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estate were old council homes, sold off cheap to people who then rented them out to people who then rented them out again. Old, threadbare furniture; dodgy electrics; and God only knew what stuffed in the wall cavities. Most of them wouldn’t have passed a safety check twenty years ago, never mind today. If that was what this fire came down to, it might still be a criminal investigation, but not one for them. They were only here for the resident.
    ‘Okay.’ He turned to Sean. ‘Shall we?’
    ‘Let’s.’
    They stepped through the open doorway into the remains of the front room. The smell hit Groves first: a foul waft of old meat and rust, like opening the oven in an abandoned house. The back window was completely gone, allowing an angle of sunlight in. Everything it touched looked either scorched black or shattered. In the far corner, water was still drizzling down from the remains of the ceiling, pattering on the broken eggshell of a television. What was left of the carpet squelched beneath Groves’ feet. Looking down, he saw dirty grey foam bubbling up around his shoes.
    The dead man was on the remains of the settee – or inside it, to be more precise. The fabric had burned away, leaving arusted skeletal frame with a spread of thick black ash congealing underneath. The man himself was bent double, with his backside on the floor and both legs poking over the front of the settee, the rest of him contorted awkwardly within the frame. If he had been alive, it would have looked for all the world like a moment of slapstick, as though he’d sat on a collapsing deckchair.
    He was very obviously not alive, though. You could still tell the body had once been a real, living person, but only just. A patch of skin and scorched hair remained on the scalp, and a single shoe was recognisable on one foot, the melted plastic hanging down in stalactites. Beneath the body, mixed with the ash, the melted flesh had hardened in greasy pools. The man himself might as well have been carved from black wood. The mouth was little more than a gaping hole.
    Groves stared down at the remains for a moment, struck as always by the distance between the living and the dead. The spark that just went: a beat of time in which everything changed. What had once been a man now resembled a snuffed-out candle.
    ‘Sir?’ Sean clicked his fingers above the figure in the settee. ‘Can you hear me, sir?’
    ‘There’s the ashtray.’ Groves gestured with his foot to a chunky glass bowl near the corner of the settee, then looked around. There were shards of glass and broken cups by the walls, some of the shapes still recognisable. ‘Bottles everywhere too. I’m guessing he passed out rather than fell asleep.’
    ‘No wonder it’s so hard to wake him up.’ Sean stepped back and sniffed. ‘Am I imagining that stink of booze in the air?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Even so, I’m thinking the commander called it right.’
    ‘Me too.’
    Groves took another look round, puzzled by the lack of furnishings. Aside from the broken television, the settee and the bottles, the room was bare. It must have been a sparse existence. He imagined the man, drunk enough to pass out withthe television flickering in the corner, the cigarette falling from his hand. A sad image.
    ‘Been and seen,’ Sean said. ‘Happy?’
    Groves leaned closer, peering at what was left of the dead man’s face. The blackened cheekbones looked strange.
    ‘Have a look,’ he said.
    Sean did so, inclining his head.
    ‘What am I looking at?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ Groves gestured at a thin ridge across the man’s cheek. ‘Something cut into the bone?’
    ‘Old scar, maybe. Like Action Man.’
    ‘There’s more than one.’
    ‘Eh. Leave it to the coroner for now.’
    They walked back to the doorway, Groves still wondering about the cuts in the bone – but Sean was right. He took a last glance behind him, at what was left of the man’s legs pointing out from the settee. Utterly still.
    ‘Not