The Burning Men

Book 0: DI Alex Finn

by Will Shindler

Genres: Mystery; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

The first in a phenomenal new procedural series featuring DI Alex Finn and DC Mattie Paulsen.

Perfect for fans of Mark Billingham, Peter James and Peter Robinson.

When a high-rise development in South London catches fire mid-construction, a close-knit team of fire fighters tackle the blaze. The building should be empty, but they find a man, unconscious, next to several cases of money.

The fire crew make a fateful decision: leave the man, take the money, quit the service and never speak of this again.

But five years later one of them is set alight in the toilets at his own wedding. Soon after, a second is found in the burnt-out remains of his Maserati, nothing but a smoking corpse. It appears that someone knows what they did. And there are still three firemen left to go....

DI Alex Finn and DC Mattie Paulsen are an unlikely pairing, but they need to discover who is behind these killings before the last man burns.

This is first in Will Shindler's Finn and Paulsen series—a British detective series that ranks with Mark Billingham, M.J. Arlidge, Staurt Macbride.

Release date: February 6, 2020

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

Chapter 1

Five Years Ago

It roared as it burnt. A monster lighting up the night. They saw it long before they got there, the usual banter tailing off as the scale of the blaze became clear.

‘Are you sure that’s empty?’ someone almost whispered.

‘Should be,’ replied Martin Walker. ‘It’s just a building site, however big.’

One Pacific Square was supposed to be a game changer, a multi-billion-pound regeneration project straddling the Battersea/Clapham borders. Well, the game was certainly changing. The foreign investors would have to wait a lot longer before they saw their money now. They’d be lucky if the unfinished structure of angled steel and glass was still standing by the time this was finished.

Stuart Portbury dragged the Mercedes-Benz Atego fire engine to a halt and the four other men disembarked. The wall of heat hit them instantly, their ears taking a second to adjust to the thunder of the flames above. Gary Elder and Adesh Kaul began pulling out the hoses while Phil Maddox fetched the Halligan bar – part claw, part blade, part tapered pick. It would get them through doors, padlocks, windows and anything else in their way. Walker could hear other sirens homing in on the site, bees buzzing to a gigantic hive. There’d be about thirty before long, coming from across London. Anything up to a hundred and fifty firefighters would be dealing with this before the night was over. And probably the next day too.

‘Third floor, top left.’

It was Kaul who was shouting. It took Walker a moment before he saw it, a figure – male, by the looks of it – frantically waving from a window. Walker strode to the cab of the fire engine.

‘Persons reported. Call it in, Stu.’ This would trigger the dispatch of an ambulance, a command unit and a station manager. It also just complicated the job. The priority would now be search and rescue before fighting the fire.

Walker ran back to join Elder and Kaul at the pump. The man on the third floor was no longer visible, smoke billowing out of the window he’d been waving from. A second fire engine was pulling up behind them. Walker recognised Sarah Connelly, his counterpart from Lambeth Station, jumping out.

‘Looks like we’ve got one trapped on the third floor, Sarah.’

‘What are they doing in there? It’s a construction site, the place should be empty?’

‘I want to send a four-man breathing apparatus team in,’ said Walker. ‘Gary, Phil, Adesh and me.’

‘I’d be happier with a two-man team. Why so many?’

‘The size; that’s a lot of floor space to cover and there might be more people in there.’

‘Alright, Marty . . . it’ll be a stage two entry control. You’ll need a crew manager – which I guess will be me. I’m calling for extra pumps at this section as well. We’ll need them. You know the drill; you don’t go in until there’s an emergency crew in place.’

Connelly headed back to her vehicle to fetch the electronic control board which tracked their oxygen levels. Walker could still remember the old days when you did the maths on the job.

Walker, Elder, Kaul and Maddox began strapping on their air cylinders. Connelly was directing her crew to break open a padlocked door. Advertising hoardings proudly boasting Opening in 2016 – Book your appointment now! hung above it.

‘That door is our entry control point. Your target’s an individual on the third floor and a potential search and rescue for anyone else who might be up there,’ Connelly said for the record. She wrote their names on to the control board as Walker and his team went through the rest of their safety routine – checking their air supplies, pressure gauges and radios. A third fire engine screeched in, two more firefighters jumping out and immediately going through the same procedures. The man hadn’t reappeared in the third-floor window. He was either looking for an exit, or he’d been overcome by the smoke. Walker contained his frustration as he waited for the go-ahead. Finally, the other crew manager signalled she was ready to Connelly.

‘You’re clear, Marty.’

