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  ‘And you think that someone set light to the bucket?’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘I think that the fire started in the bin. Spontaneous combustion of oil-and grease-soaked rags. It burns, it rolls over, and the fire spreads across the ceiling here.’

  ‘Yes, well the last time I checked, salads weren’t inflammable,’ said O’Neill.

  ‘Then you don’t know what the chef’s special is. Bacon, Gorgonzola and pear salad with a brandy vinaigrette.’

  ‘Brandy?’

  Farmer grinned. ‘Brandy.’

  ‘But wouldn’t the brandy be stored with the oils in the back room?’

  ‘He used to put the bottle in the storage room overnight but once the chef started to let standards slip, he didn’t bother.’

  ‘And you know that how?’

  ‘I interviewed him. I interviewed everyone who worked in the kitchen.’

  O’Neill looked at the remains of the bin, then the ceiling, then the wall. He nodded slowly. ‘So the fire rolls over the ceiling, heats up the wall, the bottle breaks and the brandy drips down to the floor. The brandy ignites the plastic bucket and we have a second source of fire. Shit.’ He pointed at the pile of ash and burnt shelving on the floor. ‘You found glass in there?’

  Farmer nodded.

  O’Neill walked up to the wall, squatted down and ran a hand through the muddy ash. His probing fingers found a shard of glass and he picked it up. ‘Shit,’ he said again.

  ‘Satisfied?’ asked Farmer. ‘If I’d known you were mis-reading the scene I’d have sent you a copy of my report.’

  O’Neill dropped the shard of glass on to the ash and stood up. He forced a smile. ‘Like I said, it’s always a pleasure doing business with you, Des.’

  ‘Glad to be of service,’ said Farmer.

  The two men walked outside. Farmer took off his gloves and overshoes, then fished out his tobacco pack, opened it and popped a pre-rolled cigarette between his lips. He lit it as O’Neill locked the door to the restaurant, then walked over to Vicky’s car.

  O’Neill’s jaw dropped when he saw Farmer standing next to the BMW. ‘What the hell is that?’ he asked.

  ‘A BMW i8,’ said Farmer. ‘It’s a hybrid.’

  ‘Yeah, I know what it is,’ said O’Neill, walking around it. ‘This is yours?’

  ‘Thought I’d treat myself,’ said Farmer, patting the roof as if it was a favoured pet.

  ‘How the fuck did you afford a car like this?’ asked O’Neill.

  Farmer shrugged. ‘The pay’s better than it was,’ he said. ‘The brigade has realised the value of its investigators.’

  ‘Do you still want me to drive?’ asked Vicky.

  Farmer looked over at her and caught the twinkle in her eyes. ‘Yes, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘But go easy on the accelerator, you were over-revving it on the way here.’

  ‘Sorry, guv,’ said Vicky, opening the door and climbing into the driver’s seat. Farmer took a last pull on his roll-up and then ground it out with his shoe. He climbed in and pulled the door shut, then waved a cheery goodbye to O’Neill as Vicky drove off.

  20

  Vicky drove Farmer back to Dowgate and parked. ‘Get me a coffee, will you, sweetheart,’ he said as they headed up the stairs. ‘I’m parched.’

  ‘Yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir,’ Vicky muttered under her breath as Farmer disappeared into his office. She was getting fed up with being treated as the office junior, though deep down she knew that was exactly what she was. She had been shoehorned into the job with next to no training or experience, and until she could carry her weight she really didn’t have any choice other than to suck it up.

  She dropped her tunic and helmet in her office and headed for the tea room. She was waiting for the kettle to boil when Farmer popped his head around the door. ‘Change of plan,’ he said. ‘There’s a fire in Brixton we need to check out. See you downstairs in five.’

  ‘Right,’ said Vicky. Farmer disappeared back into his office. She grabbed her tunic and helmet and went downstairs to the van. She had the engine running by the time Farmer appeared in his uniform. He climbed in and put his helmet on his lap.

  The van was equipped with sirens and lights but there was no emergency and it took just over forty-five minutes to get to Brixton.

  ‘So I read that more than a quarter of all fires are deliberately set,’ said Vicky as she drove across the river.

