‘Not exactly like the sales brochure described, I imagine,’ Garda Detective Clarke Casey mutters as we turn in through the black apartment gates. The drab blocks loom ahead of us, the grey exterior broken up only by cheap white balconies that give it a prison-like feel. We’d agreed en route that it was important not to make our interest in the police officer too obvious at first, given the sensitivity of the matter and the possibility other Gardaí may also be involved. We’d also have to look at the mother, Audrey Jones, especially as we learnt from the call sheet that she’d been the only one to escape unharmed.
‘Maybe it was something straightforward, like an electrical fault,’ Clarke says diplomatically, as I manoeuvre into a gap behind three squad cars that are pulled up alongside the entrance door shrubbery to one of the blocks. The Garda Tech Bureau van has already arrived too. A few reporters click half-heartedly as we arrive, but are herded back by one of the uniforms, his arms spread wide. A suspicious death makes a change from covering the annual horse fair, I imagine. But I know that they’re waiting for their money shot – the removal of the body on the stretcher. The black-sheathed tangibility of tragedy that will make front pages in all the evening papers.
‘I guess we’ll find out. But when you have seen as much tragedy as I have, you’ll probably be less likely to think things just happen,’ I tell him. ‘People are capable of all kinds of bad behaviour, Casey. Remember, some just hide it better than others.’
Without thinking, I massage the soft tissue between my ribs with my thumb, specifically the one broken with one swift shove last summer. I quickly let my hand fall when I realise what I’m doing. The pregnancy has made the injury flare up once again.
Clarke Casey shoots me a look.
I press the buckle and the seatbelt retracts. Easing myself slowly out of the car, I join Clarke around the front of it.
We both look up surveying the building.
Bayview, a four-block structure, is a relatively new residence, just five minutes out of town, but the wooden cladding around the communal entrance hallway is stained dark by damp and the aluminium-framed windows seem to sag slightly. A quick Google search earlier told me that it’s mainly accommodation for employees of the nearby Elan electronics company which subsidises the rent. In a place as beautiful as Currolough, it’s hard to fathom why anyone would choose to live here, beside one of the area’s busiest roads, with views across to an industrial park. As a company, Elan is known for wooing staff with pool tables, bean bags and junk food on tap. Maybe they never have to be at this place much at all, but I pity the family members trying to make this grim section of the world seem like home.
I start my investigation the way I’ve been taught – trying to patch together the circumstances that led to this tragedy. Absorbing it. Was it deliberate? Violent? What traces of evidence remain? I know it’s my job to find those clues, but I also feel a certain responsibility on a personal level to find out the truth of what happened to those who probably never saw it coming.
A Garda walks towards me. Tall, mid-thirties, I guess. When he speaks, his voice is thick with the same Currolough accent I’d deliberately shaken off years ago.
‘Detective Sergeant Fields?’
When I nod, he introduces himself as one of the officers on duty and Clarke steps forward to pump his hand enthusiastically.
‘Inspector Mulligan is upstairs,’ he tells us, and leads us towards grey double doors to the side of the building with an exit sign above, explaining that the lift of this particular block hasn’t yet been cleared safe for use. Four fire trucks are wedged close together at angles, with thick snakes of black rubber hosing coiled around their base. The air is still dense with smoke.
I make sure to trot up the steep stairs ahead of the men. Halfway up, my legs are screaming, and I discreetly support my bump through my jacket to lighten the load. I curse the need to pee again.
As we step through a door leading from the concrete stairwell onto the second-floor units, a few uniformed officers and scene-of-crime specialists mill around outside the smashed apartment door marked 2D. The first thing the team from the Garda Tech Bureau does is to photograph the place. I’ll liaise with them throughout the investigation.
I pause at the door to slow my breathing.
The fire had been brought under control early this morning, the officer tells us. The other twenty-four residents from this particular block have been evacuated.
The smell of acrid smoke is inescapable. The forensic team have their work cut out for them. Both Clarke and I step into our paper suits.
