Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) (16 page)

Pauline braked so hard that her handbag catapulted from the passenger seat, landing upside down in the Micra’s footwell, keys, lipstick, compact, wallet spreading themselves over the mat. A dog had just shot across the road in front of her.

Thank God she had only been driving at fifteen miles an hour – slowing in approach to her own drive – or she would have run it over. Her reactions were not what they used to be. Pulling over to the kerb outside her house, she switched off the engine, her hand shaking as she pulled the key from the ignition. She felt a bit tipsy. She’d had no cards all night, no luck at all, and her partner had been a pedant who had driven her mad quoting the rule book, when the only reason she went to the bridge club was to get herself out of the house one night a week and meet some pleasant people. She had drunk more than she should have done and realized now that she was probably over the limit. All she wanted to do was to crawl into bed with a hot cup of tea.

But the dog – Rusty? Was it Rusty?

She glanced at the illuminated clock on her dashboard. One a.m.
Heavens
,
it can’t have been Rusty.
Wendy had been at work all day – she wouldn’t be out walking him at this time, surely? But even so, the dog
had
looked very much like him: the size, the blaze of beige and white as it streaked past.

Pauline’s automatic security light flashed on as she climbed out of the car and crossed the lawn to her front door. The night felt colder, windier, than it had when she’d left the bridge club in the centre of Camberley – the jam of buildings in town cutting off the wind and sharing some of their heat with the street. Something loose was slamming rhythmically – a gate left open, maybe – and a curious low humming was coming from the trees in the Sandhurst training ground. Something about the sound set her teeth on edge. It wasn’t a night to be trudging around in the dark searching for stray dogs.

As she opened the door, she heard a noise behind her, which nearly made her jump out of her skin. The dog was back – on the lawn – and now she saw that it was, without question, Rusty. Crouching, clicking with her tongue, she held her hand out.

‘Rusty. Good boy. Come. Rusty, come.’

He seemed agitated, darting from side to side across her front lawn, edging towards the start of the sandy path that led to the training area, and then running back toward her. The movement, his behaviour, set a tiny alarm bell off in her brain. It was almost as if he was trying to get her to follow him. She looked beyond him, up and down the road, unable to see anyone, anything but the dense night. She had the unsettling sense that beyond the wall of darkness in front of her, the trees in Paschal Wood and the training area were alive in the wind. Shivering, she drew back into her hallway. Where on earth was Wendy?

‘Rusty. Rusty, come.’

Darting into her kitchen, she fetched a handful of dog treats. Squatting on the doorstep, making that clicking noise she had learnt from watching dog whisperer programmes on the television, holding out the handful of treats, she was finally able to tempt him close enough to catch. Holding him by the collar, she pulled him inside. He was panting and shaking, pulling, trying to wrench himself free.

‘Oh heavens, what on earth have you been up to?’ She stroked her hand over his back to calm him. His fur was wet, clumped and sticky. As she looked at the colour of the liquid on his pale fur, on her own lined palm, she felt naked fear dawn.

Standing in her back garden, gown wrapped tight around her, slippers soaking up the morning dew, Jessie took a sip of coffee. A milky mist hung low over the fields, and beyond them the sky was tinged ochre with the light of the rising sun.

She had slept fitfully, her mind lurching from one disturbing image to the next, all of them to do with burning:
the trail of Roxy’s rocket taking her dad to heaven; the black plastic donkey wrapped in Baby Isabel’s blanket; the girl is burnt, the man is burnt; the bonfire she had lit in her mother’s garden, to extinguish the past. Always back to Jamie and to her mother.

At one in the morning, she thought she’d heard a noise downstairs, had slipped out of bed – grabbing one half of a pair of stone bookends from her bedside table – and tiptoed down the carpeted stairs, clutching the bookend like a mallet, unsure of whether she could bring herself to crack it against someone’s skull if there was anyone there. But when she reached the kitchen, she realized that she must have left the back door unlocked; the sound was the door twitching against its frame in the wind. The farm cat – stretched out, soaking up the under-floor heating – must somehow have managed to prise it open and slip inside. Scooping him up, she put him outside, closed and locked the door, feeling guilty for disturbing his comfortable slumber.

Back in bed, sleep continued to elude her. At 5 a.m. she had admitted defeat and risen. She’d tidied the house: brushing away imagined dust with a damp cloth, rearranging cupboards that had been rearranged the week before, hoovering the spotless carpets, taking the cups from the cupboard and inspecting each one in turn, washing the few that bore illusory stains.

In the field beyond the fence, a flock of sheep grazed, rose-tinted in the dawn light. Though she tried only to focus on the beauty of the dawn, a beauty that the grey clouds gathering to the west told her wouldn’t last, her mind kept circling back to Sami.

