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drunk, dropped his smoke on the mattress, Bob’s your uncle.’
    â€˜I don’t know. It’s old-fashioned cotton padding, this mattress, not polyfoam. If it had been smoldering for any length of time, the walls and the ceiling would have been much more heavily stained with smoke. Like, this has all the hallmarks of a Class B fire, but so far there’s absolutely no evidence to show what started it.’
    â€˜Maybe it was spontaneous human combustion.’
    â€˜Oh, sure it was.’
    â€˜You shouldn’t be so skeptical,’ said Jack. ‘Back in nineteen eighty-two I was called out to a fire up in Cassville, and I still reckon that was SHC.’
    â€˜Oh, come on.’
    â€˜No – a fifty-seven-year-old woman was sitting in her kitchen chair and she spontaneously burst into flames. Whoomph, just like that. That’s what her husband and her son said, anyhow, at the inquest. The husband tried to put her out by dragging her over to the sink and splashing water on her but the flames were too fierce. He burned his own hands pretty bad.
    â€˜I saw the woman’s body for myself. Apparently she didn’t burn for no longer than five or six minutes, but all the clothes were burned off of her and her skin was charred all over like a hamburger.’
    â€˜Get out of here, Jack,’ Ruth told him. He was always telling stories about bizarre fires and she never knew whether to believe him or not. ‘Go bring me some evidence cans from the truck. And some cellophane envelopes, too.’
    She turned back to the blackened body lying on the mattress. Maybe Jack hadn’t been so far away from the truth after all. Maybe this man or woman had spontaneously caught fire. There was no conclusive evidence to support any of the six or seven alleged cases of spontaneous human combustion, but in the most recent incident, in 1980, a farmer called Henry Thomas had been so severely burned while sitting in his armchair that only his skull and the lower part of his legs had remained. Maybe something similar had happened here.
    Tyson came up to her and nudged her knee. She tugged at his ears and gave him a dog-choc. ‘I know, boy, you couldn’t find anything. It wasn’t your fault. If somebody set this fire on purpose, they must have been some kind of black magician.’
    Ruth remained at the house for the better part of the day, taking samples of fibers and ash and frizzled hair and carbonized flesh. At about three thirty in the afternoon, two technicians from the Howard County Coroner’s office arrived, wearing white Tyvek coveralls. They carefully lifted the burned cadaver into a body-bag, and carried it away to the morgue. Ruth and Jack wrapped up the mattress in plastic sheeting so that it could be taken back to their Fire and Arson Laboratory for further tests.
    â€˜How about a beer?’ Bob Kowalski suggested as he and Ruth finally stepped out of the front door. The wind had dropped, and there was a high hazy covering of white cloud.
    â€˜I’d love to, sir, but I have to pick up Ammy from school.’
    â€˜What’s your gut feeling about this?’ he asked her, nodding back toward the house.
    â€˜I’m not sure. But I don’t think that any kind of known accelerant was used. Jack suggested that it might be SHC, but frankly I don’t believe in it.’
    â€˜Oh, he told you about that woman in Cassville? You don’t want to set any store by that. What happened was, that woman was wearing all nylon clothing and a spark of static set her ablaze. Very rare occurrence, but it has been known.’
    Ruth said, ‘It looks to me like the victim here was in close contact with an intense source of heat, but I can’t understand what it was.’
    â€˜Blowtorch, maybe? Or a cutting torch? That’s at least three-and-a-half thousand degrees Celsius.’
    â€˜Even so, that would have taken hours , and the pattern of burning would have