Road Closed (6 page)

‘Do you know her?’ Geraldine asked. Peterson smiled. Gordon was a sharp senior officer. Geraldine was in two minds about working with her again. Professionally, she would be the first to admit Gordon was first rate. On a personal level, Geraldine was anxious. She’d had a few run-ins with the detective chief inspector on their previous case.

‘If her reputation’s anything to go by, she’s a force to be reckoned with. You haven’t come across her?’ Bennett was asking. ‘Has the DIs quaking in their boots, I’ve heard,’ he added, with a rapid glance over his shoulder. Geraldine sipped her coffee. ‘But it’s only hearsay. I haven’t worked with her before.’

‘She’s the dog’s bollocks,’ Peterson said fervently.

Geraldine grunted and rose to her feet. ‘Best get there before the briefing begins,’ she said.

‘Plenty of time,’ Bennett replied, looking at his watch. Geraldine didn’t want to be late so Bennett obligingly led the way back to the Incident Room. Built like a runner, he was wiry rather than thin, his movements fluid.

They reached the Incident Room just as the briefing was about to begin. Geraldine studied the Incident Board. The faces of the victim and his widow looked back at her: a fair haired man with pinched features and a woman who stared intensely at the camera through thick lenses. Some DCIs preferred not to display pictures of murder victims after they had been killed. Such images were considered bad for morale. But Geraldine was more disturbed by photos of the victims before they died. ‘Look at me,’ the dead man’s face seemed to say. ‘You can see how contented I am with my life.’ A life that had come to an abrupt end. And it was Geraldine’s job to find out how that had happened.

10

DCI

The detective chief inspector rapped on the board for silence. She was wearing a pale green jacket that seemed to drain her face of colour, heightening the clown-like effect of her flushed cheeks, but any impression of frailty was eclipsed by her blazing eyes. She wore no make up and her greying hair was cut in a practical bob along her jaw line.

‘Good morning, everyone,’ she said. The room was instantly silent. A female police constable dropped her pen and retrieved it, red-faced. ‘I’m your Senior Investigating Officer DCI Kathryn Gordon. Thomas Cliff died early this morning in an explosion at his home, 17 Harchester Close. A gas ring had been left on in the kitchen. Gas was leaking overnight. Mr Cliff entered the kitchen at approximately seven. The gas air mix had reached a critical level when it seems he lit a cigarette, causing an explosion.’ Gordon moved her arm further along. Her fingers trembled, almost imperceptibly, as they touched the board. ‘This is his widow, Sophie Cliff. She wasn’t home when the explosion occurred. She was called away at two twenty in the morning – this wasn’t unusual – but it was just about the time the Fire Investigation Team suspect the gas was turned on. She returned home shortly after the emergency vehicles arrived on the scene.’

Geraldine stared at Sophie Cliff’s photo as the DCI ran through details that confirmed Mrs Cliff had been called to work in the early hours of the morning.

‘Would she have known in advance when she might be called out in the night?’ someone asked.

The DCI nodded at a sergeant who had been on the phone to Sophie Cliff’s line manager.

‘She’d have known in advance which nights she’d be on call,’ the sergeant explained, ‘but not if she was going to be called out. If she was needed, she didn’t always have to go into work. Sometimes she could work on the system remotely from home. Some nights she wasn’t called on at all, so she couldn’t possibly have known beforehand if she was going to be called out of the house on any particular night.’

‘But if the gas leak started around the time she went out -’ Geraldine began.

The DCI finished her thought. ‘She could have left the gas on deliberately once she knew she’d be out of the house all night.’

‘But how could she have predicted an explosion? It takes a critical amount of gas in the air,’ someone pointed out.

‘She knew he smoked. It was a fair bet.’

A number of officers broke into scattered discussions with their immediate neighbours about the feasibility of predicting a gas explosion.

‘It seems unlikely,’ the DCI held up her hand for silence. ‘But the victim smoked so a gas leak would certainly be high risk. It all hinges on what time the gas leak started. We know what time Sophie Cliff arrived at work. Now we need to wait for the full Fire Investigation Team’s report.’

‘He might’ve gone down and heated something up after she’d gone out,’ someone suggested, ‘and left the gas on himself.’

