Читать книгу: «Singing the Sadness», страница 2
Chapter 2
If Beryl hadn’t prefaced her cry with Joe! he might not have done it.
And if he’d taken thought, he certainly wouldn’t have done it, not because thought would have brought self-interest into play and there was a presumably fully paid-up public servant in calling distance, but simply because for Joe problem-solving by the cerebral route usually involved a paper and pencil and two pints of Guinness.
But pausing only to thrust the phone into Beryl’s hand, he’d set off running around the back of the house before he’d had time to work out by reason alone that just because the front of the house was an inferno didn’t mean the back was burning fiercely too.
It wasn’t. Not yet. At least not upstairs, though the flicker of the flames was clearly visible through the ground-floor windows. Meaning it was pointless going in at that level.
Against the rear wall stood a lean-to wash house with a sloping roof angling up to a first-floor window. There was a large aluminium water butt under the wash house downspout. With difficulty Joe clambered on it and used it as a step up on to the roof.
Here he paused. Through the chill night air he could feel draughts of heat drifting from the house. Must be hot as hell in there. He looked down into the water butt. From the black mirror of the water’s surface, cold-eyed stars stared back at him.
Again, no thought. Just a deep breath, then he crouched down and slid off the roof.
Spring might be bursting out all over but winter was still lurking here. He shot out like a missile from a nuclear sub and found himself back on top of the lean-to with no recollection of how he’d got there.
Dripping water from every orifice, he knelt on the slates, looking up at the first-floor window. A taller man could easily have reached the sill by stretching out his arm, but Joe wasn’t a taller man. In fact, he was a good inch shorter than Beryl Boddington, and when she wore her nurse’s cap, he felt a good foot shorter. But uniforms generally had that effect on him.
He tried to scramble up the roof. It was like being a squirrel in a wheel. The slates started sliding under his knees so that he had to scramble even faster just to stay on the spot. Much more of this and he was going to be back in the water butt. He flung himself forward, caught at the lip of the sill with the tips of his fingers, and got just enough purchase to draw himself up.
The window was open, which was good. It was also very small, which was bad. For while no man by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature, any man by taking the Great British Breakfast and lunching regularly on cheeseburgers with double chips can add a couple to his girth.
There was a moment when he thought he was stuck and he tried to reconcile himself to the prospect of having his head toasted crisp while his legs kicked wildly in the chilly air. Far from composing himself, the notion made him struggle so violently, he erupted through the window like a cork from a bottle and found himself lying on a rug in a small but nicely furnished bedroom.
He felt beneath the rug. The floorboards felt warm but still well this side of combustion. The closed door was not so promising. It felt definitely hot to the touch and he’d seen enough disaster movies to know that opening it could be like throwing a canful of paraffin on to a bonfire.
But having got so far, he couldn’t just retreat. Could he?
He looked up for inspiration.
And found himself looking at a small trap door in the ceiling.
Fortunately, like most old farmhouses this one had been built for sixteenth-century dwarves, and standing on a chest of drawers elevated him right to the low ceiling.
The trap was a tight fit. As he pushed up with all his strength, it occurred to him that if the flames had got into the attic via the front bedrooms, this too could produce the can of paraffin effect.
Then all at once it gave way and he was standing with his head in the roof space, and it wasn’t being burnt off.
But there was smoke up here. It caught at his throat and made him cough in a manner which would have had Rev. Pot glaring. In the Rev.’s eyes, all ailments which affected the larynx were self-induced and totally undeserving of sympathy.
He ducked his head back into the bedroom, pulled off his sodden jacket and draped it over his head. Then he took a deep breath of air and dragged himself through the narrow gap into the attic.
It was unboarded so he had to lie flat across a couple of beams till his eyesight adjusted. Something scuttled over his outstretched arm. Mouse, or maybe a rat, getting the message there was trouble on the way and looking for an exit. He hoped it made it.
He rose to his feet and tore a couple of slates out of the roof. Air might feed fire but it also fed humans and anyway it was good to take a last look at the starry sky. He edited out last, took a deep breath and started moving forward.
Lack of height was now an advantage. If he’d been built like Arnie Schwarzenegger he’d have been bent double. On the other hand, he guessed the poor devil trapped in the fire would probably have preferred even a contorted Arnie.
