“Mr. Whitmore around?” she asked one of the card players.
He gave her the once-over, smiled as if he thought he was sexy and pointed with his thumb. “Office back there.”
Annie felt his eyes on her behind as she walked away, heard a whisper, then men’s laughter. She thought of turning and making some comment about how childish they were but decided they weren’t worth the effort.
George Whitmore turned out to be a pleasant, good-natured man with cropped gray hair, not far from retirement age by the look of him. He had framed photos of his family, including grandchildren, on his desk.
“You’re the lass who phoned earlier, are you?” he said, bidding Annie to sit down.
“Yes.”
“Well, I should’ve told you you’ve probably made a long journey for nothing.”
Annie smiled at him. “I don’t mind. It’s nice to get out of the office for a while.” She took out her notebook. “You remember the Walker fire?”
“Yes. I was on the crew back then, before my bad back put me on office duties a year ago.”
“You were at the scene?”
“Yes. It happened, oh, about three or four in the morning, or a bit after. I could look it up if you want the exact time.”
“It doesn’t matter for the moment. Just your impressions will do.”
He paused and frowned. “If you don’t mind me asking, love, why do the police want to know about the Walker fire now, after all this time?”
“It’s just a background check,” Annie said. “Routine.”
“Because there was nothing funny about it.”
“I understand there was no police investigation?”
“Not beyond what’s required by law and the insurance company. No reason for one.”
“What was the cause of the fire?”
“A smoldering cigarette end down the side of the sofa.”
Another reason smoking’s bad for your health, thought Annie. “And you ruled out arson?”
Whitmore nodded. “Early on. There were no signs of forced entry, of anything being disturbed, for a start. There was also no evidence of accelerants being used, and, quite honestly, nobody had any reason to harm the Walkers.”
“You knew them?”
“Only in passing. To say hello to. They were active in chapel. Everyone knew that. I’m not a particularly religious sort myself. Nice, God-fearing couple, though, by all accounts. Nice daughter they had, too. Poor lass barely escaped with her life.”
“That’d be Ruth?”
“Aye. They only had the one.”
“So what happened from the moment the alarm went off?”
“They didn’t have a smoke detector. If they’d had one, it’s likely they wouldn’t have died. A neighbor saw the smoke and flames and phoned us. By the time we got there, most of the neighbors were already out in the street. See, a cigarette can smolder for hours and generate a lot of heat. When it takes hold, it really goes. The fire had taken hold by then, and it took us a good hour or so to put it out completely. At least we managed to stop it spreading.”
“Where was Ruth at this time?”
“They’d taken her to hospital. She jumped out of her bedroom window in the nick of time. Broke her ankle and dislocated her shoulder.”
“Nasty.”
“The ankle was the worst. Bad fracture, apparently. Took her weeks before she could walk again without crutches or a stick. Anyway, it wasn’t nearly as nasty as what happened to her mum and dad. She was the lucky one. There’d been a shower earlier in the evening, and the ground was soft, or she might have broken more bones.”
“How did her parents die?”
“Smoke inhalation. That’s what the postmortem showed. Never even had time to get out of bed. Ruth had inhaled some smoke, too, before she jumped, but not enough to do her much harm. A whiff of oxygen and she was right as rain.”
“Why did she have time to escape and her parents didn’t?”
Whitmore shrugged. “Younger, stronger, quicker reflexes. Also, her room was at the front, and the fire was worse further back. Her parents were probably dead when she jumped.”
“Can you tell me anything else?”
“That’s about it, really, love. Told you you’d probably had a wasted journey.”
“Well, you know what it’s like,” said Annie. “Was the house completely destroyed?”
“Pretty much. Inside, at any rate.”
“And now?”
“Oh, someone bought it and had it renovated. To look at it now you’d never know such tragedy happened there.”
Annie stood up. “Where is it from here, exactly?”
“Carry on along the main road, go left at the next lights and it’s the second street on the right.”
“Thanks very much.” Annie left Whitmore’s tiny office and walked back past the card players. This time one of them whistled at her. She smiled to herself. It felt quite nice, actually. Thirty-something and she still got whistled at. She’d have to tell Alan about that.
Alan. They had talked most of the night while the peat fire blazed in the hearth and soft jazz played in the background. He told her about Rosalind’s visit, about Emily and Ruth, about the guilt he felt on finding Riddle dead in his garage, and she told him about how Dalton’s appearance had knocked her out of kilter, brought back feelings she didn’t know she still harbored, and how she had confronted him on Sunday morning.
Had it been summer, they would have been up talking until dawn, but because it was December, the only light that shone through the windows at four o’clock in the morning came from a full moon as white as frost. Even then they continued to talk, and the way Annie remembered it she thought she had probably fallen asleep in mid-sentence.
It wasn’t until both had slept for about three hours that they made love – tentatively and tenderly – and in the morning they had to scrape the ice off their car windows and drive like hell to get to work on time.
Now, it seemed to Annie as if there were no more secrets, as if nothing stood between them. She still worried about their working together, especially now that she was stationed at Western Divisional HQ, too, and she could never quite get over her fear of commitment, of rejection. But Banks hadn’t asked her for commitment, and if anything, it was she who had rejected him last time, out of fear of his past impinging on her life.
All she really knew, she decided, was that whatever it was they had, she wanted it. It was time again to take her lesson from Eastern philosophy – go with the flow.
Annie smiled as she touched up her makeup, using the rear-view, then she headed off to see if she could discover anything from the Walkers’s neighbors.
The atmosphere that had hung over the death scene at Riddle’s garage the previous day seemed to have permeated the entire station, Banks thought as he looked out of his window at the market square. The place had all the atmosphere of a funeral parlor. While Riddle might not have been the most loved or admired chief constable they had ever had, he had been one of them, and he was dead. It was like losing a member of the family. A distant and austere uncle perhaps, but still a family member. Even Banks felt heavy-hearted as he sipped his bitter black coffee.
The dark mood reminded him of the days after Graham Marshall’s disappearance, when everyone in the school seemed to be going around walking on eggs, in a daze, and conversations all seemed to be carried out in whispers. Those days had given Banks his first real taste of guilt, a sense of being responsible for people that was one of the things that spurred him on now in his job. He knew deep down that he was no more responsible for Graham Marshall’s disappearance than he was for Phil Simpkins’s bleeding to death on the railings, or Jem’s overdose of heroin, but he seemed to attract the guilt, draw it to him and wrap it around himself like a comforting mantle.