After the Fire by Jane Casey

violent man. I almost didn’t leave in time. I didn’t want to deprive my daughter of all the things she took for granted. I thought I could stand it, for her sake.’
    ‘But you couldn’t.’
    ‘No. I went to a hotel. I took Ruth and I took my jewellery and some money – not much. And he found us.’ She touched the scar lightly. ‘I was lucky. I try to make sure the women I help are even luckier.’
    This time, when she moved towards the stairs, Derwent let her go.

Chapter 8
     
    WE WERE LATE arriving at the briefing and Una Burt looked distinctly unimpressed. Derwent walked straight past her to find a seat. The room was full of faces, all turned towards us. I tried not to catch anyone’s eye and settled down in a seat next to Liv.
    ‘Where have you been?’ Burt demanded of Derwent, who was causing maximum chaos by making for a seat at the far end of a row.
    ‘Finding the boy’s mother,’ he said over his shoulder.
    ‘And?’
    ‘We found her. Her name’s Melissa Pell, if anyone’s interested.’
    ‘Alive?’
    ‘Sort of.’ He eased himself into a seat. ‘Fractured eye socket, smoke inhalation. She was asleep and we weren’t allowed to wake her.’
    We’d found her after touring all of the victims in the hospital. Harriet Edmonds had suffered through it without complaint, gallant and dedicated as she was. I had been expecting – and dreading – a trip to the hospital morgue, where the fatalities were stored, waiting for the pathologist to deal with them. It was a huge relief when Harriet had turned to us and said, ‘That’s her.’
    She had known her straight away, despite the bandages and the bruising to her face. It was hard to tell what Melissa looked like normally but she was slightly built with fine, delicate hands and a profusion of corkscrew-curly fair hair. Once I knew who she was, I could see how her son resembled her in the shape of his face and the colour of his hair.
    ‘But she should recover,’ Una Burt said.
    ‘She should,’ Derwent said. ‘In the meantime, her mother is coming to London to look after the boy.’
    ‘So you can stop worrying about her and concentrate on your actual job.’ Una Burt shuffled her papers, not looking in Derwent’s direction.
    Derwent folded his arms. ‘I rather thought it was part of my actual job to find out how she was injured, in case it was deliberate.’
    ‘She fell. We covered this at the scene.’ Burt shot a glance at the fire investigator, Harper, who checked his notes.
    ‘That’s what we’ve assumed. It’s certainly not unusual to have injuries of that sort in a large fire.’
    ‘Where did they find her?’ I asked.
    ‘In the hallway on the eighth floor,’ Harper said.
    I frowned. ‘Why was she there? She lived on the tenth floor.’
    ‘Someone might have helped her out of the stairwell,’ Harper said. ‘It was full of people as well as smoke. She was in danger of being trampled if she was unconscious.’
    ‘According to the control room’s logs, did anyone say there was a woman in need of assistance on the eighth floor?’ I asked.
    ‘Not according to my notes.’
    ‘Not very helpful to rescue her and then abandon her to her fate.’
    ‘There were a lot of firefighters in the building supervising the evacuation. It would have been reasonable to assume they would come across her, as indeed they did.’
    ‘But—’ I started to object and Una Burt cleared her throat.
    ‘I think we’d all like to hear what Mr Harper has to tell us about the fire, Maeve, rather than concentrating on creating a mystery around one of the victims.’
    I sat back in my seat, my face burning.
    ‘As I was saying,’ Harper began, ‘we’ve been working quite hard on trying to find where the fire originated. Ordinarily I would work from the areas of least damage towards the areas that were most damaged to find the place that the fire burned for longest. Because of the way it spread through the ventilation system, this fire didn’t burn in a