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other smoke
alarm on the ceiling. Satisfied, he gripped his torch by its lamp and brought
its blunt end down hard on what he took to be the battery compartment of the
object. It disintegrated in shards of plastic fused with green and silver
circuitry.
    “Oh,
for …..,” began McKay, training his torch on Harkness’s destruction. “You do
know you get acid in batteries, don’t you?”
    “Good
point. Just as well it hasn’t got any.” Harkness pointed at the blackened and
distended springs and contacts, nothing filling the space between them.
“Interesting. Shall we continue?”
    “Right,
bog standard three-bed semi. Kitchen ahead of you, large living room to your
left, conservatory at the back. Interior doors left open.”
    The
other rooms had been less thoroughly ravaged by fire. Here and there, the forms
of furniture were recognisable: the skeletal springs of a sofa; the shattered
screen of a TV like a mouthful of broken teeth; a high tidemark of burning
where curtains had given the fire a conduit to the ceiling; a strand of colour
from a carpet; a raised hand or half a smile still visible on fragments of
photographs.
    “Those
windows have done well,” continued McKay. “Frames seem to have warped but
nothing has shattered.”
    Harkness
moved through the lounge, the remnants of a glass coffee table splintering
underfoot. Two large double-glazed frames dominated the room, matching in size
the smashed windows he’d seen above. The inner panes had been stained yellow
and brown, but the sealed units were intact. He tried both handles, finding
them securely locked. It would be easy even with his bulk to exit through a
window that size, assuming he could open it.
    “I
take it your boys smashed their way in upstairs?”
    “Too
right. Staircase wouldn’t hold a child. We’ve got a hammer for this sort of
glass. If it’s like that Stellarglaze stuff they’re always selling in my neck
of the woods, a fat man bouncing up and down it on won’t crack it, so forget
using your bare hands or a bedside lamp. Bloody liability.”
    “You
mean the window wasn’t open.”
    “I
keep forgetting you’re a detective.”
    Harkness
gazed at the windowsill, seeing nothing but the blurred grain of wood turning
to charcoal and fractured body parts from ceramic figurines fused into new and
grotesque shapes. Nothing resembled a key or a nail where a key might be hung.
    “Why
don’t you and I go upstairs, Mr McKay?”
    “I
know you think I’m easy, Sergeant Harkness, but I don’t do this for all the
cops.”
    Back
outside, Harkness watched McKay scale the ladder and pivot through the window
with the nimbleness of someone ten years younger and five stone lighter.
Nodding to the fireman assigned to steady the ladder and prevent actionable
accidents, Harkness followed, eyes fixed on McKay’s. The ladder shimmied and
skittered on the loose gravel below as he clutched and kicked the steps,
causing cold sweat to prickle his brow and the vomit to surge into his throat.
He was more than half-cut and on the verge of giving way to a fear that had
nothing to do with falling ten feet onto a well padded fireman. He hauled his
chest over the windowsill with the grace of a rutting walrus and McKay looped
an arm under his and helped him the rest of the way.
    “You
look like shit. Sure you should be here?”
    Harkness
swallowed a lungful of air, brimstone and ammonia raking his palate and throat.
He nodded and showed an upturned thumb, waiting for his thoughts to untangle.
    “You
just get your bearings then. And watch where you stand.”
    The
wide cone of McKay’s torch rotated slowly around the room, beginning at
Harkness’s feet. Long slivers of glass lay on the carpet, jumbled with the
broken frame of a chair, soil, stalks and fragments of a shattered plant-pot,
and the varnished form of a defunct police truncheon.
    A
few hours ago, the room could have graced an estate agent’s brochure: beige
carpet, fitted wardrobes and made to