nancy — I think we’ll find the blood on David Pearson’s clothing is Eliot’s, won’t we?’

Nancy shook her head — not in denial, but in confusion. She no longer knew what to say, or how she could protect her family. Her entire rationale was falling apart right there and then, and she couldn’t cope with it.

‘And where is he?’ asked Fry finally. ‘Nancy — where exactly is Eliot now?’

‘I’m saying no more.’

With Mrs Wharton safely housed in a cell in the custody suite, Fry and Hurst drove to the house on the Devonshire Estate

Despite them hammering on the door and peering through windows, there was no sign of anyone being home.

‘Blast. Where could they have gone?’

Hurst took a call from Luke Irvine at the office. ‘Forensics,’ she said. ‘They’ve processed the smaller blood trace on David Pearson’s clothing and got a DNA profile from it. There’s a match on the database.’

‘Eliot Wharton?’

‘No. He doesn’t have a record, so he’s not on the database. This is a match to Josh Lane, the former barman at the Light House.’

‘Lane has a record?’

‘A couple of convictions under the Misuse of Drugs Act. Fined for possession of class B substances.’

‘Cannabis, amphetamines?’

‘Correct. According to Luke, intelligence shows that he’s been investigated for supply, but never brought to court. He’s lucky there. That’s a maximum of fourteen years for dealing, even class B. There’s also an indication he might have been involved in a trade in ecstasy at the Light House. Personal intelligence, never substantiated.’

So Lane had been the fourth individual. And Fry felt sure that Eliot Wharton would be a match to the other DNA profile.

She tried to call Ben Cooper and got an unavailable message, so she sent him a text. It was quicker, and at least she knew it had been done. He would get the message and could call her when he was free. Cooper been meeting Josh Lane at the Light House, hadn’t he? So he might know where Lane was now.

‘Diane,’ said Hurst, ‘if they were involved in the death of the Pearsons, and they know there’s still some evidence at the pub, perhaps in the cellar …’

‘… they’ll be anxious to destroy it before anyone gets to it.’

‘Yes, that’s what I was thinking.’

Fry watched a response unit pull into the street. She could leave them at the Whartons’ house in case anyone returned.

‘Becky, who’s up there at the moment?’ she said.

‘At the Light House? Scenes of crime. And Ben went there with Carol Villiers. I don’t know if they’re still there or not.’

Fry experienced one of those moments when her heart lurched and her mind was filled with an irrational dread. She tried to fight it, but her skin had turned cold, and terrible images began to surge through her brain unbidden.

‘Why would DS Cooper’s phone be off network?’

Hurst turned in astonishment at the urgency of her tone. ‘I’ve no idea. He could be in a dead spot. He could still be …’

‘… in the cellars?’

Fry didn’t wait for the answer. She was already fumbling for her car keys, heading for the street. There was no reason or logic for the way she felt, but she couldn’t deny the force of it. The appalling certainty in her heart drove her body automatically to jump behind the wheel and ram the Audi into gear.

Even worse than the fear was a fact banging insistently at the back of her head — the knowledge that she might have created this nightmare herself.

When Cooper finally broke open the hatch, he could see smoke high above him, swirling on the ceiling of the bar, already starting to fill the room.

Raising his head above floor level, he saw that the source of the smoke was a roaring blaze at the far end of the bar. The door they’d come in through was consumed by a sheet of flame, and the fire was spreading rapidly along the room. The curtains were blazing, little tongues of fire creeping up them. Wooden furniture was smouldering, the glass tops of the tables cracking like gunshots. A pile of cardboard boxes burned like a bonfire, spirals of card peeling away like charred flesh from a corpse.

Cooper saw a patch clear of smoke. He drew Villiers up to the top of the steps after him and pointed the direction out to her.

‘That way,’ he said. ‘When you get clear of the hatch, go left.’

Somewhere, the flames were roaring so loud that he could hardly hear his own voice.

‘Keep low,’ he said, close to her ear. ‘And get out fast.’

She nodded, and began to move. Then she stopped, and turned back.

‘What about you?’

‘I’m going for Liz. She’s upstairs.’

‘Ben, be careful.’

On the first floor, Liz might not even be aware of the fire. The smell of the smoke had alerted him in the cellar, but if she was wearing her mask as she worked on the crime scene, she would smell nothing. In a room with the door closed, the flames could be raging in the corridor right outside before she noticed.

