Evan and Elle - By Rhys Bowen Page 0,29
please, until Dr. Owens has had a chance to take a look at it.” He moved aside and Evans heard him requesting the Home Office pathologist.
While they waited, Evan was studying the way the body was lying amid the beams. “It looks to me as if he might have been upstairs,” he suggested. “See how that one beam is under him.”
“Not necessarily,” Potter said. “If he’d been trying to get out when the top floor collapsed, a beam could have crashed in front of him and then he could have been struck or felled by smoke.”
Evan nodded, appreciating this possibility.
“You weren’t wrong in what you said last night.” Watkins came back to join them. “This certainly is one step further, all right. Whoever it is has just moved from arson to manslaughter.”
“If it is the same person,” Potter said. “I’ve got the dog in the car, and I’ll bring him out to take a sniff around, but I don’t see any immediate evidence of the area being doused with petrol this time.”
“Is it possible that this was the bloke who set the fire and then got trapped in his own blaze?” Watkins asked.
“It’s happened before,” Potter said, “but I’d have thought in this case it would have been simple enough to get out. There was a back door here, wasn’t there?”
“Madame Yvette managed to get down the stairs and out of the back door after the fire started,” Evan pointed out.
“And you thought that the bloke might have been upstairs, too?” Potter looked at him with sudden interest. “You’re suggesting that she was in bed with someone and she got out and he didn’t?”
“But then why wouldn’t she have told the firemen right away that someone was possibly trapped up there?”
Potter shrugged. “Didn’t want to ruin her reputation?”
Evan had to laugh. “She isn’t that kind of woman. I don’t know her well, but I can’t imagine she’d be the type who would just leave someone to burn.”
“The first thing is to find out who he was,” Watkins said.
“You’re sure it was a he?”
“Pretty big bones,” Watkins said. “And look down here, where the beam was lying across his feet—that definitely looks like the remains of a man’s shoe, doesn’t it?”
Potter knelt beside the body. “If the beam was covering his foot there’s a good chance the inside of the shoe might be intact. No oxygen will have reached it to go on burning.”
Watkins took out a clean handkerchief and cautiously eased off the shoe. The inside leather at the heel was still brown, and in one spot, shiny. Watkins held it up so that Evans and Potter could both examine it.
“I think it says Made in Spain.” Watkins’s disappointment showed in his voice. “That doesn’t tell us anything. All shoes come from somewhere else these days.”
“If we take it to the lab, they could possibly identify the model of the shoe and where it was sold. But as you say, people buy their shoes all over the place these days. The wife stocked up in Italy last year.”
“It says forty-six here, I think.” Evan pointed at the numbers. “That’s continental sizing, isn’t it? That probably means it wasn’t made for the English market.”
“The boy’s quick, isn’t he?” Potter was half-mocking.
“Yes, he is,” Watkins agreed. “So you’re suggesting that the bloke was a foreigner?”
“Or, as Sergeant Potter says, he buys his shoes abroad,” Evan added “Although I’d imagine you can buy imported shoes easily enough here.”
“Not much to go on.” Watkins sighed. “I suppose the next thing is to find out if anyone was reported missing this morning. If he was a local and he didn’t show up last night, we’d have heard by now.”
He pulled out the phone again. “Wonderful invention, these things, aren’t they? Too wonderful sometimes. The wife knows where to find me when she realizes we’re out of potatoes, or to check on why I’m late.”
Potter brought out his dog and they moved around the ruin, examining burn patterns and taking samples. Evan waited for the medical examiner to arrive, glancing every now and then at the sprawled figure and trying not to feel pity. He’d been on the force long enough now. Why was he still so disturbed by death?
About half an hour later the white incident van pulled up beside Evan’s car. The first person out was D.I. Hughes, Sergeant Watkins’s boss and Evan’s least favorite detective inspector. He didn’t wait for the doctor to emerge from the other door, but strode toward the waiting