The Silent Girls Read online

  Edie more or less got blown out of the hatch as the fire found the air gap and exploded into it – to Sophie it looked as though Edie had been forcibly expelled from a dragon’s mouth on a tongue of raw, pure flame. Edie’s head bounced off the bannister with a sickening crack as she fell and she hit the floor with all the grace of a sack of flour.

  Sophie tried to rouse her, but it was impossible, her own weakened limbs felt useless and the most she managed was to drag Edie’s limp form to the top of the stairs. She screamed for help, but her voice was still shot both with thirst and the ever increasing dryness from the heat and smoke. In blind panic she stumbled down the stairs like a clown, feeling as though at any minute she would get tangled in her own limbs and go head first, destroying any chance of her own survival and ruling out any rescue for Edie. Everything seemed to have slowed to nothing, every movement feeling as though it was taking place at the same speed as thick black treacle dropping from a spoon – she felt as though she was trying to wade through an ocean of it as she moved through the house.

  Reaching the back door was like running marathon wearing diving boots, but she made it and once there wrenched it open, throwing herself into the small garden and launching herself out of the gate. Straight into a fireman who was focused on the fire and never saw her coming. A terrified and gibbering Sophie knocked him off his feet and they both went down like bowling pins.

  As he fought his way to his feet, trying to make sense of Sophie’s garbled, panicked pleas she saw him look up just as the windows on the upper floor of the house where she had left Edie exploded outwards, sending shards of glass knifing through the air in a lethal rain. Instinct made the fireman shy away and curve his body around the Sophie, protecting them both from the flying debris. When it was over, he let her go, and she slipped from his grasp in dead faint.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  DC Alice Hale slipped under the crime scene tape and picked her way through the debris of wet, blackened rubble – some of it still steaming – and approached the fire investigator, holding out her warrant card to tell him that she was there on official business. It had taken seven hours to finally get the fire under control and by the looks of it the flames had wiped out the best part of four houses and had seriously damaged another two, one of which lay opposite. ‘What happened there?’ she asked, curious as to how it had been the only one damaged.

  ‘When the windows blew out of this one some burning debris must have gone into the garden – from what we can tell it was chock full of rubbish which acted as fuel. It’s not as bad as it looks, most of the inside is still intact, but the kitchen has gone and it isn’t pleasant in there.’

  Alice nodded. ‘Any casualties?’

  The investigator looked pensive, they always did when faced with the question of who they hadn’t saved. ‘We pulled out three bodies. Two from that building,’ he pointed to one of the houses in the ravaged row, ‘and one from the kitchen of that one. Looks like the poor sod hid in a cupboard.’ He shook his head in an attitude of sorrow. ‘There were a couple of other minors, they were shipped off to St Mary’s’

  ‘So what are we looking at, accident or deliberate?’

  ‘I’m ninety-nine percent sure this is arson, that house was the first to go and by the looks of it an accelerant was used, I’m saying petrol as we found a partially burned can in the garden. You know the deal, I can’t give you any certainties until we make our report.’

  Alice nodded ‘Has anyone come forward offering any information on who might have started it?’

  The investigator snorted ‘This is Coronation Square love, it’s the Winfield breeding ground for pyromaniacs and idiots, what do you think?’

  Alice shrugged ‘Have to ask.’

  The investigator shrugged. ‘I suppose you do. Right, I’m going to need your guys to make sure the scene is kept clear, while my guys rake through this mess and we piece together what happened. If you can give me names of owners, and any plans showing alterations to the buildings, what they were used for et cetera, you know the deal.’

  Alice nodded, she did indeed know the deal. Somewhere in amongst all the paperwork, deeds, planning permissions, listings, rental agreements and other paraphernalia would be a clue as to who might want a fire set and why. Equally, someone in the square would have something to say, or would have a bit of footage on their phone, or would have taken a photo of the blaze. It wasn’t uncommon for arsonists to want to witness their handiwork. The three victims bothered her, a brief conversation with the lead officer who had attended the fire had established that they had made every effort to evacuate the surrounding houses – so three bodies was a worry, but also a puzzle as none of them had been in the house where the fire had started. It looked like her next port of call would be the hospital, to talk to the casualties and see what they might know.