Cooper grabbed an old bar cloth and held it over his face. Paper and wood were already burning, because they caught fire at low temperatures. Plastics and polyurethane needed higher temperatures to ignite, but they burned rapidly and gave off toxic gases. In a modern hotel, built of concrete and steel, staying in a closed room could be the safest option in a fire. But in a building like this, no one upstairs would stand a chance. The whole place would burn down.

The stairs to the function room were here somewhere, and the access to the guest bedrooms. There had to be a fire escape.

Smoke was moving up the stairs and filling the corridor where the bedrooms were. But the fire itself hadn’t reached here yet. The flames were still being held back from bursting through into the upper floors. He didn’t have long before these wooden floorboards started burning, though, and then the stairs would be gone.

‘Liz!’

He found Room One from the sign on the door — the Bakewell Room. Inside, Liz glanced up astonished as he burst in. He must look an appalling sight. She was in her scene suit with her hood up but the mask pulled down.

‘What’s that beeping?’ she asked.

Cooper hadn’t even noticed it. ‘A smoke alarm.’

‘There’s a fire?’

‘Yes, we’ve got to get out. Now. Leave your kit. This is an old building, with lots of timber in the structure. If the supports burn through, the whole thing could come down.’

‘Here, take a mask,’ she said.

Cooper pulled the mask on, and they headed back to the stairs. Even through the mask, he could smell the reek of petrol. The conflagration was fiercest around the door of the bar and in the main entrance, so that must be where the accelerant had been spread. Some of the floorboards were already reduced to ashes; others were no more than lumps of charcoal.

He heard glass shatter. That was bad. The windows wouldn’t hold against the fire.

‘The boards over the windows are keeping the air out for now. We have a chance to get out before it really goes up.’

‘Which way, though?’

Black smoke rolled across the ceiling and hung like a curtain, sinking steadily towards him in dense folds. Within a few minutes, the smoke layer was only four feet from the floor. Carbon monoxide was a narcotic gas. Two or three lungfuls of that smoke would kill them.

But the smoke and toxic gases were being forced right through the building. They needed a secondary escape route.

‘Stay low. Stay low, where you can breathe.’

In the corridor, the floor was scorched where the carpet had singed through, but the passage itself was clear of fire. Cooper peered through the smoke, trying to remember the way out from the back of the pub.

Blazing curtains fell on to furniture as their rails burned through, glass shattered as picture cords snapped and frames crashed to the floor. When the flames reached the ceiling, they would get flashover. It could reach five hundred degrees Fahrenheit in here.

The boarded-up windows were alight now, reflecting the glow of the inferno inside the pub. The fire was mirrored on to itself, doubling the size of the blaze until it looked like a vast furnace every way he turned.

The heat was becoming too intense to bear. Cooper could feel the exposed skin of his hands roasting as if he was a joint of meat in an oven. The smoke was pungent and choking, full of lethal particles from burning plastic and fibres.

He looked round to make sure that Liz was still wearing her mask too. And with an awful lurch in his heart, he saw that she was gone.

Fry and Hurst were close to the Roman road when they saw the smoke rising from Oxlow Moor. Hurst spotted it first, pointing it out with a cry of surprise.

‘Another?’ said Fry. ‘It’s not possible.’

‘No, it isn’t possible. Not like that.’

‘Call in and find out, will you?’

Fry put her foot down harder on the accelerator, forgetting for a moment her nervousness of the narrow lanes and the stone walls that always seemed to crowd in and try to trap her car. A bit of music began to play over and over in her mind. It was if Annie Lennox was still there, inside her head, though the CD player was turned off. She was still singing that acoustic version of ‘Dark Road’. Something about all the fires of destruction. All the fires of destruction.

‘No, they say it’s the Light House,’ said Hurst in an odd, strained voice.

Fry stared straight ahead at the road as they drove towards the first tendrils of smoke drifting overhead.

‘And?’ she said.

‘Persons reported.’

Swerving to avoid a car coming the other way on a bend, Fry cursed under her breath. Persons reported. It was a bit of fire-service jargon, but she recognised its meaning. There were people trapped in the fire.

Cooper flinched in pain as something dripped on to his face. It was hot and scalding, like melted wax. He brushed the blob from his cheek and saw a smear of molten green plastic on his fingers.

