He turned to see the stranger advancing one step at a time. He shouted ‘Stay back’, and held the lighter higher, his thumb resting on the trigger. Jessica still hadn’t moved but she was saying his name again, telling him to think about what he was doing.

He could feel the fumes drifting into his nostrils. As the stranger took two steps closer, he flicked the switch, feeling the heat of the flame close to his thumb. ‘Stay back,’ he shouted again, looking from side to side and wondering if there was somewhere he could run. He eyed the hedge that bordered the adjoining property. He might have been able to jump it but where could he go then? If he somehow escaped, he wouldn’t know where to hide long-term. Even so, it was surely a better idea than simply standing still?

His feet squelched again, this time uncomfortably, as he edged away from the two people towards the hedge. Jessica called his name again, seemingly sensing what he was thinking, but the stranger was now moving quickly towards him. He stepped backwards without looking and clipped his heel on an uneven part of the driveway.

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The man felt himself tumbling while instinctively putting his hands down to stop himself. The stranger leapt sideways. The man turned just in time to see Jessica dashing into the house. As the lighter slipped from his grasp, he thought the flame was out. He stretched forward to catch it but couldn’t control his falling body as he landed on his backside, the lighter dropping onto his foot.

For a moment he thought nothing was going to happen but then he felt the heat. Somehow the flame had ignited and, as he felt pain surge through his body, he stared down in disbelief at the fire that had engulfed his feet.

In the weeks that had gone by, the power of the flames had entranced him in their initial moments before he had to run off. He could barely comprehend the sight of the blaze that was covering his lower half. He couldn’t even scream as the heat and the pain overwhelmed him.

He tried to roll before he heard a woman’s voice shouting and then something hammered into his legs. He heard the liquid hitting him before he felt it but, as he scrambled onto his back and stared down, he saw Jessica holding a fire extinguisher and spraying white foam over his lower half. He couldn’t feel anything except for an intense pain and didn’t even know if he was screaming.

The man breathed in, desperate for clean air, but all he felt was a gagging sensation in his throat as the stench of his own burned flesh tore through him.

A FEW DAYS EARLIER

Garry Ashford looked up from the newspapers. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’

‘That depends on you,’ Jessica replied.

‘You know it can’t be him.’ The journalist was wide-eyed with shock and Jessica could see his hand shaking.

‘Why not?’

‘Because . . . well, why would he?’

Jessica shuffled onto the floor so she was sitting next to Garry and took the paper from him. She opened it at the relevant page and spread out the rest of the stack she had isolated, finding the articles she was looking for.

‘I went to see my friend Izzy the other day,’ she said. ‘She’s just had a baby. She’s not had much sleep and she’s hardly stopped since the birth but she looks amazing. She’s younger than me but it feels like she’s the grown-up. While I was busy trying to figure all this out, I’ve been fussing over other things and allowing my own personality to get in the way. But she asked the simplest of questions. It was the one we all should have asked at the beginning – but we were so caught up in the pace of everything and the things we thought were obvious, that we ended up missing that one issue.’

She paused, not for effect, simply because she thought she might cough. Garry asked the obligatory ‘what?’ as Jessica allowed her throat to settle.

‘Who gains?’ Jessica replied. ‘And Iz was right. Who gains from all of this? Martin didn’t, he lost a house. Anthony had already lost his son and could have lost his liberty. Ryan got his dad back but could have lost him again. What about Harley? He lost his daughter and then his house. I couldn’t see past that – because I couldn’t understand how the two things couldn’t be connected. No one is that unlucky. It was too much of a coincidence.’

She picked up one of the papers. ‘When you look at these, though, you realise it didn’t happen by chance – because there was always one person at the centre of it all. One person who gained.’

‘But what kind of person would go that far?’

Jessica pointed to the picture byline underneath the story about the fire at her house. ‘This guy,’ she said, pointing to the photograph of Sebastian Lowe.

34

Izzy grinned at Jessica. ‘You don’t have to hold her if you don’t want to.’

Jessica held out her arms and cradled Amber to her body, relaxing back into the sofa. ‘They’re not too bad after all. She still has big scary eyes but at least they’re closed.’

Izzy sat in the recliner and curled her feet underneath her. ‘Can you stop saying my only child has enormous body parts, please?’ she said with a smile.

‘Okay, let’s just say she has her mother’s eyes.’ Jessica looked up at her friend and grinned.

‘Come on then, let’s hear it.’

‘Is Amber going to mind if I say it all in front of her?’

‘Well, firstly she’s asleep and secondly she’s a tiny, tiny baby, so I think she’ll be all right.’

Jessica hugged the baby closer to her. ‘I know Dave’s spoken to you about the case a bit but, in the end, I figured it out by working my way back to what you said. It was so confusing because we were looking for the link from Harley and his daughter to Martin and his son. There was no way it could be a coincidence but we missed the obvious connection – Sebastian.’

‘He’s the reporter, yeah?’

‘Exactly. To be honest, I think things just got out of hand. We went through all of his stories. There are around a dozen crimes we think he may be responsible for, which he then reported. There was this old lady bashed over the back of the head three days after he started at the paper. He got the story before anyone else because he somehow knew where the woman lived. At the time no one there questioned him. After the assault had been reported, we didn’t pay much attention to the coverage. It was only going back now that we could see there was no obvious reason for him to know her name and address – we only gave out the woman’s age. We assumed she had approached him about the story but she says he came to her.’

‘What else have you got?’

‘A few things we’re not completely sure of but which seem likely. There’s a shop robbery where the person was wearing a balaclava. The physical description matches Sebastian but we would never be able to prove it. But then the fire stories started. He wrote something about this disused off-licence being set on fire a couple of months back. It wasn’t even something on our radar and we never put out a press release, yet he wrote about it. When he stumbled across the legitimate story about Martin, it gave him ideas. When Anthony made those threats, that meant there was a motive. The attack on Chadwick in that alley kept it in the news – and kept them on edge over each other. When the first attack on Martin’s house happened, we went straight to Anthony’s. We found a paint tin and petrol can which I guess Sebastian left there. I unscrewed the shed door to get in, so he may well have done the same.’