All four men fitted face masks and pulled down their hoods. Connelly checked them over and waved them on. Sprinting forwards, Martin Walker momentarily pictured his wife Christine – as he always did when he ran into a burning building. Just in case.

Chapter 10

 

‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’

Finn looked at the woman in front of him, and momentarily wondered why the English language offered such limited vocabulary to cover bereavement. His hopes of returning to work without fuss were already over. As he’d made his way through the corridors of Cedar House he’d been intercepted by several well-wishers wanting to pass on their condolences. The effect was counterproductive. He knew it was a touch naïve, but he’d come back to work to get away from the reminders. The woman worked somewhere in IT support, and he thought her name might be Carol, but wasn’t sure. He forced a smile and walked on.

‘I mean it, you know. I am sorry,’ she said.

He turned and saw she was looking almost offended. Was there etiquette to how you received these comments too? Were the sentiments even genuine? He wasn’t really interested in whether Carol from IT, who’d never even met Karin, was sorry for her death. People said this stuff for their own benefit. They didn’t want to be seen as insensitive and he didn’t really care whether they were or weren’t. He nodded in acknowledgement and smiled with as much warmth as he could produce. Her face brightened. She’d got the little moment of intimacy between them she’d been searching for, and went on her way.

Finn knew he wasn’t the most popular person at Cedar House. In his time there he’d consciously made little attempt to socialise or even integrate with his colleagues. He firmly believed that just because you spent the day working under the same roof, it didn’t automatically mean friendship could be assumed. In turn, many of them found him arrogant, even plain rude. He didn’t mind, never being particularly one to get exercised by others’ opinions of him. But there was another layer to it too. Finn looked every inch the Oxbridge graduate he was. Add a certain coolness of attitude, and there were the ingredients if not for a class war, then certainly an underlying skirmish. For those who noted his reluctance to join the Friday night drinking clans, there was the reward of a slowly developed mutual trust.

Finn preferred people of substance, and he liked even more those who took the time to work him out. It helped professionally as well. Those in the team who judged quickly and superficially were likely to bring the same qualities to their work. His way of operating produced results, and people who tried to conflate a personal disregard for him with a professional one found it didn’t gather much traction. Every police officer respects competence; it gets you home on time. More importantly, it keeps you alive.

He’d used the previous afternoon to familiarise himself with the evidence gathered so far. The evening was then spent percolating. He’d ordered, then ignored, a pizza as his appetite continued to fail him. He’d then forced himself to go through the evidence again. And it was an effort. In the normal run of things, he was meticulous in his absorption of information. It was a skill most police officers acquired naturally over time, and Finn prided himself on it. But as much as he trained his mind on the details of Adesh Kaul’s wedding, it was the random details of Karin’s funeral that kept resurfacing. Grief wasn’t just tiring, it was merciless too. There seemed to be no activity – washing, eating, sleeping, working – that wasn’t visited by it.

He walked into the large open-plan office of the incident room and took in the familiar low-level hubbub of chatter and ringing phones. He was pleased at the lack of heads turning to register his presence. Maybe he was overselling his own importance. One exception was DS Jackie Ojo, who was at her desk leafing through paperwork. She greeted Finn with a warm smile. Known almost universally as Jackie O, Ojo was one of Finn’s solid citizens. For those officers at Cedar House who found Finn a bit too much like hard work, she was the perfect antidote. Ojo was a single mother, but rarely talked about her private life. If she found combining her job with raising a child on her own difficult, there was no clue. She always looked immaculate, and Finn could never shake the sense of a swan; serene on the surface but working furiously underneath to survive.

‘Good to have you back, guv. You okay?’

‘It’s better than daytime TV, I suppose. Is the boss in?’

‘Yeah, in his office.’

‘What about the new girl?’

Ojo looked awkward.

‘DC Paulsen’s not here; she hasn’t rung in either. I don’t know where she’s got to, to be honest.’

Finn arched an eyebrow. Hardly an auspicious start, and punctuality mattered to him. If he was required to be somewhere at a certain time that’s when he’d arrive, bang on the dot.

‘Have you met her yet?’

‘Briefly, she came in for an induction last week.’

‘And?’

‘Seems smart. Quiet though. Hard to get to know, I think, but it’s early days.’ This chimed with what Skegman told him in YoYo’s. Smart was good, distracted was not.

‘What are you working right now?’

‘The Thornton Heath stabbing. Looks on the periphery of gang-related stuff, but we haven’t handed it over to Trident yet.’ Trident was the Met’s department for tackling gang violence, and if it did come under their jurisdiction, it would usefully free Ojo up.

‘The periphery?’

