Chapter 16

“Two restaurants burning down!” Sergeant Watkins stood in the village street, staring at the modern glass and concrete structure of the Westminster Bank. It looked completely out of place next to an old-world white-washed antique shop and a solid Georgian redbrick house with a brass plate outside, announcing it as a doctor’s surgery. “Now that’s too much of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

Evan nodded. “I’d say there were pretty high odds against it happening twice, unless she was a very careless cook who was always leaving pans of hot fat on the stove unattended.”

“And you don’t think she was a careless cook?”

“The kitchen was spotless when I saw it,” Evan said. “She strikes me as the sort of person who always knows exactly what she’s doing.”

“I reckon now’s a good time to go and talk to the local police,” Watkins said. “I’ll be very interested to hear what conclusions they reached about the fire.”

They returned to their car and drove slowly down the village street until they were back among the green hills again.

“Oh, and Evans, let me do the talking, okay?” Watkins said. “You know how touchy some people can be if they think you’re treading on their turf. They’ll want to know why we didn’t call them and ask them to take over this investigation.”

“And why didn’t we?” Evan asked.

“Because we don’t know what we’re bloody well looking for yet,” Watkins growled.

The closest police station turned out to be in Seaford, a small town on the coast, about five miles away. The desk sergeant shook hands as Watkins introduced himself and Evan. “North Wales Police, eh? You’re a long way from home. What brings you down to this part of the world?”

“We’re following up on a restaurant fire that happened earlier this week,” Watkins said. “The restaurant owner was a Madame Yvette Bouchard. We’ve just discovered that she was involved in a restaurant fire down here, in the village of Alfriston.”

The sergeant’s face suddenly showed interest. “A couple of years ago in Alfriston? Yes, I remember it.”

“Would you happen to have the incident report lying around? We’d appreciate it if we could take a look at it.”

The sergeant got up. “I’ll just go and check,” he said, “but it’s my recollection that we don’t have anything on that fire.”

“Wasn’t it your station that would have handled it?”

“Oh yes. It was our CID man that was sent out right enough, but if I recall correctly, the fire was deemed to be accidental in nature, so there were no criminal charges to follow up on.”

“The fire was an accident? Were they sure?” Evan asked, forgetting that Watkins had warned him to keep quiet.

“As far as they could tell,” the sergeant said. “It was a listed building, dating from the sixteenth century. Thatched roof, half timbered, very quaint but a real tinderbox. God knows what rubbish was stuffed into those walls. Of course it went up like a torch. There was nothing left by the time they put it out—burned right to the ground. I saw it myself. The fire had been so hot that the stove and the fridge looked like melted lumps of metal. Horrible it was. But they couldn’t find any evidence of an outside agent being used to start it, and they couldn’t come up with any kind of motive either.”

“Madame Yvette hadn’t received any kind of threatening letters?” Evan asked, making Watkins look sharply in his direction. “She hadn’t come to you for protection?”

“Threatening letters? Nothing like that, as far as I can remember.” The sergeant looked a little baffled. “Hold on and I’ll go and check. I think the inspector’s in his office. He’d know more than I would.”

He returned a few minutes later with a hollow, tired-looking man with graying hair and a bristly mustache. “This is Detective Inspector Morris. He was in charge at the time of the incident.”

Inspector Morris shook hands. “I don’t know if I can be of much help,” he said in an accent that betrayed a long-ago stint at a public school. “We all took it to be a simple accident—the kind of thing that tends to happen to old buildings. Are you saying it wasn’t?”

“We don’t know yet,” Watkins said. “But Madame Bouchard’s restaurant in North Wales has just burned down—which is a coincidence, don’t you think?”

The inspector was now clearly interested. “I’d say so,” he agreed.

“Of course, it could have been the latest in a string of arson fires,” Watkins continued. “The others appear to be the work of an extremist group—you know, Wales for the Welsh, that kind of thing. But this one doesn’t seem to fit the pattern.” He paused, glanced at Evan and then said, “And there was another element involved. A body was found in this fire.”

“A body? So it’s a murder investigation, then?”

“It looks that way,” Watkins said.

The inspector looked at them with new respect. “I see. Well, there was no suspicion of anything like that down here. We had our arson boys check it over and they came to the conclusion that it was probably faulty wiring. The owners had been told to replace the wiring when they first took over the building. Apparently they didn’t do so. And they didn’t have a working sprinkler system in place, which was a violation of code, but we didn’t cite them, considering the circumstances.”

“Circumstances? Was there any loss of life involved in your fire?” Evan asked.

“Luckily no. There could well have been if the firemen hadn’t responded so quickly. They found the owner just inside the door. She’d collapsed, overcome with smoke, trying to get out. Another couple of minutes and she’d have been a goner. As it was she was pretty badly burned. I remember seeing her—God she was a mess. Hair all burned off . . . I think she spent a long time in the burn trauma unit at the Brighton infirmary and she had to have a lot of plastic surgery.”