Where he was moving to he didn’t know. What he needed was a plan. Break through the ceiling below him was an option. He considered it. Probably go up like a Roman Candle as the fire funnelled through the hole, and in any case it only made sense if he had some idea where the trapped man was situated.
Which, he realized, he might have.
There was a water tank up ahead. Not very big, looked like the header tank for a shower, and the water in it was bubbling like the shower was switched on. Meaning maybe the trapped man had sought refuge here from the flames.
He checked the fall of the pipes. Chances were they went straight down into the shower room. He touched the plasterboard around them. Still cool.
He raised his right foot and stamped. The plasterboard cracked. He stamped again, harder. His left foot slipped off the narrow beam, his whole body hit the floor and he went through the ceiling in an avalanche of dust and plaster. And water.
He landed soft and noisy. The softness was a human body. The noise was the human whose body it was, shrieking.
He’d have felt pleased with himself if there’d been time. It was a shower room and the trapped man had sought refuge here. Only it wasn’t a man. It was a young woman. He knew that because she was naked.
She was in a bad way. She’d probably breathed in too much of the smoke which was gradually filling the cubicle for anything but incoherent shrieks to come out. Her arms were gashed like she’d pushed them through a windowpane, and her face and body were heat-blistered, but worst of all was her left leg which was both burnt and torn. Went through a burning floorboard, he guessed. If she’d headed for the back of the house she might have made it the way he’d come in. Instead she’d headed into the shower, back into the shower most likely, which would explain both why she had no clothes on and why she hadn’t heard any noise as the fire took a hold below.
Shoot, here he was thinking like a detective when what he should be doing was thinking like big Arnie. The heat in here was growing by the second and it couldn’t be long before the flames came licking through and all that the rapidly diminishing flow of water would do was let them boil before they burnt.
He said, ‘We’ve got to get out. Can you move at all?’
Her eyes struggled to focus. They were grey and he could see that her face, even though blistered, was the face of a pretty girl, late teens maybe.
The eyes had got him now. They registered puzzlement for a moment. Couldn’t blame her. Even if he had been Arnie, she’d still have wondered where the shoot he came from.
He said, ‘I’ve come down from the attic. We’ve got to get back up there. Are you ready?’
Stupid question. Her gaze went up to the hole in the ceiling then back to his face. She nodded. He could see that even that movement caused pain. He knew there was worse to come and he guessed she knew it too.
He stood up and pulled her upright with him. She let out what was a shriek in any language but she wasn’t a deadweight, not quite. She was giving what help she could. He looked up at the hole into the attic. Even with munchkin-level ceilings, this was going to be the impossible side of difficult. What he needed was a ladder. He looked down. Best he could find was a low plastic stool, presumably for Arnie-sized showerers to sit on so they didn’t bang their heads. He propped the woman up against the wall, which was getting hotter by the second. Then he squatted down, positioned the stool, thrust his head between her legs from behind, took her weight on his shoulders and stood upright like a weightlifter doing a lift-and-press.
He presumed she shrieked some more but he couldn’t hear for the sound of the blood drumming in his ears, or maybe it was the fire raging beyond the wall.
‘Try to pull yourself up,’ he yelled.
He didn’t know if she could hear or, if she could, whether she’d have the strength or the will to obey.
But she was brave, braver than he guessed he’d have been in like circumstances. And she had the resilience of youth. He felt her body move, and he stepped up on to the stool and grabbed her thighs in his hands and thrust upwards with all his might.
There was a moment when he thought she was stuck, and all his strength was gone, and there was nothing to do but subside into the cubicle and pray they suffocated before the flames got to them.
Then suddenly she was through, and the weight was off Joe’s shoulders.
‘Don’t come off the beams!’ he yelled, easing her legs through the hole.
Now it was his turn. He reached up, took a strong grip on the beams on either side of the hole, and hoisted himself through with the fluency of an Olympic gymnast on the parallel bars.
Gold medal? he thought. Piece of cake. All you need’s a fire under your bum.
But there was no time for the National Anthem. With a series of cracks like an old sailing ship taking a broadside, the attic floor burst open at half a dozen points and tongues of flame came shooting through to lick greedily at the ancient beams.
Suddenly Joe was back in his childhood schoolroom. If a nine-inch beam burns at one cubic inch every five seconds, how long will it be before the house collapses in on itself? Answer: doesn’t matter ‘cos you’ll have suffocated long before that.