‘Through here,’ the officer says, gesturing as we zip. Holding onto the landing wall for support, I pull on the matching white shoe covers, refusing Clarke’s outstretched hand. The material of the suit stretches tight over my swollen belly. I snap on my gloves. Then the officer leads us into apartment 2D, and, as we duck past the police tape, I catch my own reflection in the hall mirror. The silver glass in it is cracked, most likely from the urgency of the fire fighters dragging in equipment to quell the blaze. I stare back at myself, dead-eyed and bare-faced under the hooded suit but for my stain of lipstick. Clarke loiters behind me as we move deeper into the blackened remains of the family home. The smell of some kind of fuel, like petrol overwhelms. It’s usually the first sign a fire has been deliberate.
There are photos on the walls – the standard portrait shots, styled in black and white, of a family of three. There’s another one of a couple sitting on a beach, but as I bend to look at it, footsteps approach. A man strides towards us, his chestnut hair and elongated face giving him startlingly equine features. Inspector Ken Mulligan, I presume, the one who called the control centre overnight. A woman appears behind him, also wearing protective clothing. A strand of fair hair falls across her forehead and she flashes a tight smile in greeting.
‘DS Fields?’ Mulligan reaches for my hand, and I introduce Clarke.
‘I understand you are giving us a dig out with all of this?’ Though his tone is convivial, Mulligan’s words come out serrated. It wouldn’t be unusual to feel like we’re stepping on his turf. But they’d requested assistance from Dublin. That’s what Frank had implied anyway. There are tiny smudges of white at the corners of his mouth when he speaks. I try to ignore them as he introduces us to the others in the room.
‘This is Dr Greta Muldoon, pathologist for the Southern district,’ he explains. I know Greta, a sweet woman with sad eyes. She steers us towards another smoke-choked room – the open-plan living area. The body is slumped across the sofa, one leg dangling off. There are no signs of any outward burns or injuries, but I know from experience that in cases like this, it’s usually the smoke that gets you first.
‘Victim is Eddie Jones, electrician, aged thirty-four,’ she tells us.
I feel Clarke’s shoulders stiffen beside me. It’s the first time he’s seen a body. Out with me, anyway. I’ve seen too many to count, but you never get used to the brutality of death, the transformation of all that vitality into an empty shell. Probing slightly as she speaks, Dr Greta Muldoon tells us that on initial presentation, Mr Jones likely died as a result of smoke inhalation and that the angle of his body suggests he was sleeping at the time. I notice the number of empty wine bottles on the table next to the couch and littering the floor. This looked a lot more than a casual evening nap. But rule one of an initial scene scan is never to be presumptuous. This could have been set up on purpose to look like something else.
‘What time did it start?’
Dr Muldoon defers to Mulligan, who straightens up.
‘Neighbours rang it in about ten p.m. and the fire department were here by ten past.’ He pauses, as if awaiting praise.
‘Smoke alarm was working. We think Jones must have been passed out, or even been unconscious when the fire first started.’
I nod, looking up at the small white box on the ceiling and then back at the vic’s legs. He hadn’t heard a thing by the looks of it.
‘No obvious sign of trauma to the body,’ Dr Muldoon observes, moving a gloved finger along the man’s torso, exposing dull flesh. ‘But we’ll see what the PM throws up.’
‘And the kid?’ Clarke speaks for the first time, shuffling forward in his shoe protectors, clearing his throat self-consciously. ‘How is the little girl doing?’
‘She’s in hospital. Still in surgery,’ Mulligan says. ‘She broke both legs dropping from the balcony. The bushes took the brunt of her fall, otherwise it might have been a different story entirely.’
I wince involuntarily, thinking of the height. Poor kid. I shut my eyes. The nausea has returned – a seasickness that churns.
Glancing at me quickly, Clarke continues with the questioning, and I’m grateful to him for the moment it takes to steady myself.
‘What about the mother?’ he asks.
‘Audrey Jones was out jogging at the time the fire started. She’s currently at the hospital with her daughter. Ms Jones normally works at the post office in the town centre. Her husband, Mr Jones here, was an employee at Elan.’
