Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) (13 page)

Jessie’s boss, Dr Gideon Duursema, head of the Defence Psychology Service, was sitting behind his desk, squinting through bifocals at a psychology research paper. He looked up when he heard her knock.

‘Ah, the wanderer returns.’

‘I’ve been working.’ She slumped into the chair across the desk from him. ‘You should try it occasionally.’

Tossing the research paper on the desktop, he pulled off his glasses and folded them on top of the paper.

‘I’ve been trying to track you down. You should check your messages occasionally.’ There was censure in his quietly spoken voice, which Jessie ignored.

‘As I said, I’ve been working.’

Duursema was a black Zimbabwean, in his late fifties. He had arrived in England from Zimbabwe thirty years ago, the son of a wealthy farming family, sent by his parents to study Psychology at Oxford when Robert Mugabe and his ZANU party came to power. He had always planned to go back after doing a PhD, but by then Mugabe had begun to show his true colours and Gideon remained in England, found a job, a wife, became almost more English than the English. He reminded Jessie of a younger Nelson Mandela, small in stature, but big in thought and heart, calm and measured. But the soft exterior masked an uncompromising pragmatism, which in his job, a tricky one by any standards, was vital.

‘You’ve been working on the Sami Scott case?’ The merest hint of his Zimbabwean accent remained.

Jessie nodded. ‘Among others, yes.’

‘I gave you three sessions with the child. No more.’

‘Three won’t be enough. And I need to see his mother and father.’ She didn’t mention that she had already seen them both. ‘I can’t help Sami without understanding more about his home life, his relationship with his parents, their relationship with each other …’ she tailed off, catching the look that Gideon shot her.

‘You seem to have forgotten that I also have a PhD in Clinical Psychology.’

‘You hide it well,’ she muttered under her breath.

‘Don’t be flippant with me, Dr Flynn.’

She smiled. ‘No, sir.’

Tilting sideways, he retrieved a stack of files ten inches thick from the floor behind his desk, fifty of them at least. He dumped them on the desk in front of her.

‘This is our current caseload. You, me, Susanne, John and Gordon, need to divide these up between us. These are the soldiers, sailors and airmen – serving military personnel
– who need our help,
right now.
I’m sorry, but we don’t have the resources to focus on children of soldiers, spouses of soldiers, mothers or fathers of soldiers, and so the list goes on. His parents need to go to their GP and get him referred to a National Health Service psychologist.’

‘He’s a deeply troubled little boy. He needs help now, not some time in the next millennia – which is what would happen on the NHS.’

‘It’s the best I can do.’

‘I can’t just abandon him.’

‘He’s not Army.’

‘His father is.’

‘Not for much longer.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ She threw up her hands in exasperation. ‘Don’t play the hard-arse, Gideon, it doesn’t suit you.’

Duursema stroked a hand through his greying beard, fixing Jessie with a steady gaze, but he didn’t credit her comment with a reply.

‘Can’t we get more funding. More resources?’ she asked.

He pushed the telephone over to her. ‘Be my guest. Give Mr Cameron a call and say that we need a bit more cash, because although most of our soldiers have been pulled out of Afghanistan now, unfortunately the fallout from that crappy bloody war goes on in the minds of a huge number of them. And while you’re at it, would you mention that my niece’s school is rubbish, that I’d like my bins emptied more than once a fortnight, please, because we now have rats trotting happily along my garden wall as if they’re sightseeing on the Great Wall of China.’ He indicated the stack of files in front of her. ‘The government has driven a coach and horses through military funding, which is why we have ten inches of cases needing treatment and not enough resources to tackle a quarter of them in a decent timeframe.’

‘I’ll see him in my spare time.’

‘Spare time?’ He widened his eyes in mock shock. ‘You have spare time? I’m clearly not working you hard enough.’ Sitting back in his chair, he puffed a balloon of air from his lungs, a long, heavy sigh. ‘What’s your conclusion?’

‘On the Sami Scott case or the David Cameron case?’

‘Don’t be a smart arse, it suits you too well.’

Jessie hunched her shoulders. ‘I don’t have one yet.’

‘Post-traumatic stress disorder?’

‘That’s what his father thinks.’

‘And you don’t agree?’

‘I don’t know. I saw his mum this morning and she was very defensive.’ She paused. ‘Actually, defensive isn’t quite the right word. She was evasive. I think she just wants it all to go away.’

‘Wave the magic wand and lo and behold the child is cured.’

‘Right.’

He glanced sideways at the stack of cases. ‘That would be ideal for all of us.’

Spreading her hands, Jessie shrugged helplessly. ‘The parents insist that all his problems are due to the trauma of seeing his father so badly burnt.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think that it doesn’t quite add up.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s nothing concrete. But there is an undercurrent running through the whole family that’s making me nervous.’