OK, another problem. (Shoot! I must be dying. My life flashing before me, like they say in the books.) If a middle-aged, out-of-condition, overweight PI picks up an eight-stone woman and tries to run along a narrow burning beam in dense smoke which reduces visibility to nil and breathing to less, how does someone explain to his pet cat, Whitey, why he never came home again?
Answer: not applicable. Man would have to be mad to try it. Man would have to be very stupid indeed not to work out that one life was preferable to two deaths and abandon the woman to her fate.
Such was the verdict of rational thought. But Joe was a slow thinker and he’d been up and running before good old rational thought had even got out of its blocks. The woman was in his arms. He hit the slope of the roof at the point where he’d already removed the slates to make a breathing hole, erupted into the cold Welsh night like a comet, went straight over the edge, crash-landed on the lean-to roof, bounced twice, caught the edge of the water butt with his heels, twisted in the air to give the woman the soft landing, and found himself lying on the blessed ground, looking up at a sky so packed with stars, he felt he was trembling on the brink of eternity.
Earth beneath him, water pouring over him, fire behind him, and the bright clear air above. The four first things. It was right they should be the four last things also. He felt his whole being drawn up towards that starry infinity.
Then this peace was disturbed by the arrival of moving shapes and chattering voices, growing ever louder and calling his name, all trying to get him back to the world of here and now. But his wise old body knew that this world was full of pain and tribulation, so it gave commands.
Joe closed his eyes, and light and noise and thought and feeling all died together.
Chapter 3
When he awoke he was still on his back and he still had a naked female body in his arms.
Only now it was Beryl Boddington’s and it smelled of wild strawberries and honey and she was sighing with pleasure, like a cello accompanying a Brahms love song. And, amazingly, he could see this marvellous body, every bit of it, even as his other four senses took their perfect pleasure.
Even their minds seemed twined. He yearned towards her, eager for consummation, and in his head he heard her laugh as she pulled away a little.
‘No need to rush, Joe, boy. Not here, this is for ever, this is the place where you can pick all the flowers along the way, and see them grow again even while you’re drinking in their scent.’
This was beyond anything Rev. Pot had ever promised in his most optimistic sermons. If Joe had known heaven was going to be like this he’d have paid a lot more heed to Aunt Mirabelle and never turned over and gone back to sleep on a Sunday morning. Let word of this get around, and there’d be queues forming at first light outside chapels and churches and mosques and temples and tabernacles and synagogues …
He looked at Beryl’s smiling loving face above his, felt her warm scented breath on his lips. He strained up to press his hungry mouth to hers, got so close that her beloved features blurred. He relaxed and blinked once, twice, and smiled as that lovely, loving, beloved visage slowly came back into focus, till once more he saw clearly those big brown eyes, so full of compassion and concern …
‘Oh shoot!’ said Joe. At least that’s what he tried to say, only his throat was so rough it came out halfway between a cough and a groan.
‘Joe, you’re awake,’ said Merv Golightly.
Joe blinked again, but it was no use. Merv remained. He let his gaze drift slowly round the room. There were half a dozen other beds in it, though no one in them moved. It was either a hospital ward or a mortuary.
He pushed himself up in the bed and groaned again as the movement set off a small symphony of aches and pains. When Merv tried to help him, he shook his head and pointed to a jug of water on the bedside locker. The big man poured him a glassful and he drank it greedily.
Then he tried his voice again and this time got a result, though it sounded like something coming out of an old-fashioned gramophone that needed winding up.
‘Where am I?’ he said,
‘Some place called Caerlindys, think that’s how you say it, but I couldn’t swear. Joe, my friend, it’s really great to have you back. But how come, all these years, and you never told me your big secret?’
‘Eh?’ croaked Joe.
‘Last night, we’d just got you definitely down for dead and long gone, then you come bursting through the roof of that burning building and fly through the air with this rescued lady in your arms, and even twist round so it’s you who hits hard and her who lands soft. Joe, your secret is out. Everyone knows now you’re really Superman!’
‘You’re a real joker, Merv,’ croaked Joe. ‘No wonder folk throw themselves out of your taxi while it’s still moving.’
Merv laughed loud enough to raise a couple of heads off pillows, which was a relief. Then he leaned close and murmured, ‘Seriously, man, though I ain’t putting this in writing, I’m truly proud to know you.’
Embarrassed, Joe downed another half-pint of water and asked, ‘So where’s the others? Where’d you all end up last night?’
