After the Fire by Jane Casey

their shovel-like hands. They were dark-haired, with sallow skin, and reminded me of storybook gypsies – I half expected them to have gold hoop earrings glinting among their curls. Beside them sat a plump fair woman with small eyes and petrol-blue nails. She looked up when we came in but didn’t speak, returning her attention to the two little girls who were squabbling over a colouring book on the floor. A boy sat beside the woman, staring into space. He was overweight, his t-shirt riding up to expose a half-moon of white stomach. I recognised the unseeing gaze: shock.
    ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Derwent said. ‘I’m looking for a Carl Bellew.’
    There was a pause before the clean-shaven man said, ‘That’s me.’
    Derwent introduced us and explained that we were investigating the fire. ‘You are the owner of flat 101 on the tenth floor of Murchison House, is that right?’
    ‘That’s right.’ He was surly, not making eye contact with us. The older woman was watching us, holding the handkerchief up to her face so I couldn’t quite see her expression. Her eyes were shrewd, though, and I felt she was missing nothing. It was clear that the men got their colouring from her, even if her hair was now dyed a shade of blue-black that didn’t exist in nature. She was sallow, like her sons, but a quarter of their size. Her face was thin, the skin lined and cracked like a dried-out riverbed. Her nose was too big for the rest of her features and curved like a beak. She had a big black handbag on her lap and she held on to it with one claw-like hand that was wrapped in a white bandage. She wasn’t old so much as desiccated. She could have been any age from fifty to eighty.
    ‘And you live there with your family,’ Derwent checked.
    ‘Yeah. The kids, the wife and Mum.’
    ‘Are all of these yours?’ Derwent indicated the two girls and the boy.
    ‘No. Just the lad. My daughter is in intensive care.’
    ‘That’s why we’re here,’ the older woman said.
    I frowned. ‘Isn’t intensive care on the next floor?’
    ‘Yeah, but there isn’t a room we can use there.’ She pulled her handbag closer to her chest. ‘It’s not as if we have anywhere else to go.’
    ‘Mum, you can come home with me, I told you.’ The bearded man patted his mother’s arm with a giant hand. She shook him off without looking at him.
    ‘Leave it for now, Rocco. Now’s not the time.’
    I caught the tail end of an expression that passed over the fair-haired woman’s face: pure horror. Not the easiest mother-in-law, I guessed.
    ‘Who exactly was in the flat at the time of the fire?’ Derwent asked.
    ‘Me. Mum—’
    ‘Nina Bellew,’ she said. ‘That’s my name. Nina.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Carl said, giving her a wary look. ‘Nina Bellew. Becky, my daughter – she’s seven – and Nathan. Nathan’s ten.’
    At the sound of his name the boy’s eyelids flickered but he didn’t really come out of his stupor.
    ‘Anyone else?’ Derwent asked.
    ‘Debbie, my wife.’
    ‘No, she wasn’t there. She’d gone out, remember? Down to the shops. She wasn’t there at the time of the fire. That’s what he asked. Not who lives in the flat. Who was there at the time of the fire.’ Nina Bellew reminded me of a crow, with her harsh voice and staccato delivery. The words rattled out of her like machine-gun fire.
    ‘Yeah, all right, Mum. Debbie had gone out.’
    ‘Did she go to the shops on the estate?’ I asked.
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘So she hadn’t been gone for long.’
    ‘No. Ten, twenty minutes?’
    ‘The bloody lift was broken again, wasn’t it? She had to walk all the way down and all the way back up again. Takes bloody ages.’ Nina sniffed. ‘She’s not one to hurry herself, is she?’
    If Nina was waiting for her on her return, I was inclined to feel Debbie had every right to dawdle.
    Before Derwent could ask his next question the simmering tension between the two small girls boiled over. Twin screams of rage tore through the air. It