‘Could you tell me when you first heard about the fire, sir?’
‘Yes. Brian phoned to tell us. That’s our son-in-law.’
‘Brian did? What time was that?’
‘Good heavens, I’m not sure. It was in the early hours of the morning. I was too shocked to check the time. Well, I might have looked at the clock, but I didn’t take it in. Brian said he was phoning from the hospital – I remember that. At first, I thought it was him that had been in an accident, and I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me. I suppose I was still half asleep.’
The conservatory was probably so warm because it was full of plants – fuchsia, tree ferns, bougainvillea. In the kitchen, Fry had noticed cacti and tradescantia, and a wooden herb wheel on the window sill. She might be ignorant of what grew in the countryside, but she was familiar with house plants. During a spell with a foster family who’d run a small-scale plant nursery in Halesowen, her job had been to write out the labels for the pots – and God help her if she got one wrong through not recognizing a species.
There would be spiders and small insects crawling among these plants, too. She’d tried to sit in the middle of the two-seater cane settee to keep away from the jungle, forcing Murfin to take one of the chairs.
‘How did Brian describe what had happened?’
‘Describe it? Well, he said he’d arrived home and found the house on fire. I gather he’d been out for the evening. Brian was very distressed, you know – understandably. And he’d suffered some injuries trying to get into the house. In the circumstances I’m surprised he had the presence of mind to call us at all. But I’m glad he did. I don’t know how we’d have heard about the fire otherwise.’
‘Well, we’d have found your details somehow, and a police officer would have called on you.’
‘That would have been worse, I think,’ said Lowther. ‘If anything could be worse than this.’
Mr Lowther was officially described in the forms as a managing director. In Fry’s experience, most managing directors looked as though they’d eaten too many corporate lunches and Rotary Club dinners. But Lowther didn’t. He was a big man, but had kept his leanness. Regular squash, or business not so good?
For a moment, Mr Lowther was distracted by the fronds of a tree fern that hung near his chair. He reached out to tear a bit off the plant, with the air of someone who had no idea what he was doing. When he leaned over, Fry noticed that Mr Lowther’s shirt buttons weren’t fastened properly. One hole was empty, and its button had been fastened too low, so that part of his shirt hung untidily over his waistband.
‘That was all Brian could tell me, really. He said that the house was on fire. And that he thought Lindsay and the children were still in there.’
‘What did you do?’
‘We went up there, of course – to Darwin Street. But the fire was all over by the time we arrived. They wouldn’t let us go into the house. So then we went to the hospital, but Brian was sedated. We sat around for hours before someone came and told us that Lindsay and the boys hadn’t survived. It was horrible. It seemed as though we were almost the last to know.’
‘It can feel like that sometimes. But people have their jobs to do.’
‘Yes, I know. But it doesn’t really make it any better. Can I ask you something now?’
‘Go ahead, sir.’
‘Do you have any idea how the fire started?’
‘Not yet. We think the seat of the fire was downstairs in the sitting room, but we need to examine the house more closely before we can be sure about anything.’
Mr Lowther’s gaze drifted away again, and Fry’s attention was caught by the traffic on the A6. It had slowed suddenly as an unexpected type of vehicle mingled with the cars and vans, displaying an entirely different pattern of movement. Even through the double glazing, Fry thought she could hear the creak and rattle. For a moment, she wondered if Pride and Prejudice was being filmed again somewhere nearby.
‘A stagecoach has just gone past on the road down there,’ she said. ‘It was being pulled by four big grey horses.’
‘Yes, they’re Dutch Gelderlanders.’
Fry turned, surprised to see Mrs Lowther standing in the doorway, her eyes dried, her voice almost steady, as if she’d made a great effort to bring herself under control.
‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ she said.
‘Right. You’ve seen them before, then?’
‘Sometimes there are two of them drawing a landau.’
Henry Lowther glanced at the window, but didn’t seem interested. ‘The fire must have been caused by faulty wiring or something, I suppose. They’ll find out what went wrong, won’t they?’
‘We don’t know yet whether it was an accident,’ said Fry.
But Lowther shook his head. ‘No, no. It can’t have been started deliberately. I might just about imagine one of the boys playing with matches. But not arson.’
‘We should know soon enough, Mr Lowther.’
‘You don’t understand. There’s no one who could have had any reason to start that fire deliberately,’ he said. ‘It just isn’t possible. Lindsay would never upset anybody. And as for Jack and Liam –’
He stopped, as if finding himself unable to express the impossibility in the case of his grandsons. His anguished expression suggested that the idea of harming them was physically beyond comprehension. His wife caught a surge of his emotion and began to cry all over again.
‘What about Brian?’
‘He wasn’t even at home,’ said Lowther.
Fry watched him, trying to detect an accusatory note in his voice. But perhaps it hadn’t occurred to the Lowthers yet that their son-in-law ought to have been at home with his family, should have been there to protect them, even if it meant he’d have died in the fire too. It would come later, that anger, the readiness to find someone to blame, if only for not being there.
‘Nevertheless, do you think there might be anybody he could have got on the wrong side of? Someone who might want to take revenge on him?’
‘You’ve met him, haven’t you?’ said Mrs Lowther, between sniffs. ‘You can see he’s harmless. What could he have done to anybody to make them commit an evil act like that, just to get back at him? It doesn’t make sense.’
Her husband nodded. ‘Besides, Brian doesn’t mix with people who’d do that sort of thing. He’s a despatch manager in a distribution centre.’
On the corner table was a set of photographs in silver frames. Smiling faces, boyish grins, a baby balanced on someone’s knee – the Lowthers’ grandchildren. Fry could see that Jack and Liam were fair-haired, with the pale look of their father. But the baby, Luanne, was much darker. The biggest frame contained an entire family group – Brian and Lindsay with all three children, their youngest child held proudly out front, taking centre stage as if it was her birthday or something.
Fry felt an urge to pick the photos up and look at them more closely, but she was afraid it would distract the Lowthers’ attention. Pictures of the fire victims had already been obtained for the case files and the media. She could look at them back at the office, more safely.
Instead, she looked down at her notebook. ‘Could we talk about the house for a few minutes? I mean, your daughter’s address in Darwin Street. I presume you know it quite well?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Mrs Lowther. ‘We go there often.