Merv put his head on one side and gave a modest shrug.
‘That burning house, just another half-mile on, and there it was. Branddreth College, place where we’re staying. Didn’t I say I had the instinct?’
‘And where’s this place we’re at now, Caerlindys, is it?’
‘Sound like a native, Joe. Twenty miles going on seventy from the college, depending whether you know the lingo. Bad news is the town’s not much bigger than the Hypermart back home, good news is the hospital’s almost as big as the town.’
‘You bring me here, Merv?’
‘No. That cop, never caught his name, conjured up the whole circus, cop cars, ambulance and fire engine turned up. Too late to do any good, mind. House is ashes, which you’d have been too if you hadn’t pulled your Y-fronts over your trousers and done the switch. You’re a hero, Joe, but don’t be surprised if the cops treat you like an idiot or a suspect. Guy in charge is a DI called Ursell, pronounced arsehole from the sound of him. I’ve met some miserable bastards but he beats them all. He’s like Chivers without the charm.’
This was a poor recommendation, Sergeant Chivers of Luton CID being the founder member of the Sixsmith-sucks club.
‘He around, is he?’
‘Oh yes. Asking more questions than Ruby Wax and cheekier with it. He’ll surely want to talk to you, Joe. Numero duo on his list after the woman, and she’s not talking to anyone.’
‘The woman? Oh shoot.’ Joe was racked with guilt he hadn’t thought about the woman till now. ‘How’s she doing, Merv? You’re not saying she’s out of it?’
‘No, still with us, they say, but only just. She looked a real mess last night. Then so did you and look at you now! Hey, here’s something to cheer you up.’
Joe looked towards the door and groaned, but only inwardly. Groaning outwardly at Aunt Mirabelle was never a good idea. In a hospital bed, it could have you on your belly receiving an enema. In her eyes, any treatment that didn’t start with a good clear-out was doomed to failure.
Then his spirits lifted as he spotted Beryl close behind her, talking to a tiny nurse who looked about twelve, with an elfin face and the brightest red hair he’d ever seen, bursting out of the confines of her cap like tongues of fire. Not a comfortable image.
‘You awake at last, Joseph?’ said Mirabelle. “Bout time. Doctor says there’s not much wrong with you.’
‘Now that’s not exactly true,’ said Beryl, breaking off her conversation.
Mirabelle gave her a reprimanding glare, then stooped to kiss Joe on the cheek, at the same time whispering in his ear, ‘You did real well, Joseph. Your ma, God rest her soul, would have been real proud of you.’
‘Thanks, Auntie,’ said Joe, touched.
She straightened up and at her normal volume said, ‘Why you speaking that funny way? You ain’t gone and done something to that voice of yours, I hope. It’s rough enough the way the Lord made it without you sticking in your sixpenn’th.’
Joe sighed. He had no desire to play the big hero, but he didn’t really see why everyone should find it necessary to hide his light under their bushel. Surely modesty was his prerogative?
Rescue was close. Beryl gently moved Mirabelle aside and stood smiling down at him.
‘Hi, Joe,’ she said. ‘Reckon you owe me an apology.’
‘Huh?’
‘There we are, middle of a conversation, suddenly you take off without a pardon-me-ma’am, next time I see you, you’re flying out of a burning house with a naked woman in your arms. Hope you’d do the same for me if the occasion arose.’
The memory of his waking dream rose in Joe’s mind and he felt himself blushing.
‘You got a fever, Joe?’ she said anxiously.
Then she stooped and kissed him full on the lips.
‘No, that feels about normal,’ she said.
‘This a new NHS economy measure?’ he croaked. ‘All the nurses taking my temperature this way?’
‘In your dreams,’ she laughed. And Joe blushed again.
He took another drink of water. The red-headed nurse came forward and picked up the empty jug. She wore a name badge which told him he was being cared for by Nurse Tilly Butler, which was nice. Made it feel like a user-friendly hospital.
‘Throat bad, is it?’ she said sympathetically. ‘Doctor will be along shortly, get you something to soothe it then.’
‘Guinness?’ said Joe hopefully.
She laughed and said to Beryl, ‘You were right about him then. Back in a mo.’
‘What you been saying?’
‘Nothing that needs bother you. She’s a nice kid.’
‘I noticed. Shouldn’t she be at school?’
