‘Armed police! Armed police! Get down on the ground! Get down!’ Then a pause. Then a little mumbling. Then, ‘Secure!’
Ridley led the way in, closely followed by Jack, then Laura, then Anik, then a team of uniformed officers who would be tasked with searching the premises. In the lounge was an elderly man in his mid-70s. He sat in a Mobility riser recliner with his feet up on the elevated footplate.
‘Donal Sweeney?’ Ridley asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ the man wheezed. ‘You might be after my boy though, I reckon.’
Ridley showed Sweeney Senior a warrant to search the premises. ‘Jack . . .’ was the only word he uttered before leading everyone else out of the room.
Sweeney Senior asked Jack to pass him his reading glasses, which he did.
‘The little shit!’ Sweeney said once he’d read the warrant. ‘I said he could use my address to open a bank account and he does this? Am I under arrest?’
‘Until we can establish the facts,’ Jack explained, ‘you’ll have to come to the station.’
‘Right, then. I’d better start moving, ’cos it takes a while.’
Sweeney Senior reached down into the pocket in the side of his Mobility recliner. The Armed Response Unit instantly raised their weapons and pointed them at the old man.
‘Don’t move! Stay still! Show me your hands!’
Sweeney Senior slammed his hands over his eyes and waited to be shot.
‘The remote! Jesus Christ!’ Jack shouted. ‘He’s just going for the remote!’
He took the remote control from the side pocket of the chair and pressed the ‘down’ button as the overexcited ARU team lowered their guns. The footplate on the Mobility recliner started to lower, the seat started to tilt, and the back started to push Sweeney Senior very, very slowly on to his slippered feet. As he became more upright, a catheter bag half-full of urine dropped out of the bottom of his trouser leg. The old man stood there, hands over his eyes, crying and trembling in fear, pissing into his bag. This was a whole new low for Jack.
*
Prescott and Sally watched as two of his SOCOs attempted to move the charred body from the sofa into the body bag waiting on the ground, ready to be lifted onto the undertaker’s trolley, which was parked just outside the front door. The undertaker, employed by Thames Valley Police to transport bodies to the mortuary for post-mortem, was playing Candy Crush at full blast on his mobile.
‘Turn that down!’ shouted Prescott. ‘If I hear another stupid fucking noise from outside, there’ll be two dead bodies being driven to the mortuary, not one. Idiot . . .’ he muttered. He turned to Sally. ‘What do you think of “Sheila”?’ he asked through his white paper mask. Sally frowned. ‘We got to call him something till we find out who he is.’
‘I get that. But why “Sheila”?’
Prescott suddenly realised that the twenty years between them meant his joke was about to fall flat. He ploughed on regardless.
‘Sheila Ferguson? The Three Degrees? I know he’s got six-degree burns, but there isn’t a group called the Six Degrees.’ Sally was still looking very confused. ‘I pity you,’ Prescott mumbled. ‘You’re too young to appreciate how bloody funny I am.’
The melted underside of the charred body was tangled in with the sofa springs and each time the SOCOs wriggled an arm free, a leg would get caught, and vice versa. In the end, one of Sally’s firefighters decided to cut the springs so that any pieces of metal embedded in the melted skin could just stay there until the body reached the post-mortem table, where the pathologist could remove them in their own time. Getting the body off the sofa was like peeling a label off a jar ‒ no matter how carefully you tried to keep the paper in one piece, it would inevitably tear, and you’d then have to decide whether to push the pieces back together and try again, or just leave some bits behind. Finally, the firefighter lying on his back beneath the sofa with wire cutters said, ‘That’s the last spring gone, you’re good to lift.’
The undertakers lifted the charred body and placed it into the body bag.
As the fluids and dirty fire-hose water from the blackened corpse slowly seeped out, it was abundantly clear that something was missing. In the springs of the sofa, the rubber sole of the left shoe had melted like glue and its hold on the foot inside had proved much harder to break than the ankle joint above it. Prescott shrugged his shoulders and walked away.
‘Valiant effort, lads.’
Sally stared down through the shell of the sofa at her despondent firefighter on the floor.
‘If you could bag the left foot, please, he’d be very grateful.’
*
Forensic pathologist Abigail Coleman laughed so loud that it disturbed her assistants in the next room.
‘Ha! “Sheila”! Martin, you are funny!’
Once the laughter had died away, she got down to business. ‘Sheila’ lay on the post-mortem table in the foetal position.
‘Well,’ Abigail began, ‘it’s definitely a boy. The pelvic measurements tell us that. But, more importantly, I’m almost certain that he was murdered – there’s a large fracture at the back of the skull. This isn’t a stress fracture caused by the intense heat of the fire, and it’s not an impact fracture caused by the ceiling falling down because, as we can see from his very badly damaged jaw and cheekbones, “Sheila” was face up on the sofa. The back of his head, if anything, would have been protected as the fire took hold and debris fell. No, I’d say that the fracture to the back of the skull is a good old-fashioned blunt force trauma. But I won’t be able to tell you until tomorrow. His post-mortem is scheduled for 9 a.m.’
‘What’s wrong with today?’
Prescott wanted the victim’s cause of death and he wanted it now.
‘Well, I could do him today.’ Abigail glanced across the lab at a post-mortem table in the corner of the room. On the table was a sheeted body, no taller than three foot five. ‘But you’ll have tell the parents of that 6-year-old boy that they have to wait another 48 hours before I can tell them if their son was raped before he was strangled.’
Prescott left without saying another word.
*
Prescott’s office was minimalist to say the least. His desk, under normal circumstances, had a metal lattice cup for his pens, a desk diary, a phone and a small tray for the junk he’d pulled out of his pockets and needed to drop somewhere safe. This tray contained chewing gum, a USB stick, headache tablets, his wallet and a set of keys, complete with a miniature screwdriver for tightening the arms on his glasses. The desk itself was standard, but his chair was magnificent; Prescott liked to think in comfort.
Today, his desk was littered with crime scene photos from Rose Cottage, and Sally’s video evidence played on a tablet propped up against the phone. He sat, enveloped in his huge leather office chair and took in all the images. Prescott’s visual memory was legendary – when he looked at a photo, he could also recall what was just out of frame. It was as though he was back at the scene. The stacks of cash in the fireplace of Rose Cottage were a puzzle to him because the money dated from before May 2017, when the cotton fibre five-pound note went out of circulation. His eyes flickered as he thought.