Smoke Alarm (7 page)

This Saturday was Martha's morning for the dreaded visit to Vernon Grubb, who had a hairdressing salon in the centre of town, along a narrow street bordered with ancient and crooked black and white buildings. She parked in the Raven Meadows multi-storey car park and walked out into Pride Hill. The salon was also black and white but that was where history ended and contemporary art began. Inside Vernon Grubb's salon was more like a space station, white shiny surfaces and stainless steel, plenty of electronic devices that bleeped and alarmed. Vernon Grubb greeted her with a disapproving ‘tsh tsh' at her hair, throwing a black nylon cape over her shoulders and leading her straight to the mirror to confront herself. He was nothing like the cliché of a mincing, slightly effeminate male hairdresser: tattoos, gold jewellery and polo-necked shirts, but had the bulging biceps, meaty thighs and general bulk of a rugby prop forward. One day, Martha had long ago decided, she would pluck up the courage to ask how a man who would have looked more at home in the front of a rugby scrum had taken up – of all professions –
hairdressing
. However, so far, she had not dared to risk it. Grubb could be quite outspoken and very unpredictable. So she was left to puzzle as he lifted tress after tress, strand after strand of her thick and unruly red-gold hair, tutting and scolding at the way she managed it. Or according to him, mismanaged it. True, she could never quite dry it as neatly or silkily as Vernon himself, but she bought pounds' worth of conditioners, serums and sprays from him, and expected at least some allowance for that.

It made it worse that Vernon Grubb was a broad Geordie. ‘It's time you took your hair more seriously, Martha, pet,' he scolded her. ‘It's your crownin' glory, you know. People'd kill to have such a red.'

‘People would kill,' she remarked acidly, half turning her head to his increased disapproval, ‘
not
to have hair this colour and so naturally untidy. Especially in my job.' She eyed him in the mirror balefully. ‘Can't you
do
something, Vernon? Dye it or something? Black, maybe? I'd love to have black hair.' She looked at her reflection and pictured herself with black, straight, shining Cleopatra hair, but was dragged back to reality by Grubb.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Martha Gunn. Black hair? You'd look like the witch of Endor.'

‘Well, at least tone it down.'

‘There is such a thing as a criminal offence,' he said severely, folding his arms and scowling, ‘even in the hairdressing world.' But his good humour had returned. He was smiling again as he talked, displaying the gap between his front teeth. ‘And to start messing around with your hair would be one of them.' His lips pressed together in a Presbyterian grimace and he folded his arms, scissors poking out of one hand, comb from the other. ‘I'll not do it. And that's that. So you can just stop asking.'

He'd subdued her very brief and weak rebellion. She tucked the cape tighter round her shoulders, settled back with a sigh and said, ‘Oh, do what you like then. You always do anyway.'

‘Thank you, Mrs Gunn.' Vernon looked smug. ‘Now then, just let me tuck this towel around you. Good. Now, lean back.'

Expert hands took over then, shampooing, massaging the scalp, a dripping walk back to the chair and the scissors snipped their way into action. At the end of it Martha looked at herself in the mirror and approved, even giving herself a slightly smug smile. ‘Why can
I
never get it like this myself?' she asked.

Vernon looked even more smug. He whipped the wrap away. ‘Going anywhere nice tonight then, Mrs Gunn?'

She eyed herself in the mirror and caught the light dancing in her eyes. ‘Certainly am,' she said.

‘And are you going to tell me where?'

She shook her head.

‘Or who with?'

Another shake of the head. She stood up, said goodbye to both reflections in the mirror, the fantasy lady with black tresses and a slightly excited middle-aged woman.

Monday, as always, came around far too fast but the day brought its compensations. Today felt like the first real day of spring. Already the trees were beginning to burst through their winter drabness. They were
almost
green. One felt convinced that spring really was ‘just around the corner'. Bulbs were poking up through the soil to be greeted by a jolly sun beaming benevolently down on them. Anticipation, Martha thought as she drove round the ring road towards Bayston Hill, was so often better than arrival. How many summers were a disappointment? But spring? Never.

She parked in her usual spot and pushed open the front door. Jericho was waiting to ambush her in the hall. ‘Nice weekend, Jerry?'

