Playing With Fire

Chapter 3

After stopping off at home for a quick shower and a change of clothes, Banks headed down to Adel early that afternoon, listening to the same Beethoven string quartet that had been playing on the radio during his talk with Mark: number 12 in E flat.

The fog had thinned to a mere gauze, except in patches, so it wasn’t a difficult drive, and the temperature was heading toward double figures. One or two hardy souls were out playing on the golf course near Harrogate, dressed in sweaters and jeans.

Banks turned off the Leeds ring road onto Otley Road and stopped by the imposing gates of Lawnswood Crematorium to consult his map. A little farther along the main road, he turned right and drove into the affluent community of winding streets that was Adel.

He soon found the large detached corner house, which also doubled as the doctor’s surgery. This wasn’t going to be an easy job, Banks reflected as he got out of his car. Mark’s allegations against Patrick Aspern might be groundless, and Banks was there to tell the parents that their daughter was dead and ask them to identify the body, not to interrogate the stepfather over sexual abuse. That might come later, though, Banks knew, so he would have to be alert for anything out of the ordinary in Aspern’s reactions to his questions.

Banks took a deep breath and pushed the doorbell. The woman who answered looked younger than he expected. About Annie’s age, early thirties, with short layered blond hair, pale, flawless skin and a nervous, elfin look about her. “Mrs. Aspern?” he asked.

The woman nodded, looking puzzled, and put her hand to her cheek.

“It’s about your daughter, Tina. I’m a policeman. May I come in for a moment?”

“Christine?” Mrs. Aspern fingered the loose neck of her cable-knit sweater. “She doesn’t live here anymore. What is it?”

“If I might come in, please?”

She stood aside and Banks stepped onto the highly polished hardwood floor. “First on the right,” said Mrs. Aspern.

He followed her direction and found himself in a small sitting room with a dark blue three-piece suite and cream walls. A couple of framed paintings hung there, one over the decorative, but functional, stone fireplace, and the other on the opposite wall. Both were landscapes in simple black frames.

“Is your husband home?” Banks asked.

“Patrick? He’s taking afternoon surgery.”

“Can you fetch him for me, please?”

“Fetch him?” She looked alarmed. “But… the patients.”

“I want to talk to you both together. It’s important,” Banks said.

Shaking her head, Mrs. Aspern left the room. Banks took the opportunity to stand up and examine the two paintings more closely. Both were watercolors painted in misty morning light, by the looks of them. One showed the church of St. John the Baptist, just down the street, which Banks happened to have visited once with his ex-wife Sandra during his early days in Yorkshire. He knew it was the oldest Norman church in Leeds, built around the middle of the twelfth century. Sandra had taken some striking photographs. A plain building, it was most famous for the elaborate stone carvings on the porch and chancel arch, at which the painting merely hinted.

The other painting was a woodland scene, which Banks assumed to be Adel Woods, again with that wispy, fey early-morning light about it, making the glade look like the magical forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The signature “Keith Peverell” was clear enough on both. No connection to “Tom” there, not that he had expected any.

Mrs. Aspern returned some minutes later, along with her clearly perturbed husband. “Look,” he said, before any introductions had been made. “I can’t just leave my patients in the lurch like this. Can’t you come back at five o’clock?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Banks, offering his warrant card.

Aspern scrutinized it, and a small, unpleasant smile tugged at the corners of his lips. He glanced at his wife. “Why didn’t you say, darling? A detective chief inspector, no less,” he said. “Well, it must be important if they sent the organ grinder. Please, sit down.”

Banks sat. Now that Aspern was pleased he’d been sent someone he thought commensurate with his social standing, though probably a chief constable would have been preferable, the patients were quickly forgotten. Things were likely to go a bit more easily. If Banks let them.

