I expect it comes from working with someone who’s on the internet all the time.’
We both laughed, relieved to have a bit of banter.
‘Let’s hope they shut that bastard site down.’ Dan’s words came out in an angry whisper. ‘A lot of these kids don’t know how to keep themselves safe online.’
‘The kid with the gash is only ten.’ I gestured to the two shops. ‘What the hell’s he doing, roaming the streets with these older boys?’
Dan’s manner was sombre. ‘I agree. It worries me about my two girls. Kids are growing up so quickly these days. They don’t understand how careful they need to be.’ He was shaking his head. ‘At least it sounds like that young Syrian lad’s got his parents and brother to look after him.’
Back at the scene, Simon Chapel gave me a thumbs-up. A second aerial platform was manoeuvring itself into position outside the shop.
A uniformed officer was standing with two women at the cordon. From behind, they had similar frames. Both tall and slim. One had a curtain of blonde hair down her back, and wore a khaki parka with a furry hood, jeans and trainers. The woman she was talking to had dark brown hair in a ponytail, knee-high leather boots. I guessed they were Indra and her sister. I went straight over to them. ‘DI Rahman. You must be—’
‘Is my husband dead?’ The blonde woman’s voice quaked with fear. She had mascara smears round her eyes.
‘I’m sorry. We don’t know what the situation is yet,’ I said. ‘I think it’s only fair to warn you that if he was in the fire, it’s unlikely he will have survived.’ It was an awful thing to have to tell her, and I paused for her to absorb the news. ‘We should know more once the platform lifts a fire officer into the room where your husband is.’ I turned to the dark-haired woman. ‘Are you Indra’s sister?’
‘Таip. Marta.’ Her tone was as expressionless as her face.
‘I want to see Simas. I want to go up there.’ Indra kept covering her face with her hands and lapsing into her mother tongue. She took two paces to the left, then two back again. ‘Please can I—’
‘I’m afraid that’s not possible. It may be several hours before they can bring any victims out. As soon as we know anything, we will let you know. Would you like to go and get warm somewhere and we can ring you? It may not be until tomorrow.’
‘No. I want to stay here.’ Anguish was contorting her features, pulling the skin tight around her eyes and mouth. ‘Everything. My life is in that—’
‘Inspector?’ Simon Chapel shouted. ‘We’re going up now.’
The lift was finally in place beside the shop.
‘Excuse me,’ I said to Indra and hurried over to join Chapel, where a fire officer, in protective clothing and breathing apparatus, was being lifted up the outside of the building on the aerial platform.
‘He’s got a mic so he can tell us what he sees.’ Chapel was repeating the man’s commentary aloud to Dan and I. ‘Floor almost completely collapsed in the room on the left . . . some of the ceiling is down . . . nothing much in there . . . going to use binoculars . . . a few remnants of furniture . . . no-one alive in there . . . no signs of a corpse.’ He stopped. ‘We need to shift the lift over to the room on the right.’
A few agonising minutes later, the vehicle had moved and the crane was in place. The fire officers repeated the commentary procedure.
‘Floor intact in this room . . . what looks like a bed . . . a bump . . . bedding around the bump . . . yep, the body’s in there. He can smell it.’ Simon turned away from us to speak into his radio to his ground personnel. ‘Right, get the lift down and get him checked over. Someone chase up the structural engineer. If he can’t get here, get another one. We need to get that body out and that means getting in.’
I turned to look for Indra, to tell her that we had found a body, but she and her sister were nowhere to be seen.
While we waited for the engineer to arrive, I walked a couple of buildings away to make some calls. Dan was trying to get hold of Indra, so I rang the Royal London Hospital to inquire about Rosa Feldman. The news wasn’t good. With her asthma, and years of living with Józef’s cigarette smoke, the fumes she’d inhaled in the street had ripped through the lining of her lungs, the ward sister told me, and Rosa was still having difficulty breathing.
‘She’s on steroids and has been hallucinating,’ the nurse said. ‘She’s convinced she’s in the Warsaw Ghetto at the end of the war.’
We would have to hope she pulled through.
‘One thing,’ the nurse said. ‘She keeps mentioning masks. Black masks. Does that mean anything to you?’
*
Half an hour later, with so much soot in the sky, the light was fading fast. Floodlights shone over the crime scene and made it look as though it was the film set for a horror or disaster movie. The fire service engineer, Terry Dixon, had arrived. He confirmed within minutes that the building was not structurally safe to enter from the ground. To get Simas’s body out, we would ideally need to go through the windows, using support structures, but that would mean a further delay while we waited for those to arrive. Another option was for an enclosed cage – with a fire officer inside it – to be lowered through the hole in the collapsed roof from above.
‘We did something similar at that warehouse fire in Shoreditch a few months back.’ Terry was showing Simon the images on his phone. ‘D’you remember?’
‘OK,’ Simon said, his voice heavy with resignation and apprehension. ‘Let’s do it.’
Fifteen minutes later, and after careful manoeuvring by the lift operator, the fire officer was finally able to see into the room at the top of the house where he’d seen a body. I held my breath as he was lowered from above, where the roof had been. They had to move the lift at a painfully slow pace so that the cage and crane arm did not disturb the building structure. There was nothing above him to fall, but the walls were difficult to assess. Other than the instructions of Simon Chapel, the site was quiet. Until—
‘Hey,’ a voice shouted. ‘Why is he looking at that side of the building?’
We all turned and saw Indra, rake thin and ashen.
‘Our bedroom is on the left,’ she shouted. ‘Not that side.’ She bolted over to Chapel. ‘He’s got the wrong room. Simas isn’t in that room. Our bedroom is this one.’ She was pointing, jabbing the air urgently, her arms stick-like in the parka.
I followed her over to Chapel and relayed what the officer had seen when he looked through their bedroom window.
‘The floor collapsed? Where is he then?’ She glanced from me to Dan, and I could tell that the realisation was dawning that something wasn’t right. ‘Why would he be in the spare room?’
I was racking my brain for things to say. I wasn’t sure why Indra was bothered which room her husband was in. ‘Perhaps Simas went next door to sleep? Maybe he went in there to fetch something and got trapped by the fire?’ I could see