The ambulance crew interrupts us as they pile into the small apartment with a gurney, and Dr Muldoon crosses over to speak with them. The forensic team continue to chart anything that could be construed as evidence, despite the thin film of soot across most available surfaces.
I walk across to the remains of the kitchen units. One of the Garda Tech Bureau, a guy called Jake I’ve worked with before, crouches with a clipboard over a section of the laminate flooring that’s been melted in parts. He’s poking through the charred rubble but glances over his shoulder at me.
‘Most likely started here,’ Jake says gesturing towards the door, which is much blacker and more blistered than any of the others. ‘Blocked the hallway exit. Burnt both rooms pretty good, but the flames themselves didn’t reach as far as the living room.’
The countertops are blackened out hulls. I step over shards of smashed white dinner plates on the ground and wonder if they had also been broken by the fire crew during the emergency. The rest of the kitchen looks neat and tidy except for the fire debris. There’s a shopping list stuck to the fridge, a still intact photo of Audrey and her daughter. They look alike – both slight and dark-haired, the same closed-lip smile to camera.
‘See that?’
I examine where Jake is pointing. A melted red mess close to the chalky remains of whatever’s been burnt. I also spot the corner of what looks like a white and blue checked tea towel.
‘Fuel canister?’ I guess and he nods. I ease myself lower, towards where he’s indicating, and try not to wince at the effort. It’s one of those small containers that most people use for storing fuel for lawnmowers. The smell of it thickens the air. ‘And look over here.’ Jake uses a small metal rod to move a heap of material that’s burnt through. Ashy pieces collapse in on themselves, disintegrating as he nudges them.
‘Some kind of material. Most likely soaked in the accelerant. They’re placed so they caught the curtains, and it took off from there.’
I imagine the whoosh as the fibres took light, the speed of the spread, a child’s legs dangling in mid-air, a man oblivious on the couch.
Who would do something like this?
Why?
Out through the open door of the balcony, I spot Mulligan on his phone and follow him out. The sky remains overcast, flat and suffocating. Snapping off my gloves, I take a lungful of cold air. It’s only when you are free from something that you realise how overpowering it has been all along.
By the looks of it, the fire was concentrated towards the front of the apartment – the exit. Out here on the balcony, it’s as if there was no fire at all. There are a couple of plant pots with startled dead branches and a faded children’s sandbox leeched of its original colour. A cheap-looking barbecue sits under a torn canvas cover. Dead leaves gather in one slimy pile angled up against the balcony wall. This doesn’t feel like a happy home. As Mulligan finishes his conversation, I lean against the barrier to cough my lungs clean and close my eyes as I imagine little limbs hitting tarmac. Clarke joins us outside and I watch him gaze over towards the next-door balcony. It has a perfect line of sight into the living room of Apartment 2D. ‘I want you to speak to whoever lives in that unit,’ I say quickly. I’d learnt in other cases not to handhold. Not Clarke and not Mulligan. We’ll have to do a little investigating of our own without necessarily involving local law enforcement, especially if one of them is a suspect. Never underestimate the curiosity most have into other people’s lives.
Clarke nods and makes a note in his notepad.
‘Now…’
He looks slightly alarmed by my tone, but turns and leaves. I push down the nagging voice of my conscience telling me to ease up on my rookie, and instead turn to Mulligan, who’s finished his call.
‘What can you tell me about this Garda whose name keeps being mentioned?’
He frowns, and glances over his shoulder.
‘Everyone knows everyone around here,’ he says, by way of explanation. ‘It’s a somewhat delicate matter, as I’m sure you can appreciate.’
He seems nervous, but I’m not entirely sure he’s being straight with us. Small-town officers are tight. I remember that from my early days up at the station in Galway – the huddling of those who’d been in kindergarten with each other’s cousins. Or in some cases, those who’d been in the same classes together since they’d been young kids.