Duursema leaned forward, steepling his fingers. ‘You don’t think he’s being sexually abused? Anything like that?’

‘He’s not sexually precocious.’

‘Sexual abuse doesn’t always manifest itself like that. Particularly in such a young child.’

Go back to bed. Stay in bed. You’re a naughty boy, Sami.

Jessie bit her lip. ‘I know, I know.’

‘If you suspect sexual abuse you have to call in the Redcaps’ Special Investigation Branch, immediately.’

She nodded. ‘But I can’t start tossing out accusations. I don’t know enough yet.’

‘Brief Captain Callan about your suspicions. He knows Scott. You’re working with him on the Starkey case already, aren’t you?’

‘I met with him and Starkey yesterday. I think my involvement is probably over now.’

‘Call and brief him anyway, to cover our arses if nothing else. And keep me updated. If you suspect – really suspect – that Sami Scott is being abused, we hand this case to the Redcaps immediately.
Immediately.
Do I make myself clear?’

Jessie nodded. Duursema sat back, crossed his arms. When he spoke again his voice was softer.

‘Let me help you, Jessie.’

She looked up. ‘Help me with what?’

She had gathered up all the stray pens on his desk, put them back in the penholder, tidied the loose papers into a pile, was lining his blotter up flush with the edge of his desk. She hadn’t even realized she’d been doing it.

‘Tidy desk tidy mind.’ Sliding her chair back, she stood. ‘I’ll keep in touch.’

‘Jessie.’

Turning, she pushed through the door.

‘You can’t keep running from it.’ His raised voice tracked her down the corridor. ‘It won’t go away on its own. You need to deal with it.’ A pause. ‘Oh, and a bit of respect would be nice.’

Head down, scarf pulled up around her face in a vain attempt to stave off the cold, Jessie crunched down the gravel path to the car park. As she’d predicted, the snow hadn’t settled, only transformed into a mushy soup which was seeping through the stitching of her ill-chosen suede boots. At least the snow hadn’t turned to sleet or rain.

As she walked, she revisited her conversation with Gideon.
Sexual abuse.
She didn’t even want to acknowledge it as a possibility, though she knew the thought had been fluttering on the periphery of her mind. A thought she had, so far, flinched away from.

‘Dr Flynn.’

She spun around, heart jumping into her mouth.

‘Sorry. Sorry if I scared you.’

‘I wasn’t scared.’ Her muscles relaxed slightly; heart still thumping hard against her ribcage.

Callan gave the suggestion of a smile. ‘That’s why you look like a ghost.’

‘I always look like a ghost. Benefit of Irish colouring. Great on dark nights like this. My skin is so luminous that I don’t need a torch.’

‘Who were you expecting?’ His tone suddenly serious.

Should she tell him about Starkey ambushing her in the car park last night?
No.
It wouldn’t be fair. He hadn’t actually done anything wrong, just creeped her out.

‘No one. I’m a little on edge.’ She hunched her shoulders. ‘Work, as usual.’

She met his gaze. He looked dreadful: his amber eyes washed out and bloodshot, perpetually flitting, missing nothing, the black rings under them even more pronounced than yesterday, as if he had been face-painted as a panda.

‘I need a favour,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Come and see Jackson’s wife and kids with me.’

‘When are you planning to go?’

‘This evening.’ He shuffled his feet in the slush. ‘Now.’

‘Why now?’

‘The autopsy was earlier today. There are a few questions I need to ask his family, potentially uncomfortable questions. His wife and kids have moved in with his parents, in Wandsworth, for the moment. Andy Jackson’s father works days and can’t afford to take time off. He insisted on being there when I come.’ He paused. ‘An extra pair of hands, particularly a psychologist, would be useful with, uh, with the kids there.’

She indicated the cut on her head. ‘I’m not sure that I’m so great with kids.’

He didn’t smile, was jittering from foot to foot as if trying to get warm. But Jessie realized that nerves rather than cold were responsible, could sense he was on the edge, couldn’t face the discussion alone.

‘Of course I’ll come.’ A smile lifted the corners of her mouth. ‘I wanted a ride in the pimp-mobile anyway.’

He’d cleaned it out since yesterday: the passenger footwell was clear of crisp packets and Coke cans and the car had that waxy alkaline smell of shampoo and car polish. Flipping the heaters to maximum, he started the engine.

After a few dark miles of undulating country lanes, they joined the A3, heading into southwest London. Cutting straight across to the fast lane, Callan put his foot down. The needle rose smoothly to ninety. As he drove, he gave her a rundown of the autopsy findings and what he wanted to achieve from the visit to Andy Jackson’s wife, besides tea and sympathy.

‘I’m pretty sure that Steve, Jackson’s father, will try to dominate the discussion, but one of us needs to talk to his wife – alone, ideally. Get some information as to whether Jackson had any medical problems. Also his state of mind and other intangibles: his personality, impressions of how he was coping in Afghanistan.’

