‘No, of course not. He came once or twice a week to fix things, that was all.’
‘Do you have an address for him?’
Holden shook his head. ‘As I mentioned before, this was not done with official sanction.’
‘And there was no chance that the nuns had invited him over for dinner? Maybe felt sorry for him, one of their
lost sheep
?’
Holden looked at Carrigan as if he’d just enquired whether the convent employed a stripper. ‘No, of course not. The feast of St John was a holy and onerous occasion. There certainly wouldn’t have been any guests. That’s ridiculous.’
‘Ridiculous,’ Carrigan repeated, writing the caretaker’s name down in his notebook and, next to it, the number ‘11’ and a question mark. The pathologist at the scene had, on cursory examination, determined that the bodies were probably all female, but Holden had described Hubbard as wiry and small – could the pathologist have been mistaken in his initial assumption? Carrigan gripped the pen a little tighter, feeling a flutter-surge of adrenalin at the thought that they’d either identified the eleventh victim or found a possible suspect.
‘I’m nearly finished,’ he continued. ‘Sorry to have taken up so much of your time. Just wanted to clear something up – your diocese has overall authority over the convent, is that correct?’
Holden smiled. ‘I wouldn’t call it authority, no.’
‘But your office was in charge?’ Carrigan persisted.
‘How much do you know about ecclesiastical governance?’
Carrigan was about to say not much at all when Geneva interrupted. ‘I know that the diocese is responsible for all religious orders within its boundaries and acts as a kind of governing body should conflicts arise.’
Holden studied Geneva carefully before he answered. ‘Yes, quite right,’ he said. ‘Though that does make us sound like some kind of local council. Convents differ from parish churches in that they’re far more autonomous, as you’d expect, so we don’t often have day-to-day dealings with them. Generally, we only deal with problems that arise, otherwise they pretty much run themselves.’
‘And . . . did problems arise?’ Geneva asked.
Holden met her gaze and said, ‘No, no problems at all.’
‘No problems at all? No threats or complaints? You’re sure about that?’
‘Of course I am. Everything concerning the bishop goes through me first.’
Geneva looked puzzled as she took out a thick green file from her bag. ‘Isn’t it true that there was a serious dispute between the convent and the diocese?’
Holden stared at the ring on his finger, his tongue flicking briefly across his lips. ‘I wouldn’t call it serious, no. Nothing more than a minor disagreement.’
‘Really?’ Geneva flicked through her papers, dropping several on the floor. As she got to her knees to pick them up, Carrigan could see Holden’s lips twitching with impatience. She finally sat back down and pulled out a single photocopied sheet from a three-month-old newspaper. ‘If it wasn’t serious then why would the bishop issue a writ of complaint to the order’s headquarters in Rome?’
Holden almost managed to hide his surprise, but not quite. He shook his head as if annoyed at having to explain something very simple to someone for the fourth time. ‘These are arcane matters of theology, Detective Sergeant Miller, I’m not sure you would appreciate the subtleties.’
‘You’re quite right,’ Geneva agreed. ‘I don’t really understand much of this, which is why I looked it up earlier and, according to the
Catholic Encyclopaedia
, such a writ of complaint is only issued in matters . . .’ She glanced down and paused as if reading the next sentence from her print-out but Carrigan could tell she knew it off by heart. ‘Matters of urgent or extreme deviation from the Creed.’
‘You seem very well informed.’
‘It’s my job,’ she replied, bristling against the smooth purr of his voice. ‘So, humour me a moment – if, for instance, the nuns believed in apocalyptic imminence, in the end of the world, then that would be a reason for the bishop to issue such a writ?’ Geneva stopped, noting the crinkle in Holden’s brow, the way his eyes had narrowed slightly.
‘You believe the nuns killed themselves because they thought the end of the world was coming?’ Holden laughed. ‘Detective Sergeant, please, these nuns dedicated their lives to helping others. This wasn’t some misguided cult, this was a long established and rule-bound order.’ He rose from his chair and leaned across the table. ‘I advise you to tread carefully here. You can’t start bandying about the first thing that comes to mind, starting all sorts of rumours. This was a much loved and well-supported convent.’
‘Is that a warning?’ Carrigan asked, impressed by how Geneva had managed to rattle Holden.
‘Merely a statement of fact,’ Holden said.