  ‘That’s about right,’ he said. ‘But that figure is skewed by the small fires set by kids and the fact that half of car fires are insurance jobs. But yes, overall it’s about one in four. But the one we’re on the way to see is a restaurant, and despite what the insurance companies think, restaurant owners aren’t queuing up to set fire to their own businesses.’

  ‘It happens, though.’

  ‘Sure. But it’s a big step to take, setting fire to a business. It’s against the law; people might get hurt. Plus, if there’s a reason for torching your business then the cops are going to be all over you. It’s like murder. Almost all murders are committed by someone the victim knows. And it’s usually a family member. So when a murder happens, the first thing the cops do is look at friends and family. It’s the same with a fire in a restaurant. If it does look like it was deliberately set then they look at the owner. And the competition. So if you’re an owner and you know that, you’d be pretty stupid to set fire to your business.’

  ‘Or desperate?’

  Farmer pulled a face. ‘I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it’s rare. It tends to happen more in the States. Maybe one in ten restaurant fires are deliberate. Here’s it’s maybe one in a hundred. And if a guy is stupid enough to set fire to his own business, he’s probably going to be stupid enough to do it in a way that he gets caught.’

  ‘What about professionals?’

  ‘Professionals?”

  ‘You know. Pay someone to do it.’

  ‘It happens,’ said Farmer. ‘But for every professional there are a thousand enthusiastic amateurs. Thankfully, most of the amateurs are stupid so they get caught sooner rather than later.’

  Farmer settled back in his seat. ‘Thing is, restaurants are fire traps, just because of the nature of what they do. You’ve got people packed into rooms full of combustibles, and you have chefs cooking with oil and fat over naked flames. Cooking is the number one cause of fires in restaurants and in forty per cent of cases it’s the food that flames first. A chef takes his eyes off the stove, something catches fire and they don’t deal with it properly. It happens all the time.’

  They arrived at Brixton and Farmer gave her directions to the restaurant. ‘You really don’t like satnavs,’ she said.

  ‘They make your brain lazy,’ he said. ‘You concentrate on the screen and not your surroundings and that means you miss things.’

  ‘Don’t you get lost, though?’

  ‘Sure. But not for long. And each wrong turn you make teaches you something.’ He pointed ahead. ‘Park there, on the left.’ There was a parking space at the side of the road and Vicky reversed in. She twisted around in her seat and looked at the equipment in the back. ‘What do we need?’ she asked.

  ‘Gloves and boot covers,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a look around first, see what there is to see.’ He went around to the back of the van and pulled it open. Vicky joined him on the pavement. He handed her shoe covers and gloves. ‘And we’ll need the camera, too,’ he said. He pulled open the side door of the van and took a small digital camera from a plastic drawer. He showed her how to operate it and then gave it to her. ‘You need to photograph everything,’ he said. ‘Start with the outside and anything we see inside. General shots, specific shots, just keep shooting. More is always better. That way in the unlikely event that we miss anything we have the pictures to fall back on.’

  The restaurant was in the middle of a line of shops including a dry-cleaners, an off-licence and a pound shop. The brickwork was stained with soot and the windows were broken. The door
was open and the frame splintered as if it had been kicked in. There were two floors of what appeared to be apartments above the shops. Vicky saw that most of the brickwork above the restaurant was coated in soot, which suggested the fire had spread up rather than down. As she photographed the brickwork, Farmer went over to the door and knocked on it. ‘Hello? Is there anyone there?’

  Vicky went to join him. The acrid smell of burnt wood and plastic assailed her nostrils and she wrinkled her nose. The floor was awash with a thick black sludge.

  ‘We’re not open!’ shouted a man from inside.

  ‘We’re coming in,’ said Farmer.

  ‘Hey man, I told you, we’re not open!’ A large black man walked out of the gloom. He was wearing a yellow, green and gold knitted cap over long dreadlocks, a multi-coloured tie-dyed shirt and baggy combat trousers. ‘We’re gonna be shut for a while.’

  ‘Are you the owner?’ asked Farmer.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘We’re with the fire investigation unit,’ said Farmer.

  ‘The police have already been,’ said the man.

  ‘We’re with the Fire Brigade,’ said Farmer. ‘We visit every unusual fire to see what happened. Hopefully we can stop it happening to anyone else.’