‘Sounds like a fight over a girl involving some gangster types. Whether they’re actually part of anything and who was actually there, we’re still trying to establish. Usual bollocks.’

‘Keep me in the loop – it’d be good to have you on board though.’ Ojo nodded, and Finn moved on down the corridor towards Skegman’s office.

The DCI occupied a reasonably sized glass box of a private space. In theory it allowed for openness, but the way he sat there – stock-still, eyes darting around lizard-like as he stared at his screen – always reminded Finn irresistibly of Blofeld from the old Bond movies. He felt his phone vibrating and frowned when he didn’t recognise the number on the display.

‘DI Finn? It’s DC Paulsen. I know you were expecting me at the station this morning but I’ve gone straight to the crime scene. I’m at the Manor Park Hotel.’

The voice was distinctive, with a hint of an accent. Dutch possibly, he couldn’t tell. But it was the tone which surprised him; brusque, on the borderline of rude.

‘And why have you decided to do that?’

‘Something struck me overnight. Can you get down here?’

He really didn’t like the sense of being summoned, and by a rookie DC at that.

‘Well, I was intending to come down today at some point anyway.’

She didn’t reply.

‘Paulsen?’

‘Sorry, just saw someone I need to talk to. I’ll see you when you get here, sir.’ The line went dead. As introductions went, it was different, thought Finn.

An hour later, he was parking up in the surprisingly busy forecourt of the Manor Park Hotel. A couple of days on, the area around the banqueting hall remained a crime scene but there was a steady stream of people passing through. The hotel was taking in guests again after being given permission to reopen for limited business. The matter of a gruesome death over the weekend clearly hadn’t put off its clientele. Businessmen and women mainly, Finn noticed as he walked towards the entrance. Heads buried in phones, they seemed neither interested in nor bothered by the police presence.

The first thing that struck him was the smell. It was all pervading as he entered the lobby. Sour and rank, he was guessing it was a cocktail of the fire brigade’s work, the hotel’s sprinkler system and the charred micro fibres of what was left of Adesh Kaul. A slightly haunted young woman was sat behind the reception desk, while a uniformed police officer stood protecting a sealed-off passageway. The PC recognised him and pulled a cardboard box from behind the desk. Finn helped himself to blue plastic overalls, disposable gloves and bootees and slipped them on. He walked down a darkened corridor with the stench growing noticeably stronger until he arrived at a set of large double doors. There was a sign pointing the way to the toilets and he could hear the low-level conversation of the scenes of crime officers at work around the L-shaped corridor. Deciding he’d only be a distraction for now, he pushed the doors in front of him open and entered the deserted banqueting hall.

It was hard not to be affected by the scene inside. The room was untouched since its sudden evacuation over the weekend. Flattened rose petals were strewn over the floor beneath the mandap. Plates of food were still half eaten on tables, broken glass littered the carpet and even the wedding cake, part demolished, sat sagging still on its display table. The smell was now inside his throat, and he started to cough.

‘You’ll stop noticing it after about ten minutes,’ said an accented voice behind him. Finn turned and saw a tall, slightly gangly woman with a black bob. Even under the forensic apparel he could see she was distinctive, her face catching his eye. Part rock chick, part academic, it made you look twice. He made a mental note to cut that out straight away, not entirely sure where it’d come from.

‘DC Paulsen?’ asked Finn.

‘DI Finn? I’m sorry for your loss,’ she said formally.

‘Thank you, it isn’t necessary though.’

She looked uncomfortable, as if unsure whether she’d been inappropriate.

‘So, what brought you down here? I was expecting to meet you at the station this morning.’ He was trying to keep the irritation out of his voice, but she’d already managed to get under his skin. Her first choice on her first day was a minor act of insubordination.

‘Some of the wedding guests were due back today. They were staying here for the ceremony, but then left after what happened. The hotel told me they were coming back this morning to pick up their luggage so I wanted to catch them. They’ve had forty-eight hours for the initial shock to wear off and I thought that that, plus seeing the hotel again, might spark something. Bring back a memory or a small detail they’d forgotten in the immediate aftermath.’

When she spoke it was quickly and efficiently, and despite himself he found he was nodding. Not so much insubordination as initiative, it turned out.

‘And have you found something?’

‘Not from anything anyone’s said, but . . .’ She looked around the room again. ‘It’s all this. It’s lavish, very lavish – bells and whistles, and some.’

Finn took in the room properly this time. She was right; add the cost of hiring the hall to everything else and you weren’t talking thousands, more like tens of thousands.

‘Rich parents?’

‘That’s just it. One of the bride’s friends told me Kaul paid for the whole thing.’