  She thanked the fire officer and made her way back towards the cordon where a man was arguing with one of the uniformed officers who was standing sentinel there. He seemed to be waving a bag and pointing towards the carnage of the houses. Her colleague had his hand up and seemed to be struggling to calm the man down. The warrant card held aloft again she strolled over to them. ‘What seems to be the problem?’

  Her colleague turned and gave her the ‘there’s always one’ look. ‘This gentlemen believes that a friend of his might have been caught in the fire, apparently he found her bag in that dustbin over there, and has put two and two together and determined that she must have been in one of the houses.’

  Alice looked at the bag, a scruffy, worn and dirty object, then followed her colleague’s pointing finger towards an overturned wheelie bin that lay beyond the cordon. It had disgorged its contents into the street and appeared to have been hastily shoved out of the way during the previous night’s activities. ‘What makes you think your friend was in one of the houses, sir?’

  ‘Because she disappeared unexpectedly, we thought she’d just left but then I saw someone dump her bag yesterday, only I didn’t realise what it was at the time, it was only when I saw it this morning that I recognised it. Her name is Sophie, Sophie Hedley.’

  Alice sighed. ‘It’s just a bag sir, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s pretty tatty, maybe she just threw it away?’

  The man screwed up his face in frustration and looked as if he might be about to lose his temper. ‘That’s just it, it wasn’t her that threw it away. It was a man and he came out of that house.’ he said it through gritted teeth and pointed towards the building that had been the seat of the fire.

  Alice looked at him for a moment, he was clearly stressed. ‘What’s your name sir?’

  ‘Bastin, Matthew Bastin.’

  Alice tried to stop her eyebrows from rising in surprise, it was the second time she’d heard the name Bastin in two days. ‘And the name of the man you saw, if you know it?’

  ‘Yes, I know it. His name is Campion, Sam Campion.’

  This time Alice couldn’t supress her reaction. Since meeting Lena Campion and hearing her strange tale the day before, she had done a bit of digging and had found out a fair bit about the Campions. Sam Campion in particular. A known criminal, suspected of all sorts – extortion, protection, living off immoral earnings… the list went on. She had learned that his front was as a property developer and though he was known to have connections with some of the most dubious people in the area, he had never been successfully prosecuted. He was also off their radar, having been reported as fleeing the scene of an accident the previous afternoon. In fact his crumpled car was sitting in the pound at this very minute. Her governor had dismissed Lena Campion’s story as the insane ramblings of a demented old woman and had shown little interest in the story, but he had mentioned Matthew Bastin as a thorn in his side. Apparently he was the son of the guy they’d hanged for the murder Lena Campion claimed she had committed. He’d spent years trying to prove the state wrong and now he was standing right in front of her. Alice appraised him again, he seemed pretty respectable, decentl
y dressed, upright, a military bearing, probably good looking as a younger man – he didn’t look like your typical obsessive type. But looks could be deceptive – she hadn’t expected a sweet little old lady to confess to murder either. There were days when Alice seriously regretted not living out her childhood dream of becoming a ballet dancer, but two flat feet seemed to have dictated her career path and she was stuck with consternation instead of contusions.

  Matthew Bastin was waiting for a response, and it looked as though he wasn’t going to shift until he got one. She turned to her colleague. ‘Would you radio through and get me the names of the casualties who were admitted to St Mary’s?’ He nodded and walked away. A few moments later he came back and called Alice over, whispering in her ear so that Matt Bastin was out of earshot. She was looking at Matt the whole time, seeing a worried man. ‘Mr Bastin, your friend is in the hospital.’ The look of relief on his face was a sight to see. It was hardly the done thing to offer complete strangers lifts, but something about Matthew Bastin had piqued Alice’s curiosity. She wanted to know more about him and test the veracity of Lena Campion’s story – though her boss had dismissed it out of hand, Alice had not.