  The man’s eyes narrowed. ‘Nah, man, you think I torched my own place, don’t you? That’s what the cops seem to think.’

  ‘Did you?’ asked Farmer.

  ‘Hell no,’ said the man. ‘This is my livelihood. This place burns and I got nothing.’

  ‘But you’ve got insurance, right?’

  Vicky was clicking away with the camera, starting at the corners and covering every inch of the floor and ceiling.

  ‘Some,’ said the man. ‘But this place was always busy. Every day I’m shut I lose money.’

  ‘There you go then,’ said Farmer. ‘So you are the owner?’

  The man nodded. ‘Moses Miller.’ He grinned showing a gold tooth at the front of his mouth. ‘They call me M&M.’

  ‘I’m Des Farmer.’ He gestured at Vicky. ‘This is Miss Lewis.’

  Moses grinned at Vicky but his smile hardened when she lowered the camera and he saw the scars on her left cheek. ‘Hey, baby, what happened to you?’

  ‘I got burned,’ said Vicky.

  Moses nodded. ‘That must have hurt like hell, baby.’

  ‘It did,’ said Vicky. She tilted her head so that her hair fell across her ear and started photographing the fire damage again.

  ‘So this is what, an Ital restaurant?’ said Farmer, looking around.

  Vicky turned to look at him. ‘Guv, it’s clearly not an Italian restaurant,’ she said.

  ‘Not Italian,’ said Farmer. ‘Ital. Comes from the word Vital, if you must know. It’s a Rastafarian way of cooking. No salt, no meat, no preservatives, no colourings, no artificial flavourings. It’s as natural a way of cooking as you can get.’

  Moses was staring at Farmer in astonishment. ‘You know your Ital,’ he said.

  ‘I get around,’ said Farmer. ‘What’s your signature dish?’

  ‘I’m famous for my curried lima beans,’ he said.

  ‘I bet you are.’

  ‘Lots of turmeric, coriander and cumin, plus my own special curry powder,’ said Moses proudly. ‘Ain’t nothing like it outside of Jamaica.’

  ‘I’m a big fan of curried lima beans,’ said Farmer.

  ‘Get out of here,’ said Moses. ‘So how do you know so much about Ital food?’

  Farmer grimaced. ‘My second wife was Jamaican.’

  ‘Get out of here!’ said Moses, louder this time.

  ‘It’s true. She came over as a nurse in the nineties. She was a great cook. I was married to her for three years and I put on twenty pounds.’

  Moses laughed. ‘Yeah, man, rice and beans will do that.’

  ‘I miss her jerk chicken more than anything,’ said Farmer. ‘It was her grandmother’s recipe and she never told me what was in it.’

  ‘Did she do it in the oven or original style, roasted on coals and pimento wood?’

  ‘If the weather was good, yes, she’d do it on the barbecue in the garden.’

  Moses laughed and slapped his thigh. ‘There’ll be pimento, scallion, thyme and onions in the sauce,’ said Moses. ‘But it’s Scotch bonnet that makes it special.’

  Vicky frowned. ‘Scotch bonnet?’

  Moses grinned and tapped the side of his nose. ‘Yeah, that’ll be the secret ingredient,’ he said. ‘It’s a Caribbean chilli pepper, shaped like those hats that Scotsmen wear.’

  ‘Tam-o’-shanters?’ said Vicky.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Moses. ‘Scotty bons, or bonny peppers they call them. Nothing else tastes like a Scotch bonnet. That’s what she’ll have used.’

  ‘So I’m guessing you’re also the cook?’ said Farmer.

  ‘You got that right,’ said Moses. ‘They’re all my recipes, too.’

  ‘And you were working last night?’

  ‘Every night,’ said Moses.

  ‘Do you sleep above the shop?’

  Moses shook his head. ‘I live a couple of miles away. I got the call to say the restaurant was on fire about two o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘Not too much fire damage,’ said Farmer, looking around the restaurant.

  ‘It’s mainly in the kitchen,’ said Moses. ‘The firemen did most of it with their water,’ said Moses.

  ‘They had to move fast,’ said Vicky. ‘They couldn’t risk it spreading to the flats upstairs.’

  ‘But even when the fire was out, they kept going back in to spray more water.’