‘His family paid?’ queried Finn.

‘No. Just him. He footed the bill for all of this, out of his own pocket.’

‘Interesting. He could just be boasting though – people never like admitting their parents helped them out. We need to have a look at his finances, see how well his business was doing. At the very least we should establish how he did manage to fund this. How much more work needs to be done on site here, by the way?’

‘Forensics should finish off later but the fire and the water in the toilet area hasn’t made it easy. I’m not sure how much they’ve got.’

‘Alright, I’ll go and talk to them – see where they’re at. What about the fire investigation team?’

‘Been and gone – we should get something back fairly soon from them. There’s still a lot of people who were here on the day who we need to take witness statements from. Quite a few of them have already disappeared into the wind.’

‘We’ve got a complete guest list though, haven’t we?’

Before she could reply she was interrupted by her phone ringing. She answered it and listened for a moment.

‘Okay, thanks for letting me know, we can be there inside half an hour,’ she said, before turning back to Finn.

‘Stephanie Kaul, the bride – she’s awake and wants to talk to us.’

 

Finn and Paulsen set off across south London to St George’s Hospital in Tooting, after Finn had checked in with the forensic team in the burnt-out toilet. The scene was a mess and he didn’t envy them their task. It was hard not to consider the irony of Adesh Kaul’s last moments – surrounded by firefighters whose uniform he’d once worn.

Roadworks meant the journey was taking considerably longer than it should. Sitting behind the wheel, Finn could feel the frown on his face beginning to ache. 

‘Better call the hospital and let them know we’re running late,’ he told Paulsen, who was staring absently out of the window. She nodded without reply, and made the call. He refocused on the road. Paulsen certainly hadn’t made any extra efforts to ingratiate herself since they’d left the hotel. Over the years he’d seen every kind of response from a new officer on their first day. There were the eager-to-please puppy dogs, the measured ones who kept something back and the loud brash types keen to impress. She was giving him something new. He’d spent most of the journey trying to figure out whether it was an affectation or genuine. With the traffic reducing them to a slow crawl, he decided to test the waters.

 ‘So how are you settling in?’

 ‘Hard to say – first morning of the first day. But I’ve only heard good things about Cedar House so it’s good to finally get started.’ 

 ‘Your accent – I can’t quite . . .’

‘Father’s Swedish, mother’s from Croydon. I grew up in south London, so not as exotic as you might think.’ 

 ‘Holiday romance?’ 

 ‘No, they’re both scientists. They met on a research project.’ 

 ‘Not tempted to follow in the family footsteps, then?’ 

 ‘No. But one of the things I like about detective work is the methodology. Investigative work of any kind has a lot of shared principles with the sciences. Besides . . . I like fast cars.’

She said it in the same quiet monotone as before, and it took him a moment to register. He glanced across at her, and was rewarded with an unexpected lopsided smile, as she gestured at the non-moving traffic ahead of them. He smiled back, despite himself.

Half an hour later they arrived at St George’s, and after another ten minutes working through a maze of identical corridors, they arrived at a small reception area. A youngish doctor with a mop of red hair was sat studying an iPad intently.

‘Doctor Edwards?’ said Paulsen.

Edwards stood and turned.

‘I’m DC Paulsen, we spoke on the phone earlier. This is DI Finn—’

‘How’s she doing?’ asked Finn, skipping the pleasantries.

‘Not great, as you can imagine. You know what happened?’

Finn turned to Paulsen for a steer.

‘When she heard what was going on in the toilet she ran to try and help her husband. She suffered some burns in the process.’

‘There was smoke inhalation too. We’ve given her a lot of painkillers and kept her sedated for the most part,’ said Edwards. Finn nodded.

‘Probably no bad thing.’

‘This morning she expressed a wish to talk to the police. She hasn’t said a word since. She’s refused food, but she’s drinking water at least.’ Edwards paused. ‘I appreciate you’ve got a job to do, but her mental state is extremely fragile so please use some common sense, eh?’

Finn nodded in acknowledgement, and the doctor led them into the ward.

There was only one bed curtained off from the rest of the room, and Edwards pulled the curtains apart to let Finn and Paulsen through. Just for an instant, Finn’s thoughts turned to another woman in another hospital bed, but there was no time to dwell. His eyes narrowed as he saw the condition of the woman lying there. Though they’d been warned of her injuries, it was still shocking to see. There was a dressing over the left side of her face and on her left arm. Both her hands were bandaged and the hair on the left side of her scalp was scorched away. What struck him most wasn’t the physical injuries, it was the look in her eyes – dead and expressionless. Terrible as her injuries were, she looked as if she was barely aware of them. Barely aware of her surroundings even.

