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windows.
    The smoke and scorch patterns would show her if the fire had been deliberately started by the use of an accelerant, and how quickly it had burned, and what its rate of heat release might have been. To Ruth’s eyes, every pattern formed part of a narrative, like a series of prehistoric cave paintings: how the fire had started, how it had become so intense. How the hot gases might have risen to the ceiling and then returned to the lower levels by thermal radiation, leaving those V-shaped plumes.
    â€˜How’s Amelia?’ asked Val, as she delicately tweezered a triangular piece of crisp black skin from the victim’s shoulder and dropped it into an evidence bag.
    â€˜She’s good,’ said Ruth. ‘Better than ever. Do you know something, she even cooked me breakfast this morning, and she got up at the crack of dawn to do it.’
    â€˜Amelia is such a sweet girl,’ said Val, although Ruth couldn’t help hearing the unspoken words, ‘in spite of the fact that she has William’s Syndrome.’
    â€˜She did great,’ Ruth lied. ‘Made me an omelet and everything. She’s really growing up.’
    Val slightly raised the body’s left hand, being careful not to break it off at the wrist. ‘You see this wedding band? What temperature does gold melt at?’
    Ruth peered at it. The ring had lost its shape and had even started to form a teardrop drip at one side. ‘Over one thousand degrees Celsius,’ she said. She took five photographs of the ring, all from different angles. Then she prodded the mattress springs. ‘See? Most of these springs have collapsed, which means that the temperature must have been well over seven hundred, but I can’t say that I’ve ever seen any gold jewelry melt before, even at that temperature. It’s a pretty good size, isn’t it? Hard to tell if it’s a man’s or a woman’s.’
    She packed away her camera. She was surprised to see that Tyson was still whuffling around the room in obvious frustration.
    â€˜How’s it going, boy?’ she called out. Tyson looked across at her and gave a single sharp bark.
    â€˜He’s annoyed at himself,’ she told Val. ‘If he can’t find anything, he thinks he’s let me down. He’s also worried I won’t give him his dog-choc.’
    She took her hydrocarbon detector out of her case, switched it on, and started to probe the ruins of the mattress with it. The detector was like a wand attached to a tiny vacuum-cleaner. It sucked up any residual vapors or gases and it would buzz like an irritated blowfly if it sensed the presence of any accelerants.
    All the same, she was already beginning to question whether this fire had been started with accelerants at all. If there were any traces of fuels to be found, Tyson would always head for them like a rocket and sit on the area of strongest concentration first, panting proudly, to show her where they were. Tyson’s nose was ten times more sensitive than her detector; he could locate a thousandth of a drop of half-evaporated gasoline in a room twice this volume.
    Jack Morrow came back into the living-room. ‘All of the utilities check out,’ he told her. ‘Electricity is still on, but the wiring looks sound, even the cables that run right beneath this room. Gas is still connected, too, but nobody’s tampered with the meter or any of the piping. No wrench-marks, no disconnected joints, no leaks.’
    He sniffed, and added, ‘No windows are broken, but the kitchen door could have been jimmied. Ron Magruder’s taking a look at it. There’s no damage to any other room in the house. No signs of lightning-strike. How’s Tyson doing?’
    â€˜He hasn’t found anything so far, and neither have I.’
    â€˜Could’ve been a cigarette, I guess,’ Jack suggested. ‘Maybe this was a vagrant, using the house as someplace to crash. Got