It took no more than a match, nestled beneath the crumpled paper and foil crisp packets. The flame smoldered, then flared and crackled, and within seconds tongues reached out for the bottom layer of furniture stacked so conveniently on the ground floor of the old warehouse. Nothing burned like polyurethane foam, and the cheap chairs, sofas, and mattresses removed from the flats on the upper floors of the building were old enough not to have been treated with fire retardants.



A gift. It was a gift. He could hardly have asked for more if he had assembled the ingredients for a perfect fire himself. The furniture would generate enough heat for flashover, then the old wooden floorboards and ceiling joists would blaze with a beautiful fury. The fire would take on a life of its own, separate from its creator.

And the fire had power, that he had learned early on, power to exhilarate, power to transform, power to induce wonder and terror. He had first read about the great Tooley Street fire of 1861 in school, which seemed to him now an odd place to have discovered a life's calling.

The conflagration had burned for two days and consumed over three hundred yards of wharf and warehouse, damage unequaled since the Great Fire of 1666, damage not to be seen again until the Blitz.

There had been other fires, of course: the Mustard Mills in 1814, Topping's Wharf in 1843, Bankside in 1855; it seemed to him that fire was as necessary to Southwark as birth and death, that it provided an essential means of growth and regeneration.

Heat began to sear his face; the skin across his cheekbones and forehead felt stretched, his nostrils began to sting from the smoke and escaping gas. The blaze was well under way now, burrowing deep into the pile of furniture, then licking out in unexpected places. It was time for him to go, but still he lingered, unable to tear himself from the energy that gave him more than a sexual charge-it was a glimpse into the heart of life itself. If he gave himself up to it, let it consume him, would he at last know the truth?

But still, he resisted complete surrender. Shaking himself, he blinked against the stinging in his eyes and took a last look round, making sure he had left no trace. Satisfied, he slipped out the way he had come. He would watch from a distance as the fire mounted to its inevitable climax and then…then there would be other fires. There were always other fires.

Rose Kearny liked night duty best, when the station was quiet except for the muted murmur of voices in the staff room as everyone went about their assigned tasks. There was something comforting about the camaraderie inside held against the dark outside, and in the easing of the adrenaline rush after a call out. And she considered herself lucky to have ended up at Southwark, the station where she had trained, and the most historic in the London Fire Brigade.

She and her partner, Bryan Simms, were checking their breathing apparatus after the first bell of the night-a little old lady in a council flat, having decided to make herself a bedtime snack, had dozed off with the chip pan on the burner. Fortunately, a neighbor had seen the first sign of smoke, the blaze had been easily contained, and the woman had escaped serious injury.

But every fire call, no matter how minor, required a careful examination of any equipment they had used. Tonight she and Bryan had been assigned BA crew and their lives depended on the efficiency of their breathing apparatus-and on one another. Simms, at twenty-three a year older than Rose, was as steady and reliable as his square, blunt face implied, and not inclined to panic.

He looked up at her, as if sensing her regard, and frowned in concentration. "What's in a name?" he asked, as if continuing a conversation. "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

For a moment, Rose was too startled to respond. Not that she wasn't used to being teased about her name, or her fair looks, but this was the first time one of her fellow firefighters had resorted to Shakespeare.

Taking her silence as encouragement, Bryan went on, grinning, "But earthlier happy is the rose distilled, than that which withering on the virgin thorn grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness-"

"Piss off, Simms," Rose interrupted, smothering a laugh. She had to admit she was impressed he'd gone to the trouble of memorizing the line. "I'd never have taken you for a Shakespeare buff."

"I like the second one. It's from A Midsummer Night's Dream," said Simms, and she wondered if she had imagined a blush in his dark skin as he bent again over his task.

"You don't say," Rose retorted with a smile. "And Romeo and Juliet as well. Aren't you the clever one." Her father, a high school English teacher, had begun quoting Shakespeare to her before she could talk. "Look sharp there," she added, glancing at his neglected equipment. "You don't want to miss a crack in that hose."

She'd started with the Southwark Fire Brigade six months before Bryan, and she never missed an opportunity to remind him of her seniority. It was hard enough, being female in what was still basically a man's profession, and she certainly couldn't afford a partner with some half-baked romantic idea about their relationship.