Aspern was a good fifteen years or so older than his wife, Banks guessed. Around fifty, with thinning sandy hair, he was handsome in a sharp-angled way, though Banks was put off by the cynical look in his eyes and the lips perpetually on the verge of that nasty little superior smile. He had the slim, athletic figure of a man who plays tennis and golf and goes to the gym regularly. Being a doctor, of course, he’d know all about the benefits of exercise, though Banks knew more than one or two doctors, the Home Office pathologist Dr. Glendenning among them, who smoked and drank and didn’t give a damn about fitness.

“I’m afraid it’s bad news,” he said, as Dr. and Mrs. Aspern faced him from the sofa. Mrs. Aspern was chewing on a fingernail already, looking as if she was expecting the worst. “It’s about your daughter, Tina.”

“We always called her Christine. Please.”

“Out with it, man,” Aspern prodded. “Has there been an accident?”

“Not quite,” Banks said. “Christine’s dead. I’m sorry, there’s no easier way to say it. And we’ll need one or both of you to come and identify the body.”

They sat in silence, not looking at each other, not even touching. Finally, Aspern found his voice. “Dead? How? What happened?”

“There was a fire. You knew she was living on a canal boat just outside Eastvale?”

“Yes. Another foolish idea of hers.” At last, Aspern looked at his wife. Tears were running from her eyes as if she’d been peeling an onion, but she made no sound. Her husband got up and fetched her a box of tissues. “Here you are, dear,” he said, putting them down on her knees. She didn’t even look at them, just kept staring ahead into whatever abyss she was seeing, the tears dripping off the edges of her jaw onto her skirt, making little stains where they landed on the pale green material.

“I appreciate your coming yourself to tell us,” said Aspern. “You can see my wife’s upset. It’s been quite a shock. Is that all?”

“I’m afraid not, sir,” Banks said. “The fire was of doubtful origin. I have some questions I need to ask you as soon as possible. Now, in fact.”

“It’s all right, Patrick,” Mrs. Aspern said, coming back from a great distance. “Let the man do his job.”

A little flustered by her command of the situation, or so it seemed to Banks, Aspern settled back onto the sofa. “If you’re sure…” he said.

“I’m sure.” She looked at Banks. “Please tell us what happened.”

“Christine was living with a boy, a young man, rather, called Mark Siddons, on an abandoned narrow boat.”

“Siddons,” said Aspern, lip twisting. “We know all about him. Did he do this? Was he responsible?”

“We have no evidence that Mark Siddons had anything to do with the fire,” said Banks.

“Where was he? Did he survive?”

“He was out at the time of the fire,” Banks said. “And he’s unharmed. I gather there was no love lost between you?”

“He turned our daughter against us,” said Aspern. “Took her away from home and stopped her from seeing us. It’s as if he took control of her mind like one of those religious cults you read about.”

“That’s not what he told me,” Banks said, careful now he knew he was walking on heavily mined land. “And it’s not the impression I got of him.”

“Well, you wouldn’t expect him to admit it, would you? I can only imagine the lies he told you.”

“What lies?”

“Never you mind. I’m just warning you, that’s all. The boy’s no good. Don’t believe a word he says.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” said Banks. “How old was Christine?”

“Seventeen,” said Aspern.

“And how old was she when she left home?”

“She was sixteen,” Mrs. Aspern answered. “She went the day after her sixteenth birthday. As if she just couldn’t wait to get away.”

“Did either of you know that Christine was a drug user?”

“It doesn’t surprise me,” said Aspern. “The crowd she was hanging around with. What was it? Pot? Ecstasy?”

“Apparently she preferred drugs that brought her oblivion rather than awareness,” Banks said softly, watching Patrick Aspern’s face closely for any signs of a reaction. All it showed was puzzlement. “It was heroin,” Banks continued. “Other narcotics, if she couldn’t get that, but mostly heroin.”

“Oh, dear God,” said Mrs. Aspern. “What have we done?”

Banks turned to her. “What do you mean?”

“Fran,” her husband said. “We can’t blame ourselves for this. We gave her every opportunity. Every advantage.”

