Borrowed Light by Graham Hurley Read Free Book Online Page A

How it had spread. And who may have helped it have its way.
    The Scenes of Crime caravan was parked next to the barn. Suttlehad already briefed Faraday about the Crime Scene Coordinator in charge of the forensic team. Her name was Meg Stanley. She
     was new to Hantspol, not bad-looking, and had apparently scored a university degree in theology before joining the men in
     blue.
    She was waiting for them in the caravan, a small neat woman in her mid-thirties with a generous mouth and a flawless complexion.
     She was wearing a two-piece grey suit that lent her an air of slight severity, and at once Faraday could imagine her behind
     a lectern in a pulpit, or robed beside an open grave. This was someone, he thought, you’d be wise to take seriously.
    She offered tea or coffee from a nest of Thermos flasks. The fact that the pathologist had found shotgun pellets in all four
     bodies had given the forensic search an extra edge. Unless she could demonstrate otherwise, the fire had been deliberately
     set.
    Faraday was looking at the pile of paperwork beside the laptop on the tiny desk. Incidents this challenging were mercifully
     rare. If you wanted to muddy a multiple homicide, a thatch fire was a near-perfect way of reducing everything to sludge. From
     the forensic point of view, the hours and days to come would be critical. Any tiny clue spared by the fire. Any evidence that
     might begin to chart the final hours of the four blackened corpses in the hospital mortuary.
    ‘So what have we got?’
    Stanley talked them through her progress to date. As the on-call CSC, she’d been alerted twenty-four hours ago after the discovery
     of the first body. She’d taken the hovercraft to Ryde, met the Crime Scene Manager on site and framed the Forensic Strategy
     that would flag the various pathways forwards. Inside the house itself, once the building surveyor had declared the remaining
     structure safe, they’d be working inwards from the areas of least damage. A fire dog trained to hunt for accelerants had been
     shipped in from the mainland, and the CSM had led a flash search of the immediate area in case something obvious was staring
     them in the face. In the absence of a dropped wallet or a signed confession, alas, she’d briefed the Police Search Adviser
     to map out coordinates for a more thorough trawl of the surrounding fields and hedgerows.
    Faraday was keeping a mental log, ticking off each action. In his experience no one got to the giddy heights of Crime Scene
     Coordinator without seizing a situation like this by the throat. You had to get structure and process into these first busy
     hours. You had to fold the forensic priorities into the firefighting operation and make absolutely sure that the cracks didn’t
     show. Above all, once the investigative machine was cranked up, you had to make certain that nothing was lost as gaps started
     to widen between an army of maraudingdetectives, the guys in the Incident Room and the painstaking recovery of evidence out here in the field. On paper or in
     the classroom it always looked simple. In reality it could easily become a nightmare.
    Stanley had already confirmed a blank on the accelerants – the dog had found nothing. Now Faraday wanted to know about the
     state of the place when the fire brigade arrived.
    ‘Was the front door locked?’
    ‘Yes. But not bolted.’
    ‘Key on the inside?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘No key in the property? On a hook? Under a window sill?’
    ‘Not so far. It’s still early days.’
    ‘What about the phone landline?’
    ‘It came out of the house just under the thatch. None of that survived the fire so we don’t know whether there was any interference.’
    ‘Was the place alarmed?’
    ‘Yes. It was an oldish system. No cameras. The suppliers are coming over this afternoon to take a look at the control box.’
    ‘It’s still intact?’
    ‘More or less. Scorch marks. Nothing serious.’
    Faraday nodded. He wanted to know about the POLSA