Cooper began to move towards the doorway, but hesitated. ‘See you later?’

Petty nodded. ‘Yeah.’

Diane Fry stood in the burnt-out building, her nostrils filled with the stench of smoke and charred furniture. Water still sloshed around on the floor from the fire crew’s hoses, black and floating with ash. She was aware of Cooper talking to Liz Petty outside, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying, and she didn’t want to. She moved further away from the window, in case she overheard her name. Deep inside, she was holding on to a tide of anger. It felt too strong to resist for ever, or the dam would burst. She had to channel it in some way.

She looked around the storage area. A doorway straight ahead of her led into what she remembered as the staff room, used by the bearers and office staff for their lunch breaks. There were a couple of tables and some tubular steel chairs, a sink, a cooker, a fridge. Paper had been seared from the walls and hung in shreds, like burned skin. The vinyl flooring had melted and bubbled into twisted shapes, lunar contours that swallowed the shadows from the crime scene lights.

To the right, a second door stood open. Fry moved cautiously across the room, following the aluminium stepping plates. She was irrationally afraid of touching anything – not in case she left fingerprints, but for fear that the scorched surfaces would leave black marks on her skin and clothes. She felt as though they’d somehow contaminate her, bring out on her body the dark stains she could feel growing in her mind ever since she’d listened to those phone calls.

Everywhere she’d gone during the last few days, she’d been wondering if she was in the dead place. She’d been expecting to find a body at any moment, as if a decomposing bundle of bloodied sacking lay behind every door, or the rustling of feeding maggots waited somewhere on the edge of her hearing. But now she wasn’t even supposed to be looking. No more chasing around the countryside.

Hardly realizing she was still moving, Fry found herself in the next room. What place was this? At first, she couldn’t interpret the sea of black pulp at her feet, sodden heaps rising several inches out of the water. A row of grimy shapes ran along one wall, stained metal drawers gaping open. Filing cabinets. She was in the room behind the main office, where the records were kept.

‘Oh, God.’

Fry turned and saw Cooper behind her in the doorway. He reached out a hand to one of the filing cabinets and rubbed the soot off a laminated label.

‘Personnel files,’ he said. ‘They’ve burned the personnel files.’

Chapter Thirty-One

Later that morning, Cooper finally got a chance to catch up on the files filling his pending tray, refreshing his memory of them in case there was anything important he’d forgotten. He didn’t achieve much. But handling the files made him feel a bit better, as if touching them might keep an enquiry alive.