Deadly Deceit (4 page)

‘Be my guest. But I have to tell you it’s not pretty. You’ll be pleased to hear the young ’un’s been taken away already, recovered from his cot upstairs by officers
first at the scene. They tried to revive him but . . .’

He broke off. Daniels could tell from his expression that he’d witnessed the rescue attempt and she was relieved to have escaped the immediate trauma of seeing the child herself. She had
no kids of her own, or any intention of ever having any, but she got on with children and hated to see them hurt. The gruesome post-mortem would come later. Her promise to Detective Constable Lisa
Carmichael that the next PM was hers would have to be broken. Lisa would have to wait a while longer. This one would be far too distressing.

Unzipping the holdall she’d brought with her from the car, Daniels noticed a heavy medical bag at the entrance to the premises, the initials TWS engraved on the side. It belonged to Home
Office Pathologist, Tim Stanton. She wondered how he’d got there. His Range Rover wasn’t parked outside.

‘Kit off, Hank,’ she said.

Gormley’s shoulders fell. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’

Daniels was already down to her underwear. ‘Come on, don’t be shy.’

Gormley dropped his pants. He was wearing a pair of Union Jack shreddies his wife had bought him – his lucky World Cup shorts she called them – an infrequent gesture of affection
these days. He’d felt obliged to put them on. It was either that or face more argy-bargy from Julie when he got home. He hadn’t figured he’d be sharing the spectacle with his
female boss and the fire investigator.

‘Where’s that camera?’ Abbott laughed. ‘Got to get this for
The Burning Issue
.’

Daniels grinned at his reference to the fire and rescue bimonthly magazine.

‘Move and you’re dead meat,’ Gormley warned.

A
camera flashed as they picked their way into the hallway where crime scene investigators were doing their bit. Tim Stanton looked up from the body as they walked through the
door, greeting them with a nod. The house hardly resembled a house at all. Everything was black and smouldering, the air heavy with the nauseating stench of burning flesh – like barbequed
meat left on too long. Ceiling tiles had caught fire, melted and dropped down igniting furniture below. There was a gaping hole above their heads and the sky could be seen where the roof once was.
A body, unrecognisable as man or woman, was lying on what was left of the staircase, beaten back by the flames, its hand fused to the metal pin securing the charred remains of a banister.

Another volley of shots from the CSI camera.

Beneath her mask, Daniels tried to breathe. It was like a manifestation from hell. She’d seen enough death and destruction for one day. But as horrific as the scene facing her was, the
accident she’d come from had been much worse. Dead bodies were dead bodies, whereas people alive and in pain really got to her. She could avoid the eyes of a corpse, but never those of the
living. Helplessness in a situation like that was what kept her awake at night.

Psychologically wrung out, she stared at the body on the stairs, her mind drifting back to the RTA. One casualty, Bridget McCabe, a pretty girl of about eighteen, had clung on to her, begging
her to ring her dad, himself a policeman on nightshift. Though the DCI didn’t know the officer personally, it made her feel sick to think of him going about his business not knowing his
daughter had come to harm.

In her years in the force, she was used to dealing with the fallout from major road accidents. But somehow it seemed more personal because this was a fellow officer’s child. As Bridget was
finally lifted into an ambulance, she’d contacted Hexham station to break news of the accident to Sergeant McCabe, hoping his daughter would make it to hospital.

W
hen she got home, Daniels stripped off her clothes at the front door. She carried them straight to the laundry room, dumped them in the washing machine and set it to a hot
cycle. Then she walked upstairs to the shower, keen to wash away the muck and the grime from her body, wishing she could do the same thing to the images in her head. Had her mother still been
alive, she’d most probably have called her for a sympathetic ear. She always did that whenever she felt unwell or down or just pissed off. Sadly that was no longer an option.

As the water pulsed from the shower, Daniels checked the diver’s watch her mother had bought for her thirtieth birthday. Six-thirty a.m. She needed to get a wriggle on: a quick change of
clothes, a coffee to go, and then a race back to the Murder Incident Room before the troops arrived – an opportunity to get her shit together on the drive into town.