Banks had heard this before on so many occasions that it slipped in one ear and out the other. Nobody had a clue what their kids really needed – and how could they, for teenagers are hardly the most communicative species on earth – but so many parents assumed that the advantages of wealth or status were enough in themselves. Even Banks’s own parents, working-class as they were, thought he had let them down by joining the police force instead of pursuing a career in business. But wealth and status rarely were enough, in Banks’s experience, though he knew that most kids from wealthy families went on to do quite well for themselves. Others, like Tina, and like Emily Riddle and Luke Armitage, cases he had dealt with in the recent past, fell by the wayside.

“Apparently,” Banks went on, cutting through the husband-wife tension he was sensing, “Christine used to steal morphine from your surgery.”

Aspern reddened. “That’s a lie! Did Siddons tell you that? Any narcotics in my surgery are safely under lock and key, in absolute compliance with the law. If you don’t believe it, come and have a look for yourself right now. I’ll show you. Come on.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Banks. “This isn’t about Christine’s drug supplies. We know she got her last score from a dealer in Eastvale.”

“It’s just a damn shame you can’t put these people away before they do the damage,” said Aspern.

“That would assume we know who the criminals are going to be before they commit their crimes,” said Banks, thinking of the film Minority Report, which he had seen with Michelle a few weeks ago.

“If you ask me, it’s pretty bloody obvious in most cases,” said Aspern. “Even if this Siddons didn’t start the fire, you can be damn sure he did something. He’s got criminal written all over him, that one.”

More than once Banks, like his colleagues, had acted on the premise that if the person they had in custody hadn’t committed the particular crime he was charged with, it didn’t matter, because the police knew he had committed other crimes, and had no evidence to charge him with them. In police logic, the crime they were convicted for, the one they didn’t commit, made up for all the crimes they had committed and got away with. It was easier in the old days, of course, before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act gave the criminals more rights than the police, and the Crown Prosecution Service wouldn’t touch anything with less than a hundred-percent possibility of conviction, but it still happened, if you could get away with it. “We’d have to overhaul the legal system,” he said, “if we wanted to put people who haven’t done anything away without a trial. But let’s get back to the matter in hand. Did you know of anyone who’d want to hurt Christine, Mrs. Aspern?”

“We didn’t know her… the friends she made after she left,” she answered. “But I can’t imagine anyone would want to harm her, no.”

“Dr. Aspern?”

“Me, neither.”

“There was an artist on the adjacent boat. All we know is that his name was Tom. Do you know anything about him?”

“Never heard of him,” said Patrick Aspern.

“What about Andrew Hurst? He lives nearby.”

“I never saw anyone.”

“When did you last visit the boat?” Banks asked him.

“Last week. Thursday, I believe.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” Aspern said. “She’s my stepdaughter. I was concerned. I wanted to persuade her to come home.”

“Did you ever see the neighbor on one of your visits?”

“Look, you’re making it sound as if I was a regular visitor. I only went up there a couple of times to try to persuade Christine to come home, and that… thug she was with threatened me.”

“With what?”

“Violence, of course. I mean, I’m not a coward or a weakling or anything, but I wouldn’t put it past someone like him to have a knife, or even a gun.”

“You didn’t go there yesterday?”

“Of course not.”

“What kind of car do you drive?”

“A Jaguar XJ8.”

“Did you ever visit the boat, Mrs. Aspern?” Banks asked.

Before Frances Aspern could answer, her husband jumped in. “I went by myself,” he said. “Frances has a nervous disposition. Confrontations upset her. Besides, she couldn’t bear to see how Christine was living.”

“Is this true, Mrs. Aspern?” Banks asked.

Frances Aspern nodded.

“Look,” said Dr. Aspern, “you can see we’re upset over the news. Can’t you just go away and leave us in peace for a while, to grieve?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to save that for later,” said Banks. “When I’ve finished here, I’d like one or both of you to follow me up to Eastvale and identify the body.”

