Critical Incidents. Lucie Whitehouse
He’d been standing behind his desk, fists planted, knuckles white. His shirt strained in lines, neck to armpit, stuffed with mid-life-crisis muscle. Anger shimmered off him but his eyes had been gleaming, too: Gotcha. Here it was at last, the excuse he’d been waiting for. ‘So we’re ignoring the facts – the facts gathered by your team, DCI Lyons – and going with your instincts, instead. What the fuck …?’ His prissy fountain pen jumped in his prissy glass tray. He’d spun around, turning his back as if disgusted. Her instincts said he was hiding his face, trying not to whimper at the pain in his knuckles.
Instinct wasn’t ‘woo-woo woman shit’ – she couldn’t wait to talk about that at her appeal – as any cop worth his salt knew. ‘Read Malcolm Gladwell, you …’ Fuckwit – she’d stopped herself but barely. He’d got the message, though. The next day, she’d ordered him a copy of Blink on Amazon. She knew it had arrived; Gid said he’d seen it on his desk. Instinct was years of lived experience, years of watching people, their words, behaviour, body language, processed in a moment and delivered to your gut as guidance on what you were dealing with, so you could protect yourself. And her instinct told her that Corinna had never had to protect herself from Josh.
An hour ago, she’d lain with her eyes trained on the red digital numbers of the desk clock: 1.30 a.m. A full day since the emergency call, already half – half! – of the first forty-eight hours, the most valuable in a murder enquiry, when everything was freshest: scene, witnesses, investigators. With every hour that passed, the case became cooler, the odds of solving it longer.
Arson.
The lack of information was doing her head in. ‘Evidence of an accelerant’ – what did that mean? A jerry can dropped on the drive, or areas of petrol that had somehow failed to ignite? Was it petrol for the lawnmower, grabbed from the garage on the spur of the moment or had it been brought there, premeditated? Where was Corinna found – which room? Had she been dead before the fire started? If she was badly burned and any existing injuries had been soft-tissue … Veteran of hundreds of crime scenes, gangland executions, shootings, drownings, Robin had run to the bathroom and puked.
She took a deep breath now, made herself exhale slowly. Hidden by the dark, she acknowledged it, the other thing that had bound them together, she, Josh and Corinna, never spoken about but always there, the fuse on everything they’d accomplished since. Had someone found out? Was that possible after all these years? Eighteen years – before Lennie, before Peter, any of it. If so, why now? What had changed?
You moved yesterday.
And she’d been in the papers – someone could have seen the photo, recognized her … No – she ordered herself to stop. That way madness lay; a spiralling nightmare.
There was so much she didn’t know, all of it essential for building a picture of what had happened. The effort it had taken not to ring the number on DS Thomas’s card, try and glean new crumbs. By now, the initial house-to-house would be long done, and the search of the immediate area. They’d be looking at CCTV, checking speed cameras. Anyone driving away from the house had to use either the A38 or Pershore Road and there’d be cameras there – they were both routes in and out of the city centre. The time-window was three and a half hours, ten o’clock to half past one; it wouldn’t take very long to find out what time Josh’s car had left, and in which direction.
Who else would they have spoken to? Di and Will, of course, and they’d have family liaison there. Gerry, Josh’s dad, and his sister, Kath. Poor Gerry – he was fragile anyway since the stroke, and a widower. What would it do to him, knowing that Josh was a suspect – the suspect? Josh, Kath and the grandchildren were everything to him. And to Rin; he’d been the dad she never had.
Robin pulled Lennie closer, breathed her in. Corinna would never cuddle Peter again – never put her arms round him and pretend to crush him while he pretended he wanted to get away. He was ten, just turned – his birthday was at the beginning of January. He’d asked for a Star Wars Lego kit and a trip to WaterWorld in Stoke. ‘Thank Christ it isn’t Alton Towers,’ Corinna had said on the phone. ‘I’d have to be tranquillized to get on one of those rides. Oblivion, Nemesis – I feel sick on the bloody spinning teacups.’ She would have done it, though, even if it had taken a general anaesthetic; she’d have done anything for Peter. Not overindulgence – he wasn’t spoiled or allowed to run wild on a diet of TV and processed sugar – but attention, fun, structure, family. Proper care. Corinna had been a great mother – way better than she was. It’s not fair, Robin wanted to shout; you fucking bastard, whoever you are, it’s not fair. Why did it have to be her?
Dennis had tried to stop her but at six thirty, she’d turned on Midlands Today. It had been the top story, trailed over the pulsing theme music. ‘Police launch a murder enquiry after an Edgbaston house fire leaves a woman dead and her son with life-threatening injuries.’ A preview of other stories to come – three teenagers jailed for a knife attack; a planning controversy; a woman looking for a bone-marrow donor – and then straight to it. Nick Owen – silver-haired, kind-eyed. He’d been the presenter since they were at school, it had to be twenty years, and now he was saying Corinna’s name.
He cut to a reporter at the scene. Russell Road, where Rin and Josh lived, was busy, the woman talking over a hum of rush-hour traffic, but the houses themselves were set back behind a verge lined with trees and a small service road now cordoned off. The reporter was a few feet outside the tape, backed by a fire investigation van and a square white forensics tent. They had a uniform at the foot of Corinna’s driveway.
Floodlights blazed over the area, and the bare February branches gave the scene a weird gothic beauty. But then the reporter had turned aside, the camera panned out and they saw the house itself. Across the room, Christine had gasped.
When she was little, Lennie had called Corinna and Josh’s the ‘snowman house’. Built in the Thirties with some Deco influence, its white stucco façade looked out from under the hat of a steep dark-tiled roof like a cheeky face, or – with the small round porthole just under the roofline – a winking emoticon. A long stained-glass window – the carrot – lit the central stairs, and the bigger, horizontal windows of the bedrooms made the eyes.
The glass was gone, shattered by the heat, and the eyes were black and gaping, lascivious soot tongues licking over the stucco above each one. The size of them – the flames must have been eight or nine feet high. The creepers either side of the front door were burned to a network of fine charcoal, intricate etchings across a face now rendered macabre, a painted Mexican skull for the Day of the Dead.
Just visible against the evening sky, beyond the reach of the floodlights, was a hole at the apex of the roof, the supporting timber burned away, tiles collapsing inward like fish-scales. Peter. The skylights were at the back of the house, Robin knew, one over the back stairs, the other – the one he must surely have jumped from – in his room, over his bed, surrounded by his glow-stars. She imagined his terror at waking to find the house on fire around him. Had his door been open? Had it come into his room? The smell; the sheer noise: roaring flame, groaning timbers, the shattering glass.
Dennis had taken her hand, squeezed it so hard her knuckles ground together, and she’d heard the reporter say, ‘… DI Webster. To confirm, this is a murder investigation?’
The camera moved to a man of about forty-five wearing a wax jacket over a suit. Broad face, short brown hair greying at the temples. Large brown eyes.
‘That is how we’re treating it, yes,’ he said. ‘Obviously, the fire damage is significant so it’ll take time to establish exactly what happened here but we do have evidence that the fire was started deliberately.’
‘And you’re appealing for help from the public?’
He looked directly at the camera. ‘Yes. We’re keen to talk to anyone who was in the Edgbaston area last night and saw or heard anything that struck them as unusual. We’re also appealing to anyone who may have seen Josh Legge or believe they know his whereabouts. Mr Legge was last seen late yesterday evening, shortly before