Playing with Fire by Peter Robinson

got a driver’s-seat view as the fire engine raced to the scene.
    Most engines, or “appliances,” as the firefighters called them, were fitted with a “silent witness,” a video recorder that taped the journey to the source of the call. It could come in useful if you happened to be really quick off the mark and spotted a getaway vehicle, or arrived at the scene and got a picture of the arsonist hanging about enjoying his handiwork. This time, there was nothing. The fire engine passed a couple of cars going the other way, and it would probably be possible to isolate the images and enhance the number plates. But Banks didn’t hold out much hope they would lead anywhere. The fire was well under way by the time Hurst called it in, and the arsonist would be well away, too. It was an exhilarating journey, though, and Hamilton ejected the tapewhen the appliance came to a halt at the bend in the lane.
    â€œThere’s one thing that bothers me,” Banks said. “The boy, Mark, described the artist’s hair as brown but what little of it we saw on the boat was more like red.”
    â€œFire does that,” said Hamilton.
    â€œChanges hair color?”
    â€œYes. Sometimes. Gray turns blond, and brown turns red.”
    â€œInteresting,” said Banks. “What about Tina? Could she have survived?”
    â€œIf she’d been awake and aware, yes, but the state she was in…not a chance.”
    â€œThe way it looks, then,” said Banks, “is that the artist on boat one was the primary victim, yet some small effort had been made to see that the fire spread to boat two, where Mark and Tina lived. But why Mark and Tina?”
    â€œI’m afraid that’s your job to find out, not mine.”
    â€œJust tossing ideas around. Elimination of a witness?”
    â€œWitness to what?”
    â€œIf the arsonist was someone who’d visited the victim before, then he might have been seen, or worried he’d been seen.”
    â€œBut the young man survived.”
    â€œYes, and Mark did see two people visit Tom on different occasions. Maybe one of them was the killer, and he had no idea that Mark was out at the time. He probably thought he was getting them both, but he was in a hurry to get away. Which means…”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNever mind,” said Banks. “As you said, it’s my job to find that out. At the moment I feel as if we’ve got nothing but assumptions.”
    Hamilton tapped the graphs and stood up. “Not true,” he said. “You’ve got confirmation of accelerant usage in a multi-seated fire.”
    Hamilton was right, Banks realized. Until a few minutesago, all he’d had to go on were appearances and gut instincts, but now he had solid scientific evidence that the fire had been deliberately set.
    He looked at his watch and sighed. “Dr. Glendenning’s conducting the postmortem on the male victim soon,” he said. “Want to come?”
    â€œWhat the hell,” said Hamilton. “It’s Friday evening. The weekend starts here.”

Chapter 4
    â€œD o you know that it takes about an hour or an hour and a half at between sixteen and eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit to cremate a human body?” Dr. Glendenning asked, apropos of nothing in particular. “And that the ordinary house—or, in this case, boat—fire rarely exceeds twelve hundred? That, ladies and gentlemen, is why we have so much material left to work with.”
    The postmortem lab in the basement of Eastvale General Infirmary was hardly hi-tech, but Dr. Glendenning’s experience more than made up for that. To Banks, the blackened shape laid out on the stainless-steel table looked more like one of those Iron Age bodies preserved in peat bogs than someone who had been a living, breathing human being less than twenty-four hours ago. Already, the remnants of clothing had been removed to be tested for traces