After the Fire by Jane Casey Page A

the rubbish on the floor. ‘This is a wire spring,’ he said, holding it up in a gloved hand. ‘It’s likely to have been from a mattress.’
    ‘So there was a bed in the uninhabited flat, and someone who opened the windows.’ Derwent headed to the bedroom window and looked down. ‘Are you thinking of Armstrong?’
    ‘It’s a possibility.’
    ‘His body was a bit to the left of this window.’ Derwent was leaning out at a perilous angle. I had to restrain myself from grabbing the back of his coat and hauling him back.
    ‘I’d say it bears further investigation.’ Harper’s voice was as calm and reasonable as ever.
    We followed him out to stand in the corridor. ‘From here on the fire was largely contained by the firefighters.’ He pointed. ‘Flat 104, the firefighters rescued the elderly resident without too much trouble once they found the flat. The main issue was gaining access. She was barricaded inside and it took a while to persuade her to open the door.’
    ‘Lucky escape,’ Una Burt commented.
    ‘Very.’ Harper sighed. ‘Not the case upstairs, unfortunately. If you’d all like to follow me, I can show you flat 113. Whoever they were, they had no luck at all.’

Chapter 5
     
    SOBERLY, I WALKED downstairs with Derwent.
    ‘I’m never going to live anywhere higher than the first floor,’ he said.
    ‘Me neither.’
    ‘What a fucking horrible way to die. Locked in.’ He shuddered. ‘Give me Armstrong’s death any day.’
    It didn’t seem to me that Armstrong’s ending had been a whole lot better than the two people who had been located in flat 113, but I could understand why Derwent was so unsettled. Flat 113 had been a horror show, a nightmare made real. The smell had hit me first and I wasn’t the only one who struggled with the dark, awful stench of charred meat. I’d seen plenty of dead bodies – I’d even seen burned bodies before. These were different, though. The fire had seared through the flat with tremendous speed and heat. I’d never seen destruction like it. Even the front door was warped and buckled. Harper had shown us the lock, proving that the door had been locked at the time of the fire.
    ‘Locked from the inside or the outside?’ I’d asked.
    ‘We don’t know. We haven’t found a key yet.’
    ‘Let’s not jump to conclusions,’ Una Burt said, her voice firm. ‘They might have been waiting for rescue. They might have been scared to leave. It’ll take time to search for the key in this mess, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t here.’
    But it was hard to imagine why you would allow yourself to be trapped in an inferno if you had a choice in the matter. The corpses were distorted and black, charred to the bone, huddled in a cupboard where they had tried to hide. They looked like specimens from a museum, bog people dug out of the ground, withered, alien. You had to remind yourself these had been people, once. Recently.
    Everyone else on the eleventh floor had escaped, though several had suffered injuries that ranged from very minor to serious. If the two people hadn’t been locked in, or if the fire had broken through in a different flat – even if the fire crews had known they were trapped there – the outcome might have been different.
    ‘We’ll be looking at the building regulations and whether they were correctly observed,’ Northbridge had promised.
    ‘I’m sure that’ll make all the difference to them.’ Derwent had walked out, as if he couldn’t bear to stay there for another moment, and after a nod from Burt I’d followed him. I’d caught up with him on the stairs, aware that he wouldn’t want to discuss the fact that he’d walked out. I sometimes wondered why I bothered being tactful around Derwent when he was so absolutely not tactful in his dealings with me.
    ‘So what do you think?’ I asked.
    ‘About what?’
    ‘Armstrong. Did he fall, did he jump or was he pushed?’
    ‘Pushed. Definitely.’ He was going faster as he got