‘How bad are the burns?’ whispered Finn to Edwards as they approached.

‘She should make a full recovery, but the next few weeks are going to be painful.’

That was an understatement, thought Finn. He tried to imagine how the woman in front of them would have looked on Saturday afternoon. In her wedding dress, committing to the man she loved. They were supposed to be in Bali now – lying on a beach without a care in the world. He walked carefully over and took a seat next to the bed.

‘Hello, Stephanie, I’m DI Finn and this is my colleague DC Paulsen. How are you bearing up?’

She stared ahead, as if she hadn’t heard him. He recognised that expression; when your mind was working so hard to absorb something, it was almost impossible to articulate anything. He’d felt like that himself enough times recently.

‘How’s Neeta?’ said Stephanie eventually in a dry voice. Finn glanced up at Paulsen quizzically.

‘His mother,’ Paulsen whispered in his ear. She turned to the woman in the bed and smiled reassuringly.

‘She’s being looked after by the family.’

Neeta Kaul, by all accounts, hadn’t stopped sobbing for the first twenty-four hours after her son’s death. The family liaison officer said she was sat alone in her bedroom rejecting all attempts to console her. An awful lot of trauma counselling was going to be needed and Paulsen wondered whether it would ever be truly enough. Finn gave Stephanie a gentle smile.

‘I’m told you wanted to speak with us?’

‘Who did this?’ she said finally.

‘We don’t know. We’re still looking into the circumstances.’

There was truth to that too, thought Finn. There was still a possibility it was all some sort of tragic accident. It was highly unlikely though. Adesh Kaul neither smoked or vaped. The early forensic work showed no evidence of a phone or any other electronic device which might have exploded, and nobody was seriously going down the spontaneous human combustion route.

‘Someone did this to him, didn’t they?’

‘It’s a possibility. We’re not ruling anything in or out at this stage. We’ll wait and see what evidence the forensics give us and also what the post-mortem shows before we start building a picture.’

‘What do you think though?’

‘I don’t. Or at least we don’t. It’s a misconception from movies and television that we throw around theories and hunches. The reality is we try to be guided by the facts and by evidence, then let that direct us.’

Paulsen was watching Finn as he spoke. His voice was so quiet she could barely hear him, and his tone was easy and conversational. If you’d walked in on them then you might be forgiven for thinking he was family, or at least a close friend. It struck her randomly how smart his appearance was – the closely trimmed hair, the crisply ironed shirt, the carefully moisturised skin. She reminded herself this was a man who’d just cremated his own wife. If he was falling apart, it wasn’t showing. Outwardly, anyway.

‘But you think he might have been murdered?’ said Stephanie.

‘Like I say, until we know more, nothing’s off the table. Did he have any enemies you can think of?’

‘No. That’s just it . . . Adesh was the most easy-going guy you could ever meet. He never really lost his temper.’

‘There’s nobody – no situation – you can think of then?’

She stopped to properly consider the question, then shook her head.

‘Is there anyone who might have had a problem with the wedding?’

‘No, why would there be?’

‘An ex-boyfriend maybe? Someone else who liked you?’

‘No, nothing like that either. And both our families were just thrilled to bits. There was no one who was opposed to the marriage, quite the opposite.’

‘Did Adesh have any financial problems?’

‘No. His business was a success and we were all so proud of him. It was a big risk when he quit the fire brigade but it turned out to be the best thing he ever did. He loved being his own boss.’

She started to cough suddenly, clearly in some discomfort. Edwards poured her a glass of water from a jug on a side table and passed it across, giving Finn a warning glance as he did so. They all waited a moment while Stephanie gulped it down.

‘Why did he quit the fire service?’ asked Paulsen.

‘Why put your life on the line every day when you’ve built up the expertise to earn good money much more safely?’

‘Some people don’t like the quiet life?’

Stephanie shook her head.

‘There was one fire . . . it was quite traumatic for him, I think. It wasn’t the reason he quit but I think it helped make up his mind.’

‘Can you remember anything about it?’ asked Finn.

‘He was one of the first responders at One Pacific Square.’

Paulsen saw Finn react.

‘What was it about that one that was different?’ he asked.

‘A man died. They were too late, I think . . .’

Finn nodded, but Paulsen could see an intensity about him now, as if a switch had been flicked.

‘One more night . . .’ said Stephanie, almost as if to herself.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ said Finn.

‘We wanted a baby, and we always said that the most magical thing would be to conceive our child on the night we got married.’ The tears were beginning to . . .