An image swam into Evan’s head—Yvette’s luxuriant hair piled on her head and no sign of burns. She’d apparently made a remarkable recovery.

“Was she the only person in there?” Watkins asked. “Nobody else was trapped inside”

The inspector shook his head. “It was the middle of the night, luckily. She ran the place alone after her husband died. A lot of work, if you ask me. I think she got a local girl in to help wait on tables at weekends, but she did all the cooking and clearing up herself.” He paused, then asked, “Look, do you want to come into my office and sit down? I don’t know what else I can tell you. As I say, the report stated that there were no signs of the fire being deliberately set, so that was pretty much that. We sent the report on to her insurance company and they paid out as far as I know.”

“And Madame Yvette never came to you before the fire? She never mentioned that she’d been threatened?”

“No. She never came to us. Are you saying that she received threats where she is currently?”

“She got two threatening letters and she felt she was being watched,” Evan said.

“Was she the one killed in the fire?”

“No, she’s alive and well. She got out in time,” Watkins said. “Our body is an unidentified male, probably French. And he was dead before the fire started—stabbed.”

“Fascinating,” the inspector said. “What does she have to say about it?”

“She claims to have no knowledge of anyone else being in the place. She’d already locked up for the night. She has no idea who he was.” Watkins said. “Essentially she’s given us her name, rank, and serial number, nothing more. If she knows anything, she’s not talking. That’s why we decided to come down here and see if we could unearth any skeletons in her closet.”

“I’m afraid not,” Inspector Morris said. “Not with us, at least. Of course, we’re just the local chaps. The highlight of our week is usually a breaking and entering, or a drunk and disorderly.”

“So if we were dealing with something on a bigger scale,” Watkins said cautiously, “importation of drugs from across the channel, for instance . . . you wouldn’t have any ideas on that score?”

“I think you’d have to ask HQ about that,” Inspector Morris said. “But we’d have received a directive to be on the lookout if they’d had any suspicions about this area. Of course drugs are probably coming in all the time in dribs and drabs, but it’s so easy these days, who can check? You can go across on the morning ferry, do your shopping and come back on the afternoon boat and half the time they don’t even check your passport.”

“But if it was a large-scale operation—an international group of organized crime?” Evan asked.

“Then it would be HQ, with Scotland Yard providing assistance in all probability. You’re not saying that these restaurant fires had anything to do with that kind of thing, are you?”

“We’re just trying to examine all possibilities,” Watkins said. “We need to find out how a man she apparently didn’t know was found dead inside her locked, burned-out restaurant.”

“I’d check with our HQ if I were you,” Inspector Morris said. “They have a drug task force. All I can tell you is that we never received any hint that there was anything suspect about that place.” He reached for the nearest phone. “Look, do you want me to call Lewes and see who’s around to answer questions today?”

“Uh—no thanks. Maybe we’d better wait until we’ve cleared this with the D.I. at home,” Watkins said quickly. “He might want to have a chat with your drug squad himself. We don’t want to overstep our directive.”

“No, you certainly don’t want to do that.” The inspector gave a tired smile.

Watkins extended his hand. “Thanks for the offer, and for your help.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t been of much help to you, but we had no reason to suspect we were dealing with anything other than faulty wiring in an old building. Let me know what the outcome is, will you? I’d like to find out if I’d had a hotbed of drugs under my nose and never knew it.”

“We’ll keep you posted if we find anything,” Watkins said.

They came out to a stiff sea breeze from the Channel. The water was dotted with whitecaps. A ferry was just leaving Newhaven bound for Dieppe. They stood for a moment watching it before Evan said, “I notice you got cold feet suddenly.”

Watkins nodded, still not taking his eyes off the ferry. “It occurred to me that we have no directive to look into anything more than a murder and an arson fire. I don’t want to put my foot into anything that might spoil the D.I.’s big roundup—his Operation Armada. It’s amazing how word gets around, isn’t it?”

“And if the drug route into Wales is part of an organized crime ring, they’ll probably have tipsters all over the place.” He shook his head. “Funny, but I don’t picture her as a cog in the wheel of organized crime somehow.”

“People can find themselves trapped in these things, can’t they? Maybe she owed protection money or she was a small-time user and next thing you know, they’re leaning on her to do them a favor.” The ferry was now just a dark blob in an angry sea. Watkins turned away and started to walk back to the car. “Or it might turn out that this has nothing whatever to do with drugs. I just wish we had one solid lead. I feel like I’m floundering in the dark.”

“So are you going to call the D.I. and then go back to the local headquarters in Lewes?”

Watkins stared out to sea again. “I don’t fancy facing the D.I. at the moment. He thought this jaunt was a waste of time to start with.”

“Maybe we should try the local paper,” Evan suggested. “They would have reported the fire, and who knows—they might have come up with some interesting tidbits the police didn’t know about.”

Watkins sighed. “It’s worth a try, I suppose. It can’t do any harm—although we’re not exactly dealing with the Sun down here, are we? I mean they’re not likely to be digging down for deep dark secrets.”