Carrigan nodded blankly and wrote something down in his notebook. ‘Talking of facts, Mr Holden, would it surprise you to know that there
was
someone else in the convent yesterday evening? An eleventh victim? After all, according to your statement, that would be impossible.’
For the first time since they’d got there, Holden’s expression slipped, and Carrigan caught a flicker of panic and something else beneath the well-heeled charm.
‘Eleven bodies?’ Holden repeated to himself. ‘You must be mistaken. That . . . that simply can’t be.’
‘Merely a statement of fact,’ Carrigan replied.
8
The fire investigation officer was perched on the bumper of his truck, smoking a cigarette and reading a book. His helmet lay next to him and snow covered his blond curls and lined the curves of his droopy moustache.
Carrigan made his way through the slush, feeling his socks turning wet and cold, and introduced himself. The fire investigator nodded once and finished the sentence he was reading. He put down the book and Carrigan saw it depicted the blackened bodies of burn victims, displayed in glossy colour and intimate close-up, scrawled notes and bright yellow Post-Its covering the page.
‘Kirk,’ the investigator introduced himself, not specifying whether this was his first name or last. He was at least four inches taller than Carrigan and twice as wide, but he carried his size lightly, moving with a deft assurance as he offered Jack a cigarette.
‘Year and a half,’ Carrigan said, waving away the pack.
‘Me too,’ Kirk replied. He lit his cigarette and laughed, blowing smoke out into the night.
The snow kept falling, thicker and thicker clumps, soundlessly lighting on their hair and clothes, blanketing the street around them.
‘You finished in there?’
Kirk stubbed out his cigarette and nodded. ‘You want to grab a drink and I’ll talk you through it?’
Carrigan smiled and pulled two paper espresso cups out of the take-out bag he was carrying. ‘I want you to show me.’
Kirk looked Carrigan up and down as if he’d initially mistaken him for someone else.
‘It’s not really safe,’ he finally said.
‘Neither is smoking‚’ Carrigan replied with a smile, and led the way.
Now that the fire was out, the real extent of the damage could be seen. The blackened shell of the building smouldered and sizzled darkly in the morning air, a hissing skull with empty windowframes and gaping doorways made all the more sinister by the normality of the houses on either side.
Kirk handed Carrigan a fire jacket and hard hat as they crossed the front garden. Some of the trees had caught fire and stood blackened and skeletal, smoke rising from their stippled branches.
The change in temperature hit Carrigan as soon as he stepped inside the house. The air was thicker, dusty and sour, and he began to sweat under the too-tight hat and clumpy jacket as he followed Kirk through the hallway and up the stairs. They walked across the landing, avoiding the places where the floor had collapsed to reveal black holes yawning like pulled teeth, and entered the dining room.
The parquet flooring had turned black, blistering like sunburnt skin. The painted canvases had melted from their copper frames leaving new designs, tongues of smoke and flame, a narrative of blister and peel. Two wheelchairs sat in the corner of the room, arabesques of steam rising like probing fingers from their seats. Random mounds of ash and metal lay scattered across the floor. A large crucifix hung above the fireplace, the figure still smoking and blackened beyond recognition.
Carrigan crossed over to the centre of the room and peered down at a set of dark smudges spotting the floor. ‘That what I think it is?’
Kirk squatted on his haunches and nodded. He was biting the ends of his moustache between his teeth, his jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed. ‘The SOCOs took the bodies away this morning but yes, that’s what you’re looking at. Human tissue burns much more fiercely than wood. That’s where they died.’ Something cracked behind them and Kirk looked back uneasily. ‘We shouldn’t stay here long. The kitchen floor collapsed overnight and this one’s next.’
Carrigan ignored him, bending down and examining the black patches. Each expertly traced the shape of the body that had left it, as if their very shadows had been trapped at the moment of death. He got up and began to count. He did this twice and each time he got ten. Ten black smears, ten bodies burnt down to ash and memory.
‘Doesn’t it seem strange to you that they’re so neatly positioned around the table?’ Carrigan took two steps back and inspected the mound of ashes which lay at the centre of the room. ‘That’s the dining table, right? And here,’ he pointed to one of the dark smudges, ‘and here and here and here. The nuns are sitting around the table when the smoke creeps through the door. Okay, that makes sense. But why are they all in the same position when they die?’ Carrigan shook his head and scanned the room. ‘You’d expect that as soon as they smelled the smoke they’d start to panic and try to find a way out. We should be seeing bodies scattered in a random pattern, or at least closer to exits and windows, but all we have here is ten dead nuns who seem to have quietly sat at the dinner table as the fire entered the room and who continued sitting at their places until the fire consumed them.’
