A Donation of Murder Read Online Free PDF

on his pistol, the other pressing his handkerchief to his mouth and nose. He trod cautiously, testing the floorboards and joists before applying his full weight. The source of the flames turned out to be a stack of smouldering wooden furniture, topped by a cheap mattress. The smell of burning horsehair was sickening, and took Pike back to places he wished to forget: the African war, all those dead men and horses.
    An empty can of kerosene lying beside the pile explained the thick greasy smoke. It was hard to imagine men attempting to burn themselves alive. It must have been a planned diversion, Pike decided. Perhaps the noxious smoke had overcome them before they could make their escape.
    â€˜Police. Show yourself!’ he called into the gloom.
    No answer.
    Through the poor, smoky light, Pike caught a metallic gleam. He whirled towards it, his finger split seconds away from pulling the trigger of his pistol.
    â€˜Can we come in now, sir?’ the brass helmeted fireman asked.
    Idiot. Pike had almost shot him. ‘No. Stay where you are,’ he barked.
    He continued to make his way through the haze. A Remington rifle lay beside the body of a man stretched face down upon the floor. Pike kicked the rifle away and bent to check the pulse at the man’s neck, as Dody had taught him.
    No sign of life from this one.
    He moved deeper into the dwelling, finding two more dead men, one in the flat and the other on the landing. Were their deaths an accident, or had they hoped thesmoke or fire would kill them before the police did? Perhaps they’d decided this was a better alternative to the gallows — at least they had been in control to the last. Or had they?
    Witnesses to the robbery at the jewellery shop had said there’d been a group of men, four at least. Where was the fourth? Pike wondered as he moved about the creaking landing. He checked all ten rooms on the floor and found no sign of life, though plenty to suggest these were the homes of overcrowded family groups, living hand to mouth. In one room he found a drawer improvised into a baby’s cradle. A one-eyed doll stared at him from the floor, its china head a mosaic of cracks. Was this the flat where the terrified children he had tried to rescue lived? Did the dolly belong to the injured little girl? Best not to think about that.
    A few flames were smouldering their way through the paper-thin walls to the flat next door. Pike called the firemen in, warning them not to touch the bodies and to confine their activities to this floor only until further word from him.
    And then he heard a sound: footsteps on the floor below.
    â€˜You! Stop right there, police!’ he cried as he set off in pursuit. Looking down the stairwell, he glimpsed a small man in a cloth cap. The man was a lot more nimble than Pike, bolting down the stairs three at a time and swinging through the air at each turn of the banister.
    Pike did his best to follow him down five flights of stairs, but lost him on the first-floor landing. Pike stopped, listening to the sound of his own laboured breathing. The man could not have reached the ground floor so quickly unless he’d slid down the banister the rest of the way. Pike glanced at the dull wooden handrail. Strategically placed knobs put paid to that notion. And surely if the man had made it through the back door, Pike would have heard shots by now.
    He had to be somewhere on the first floor.
    Pike found him in the third flat he searched, hidden behind a wardrobe missing its door.
    â€˜Out you come, lad,’ he said to the boy, fifteen years old if a day.
    The boy stepped out, wide-eyed and blinking. His Adam’s apple scurried up and down his scrawny throat as he faced Pike and tried to swallow. He had a small triangular-shaped face and the beginning of a downy moustache on his upper lip. Pike recognised him immediately.
    â€˜Tommy “the Tadpole” Boo-champ.’ He pronounced the boy’s surname with the