The first thing she needed to know was how much evidence had been preserved from the original scene, and what had been interfered with. Here, in this house in Darwin Street, she could see at a glance there had been far too much interference. For a start, someone had disturbed the opened post that lay on the hall table, where it lay in a pool of dirty water. She poked at the envelopes with a finger. One of them seemed to be a packet of photographs back from the printers, and another was a BT phone bill. On the bottom were a couple of polling cards for next month’s county council by-election. Some local politician had just lost a voter.

Surrounded by the remains of a family’s day-to-day existence, Fry paused for a moment, listening to the slow drip of water from a ceiling, the crack of a splintered window frame. Her eyes drifted across the muddy carpet to the walls, scratched and gouged by passing equipment – hose reels, breathing apparatus, stretchers. Her attention settled on the incongruous chrome gleam of the spanner, still waiting for someone to pick it up and replace the wheel of the bike.

‘Ugh. The Marie Celeste, with extra charcoal.’

Fry lacked the energy to answer Gavin this time, let alone to shut him up. It was too early in the morning, and she was too depressed at having been on call when something like this came in. Derbyshire’s E Division didn’t catch an incident like this more than once every ten years or so. Of course, Edendale had house fires like anywhere else, but it was bad luck when someone died in one. Today was unlucky all round.

At least the structure of the building was intact. From the street, it had been hard to tell that anything serious had happened, except for the broken windows and the scorch marks where flames had licked the walls. It might just have been a rowdy party that had got out of hand. Inside, it was a different story. Whether the story was anything to do with her, Fry had yet to find out.

Fry tried to tune down her senses as she followed the approach path towards the tape that marked the inner cordon. She realized that the hallway smelled a bit like her kitchen – charred bacon and evaporated steam. When it was her turn to kick the bucket, this was the way she imagined it would be. She’d be a kitchen accident statistic, one more victim of a faulty toaster, killed by an exploding microwave. Death in the throes of breakfast.