Alex and Chloe stood in the stifling heat of the terraced house’s front room, assaulted by the heat being pumped out by the five-bar gas fire that was fixed to the wall. Alex remembered her own parents having a similar fire, decades earlier when she had been a teenager, before they’d had central heating installed. The smell of it evoked a number of memories, all of which she was loath to return to in the aftermath of everything the last year had thrown at her. That single fire in the living room had been relied upon to heat the whole house, yet she couldn’t remember ever having felt cold as a child. Sliding two fingers beneath the collar of her shirt in an attempt to peel the cotton from her sweating neck, it was obvious why not.

‘Cup of tea for either of you?’

The woman who lived there must have been at least eighty years old, though she had the energy of someone far younger. Chloe watched with a mixture of disbelief and admiration as she bustled about between them, clearing her teacup from the side table and plumping the floral cushions on the sofa as though welcoming long-awaited guests. She wondered whether the ringing of the bell that morning had signalled the first signs of human life beyond the house the woman had experienced for a while, and the thought filled her with a curious sadness that managed to make the oppressive heat of the small room even more unbearable.

‘Not for me,’ Alex said. ‘Thank you, Mrs …’

‘Adams,’ the woman told her. ‘Doris Adams, but please, just call me Doris.’

Doris gestured to the sofa and Alex and Chloe took a seat at either end, their mirrored positions with legs crossed and elbows on the armrests making them look for a moment like a couple of misplaced bookends. Alex noted the crocheted furniture protectors beneath her sleeve and behind her head and felt another twinge of nostalgia that tugged at her stomach. An approaching birthday was signalling fresh fears of ageing; fears she knew were futile, but that she was unable to shake off.

‘We’re speaking to everyone on the street,’ Alex explained. ‘Did you see or hear anything over at the hospital last night?’

Doris shook her white-haired head. ‘I didn’t hear anything until the sirens came screaming past. Fire again, was it? Been quite a few up there over the past couple of months.’

Alex nodded. ‘So there are trespassers over there regularly, you think?’

‘Places like that are always going to attract them. Drug addicts, kids messing about … Such a shame when you think of what the place used to be like.’

‘Have you always lived here?’ Chloe asked, slipping the sleeves of her jacket from her arms. If she left it on any longer she was at risk of melting inside it.

‘Sixty-four years,’ Doris said proudly. ‘Moved here when I got married, but I only came from just up the road. I was a nurse over at the hospital, you know. C2 ward sister.’

She got up from her chair and went to an old-fashioned sideboard, where she opened the top drawer. She pulled out a photograph album, velvet-covered and frayed at the corners, and crossed the room to sit between the two detectives on the sofa.

‘There,’ she said, turning a few pages and pointing to a photograph that was protected behind a thin page of clear plastic. ‘That’s me.’ The black-and-white image showed a row of female nurses standing for a photograph, all in full uniform. Doris was second from the right, little more than in her early twenties. Her hat was tilted on her head and she was smiling proudly for the camera. She was quite striking, Alex thought, the sparkle behind the old lady’s eyes making her still recognisable as the young woman in the picture.

‘It’s a lovely photograph,’ Chloe told her.

Alex stood and turned to the window, though little could be seen through the net curtains that kept the room hidden from the world beyond. The only view from this room would be the houses on the other side of the street, but she wondered whether the hospital’s derelict buildings were visible from the bedrooms upstairs. She doubted anything useful could be seen from this distance anyway. Most of the street had now been spoken to and it already seemed they were wasting their time. It appeared that at this time of year everyone was inside with the television on and their curtains drawn by six o’clock in the evening.

‘You must have been very sorry to see the hospital close,’ she said.

It seemed a dreary prospect: to have lived in the same house for all those years and to watch the places around you – the things that had once formed the shape of your life – crumble and disintegrate, left to go to ruin. The small town a mile or so further along the main road was evidence of the area’s decline: shops stood empty, buildings boasted boarded-up doorways and windows; the air above each street seemed to hang dreary and grey, as though even the sky had given up on what lay beneath it.

‘Well now,’ Doris said, closing the album and smoothing the front of her pale blue skirt over her knees. ‘Everything must come to an end, mustn’t it?’

‘Sadly true,’ Alex said, turning back to the room. ‘Thank you for your time, Mrs Adams. If you do think of anything, no matter how small it might seem, please let us know.’

Doris stood and followed the two women back out into the narrow hallway and to the front door. The detectives thanked her and stepped out into the October air. Out on the street, Chloe breathed in a cold lungful, grateful to have escaped the heat of the house.