Shielding his eyes, he looked up at the ceiling. The light fittings were melting. They had once been shaped like candles, but now they were drooping, slowly dissolving into liquid that spattered his scene suit and landed in his hair.

He pulled his jacket over his head, conscious as he did it how futile a gesture it was. The protection wouldn’t last long once the flames touched him. He had to keep moving.

He turned back towards the bar. Glowing embers faced him. Before he could move, a shelf bearing a line of optics tore away from the ceiling with a shriek and crashed to the floor. Glass flew in all directions, shattering into fragments, glittering in the flames like a shower of meteorites.

He pulled open the blackened door, keeping his body behind it in case of a back blast caused by a rush of air. The door handle was almost too hot to touch. Cooper looked at his hands, and saw that his fingers were red and blistering. The pain hadn’t hit him yet, but it would.

He glimpsed something red on the wall by the door. A fire extinguisher. He grabbed it from its bracket, thumped the handle and sprayed foam towards the heart of the blaze. It subsided a little, and he kept spraying until the extinguisher was empty. Immediately, the fire flickered and sprang back to life.

‘Liz! Where are you?’ he called desperately.

But his voice was hoarse, and he burst into a spasm of painful coughing.

In the bar, smoke travelling across the ceiling hit a wall and rolled down to floor level. His mouth was parched, his throat sore from the smoke penetrating his mask. His eyes streamed with tears so that he could barely see, even if the smoke hadn’t plunged the pub into unfathomable darkness.

He fumbled blindly along the wall, found a steel bar under his fingers and a door behind it. The fire exit. At first the bar wouldn’t move. Crying out in frustration, he banged at it with his fists, kicked out at it, thumped it again. Finally, he spun round and grabbed the empty fire extinguisher, swung it hard against the bar and felt it give way.

But he must have inhaled too much smoke. He was getting confused. He didn’t know where right or left was, didn’t know where the doors were, felt as though he couldn’t breathe at all.

Irritants hit his eyes and the back of his throat. He could barely open his eyelids. He retched and took a deep breath, in involuntary reaction. The smoke he inhaled was disorientating, dizzying. He went down on his knees. He knew he was giving way to the carbon monoxide, but he was unable to fight.

Now he saw shadows in the smoke, flickering and shimmering, dancing and shuddering, fading in and out. Was that a figure outlined against the flames? The smoke was black and thick and choking. Boards over the windows were burning.

Glass shattered, and a blast of air exploded the flames into a great roaring blaze, a wild beast devouring the furniture, ripping up the floor, stripping paper from the walls. A sheet of fire rolled across the ceiling and engulfed the room.

‘Liz!’

His voice came as a feeble croak, and there was no answer.

Cooper thought he glimpsed a movement near him in the smoke. He reached out for an indistinct shape like a hand, but grasped at empty space and found himself falling forwards into darkness, until his face hit the floor and his mind swam into swirling oblivion as he lost those last shreds of consciousness.

All around him was shouting and screaming, a muffled roaring noise. The crash of falling stone. And the screaming.

Then silence.

Arriving at the Light House, Fry and Hurst jumped out of the car, but within a few yards they were driven back by the smoke and heat.

Almost choking, her eyes running with tears, Fry saw that two fire appliances were already on the scene and were tackling the fire at the back of the pub. Clouds of steam rose from the jets of water they were directing on to the ground floor, trying to suppress the flames for a team in breathing apparatus who were entering through the rear door.

The lights of the two appliances and the arriving ambulances bounced off the columns of black smoke pouring from the building. Flames erupted from another window higher up. The first floor was well alight by now, and smoke was beginning to trickle from between the tiles of the roof.

At last Fry saw two figures stumble out of the smoke. Firefighters ran towards them to support them, and she couldn’t see who it was from the bodies in the way.

‘Becky, who …?’

‘I don’t know. No, wait a minute — Diane, one of them is a woman. And the other is Eliot Wharton.’

‘Oh God.’

A fireman in a respirator emerged from the building, stepped over the hoses and pulled off his mask. He shook his head wearily at the incident commander and mouthed something. Fry couldn’t hear what he was saying. She strained her eyes, wishing she could lip-read.

It wasn’t until the commander turned to look at her, and she saw his despairing expression, that hope began to die.