‘According to the mother, Audrey Jones, a Garda had been harassing them for weeks. He’d been calling on their buzzer repeatedly, even following her a couple of times, she said. A neighbour corroborated the story. She said the same man returned to the block again at the time of the fire last night, but without his uniform. She let him through the glass community doors. The same cop was also first on the scene of the crime, just ahead of the fire brigade. He was the one who broke down the door.’
‘So this cop was first on the scene too?’ None of this looks good for him.
Mulligan shifts uncomfortably, like he doesn’t want to admit what’s coming next.
‘One other thing.’ He lowers his voice. ‘The Garda wasn’t supposed to be on duty last night. He took a leave of absence last week.’
‘Would there be any reason for this Garda… Barrows to have contact with the Jones family in any other capacity?’
He shrugs. ‘There’s nothing on the system. The family are relatively new to town. They moved from Dublin for the husband’s work. The kid is in her last year at St Killian’s Primary over the road. No immediate red flags.’
Not yet, I think. Not yet.
‘Was the place insured?’
Mulligan shakes his head.
‘Well… yes, but not by them. It was a rental. Most of these apartments are owned by Elan.’
I picture the high-walled electronics factory in the retail park across from where we’re standing. Everyone in the town knew someone who worked at Elan, the uniform had told us earlier as we climbed the stairs. It had brought a lot of employment to the town – better infrastructure and community amenities. But it had also brought a lot of outsiders to the area, he’d said, lowering his voice. Something many die-hard locals didn’t love I gathered, reading between the lines.
‘Has Audrey Jones given a statement?’
‘She’s at the hospital, but we’ve asked her to come to the station at six this evening for a more in-depth interview, once everything goes okay with the kid’s operation.’
We’ll have to speak to the kid too, I think, as the baby thumps me from the inside out. Maybe I shouldn’t have deliberately fluffed my due date to the station’s HR. Maybe I should be feet up on the couch, eating Pringles and shortlisting baby names like other mothers-to-be.
‘Any other witnesses?’
He shakes his head slowly.
‘We’re gathering them currently. Garda Press have issued a statement appealing for information. So far, nothing useful. It made the one o’clock news so hopefully we’ll have more of a picture in the coming hours. CCTV in the area is being called in as we speak. I’m sure those vultures will uncover something too.’ He jerks his head towards the ever-increasing huddle of reporters gathering in the car park.
I watch Clarke below us, striding across the tarmac past the fire trucks, all business. He seems to say something to the officer supervising the press scrum. He’s looking for information about the neighbour, like I told him. As the Garda points towards another block, the group of journos shout something to Clarke, and he turns and has a conversation with them, his willowy frame bent slightly towards one particular journalist. I sigh, resisting the urge to shout down at him to never talk to the press. He knows this. I feel the agitation build. What the hell is he playing at? But when I squint, I see that Clarke isn’t speaking, he’s listening to something the long-haired female journalist is saying and writing it carefully down. His brown head bobs as he nods along encouragingly. Then, after a few moments, he turns and disappears back into the chaos of the emergency services.
Mulligan and I step back inside the apartment, pulling on fresh gloves from a box just inside the door. The air turns heavier once more and I try not to inhale the sharp sour petrol smell. I pause for a moment to absorb my surroundings. Despite the smashed photo frames on the ground and partly charred interior, it seems like a typical family home set-up. There’s an exercise bike tucked up to one side of the living room, an office area with an old desktop computer in the other. I pick up a few papers scattered on the desk – electricity bills, school notices, a few supermarket leaflets advertising this week’s grocery offers. The bedrooms I walk through don’t jar either; Harry Styles poster-strewn walls in the little girl’s room, books by the bed next to the locker in the other, an electric toothbrush left casually on the side of the sink, Nike trainers kicked under a small white bench I recognise from IKEA that I’d considered getting myself. Why would someone deliberately start a fire here?
Why would someone want to harm this family?
I have to find everything about who the Jones family were, what they had, what they did, who they socialised with, what their friends or work colleagues said about them. It’s always a very long and drawn-out process of elimination, but I just need something that will lead us towards the first stepping stone that I need to figure out what happened here.