‘Very nice, ma'am,' he answered in his slow, Shropshire burr. ‘Quiet, just with Mrs Palfreyman and myself, but very pleasant for all that.' He could hardly avoid adding the nicety, ‘And you, Mrs Gunn?'

‘Very good, thank you.' She could have said so much more now that Sam, her son, had moved back in with them: that he was on loan from Liverpool to play for Stoke City and her Sunday had been spent watching him play and cheering on his side. That almost as soon as Sam had walked in through the door, Agnetha, the au pair, had tearfully left, returning to her home land of Sweden to be married in a couple of months' time and that she, Martha, had finally, finally given up her grieving for Martin's death from cancer when the twins had been only three years old, and that she had finally dumped her normally sensible, practical, middle-aged ‘mumsy' role to go out on a date. A proper, romantic, dinner date. She could still feel her toes tingling with the remembered anticipation. The only problem had been that the ‘date' had been with her old friend – or rather, the widower of her late friend – Simon Pendlebury. And although the evening had been pleasant – very pleasant, Simon being an urbane, amusing and polite character – it had not been the toe-tingling, breathless experience of her early dates with Martin. When she had got home on Saturday night she had undressed and felt numb and a little depressed as she climbed into bed. It wasn't the same.

Dr Mark Sullivan had made an appointment through Jericho, the guardian of her gate, and appeared at 10 a.m. He'd brought with him the notes and pictures of the three post-mortems he had had to perform on Saturday. He walked in, a man of medium height and unremarkable appearance, blue eyes behind glasses, hair brown. He was a few years younger than her. ‘Basically,' he said, ‘they all died of smoke inhalation with varying degrees of burns. As you'd expect seeing as her bedroom was directly over the seat of the fire, Mrs Christie Barton had the most severe burns, most sustained post-mortem. There is very little inflammation around the sites which were basically hands, forearms, and legs. She was otherwise healthy as was her daughter, Adelaide. The old man had some heart disease and a little underlying fibrosis of the lung but he too died of smoke inhalation. He also had some ischaemic changes in his brain. I understand he had a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. I'm waiting for the results of a brain scan he had about a year ago.'

‘That's right.' Martha looked sharply at the pathologist. ‘No other wounds, Mark?'

‘No.' He shook his head.

‘OK.' She looked at him and marvelled at the change the last twelve months had wrought in him. Mark Sullivan, a brilliant pathologist, had had a serious and fairly obvious drink problem as well as a reputedly wretched marriage. But now he was a different man. Not half drunk most of the time, with shaking hands and bloodshot eyes but clear-eyed, steady-handed and best of all sober. ‘You've changed,' she commented.

Surprisingly Mark Sullivan took this as an invitation to sit down, smiling, and confide. ‘I had to,' he said bluntly. ‘Otherwise . . .' He didn't enlarge but stayed sat down, still smiling at her.

‘Well, I've noticed,' she said. ‘And it's a welcome sight, I can tell you, in a doctor with your talent.'

‘It was a big change,' he said. ‘I was drinking too much.'

She deliberately didn't respond but now Mark Sullivan had begun to open up he seemed anxious to continue.

‘Like most people I was drinking for a reason.'

Again she made no response but watched him.

Sullivan ploughed on. ‘My wife and I – we're divorced.' He smiled now. ‘Take away the reason why you're drinking too much and everything else falls into place.'

‘Well, I'm glad of it,' she said. ‘You're a good pathologist, Mark; it would have been such a waste.'

He stood up then. ‘Thanks,' he said, grinning at her, and left.

M
artha opened her eyes and remembered why today felt special. It was the first of March, not only in her mind the first day of spring but also St David's Day, patron saint of Wales. She made a mental note to ring her dad this evening and wish him happy St David's Day, knowing he would be noisily celebrating at the pub, wearing either a leek or a daffodil, (the emblems of Wales), and watching the St David's day concert broadcast live on the large-screen TV from Cardiff's Millennium Centre. The weather was bright and cold and she was still smiling as she drove round the ring road towards her office in Bayston Hill. Today the weather displayed the best of early spring, the time when a young man's thoughts turn to love. Martha pulled in outside her office, switched the engine off and sat still for a minute, contemplating. And a woman fast approaching middle-age? What do her thoughts turn to in the early spring? She pushed the thought aside and opened the door. Jericho was waiting for her. ‘Any news about the fire?' She tried to make the question sound casual but Jericho wasn't fooled for a minute.