Mrs. Aspern touched her chalklike cheek. “You said it was a fire.”

“Yes,” said Banks. “I’m sorry. There is some disfiguration. Not much, but some.”

“I’ll go, darling,” said Aspern, resting his hand on her knee. “I can cancel surgery. I’m sure everyone will understand.”

She shook him off. “No. I’ll go.”

“But you’re upset, dear. I’m a doctor. I can deal with these things. I’ve been trained.”

She shot him a scornful glance. “Deal with? Is that all this means to you? I said I’ll go, Mr. Banks. Can you take me and have someone bring me back? I’m afraid I’m far too upset to drive myself.”

“At least let me drive you,” her husband pleaded.

“I don’t want you there,” she said. “Christine was my daughter.”

There. It was said. And it lay heavily between them like an undigested meal. “As you wish,” said Patrick Aspern.

“Are you certain it couldn’t have been an accident?” Mrs. Aspern asked, turning to Banks. “I still can’t believe that anyone would want to harm Christine.”

“Anything can happen when drugs enter the equation,” said Banks. “And that’s another angle we’ll be looking at. There’s also a strong possibility that Christine wasn’t the intended victim.”

“What do you mean?” asked Aspern.

“I can’t say much more at this point,” said Banks. “We still have a lot of forensic tests to do and a lot of questions to ask. At the moment, we’re simply trying to get as much information as possible about the people who lived on the boats. When we know more, we’ll know where to focus our investigation, which line of inquiry to follow.”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” said Aspern.

His wife stood up. “I’m ready to go,” she said to Banks, then added, looking at her husband, “you can get back to your patients now, Patrick.”

He started to say something, but she turned her back and walked out of the room.

Mark’s cell was small and basic, but comfortable enough. It smelled a bit – a hint of urine, vomit and stale alcohol – but they were old smells. At least it was clean, and he wasn’t shut in with a gang of sexually frustrated bikers with fourteen-inch penises. There were a couple of drunks down the corridor, even at that time in the afternoon. One of them kept singing “Your Cheatin’ Heart” over and over again until one of the officers made him shut up. After that, Mark could hear them snore or call out in their sleep from time to time, but other than those few irritations, things remained fairly quiet. All in all, it wasn’t so bad. The only thing was, he couldn’t go out when he wanted. It was like home, until he plucked up the courage to take on his mother and Crazy Nick and made his final break.

Mark tried, but sleep just wouldn’t come. Most of his thoughts centered on Tina and the news the policeman had given him of her death. Of course, he had known it, known as soon as he got to the woods and saw the firemen and the smoldering barges that she had to be dead. But he had tried to deny it to himself; now he had to face it and accept it: he would never see Tina again.

And it was his fault.

Tina. So gentle, so frail and so birdlike, it broke his heart that he had been unfaithful to her and hurt her and would never get the chance to put things right, to tell her he was sorry and that he loved her, only her, not Mandy or anyone else. Tina trusted him, needed him and depended on him. He got her through the bad times, and when there were good times – which there were – they laughed together, and some-times went on walks in the country and drank screw-top wine and ate cheese-slice sandwiches beside a crystal stream.

Sometimes they seemed to live an almost normal life, the kind of life Mark wanted for them. In his dreams, he got a steady job in Eastvale, maybe working on church restoration, got Tina straight, then they rented a little flat. When the first baby came, they had saved enough for a small semi, maybe by the sea. At least that was how he saw their life developing. He knew he’d be taking care of Tina forever, because she would always need that, even if she got straight, she was so badly scarred inside; but he could do it, he wanted to do it, and once she kicked the habit she couldn’t help but get stronger. She was intelligent, too, much brighter than he; maybe she could get into the college like Mandy and get a job as a secretary or something. He bet she could work with computers if she put her mind to it.

Sometimes they even made love, but that was hard for Tina; she was never far from the hunger and the darkness at the center of her being. The wrong word or gesture, and she was burrowing deep inside herself again, scrunching up in the fetal position with her thumb in her mouth, on the nod. And when she was like that, it didn’t matter if he was there or not. Which was why he hadn’t been there last night.