Was Nooria having an affair? The Army lifestyle put huge strain on relationships and divorce rates were high. Service before self, the Army before everything, constant moves, forced absences for months at a time. Nooria was fifteen years younger than Scott, stuck out in that farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, alone. Had she hooked up with someone at art college perhaps, someone who hadn’t taken a shine to Sami?

And what about sexual abuse? – the beast that dare not speak its name. She’d told Gideon that she thought it unlikely, but why had she said that? What evidence did she have to back up her statement? One in twenty children in the United Kingdom were the victim of sexual abuse and of those, over 90 per cent were abused by someone they knew. Was Sami one of those children?

Go back to bed. Stay in bed. You’re bad. The Shadowman will come.

The thought made her sick to her stomach, but she had to acknowledge that it did happen, and often. People exploited innocence for money, for power and control over the child or over their parent, the mother usually, and purely for their own, sick enjoyment.

She could meet with Sami’s parents again, but she felt as if she was merely going around in circles. Did she have time to eke out the truth from Sami himself? She was making progress in their sessions, but it was slow and time was running out. If he was the victim of sexual abuse, he needed to be removed and quickly.

What about Scott’s ex-wife? Wendy had mentioned meeting her a few times in Aldershot. She had been a fitness instructor before marrying Scott, had been forced by financial circumstances to return to the profession when Scott left her for Nooria. Humiliation piled upon humiliation. She was linked to Scott by blood – two daughters. Would Jacqui be able to give any insights as to Scott’s psychology and what might be going on in his current family?

And what about on Nooria’s side? She had no siblings, an absent father and an estranged mother. The closest people to her, perhaps, the teachers at the school she was working in when she met Scott. A stretch, Jessie realized – clutching at straws.

But she had hit a wall. To move forward, she had to branch out. She would see Sami again this morning and then make a decision as to where she went from there.

They were back in the same spartan, utilitarian interview room as for the first interview, Starkey waiting for Callan, again, by the window, a rain-heavy early morning sky beyond the glass.

‘Sergeant Starkey.’

Starkey turned. He fixed Callan with a cool stare before he came slowly, reluctantly to attention. Callan returned the salute.

‘Captain Callan. I won’t say that it’s nice to see you because that would be dishonest and I hate dishonesty.’

‘Do you now?’ Callan muttered, sitting down at the table, laying the digital recorder on the metal tabletop and switching it on. ‘Have a seat, Sergeant Starkey.’

Starkey pulled out the chair and sat down. They faced each other across the table, Callan’s amber eyes looking straight into Starkey’s dark ones, neither having any intention of looking away first. The tension between them palpable.

‘You have said twice before that you do not want a Ministry of Defence lawyer appointed on your behalf. Is that still the case, Sergeant Starkey?’

‘It is, Captain Callan. I have done nothing wrong, so I do not need defending.’

Callan laid both hands flat on the desktop either side of the recorder. The forensic evidence from Starkey’s well-oiled gun had given him nothing concrete to work with, only the partial print of Jackson’s on the trigger, and forensics had been lucky to find that. So Jackson could have shot himself accidently while they fought or Starkey could have shot him deliberately. Callan also had no independent witnesses. The only live participant, sitting across the table from him, looking belligerent. He knew that he was playing this game from a huge disadvantage.

‘Why did you shoot Jackson, Starkey?’ he began.

‘I didn’t shoot him. He shot himself.’

‘With your sidearm?’ His tone was combative, deliberately so. He had nothing to lose in goading Starkey, seeing if Starkey cracked and told him some truth – any truth.

‘Yes.’

‘Why did Jackson have your sidearm?’

‘He took it off me.’

‘And you let him take it?’

Starkey flashed that sharp-toothed grin, unruffled. But Callan noticed that the whites of his eyes were bloodshot. For all his bravado, he clearly wasn’t sleeping properly. Callan knew that feeling well.

‘He had his own, so I wasn’t expecting him to want mine too. That’s greedy.’

‘I could have you disciplined for not taking due care of your personal weapon.’

Starkey smirked. ‘Sounds to me like you have jack shit, Captain.’

Callan sat back, scratched a leisurely hand through his stubble. He wasn’t going to give Starkey the satisfaction of losing his temper and at least someone had fixed the bloody strip light.

‘You had a fight.’

‘Soldiers fight all the time. So what?’

‘This fight ended in a death.’

Starkey shrugged. ‘He was being an arsehole. Trying to take my gun. Not my fault if the idiot shot himself accidently in the process.’

‘You coerced Jackson into going for that run and you had a reason for doing so.’

‘Coerced. You swallowed a dictionary, Captain?’

Callan ignored the comment. ‘What did you want from him, Starkey?’

No reply.

‘What was Jackson hiding?’

Silence.

Leaning back in his chair, Callan sighed. ‘I’ve been going through the list of British Army Intelligence Corps. Officers who were based at TAAC-South, Kandahar, at any point during the past three months. The list wasn’t long – only three names. You, Jackson and Major Scott.’ He paused. ‘The petrol bomb attack on Major Scott – it sounded planned to me.’

