Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [64]
When he looked back, she was gone.
The next day Detective Richard Higgs sat at his desk in the Hampstead police station reading the preliminary reports on the fire at 49 Lowfield Road. By the time the firefighters had arrived at the scene, the three-story boardinghouse was nearly gutted. The investigators had determined that the fire spread too quickly to have been an accident. Higgs noted that none of the doors had been locked and that the fire alarms were intact.
All the students had escaped without life-threatening injuries save for Gyongyver: She had either slipped or jumped from the top floor and was found unconscious in a basement well. Her condition was critical, with severe burns and carbon monoxide poisoning from the smoke. Her ribs and pelvis had been fractured in the fall, and she was not expected to pull through.
If anyone had asked Higgs, a former fraud investigator, about his approach to detection and police procedure, he would have described himself as a “pond man.” An investigation was like a pond: You threw a pebble in and watched the ripples. A good detective began in the quiet center, then proceeded methodically to the bank. Somewhere in between, he got his man.
Higgs set the file out on his desk: He had witness statements, photographs, the medical examiner’s report, the fire marshal’s log, and the police report. In light of the young woman’s critical condition, the fire had been bumped up to a high priority. Nevertheless, Higgs knew that his chances of finding the culprit were slim, no matter how many detectives he had on the case. Arthur Conan Doyle once said that forensic science was unique because with most sciences, “you start with a series of experiments and work forward. But in forensic science we have the finished product and we have to work backward.” This was particularly problematic in the case of arson, where the statistics were not in Higgs’s favor: Only about 16 percent of all arson crimes were solved, compared to an average of 28 percent for other crimes. Arson was particularly tough to prove. The evidence was destroyed by the fire, and the possible motivations were myriad, ranging from murder and intimidation to revenge and hate crimes.
Higgs had considered all these, and none seemed to apply. He had quickly ruled out the most obvious suspects. In 98 percent of all murders in Europe, it was a spouse or close relative who pulled the proverbial trigger, but most of the Hungarian woman’s family lived abroad, and her boyfriend, initially a suspect, had been cleared. He had been severely burned on his legs and chest while he stood on the roof screaming for his girlfriend and trying to pull her out. When she died nearly one month after the fire, he would blame himself for her death and be placed under psychiatric observation.
As for the other students, all of whom were foreigners, none had reported racial or xenophobic harassment, which meant this probably wasn’t a hate crime. Higgs also had to rule out pyromania: Firebugs tended to work serially, using the same modus operandi over and over again. In this case, there were no other reports of arson in Hampstead or in the surrounding neighborhoods.
There was another possibility. Arson was often used to cover up other crimes, such as fraud, and Higgs thought there were two possible suspects in this regard. The first was the stranger Tominaga had seen in the bathroom. With her help, the police put together a computerized composite of a man in his forties, of average height and weight, wearing glasses and a mustache. The second suspect was the landlord. Detectives had recovered enough charred documents from his room to fill a Dumpster—among them, mail-order invoices addressed to different people, suspicious mortgage applications, and requests for rent aid, a state system set up to help landlords unable to rent out their premises. That was odd, Higgs thought, since Konigsberg had no vacancies when