Rose meant to go far, perhaps even divisional officer one day, and she wasn't about to let an entanglement stand in her way. Not that she was averse to a night out and a bit of a recreational cuddle, but not with someone on her own ground. And the job left no time for a real relationship. If you wanted to be good, you had to eat it, sleep it, breathe it. She wanted more than the ability to put a fire out; she wanted to understand the why and how, and fire investigation was a way to move up in the ranks.

It was now after midnight, and she intended to use her downtime to study if things remained quiet. She'd just stowed the BA set and pulled out her books when the bells went for the second time that night.

Rose felt the familiar jolt of adrenaline, and then she and Bryan and the rest of the watch were running for the pole-house. Descending to the appliance bay, they began rigging in fire gear as the duty officer called out "Pair," over the Tannoy, meaning that both the pump and the pump ladder were needed. As if of their own volition, Rose's hands performed the familiar rituals: fastening her tunic, tightening the throat buckle, pushing back her hair before slipping on her helmet and adjusting the chin strap, clasping her belt so that the weight of the small axe rested against her hip.

The station officer, Charlie Wilcox, ripped the call slip off the teleprinter. "It's just round the corner-warehouse in Southwark Street," he told them. "Sounds like it's well away-we'll need sets on this one."

Within seconds they were aboard the appliance and rolling into Southwark Bridge Road, sirens wailing and blue lights flashing. A fine drizzle blurred the September night, slicking the tarmac and haloing the street lamps. As they swung round into Southwark Street, Wilcox called out from the front, "It's showing."

As the pump came to a stop, Rose saw a bank of smoke hanging heavily over the street, and in the lower windows of a brick Victorian warehouse, the telltale red-orange flicker of light. Acrid smoke stung her nostrils as she leapt from the back step of the appliance and pulled on her mask. She caught a glimpse of huddled bystanders as Wilcox said, "Rose, Bryan. It looks as though the worst of it is still confined to the ground floor. Take in a guide line and check for occupants." He turned to his sub officer, Seamus MacCauley. "Check round the back, will you, Seamus? See what we've got."

The other BA team from the pump ladder was already laying hose line as Rose and Bryan tallied in their breathing apparatus, checked their radios. "Door's open," she heard Wilcox shout as she pulled her visor down, and she registered a faint surprise before focusing again on her task.

They went in low, Rose leading, peering through the smoke, feeling their way into the dense blackness. The heat seared, even through their coats, and she could hear the groaning and cracking of a well-established fire. She fell against something soft and bulky, went down on her knees. Through a momentary thinning of the smoke she saw shapes piled above her like a giant child's tower of blocks. The disjointed images suddenly coalesced.

"It's furniture," she said. "Someone's piled up bloody furniture." The polyurethane foam used in furniture cushions and mattresses was highly flammable-the thought of the devastating fire that had started in the furniture department of the Manchester Woolworth's crossed her mind, but she banished it, concentrating on the job at hand.

Still on her knees, she moved forward, feeling her way round the obstacles, trying to find a suitable place to tie off the line. Suddenly, there was a loud crack, then a series of pops, and the heat bloomed as debris rained down on them.

"Flashover," shouted Bryan. She felt him grab her waist belt. "We've got to get out of here. Forget the line, Rose."

Even with Bryan's weight dragging at her, her momentum carried her another foot, her hand still outstretched with the line.

"I said forget the fucking line, Rose. Evacuate! Evacuate!"

Even though her stubbornness, her refusal to let the fire get the better of her, was one of the things that made her good at her job, she knew he was right. Going on would be suicidal, and nothing could have survived this blaze without protection.

Hemmed in on one side by a sofa, on the other by what seemed to be stacks of lumber, Rose tried to turn back the other way. As she maneuvered her body round, her gloved hand came down on something that yielded beneath her fingers. It felt malleable, like flesh, with the brittleness of bone beneath.

Rose looked down, blinking eyes burning and swollen from the heat, and felt the bile rise in her throat. "Jesus Christ," she said. "We've got a body."



On this morning there had been no drifting slowly into consciousness, no lingering in imagined wholeness, no savoring the memory of life as it used to be.