As she stepped from the shower, her landline rang. That would be Gormley checking on her. Something he’d done frequently in the past few months, aware she had no one at home to offload on
after a day like today. He was a little over-protective sometimes.

The phone stopped ringing.

Daniels hated living alone. Her former partner, Jo Soulsby, had moved on and so must she. That was easier said than done when the woman was the department’s Criminal Profiler, still part
of her world, working alongside her, eating in the same bate room – tantalizingly close and yet a million miles away.

The phone rang again.

Gormley was such a softie.

He knew all about her nonexistent love life and the reasons behind it. He seemed to know when she was feeling rough and tried his best to comfort her. Once or twice he’d gone too far,
attempting to play Cupid between her and Jo, interfering in matters that didn’t concern him. Smiling, Daniels dried her hands, threw herself on her bed and picked up.

‘I’m fine, Hank. But thanks for asking . . .’

A woman’s voice came on the line, one she didn’t recognize.

‘Am I speaking to DCI Kate Daniels?’

‘You are.’ Daniels’ stomach tightened.

‘My apologies, I thought you might have been someone else.’ Palming her forehead, Daniels listened. ‘Yes. Yes I did . . . OK, no, I didn’t know her personally. Yes,
tragic . . . Thank you for taking the trouble to call.’

Replacing the handset gently on its charger, a sob caught Daniels’ throat.

Bridget McCabe hadn’t made it.

T
he RTA and the fire played second fiddle to World Cup football on the radio, the sporting achievements of eleven men dominating the news headlines. Daniels had watched the
game alone at home, unmoved by the hysteria that was going on in the rest of the country. Not that she didn’t like sport. She did. But she could’ve done without the hype beforehand. Her
team had talked about nothing else for weeks. The tournament hadn’t lived up to its billing – not by any stretch of the imagination.

A murder enquiry was well underway by the time Daniels reached the incident room, launched by her new boss, Superintendent Ron Naylor. She could feel the tension in the office the minute she
walked in. She was expecting that. The nature of the crime, the death of a young child, affected everyone. But like the components of a well-oiled machine, each member of her team had a part to
play and it was business as usual.

She watched them from the doorway, brooding on her visit to Bridget McCabe’s home on her way in. She’d gone to offer comfort to the girl’s father, not knowing if she’d be
welcome at such a difficult time. He was a widower, a single dad of three girls, who’d lost his wife to a malignant brain tumour a year ago.

Poor sod!

In a moment of confusion, Daniels’ jaw had dropped when Bridget opened the door. Except it wasn’t her at all. It was her identical twin, Becci.

McCabe had come to the door, pulling the surviving twin inside. ‘Fuck’s sake! What is wrong with you people?’

The DCI had shown her badge to reassure him she wasn’t press. Inside the house, she’d managed to convey, she hoped, a sense that Bridget had no idea of how poorly she was, that she
was conscious, joking even – that she wasn’t alone. Mick McCabe appreciated that. There was nothing more to be said.

Such traumatic situations made Daniels question her decision to join the force. But then the opposite was also true. Those same events compelled her to remain in the job for as long as possible.
Nevertheless, at the McCabes’ front door she’d had a sudden urge to run and keep running, not to get involved, let the traffic and welfare departments do their jobs. It was their remit
to support bereaved police officers, not hers. But she liked to think that her timely intervention had made a difference in some small way.

Gormley looked up, probably wondering why it had taken her so long to dash home, shower and change. She thought of offering an explanation but then decided not to get into it. They both needed
their minds on the job. They had an arson case to solve and, as brutal as it might sound to the wider public, Bridget McCabe was history. Reflection was a luxury Kate couldn’t afford. It was
time to move on.

Her DS looked weary. He’d not gone home, hadn’t wanted to disturb his wife – at least, that’s the reason he gave. Instead, he’d opted for a shower in the
men’s locker room. Like the rest of the team, he kept a change of clothes there for such an eventuality. Daniels’ attention shifted to a nearby desk.

