Page 25 of Glasshouses

“Morning.” I wondered how many coffees he needed to be this chipper. “Ready for the tour?”

“Just about.” I looked at the back door. “You thought this was where the fire started?” I wasn’t sure how to work with someone who was giving out such positive vibes. I wasn’t used to it, dealing with cops and pathologists.

“That’s still the same. Just inside the door is the point of origin. The greatest damage is at this point, low origin, high intensity burn. I think your perp trailed petrol through the house, threw a match in, closed this door, and the fire took.” He moved us away from the back door to a side door, which would once have been the tradesman’s entrance. “It isn’t safe to go in that way.”

We walked back round the side of the house, hawthorn and holly making up a dense hedge, separating the land of Micky Mulligan’s house from next door. It was old paving stones, probably laid decades ago. Some had cracked and some were loose, so this was the moment when I’d probably step on a lose one and end up splashing water up the inside of my trousers.

“If we come through here the damage was really only done by the smoke.” He walked ahead of us, but I slowed down, wanting to try to get an idea of Micky’s life. The wallpaper was old fashioned and I suspected it had been there for a number of decades. There were a few cracks at the top of the walls that I suspected had been there for some time, a sign of the house moving and not necessarily anything to worry about.

I passed a kitchen, small and probably from the seventies, just enough space for one person to move around, units facing each other and a window at the end. It was tidy, nothing visibly left out on the worktops.

“Jenna, did the contents of the fridge and cupboards get checked?”

“I’m pretty sure they did, but have a look.” She called Ste to wait for a moment.

I went into the kitchen, pulling open some cupboard doors, immediately finding jars full of preserves and pickled veg, each labelled with what I thought was Amanda’s handwriting.

There was a bustle of noise from the side entrance and I heard a familiar Australian accent.

“Hi Lachy,” Jenna said. “Mia’s in the kitchen.”

“There’s a first.” He peered round the corner. “What’ve you found?”

“The same sort of jars we found in Amanda’s kitchen. I can just about tell it’s the same writing on the labels. Maybe she came here to give him some of her preserves, something as innocuous as that.”

“Could’ve been. What’s in the fridge?”

I wrinkled my nose. The electricity had been out for days, whatever was in there was going to stink. “It’ll be logged in the crime scene report, but I’d bet they’ll be similar meals in there to Amanda’s.”

“Shall we move on?” Ste appeared. “So this has all the signs of a light petroleum distillate – petrol is the obvious one. Easy to get hold of, easy to know what it’ll do. The fire had a rapid, high temperature burn and a fast transition to full room involvement, so it spread, quickly. We’ll confirm for sure that it was petrol when the samples are run.” We followed him across the hallway to the doorway that led into the dining room. There wasn’t a door there any more, metal posts holding the area up.

I peered through, seeing total devastation, ash and charred furniture, water damage visible on the walls and on the floor, the floorboards reduced to burned fragments.

“That’s not good.” I moved away, letting Lachy look.

“That’s even worse than your house, Boss.”

I stabbed him with a glare. “My house is doing just fine.”

He laughed, pleased I’d risen. “Sorry I was late, by the way. I dropped DI Wrigley off at a station in Oldham on the way.”

“Another arrest?” Vinny’s case was picking up steam it seemed.

“Three. Last night was a big night. I saw Vin – he looks knackered.” Lachy moved away from the door.

“An improvement then.” I refocused on Ste. “So where did the fire move to?”

“Above and below straight away, but there was a trail of accelerant from this room, down the hallway to the cellar stairs.”

The cellar stairs were still there, made of stone, now black with ash and charring. A wooden rail might’ve been there once, but now were just the remains of something, thick nails still embedded in the wall.

“Can we go down?” I looked at Ste.

He shook his head. “No. The chamber where we found the body down there is directly under the dining room. It was also a space where the owner kept his paperwork; some of what’s left suggests that anyway. We’ve salvaged what we can and taken photos. You should get them this afternoon.”

“Can I not just go to the bottom of the steps?” I really wanted to have a look down there. “You said you saw a computer when the robot was doing its thing. Did you find it when you went down there?”

“The remains of it. There’ll be no way of getting anything off it now if it worked in the first instance.” He started to point something out.