This search is easy. I have Adele’s maiden name from Rob’s notebook and ‘Rutherford-Campbell fire’ brings up streams of information, mainly newspaper articles from the aftermath, both national and local. There’s pages of it here. Faced with so much information, I can’t believe I haven’t looked all this up before, when she first told me. When she gave me the notebook.
At first, I’m entirely distracted by the photographs. It’s hard not to be as I open link after link, leaving about fifteen tabs on my browser. There’s an aerial before and after shot of the estate, and Adele hadn’t been joking when she said it was a big place. In the second picture I can see where one part of the building is blackened and charred, but what’s left is still the size of maybe three or four normal houses. It’s built from thick pale stone and looks as though it’s been there for a couple of hundred years or more. Built in a time of landed gentry. There are woods and fields surrounding it, creating a sanctuary for the building away from prying eyes. I try and imagine it now. Does someone keep up the grounds? Or is it now overgrown and forgotten?
There’s a photo of Adele’s parents, and seeing her mother is like looking at a reflection of her face on unsettled water. Almost the same but slightly different. Adele is more beautiful, her features more aligned, but her mother had the same dark hair and olive skin. Her father, originally an investment banker, and with a personal fortune of several million as well as a portfolio of high-profile investments according to these articles – looks grey and serious in one picture – obviously from his time in the City – but there is another of him in a Barbour and wellies smiling straight at the camera. His skin has reddened from time in the fresh air or maybe from too much good wine and good food, and he looks happy.
There are pictures of Adele too – the tragic beautiful daughter left behind. A face slightly plumper with the glow of youth, but still the Adele I know. The heiress, one paper calls her. How much money is she actually worth? A fortune it would appear. Her eyes sparkle with carefree laughter in a photo of the three of them one Christmas.
In another, blurry and taken from a distance in that way that tabloid journalists do, her head is down, one hand covering her face, and she’s thinner, her jeans hanging loosely on her hips as she walks through the grounds of the damaged house. Grieving. There’s a man beside her, one hand on the small of her back, his face turned almost directly to the long lens camera as if he can somehow sense it’s there. His other arm is bandaged and in a sling. David. His face is blurry, but it’s him. He looks wary and protective and tired. They both look so young. Them, but not them. I stare at the picture for a long time and then lose myself in the myriad news articles, piecing the story together from all the different angles.
There’s talk of Adele’s parents’ partying, of their wealth and their move from London after their daughter was born. All the usual gossip from neighbours feigning shocked grief but actually giving snippets of judgement. Adele was a lonely child apparently. Her parents didn’t have much time for her. A lot of space is given to the romance of the poor farm boy and the beautiful daughter, and how he saved her from the blaze. There’s mention that some sources say Adele had been in therapy as a child.
Then I find something that stops my heart aching at their story that I’m not a part of, at David’s obvious love for her in that moment, of how intertwined they are in ways that make my entanglement with them seem like gossamer threads, not weeds at all. Three words that stamp themselves into my head. Heavy boots on my sentimentality. A reminder of why I’m doing this before I get sucked down into the rabbit hole of digging into their relationship.
Suspicion of arson.
There, in the later reports, once the emotional tabloid feast is done, the words slip in, insidiously. A policeman, Angus Wignall, is pictured studying the fire damage. A thickset man in his thirties maybe. A comment on the speed at which the fire spread. The mention of petrol kept in canisters in the barn for the quad bikes. Arson can’t be ruled out.
Detective Inspector Angus Wignall was seen leaving the Perth Royal Infirmary where David Martin is being treated for third-degree burns to his arms. Sources say that the inspector, accompanied by a sergeant, spent two hours talking to the student who has been hailed as a hero after rescuing his girlfriend, Adele Rutherford-Campbell, 17, from the blaze in which both her parents died. Inspector Wignall has refused to comment on the nature of his visit other than to say it was part of an ongoing investigation.