Jessie nodded. ‘Why medical problems? Is it looking as if he died of natural causes?’

Callan shrugged. ‘The autopsy wasn’t conclusive, but the pathologist, Val Monks, thinks that his heart had stopped beating before the bullet entered his stomach. I’m expecting a call from Val when she has more.’

She looked across at him, biting her lip. ‘Mrs Jackson will be forced to give up her Army house now that Andy Jackson is dead, find somewhere else permanent to live.’

‘She’ll get a widow’s pension.’

‘And then she’ll be tossed out into civilian life with no support.’

‘The Army isn’t a charity or a babysitting service.’

‘You’re damn right there.’ Her tone was harsh. ‘Eat ’em up and spit ’em out.’

‘It can be a great life when it’s going well and a shit one when it isn’t,’ Callan replied evenly. ‘Unfortunately, Jackson’s family have been handed the shit end of the stick.’

Despite feeling anger rise at the injustice of it all, she knew that what Callan said was true. Yin and Yang. The Army life could be hard to beat when it was going well – the flip side, horrific. But with Afghanistan and Iraq, the continuing turmoil in the Middle East, the death toll among young service personnel was considerably higher than in the preceding decades. When a soldier died, their dependants were given a pension, a few months to find alternative accommodation and then left to fend for themselves. Many soldiers married young, and it could be incredibly hard for wives who had spent the whole of their adult lives as Army dependants to cope alone. Life on the outside was isolating. The issue was constantly top of mind for the Psychology Service.

They had reached the end of the A3, where three lanes merged to two, then narrowed soon after to one, the traffic backed up in front of them, a mass of flashing tail-lights. Neither Callan nor Jessie spoke. There wasn’t much to say. As they got closer to Wandsworth, the tension she felt at the prospect of seeing Jackson’s wife and children had grown. She knew that Callan felt it even more acutely.

Cutting across two lanes of the Wandsworth one-way system, he took a left turn and they entered a maze of streets, three-storey terraced houses. He turned into another street, this one narrower, the pavement studded every twenty metres with birch trees.

‘Forty-six,’ he said.

Jessie pointed. ‘There.’

Callan parked fifty metres further down the street, the only available space, and shut off the engine. The Jacksons’ lived in a neat, red-brick terrace house at the end of the street, anchored on one side by a newsagent, metal shutters pulled down over its plate-glass window, on the other by another architecturally identical house, its brickwork painted a pale cream. The street was a mix of houses: a few obviously occupied by people who had lived there for many years, bought them when they were cheap, before Wandsworth’s gentrification, net curtains hanging in the windows, paint peeling from facades. Others had clearly been snapped up by professional couples. White plantation shutters and dove grey silk curtains replacing net, Land Rover Freelanders parked on the kerb. The suburban normality felt miles from the Army, from Afghanistan, from death, and Jessie wondered how Jackson had found his way into the Intelligence Corps from this quiet West London street.

The Jacksons’ house was one of the former, slightly shabby now, a thin layer of city grime coating its brickwork but, other than that, it was tidy and well kept. A path of pale yellow and pink crazy paving led from the gate to the yellow front door, a six-inch high hedge of evergreen box lining either side of the path. A circular pattern, like a wagon wheel, was laid out in the same stone in the tiny front garden, the patches of earth between each spoke filled with more evergreen box bushes. Tidy, low maintenance. The light was on in the front downstairs room, but thick, dark curtains pulled across the window prevented them from seeing inside.

Callan had dressed in a dark grey suit and a red-and-black striped tie. Only the highly polished shoes hinted that he might be something other than a City worker returning home from a day in the office. Army habits hard to extinguish even when out of uniform. It had been a problem with the Army in Northern Ireland, Jessie remembered from her training, soldiers undercover as vagrants giving themselves away by the shine on their shoes.

She and Callan exchanged tense glances on the doorstep.

‘I’m not expecting this to be easy,’ he said in a low voice, reaching for the doorbell. ‘Jackson’s father, Steve, didn’t sound like the type of man to take anything lying down.’

The bell sounded like a bee in a jam jar. For a few moments their twin breaths, clouding the cold air in the porch, were the only sound. Then light footsteps on wooden boards approaching.

The woman who opened the door couldn’t have been more than fifty, but she looked ten years older, shrunken and faded, as if she had been washed on a hot cycle too many times. Her brown hair, streaked with grey, was pulled back into a tight ponytail and she was wearing a shapeless grey jumper and grey trousers, elasticated at the waist. Her feet were shoved into backless slippers. The only colour on her was a bright red poppy pinned to her jumper.
Remembrance Day.
Every day was Remembrance Day now for Jackson’s parents, his wife and children.

