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beams were left, broken and jagged and charcoal. The reality was that this was no longer a house, just some walls, and a front door.
    Jake kept me moving past it, however, without a chance to take in more, and I was grateful. At the bottom of the hill, a small, shifting group of uniformed and plain-clothes police stood. There was some freemasonry of police that Jake could read, because he walked up to one of the plain-clothes men without needing any of them to be identified. I lagged behind as he took out his warrant card and introduced himself, but he pulled me over and told me to give my information about the residents of the house. I did, including what I knew about the adults who lived there, which wasn’t much. Mo worked in the station café. I didn’t know what Dan did, or even what he looked like; if I’d seen him around, I didn’tknow that I had. They had children, but I didn’t know how many. I’d used Mike as an electrician too, and Steve did odd jobs around the neighbourhood: he came to me once a year to hack back the ivy growing up the side of our house. At the sergeant’s request, I passed over the phone numbers I had for Steve and Mike.
    Then I decided to do a little fishing of my own. Being with a CID officer moved me from being a neighbour with information to being someone that they might give driblets of information to in return. ‘How did it start?’
    A uniformed man I’d mentally, but with no certainty, decided was the sergeant shrugged. ‘Don’t know, and we won’t until the fire inspectors go through later today.’ He looked at Jake and continued, ‘We assumed arson, since the house was empty. If there were squatters living there, it’s more likely it was set off by them tapping into the utilities illegally, or leaving a hotplate on. That kind of jerry-rigging is always a danger.’
    I knew nothing about what squatters did or didn’t do, but I noticed that the possible cause had slid from arson to being the fault of the occupants because they were, conveniently, living outside the conventional legal system. But if I pointed that out, whatever information was forthcoming would dry up.
    ‘Who is the owner?’ I asked. ‘I’ve often wondered why the building’s been empty for so long.’
    The sergeant didn’t know, didn’t care. ‘We were just told the house was empty, awaiting redevelopment.’
    The building was tiny, probably two-up two-down. I wondered how it could be redeveloped into anything. I didn’t ask. I’d get better info from the neighbours.
    And I did. Jake headed off to his car and I stopped for coffee at the Tube station café on my way to work. Or, rather, I got in line behind everyone who had decided to do the same thing. It was going to be record takings for the café owners that day. Catching up with the news was not just easy: it would have been impossible to have done anything else. Those who lived nearest the empty house told the rest of us that the fire had been put out before dawn, but the police had been there ever since, and more had arrived first thing in the morning. The gossip continued: the café owners had put up Mo and Dan and their kids – they had two – in the flat above the café, which was, happily, between tenants. It was only two rooms, but it was better than nothing, and meant the kids could still walk to school. Mike and Steve were temporarily split up, on the couches of two neighbours, but the word was that they had the promise of a spare room not too far away that they could move into soon.
    By the time I reached the head of the queue and ordered, I was caught up: fact, fiction, and everything in between. Mo was running the coffee-machine, and she looked exhausted, but otherwise exactly as she always did, like she was ready to head off to Woodstock in 1969: grey hair in a long plait, dyed Peruvian pullover and – I peered over the counter – yes, buffalo sandals.
    ‘Is there anything I can do?’ Even as I asked it, I knew that that was