  ‘I’m going there myself if you’d like a lift.’

  ***

  Sophie was sore, bruised, battered, frantic and very, very angry. If it hadn’t been for the massive hit of oramorph she’d been given she might have felt more in touch with the anger and done something about it, as it stood she was aware of the rage, but somehow detached from it. Pondering it, she felt as if all her feelings had been contained in a bubble and were floating in front of her. Real, almost tangible… but just out of reach. She felt trapped, soporific and useless. And no one wanted to know about Edie, or how she’d ended up in a burning house. No one. In fact all they seemed to want to do was give her something to ‘help with the pain and calm you down’.

  She’d asked if she could discharge herself, but had been told by a sweet nurse with a bright smile that the doctor would be along shortly. That had been two hours ago. Hospital was mañana land. She might have just got up and walked out if she had any idea how she could remove the thing they’d stuck in the back of her hand, or if she had known where she could find something to wear that didn’t flash her bare arse at every move. Besides, she hurt – everything hurt and despite the woozy distraction caused by the opiates, she was even aware that every hair on her head was hurting. With the drugs on board it was kind of fascinating to notice, feel it but not care. How could you be exponentially angry, yet not care? Maybe this was how the prozzies felt when they got their fixes – aware of how shit things were, but completely detached from it. Weird.

  She was still talking like a twat, they’d reset her nose but she still sounded like she had the worst head cold in the history of mankind. And she looked like a grizzled rugby player, or as if she’d done ten rounds with Lennox Lewis, or that Welsh guy, what was his name? Anyway, she was pissed off, no, livid that no one would tell her where Edie was. They wouldn’t even tell her if Edie had got out – despite her saying it was OK, she could take it, if it was bad news, they could tell her. It seemed like no one had a bloody clue what she was on about. And man, was it boring, being in hospital was less fun than watching paint dry.

  The need to pee was becoming intense, but hooked up as she was she couldn’t get out of bed, and even if she could there was the issue of the gaping gown. Having already pushed the call button twice she decided in her addled state to take matters into her own hands. Shuffling out of her bed she took off the blanket and draped it around her shoulders, then wheeled her drip stand into the nearest toilet. The relief was immense, combined with the drugs it made her feel so euphoric when she emerged that she almost missed it. Recognition hovered on the brink of her consciousness, niggling, making her reactions tingle, yet she couldn’t quite place what was making it happen. Something about the new patient they had just wheeled into the side room was prodding at her. Maybe she would take a look when the nurses had gone, when they stopped their faffing and fussing. Was there some clinical reasoning behind all that pillow plumping? Sophie didn’t know, but she did know that she wanted to get into that room and find out who was in the bed.

  ***

  Matt was still clutching the filthy backpack, holding on to it as if it was some kind of cushion against the trauma of the woman’s driving. This DC Hale drove like a maniac, flinging the car round corners and pulling out into traffic with seemingly no regard for what might be alongside her on the road. ‘Have you done a driving course or something?’ he asked, hoping that there was some reason why she was making him feel like he had diced with death through the mere action of getting into her car.

  ‘Not yet, booked on to one in a month’s time. Why?’

  ‘No reason.’ Matt said, closing his eyes because obliviousness seemed like his safest option.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘where were you when the fire started, Mr Bastin?’

  ‘Walking back from St Mary’s funnily enough. A neighbour had an accident so I went with her to the hospital and stayed until she was settled.’

  ‘I see. I take the hospital staff will be able to back that up?’

  Matt raised his eyebrows ‘I imagine so, why, am I a suspect?’

  ‘At this stage very few people aren’t Mr Bastin. So, tell me about your friend and why you think her bag ended up in that bin.’