‘You think? Maybe she thinks you should be in the gerry ward.’
‘Sorry,’ said Joe, reproved. ‘So how’s it look to an expert, this place? They got chloroform yet?’
‘There you go again, Joe,’ sighed Beryl. ‘You and that lady you saved hit real lucky. Nurse Butler was telling me, they closed a lot of small hospitals round the region and put all their resources into this one. State of the art is what you got here. Makes where I work look ancient.’
‘Yeah, but they got you to keep them young,’ croaked Joe gallantly.
It got him a smile. Then a voice said, ‘Excuse me,’ and Beryl was edged aside by a weary-looking young man in a white coat whose name badge said he was Dr Godsip, though from the way he glanced down at it from time to time, Joe got the impression he wouldn’t have minded finding he was somebody else.
After a yawn which looked like it might be terminal, he started checking off Joe’s ailments. Joe was reminded of a mechanic doing an MOT.
‘Superficial burns to the face and hands; dislocated left shoulder, replaced; wrenched right knee; heavy bruising to the back and buttocks; various other minor strains, sprains, and contusions of the arms and legs; nothing life-threatening; I’d say you’ve been very lucky, Mr Sixsmith.’
It didn’t feel that way. Like warning lights on a test circuit, each of the injuries flashed pain as the doctor listed them, and by the time he finished, Joe felt much worse than he had before.
‘What about his lungs and throat, Doctor?’ asked Mirabelle. ‘He sounds real funny.’
‘Yes, that was the most worrying thing. Often it’s not fire that does the real damage, but smoke inhalation. But as far as we can see, he’s been lucky there too. There’ll be some discomfort if he breathes too deeply, and his oesophagus will feel like it’s been pulled through with a pineapple for a while, but no lasting damage. Now, normally we’d keep him in for observation for another day or two, but if he’s happy to discharge himself …’
Joe sat straight up, ignoring the pain.
‘Hey, man,’ he said. ‘What is this? I know you folk get short of beds, but how many legs do I need amputated before you let me stay here?’
It was Beryl who answered.
‘Don’t be exciting yourself, Joe,’ she said. ‘Yes, they are short of beds, but no, they’re not throwing you out. Only there’s a nice little sickbay at Branddreth College, and with me being a nurse, the doc’ll be happy to let me take care of your medication. Also there’ll be a doctor in attendance at the festival who’ll be able to check you out if necessary. We thought you might like it better to be close to the others rather than stuck here, miles away. But it’s your say-so.’
Joe scowled thoughtfully, but inside he was chortling with delight. Cosy little sickbay with Beryl as his private nurse or stuck here among the living dead with hospital hours and hospital food … no contest!
‘Where do I sign?’ he wheezed.
Godsip, who was still young enough to feel guilty at giving a patient the bum’s rush, wanted to put him in a wheelchair but Joe insisted on getting dressed and walking under his own steam.
He regretted it the moment he stood up but he wasn’t going to back off now and by the time he’d got into his clothes, he’d adjusted to the discomfort, but tying his shoelaces made him wince.
‘I’ll get that,’ said Merv, kneeling before him.
‘Heard you English were into hero worship but didn’t realize how far it went,’ said a sardonic Welsh voice.
It came from a tall thin man with eyes screwed up as if against the sun and a weathered face who looked like Clint Eastwood at early Dirty Harry age. His suit looked about the same vintage too.
Brynner, Burton and Eastwood, all in the same neck of the woods. Maybe I’ve wandered into an old movie, thought Joe, and these burns and bruises are just make-up.
Merv stood up. He didn’t tower over the newcomer but he had a couple of inches advantage which he used to good effect.
‘Joe, this is DI Ursell I told you about, but I expect you’d have recognized him anyway.’
Ursell regarded Joe as though thinking about inviting him to make his day.
‘Glad to meet you,’ said Joe. ‘How’s the lady?’
‘I’m a copper not a quack,’ said Ursell. ‘What bothers me isn’t how she is but who she is. Thought you could help me there.’
‘Sorry?’ said Joe.
Ursell rolled his eyes and said very slowly, as to a backward foreigner, ‘Did she say anything which might give us a clue who she is?’
‘Not a thing,’ said Joe. ‘Didn’t have time for introductions and she wasn’t in a fit state anyway. But don’t you folk keep records of who lives round here, council tax, electoral register, that sort of thing?’
