Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) (18 page)

Raised voices, the scuffle of feet, a man shouting and a child screaming, right outside her office door.

Jessie was counselling a twenty-four-year-old corporal who had lost both legs to the thigh when the lightly armoured Snatch Land Rover – mobile coffins, the troops called them – he had been travelling in had hit IED while on routine patrol in Helmand Province. He was the only survivor, spending two hours trapped under the overturned Land Rover, playing dead, before he was rescued, listening to the young men who he had worked and lived with for the past three years dying slowly and painfully around him.

Her office door slammed open and Sami rocketed into the room. Charging across the carpet, he launched himself at her, wrapping his arms around her legs. Scott strode into the room after him – barely suppressed fury on his face – Jenny, the department secretary, behind him, looking pale and tense. Scott stopped when he saw Corporal Jones.

‘Sami!’ Jessie heard the metallic tone, the anger lacing his voice.

‘Do you mind if we finish the session here, Corporal Jones?’ Jessie asked.

The corporal glanced at Major Scott, double-digit ranks above him in the Army hierarchy. ‘Of course not.’ Reaching for his crutches, he levered himself upright. He made slow progress across the office on his crutches and prosthetics. Scott stood aside, eye burning. When Corporal Jones had crossed the threshold, he slammed the door closed.

Jessie levered Sami away from her. Holding him at arm’s length, she knelt in front of him so that she could look him in the eye.

‘Your daddy is here, Sami. It’s time to go home, but I’ll see you again tomorrow.’

‘No!
’ Sami cried, his voice thick with anguish. He clutched the torch tight to his chest with one hand, clung to Jessie’s hand with the other. ‘Don’t want to go home. The girl is safe with the woman. Sami is safe with you.’

Scott crossed the room and put his hands on Sami’s shoulders.

‘Sami, for God’s sake, you’re being ridiculous.’

Sami screamed. Scrabbling from his father’s grip, he shot around to the back of Jessie’s desk and buried himself in the space below it.

‘Shall I bring him home?’ Jessie said. ‘I can delay my next appointment.’

‘No,’ Scott replied through gritted teeth. ‘He’s coming home with me now.’

He was struggling for control. He leaned down to retrieve Sami, but Sami howled and kicked at his hand. Catching one of Sami’s ankles, he hauled him out from under the desk. Sami swung at his dad with his torch, but Scott saw it coming, caught his arm and held it. Sami screamed and struggled wildly, like a furious, trapped animal, as Scott pulled him across the room.

‘He’s not coming here again, not after this performance.
Nothing
you are doing is helping.’

‘I had this conversation with Nooria earlier. There’s always a tough period before it gets better.’

‘A tough period? Is that what you call
this
? A tough bloody period,’ he shouted. ‘You are
not
seeing him again.’

He walked towards the door, towing a howling, writhing Sami after him.

‘Major Scott, my boss is concerned for Sami’s safety. He believes that he might … might have suffered abuse.’ Her voice shook as she spoke and she hated herself for it. ‘He wants to call in the Military Police. I am trying to ensure that doesn’t happen, but if you stop me from seeing Sami I will call them in myself.’

Scott spun around. ‘Jesus Christ, you bitch. You are supposed to be helping us.’

‘I’m trying to help you, but neither of you is telling me the truth.’

‘Look at me,’ he snarled. ‘
Just
…’ His voice faltered; his head dipped and he paused. ‘Just look at me. This is the fucking truth. This is all there is.’

Jessie held the gaze of his one good eye across the room. A lump had formed in her throat. She felt that if she spoke another word – one word – the floodgates would open. She swallowed, breathed.

‘I’m seeing him tomorrow, ten a.m. He had better be here.’

Scott didn’t answer. Holding Sami tight by the hand, he pulled him out of the room, still struggling and sobbing. Pushing the door shut, twisting the key in the lock to ensure her privacy, Jessie leaned back against it and burst into tears.

Pulling into Birch Close, Callan parked his Golf halfway across someone’s drive, the only place he could find among the civilian and Army police vehicles clogging the tiny cul-de-sac. Jogging down the sandy path that led from the end of the close to the Sandhurst boundary fence, he saw Detective Inspector Bobby Simmons pacing backwards and forwards, a cigarette hanging from his lips, mobile phone clamped to his ear. He looked a wreck. An ageing, alcoholic rocker: grubby black clothes hanging off his skinny frame, deep lines cutting vertically through the skin of his face, black hair too long and those odd, mismatched eyes, one blue, one brown, absorbing everything going on around him, even as he was engaged in conversation with whoever was on the other end of the line.

They had worked together on another case last year. The twenty-one-year-old, six months pregnant wife of a corporal serving in Afghanistan who Callan had cut down from the banister of her stairwell, the body four days old, bloated and yellowing, the smell so visceral that he could taste it on his tongue days later. The couple had lived off base, so Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes had led the investigation; a formality, as it had become clear, very early on, that she had taken her own life. He remembered Marilyn back then, full of preconceptions about Army officers, bristling before they’d exchanged a word, and later, standing at the bottom of the stairs, a green pallor colouring his face, clearly grateful that Callan had volunteered to do the honours with the kitchen knife. They had ended up in the pub together that evening, got drunk, realized that they actually liked each other despite their surface differences.

