Out of the Ashes: A DI Maya Rahman novel

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.

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