What Will Burn by James Oswald (ebook reader web .txt) 📕

in the basement had been stifling, but now the damp sweat on his back and neck made him shiver.

‘Not much, sir. Seems Whitaker kept to himself most of the time. He’s not been living here long, either. Only moved in a couple of months ago. According to Mrs Collings there.’ Blane nodded his head at the front window of the ground-floor flat, where an old lady stood and stared out at the proceedings. She caught his eye and gave him a cheery wave. ‘As she tells it, Mr Whitaker’s marriage was on the rocks and he’d moved out of the family home.’

‘Do we have the address?’

‘Not yet, sir. I’ve asked Jay— DC Stringer to run it down. And where he worked, too. Mrs Collings thought he had something to do with the new construction up at St James.’

‘OK. Keep digging. I want a full profile by shift end.’

DC Blane nodded and pulled out his airwave set. McLean knew the constable was a better detective in front of a computer than out in the field, but there were a few more things to cover before they could head back to the station.

‘Anything to report yet?’ he asked Parsons. Her face mask hung around her neck, and she had pulled back the hood attached to her protective overalls, wayward blond hair fluttering in the breeze.

‘We only just got here, Tony. I mean, Detective Chief Inspector, sir.’ Parsons pulled herself to attention, but stopped short of snapping an insolent salute.

‘It’s just detective inspector, Manda. Didn’t Janie tell you?’ McLean didn’t wait for an answer to that. ‘And I meant first impressions. Is it going to be a hard scene to process? Do you think you might find anything to explain what happened?’

‘Umm . . . you went in and saw the body, right? Or what’s left of it, anyway. I’ve been doing this job almost six years and I’ve never seen anything like that. I don’t even know where to start.’ Despite her complaint, Parsons began to count on her fingers. ‘I mean, there’s no obvious sign of any accelerant, nothing to suggest how the fire even started. From what I remember of training, you need a fierce old heat to burn a human body, and yet a stack of girlie mags on a table just a few feet away didn’t catch fire. The pages weren’t even crisped, more’s the pity. The ceiling should have burned through and set the whole tenement alight, but nobody even noticed there was a problem until Mrs Collings there couldn’t put up with the stink any more. It makes absolutely no sense at all.’

‘Angus reckons it could be spontaneous human combustion.’

Parsons ran a gloved hand through her hair, perhaps forgetting where she had been and what she had been doing there. When she spoke, the sarcasm was as marked as it was uncharacteristic. ‘Really? I guess all his many years of experience haven’t been completely wasted then. Human? Tick. Combustion? Tick again. Spontaneous?’ She said no more.

‘OK. I get the picture. I’ll leave you to it, shall I?’

‘Unless you’ve a good idea for getting him out of there in one piece.’

McLean didn’t, so he left Parsons to her job and walked back to his car. DC Blane was hunched beside it, airwave to one ear, finger in the other as he tried to hear whatever was being said at the other end. The wind had picked up now and was whistling down the narrow street, accelerated by the tall buildings on either side. McLean unlocked the car and climbed in, thinking Blane would do the same to get away from the noise, but he’d started the engine and cranked up the heater before the detective constable joined him.

‘That was control, sir. They’ve been on to the council. Got another address for Whitaker. I’m guessing that’s the family home he moved out of. He’s still on the register for council tax there, but there’s another person registered at the address too, Miranda Whitaker. Must be his wife?’ Blane had the good sense to make it a question.

‘Don’t guess, find out.’ McLean checked his mirror and then indicated before pulling out of the parking space. ‘Then you and Harrison can go have a chat with her.’

16

Up the hill towards Liberton from the Cameron Toll shopping centre and Inch Park, the housing estate was a twisty mess of cul-de-sacs and circles designed to confound even the most well-developed sense of direction. It had been built long before the advent of Sat-Nav, and Janie Harrison could only imagine that the planners involved had suffered miserable childhoods. It didn’t help that all the houses looked the same, making it almost impossible to tell whether they had been down any particular drive once or half a dozen times.

‘Not the most inspiring of places,’ she said as she leaned over the steering wheel and peered out through the windscreen. The pool car she’d managed to grab wasn’t as nice as the boss’s Alfa, but it was a lot quieter. One of the new additions to the fleet, a boxy little Nissan, it ran on electricity and was surprisingly fun to drive. It seemed to have a decent range too, if the numbers on the screen built into the dashboard were anything to go by. How long it would last when a forgetful constable left it parked up overnight without plugging it in was something they would no doubt find out soon enough.

‘Doesn’t look much, no. But these houses are a lot bigger than the shoeboxes they’re throwing up nowadays. Friends of mine rented one when they were at Uni.’ DC Blane had pushed the passenger seat so far back he was practically looking out the rear window.

‘You’ve been here before then?’ Janie asked, as she indicated to turn down yet another street with no obvious street sign.

‘Not for a while. But I crashed a couple of times. It’s fine and handy for the King’s Buildings.’

Janie tried to keep the exasperation out of her voice. ‘So you know your