At the front door, Mulligan and I remove our protective suits. Mine crumples to the floor and I kick it off, stepping on the material of one side to free the other foot, unwilling to bend low again. I do the same with my shoe covers.
‘There’s something else you should probably know,’ Mulligan tells me as he shimmies one arm out of his suit awkwardly. I resist the urge to help him struggle out of it. I doubt he’d thank me for highlighting his difficulties. Men are like that sometimes.
He lowers his voice. The arm pulls free with a jerking motion.
‘It might be nothing,’ he adds, as if debating whether or not to tell me something. ‘But a few years back, the same cop, Garda Gerald Barrows, was involved in something… similar.’
I glance at him sharply from the other side of the hallway, my hackles immediately raised. This is how it always starts: a missing piece that might just fit.
‘What do you mean similar?’ I say, and I notice that beneath his protective gear, Mulligan’s shirt is immaculate, unrumpled despite the urgency of today’s case. He fusses with straightening his jacket shoulders.
‘Six years ago, Gerald Barrows was first on the scene of another house fire nearby – one down by the lake. It was the home of a family called the Wills. The mother, Nancy Wills, was badly injured in the… eh… incident, but it’s been the source of some conspiracy theories for the last few years.’
‘What do you mean conspiracy theories? What happened?’
‘The mother Nancy Wills – she lost her baby in that fire,’ he answers. ‘But for some reason, she’s always claimed her son wasn’t in the cot when she ran back into the burning house to grab him.’ Mulligan looks distraught as he explains. Such big tragedies in such small places can traumatise entire communities, and I’ve seen that haunted look in the eyes of people I know. I know it far too well. But the idea of a mother running back into a burning building to find no trace of her child terrifies even those of us who’ve been around the horrible things block a few too many times. I tuck my arm across my bump protectively, trying to shake some of that horror away.
‘Jesus Christ. Was it arson?’
‘Actually, that fire was ruled accidental. It’s believed the baby perished in the incident.’
‘Believed?’
‘His remains were never found.’
He hesitates. Out of respect perhaps? But I get the sense he’s trying to keep his tone neutral.
‘Nancy’s five-year-old son, her other child, escaped unharmed,’ Mulligan continues. ‘But the baby…’ He gazes past me into the distance, obviously upset by the recollection.
‘The thing is, Barrows was a good friend of the Wills family…’
To me, it seems that linking this Barrows cop to both fires was a huge leap. But maybe there is something I’m missing.
‘Barrows was presumably the local Garda, so wouldn’t it have been perfectly reasonable that he’d be the one first on the scene back then?’ I ask, studying his face.
Mulligan shrugs.
‘That was the thinking for a long time – that the mother was grief-stricken and prone to denial, but earlier this week something else happened that now casts doubt on everything we knew about that fire. There are too many coincidences and they all involved Barrows.’
The hallway is growing busier as officers gather in the doorway of the apartment. I shift on my feet, trying to ignore the urge to use the bathroom.
Clarke is back. He strides towards us, his fingers busy on the screen of his phone. When he looks at me, it’s clear there’s something he wants to tell me, it’s written all over his face, but I don’t want Mulligan to lose his stride either. I picture the blackened skeleton of a roof behind trees Clarke and I had noticed as we drove close to Lake Lagan on our way here and wonder if that’s the house Mulligan is talking about. If so, it isn’t far from where Aunt Roe lives. I shiver, despite the uncomfortable warmth of the hallway.
Mulligan closes his folder, but he still seems distracted.
‘I’ll never forget that fire,’ he says, a haunted look on his face. He lets his words hang in the air a minute, not needing to emphasise the trauma of what he’s remembering. But it’s obvious that he’s back there. Reliving it. I’ve many questions for him because I don’t believe in coincidences either.
‘It was the week before Christmas,’ he says quietly, and in the light of the hallway, his face takes on new shadows. He looks greyer somehow, more haggard. ‘Six years ago… the night that poor baby died.’