Fanny Liu opened her eyes and took stock, reluctantly. It was later than usual, that she could tell by the angle of light in the sitting room window, but still overcast, as it had been the previous day. She slept, as she had since she'd become unable to manage the stairs, on an old velvet-covered chaise longue that had belonged to her mother. For once in her life her small stature was a blessing-a few inches taller and her feet would have hung over the end of her makeshift bed. At night the arms of the chaise cradled her, offering a solid comfort; in the daytime her bedding could be tucked away, allowing her to maintain an illusion of normalcy.

Elaine had argued with her, of course, wanting to put a bed in the sitting room, but for once Fanny's soft refusal had held sway over her flatmate's brisk efficiency. The wheelchair was bad enough. For Fanny, a bed in the sitting room would have meant admitting the possibility that she might not improve.

Her cat, Quinn, still lay curled on her feet. The only sound in the flat was his faint purring. It was the silence that had awakened her, Fanny suddenly realized. There were no footsteps upstairs, no sound of movement in the kitchen. Elaine was always up first, making coffee and puttering round the flat. Before leaving for her job as an administrative assistant at Guy's Hospital, she allowed time to make Fanny tea and toast and helped her with her morning routine.

Perhaps Elaine had overslept, thought Fanny-but no, Elaine was as punctual as Big Ben. Could she be ill? "Elaine?" Fanny called out, tentatively, pulling herself up by using the arms of the chaise. Her voice seemed to echo emptily, and a spark of fear shot through her. "Elaine?"

There was no answer.

Suddenly, Fanny remembered her dream, a jumbled nightmare of doors closing softly, and felt again the dream's inexplicable sense of loss. It made her think of the deathbed watches she'd kept as a private nurse before her illness, of the way she'd felt when she'd awakened from an inadvertent doze and known instantly that her patient had died while she slept.

Just as she knew, now, as the silence closed around her, that the flat was empty. The sound of the door closing in the night had been no dream.

Elaine was gone.



There was nothing Harriet Novak hated more than having to tell strangers that she attended Little Dorrit School. Grown-ups would smile and coo as if it were disgustingly sweet-which made Harriet wonder how many of them had ever actually read Little Dorrit-and kids looked at her as if she'd just teleported from another planet.

Not that the school itself was all that bad, she allowed, digging the toe of her trainer in the play yard dirt as she waited for the first bell. It was just that it sounded so God-awfully sickening-like telling people you were called Tiny Tim.

It helped to be prepared, Harriet had learned, knowledge a necessary defense against living in a Dickens-infested neighborhood. She'd read the biography in the school library, and could tell people more about Dickens than most wanted to know. Charles Dickens's father had been briefly imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison, just up the road, and twelve-year-old Charles had lived in lodgings nearby. This experience had stayed with him all his life, working its way into many of his books, and then his creations had come back to haunt the Borough. Not only did the area boast a Little Dorrit Court and a Little Dorrit Street, there was a Marshalsea Road, a Pickwick Street, and a Copperfield Street.

At least there was nothing named after Oliver Twist. Harriet thought Oliver a right little tosser, too sweet to be borne. Davey Copperfield she liked better. He was a bit soft on his dead mum, but at least he had bitten his horrid stepfather. Davey knew how to stand up for himself.

Harriet scowled, only half aware of the smoky tang in the air and the students straggling in the school gate. Her thoughts settled into a well-worn groove. Would it be better to have a wicked stepfather, like Davey, rather than a father who had walked out? He said he loved her, her dad, but if that was true, how could he have left them?

He told her lots of parents got divorced, that it was just something they would all have to learn to live with, but that didn't stop her missing him. Nor had his moving out stopped her parents' rows. She heard them arguing when he came to pick her up, and other times she heard her mum on the phone, shouting at him.

The last argument had been the worst, when her dad had taken her home hours late after her last weekend at his flat. Her mum had been sitting on the doorstep of their house, watching for them, and she'd run to the car as Harriet was getting out.

"You bastard, Tony, you selfish little shit," her mother had shouted-her mother the surgeon, who was always in control, who had never raised her voice before this began. Her dark curly hair bloomed round her head as if energized by her anger; her jeans and jumper hung loosely on her too-thin frame, making her bones look as sharp as her voice. "You're late, you don't answer your bloody phone-does it ever occur to you that I might worry? Anything could have happened."

Harriet stood frozen on the pavement. She'd glimpsed a movement in the open window of the flat next door and knew their neighbor was listening. In the street, a couple walking by with their dog pointedly looked away and increased their pace. She felt her face flush scarlet with embarrassment. "Mum, we only-"

"For God's sake, Laura," her father broke in. "We went to the bloody zoo. It was a nice day, and we stayed longer than we meant. Is that a crime?" His voice was level, tight, his face pinched.

