Lindsay had always wanted, but her husband insisted wasn’t practical. It would show up the dirt, he’d said. It was a shameful waste of money.
Royal Wilton in chamomile, that was it. According to the uniforms who’d taken initial statements, the lady in the house to the left had heard the entire argument as Brian Mullen left for work one morning.
Fry looked around the wrecked lounge. Mr Mullen had been right. The carpet was black now, and trampled with charred debris. Dozens of boot prints had sunk into two inches of filthy sludge.
The problem was, the bottom edge of the door into the kitchen had sealed so tightly against the new Wilton that there was no gap for air to get through. When the sofa ignited, thick smoke would have filled this room in minutes, choking fumes that seared the lungs and stung the eyes. If only a few wisps of it had seeped under the door into the kitchen, they might have reached the smoke alarm, and the outcome could have been different. Unlike so many others, the Mullens’ alarm had been working, the batteries recently replaced. It just hadn’t detected any smoke until it was too late. Far too late.
‘They never stood a bloody chance, did they?’ said Murfin.
Fry glanced at him. His flippancy was gone, and he was sweating a little despite the draught stirring the curtains behind him. Of course, Gavin was a family man, with children of his own. There were some things that got to you, no matter how hard you tried to keep up the exterior.
‘They say it’s better to die of smoke inhalation than burn to death, anyway,’ she said, though she didn’t expect it to help. Her own flesh still crawled at the thought of the flames.
She looked away from Murfin before he could distract her concentration. This room had been packed with plastics, too — TV, video recorder, racks of CDs and DVDs, boxes full of children’s toys under a shelf in the corner. Most of the toys were just a molten mess now, multi-coloured pools of lava that had run on to the carpet and congealed in the spray from the firemen’s hoses. There were recognizable shapes here and there — the twisted controls of a PlayStation console, the burned edge of a Monopoly game. The head and one arm of a Barbie doll waved from a skin-toned puddle, like someone drowning in a sea of their own flesh. Something scorched and wooden gazed accusingly at her from blackened eyes.
Then a tiny flash of colour caught her attention. A glint of bright yellow, like a drop of sunlight in the blackness. She crouched towards the floor and gently blew away the ash. A broken section of Monopoly board lay at her feet: Piccadilly and the Water Works.
Of course, the untreated polyurethane foam in the furniture had been the real problem. Brian Mullen had definitely had a point. Lindsay could have spent her money more wisely if she’d replaced the cheap sofa instead of the carpet. The outcome really could have been different. For a start, her children might still be alive.
When she walked through into the kitchen, Fry found it almost pristine and untouched, apart from a few muddy footprints on the vinyl flooring. From the condition of the teak-effect units and the white painted walls, she would never have guessed there had been a fire at all. She felt as though she’d stepped out of one film set and into another, where an entirely different story was taking place. This one suggested a harmless domestic comedy — a family eating breakfast together in their spotless kitchen, Mum and Dad and the kids, all chattering and laughing, hurrying to get ready for work or school. Behind her, the other room might have been the scene of a cheap horror film, except the credits had already rolled and the crew had packed up and gone home.
‘Diane, do you want to have a look upstairs?’ called Murfin, without enthusiasm.
‘Yes, in a minute.’
Fry took a last look at the kitchen, with its silent smoke alarm. She noticed that the cooker was new, too. A Smeg dual-fuel with air-cooling system. A thousand pounds or so, she guessed. Money wasn’t all that short in the Mullen household, after all.
She went back through the sitting room and joined Gavin at the foot of the stairs. She wasn’t sure that she needed to visit the bedrooms. They might have been where the victims died, but they weren’t where the fire had started. If there had been a crime committed, it was here on the ground floor that the evidence would be found, surely?
As she was debating with herself, Murfin settled the question by hauling himself slowly up the stairs, sighing at every step. Fry had no choice but to follow him.
And, in a way, the bedrooms weren’t quite so bad. It was clear that the flames hadn’t reached here. The furniture was almost untouched, though covered by a layer of soot. The covers of the beds had been pulled back, revealing clean, unmarked sheets. The first room she saw might simply have been waiting for Lindsay Mullen to come home and clean up the mess. Apart from the markers where her body had lain when she collapsed from smoke inhalation, of course.
‘Have you got the photos there, Gavin?’
Murfin grunted and passed her the file. Fry had seen the photographs before she came out, and remembered the condition of Lindsay’s body, the cotton pyjamas she’d been wearing, with the left leg rucked up to expose a thin, white calf. Her face was only visible in the close-ups, turned to the right, her left cheek pressed tightly to the floor.
It wasn’t Lindsay Mullen’s face that Fry was interested in, but the position of her body, the angle of her limbs. She turned one of the photos to align it with the room, and checked the direction of the door. Lindsay had almost certainly been going the wrong way. It wasn’t too difficult to picture her, blinded and disorientated by darkness and dense smoke, feeling her way frantically round the walls in an effort to find the door, while her children screamed in the next room. It wasn’t difficult at all. In fact, it was too easy for comfort.
‘Next room, Gavin,’ she said.
‘That’s the kids’ bedroom.’
‘I know that.’
Jack and Liam Mullen had died without leaving their beds, according to the incident reports. They woke up choking, and died from the effects of smoke inhalation. Died calling for their mum, probably.
The house must have been so full of smoke by then that the boys would never have made it to the stairs, let alone through the flames in the hall. Still, their bedroom wasn’t a pleasant place to be. Gavin wouldn’t even come inside the door. He knew the bodies had lain here for some time, since the boys had obviously been dead and beyond rescue. Coroners’ rules required the bodies to be left
Of course, the vast majority of house fires were tragic accidents. Faulty wiring, a fag down the back of the sofa, clothes left too near an electric heater. If sudden deaths didn’t go automatically to CID, she wouldn’t even be here. Fire service codes on this incident were ambiguous — but then, the firefighters on the scene would have had other priorities than looking for a cause.
Fry heard a rustle and a cough, and turned to find a uniformed PC standing at the bottom of the stairs. He was wearing a yellow reflective jacket, and he held his helmet in one hand as he wiped the sweat from his forehead with the other.
‘DS Fry?’ he said, looking up at her. ‘They said you’d be here. I thought you ought to know straightaway — ’
‘What is it?’
‘Well, we’ve been talking to the neighbours again. We ought to have found out earlier, I suppose, but we never thought to ask. You know what it’s like, everyone is in shock when a thing like this happens, and with the husband being taken off to hospital — ’
‘Out with it, for heaven’s sake.’
He coughed again and turned the brim of his helmet in his fingers. ‘I’ve been speaking to the lady next door. She says it’s only just occurred to her to mention it … Well, it seems there were three children living at this address. Mrs Mullen had a daughter, as well as the two boys.’
Fry stared at the charred wreckage and thought about the bedrooms. There was a closed door at the end of the landing, a third room she hadn’t entered. But the firefighters must have been through the whole house, surely? They wouldn’t have left a bedroom unchecked for victims, would they?
‘The daughter could be away from home,’ she said. ‘Staying over with friends for the night or something. What age is she?’
The officer swallowed. ‘According to the neighbour, the third child is about eighteen months old.’
Fry bit her lip. She hated incidents that involved children. Someone else ought to have taken this job. She ought to have sent one of her DCs. Not Gavin Murfin, though — well, not on his own. But Ben Cooper would have
