Page 106 of Savage Justice
I shake my head. “No. My children were with me. The house was empty.”
“I see. Thank you. The police will need to interview you, but for now I shall need you to stay back, miss.” He turns to leave.
“Wait. Do you know how it started?”
He pauses. “It’s early still in the investigation, but at this stage all we know is that an accelerant was used. The seat of the fire was in the dining room. That’s all the information I have at present.”
“A-accelerant? Did you say…?”
“Accelerant. Yes. I don’t yet know what that was.”
“You mean, petrol?”
“Possibly. Or lighter fluid. Something of that sort. Highly flammable.”
“But it was started deliberately? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, miss. It was. Can you think of anyone who might want to cause you harm?”
“Yes, I—”
“No, I’m afraid we can’t. Can we?” Nico interrupts before I can share my suspicions. A sharp nudge to my side reinforces his point.
“No,” I mumble. “No one.”
I wait until the fire chief has gone back to his duties. “What was that about? They need to know…”
“We don’t want the authorities crawling all over our business. We’ll deal with Glodowski our way.”
“But we can’t be sure it was him. Not until they’ve finished their investigation.”
“We know,” he insists, “but we’ll be glad to have any information their experts come up with. Meanwhile, the security system I had installed includes state-of-the-art CCTV. If anyone was lurking around tipping petrol through your letterbox, we’ll have footage of it.”
“We ought to hand this over to the forensic team.”
“Molly’s right,” Nico backs me up. “They already know we have the cameras.”
Ethan nods. “Okay. The image isn’t good enough to identify anyone in any case.”
We watch again, in silence, as the pair of hooded figures scuttle across my rear garden and around to the French windows at the side. One of them smashes the glass close to the ground and tosses something through the hole. There’s brief flash of white, a match being struck, then the door is engulfed in flames. The two fire-starters sprint off the way they came.
If that was all the footage we had access to, we’d be as stumped as the police. But Frankie has somehow managed to hack into a couple of the fancy doorbell cameras along the street and got a clear image of a dark-coloured Renault leaving the area within moments of the fire starting. It was a simple matter to trace the registration plate and pay a visit to the owner.
Marcus Jordan is a small-time crook. Or he was. What remains of him and his brother is now in the hands of what Nico refers to as a ‘clean-up team’, but not before they confirmed what we suspected. They were hired by ‘someone foreign’ to torch the house, preferably with the family trapped inside, but they didn’t know whether Molly and her kids had been at home or not. They just took the chance and were paid two hundred pounds for their trouble.
At one time I would have baulked at the violence, the loss of life. Not now. Those lives could have been mine, my children. The Jordan brothers got what they deserved.
How my perspective has shifted.
CHAPTER 25
Nico
Slipping into Poland is not nearly as straightforward as slipping into Luxembourg was, especially with my rig in tow. I can’t risk normal airport security, they tend to be sniffy about high-powered rifles on commercial passenger planes, so I opt to go the long way round.
Rome is with me, at Ethan’s suggestion, to help out with any language issues at the border crossings. We fly to Moldova by private jet, where our ally, Marius Bival, has a vehicle waiting for us. Marius is Ethan’s brother-in-law, and luckily, they get on a lot better than Borys and Kristian appear to. He heads up the Moldovan Bratva and is a useful contact whenever business brings us to Eastern Europe.
Then we travel overland through eastern Ukraine. We cross the Polish border close to Lviv then head on northwest towards Warsaw.