‘Perhaps they couldn’t move because they were tied up,’ Kirk said quietly.
Carrigan looked down at the zigzag canyon cracks in the floor. ‘Could you tell from the lock whether the door was fastened from the outside or inside?’
Kirk shook his head. ‘No. Only that it was locked. But we didn’t find any key.’
Carrigan thought about this as they stood among the ash and dust. ‘If the door was locked from the outside, we’d still be seeing a scatter pattern, right? People still panic even if they know there’s no way out. Which suggests that maybe the door was locked from the inside.’
‘Why on earth would they want to do that?’
Carrigan shrugged. He thought back to what Geneva had said earlier. Maybe he needed to let her follow her instincts. She’d been right before, and it reminded him of being young and eager and new to murder work and how the years of practice and experience had dulled and withered his hunch-sense. He stared at the black smears and thought about the nuns’ last remaining moments. The agony and fear and panic as one by one they succumbed. What prayers, what regrets and childhood memories flashed before their eyes in those final fleeting seconds?
He crossed over towards an alcove and checked the surrounding area but there was nothing of interest there. He looked up at the high inaccessible stained-glass window, the stately procession of pain and suffering enacted on the way to Golgotha, then turned his attention to the wall below, using the torch to run light up and down its coffered surface. The wall was empanelled with square insets made from a darker wood. The wood had blackened and blistered and peeled, the years of dust and varnish and smeary touch erased in flame. There was no way anyone could have gained purchase and climbed it to get to the window. Would the nuns have known that?
A sudden thought flashed through his head and he crossed the room and squatted in front of the remains of the table. He could see the dulled edges of cutlery poking through the debris, teapots and trays, broken glass and cracked porcelain, a fork missing its tines and a swan-shaped salt shaker, its wings tarnished black. But he wasn’t interested in these. It was the small black objects peppering the ash that he now examined. Carrigan bent down and picked one of them up and rolled it between his fingers. It was still warm and when he tilted it towards the light he could see the pinprick tunnel threading through it. He put it back down and selected another but he already knew what he was looking at. When he was finished he got up, his knees cracking painfully, and pointed to the round black stones dotting the floor. ‘Their rosary beads were kept under their habits, on the waist. We shouldn’t be seeing them all over the place like this unless they had them out when the fire reached them.’ Carrigan looked down. ‘And that doesn’t make sense . . . why would they all have their rosary beads out when they were sitting down to dinner?’
‘Downstairs is where things start to get interesting,’ Kirk explained as they exited the dining room and made their way across the landing. Carrigan couldn’t help thinking there was something about the house, beyond the damage wrought by the blaze, which made it seem oppressive, as if gravity had more purchase here, a fleeting sense of agony and confinement which made him eager and impatient to get back out on the street.
As they passed the door which led down to the basement, Carrigan stopped. He looked down at the blackened set of steps disappearing into darkness.
‘We can’t go down there until tomorrow at the earliest,’ Kirk said. ‘You wouldn’t last two minutes in there. If the stairs don’t get you, the fumes will.’
Snow was falling in the chapel. The outer wall had collapsed and wind-blown flurries danced and scurried in front of them. Steam was still curling from the walls, white puffy coils which dissipated in the frigid air. Dotted around the room were niches and hidden cloisters, screened-off areas and the row of confession booths, making the room seem smaller than it actually was. At the far end, where the space opened up into a large hexagonal bay, stood the altar on a raised stone platform, a darkened crucifix smoking behind it. Carrigan stood silently taking in the scene, the language of niches and candle stands, the hewn syntax of rood screens and mystical vision and seared eyes.
He walked over to the confession booths and searched the skeleton remains of the two on either side, then the one where the body was discovered. Most of the wood had burned leaving only the metal doors, the spiny supports and screens, yet, despite all this, they still looked eerie and magnificent. He stepped inside the booth, the smell heavy and rich in his nostrils, imagining the people who’d sat here and poured out the worst moments of their lives into the blank and faceless screen.
