officers to enter.
‘Armed police! Armed police! Get down on the ground! Get down!’ Then a pause. Then a little mumbling. Then, ‘Secure!’
Ridley led the way in, closely followed by Jack, then Laura, then Anik, then a team of uniformed officers who would be tasked with searching the premises. In the lounge was an elderly man in his mid-70s. He sat in a Mobility riser recliner with his feet up on the elevated footplate.
‘Donal Sweeney?’ Ridley asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ the man wheezed. ‘You might be after my boy though, I reckon.’
Ridley showed Sweeney Senior a warrant to search the premises. ‘Jack . . .’ was the only word he uttered before leading everyone else out of the room.
Sweeney Senior asked Jack to pass him his reading glasses, which he did.
‘The little shit!’ Sweeney said once he’d read the warrant. ‘I said he could use my address to open a bank account and he does this? Am I under arrest?’
‘Until we can establish the facts,’ Jack explained, ‘you’ll have to come to the station.’
‘Right, then. I’d better start moving, ’cos it takes a while.’
Sweeney Senior reached down into the pocket in the side of his Mobility recliner. The Armed Response Unit instantly raised their weapons and pointed them at the old man.
‘Don’t move! Stay still! Show me your hands!’
Sweeney Senior slammed his hands over his eyes and waited to be shot.
‘The remote! Jesus Christ!’ Jack shouted. ‘He’s just going for the remote!’
He took the remote control from the side pocket of the chair and pressed the ‘down’ button as the overexcited ARU team lowered their guns. The footplate on the Mobility recliner started to lower, the seat started to tilt, and the back started to push Sweeney Senior very, very slowly on to his slippered feet. As he became more upright, a catheter bag half-full of urine dropped out of the bottom of his trouser leg. The old man stood there, hands over his eyes, crying and trembling in fear, pissing into his bag. This was a whole new low for Jack.
*
Prescott and Sally watched as two of his SOCOs attempted to move the charred body from the sofa into the body bag waiting on the ground, ready to be lifted onto the undertaker’s trolley, which was parked just outside the front door. The undertaker, employed by Thames Valley Police to transport bodies to the mortuary for post-mortem, was playing Candy Crush at full blast on his mobile.
‘Turn that down!’ shouted Prescott. ‘If I hear another stupid fucking noise from outside, there’ll be two dead bodies being driven to the mortuary, not one. Idiot . . .’ he muttered. He turned to Sally. ‘What do you think of “Sheila”?’ he asked through his white paper mask. Sally frowned. ‘We got to call him something till we find out who he is.’
‘I get that. But why “Sheila”?’
Prescott suddenly realised that the twenty years between them meant his joke was about to fall flat. He ploughed on regardless.
‘Sheila Ferguson? The Three Degrees? I know he’s got six-degree burns, but there isn’t a group called the Six Degrees.’ Sally was still looking very confused. ‘I pity you,’ Prescott mumbled. ‘You’re too young to appreciate how bloody funny I am.’
The melted underside of the charred body was tangled in with the sofa springs and each time the SOCOs wriggled an arm free, a leg would get caught, and vice versa. In the end, one of Sally’s firefighters decided to cut the springs so that any pieces of metal embedded in the melted skin could just stay there until the body reached the post-mortem table, where the pathologist could remove them in their own time. Getting the body off the sofa was like peeling a label off a jar ‒ no matter how carefully you tried to keep the paper in one piece, it would inevitably tear, and you’d then have to decide whether to push the pieces back together and try again, or just leave some bits behind. Finally, the firefighter lying on his back beneath the sofa with wire cutters said, ‘That’s the last spring gone, you’re good to lift.’
The undertakers lifted the charred body and placed it into the body bag.
As the fluids and dirty fire-hose water from the blackened corpse slowly seeped out, it was abundantly clear that something was missing. In the springs of the sofa, the rubber sole of the left shoe had melted like glue and its hold on the foot inside had proved much harder to break than the ankle joint above it. Prescott