‘Enough speculation. We’ll have to wait for Scene of Crime officers and the FIT to finish. In the meantime, the adjoining properties have been evacuated while the gas supply’s being checked just in case, though there’s no reason to suspect a leak was caused by anything other than the tap left on in the Cliffs’ house,’ the DCI concluded. ‘Now let’s get going and see what else we can find.’

Back at her desk, Geraldine scanned the Fire Investigation Team’s initial findings which confirmed the fire had been caused by gas leaking from an open tap. They were still at the scene. It had taken time to control the blaze and the property had sustained substantial damage. After talking to neighbours, they had been able to pinpoint the time of the explosion: just before six in the morning. Thomas Cliff had been in the kitchen when the gas had ignited. He had been thrown to the floor, probably stunned, where he died of smoke inhalation. Sophie Cliff had been on her way home at the time.

Geraldine sat in the privacy of her office and sighed. Having an office to herself wasn’t as satisfying as she had expected. She missed the bustle of the Incident Room. She grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair and went to check her schedule for the day. The list was ready. She was assigned to work with Detective Sergeant Ian Peterson.

‘Excellent,’ she muttered under her breath. Peterson was a reliable officer. She had appreciated his steady good sense on their last case together.

Geraldine found him perched on a desk chatting to a young blonde detective constable. Sprightly and well turned out, his hair combed flat once more, Peterson looked out of place in the dingy Incident Room. His shirt was pressed and his shoes polished. He looked more like a TV sports presenter than a detective.

‘Let’s go, Sergeant.’

He slipped smoothly to his feet. ‘Yes, gov.’ Geraldine wasn’t sure, but she thought he winked at the seated constable and felt irritated. The sergeant grinned at her and she thought, with a pang, how young he looked.

‘Gordon again,’ he said as they left the station.

‘Better the devil you know.’

Peterson nodded. ‘Just what I was thinking, gov.’ He grinned as he emphasized the last word. Geraldine pursed her lips.

She ran through the gist of the report with Peterson as he drove. From its origins in the Middle Ages, Harchester had evolved into a sprawling jumble of incompatible styles of architecture. Still, in some sense, a market town, the heart of the place was its brand new shopping mall. Radiating out from the main shopping centre were streets of dilapidated Victorian properties, multiple bells indicating that they had been divided into apartments. Most of the buildings looked as though they were in urgent need of renovation. An occasional purpose built block of flats from the sixties added to the pervading air of neglect. As they drove further away from the centre of town, the tall properties gave way to smaller houses opening straight on to the pavement. Still further out, the streets were lined with conventional suburban semi-detached brick houses. These sported front gardens, wrought iron or wooden gates, and low picket fences or evergreen hedges separating them from the street. Geraldine had heard about an old part of Harchester, with buildings that were said to be genuine Tudor, but there was no sign of it as they drove through the town.

Finally they climbed Harchester Hill. Here the houses were larger, detached, and concealed from the road by tall bushes.

‘Let’s hope there’s not going to be another explosion,’ Peterson said as they negotiated the road block and approached the damaged house.

‘They’re still investigating. They’ve cleared the neighbouring houses to avoid any danger of contamination but it’s quite safe.’ Geraldine hoped she sounded confident.

The Chief Officer of the Fire Investigation Team was expecting them. A constable led them along a dark hallway into the burnt out shell of a kitchen. The place stank.

‘One of the gas taps was turned on,’ the fire officer explained. His eyes sparkled at them from a sooty face, like a Hollywood version of a Victorian chimney sweep. He indicated a
mangled twist of metal, and pointed at fire damaged plaster on the ceiling. ‘At the rate the gas was escaping, it must have been leaking for several hours to reach a flammable mixture in the atmosphere. The explosion occurred here.’ He touched a crusty central hob surrounded by a blackened worktop. ‘We’re still looking at it. From the direction of damage to the plasterwork and flooring, it looks as though the victim entered the room there, went to turn on the light…’ He nodded at a burnt out electric switch by the door.

‘You mean it wasn’t a cigarette that caused the explosion?’

The fire officer frowned. ‘Looks like he switched the light on and sparked it, but it could have been a cigarette. We haven’t found evidence he was smoking when it started, but that’s hardly surprising.’ He glanced around the burnt out kitchen and shrugged.

‘Would switching a light on be enough to cause an explosion?’

