The Shout by Stephen Leather

Author:Stephen Leather [Leather, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bought, pappa
ISBN: 9781473671829
Google: pt4sDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B075CS2BZJ
Goodreads: 36457155
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2018-01-24T23:00:00+00:00

29

It was midday before Vicky had finished photographing everything and they were back loading their gear into the van. ‘So it was an accident?’ she asked.

‘Accident is a funny term,’ said Farmer. ‘Most accidents aren’t accidents, not using the word with its true meaning.’ He grinned. ‘Pop test. What’s the definition of an accident?’

She frowned. ‘Something that happens unexpectedly,’ she said hopefully.

‘Close enough,’ he said. ‘Me, I’d go with an event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause. But yeah, “something that is unexpected” is okay. Now here’s the thing, how often in life do things happen without a cause? It’s very rare. As any traffic cop will tell you, the vast majority of what are called road accidents aren’t accidents at all. They’re people driving stupidly, or aggressively, or simply not paying attention because they’re on the phone or staring at their satnav. They used to call them RTAs, road traffic accidents, but a while back they stopped referring to them as accidents, now they’re RTCs, road traffic collisions.’

‘So you’re saying accidents don’t happen?’

‘I’m saying that true accidents are very rare.’ He gestured with his thumb at the garage. ‘Like I said to O’Hara, it was an accident caused by stupidity. The mechanics overloaded the circuit. Did they mean to? Of course not. Did they realise they could cause a fire? No, obviously not. But from the look of it, the wiring wasn’t in great shape to start with. I’m sure it was up to code but it was old and could have done with being replaced. If the wiring had been better then the circuit probably wouldn’t have overloaded.’ He shrugged. ‘What we’ve got is a chain of events. The wiring wasn’t in great condition. The mechanics were running too much equipment off a single plug. Someone had put combustible materials close to the plug. If any one of those steps hadn’t been in place, there wouldn’t have been a fire. Or at least the fire wouldn’t have been as bad as it was. The insurance will pay out because it wasn’t a deliberate fire, but it certainly wasn’t what I’d call an accident.’

Vicky nodded. ‘And what about the assessor? Why didn’t he see what you saw?’

‘Oh he did, he just read it differently. Multiple seats of a fire is often a sign that the fire was set. But not always. I know that because I’ve been to thousands of fire scenes over the years. But for insurance assessors and SOCO investigators, fire is just a small part of what they look at, probably less than ten per cent of their workload. A SOCO investigator is more likely to be investigating an assault or a rape or even a murder, so unless someone dies a fire is pretty low down their list of priorities. Most insurance assessors are chasing up water damage, theft, weather, they maybe only get to see fire damage a few times a year. But we see fires every day, they’re our bread and butter.

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