It was a genuine question. Joe knew the Scots had a different legal system because it had come up in an episode of Dr Finlay’s Casebook, so maybe the Welsh moved in their own mysterious way too.
Ursell, however, looked like he was taking it as a crack.
‘Oh, yes, we keep very good records, as you may find, Mr Sixsmith. We like to know all about everyone who lives round here, or comes visiting for that matter. But nothing’s known about this woman, nothing at all, which I find very puzzling. I suppose everyone on your coach is accounted for?’
He glared accusingly at Merv, but it was Mirabelle who leapt into the breach.
‘What you saying? This poor lady jumped off our coach and ran into that burning house just so my nephew could risk his life saving her? And while we’re disputing the matter, how come that other policeman who was there didn’t do the saving? Ain’t that what we pay our taxes for?’
Even without the backing of rational argument, Mirabelle was a fearsome disputant. With it, she towered like the sons of Anak, and Ursell became as a grasshopper in her sight.
‘Sorry, no, you misunderstand me,’ he said, trying without much success for a placating smile. ‘Far as I understand it, Sergeant Prince was in his car, summoning help, and didn’t know there was anyone in the house till a few minutes later when he rejoined you all. House should have been empty, see? So what we have here is a woman nobody knows, and she’s in a bad way, and all of us are very keen to let her next of kin know what’s happened, so as they can get here to give her support and comfort.’
He didn’t sound very convincing but he suddenly sounded very Welsh, in the same way the Scots become very Scottish and the Irish very Irish at times they want to be defensively disarming. This was a phenomenon Joe’s radical solicitor friend, Butcher, had pointed out in reference to himself. ‘You saying I come over all Uncle Tommish?’ he’d demanded indignantly. ‘Worse than that,’ she replied. ‘You come over all poor-me-deprived-Luton-laddish.’
Mirabelle wasn’t disarmed.
‘If that wasn’t her own house burning, why you not hassling the folk whose house it is?’ she demanded.
‘That’s Mr and Mrs Haggard of Islington, London,’ said Ursell. ‘They’re on their way but over the phone they’ve made it clear no one was staying in Copa Cottage with their permission.’
He made Islington, London, sound like Gomorrah, thought Joe. And also he got an impression that this Mr and Mrs Haggard were not people of good standing in Ursell’s eyes. Of course it could be it was just this anti-Anglocolonization thing he’d once read about in a magazine at the dentist’s.
‘Maybe they got children,’ said Mirabelle. ‘Young ‘uns can be pretty free with what ain’t their own.’
She shot Joe an unjustifiably significant glance.
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Ursell, clearly tiring of being disarming. ‘Now, if I could have a quick word with Mr Sixsmith alone …’
There was resistance, but the DI was good at crowd control and in less than a minute he had everyone else out into the corridor. He now looked at the other patients as if considering pushing them out too but decided against it.
Joe said, ‘There was some writing on a wall, something about GO HOME ENGLISH. Maybe this wasn’t an accident, is that what you’re thinking?’
Ursell let out the long-suffering sigh of one who is fed up with being taught how to suck eggs.
‘Someone mentioned you were some kind of investigator, Mr Sixsmith,’ he said with a neutrality worse than sarcasm. Not that it mattered to Joe who’d been put down by men with research degrees in down-putting.
‘Not trying to investigate anything,’ he said. ‘Specially not when you had one of your own men right on the spot. Prince, did someone say his name was? He the local bobby?’
Ursell took his time answering.
‘Not really,’ he said finally. ‘Just happened to be in the area on another matter, it seems. And not one of my men. Uniformed, or perhaps you didn’t notice?’
Joe, familiar with the often strained relationship between CID and the rest back in Luton, said provocatively, ‘In, out, always a cop, isn’t that what they say?’
Ursell said softly, ‘We can certainly count ourselves lucky having two pairs of trained eyes at the scene of the crime.’
That unsarcastic sarcasm again.
‘So it was definitely a crime?’ said Joe.
Ursell hesitated then shrugged.
‘It’s no secret, not round here anyway. Yes, it was arson. Traces of an accelerant, probably petrol.’
‘So maybe if this woman shouldn’t have been in the house, these fire raisers thought the place was empty?’ suggested Joe.
‘Could be,’ admitted Ursell. ‘Why she didn’t hear something and get out quick is the puzzle.’
Бесплатный фрагмент закончился.