‘Given the right fuel oxygen mix in the air, yes. That’s all it takes. It happens.’

‘Jesus,’ Peterson muttered under his breath, gazing round. ‘Just from switching on the light.’

The fireman nodded. ‘You’d hardly credit it, would you?’

‘Makes you think twice about turning the lights on.’ Geraldine frowned at the sergeant’s flippant tone.

The fireman smiled. ‘There’s really nothing to worry about, as long as you don’t have a gas leak.’ He turned back to his exploration of the ruined kitchen, picking his way carefully through the debris.

‘If the kitchen’s like that, I dread to think what the victim must look like,’ Peterson said as they left.

‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ Geraldine replied briskly, doing her best to conceal her own dismay.

11

Mortuary

That afternoon, Geraldine and Peterson met at the mortuary.

‘George Talbot,’ the pathologist introduced himself.

‘DI Steel and this is DS Peterson.’

They were about to follow Dr Talbot through the swing doors when Kathryn Gordon arrived.

‘Not much mess,’ the doctor announced cheerfully. ‘No spilt blood and guts with this one. Other than from my intervention,’ he added. Above his mask, Geraldine thought his blue eyes were smiling. No one smiled back.

Apart from the long, neatly sewn up incision across his chest, and the horribly white flesh, Thomas Cliff could have been asleep.

‘His face was black with soot but he’s cleaned up nicely. The widow’s coming in soon to identify him,’ the doctor explained. ‘You can see he’s hardly burnt at all. Just the palms of the hands, here, and again on the knees and shins. He managed to crawl out of the kitchen into the next room but that’s as far as he got.’ He indicated the charred palms of the dead man’s hands and the burn marks on his legs. ‘He pulled a rug over his head, but didn’t manage to keep his hands inside it. He was holding on to it.’

‘The rug didn’t save him,’ the DCI said.

‘It probably protected him from the flames on the back of his head and across his shoulders, but it was the smoke that got him. If the fire service had got to him sooner, it’s possible he might have survived, but he was trapped for too long before they found him.’

‘If the door from the next room into wherever – was it the hall? – had been open, could he have got out?’ Peterson wanted to know.

‘I’m not sure,’ the doctor replied. ‘The dining room might’ve reached flashover if it was ventilated by an open door.’

‘Wouldn’t an open door have lowered the temperature?’ the sergeant asked. The doctor shrugged. ‘And why the hell didn’t anyone hear the explosion?’ Peterson went on. He sounded angry.

‘They did,’ the DCI answered, ‘a neighbour called up almost immediately, which is probably why the victim escaped being burnt. But it was still too late. They didn’t get to him in time.’

‘What about the windows?’

The doctor shrugged. ‘The smoke must have overcome him too quickly. The presence of cyanide in his blood was already nearing potentially lethal levels –’

‘Cyanide?’ Geraldine interrupted. ‘Are you saying he was poisoned?’

‘And the fire was started to cover it up,’ Peterson added.

‘No, no, that’s not what I meant,’ the doctor answered. ‘You’ll have to ask the fire investigation officers for the specific source but cyanide can derive from any number of burning substances, wool, cotton, paper, plastics and other polymers, for example, any number of which might’ve been present in the kitchen, and cyanide poisoning, even before it reached such a dangerous level, would have incapacitated him. It prevents the body from carrying oxygen. He managed to crawl as far as the adjoining room before he lost consciousness. The cyanide might’ve prevented him from even attempting to escape. At the very least it would’ve contributed to his difficulties, and prolonged his exposure to fatal concentrations of carbon monoxide which killed him.’
He sighed. ‘In any event, he didn’t make it. The combination of cyanide and carbon monoxide did for him.’

‘So he died from smoke inhalation?’

‘Yes. That’s basically it.’ The doctor tapped the neat incision across Thomas Cliff’s chest as he listed the symptoms it concealed. ‘He died from respiratory failure although there’s significant pulmonary injury evident, which is hardly surprising. There’s swelling of the airways, and soot evident in the nostrils and throat. The respiratory tract is full of black mucus, also present in the trachea and lungs. Oxygen levels are low in the blood, and cyanide and carbon monoxide present, as I mentioned, in lethal levels. He died of asphyxiation from the smoke. There’s no question about that.’