The Burning (21 page)

Jenny stared at the screen knowing that the right response would be to fire back an email telling him to go to hell, but as her fingers reached for the keys they refused to
obey. She realized that it wasn’t only anger that she felt, but disappointment, and not only with Michael, but with herself. He had represented something of a fantasy to her, too: a tough
pilot, a man who had flown fighter jets, whom she had allowed herself to believe wasn’t afflicted by the usual human fears and weaknesses. A man who could make her feel safe. But he
wasn’t that at all. He was as fallible as she was.

Her struggle to formulate a reply was interrupted by Alison bursting in unannounced.

‘Everything’s working fine. Shouldn’t be any more problems. He may have been cheeky, but he was cheap. Two hundred, cash.’

‘You paid him in cash? Do we even have that much in the office?’

‘I went to the ATM on the way in. You’re always saying we need to save money.’

‘Hold on – didn’t he say this repair was being covered by his company? Something about frozen connections? Nothing to do with us?’

‘Oh,’ Alison said, deflated, ‘he did say that, didn’t he?’

Jenny sighed. The feeling of sickness that she had temporarily managed to face down was returning with a vengeance. ‘Look, Alison, I’m very much aware that we haven’t dealt
properly with your medical situation. I’ve given it some thought, and I think I’ll have to ask your neurologist for a report – just to make sure we all know where we
stand.’

‘I didn’t have any problem dealing with Mr Burden after you’d gone yesterday.’ She dropped the document she was holding onto the desk. ‘I took his statement, and
then I chased up the lab for the DNA results on Layla Hart.’

‘Thank you,’ Jenny said, feeling a twinge of guilt. ‘Did they find anything?’

‘Something and nothing. They got some usable samples from the tissue Dr Kerr sent over. It was too damaged to create a complete profile, but there was enough to compare with the sample we
took from Ed Morgan after Susie Ashton went missing.’

‘And?’

‘He wasn’t the father. Not even close. The full report will be with us tomorrow.’

Jenny slowly absorbed the implications of this news. Just because Ed wasn’t the father didn’t mean he hadn’t behaved inappropriately with Layla, but it made the prospect of
finding evidence to prove it close to impossible.

‘Oh, well,’ Jenny said, ‘I suppose that’s one small crumb of comfort for her mother. Tell me about your meeting with Mr Burden.’

‘He couldn’t have been any more ordinary. Works in the back office of a builders’ merchant down in Somerset. Married, two kids, boring car . . .’

‘Does he have any idea what happened to his brother?’

‘Not exactly, but when you hear his story you can start to join the dots. Both brothers were put into foster care when they were teenagers. Usual tale – violent dad, mum not coping.
Tony – that’s the older one – was sent to a family in Wells, who treated him like one of their own. Diana – as she then was – went from one family to the other and
ended up in a home. Tony thinks she got into drugs while she was there and probably did what girls like that mostly do to pay for an expensive habit. She picked up a couple of juvenile convictions
for possession, but somehow had the sense to join the Navy at seventeen and started to pull herself together. Her brother had no idea she had gender issues until she came out with it all in her
early twenties. And once she’d made up her mind, that was it. She left the Navy, got a job in the civil service, and as far as he could tell, devoted her life to convincing the doctors she
should be allowed the treatment. It took a few years, but she got there in the end.’

‘Part of the way,’ Jenny corrected her.

‘I asked him about that. He said he thought
Daniel
had been putting money by to have the surgery done in the US. Apparently that’s where you’ve got to go for the
state-of-the-art procedures. That’s the only reason he was holding out.’

‘He sounds pretty together. Not like a man overwhelmed with despair.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Alison said. ‘See?’ She tapped her temple. ‘Not so empty after all. Read on – I took it down word for word.’

Jenny turned to the second and final page of the statement, and found a paragraph in which Anthony Burden gave his thoughts on his brother’s possible reasons for committing suicide:

‘I’ve asked CID to bring it over today,’ Alison said. ‘I’ve arranged to send it for data retrieval.’