Tina wasn’t much interested in sex, partly because drugs do weird things to your sex drive, but mostly because of her stepfather. When Mark thought of Patrick Aspern, his stomach knotted and rage surged through him. One day he’d…

Despite what the policeman had said, Mark wondered if Tina could have started the fire accidentally. She heated her spoon over a candle to prepare her fix, and she’d been careless once or twice in the past. But he’d been there then, not like this time.

But no, he realized; it couldn’t have happened that way. He remembered that he had been careful to snuff out the candle himself before leaving her on the nod, in a sleeping bag, her eyes glazed, pupils dilated, to all intents and purposes lost to the world, wrapped in a warm cocoon of safety and oblivion, without a care, until it started to wear off and she started to itch and her stomach knotted up and her every pore oozed with craving for more. He’d been through it all with her so many times, and he knew he’d have gone through it again when he got home, if it hadn’t been for the fire.

He’d told Tina he was sick of her and her junkie ways, and if she didn’t get into some sort of rehabilitation center or methadone program he was leaving her. She didn’t care when he said it because the heroin was kicking in and flooding her veins and that rush, that golden warmth, was the only thing she cared about in the whole world when it spread through her like an orgasm. So he stormed out. Out to Mandy and her tantalizing, lithe young body. Tina didn’t know where he was going, of course, and she never would now. But he knew, and that was more than enough.

At least he knew the fire couldn’t have started on their boat. Did she know it was happening, that the flames were creeping closer, the smoke enveloping her? Even if she had come round when she smelled the smoke or saw the flames, would she have had time to get her head together and jump for land? Or water? Perhaps then she would have drowned. Tina couldn’t swim.

Mark curled up on the hard bunk, and the thoughts and fears tumbled around in his tired brain. When the drunk started up again with “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” he put his hands over his ears and cried.

“Is the music all right?” Banks asked Frances Aspern.

“Pardon?”

“The music. Is it okay?”

They were entering the Dales landscape beyond Ripon, and the distant shapes of the hills rose out of the mist in shades of gray, like whales breaking the water’s surface. Banks was playing Mariza’s Fado em Mim, traditional Portuguese songs, accompanied by classical guitar and bass, and he realized they might not be to everyone’s taste. Frances Aspern had been staring out of the window in silence the whole way so far, and he had almost given up trying to start a conversation. He couldn’t help but be aware of the weight of her grief beside him. Grief or guilt; he wasn’t certain which.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Aspern. “It’s fine. She sounds very sad.”

Indeed she did. Banks didn’t understand a word of the songs without the translations on the CD booklet, the print of which was daily getting too small for him to read without glasses, but there was no mistaking the sense of loss, sadness and the cruelty of fate in Mariza’s voice. You didn’t need to know what the words meant to feel that.

“I didn’t want to ask you while your husband was present,” Banks said, “but is Christine’s birth father still around?”

She shook her head. “I was very young. We didn’t marry. My parents… they were good to me. I lived with them in Roundhay until Patrick and I married.”

“We’ll still need to talk to him,” said Banks.

“He’s back home. In America. We met when he was traveling in Europe.”

“Can you give me the details?”

She looked out of the window, away from Banks, as she spoke, so that he could barely hear her. “His name is Paul Ryder. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. I don’t have his address or telephone number. We haven’t been in contact since… well…”

Banks made a mental note of the name and city. It might be hard to track down this Paul Ryder after so long, but they’d have to try. “How did you and Dr. Aspern meet?” he asked.

“Patrick was a colleague of my father’s, a frequent visitor to our house when I was at home, when Christine was only a baby. My father is also a doctor. I suppose, in a way, he was Patrick’s mentor. He’s retired now, of course.”

Banks wondered how well that marriage had gone down with Mrs. Aspern’s family. “Were you both at home last night?” he asked.

