“Wild horses wouldn’t keep me away!”
“Then I’ll pick you up at ten o’clock.”
Tash was waiting for him downstairs when he arrived. As she slid into the passenger seat beside him, she said: “Why has this investigation taken so long? This is August. The fire was in April.”
“It was unusually thorough. They must be sure of their facts in this case. If the fire was the work of a torch—”
“A torch?”
“Police jargon for an arsonist. If this was arson, it may have been an attempt to assassinate the Governor.”
“His wife was the one who died.”
“But the fire could have been meant for him. Her death could have been incidental.”
For the first time Tash wondered if Jeremy had escaped death because he had been in her rooms when the fire started, something no arsonist could possibly have foreseen. In Vivian’s bedroom or in his own adjoining bedroom, he might have had as little chance as Vivian herself. It was in her room that the fire started and blazed most fiercely.
“But who would want to kill Jeremy?”
“There were some pretty violent people involved in that strike. Remember? Two men were killed and several injured.”
“But Jeremy settled the strike!”
“And by so doing made the Barloventan political exiles his implacable enemies. They say he betrayed them by breaking all sorts of promises he made to them in the beginning.”
“I don’t believe that. Do you?”
“Probably just a misunderstanding. Verbal agreements are tricky things. But whether it’s true or not, they believe it and they are fanatics, so that gives them a motive for killing him.”
Tash fell silent as the car turned into the familiar Leafy Way drive.
The fagade in front was not so bad. Just some windows boarded up where glass had been broken. It was only when Bill and she walked around the house to where she could see her own windows and Vivian’s, that she caught her breath.
The mild August sunshine fell gently on a charred and lunatic chaos. Great holes gaped in once solid walls of brick and lathe and plaster. Insulation leaked from between inner and outer walls in the form of powdered ash.
A lilac silk quilt, grimy with cinders, dangled from an upstairs window. A portable television set lay on one side just inside an open door. Its plastic case had been melted by intense heat into a fantastic, free-form shape that had no rational relation to the shape of circuits and wiring inside the case.
They walked into a drawing room and saw a bucket of dirty water standing on top of a mahogany piano. Some paintings in oil stacked in a fireplace looked as if the paint had become soft and sticky. Underfoot, shards of broken glass and splintered wood and a dozen varieties of ash were all melded by rain and dew into a thick, gritty mush.
“They haven’t even begun to clean up!” cried Tash. “They can’t,” said Bill. “There’s an unusually large amount of insurance money at stake. There were absolute orders from the insurance company that nothing must be moved or even touched until their investigation was completed. They’ve been out here for weeks, photographing, sifting, and analyzing in the most minute detail. The Police Commissioner and the Fire Commissioner backed the insurance company, because they’re even more anxious to know whether this was arson or not.”
Tash looked up at exposed beams overhead that were badly charred. “Will they have to be replaced?”
“Probably, and that alone is about the most expensive thing you can do to a house.”
“Couldn’t those charred beams be encased in wood paneling?”
“They could, but if you did that you’d get a horrid smell of burnt wood on every rainy day.”
At last they came to the Florida Room. The wicker and rattan furniture had vanished in the flames. All that remained were the iron and glass tables, the stone floor, the marble chimney piece.
It was there that Captain Wilkes met them.
“We’ve seen enough of the downstairs,” said Bill. “Is it possible to go upstairs where the fire started?”
“You mean poor Mrs. Playfair’s room? Yes, it’s safe to go up there now. We’ve braced the stairway and shored up the floor in several places. We had to do that before we could go up ourselves.”
Wilkes led them to the door of Vivian’s room.
The taffeta curtains were gone. The paneling that had not been repainted since the eighteenth century was blistered and black. The whole room was black, brown, yellow, and gray now. Even the bed had burned after Jeremy and Carlos got Vivian out. The linen sheets were scorched rags. The screen of black lacquer and mother-of-pearl, that was supposed to have protected Vivian when the fire first began, was now itself a mass of cinders and ashes turning to powdery dust beneath their feet.
Something glinted there. Tash kicked the dust aside with the toe of her shoe and discovered two dimes.
“Did one of you drop these?”
Both men shook their heads.
“Better keep them,” said Wilkes. “Found money is supposed to be lucky.”
Bill touched one of the curtains. It crumbled into flakes. He looked at Wilkes. “Well? What do you think? Was it arson? That’s what I came here today to find out. What do the insurance people say?
“They say not. In spite of all the money involved, they have to say that because they have not turned up any evidence of arson.”
“Do you agree?”
“I have doubts, but no evidence, so I can’t arrest anybody.”
“Do you suspect any person or group of persons?”
“Not even that. It’s just a feeling I have, an insight, a Gestalt thing.”
“How do the insurance people account for the fire?”
“Mrs. Playfair had the habit of sleeping in bed. That’s her ashtray still there on the bed now.” He pointed to a few shards of broken china, white with touches of gilt and pale blue and green that had once been a forget-me-not pattern. “Some of the ashes on the counterpane were analyzed. They proved to be cigarette paper and