He shook his head solemnly. ‘Not so far as I've heard,' he said. ‘In the
Shropshire Star
last night it said that they was looking for an arsonist.' His Shropshire burr was always more pronounced when he got overexcited. He paused, his eyes as round as saucers. ‘I can't think how anyone would do such a terrible thing.'

‘No word from Detective Inspector Randall, then?'

‘Not this morning, Mrs Gunn.' Jericho Palfreyman spoke firmly, eyeing her with bright-eyed curiosity. It was time to drop the subject. She moved towards her office door. ‘Coffee's already waitin' on your desk, Mrs Gunn,' he called after her.

That was another thing about Jericho. He had to have the last word.

She walked into her office and closed the door behind her. Quite apart from the scent of fresh coffee that steamed from the mug on her desk, she simply loved the room. High-ceilinged, unmistakably Victorian but with oak-panelled walls, it had an air of substance, dignity and a reassuring permanence. It was a good place to interview grieving and sometimes angry relatives. It lent gravitas to the situation. But the best feature of the room, in her opinion, was the bay window, floor to ceiling, which gave her a bird's-eye view of the town. Bayston Hill was, as its name suggested, on an elevation to the south of Shrewsbury. Shrewsbury town itself was on a small hill in an oxbow of the River Severn. This had protected the English town, wealthy from the proceeds of Welsh wool, from the attentions of the hostile and sometimes aggressive Welsh. The geography of Shrewsbury was also the reason why it used to be cut off when the rains washed down heavily from the Welsh mountains, raising the level of the river and making the town, in effect, a fortified island. Shrewsbury (or Scrobbes-byrig, which was its Anglo Saxon name – the Fortress of Scrob) had been susceptible to floods for hundreds of years – right up until the council had installed flood defences. These now protected the town and sent the unwelcome waters shooting downstream. Elsewhere.

The window gave her a fine view of the town, familiar landmarks fixing its points: the spire of St Mary's (tragic witness to the first hang gliding fatality), the English Bridge with its elegant Georgian buildings, and the cross at the top of the domed church of St Chad's with its distinctive round shape. Martha warmed her hands around her coffee mug and still smiled. How many times had she played a trick on friends and relatives? Taken them into the quiet graveyard of St Chad's and watched them read the tombstone of Ebenezer Scrooge? They always fell for it. ‘He's a real person, then?' they'd ask until, laughing, she had to tell them that the town of Shrewsbury had been the setting for the 1984 film of Charles Dickens's
A Christmas Carol
and that this stone was merely part of a film set which had not been removed when the shooting was over, left to become yet another tourist attraction.

She looked over the town, feeling a certain pride and affection for it then, reluctantly, turned back to her work. She was not paid to dream around spires but to try and make some sense, truth, logic and justice out of death. She was haunted by the image of Christie Barton fumbling with a locked door, trying to escape the bedroom, her lungs gradually filling with smoke, finally suffocating while the fire raged. And Adelaide Barton, cowering underneath her bedclothes. They were truly awful images. She was not smiling now but frowning. And the old man, she wondered. What part had he played in the drama? Perpetrator? Muddled interferer? Who could know? Would they ever know the full truth?

Once she had settled down to work the images receded and she quickly lost track of time. She was absorbed in reading reports, checking statistics and taking phone calls, one or two from hospital doctors. Periodically Jericho came in with coffee, sometimes biscuits, and at lunchtime a sandwich nicely set out on a plate with a glass of fruit juice.

But the back of her mind was still tracking around the fire, considering it from a different angle now. She was thinking about the living, wondering how Jude was and how his father was responding to the tragedy. What was his view on the events of Friday night? she wondered. How was he reacting? Once or twice she glanced at her phone, tempted to ring Alex Randall and ask him how the enquiry was progressing but she resisted the temptation – with difficulty. It was a relief when Jericho buzzed her at four o'clock to say that Detective Inspector Alex Randall was on the phone and had asked to speak to her.