‘Thank you.’

‘No need to sound surprised, Mrs Cooper. I’ve got more for you, too. I had a word with one of my old colleagues in CID and managed to get hold of Daniel Burden’s bank details.
I haven’t got detailed statements through yet, but according to his account manager he had nearly fifty grand put away. I called his brother last night to ask if he knew how he came by it,
and he didn’t have a clue. He grossed just over thirty at the passport office, so it doesn’t seem likely it all came out of his wages.’

‘No,’ Jenny agreed, now more confused than ever by Alison’s many internal contradictions.

‘I’d bet my house on it being drugs,’ Alison said. ‘Maybe not Class A, but steroids, hormones, all that kind of stuff. That’s where all the smart money is these
days. Back in the nineties it was heroin chic, now you’ve got to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.’

Jenny recalled how clean and orderly Burden’s flat had been. A considerate suicide. He hadn’t left a note, which sometimes – but not always – was an indication that the
deceased had felt too ashamed of something to commit the details to paper. But even so, those who couldn’t bring themselves to write a note often inadvertently left a clue to the cause of
their unhappiness. Burden’s laptop had been set to a pornographic website, which was so obvious a signal that Jenny found herself wondering whether it might not have been intended to throw
her or the police off the scent.

‘There’s little point speculating now,’ Jenny said. ‘Let’s see what turns up.’ She reached for the file she had opened on Burden’s case and slotted his
brother’s statement in next to those of the police officers who had discovered the body. Tempting as it would have been to spend time delving into Burden’s past, she needed to direct
all her slender resources at the inquest she was opening in only five days’ time. And daunting as the prospect was, she had little choice but to continue to rely on Alison’s help.
‘Do you think you could manage a trip out of the office to take a statement?’ Jenny asked her.

‘If you’re sure I don’t need a doctor’s note.’

‘You tell me.’

‘I did a decent job with Burden’s brother, didn’t I?’

Jenny had to acknowledge that she had. She put her doubts to one side. ‘Kelly Hart worked as a cleaner for a family called the Grants. Big house with a tennis court, just outside
Blackstone Ley. Husband’s a solicitor. And according to Nicky Brooks, their seventeen-year-old son slept with Layla last summer.’

‘Nice to be eased back into the job gently,’ Alison said. ‘Good morning, madam, is it true your boy committed statutory rape?’

‘You’re right. I should go.’ Jenny climbed out of her chair, but found herself grabbing the edge of the desk as the blood rushed from her head. Stars appeared in front of her
eyes.

‘Dizzy as well as sick?’ Alison asked.

‘It’ll pass,’ Jenny said. She made her way unsteadily to the door.

‘These symptoms wouldn’t be worse in the mornings, would they?’

Jenny stopped dead and looked back at her.

‘It’s not completely unknown at your age, Mrs Cooper,’ Alison said. ‘My mother had my youngest brother at forty-five.’

Jenny felt the floor buckling beneath her.

‘I’m probably wrong, but I’d check if I were you – if only to put your mind at rest. I’ll pop off to see the Grants now, shall I?’ She went to the door ahead
of Jenny and opened it for her. ‘After you, Mrs Cooper.’

There was a chemist’s shop in the small arcade that stood several doors along from Jenny’s office, but she walked on past, too embarrassed to purchase a test kit
over the counter from the assistant who knew her by name. She didn’t believe for a moment that Alison could be correct in her diagnosis; it was unthinkable. She couldn’t have arrived in
her late forties only to find herself pregnant by a man who had cheated on her. Life couldn’t be that unfair, not even hers. But however absurd, now the idea had been planted, she
couldn’t rest until she had discounted the possibility. She made her way down Park Street, crossed over College Green and went on past the cathedral to the new development at the
harbour-side. There she found a supermarket that served the residents of the neighbouring apartments. Moving between the aisles in comfortable anonymity, she sought out the pharmacy section,
selected the most expensive product from the shelf and passed as quickly as she could through the self-service checkout. She emerged onto the street feeling like a shamefaced teenager, stuffed her
secret purchase deep into her coat-pocket and turned back towards the office.

