Free Nightmare by Stephen Leather Page A

though. Should clean up okay.’
    ‘What about the clean-up? Can you handle that as well?’ said Nightingale.
    Garner nodded. ‘Can do,’ he said. He looked up at the chandelier and pointed his pen at it. ‘That’s a professional job, though. You don’t want amateurs messing around with that. It needs to be taken down and done properly.’
    ‘Do you know somebody?’
    ‘Let me ask around. So where was the fire?’
    ‘Upstairs,’ said Nightingale. ‘Most of the damage on the ground floor is from the smoke and water.’
    Garner walked over to the panelling by the stairs and ran his finger along it, then tapped it. He was only a few feet from the panel that led down to the basement. He rapped the wood with his knuckles. ‘The wood’s basically sound,’ he said. ‘But you’d be best sanding it all down and revarnishing.’ He made a note on his clipboard.
    Nightingale headed up the stairs and the builder followed him, still scribbling on his clipboard. They stopped at the hallway, where the fire had started. The smell of smoke and burned wood was much stronger here. There were darker burn marks running down the centre of the hallway and scorch marks up the walls.
    ‘How did this start?’ asked Garner, kneeling down to examine the burned floorboards.
    ‘About a gallon of petrol and a match.’
    ‘It was deliberate?’
    ‘Oh yes.’
    ‘That’s funny. If someone wanted to burn the house down, why pour the petrol up here? They’d have been better off setting the fire downstairs.’
    ‘Who knows what was going through his mind?’ said Nightingale. Actually he knew exactly what the arsonist had been thinking. Nightingale had been in the master bedroom and if all had gone to plan he would have died in the fire.
    ‘What about the bedrooms?’
    ‘Smoke damage, mainly. And water. The water went everywhere.’
    Garner opened the nearest door and looked into the bedroom beyond it. ‘What happened to all the furniture?’
    ‘The place was empty.’
    ‘That’s lucky,’ said the builder, making a note on his clipboard. He went back to the hall and stamped down on the boards in several places. ‘All the boards are going to have to be replaced,’ he said. ‘Until we’ve taken them up we won’t be able to see how much damage has been done to the joists. But the wood is so old that it’s as hard as metal, so you should be all right. All the panelling’s going to need replacing.’ He gestured at the ceiling. ‘All the plaster’s going to have to come down. It’s been soaked and even if you let it dry out it’s never going to be right.’
    He took out an electronic tape measure and measured up the hallway, then nodded at Nightingale. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mr Nightingale. I’ll give you two estimates. I’ll give you a basic one where I’ll put it back in as-new condition. New panelling, new floorboards, new joists, whatever needs doing, but using new materials. And I’ll give you a proper restoration estimate, where it’ll be put back to the condition it was before the fire. As if the fire never happened, if you get my drift.’
    ‘Okay,’ said Nightingale. ‘But do you have a ballpark figure?’
    The builder looked pained and scratched his ear with his pen. ‘Difficult to say off the cuff,’ he said. ‘There’re a lot of materials to price. But for a basic repair job you won’t be getting much change from twenty-five thousand pounds. That’s assuming there’s no major damage to the joists. And that we don’t uncover anything else when we start pulling panels off.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘Dry rot, wet rot, insect infestation. Panelling can hide a multitude of sins. But if we do find anything then we’re best dealing with it there and then.’
    ‘And the restoration budget?’
    Garner exhaled through pursed lips in the same way the mechanics did when they were about to give an estimate for work on Nightingale’s MGB. ‘A hundred grand. More maybe. We need craftsmen carpenters