Read Into The Fire for Free Online Page A

right eye. Immaculate in a white paper suit, yellow hard hat and latex gloves, he leads the way to the burned-out building.
    ‘Is he making trouble?’ He nods back at Ducat.
    ‘No more than usual. What have you got?’
    ‘Male, Caucasian, good height, middle-aged. Exactly what the Fire Department said. The fire cooked him fairly comprehensively.’ He sends her a warning glance. ‘He’s not pretty.’
    ‘They never are. I’ll be fine. Really.’
    ‘Take this, then.’ He hands her a spare safety hat. The weight settles cold on her brow. She follows him, ducking under a fallen lintel held up by a jack, into the sodden, aching building.
    Inside, the fire has rendered everything in shades of black and white; coloured only by flashes of blue sky that let in the morning in places where the roof has fallen away. They enter a hallway, walk past remnants of picture frames slewed on smoke-blackened walls. In one corner is a mess of melted plastic that was once the telephone. The air hangs thick and damp, scented with an unholy hybrid of wet dog and sodden wood with the first taste of burning flesh.
    There was a time within living memory when the Fire Department moved dead bodies from their location to somewhere ‘safer’ in a fire-wrought building. Now they know better, and so Picaut follows the pathologist along a smaller hallway and left into a good-sized double bedroom with en-suite shower and views that are notionally north towards the cathedral, but in fact are of the street opposite, a landscape of pale stone and buff-painted wood.
    With one long, sweeping look, she takes in what might be the blackened remnants of a woollen carpet, a broad bed, furniture with classic, cool French lines. The fire has destroyed everything in this room, but the withered, blackened skeletons left behind still speak of taste and discrimination on a limited budget. The Hôtel Carcassonne was not as cheap as its situation and exterior might suggest, but nor was it ostentatiously expensive.
    A photographer steps back as they approach, leaving a space around the body. The smell of overcooked meat is strongest here. Breathing through her mouth, Picaut tastes it on her tongue.
    The victim lies on the floor to the left of the bed. He is curled in a foetal position, knees and elbows tucked in, face behind fists. His body is a black hulk, impossible to see where his burned clothes end and his burned skin begins. His hair has vanished, leaving no clue as to its colour. His eyes have broken apart and all that was liquid is gone. Vacant sockets stare at the wall.
    Never in human history has this been a good death. Six hundred years ago, the Maid of Orléans was fixed to a stake and burned. When she was dead, the executioner stripped her naked to prove to the crowd that she was a woman, then built up the fire and burned her to ashes, and then took those ashes and burned them again, to be sure nothing was left. On English orders, Frenchmen destroyed her. Turning her into a saint has done nothing to wash away the horror.
    Picaut closes her eyes. ‘Tell me he died of smoke inhalation …’
    ‘Possibly.’ Masson is kneeling, careful to keep his white suit white. Already, Picaut’s is smudged and smeared. He has second thoughts; truth is his touchstone. ‘Actually, no, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think he was conscious.’ He takes a step back, leaving her to study the body.
    He has given her a clue but she likes to think she didn’t need it; after nearly two years of tuition, she can see almost all that he sees.
    She points just above the dead man’s left eye. ‘Fractured skull?’
    ‘Good.’ He lectured once to students at Harvard, and the habit has never left him. Now, he pulls a Bic from an inside pocket and uses it as an extension of his finger, sweeping it in an arc from the eye socket up and out towards the temple. Viewed from a particular angle, it is possible that the blackened skin in this area might be slightly depressed.