She had hardly gone ten yards when her phone rang. Dreading that it was Michael, she fetched it out, ready to switch it off immediately, but it was DI Ryan’s name on the screen. Fighting
the urge to dodge the conversation, she told herself to be strong and took the call.

‘Hi. How did you get on with the search?’

‘It was interesting, though not in the way we expected. Any chance of having a quick chat? I’ve just come from a meeting with colleagues at Broadmead. I could be at your office in
ten minutes.’

Jenny stalled, not sure that she could survive a face-to-face meeting until she’d done her test.

Ryan persisted. ‘Or we could meet up for a quick coffee somewhere. That might be best – I’d like to keep what I have to say strictly between ourselves for the time
being.’

He didn’t have to spell it out. Jenny knew that he meant he didn’t altogether trust Alison with sensitive information, and she didn’t blame him.

‘OK, if we’re quick,’ Jenny said. ‘I can meet you at No. 1 Harbourside in ten minutes.’

‘I’ll be right there.’

From her seat at the window, Jenny watched the gang of kids on the dockside throw snowballs onto the hard-frozen surface of the harbour, where they exploded amongst the other
missiles that passers-by, excited at the novelty, had tossed onto the ice: tin cans, stones, several traffic cones, and a half-submerged shopping trolley, the back half of which jutted into the air
at an incongruous angle.

‘Is that one of Banksy’s?’

Jenny looked up to see DI Ryan approaching with a cup of coffee. ‘I did wave. You were lost in thought.’

‘I must have been,’ Jenny said, puzzled by how she had failed to see him. ‘I don’t think it’s a sculpture, just a trolley some drunks threw in. It does look a
little surreal, though.’

‘One would be polemical,’ Ryan said, pulling up a seat. ‘I’d argue it would take two or more to make it surreal.’

‘I see – I think.’

He gave an apologetic smile. ‘I took a third-year module in the psychology of art. You’re one of very few people to whom I’ve ever confessed that.’

‘Is that the secret you wanted to tell me?’

‘One of them.’ He cast a subtle glance around the cafe tables and saw only a smattering of student and arty types. No one to cause him any concern. ‘We didn’t get
anywhere with the coat, sadly. but something else turned up.’ He brought a clear plastic bag with a tag attached. Inside was a mobile phone. ‘It was jammed into a stack of felled timber
on a forest track about a quarter of a mile down the road from Kelly’s place.’

‘Ed’s?’

‘Who else? It’s got his Facebook on there, but no emails or texts, no contacts, nothing – they’ve been wiped. SIM’s missing, too. It’s as if he wanted it to
be found, but only to wind us up some more.’

‘He must have put it there before going back to the house,’ Jenny said.

Ryan nodded. ‘Had it all planned out.’

‘Let’s face it,’ Jenny said, ‘no one annihilates their family on a whim.’

‘I guess not.’ He nodded to the bag. ‘You can keep it. I’ll send you over a finder’s statement later. How about you – anything useful at the Brookses’
place?’

‘What I mostly learned was that Darren Brooks has spent the last ten years hoping Kelly would come running back to him.’

‘We suspected that,’ Ryan said, taking a sip of his coffee, ‘but I doubt he got lucky. Kelly doesn’t strike me as the kind to repeat her mistakes.’

‘Is that an official psychological insight?’

‘Just a gut feeling, taking account of her history.’

‘She didn’t exactly choose well with Ed.’

Ryan nodded. ‘Point taken. But until he blew, Ed was a quiet, dependable type. I think that suited her. As she told us, she had enough going on with three kids without more
excitement.’

Jenny noticed the careful way Ryan was holding his cup. He had gentle hands, not quite womanly, but almost. She kept expecting to come up against the tough side of his character that had
attracted him to his profession, but she hadn’t seen much evidence of it yet.