Still no reply, but a minute tensing of Starkey’s jaw. Callan was merely fishing, verbalizing ideas, tossing out tenuous links, seeing if any of them hit a nerve. It looked as if that one just had.

‘You were driving Scott at the time and you were lucky to come out of it unharmed,’ he continued.

Starkey’s lip curled. ‘Quit ferreting, Captain. It’s getting you nowhere.’

‘Did Jackson set you and Scott up? Did he have a deal with the enemy?’

‘Patrols in Kandahar are being attacked all the time. Shit happens.’

‘You weren’t on patrol. You’re Intelligence Corps and you were going to meet with an Afghan governmental official. Who were you going to meet with and why?’

‘It was only my fourth day in Afghanistan, Captain Callan. I was the new boy. I knew shit.’

‘Did someone tip them off as to the route you were taking? Did Jackson? Is that what you thought?’

Starkey shrugged.

‘Did Jackson betray you and Scott?’

‘Why don’t you ask Scott? They were working together long before I arrived in Kandahar.’

‘Funnily enough, Scott doesn’t remember much.’

‘And neither do I. Must be the shock – wiped my memory clean.’ Leaning back in his chair, he put his hands behind his head and yawned.

Callan felt hot. Despite the cold outside, the room was warm. Unbuttoning his jacket, he shrugged it off and hung it on the back of the chair.

‘Feeling the heat, Captain?’

Callan bit down on his temper, kept his voice even. ‘Jackson didn’t die of that gunshot wound. He died of a heart attack.’

Starkey’s eyebrows rose.

‘Did Jackson have a heart problem, Starkey?’

Fingers tapping a rhythm on the tabletop, Starkey’s gaze slid away from Callan’s. ‘How the hell would I know?’ He paused, something changing in his face, a dawning recognition. Eyes finding Callan’s again, he smiled. ‘A heart attack? So that’s the murder charge off the table.’

‘There’s manslaughter,’ Callan said coolly. ‘Ten years plus in the can, cosying up to Bubba every night. So why don’t you start being straight with me.’

Starkey stretched out both hands, hunched his shoulders. ‘I know nothing.’ Spanish accent, Manuel in
Fawlty Towers
. An improvement on Clint Eastwood, and at least he had dropped the insane act. Perhaps he’d put it on for Dr Flynn’s benefit, couldn’t be bothered when it was only Callan. Or perhaps he didn’t give enough of a shit any more to pretend. He’d had two days since that first interview to sit and think, work out the best strategy for coming out of this mess as well as he could. And he was Intelligence Corps. He was smart and cunning, no doubt about it.

‘We found opium in his system. What can you tell me about that?’

‘I can’t tell you anything about that.’ Starkey’s dark eyes were hooded, unreadable. ‘But if you could ask a dead man—’ He broke off. Callan watched the light come on in his brain, as if someone had flicked a switch; light that reflected through his eyes, suddenly bright and knowing. ‘Opium? He was on opium? Now if I’m not mistaken, Captain, aren’t drugs bad for the heart?’

‘He shouldn’t have been out there, running with you.’

Starkey shrugged. ‘He shouldn’t have been in the Army at all. Fucking druggie.’

‘Watch your mouth, Starkey. That’s a fellow soldier you’re talking about.’

‘Was.
Was
a fellow solider.’ He smirked. ‘When is the funeral?’

A picture of Jackson’s wife, his kids, filled Callan’s mind. Sliding his hands from the table, he balled them into fists in his lap. The urge to lean across the table and punch Starkey in the face was almost overwhelming, but he wasn’t going to lose it this time, whatever the provocation.

‘Don’t worry about it. I don’t think you’re invited,’ he said.

Pushing his chair back, Starkey stood up.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Callan snapped.

‘If I’m not mistaken, you have nothing on me, Captain Callan. That means I’m free to go.’

‘You are not a civilian, Starkey, and you are free to go only when I tell you.’

Jesus Christ.
He had nothing. Knew that he had nothing. He could posture all he liked, pull rank, be an arsehole, but both he and Starkey knew that he had jack shit. Callan pushed himself to his feet. They faced each other across the table, Callan an inch or so taller, but both big men, barely suppressed aggression radiating from them like heat.

‘I will find out what happened, Starkey.’

‘Good luck with that, Captain. You can interview me as many times as you like, but you’ll get nowhere. I was taught by the British Army to be the best of the best when it comes to intelligence, half-truths, lies, taking interviewers for twenty-rounds in the ring and then KO’ing them. You can’t break me and you can’t make me talk.’

Starkey walked towards the door. Callan followed, stood behind him, right in his personal space.

‘The truth will set you free, Starkey. Isn’t that what you said?’

Starkey paused, his hand on the door, but he didn’t turn.

‘The truth never set anyone free, Captain Callan. Only the fucking stupid believe that. And whatever I am, I’m not stupid.’