She turned to look at him. “What do you expect me to say to that?”

“I expect you to tell me the truth,” Banks said.

“Ah, the truth. Yes, of course we were both at home.” She turned to look out of the window again.

“Did your husband go out at all yesterday?”

Mrs. Aspern didn’t reply.

“Is there anything else you want to say?” Banks asked. “Anything at all you want to tell me?”

Mrs. Aspern glanced at him again. He couldn’t make out the expression on her face. Then she turned back to look out of the window. “No,” she said, after a long pause. “No, I don’t think so.”

Banks gave up and drove on, Mariza singing against a backdrop of the misty Dales landscape, a song about sorrow, longing, pity, punishment and despair.

The scene looked different in the late afternoon, Annie thought as she walked through the woods to the canal branch. The area was still taped off, and she had to show her warrant card and sign in before entering, but the firefighters and their equipment were gone, and in their stead was an eerie silence shrouding the two burned-out narrow boats and the scattering of men in hooded white overalls patiently searching the banks. The smell of ashes still hung in the damp air.

She found Detective Sergeant Stefan Nowak poking through debris on the artist’s boat. Stefan was their crime scene coordinator, and it was his job to supervise the collection of possible crime scene evidence by his highly trained team and to liaise between the special analysts in the lab and Banks’s team.

Stefan looked up as Annie approached. He was a handsome, elegant man – no doubt a prince, Annie thought, as so many exiled Poles were – and he looked aristocratic, even in his protective clothing. There was a certain remoteness about him, which stopped on just the polite side of aloofness, and made him seem regal in some way. He had a faint Polish accent, too, which served to heighten the mysterious effect. He was friendly enough to be on a first-name basis with both Annie and Banks, but he didn’t hang out in the Queen’s Arms with the rest of the lads, and nobody knew much about his private life.

Annie sniffled. “Found anything?” she asked.

Stefan gestured toward the murky water. “One of the frogmen found an empty turps container in there,” he said. “Probably the one used to start the fire. No prints or anything, though. Just your regular, commercial turps container. Anyway, I’m finished here,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you what we’ve found so far.”

Annie wrapped her scarf more tightly around her sore throat as they took the narrow path through the woods. Wraiths of fog still drifted between the trees like elaborate spiderwebs, and here and there they had to step around a patch of muddy ground or a shallow puddle.

About halfway to the lane, Annie saw the plastic retaining frames around faint imprints in the mud, each with a ruler lying next to it. “Luckily, the ground was just muddy enough in places,” Stefan said. “Probably protected by the trees. Anyway, we got reasonably fresh shoe impressions, but they could be anybody’s.”

“How many?”

“Just the one person, by the looks of it.”

“Did the firefighters use this path?”

Stefan pointed. “No, down there. This is the path you’d take from the lay-by. They parked farther down, closer to the canal. This part of the woods is riddled with paths. I gather it’s a popular spot in summer.”

Annie looked down at the markings. “So they could be our man’s?”

“Yes, but don’t get your hopes up. Anyway, they’ve all been carefully photographed, and casts have been made. They’re drying out right now, but tomorrow we’ll run them through SICAR.”

SICAR was an acronym for Shoeprint Image Capture and Retrieval, which combines a number of scanned databases to match footwear files with specimens, primarily the “Sole-mate” database of over three hundred common brands of shoes and two thousand different sole patterns. Stefan’s expert would have sprayed the muddy impression with shellac or acrylic lacquer, then he would have made a cast in dental stone. Back at headquarters, he would enter the details of the shoe impression on the computer, coding by common patterns such as bars, polygons and zigzags, and by manufacturers’ logos, if any were present. From these reference databases, they could find out what type and brand of shoe caused the imprint, and they could also search the crime and suspect databases to see if it matched the shoe of a person taken into custody, or a footprint left at a previous crime scene.

