Playing With Fire

There wasn’t much olde worlde charm in evidence when Blackstone opened the door to Aspern’s surgery, but whatever damage had been done there hadn’t been done by fire. Even with the slight charring and spray of foam from the extinguisher, it was plain to see that the walls and floor were covered in blood, and that the blood came from the body of Patrick Aspern, well beyond the help of any doctor now, spread-eagled on the floor, the entire front of his body ripped open in a glistening tapestry of tissue, organ, sinew and bone.

Banks glanced at Blackstone, who was looking distinctly peaky. “Shotgun?” he said. “Close range? Both barrels?”

“Exactly. Gary’s bagged it and tagged it.”

“Jesus Christ,” Banks said under his breath. In such a small room, the impact must have been tremendous. Even now he could still smell the powder mingled with burned rubber, surgical spirit and blood. Banks could only imagine the deafening noise and the spray of arterial blood, the gobbets of flesh blown clean off the bone, leaving dark slimy trails on the walls. Even the eye chart was splattered with blood, and so was the hypodermic syringe on the floor by the chair.

“Who did it?” Banks asked.

“Looks like the wife,” said Blackstone. “But she’s not talking yet.”

“Frances?” Banks said. “Where is she?”

“Station.”

“And the boy was in the room, too? Mark?”

“Yes.”

“What does he have to say for himself?”

“Nothing. You saw for yourself. I think he’s still in shock. We’ll have to wait awhile before we get anything out of him.”

Banks kept silent for a few moments, looking around the room. A shambles, in the original meaning of the word. He noticed several strands of cord on the floor by the doctor’s chair. “What’s that?” he asked.

“We think the boy must have been tied to the chair.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know yet. But Mrs. Aspern must have cut him free.”

“And the fire?”

“Hardly got started before the kid turned the extinguisher on it. As you can see.”

He pointed to a burned patch on the carpet, which had spread as far as the cubbyhole used to store patient files and singed the crisp white sheets on the examination table.

“Who set it?”

“Again, it looks like the wife.”

Frances Aspern. Well, maybe she had reached a snapping point, Banks thought. If what he suspected had been going on, and if she had known, then he could only guess at the power of the emotions she had suppressed, or how warped and dangerous they had become under the pressure of the years. But something must have happened to make her snap. A trigger of some sort. Maybe they would get something out of her or Mark later.

The outside door opened, letting in a draft of icy night air. “Sorry, lads,” said the photographer, tapping his Pentax. “I finished the video, then I had to go back to the car for this.”

The young photographer didn’t seem at all fazed by the scene of carnage in front of him. Banks had seen the same lack of reaction before. He knew that photographers often managed to distance themselves through their lenses. To them, the scene was only another photo, an image, a composition, not real human blood and guts spilled there. It was their way of coping.

Banks wondered what his way of coping was and realized he didn’t really have one. He looked upon these scenes as exactly what they were – outbursts of anger, hate, greed, lust or passion, which left one human being mangled and split open, the fragile bag of blood burst, and he didn’t have any way of distancing himself. But still he slept at night, still he didn’t faint or puke his guts up over someone’s shoes. What did that say about him? Oh, he remembered them all, of course, all the victims, young and old, and sometimes his sleep was disturbed by dreams, or he couldn’t get to sleep for the images that assaulted his mind, but still he lived with it. What did that make him?

“Alan?”

Banks turned to see Ken Blackstone frowning at him.

“All right?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“My sofa?”

“Why not,” said Banks, with a sigh. “It’s a bloody long way home, and I’m knackered. Got any decent whiskey?”

“I think I could rustle up a dram or two of Bell’s.”

“That’ll do nicely,” said Banks. “Let’s leave it to DI Bridges and go. We’ll sort this mess out tomorrow.”

A

It wasn’t long after nine when an excited DC Templeton came up to her waving a sheet of paper. “I’ve got it!” he said. “I’ve got it.”

“Alleluia,” said A

“McMahon and Gardiner. The co

A

“Come on, then, Kev,” she said. “Give.”

“They were at university together,” said Templeton. “Well, it wasn’t actually a university back then, but it is now.”

“Kev, slow down,” said A

Templeton ran his hand over his wavy brown hair. He had some sort of gel on it, A

“Okay,” he went on, reading from the sheet. “Between 1978 and 1981, both Thomas McMahon and Roland Gardiner attended the former Leeds Polytechnic, since 1992 known as Leeds Metropolitan University. Back then it was made up of the Art College, the College of Commerce, the College of Technology and the Cookery School. Thomas McMahon attended the Art College, obviously, and Roland Gardiner went to the College of Commerce.”

“Did they know one another?”

Templeton scratched his forehead. “Can’t tell you that, ma’am. Only that they were both there at the same time.”

Winsome shot A

“In my experience,” A

“Not the same subjects, maybe,” said Templeton, “but that’s only a part of what college is all about, isn’t it? There’s the pub, student politics, the music scene. Leeds Poly always had great bands. They could have met through something like that.”

“ ‘Could have’ isn’t good enough, Kev. If we’re to make any sort of link, we need to know for certain. And we need to know who else they hung out with. There’s a fair chance that whoever killed them met them back then, was someone who was maybe part of the same scene. I certainly don’t believe it’s a coincidence that two men who were murdered so close together and in much the same way just happened to go to the same poly at the same time. But we need a definite co