  ‘They have to,’ said Vicky. ‘It’s called dampening. If they don’t keep everything wet, the fire can start up again.’

  Farmer pointed at double doors at the far end of the restaurant. ‘That’s the kitchen?’

  ‘What’s left of it,’ said Moses. He took them across the muddied floor and pushed the doors open. The burnt smell was much stronger and the stains on the wall were much darker. The kitchen was in darkness.

  ‘Electricity’s off,’ said Moses.

  Farmer nodded at Vicky. ‘Grab a couple of torches from the van,’ he said. Vicky hurried outside. ‘And the portable LED lights. Let the dog see the rabbit.’

  Vicky headed out to the van.

  ‘She your assistant?’ asked Moses.

  ‘For the moment.’

  ‘That burn is something.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She a fireman?’

  ‘A firefighter? She was, yes. Dragged a guy out of a burning building. Saved his life.’

  ‘I didn’t know they had women firemen.’

  ‘Yeah. They do.’

  Moses shook his head. ‘No job for a woman, that.’

  Farmer smiled thinly. ‘You’re preaching to the converted there, Moses.’

  Vicky returned with torches and handed one to Farmer. She was carrying a rack of LED lights and she assembled them. They operated on their own batteries and she switched them on so that the kitchen was illuminated with a bright, clinical white light. It was about ten feet wide and fifteen feet long with two stoves to the left and storage cupboards and a fridge-freezer to the right. Vicky clicked away with the digital camera.

  ‘How many staff do you usually have in the kitchen?’ asked Farmer as he looked around the room. Most of the fire damage seemed to be in the far corner where there was a metal rubbish bin.

  ‘Three cooking,’ said Moses.

  ‘Including you?’

  ‘I’m head chef.’

  ‘Waiting staff?’

  ‘Two girls.’

  ‘So a staff of five?’

  ‘We have a busboy to clean.’

  Farmer looked around, then went over to the two large metal hoods over the stoves. He shone his torch inside them. ‘How often do you clean these?’

  ‘Every night,’ said Moses.

  ‘I mean inside.’

  ‘Inside?’ Moses frowned.

  ‘Yeah, the
y need to be steam-cleaned on a regular basis. They get coated in grease over time. Sometimes cooking alone can set them alight. From the look of the burn patterns on the wall, they caught fire last night.’

  ‘But no one was cooking,’ said Moses. ‘The place was empty last night.’

  Farmer nodded. ‘The hoods didn’t cause the fire, but they helped the spread. So where do your staff smoke?’

  ‘Outside. There’s a yard where we keep our rubbish.’ He frowned again. ‘You think one of my staff caused the fire?’

  Farmer grinned. ‘Let’s see what my young assistant thinks. Vicky, over here.’

  Vicky stopped photographing and joined them.

  ‘Right, let’s put your investigative skills to the test.’ He grinned at Moses. ‘She’s read all the manuals. Back to front.’

  ‘Does that help?’ asked Moses.

  ‘Apparently,’ said Farmer. He nodded at Vicky. ‘Right, you’ve been snapping away but have you been using your eyes and ears?’

  ‘I think so, guv.’

  ‘What do you think caused this fire?’

  Vicky smiled at Moses. ‘It was raining last night, wasn’t it?’ she asked.

  ‘It had stopped by the time we closed up.’

  ‘Sure, but I’m guessing your staff don’t smoke in the rain,’ said Vicky. ‘So when it rains, where do they smoke?’

  ‘They open the back door and stand there.’

  ‘So they smoke in the kitchen?’

  Moses nodded. ‘They’re not supposed to. But, yeah.’

  Vicky tried the door. It was burnt but locked. She looked at the metal bin. It was on its side and he lifted it up. ‘This is for rubbish, right?’

  Moses nodded.

  ‘Is it emptied every night?’

  ‘It’s supposed to be.’

  ‘Was it last night?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know, man. Maybe.’

  Vicky examined the wall above the metal bin. There was a dark V-shape of soot that went up to the ceiling. ‘See that, Moses? That tells me the fire started in the bin. With the grease and stuff on the ovens and hoods the whole place would be burning within a few minutes.’

  Vicky photographed the marks and Farmer nodded his approval.