Page 10

10

Sunday lunchtime

Charlie saw Eddy’s mouth open in shock and had to make an effort to stop his own doing the same.

“Quite,” Ravensbourne said. “Stick the kettle on, Eddy. Tea, two sugars, and pass me the doughnuts.” She sounded almost human. Possibly because she’d just had a smoke.

Eddy stood up, as if in a daze, and walked over to the kitchen, fumbling to get the kettle under the tap, and then to open the fridge for milk. Ravensbourne tore the bag to extract the final doughnut, which she ate in about three bites. Charlie passed her the roll of kitchen paper before she could wipe her sugary fingers on her trousers. The usual worn-out black polyester trousers, he noted, which must be boiling in this weather. But he couldn’t imagine Ravensbourne wearing anything else. She gave him a wry smile, and he wondered if she knew what he was thinking. Probably. His boss might look like a bag lady, but she was a sharp as a scalpel blade.

“Who showed us round the empty shop this morning?” Charlie asked. “He had ID, I saw it, and he seemed to know what he was talking about when it came to how the fire started.”

Ravensbourne shrugged. “At this stage, your guess is as good as mine, Could be the arsonist, could be Unwin’s killer, could be our graffiti artist. All I know is his name isn’t Jeff Britton, it’s Ivan Smith. Thanks.” She took the cup of tea from Eddy and blew on it to cool it down. Eddy put a coffee in front of Charlie and another on the floor by his chair.

Just then the outside door banged again, and a familiar figure entered the room.

“I understand you need my help,” PC Mags Jellicoe said. She looked relaxed and tanned in a summer dress. Her hair had lightened in the sun.

“You’re on holiday,” Charlie said.

“We got back from France yesterday. I was only going to be unpacking, doing laundry and mowing the lawn.” She smiled. “I have a perfectly capable husband who can do all that stuff, probably better than me, so here I am. Tell me what’s been going on. Isn’t Patsy here?”

Eddy looked at Charlie. Charlie wished this was a job he could pass upwards, but it wasn’t. He cleared his throat.

“What?” Mags said.

“So, last night there was a fire in the old pizza and kebab place, and this morning when we went to look at the damage, we found a dead body. It was Unwin, Patsy’s boyfriend. It looks like someone attacked him with a hammer.”

The colour drained from Mags’s face. “Our Unwin? Unwin who works at HQ with Will Wayward? Computer nerd Unwin?”

Charlie nodded. “Sorry, but yes. There’s more. The guy who showed us round the building this morning when we found Unwin? He said he was the fire investigator, only he wasn’t, and we don’t know who he was or what he was doing there.”

“Someone sprayed racist stuff all over the alley by the Town Hall,” Eddy added. “We were all there in the town centre, and none of us saw anything.”

“You missed someone setting fire to a shop? ”

“Patsy was right outside, and she didn’t see it,” Eddy said defensively.

Charlie remembered the crash and the shouts as the flames had lit up the main street. But nowhere did he have an image of anyone running away, or carrying a petrol can, or being other than happily drunk on an unexpectedly warm evening.

“You need me even more than I thought,” Mags said.

Charlie was torn between relief that the team was now more than him, Eddy, and the temporary constables, and concern for Mags, who was entitled to time off.

Ravensbourne had no such inhibitions.

“Good. We’d probably have called you in anyway. Now, let’s try and get this into some kind of order. This place is hopeless as an incident room, but it’s what we’ve got. There’s no point in running the enquiry from HQ. Charlie, get your whiteboard.”

Charlie set the battered whiteboard up on its ‘stand’ of two decrepit chairs, and found the marker pens in one of the kitchen drawers. Then he stood and waited, but this was Freya Ravensbourne. She waved her hand in a get on with it gesture.

“Three probable crimes,” Charlie said. “Arson, criminal damage, probably also a hate crime, and a suspicious death. I’d say murder, but we should wait on the post-mortem to be sure. First question. Are they connected?”

“They must be,” Eddy said. “This is a small town. If you don’t actually live here, you’ve probably never heard of it. Three separate sets of criminals doesn’t make any sense ...” He trailed off, presumably remembering that he had been the one insisting that Unwin’s murder was about sex rather than immigration. “Well,” he rowed back, “Unwin and the fire. They must be connected.”

“The fire was in a shop run by Muslims,” Mags said, “and the graffiti was racist, and so is all this talk about saving Wales from immigrants. Maybe Unwin was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it got him killed.”

“Except the fire was downstairs at the front of the shop, and Unwin’s body was found upstairs, at the back,” Charlie said. “And we know the shop was run by Muslims, but no one from out of town would know. There’s no signage left. I think the fire was set so we would find Unwin’s body.”

“It’s four crimes,” Ravensbourne said. “Or possibly. Patsy would know and would quote the statutes. This man who pretended to be a fire officer. It’s certainly obstruction.”

Charlie divided the board into four columns, headed Arson, Graffiti, Murder? and Fire Officer. There was precious little to go under any of the headings, and only wild speculation to connect the four. He sat down, feeling damp sweat bloom everywhere his skin touched another surface.

“Unwin could have been meeting Jeff Britton, or whatever his name really is, for sex, and he could be the killer …” was Eddie’s offer, though it failed to account for the graffiti … or, as Charlie pointed out, to account for meeting in an abandoned, and presumably locked, building.

“Only an idiot would come back the next morning to show the cops where the body was,” Mags said. “Unless he was worried that he’d left fingerprints and wanted an excuse for them to be there.”

“But he seemed genuine,” Charlie said. “He knew his stuff about the fire, and he didn’t disappear after we found Unwin.”

“Arsonists do that,” Eddy said. “They like everything to do with fires … know all about them …”

Round and round they went, their theories getting more outrageous with each turn, until Ravensbourne waved her hand.

“Enough.” She looked at Charlie, who stood up again beside the whiteboard. “Populate it with actual evidence,” she said.

Charlie added the few things they actually knew: the ownership of the building, the time of the fire, the time Unwin’s body was discovered by the police, all the identifying details they had for Jeff Britton, pictures of the shop, pictures of Unwin’s body, pictures of the graffiti, references to the various social media comments about immigrants coming to Llanfair.

“Suspects? Put their names up. All of them.” Ravensbourne asked, and with a sickening lurch in his belly, Charlie knew exactly the name she wanted him to write on the board. He shook his head as he spoke.

“No, boss. I don’t believe it. No. You’re wrong.”

“She was the nearest thing he had to a spouse; he would have gone to meet her without question; and she was close to the source of the fire when it started. You, yourself, said that Unwin’s sister accused her of killing him because of her jealousy over ‘his other women’. I know she’s a police officer, and a friend, but Patsy Hargreaves has to be considered as a suspect in her boyfriend’s murder.”