The squad rookie, Detective Constable Lisa Carmichael, was a bright and bubbly twenty-five-year-old with more nous than her age would suggest. A whizz-kid on the computer, she was an officer of
exceptional talent, ripe for promotion and tipped for the top. A young woman keen to put a recent setback behind her, having been slipped a Mickey Finn by some freak in a nightclub on the
team’s last, her first, undercover operation.

Right now, she was entering data into the HOLMES system. As she typed, information was updated automatically on a state-of-the-art murder wall, a digital, touch-screen facility in the relatively
new murder suite. The identities of victims Nominal One and Nominal Two – Mark and Jamie Reid – were highlighted, along with their ages, dates of birth, relationship to each other.
Daniels had instructed Carmichael to upload only images of Mark and Jamie Reid alive. She didn’t want civilian typists seeing the harrowing crime-scene photographs displayed. More
importantly, she wanted her officers to relate to the victims as people, which was difficult to pull off if badly burned corpses were constantly in their faces. It was a skill, knowing how to get
the most from her team.

Carmichael was scratching to find information to input at present. A video of the crime scene would be shown at the briefing later. But there was a lack of witness statements coming in from the
house-to-house team. Unbelievable in a street where most of the residents had been up when the fire began. Daniels’ guts were telling her that the person she was looking for would be among
them, or else not so very far away from Ralph Street. Only time would tell if she was right in that assumption.

Carmichael logged off. She’d just removed her warrant card from its slot when her landline rang. She took the call, gesturing to Daniels not to move away. She obviously needed a word.
After a moment or two, she thanked the caller and put down the phone. ‘That was Tim Stanton,’ she said. ‘He needs to get an early start in view of the unprecedented number of
bodies lying in his morgue. You heard about the RTA?’

‘Yeah, I heard.’ Daniels explained that she and Hank had been delayed by it on the way to the fire. ‘Tell Stanton I’m nipping back to the crime scene with Hank and then
I’ll be with him.’

Carmichael’s face dropped. ‘But you said the next one was mine.’

‘Don’t whine, Lisa. I know what I said. Trust me, this isn’t the right one for you. You don’t want to go there. Postmortems are gruesome, more so when the cadaver no
longer resembles a human—’

Carmichael looked at Gormley, a plea for support.

‘What?’ Daniels said. ‘You got something to say, Hank? Spit it out!’

‘You did promise her. No point putting off the evil day.’

The DCI listened carefully as he made a case for Carmichael. It reminded Daniels of when she was starting out. Keen to experience a murder enquiry down to the last detail, she’d pleaded
and cajoled, using every trick in the book in order to tick all the boxes and impress her senior officers. Countless times, her former boss and mentor, Superintendent Bright, had warned her she
needed to walk before she could run. But did it make a difference?
Did it hell!
As far as Daniels was concerned, she knew best. From the begging expression on Carmichael’s face, her
DC thought
she
did too.

Daniels had to hand it to her: the girl had guts. Problem was, she didn’t know what she was letting herself in for. But, knowing how protective of their protégé Gormley was,
the DCI knew he’d given the matter serious thought and not jumped to a decision they’d all live to regret. If he reckoned Carmichael was ready, that was good enough for her.

‘OK,’ Daniels relented. If the truth were known, she was too tired to argue. ‘I’ll drop Hank off and pick you up in half an hour. Get yourself some mints.’

‘Mints?’ Carmichael queried.

‘That’s what I said.’ Daniels walked away.

T
he newspaper reporter took out his pen, flipped open his notepad and made a beeline for a group of kids milling around the crime scene. They were making fun of a puny bouquet
and a teddy bear tied to the black railings outside number twenty-three. Chantelle Fox glared at them. She’d stolen the flowers from a neighbour’s garden and wrapped them in paper that
was entirely inappropriate. But it was all she could manage at such short notice.

Improvisation, she called it.

It was another fabulously sunny day. Yet most of the curtains in the houses were drawn, the neighbours still half-cut from the party the night before. A team of police officers at either end of
Ralph Street obviously hadn’t heard of letting sleeping dogs lie. They were working their way from house to house, banging loudly on doors, refusing to take no for an answer. They’d get
to her eventually. Not that Chantelle had anything to say. Not to them, anyhow. Or to the young journo who was eyeing her from across the road.