Evan grinned. “More like who won the baking contest at the townswomen’s guild?”

They checked at the nearest telephone booth for the newspaper offices and then drove back into Eastbourne.

“Nice country, this,” Evan commented as he drove between hills covered in smooth green grass on which sheep were grazing. “Sort of clean and fresh, if you know what I mean.”

“You make it sound like a deodorant ad,” Watkins said. “And don’t go breaking into song, either. I’m not feeling ultracheerful at the moment.”

“Have last night’s steak and wine come back to haunt you?”

Watkins shook his head. “No, I’m just trying to decide what we should do now. We know the restaurant burned down but everyone here thinks it was an accident and they had no suspicions about Madame Yvette or anything illegal going on. It doesn’t look as if we’ll get much further on our own.”

“We’ve only been here half a day, Sarge. Give it time.”

Watkins sighed again. “I’m afraid we’re barking up the wrong tree. The body in the restaurant might have had nothing at all to do with Madame Yvette or her restaurant. It could turn out to be a botched robbery or even Welsh extremists having a falling out . . .”

“Come on, Sarge,” Evan said. “Two restaurant fires in two years? There’s something going on here and Madame Yvette’s mixed up in it somehow.”

The offices of the Eastbourne Herald and Evening Argos were in a modern glass building on the outskirts of the town.

“You’ll want the archives center.” The girl at the reception desk had startingly red lips, long red nails, and a curtain of hair that covered one eye, but she looked impossibly young underneath the veneer. “It’s down the hall on the right. It’s all interactive now. The back issues are on our website.”

“Bloody ’ell,” Watkins muttered as they opened the door and found themselves facing a table with a computer on it. He looked around hopefully. “So what do we do now?”

“Do you need help?” A large, motherly woman appeared outside the half-open door.

Watkin’s face lit up. “We’re actually not very good with these things,” he said. “Do you think you could find us someone who could trace a back issue for us?”

The woman smiled, crossed the room and hit a key on the keyboard. “It’s loading now,” she said. “Just click on the date that you want. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Just click?” Watkins looked at her dubiously. “Are you sure I can’t blow up anything?”

She laughed. “It’s ever so easy. It only took me a two-day course.” She patted his shoulder reassuringly. “So where are you gentlemen from? Wales?”

“That’s right,” Evan said.

“I thought so. I could hear the accent.” She looked pleased. “You’re a long way from home then, aren’t you? I’ll go and get you that tea.”

“Humiliating, that’s what it is,” Watkins muttered as the woman walked away. “First our Tiffany and now a woman old enough to be my mother. I feel like a proper charlie. I’m going to take a course as soon as I get home.”

“Maybe P.C. Davies will give you private lessons,” Evan teased.

Watkins grinned. “I wouldn’t say no to that, but I got the impression she’d rather be working one-on-one with you than with me.” The program finished loading, leaving them with a screen full of choices. “You could do worse,” he added.

“Oh, come on, Sarge,” Evan felt himself blushing. “She was just being friendly.”

“Friendly, my foot. She fancies you, boyo.”

Evan nudged Watkins. “Go on, then. Click on the button of the year that you want.”

Watkins pushed the mouse in Evan’s direction. “You do it. I’ll probably wipe the whole thing.”

Evan leaned across and clicked. “We don’t know what month it was, do we? So we’d better start with January and work forward.”

“I’m glad it’s only a weekly and not a daily,” Watkins said. “We could be here all night.”

Items of local news flashed to the screen and vanished again. Borough council grants for improving the swimming pool. Hooliganism on the pier. The tennis tournament at Devonshire Park . . .”

“Surely it would have made the front page?” Watkins said in frustration.

“Unless it was a big week for news—it’s not likely to shove out Martina Hingis winning the tennis tournament or the Eastbourne Show.”

They got as far as September. “Wait.” Evan put his hand on Watkins’s arm. “Page three. There it is.”

A somewhat fuzzy black-and-white picture of the devastated site came onto the screen under the headline LOCAL RESTAURANT BURNS DOWN.

Evan skimmed the article. There was nothing that the police hadn’t already told them. Fire started in the middle of the night . . . quick response of local fire brigade saved owner’s life . . . She was rushed to the East Sussex medical center burn unit.

Then the article concluded, “This is the second tragedy to strike the vivacious Frenchwoman, whose husband died in a yachting accident three years ago. Since that time she had valiantly tried to keep the restaurant going single-handedly and was gaining a reputation for her haute cuisine.”

“Nothing much there,” Watkins said.

“Except for one thing,” Evan pointed out. “Her husband didn’t just die. He was killed—in yet another accident.”

“So either this woman is a walking Jonah,” Watkins began, “or she’s good at making things look like accidents. We should check on how much the insurance policy was for—and whether there was a big policy on her husband’s life.”

Evan nodded. “Of course there is another option. It’s just possible that someone’s out to get her in a big way.