"You were supposed to have Harriet back hours ago. You know the rules-"

"Mum, please," said Harriet, hearing the mortifying quaver in her voice. Her throat ached, and a sharp pain seared her chest. "I'm fine, really. Can we please go in?"

Her father shot her an anguished glance. "Laura, let it go, okay? You're upsetting Harriet-"

"I'm upsetting Harriet?" Her mother stepped back from the car, looking suddenly, dangerously, calm.

"Listen, it won't happen again," Tony said quickly, as if realizing his mistake. "Next time I'll-"

"There's not going to be a next time," her mum had said quietly, taking Harriet's arm in a vise grip and turning them both towards the door. As they reached the building, Harriet looked round and saw her dad pulling away, and if he had tried to ring her since, her mum hadn't told her.

Harriet hadn't dared ask her mother what she'd meant, but the words had stayed with her over the past few days, disturbing her sleep and haunting her waking hours.

She shifted her backpack and frowned again, aware of a headache coming on. She hadn't eaten her breakfast and her empty stomach was starting to cramp.

That was one of the worst things about her parents' separation-now, with her dad gone, when her mother had to work night duty at the hospital, she left Harriet with old Mrs. Bletchley, who lived in one of the cottages across from the school. Mum said Mrs. B was lonely and enjoyed having children stay with her, but the woman reminded Harriet of the witch in Hansel and Gretel, and her house smelled of cats. That morning she had given Harriet some sort of unspeakable hot cereal for breakfast, which Harriet had mushed around in the bowl and tipped in the bin when Mrs. B wasn't looking.

A shiny black Range Rover pulled up to the school gate and a boy climbed from the back, shrugging into his backpack with impossible-to-imitate eleven-year-old cool. Shawn Culver was a year ahead of Harriet, and the most popular boy in school.

"Hey, Harry," he called out, seeing her watching. She nodded without smiling, determined not to appear impressed, but she didn't protest his use of the hated nickname. She tugged her hair more tightly into its bunch, suddenly aware that she looked as if she hadn't bothered to wash that morning-which she hadn't. And if her hair weren't bad enough at home, when she could smooth it down with some of her mum's gel, on a Bletchley morning it was impossible.

The bell rang. She'd turned to follow Shawn with a studied nonchalance when the sound of a car braking fast made her look back. It was a dark green Toyota, like her dad's-no, it was her dad's. As she made out his face through the tinted glass, she saw that he was motioning to her. What was he doing here, before school? Was something wrong? She felt suddenly hollow in the pit of her stomach, as if she'd just come over the top of a roller coaster.

She started towards the car, slowly, aware of the second ring of the bell, of the play yard emptying behind her. As she neared the car she realized there was a second person in the passenger seat, a woman, and for a moment her heart flared in wild hope.

Then her dad reached back and swung open the rear door, and she saw that the woman was not her mother, but a stranger.

"Want some coffee, guv?" asked Doug Cullen, popping his head into Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid's office. "I mean real coffee, not that slop," Cullen added, nodding at the mug on Kincaid's desk.

Kincaid grimaced at his sergeant and laid down his pen, stretching the stiffness out of his shoulders. "You just want an excuse to get out, and we've not been here an hour." They'd come in early the past few days, catching up on accumulated paperwork, and the warren of cubicles that made up Scotland Yard's CID had begun to seem more like a prison than an office.

"Guilty." With his thatch of straight blond hair and wire-framed spectacles, Cullen looked more like a schoolboy than a detective sergeant. But in the year since Kincaid's former partner, Gemma James, had been promoted to detective inspector and posted to the Metropolitan Police, he had learned to work well with Cullen, respecting the younger officer's intelligence and dogged persistence when faced with a problem.

Not that Cullen or anyone else could truly replace Gemma as a partner. Although he and Gemma had been living together since the previous Christmas, he found he still missed working with her.

Glancing out his window, he was tempted to play truant along with Cullen, but the pile of paper on his desk argued against it. Besides, the day had gone perceptibly grayer since he'd come in, and he wasn't in the mood to get drenched. "Okay," he said, stifling a sigh. "A coffee. But just coffee, mind you, no poncey lattes."