  ‘I’ve no idea why it was thrown away, but Sophie walked out on us and it seemed unusual as she was staying with Edie and seemed quite happy. Then, when your guys turned up and took Edie for questioning, I saw the blood, then found her toothbrush and spotted Campion dumping the bag… although I didn’t know it was her bag then. But it didn’t seem to add up right, all the different things.’

  She slipped him a sidelong glance. ‘Any reason you didn’t go and investigate what he’d put in the bin at the time?’

  Matt knit his brow in confusion. ‘Well you should know, half your lot turned up at the house to turn the place over – so you could say I was a mite distracted.’

  ‘My lot? We all work for different teams and sections, Mr Bastin, I’m not privy to every crime that’s been committed. Who is Edie?’

  ‘That’s something I was going to ask you, whether she’d been arrested or held or something? I haven’t seen her since your guys took her off yesterday. Has she been charged with something?’

  She shrugged. ‘No idea, I wasn’t aware of any investigation involving that name. But if she’s committed a crime and they have good cause and evidence to charge her, then she will still be in custody, probably awaiting a hearing I should think. Anyway, we can rule her out of any involvement with the fire if, as you say, she was with “my lot”.’

  Matt was relieved, better for Edie to be holed up in a cell facing charges than caught up in the fire. He’d hardly been able to believe it when he’d glimpsed the devastation that morning. He’d have liked to have taken a closer look, but the whole of the back lane had been cordoned off. Spotting Sophie’s bag had been a fluke. To his shame he hadn’t really thought much about her until he’d found the bag, she had slipped from his mind as easily as she slipped from everyone else’s, just a homeless girl doing what homeless people did – moving on. The realisation that she had been caught up in the fire made him feel like crap.

  Alice Hale interrupted his thoughts with a very salient question. ‘You mentioned finding blood, what did you mean and where did you find it?’

  ‘Just some spots, like someone had a nosebleed or something, only no one had. It was in the house, Edie’s house, Number 17.’

  He was sure that he saw Alice’s hands tighten on the wheel as he said it, as if his words were significant in some way. She didn’t speak, just seemed to hurl the car into the hospital car park whilst ignoring the ten-mile-an-hour limit. He wondered if she’d always wanted to be a detective and whether she had honed her ambition on Starsky and Hutch, or maybe even The Sweeney. Looking at her youthful face he concluded that s
he probably wasn’t old enough to know those shows, but that there must be some modern equivalent that had got her juices flowing. No one drove like that without some degree of bad influence.

  Finally released from the dodgem car from hell with its demon driver he breathed a sigh of relief. He’d felt less threatened on patrol in the foothills of Afghanistan than he had in that car. Alice Hale turned to him, a slight frown on her face. ‘OK Mr Bastin, let’s go and find your friend, but I’m going to need to chat to her first.’

  They found Sophie loitering in the corridor, hanging onto her drip stand and looking like a refugee from a bar fight with her pulped face and grazed hands. Matt called out to her but she barely glanced at him, her attention was entirely focused on one of the side rooms. ‘Sophie, it’s me. Matt.’

  She looked as if she was waking up from a dream as she turned to them, her eyes seemed glazed and she looked like she was measuring nearly a ten on the Richter scale of shock. Matt caught her just before she hit the floor.

  The staff were quite satisfied that Sophie was suffering from shock as a result of her ordeal, and that she would make a full recovery if she just stayed in bed and didn’t go wandering about the place. They insisted on giving her oxygen through a mask that she had to hold near her face, a fact that seriously hampered Alice Hale’s attempts to ask her questions. Matt didn’t need a doctor to tell him that Sophie was so out of her face on painkillers that coherent communication was going to be a short-term impossibility. In the end he turned to Alice, ‘Look, she’s absolutely out of it. I’ll stay with her. If she comes to and I can get any sense out of her, I’ll call you.’

  Alice Hale frowned at him as if he might be trying to pull a fast one, or push a compromise a step too far, but even she had to see that she was on a hiding to nothing with the girl. Eventually she fished in her pocket and gave him a card with her details printed on it. ‘OK, but the minute she can string a sensible sentence together, I want to know.’