Pulling his torch out, he aimed the beam at the back of the door and took an involuntary swallow of air as he saw the marks on it. He splashed the light left and right and saw that they were everywhere, up and down and across the surface of the door. He snapped on his gloves and used the back of his hand to wipe away the top layer of soot. The marks were more like scratches, you could see that now, small crescent-shaped grooves in the metal, overlapped, random and furious.
‘She was alive when the fire got to her. She was trying to get out,’ he said.
Kirk craned his neck and saw the frenzied palimpsest of scratches that the eleventh victim had made. He took a deep breath and shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. This close to the seat of fire the flames would have got to her before the smoke could knock her out. Those scratches may have been involuntary.’
‘Involuntary?’
‘As she burned, her muscles would have contracted and popped and she’d have flailed and lashed out. I’m afraid it would have been an extremely painful few minutes.’
‘Jesus,’ Carrigan said, stepping out of the booth, trying to rein in the dread images conjured by the fire investigator. He scanned the room, the dark ceiling, the mottled floor. ‘Where did the fire start?’
Kirk pointed to a large bayed niche at the opposite end of the room and they slowly crossed the nave, weaving through the scattered debris and mulch until Carrigan stopped and wrinkled his nose.
‘What’s that smell?’ He could feel it in his nostrils, sour and caustic, an underlying stench behind the stink of the fire.
‘You noticed it too?’ Kirk came up beside him. ‘We’re not quite sure what it is.’ He pointed down at the floor, to an area that was darker than the rest. ‘From the amount of ash it looks like there was a large item of furniture here, maybe a chest of drawers or bureau. I took a sample and sent it off to the lab. We’ll know soon enough.’
They crossed the room and the fire investigator gestured towards the wide semicircular niche in the west wall, a single blackened statue at its centre. ‘That’s your seat of fire.’
Carrigan looked at the dark patchwork of marks behind the icon then craned his neck and saw the burnt ceiling beams and partially collapsed floor of the room above. Black arrows of smoke snaked up the walls in twisting spirals as if they too had tried to escape the flames.
Kirk aimed his flashlight at a dense hatchwork of soot and grime to the left of the statue. ‘See how the damage is worse here than anywhere else?’
Carrigan found it hard to tell one scorch mark from another, the seemingly random mosaic of burn shadows and ash smears vaguely sinister, a perpetual flicker at the periphery of his vision, but for Kirk the chaos of smudge and burn was like an open book, one whose language he could easily decipher.
‘What we have here is your classic V pattern, telling us this is where the initial temperature was the highest. That was a table,’ Kirk pointed to the two-inch deposit of ash spread evenly across the floor, grey and flecked with small shiny particles. Next to it stood a twisted frame of hissing metal. It was rectangular in design and composed of three horizontal sections with gothic tines of blackened metal rising from its cross-bars like accusatory fingers. ‘No idea what that is. Looks like one of those medieval torture devices,’ Kirk said quietly, and he was unprepared for Carrigan’s throaty laugh.
‘It’s a pricket stand,’ Carrigan said. ‘You find them in most Catholic churches. They’re usually dedicated to a saint, that’s what the statue is. People light a candle, put some money in the collection box and say a prayer.’
‘Didn’t help them much,’ Kirk replied. ‘All these bloody candles.’ He shook his head and pointed up to a set of metal rods fixed to the wall, small cylinders with empty brass rings hanging loosely from them. ‘Drapes or curtains,’ Kirk explained. ‘Textbook fire hazard. A candle must have fallen over and ignited them. The fire would have then spread up and across. Once it hit the drapes there’d be no stopping it.’
Carrigan studied the niche then made a sketch in his notebook of the relative positions of pricket stand, table, drapes and saint. He took out his phone and snapped a few shots. ‘And you’re absolutely certain this is where the fire started?’
Kirk smiled broadly. ‘It’s physics and geometry, not a matter of opinion.’
‘Any evidence of accelerants?’
Kirk shook his head. ‘Not that I can see. No pool marks, no residual smell – the candles, the drapes, the painting – you wouldn’t need anything else,’ he said, biting the ends of his moustache again.
Carrigan nodded and stared at the blackened statue. He didn’t recognise the saint. The figure was tall and thin and seemed unruffled by its present condition, an enigmatic smile planted on carved grey lips. He took a couple more photos of the statue’s face and turned around, studying the layout of the room, then took several steps back and looked again at the pricket stand, and from this vantage there was something different about it, a subtlety of shade and angle revealed by the slanted slabs of spilled light.