Downie scowled, and seemed about to lose his temper. ‘I’m just doing my job,’ he snapped.

‘So you said.’

She watched him stamp off in his scene suit, like an angry paper bag.

It wasn’t much of a moral victory, though. Fry knew how much she relied on people like Downie following procedures to the letter. If she didn’t have a watertight chain of custody when evidence was presented in court, it could undermine the whole case.

Now the scene was filling up with personnel. Scientific Support had allocated a couple of SOCOs, who’d waited for Downie to arrive from the lab at Chorley. And the two civilians she could see approaching the outer cordon looked as though they might be the insurance assessors. Great.

Fry tried to look on the bright side. This would make a good impression on her next personal development review. It was real team work.

Brian Mullen’s hands were still bandaged, and he fumbled a bit taking off the radio headphones when he saw his visitor coming. From the look on his face, Fry thought he was going to leap out of bed and make a run for it. The ward sister had said yesterday that he’d been so frightened he’d fought against being kept in hospital. But what was he frightened of? Not her, surely.

‘How are you getting on, Mr Mullen?’ she asked, pulling a chair up to the side of his bed.

‘Oh, not too bad,’ he said warily. ‘You’re the police, are you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Everyone’s been very good to me. A vicar came round. And there was a counsellor, to see if I needed help.’

Now the pinkness in his cheeks had subsided, Mullen looked very pale. He had the sort of narrow, angular face and waxy skin that she’d only ever seen in Englishmen and some Scandinavians. His voice sounded hoarse from the effects of smoke inhalation, and he reached for a glass of water standing on the bedside cabinet. He had to hold the glass carefully between the tips of his fingers because the bandages got in the way.

‘I hope the hospital have managed to keep the press away, sir,’ said Fry.

‘The press? I never even thought about them.’ Mullen looked suddenly panicked. ‘You’ve got to talk to the doctors. Tell them they have to let me go home. I need to get out of here.’

‘You’re much better here for now, sir. You’ll be able to leave when you’re fit. Meanwhile, we need to talk to you about what happened at your house.’

‘I’ve already given a statement, you know.’

‘An initial statement, yes. But that was only the start of our enquiries. There are a lot more questions to be asked.’

Mullen lay back on his pillows and sighed. ‘Oh God, I suppose it’s necessary.’

‘If we’re going to find out what happened, it is.’

‘Tell me something, though – is Luanne all right?’

‘Your daughter, sir?’

‘Yes. Is she safe?’

‘She’s with your in-laws. There’s no need to worry about her. Why shouldn’t she be safe?’

‘I don’t know. She’s only eighteen months old.’

‘A family liaison officer has been assigned. There’ll be support from Social Services, too, if it’s needed.’

‘Right.’

Fry watched his bandaged hands twitching, his eyes roving anxiously around the room. She was puzzled by his reactions. But Brian Mullen was a victim right now, a bereaved relative. Protocol called for politeness and consideration. Perhaps she ought to have brought him some grapes.

‘Your daughter wasn’t in the house at the time of the fire, was she?’

‘No. Henry and Moira had been looking after her for a few days, to give us a bit of respite. Luanne wasn’t sleeping, you see. She was having us out of bed every couple of hours.’

‘I don’t have children myself, but isn’t eighteen months quite old to be still having that problem?’

‘It varies.’

‘Did your wife take anything to help her sleep, Mr Mullen?’

‘Well, she couldn’t when Luanne was in the house, obviously.’

‘But on Sunday?’

‘Yes, I think she might have done. A couple of pills, maybe.’

‘Any idea what she took?’

He shook his head, and Fry decided to leave it for a while. She could easily get the information from Lindsay’s GP – or even from her bedside drawer.

‘As for you, I believe you’d been out for the evening?’

‘I won’t ever be able to forgive myself for that. I should have been there with my family. I could have saved them, couldn’t I?’

‘Probably not, Mr Mullen. You could have ended up a fatality yourself.’

‘I’ve been lying here thinking it would have been better if I had died with them. To have survived seems … well, it seems like a punishment somehow.’

Fry nodded cautiously. Statements like this always sounded false to her. She couldn’t help thinking that Brian Mullen had been rehearsing the phrases in his head for maximum effect. But her instinct was sometimes wrong – there were people who had difficulty expressing the most genuine emotions in a convincing way. On the other hand, Mullen had also tried to divert her from her line of questioning.

‘Who were you out with that night, sir?’

‘Just some mates.’

‘Anyone in particular?’

‘Oh, my mate from work, Jed – Jed Skinner.’

‘And you arrived home at about one thirty a.m. Is that right?’

‘Yes, I got the taxi driver to drop me off at the corner of Darwin Street. I’d already paid him off before I noticed anything wrong, and I didn’t realize what was happening at first. I saw the flashing lights from the fire engines. There weren’t really any flames then, you know. Just a lot of smoke. An awful lot of smoke.’

‘When did you realize it was your own house on fire?’

‘Not until I was almost there. Things looked so different with the lights and the smoke, and the hoses running across the road. It felt as though there ought to be a film crew somewhere. And all the neighbours were standing outside in their nightclothes. I was thinking, “Some poor bugger’s got a real problem there,” and wondering who it was. It didn’t seem possible that it was my house they were all looking at.’

‘I suppose you weren’t thinking too clearly at the time, either.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I expect you’d had a few drinks, hadn’t you, Mr Mullen?’

The look on his face changed then. His colour went a deeper pink, his mouth twisted into a less relaxed shape. Fry tried her hardest to read his expression as guilt, but it looked more like petulance.

‘Yeah, a few.’

‘Which club had you been in, by the way?’

‘The Broken Wheel. There are only two places that stay open late in Edendale, and the other one is full of kids on drugs.’

‘All right. So when you finally realized it was your house on fire …?’

‘I looked around for Lindsay and the boys, obviously. There was a crowd of people gawping, and a copper trying to sort out the traffic. I couldn’t see my family anywhere.’

‘So you ran into the house?’

‘Yes …’ He hesitated. ‘No, not straightaway. I saw my neighbour, Keith Wade. I asked him where Lindsay was. He said he hadn’t seen her, or the boys either. Well, I knew from the way he said it, and the look on his face …’

‘Knew what?’

‘That they were still in there.’

Even Fry could detect a frisson of genuine emotion in Brian Mullen as he reached the next part of his story. A physical reaction was evident in the tightening of his mouth, the half-closed eyes, the sheen of sweat that appeared on his brow. Fear, yes – and a memory of pain, too.

But, of course, he had been burned by the fire, as proved by his bandaged hands and the notes on his chart at the end of the bed. His breathing had been affected by smoke inhalation, but that was only evident in the hoarseness of his voice, and perhaps in a peculiar inability to vary the pitch of his speech. That might be why his words sounded almost mechanical and insincere. Just might be.

‘The firemen took no notice of me at first,’ he said. ‘They were too busy. But I could see some of them getting kitted out in masks and oxygen tanks – all that gear, you know.’