Callan held up his identification with his left hand, extended his right. She didn’t shake it.

‘Captain Ben Callan, Military Police, Special Investigation Branch.’

She looked scared. ‘Steve,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘Steve. That policeman is here.’

Jessie stepped past Callan.

‘Mrs Jackson. I’m Jessie Flynn, one of Captain Callan’s … colleagues. May we come in?’

Almost reluctantly, as if by keeping them on the doorstep she was keeping reality at bay, Mrs Jackson inched the door open. Jessie and Callan stepped over the threshold, into the narrow hallway, as Steve Jackson pounded down the stairs, two at a time. He was a short, stocky man with a grey crew cut. Piercing blue eyes were the only colour in his face, the skin around them heavily lined, grey and wan. Callan held out his hand.

‘Mr Jackson, I’m Captain Ben Callan. This is Dr Jessie Flynn, one of my colleagues. She’s a clinical psychologist.’

Ignoring Callan’s outstretched hand, a frowning Steve Jackson looked from Jessie to Callan and back.

‘A psychologist?’ He blew air out of his nose. ‘What the hell do we want with a bloody psychologist? We need justice, not counselling.’

‘She’s helping me with the case. It’s not clear-cut.’

‘It’s bloody clear-cut to me. My son was shot, murdered, by one of his colleagues. Not by a bloody Afghan. I would have expected that. I would have been able to
live
with that. But, Jesus, one of his own comrades—’

Choking off the rest of his sentence, he turned and strode into the sitting room: the room at the front of the house they had seen, lit behind brown curtains, from the pavement. Callan followed. Jessie hung back by the door.

Rachel Jackson had already been visited by men from the Intelligence Corps who had broken the news of her husband’s death. The family were putting themselves through this visit for Andy Jackson – to get justice – and Jessie knew that what they really wanted was for her and Callan to go, leave them alone, never come back.

The living room smelt of air freshener and smoke. An artificial coal fire burned in the fireplace, the only furniture two slightly shabby-looking flower-patterned sofas set at right angles to each other around an old wooden coffee table. There were four used mugs on the coffee table and a couple of plates with biscuit crumbs on them. A half-empty packet of Superkings lay next to a full ashtray. A red Henry vacuum cleaner sat in the corner of the room, plugged in, as if someone had started vacuuming and then lost interest halfway through the job.

A huge framed photograph of Jackson, in his dress uniform, hung over the fireplace. Other photographs lined the mantelpiece and the oak sideboard next to it, every milestone in his progression from toddler, to gap-toothed little boy clutching a football, to young man dressed in his best shirt for a night out, faithfully captured on celluloid. Steve Jackson indicated the sofa.

‘Have a seat, Captain.’

Reaching for the packet of Superkings, he shook one out and lit it.

Callan sat down. He looked huge and awkward on the little flower-patterned sofa. Mrs Jackson hovered in the doorway behind Jessie.

‘Would you like a tea or coffee?’ she asked.

Callan shook his head. ‘I’m fine, thank you, Mrs Jackson.’

‘Dr Flynn?’

‘Yes, a coffee please,’ Jessie said. She didn’t particularly want a coffee, but she did want to get Jackson’s mother alone, knew that she’d have a better chance of getting under the woman’s skin without his father there, bristling with aggression. He was clearly the boss in their relationship and, while they were in the same room, Mrs Jackson would defer to him. ‘I’ll help you make it.’

She followed Mrs Jackson down the narrow hallway. The kitchen was small, the surfaces cluttered with unwashed mugs and plates. Jessie could feel crumbs grinding into the soles of her shoes as she shuffled her feet, embarrassed, uncomfortable, torn between an almost overwhelming urge to roll her sleeves up, get to work cleaning, and an opposing one, to walk out of the front door, never come back. The weight of grief in this house felt too familiar, too much like stepping back fifteen years into her own personal nightmare. The mundanities of life meaningless in the face of such overwhelming loss. Everything meaningless.

‘I’m sorry about my husband. He doesn’t mean to be rude. It’s just—’

‘My brother died unexpectedly when I was fourteen. Please don’t apologize. You have nothing to apologize for.’

Mrs Jackson met her gaze and gave a small, grateful nod. Her eyes looked dead, Jessie realized, the way her mother’s had after Jamie’s death.

A young girl’s voice suddenly from upstairs, quickly shushed.

Raised men’s voices from the sitting room, Steve Jackson shouting, ‘
Accidental death? Are you fucking kidding me? He was murdered, for Christ’s sake.
’

Mrs Jackson flinched. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

Callan’s reply, his voice steady, controlled:
‘
I have to keep an open mind at this stage.
’

‘Milk please, Mrs Jackson.’

The girl again, her pitch higher this time, laced with tension. Jessie wished that Steve Jackson would keep his voice down, control his temper, if only for his grandchildren’s sake.