Of course, what everyone really hoped for was something more than just class characteristics, some sort of unique markings, the kind that come from wear and tear, a nice drawing pin embedded in the sole, for example, something that could be matched with a specific shoe. Then, once you have your suspect and his shoe, you have solid evidence that links him to the scene.

They got to the lay-by, beside which the police mobile unit was parked, completely blocking the lane. It didn’t matter much, though, as the track was hardly ever used and it led only toward a narrow bridge over the canal about two miles west. Anyone wanting to get there was advised to take the next turning by a diversion sign posted at the junction of the lane and the B-road half a mile north.

Annie noticed more retaining frames, measures and markers on the lay-by itself.

“Impressive,” she said. “You have been busy.”

“We’ll see,” said Stefan. “Trying to process a crime scene like this is like peeling the layers off the onion, and you don’t know which layer is the important one.” He pointed to one of the imprints. “Here we’ve got parallel tire tracks,” he said. “And that should be enough to tell us who the manufacturer was. From these we can also get the track width and wheelbase measurements, which might even help us identify the make of the car. If there are a number of individual characteristics present in the tire impressions, which may be the case, then we should be able to match them to the specific tire, and vehicle, too.”

“If and when we find it,” said Annie.

“Naturally. We’ve also collected soil samples from the entire area. No rare wildflowers at this time of year, of course, but there are some unique mineral features, and they should also help us tie in the shoes and tire to the scene, should we find them.”

“And should they still be dirty.”

Stefan narrowed his eyes. “Trace evidence can be microscopic sometimes. You ought to know that. You’d be surprised how little we can work with.”

“I’m sorry,” said Annie. “I don’t mean to be negative. It’s just… I have a feeling we’re not dealing with an amateur here.”

“And we’re not amateurs, either. Besides, we don’t know what we’re dealing with here yet.”

“True enough,” Annie agreed. “I’m just suggesting that he’ll have done his best to cover his tracks, and the longer it takes us to find him…”

“The more tracks he’ll manage to cover. Okay, I’ll grant you that. But it’ll take more than a car wash and a good polishing to get rid of every atom of soil he might have picked up here. Besides, don’t forget, we’ve got the tire impression to go on. There’s an oil stain, too, by the looks of it.” He pointed to another protected area on the lay-by. “We’ll have that back for analysis by the end of the day. It’s certainly beginning to look as if someone parked here recently, and if it wasn’t you or the fire brigade…”

Annie knew that it was neither she nor Banks. They had been concerned to preserve as much of the scene as they could when they arrived, almost by instinct, so they had left their cars farther up the lane and made their way through the woods without benefit of using a marked path. All in all, then, things were looking promising. Even if the evidence that Stefan and his team painstakingly collected didn’t lead them directly to the arsonist, it would come in useful in court when they did find him.

“Any chance it was a Jeep Cherokee?” Annie asked, remembering what Banks had told her Mark said he’d seen. “Or something similar?”

Stefan blinked. “Know something I don’t?”

“Just that something resembling a Jeep Cherokee has been reported seen in the area. Not last night, but recently.”

Stefan looked down at the tire tracks. “Well,” he said, “it’s something to go on. We can certainly compare wheelbase and track width. Anyway,” Stefan said, opening the door of the mobile unit with a flourish, “it’s not exactly the Ritz, but the heater works. How about coming in for a cuppa?”

Annie smiled, her body leaning toward the source of heat the way a sunflower leans toward the sun. “You must be a mind reader,” she said, and followed him in.

By the time Banks and Frances Aspern got to Western Area Headquarters after Mrs. Aspern’s positive identification of Christine at the mortuary of Eastvale General Infirmary, Annie had already left to talk to the SOCOs at the canal. Banks arranged for a uniformed constable to drive Mrs. Aspern back home, and he had just settled down to review the findings so far, with Gil Evans’s Jimi Hendrix orchestrations playing quietly in the background, when Geoff Hamilton appeared at his office door. Banks invited him in and Hamilton sat down, glancing around.

“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.”