Chapter 3
Chapter Three
There was a curse I couldn’t make out and the sound of liquid being poured, which I figured was coffee from Wrigley’s new cafetiere. I would happily have maimed for a coffee right now.
“So the body isn’t that of Mike Mulligan?”
“Correct.”
“Why couldn’t this have been straightforward?”
“Because it doesn’t work that way, sir.” I watched the CSIs carefully move the body bag into the back of a van, Nate supervising them, not that they needed much supervising.
“Just once. What do you need? I want this wrapping as quick as possible and I’m aware you can’t conjure a conviction from thin air.” He was now tapping his pen on his desk; I could hear the repetitive sound which meant he was stressed.
“Verity would be useful. Maybe Lachy. I’ve got the locals on door to door here, but that’s only for forty-eight hours.
” The golden hour was evaporating. “Reporters are out. Cordons are in place, all the usual stuff.” I’d spent the last hour organising the scene, liaising with Jenna and Katie, and trying to avoid Paul who seemed adamant he needed to live in my pocket.
“What’s been done so far to identify the victim?”
I looked up to the sky in the hope it would drop a barrel of patience on me.
“Body’s at the morgue. Nate’s starting this afternoon.
I’ll attend. Paul’s sending in a robot to look at the cellars in case we have a second – or more – body there.
That’s starting in about ten minutes. The body’s not really recognisable and the house is in too much of a state to find anything that would help with identification between the fire and what’s been used to put it out. ”
There was another grumble, unintelligible and bad tempered. “So we could be looking at identification through dental records or that malarky. That’ll take ages. What about Mike Mulligan? Any sign of him?”
“No. He doesn’t have a car registered to him and there’s no vehicle registered to this address.
Neighbours reported he was isolated, spending a lot of time in his garden, but the house was a concern.
He retired in his fifties and has money, by all accounts, but they didn’t know what it was spent on.
He’s apparently a club member or it could be a church or religious organisation, no one’s sure.
” The houses on the road were spread apart, long driveways and wide gardens so they could go months without bumping into each other.
There was silence from Wrigley.
“If you can let me have Verity and Lachy, that would help. The priority is locating Mike Mulligan and IDing our vic.” I pushed, knowing that Wrigley was set on the epitaph to his police career being that he’d taken down one of the city’s gang lords, and with what had happened last week, there was a good chance he could pull this one off.
“You can have Verity from this afternoon, she’s just interviewing at the moment, and I’ll send Lachy over now.”
“Thank you. Could you send him with a couple of coffees and a sandwich?”
“Now you’re pushing it, McAllister.”
Paul had set up a screen on a makeshift table, one of his colleagues faffing with a wire.
He looked up as I headed over, forcing a smile.
I knew he was trying to not be pissed off with me and to make an effort simultaneously.
I was the reason he’d had to do three days of DEI training, or at least, I thought it was me.
“We can watch the live feed from here. It’ll be slow going but thorough and we can’t risk sending anyone down there without checking first. Get comfy.” Paul gestured to a box that I was meant to sit on. “This is Ste; he’s the tech head for this.”
Ste gave me a grin. He was in his twenties, cute with a smile that probably got him out of trouble on the regular.
“How does it work?” I was intrigued.
Another award-winning grin. “It’s like a mini tank.
It can go over rubble and use and arm to lift itself down steps or over obstacles.
There’s a range of features – thermal imaging, gas sensors, two-way audio in case there are survivors and the camera that can be repositioned.
We’re using it here to check if anyone was trapped in the cellar; if there was, it’s pretty much impossible they’d have survived.
The heat down there would’ve been huge and the lack of ventilation would’ve led to increased toxicity with the fumes.
At the moment, we’d only deploy people if we had a sign that someone was still alive and we were confident that we’d thoroughly assessed structural integrity. ”
I watched the robot climb down the cellar steps, navigating debris that had fallen from the ceiling.
I could see exactly why we weren’t sending any people down there.
Ste continued to talk me through what we were seeing, explaining about how the fire had travelled and how it looked like accelerant was used in the cellars as well as the ground and first floors.
