Evan and Elle - By Rhys Bowen Page 0,51

and a fresh-scrubbed, red-cheeked face. “It’s been gone about two years now.”

“Where was it? We couldn’t find where it might have been.”

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” She looked puzzled. “The new bank’s on the site now. The Westminster on the corner over there.”

“Oh, I see. Did they pull it down?”

A shocked look came over her face. “Oh no, sir. It burned down, didn’t it? Burned to the ground.”

Chapter 16

“Two restaurants burning down!” Sergeant Watkins stood in the village street, staring at the modern glass and concrete structure of the Westminster Bank. It looked completely out of place next to an old-world white-washed antique shop and a solid Georgian redbrick house with a brass plate outside, announcing it as a doctor’s surgery. “Now that’s too much of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

Evan nodded. “I’d say there were pretty high odds against it happening twice, unless she was a very careless cook who was always leaving pans of hot fat on the stove unattended.”

“And you don’t think she was a careless cook?”

“The kitchen was spotless when I saw it,” Evan said. “She strikes me as the sort of person who always knows exactly what she’s doing.”

“I reckon now’s a good time to go and talk to the local police,” Watkins said. “I’ll be very interested to hear what conclusions they reached about the fire.”

They returned to their car and drove slowly down the village street until they were back among the green hills again.

“Oh, and Evans, let me do the talking, okay?” Watkins said. “You know how touchy some people can be if they think you’re treading on their turf. They’ll want to know why we didn’t call them and ask them to take over this investigation.”

“And why didn’t we?” Evan asked.

“Because we don’t know what we’re bloody well looking for yet,” Watkins growled.

The closest police station turned out to be in Seaford, a small town on the coast, about five miles away. The desk sergeant shook hands as Watkins introduced himself and Evan. “North Wales Police, eh? You’re a long way from home. What brings you down to this part of the world?”

“We’re following up on a restaurant fire that happened earlier this week,” Watkins said. “The restaurant owner was a Madame Yvette Bouchard. We’ve just discovered that she was involved in a restaurant fire down here, in the village of Alfriston.”

The sergeant’s face suddenly showed interest. “A couple of years ago in Alfriston? Yes, I remember it.”

“Would you happen to have the incident report lying around? We’d appreciate it if we could take a look at it.”

The sergeant got up. “I’ll just go and check,” he said, “but it’s my recollection that we don’t have anything on that fire.”

“Wasn’t it your station that would have handled it?”

“Oh yes. It was our CID man that was sent out right enough, but if I recall correctly, the fire was deemed to be accidental in nature, so there were no criminal charges to follow up on.”

“The fire was an accident? Were they sure?” Evan asked, forgetting that Watkins had warned him to keep quiet.

“As far as they could tell,” the sergeant said. “It was a listed building, dating from the sixteenth century. Thatched roof, half timbered, very quaint but a real tinderbox. God knows what rubbish was stuffed into those walls. Of course it went up like a torch. There was nothing left by the time they put it out—burned right to the ground. I saw it myself. The fire had been so hot that the stove and the fridge looked like melted lumps of metal. Horrible it was. But they couldn’t find any evidence of an outside agent being used to start it, and they couldn’t come up with any kind of motive either.”

“Madame Yvette hadn’t received any kind of threatening letters?” Evan asked, making Watkins look sharply in his direction. “She hadn’t come to you for protection?”

“Threatening letters? Nothing like that, as far as I can remember.” The sergeant looked a little baffled. “Hold on and I’ll go and check. I think the inspector’s in his office. He’d know more than I would.”

He returned a few minutes later with a hollow, tired-looking man with graying hair and a bristly mustache. “This is Detective Inspector Morris. He was in charge at the time of the incident.”

Inspector Morris shook hands. “I don’t know if I can be of much help,” he said in an accent that betrayed a long-ago stint at a public school. “We all took it to be a simple accident—the