Cullen grinned and gave him a mock salute. "Right, boss. Back in a tick."

It was a bad sign, Kincaid thought, when going out on such a dreary morning seemed preferable to work, but administrative reports had never been his strong suit. Not that he didn't have the aptitude for it; he just lacked the patience. He hadn't joined the force to become a bloody bureaucrat, yet that seemed more and more the case. And he had reached the point in his career where he felt increasingly pressured to seek promotion, but such a move would mean still less work in the field.

Could he stay where he was, watching the university fast- trackers like Cullen pass him by, without becoming bitter? It was not a prospect he wanted to consider, so with a scowl he turned his attention back to the performance survey on his desk. But when his phone rang a moment later, he leapt on it like a drowning man.

It was his guv'nor's secretary, summoning him to a meeting with the chief superintendent. Kincaid straightened his tie, grabbed his jacket from the coatrack, and was out the door with only a twinge of regret for his missed coffee.

Chief Superintendent Denis Childs had moved office recently, now commanding a view of the parks and the river, but in spite of his elevated status the man remained as Buddha-like as ever. His round, heavy face betrayed little emotion, but Kincaid had learned to read the slightest flicker in the deep brown eyes half hidden by folds of skin. Today, he detected apology, annoyance, and what might have been a trace of worry.

"I'm sorry to put this on you, Duncan," said Childs, his voice surprisingly soft for a man his size.

Not a promising start, Kincaid thought, settling himself in a chair. Perhaps he should have stayed with the paperwork, after all. "But?"

"But as you have nothing pressing on at the moment, and as you have a knack for soothing ruffled feelings"-Childs's Childs's lips turned up in the smallest of smiles-"you seemed the best man for the job."

"I'm not going to like this, am I?"

"You can look on it as a diplomatic challenge. It will mean liaising with the Fire Investigation Team and Southwark CID. A fire broke out in the early hours of this morning, in a warehouse on Southwark Street. Do you know it?"

"Southwark Street? That's near London Bridge Station, isn't it, not far from Borough Market? But why send me?"

"Patience, boyo, patience. I'm getting there." Childs leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers together, a familiar gesture. "This particular building is Victorian, and was in the process of being made over into luxury flats. The fire apparently started on the ground floor, but by the time the brigade got there it had done considerable damage to the upper floors and had begun to threaten the building next door."

"The warehouse was empty, then, if it was undergoing renovation?"

"Not quite. When the brigade got inside, they found a body among the debris. Quite badly burned, I'm afraid. And no identification."

"A tramp, smoking-"

"Possibly, although tramps aren't usually found naked with no effects. And it gets a bit more complicated. This particular building happens to be owned by one of our more illustrious MPs, Michael Yarwood."

"Yarwood?" Kincaid sat up a bit straighter in surprise. "I didn't know Yarwood was developing property." The vocal and abrasive Yarwood leaned far to the left of the government's moderate Labour Party, and was often heard publicly castigating anyone capitalist enough to make a profit. "This could be awkward for him, I take it? And the press will be on it like flies."

"An understatement. A public relations nightmare in the making, to be more accurate, especially with an important by-election coming up. Not to mention that the loss adjustors are already sniffing round and muttering about possible insurance fraud. And I've heard rumors from other quarters-one of my golfing mates who's in the property market-that Yarwood hasn't had the early interest in his leases that he expected."

"Ouch." Kincaid winced. "So he might have a very costly boat anchor on his hands-or he did until last night."

"Not that he'd admit it. But the powers-that-be are worried enough that someone from Number Ten rang the assistant commissioner and called in a favor."

"And that's where I come into it?" Kincaid said, enlightenment dawning.

"The word is they only want to be sure the investigation is given high priority-"

"Meaning they want to be sure Yarwood's interests are well represented." Kincaid weighed the prospect of taking on such a politically sensitive case against going back to his performance reviews. It could prove messy, both literally and figuratively. He hated self-important politicians, and fire scenes had always given him a bit of the creeps.

"You can refuse, of course," said Childs, with a deceptive gentleness Kincaid recognized. Not only did Childs want him on the investigation, he knew that Kincaid could use the good mark in the AC's book.

"Is the body still in situ?" Kincaid asked.

Childs permitted himself another small smile. "I told them to wait for you."