“It looks like a lot of paper was stored down here. See that?” He pointed to the screen. “That was a lever arch file. That,” he pointed to something else on the screen, “is the remains of a computer. Probably an old nineteen nineties model.”
“How can you tell that?” To me, it looked like a heap of melted something.
“I’ve seen a lot of stills from explorations after fires.
There are melting patterns that can be studied; you can work out approximately what the heat was, and this can give additional details that can support a conviction.
” He sat back, something else capturing his attention.
“Boss, have you seen that.” Ste turned to Paul, tapping his shoulder to get his attention. “Look.”
“Shit. We have a second body.”
I swallowed, the rush of adrenaline of a case becoming bigger feeding my dopamine, the thrill of the chase beginning. I wasn’t bloodthirsty; I didn’t wish for these things to happen so I had something to solve. I didn’t need to. Humans were very good at reverse engineering themselves.
“Can you move the camera?” Paul was glued to the screen now, a blockbuster with a private viewing, just not the sort you’d pay money for.
I didn’t say anything, just watched, Jenna Osei joining us and adding to the conversation between Paul and Ste, plans being made.
“It looks like the chair they were sat on collapsed,” Ste said. “Why were they sat on a chair in the cellar in the first place?”
I didn’t like any of the answers my brain came up with for that, but I was certain that this wasn’t kids messing about or something gone wrong.
“We have a house with two dead bodies, the building burned beyond repair, with a fire hot enough to get rid of any evidence, either from the killer or whatever these people were up to.” I stood up and stretched.
I’d been off the day before and had gone for a run in the Peak District that had also included some climbing and I was aching.
“How do we recover the body? And anything else that’s in there. ”
“You won’t get anything off the computers. The fire was too hot amongst other things.” Ste was still glued to the robot’s movements.
Paul’s sigh was loud enough to pull attention towards him. “We need to get the remains out before the floor above gives way. It’s right underneath the point of origin. I wonder if the son of a bastard did that on purpose.”
“Maybe. That would be torture in itself. You said the remains look like they were on a chair. What if they were tied to chair and knew that a fire was starting? That would’ve been hell.” Again, I’d pick the water.
“Burned alive?” Ste looked sickened. “Horrendous way to go. You have to hope they were unconscious with the fumes and smoke. Okay, we have one more chamber to check. Hopefully there’s nothing else in there.”
We stayed watching the live stream as the robot continued to sweep through the cellars, climbing over debris and momentarily being covered in dust from a falling rafter.
DC Lachlan Dixon arrived bearing eight takeaway coffees in cardboard cups and a tan fresh from two weeks in Ibiza. Ste kept his eyes fixed on the screen while the rest of us attacked Lachy like a plague of locusts, ones which were dehydrated and had a significant caffeine addiction.
“Thank you.” It was too hot, too strong and tasted too bitter, but it was better than the stale opened bottle of water I’d found in my car when I was desperate half an hour ago.
“Welcome. What do we have here?”
Jenna filled him in because I was too busy trying to drink and not lose the inside of my mouth at the same time.
“How do we get the second body out? That robot is immense by the way.” Lachy inched closer to Ste. “How do you get to work with that sort of tech?”
“By not becoming a copper.” Ste grinned again. “Your department is still stuck in the Stone Age.”
“True. How do we get the remains out of there?” He looked over at me. “I’m not volunteering.”
“No one’s asking you to,” I said. “What I need you to do is co-ordinate the search over the fields. The dog’s just arrived.
” In fact, there were two dogs. I recognised their handler first; Josh Moore had worked on a couple of my previous cases and was a lively colleague, full of energy and optimism.
His two dogs were springer spaniels, both full of beans and on the crazy spectrum, unless they were working.
“I want to find out the route our perp took to get into the property. I think the entrance is the gap in the hedge onto the field.”
Lachy gave me a mock salute and strode off. He was a good officer, thorough and hardworking, if his head could be back on the beach in his native Australia some days.
“How do we get the body out?” I looked at Paul, annoyed that I actually needed his knowledge.
He stood up, crossing his arms which only made him look bigger. “We have to make it structurally safe, stabilise the walls, remove any hazards, check oxygen levels first. It’s going to take hours, Mia.” He eyed me as if I was a cannon that needed decommissioning.