‘What a lovely woman.’ She slipped her coat back on. ‘She doesn’t seem to know about the death at the hospital. Everyone else on the street appeared to have heard about it.’

‘She might not have left the house for days. Come on,’ Alex said, unlocking her car. ‘I think we’re wasting our time here. Let’s go and find out how Dan’s getting on with the missing persons database.’

---

Back at the station, they found DC Daniel Mason at his desk in the incident room, lost in the pages of the database. It never failed to surprise and sadden Alex that so many missing persons cases existed; even now, with so much technology and so many resources available that it seemed impossible anyone should be able to just disappear.

‘Any joy with the hostels?’

The remains of the sleeping bag found among the burned remains suggested that someone – presumably their victim – had been using the hospital for shelter. There were few facilities for homeless people in the Rhondda valleys, but in recent years a couple of hostels had been opened that offered free beds for those who might find themselves having to sleep rough.

Dan shook his head. The flecks of silver in his hair were beginning to compete for dominance and he was wearing the look well. ‘Homelessness is still Cardiff’s problem, by all accounts.’

‘Missing persons?’ Chloe asked.

‘I don’t know what I’m looking for,’ Dan said despondently as Alex and Chloe sat either side of him. ‘I think we need to wait until we get the post-mortem report back … I don’t even know if I’m looking for a man or woman at the moment, do I?’

Alex had realised that morning when she had assigned Dan the task of checking the database that doing so at this stage would probably prove fruitless, but patience had never been her strong point. With little else to go on, she had to try to cover any possible angles. DC Jake Sullivan had been helping with house calls on the street behind the hospital, while the rest of the team was looking into details of any CCTV footage in the area. So far, they were drawing a blank on all fronts. Alex hoped the pathologist would be true to her word and would get the post-mortem report to her by the end of the day.

She was SIO on the case, but she would be expected to report back to Detective Chief Inspector Thompson later that afternoon, and she needed something to offer him. No permanent appointment had been made since Superintendent Blake had retired during the summer, and in his absence Thompson had temporarily transferred from Bridgend. The man seemed decent enough, but it was obvious he resented being taken away from his own team.

‘The fire at Llwynypia Stores last night,’ Alex said, perching on the edge of Dan’s desk. ‘Also arson?’

Dan nodded. ‘Window at the side of the building was smashed – petrol-soaked rag thrown in.’

‘No CCTV?’

‘No tape. Camera was put there just to act as a deterrent.’

Alex rolled her eyes.

‘Think they’re linked?’ Chloe asked. ‘The residents we spoke with this morning said fires at the hospital aren’t unusual, though. Fire investigation team said the same.’

‘Fires aren’t that uncommon round our way either,’ Dan said, turning in his swivel chair and scratching his head. ‘Starting mountain fires is like a sport during the summer.’

Dan lived in Pentre, just up the valley from Llwynypia. He had been born in the valleys, had grown up there and was raising his own two daughters there. He was well known locally, and despite him being with the police, even the regular offenders had a respect for him that was rarely extended to his fellow officers. There had been occasions when he had been involved in the arrest of members of his own family, yet there never seemed to be any lasting resentment towards him.

Yet again, Alex’s thoughts were drawn back to her own house and to the graffiti sprayed across it. If only she had Dan’s personable nature, she thought. Clearly someone still had a lasting resentment where she was concerned. She knew she could just choose to ignore it, but a nagging doubt had been gnawing away at her all day. It was obviously not a random slur, and for someone to put themselves to the trouble of finding out where she lived and then going to the house meant that they were intent on unsettling her at the very least.

At worst, she didn’t like to consider what they might wish upon her.

‘We’ll have to wait for the fire report,’ she said. ‘Have the owners been back to the shop yet?’

Dan shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’

‘Find out. And if not, I’d like you two to go with them. We need as many details as possible – who was the last person there before the fire broke out, what security measures they’ve got in place, if any, who had access to the shop … get as much as you can. They’ll have been asked all this already, but perhaps the fire at the hospital changes things. If there is a connection between the two, we don’t want to miss it.’

They needed details of the victim whose body had been burned at the hospital, but Alex realised that this might prove difficult. The corpse had been so badly burned that identification would be a challenging process. She would call the pathology lab at the hospital in Cardiff and arrange to visit the place later that day. Speaking face to face with the pathologist often proved far more useful than simply reading the report.

She couldn’t see any reason for the two fires to be connected, but that didn’t mean they should be ruling out the possibility. The shop had been empty when the fire had been started, but had whoever was responsible for the blaze been aware of that?

In Alex’s experience, it was always worth assuming the worst.