Two lines of police
Do Not Cross
tape were strung across the pathway, which ran alongside the boundary fence, sectioning off two hundred metres of it.

Beyond Marilyn, Lieutenant Ed Gold was standing stiffly inside the tape, talking to Corporal Kiddie. Neither of them appeared to be doing much. Further inside the tape, a group of uniformed police officers were being given instructions. The unlucky ones would end up combing the pathway, on all fours, searching the sodden earth and puddles for clues. Others would go on the knock, from house to house, trying to find someone who had seen something, anything useful late last night. At least they might get offered a cup of tea. On the other side of the boundary fence, within Sandhurst, a white forensic tent had been erected, obviously covering the body of Wendy Chubb. A couple of figures in white Tyvek overalls hummed around the tent. It had stopped raining at last, but the ground under Callan’s feet was boggy and huge puddles, reflecting the stormy grey sky, swamped the path. Search conditions were far from optimal.

Marilyn finished his call and they shook hands.

‘Good to see you, Callan.’ He laid a hand on Callan’s shoulder, a stretch as Callan was a good twenty centimetres taller than he was. ‘Look, I’m sorry about what I said earlier, on the phone, about you leaving the Army. I obviously got the wrong end of the stick.’

A shadow crossed Callan’s face and Marilyn realized that he’d got closer to the truth than was comfortable. His eyes grazed across the scar on Callan’s temple – clearly a bullet wound; he’d seen a few in his time. So Gold had been right about that, at least.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Callan murmured, unsmiling.

‘Right then.’ Marilyn rubbed his hands together, raised them, cupped, to his face and blew into them. ‘I can’t tell you how good it is to see you here. My tolerance for fuckwits appears to be running on empty today. This is clearly a case for our unit and as you can see I’ve brought in my teams, but your friend Gold isn’t having any of it.’

‘The victim is definitely civvy?’

‘Without a doubt.’ Marilyn pulled out his notebook, flicked to the first page. The phone call had been from DS Workman who was at the hospital, had just spent half an hour interviewing Pauline.

‘Wendy Chubb, a fifty-six-year-old housekeeper. Lived at 25 Saddleback Close.’ He jerked his thumb over his left shoulder. ‘Over there – one of the houses with a garden backing on to these woods.’ Frowning, he looked up, meeting Callan’s searching gaze.

‘What is it, Marilyn?’

‘There is an Army connection, so I think we’re going to need to work together on this one after all.’

‘What’s the connection?’

‘She’s a housekeeper for an Army family. The Scotts – Major Scott.’

‘Scott?’ Callan frowned. ‘Are you sure of the name?’

‘Yes. I’ve got it written here, straight from my DS who has interviewed Wendy Chubb’s friend. Major Nicholas Scott. We’ll need to verify it, but I doubt we’ll find that the information is wrong.’ Marilyn folded his arms across his chest, tipped back on his heels, looking hard at Callan. ‘Do I sense a motive?’

‘I don’t know, but I’m dealing with another case in which Scott is involved.’

‘A murder?’

‘Someone died in suspicious circumstances, yes, but it wasn’t a murder per se.’

‘Cryptic.’

‘Not deliberately. That’s as far as I’ve got.’

Marilyn nodded. ‘Well let me give you a guided tour of our body and we can take it from there.’

‘Give me a minute,’ Callan said, moving past Marilyn.

Gold was still standing together with Corporal Kiddie. They were laughing about something. Gold looked over as Callan approached, let the laugh fade to a small, knowing smile. When Callan was comfortably within earshot he turned to Kiddie and said, ‘How can you tell when a drug addict is lying?’

Kiddie looked surprised. ‘What? A drug addict? I don’t know.’

‘Come on. A drug addict. How can you tell when he’s lying?’

‘I don’t know. Tell me.’

‘He opens his mouth.’

‘Jesus, you’re at a crime scene,’ Callan hissed. ‘Have a bit of respect.’

Shoulders shaking, Gold shrugged. ‘I wasn’t joking about the victim,’ he muttered, in a ‘fuck you’ tone.

‘Get out of here now,’ Callan snapped.

Gold walked off sniggering and Callan realized that the rise had given him even more satisfaction.
Fuck.
He thought he’d been careful with his epilepsy medication, but obviously not careful enough. He’d clearly have to watch his back.

A knock on the door. Jessie didn’t move.

‘Jessie, it’s Gideon. Unlock the door.’

She took a couple of breaths, sucking air deep into her lungs. The lump was still fixed firmly in her throat, making it hard to breathe, even harder to speak.

‘I’ll try again. It’s Gideon, your boss. Unlock the door, now.’

Scrubbing her sleeve fiercely over her face to wipe away the tears, she flapped both hands in front of her cheeks, cooling her skin. She didn’t care what she looked like, as long as she didn’t look as if she had been crying. She felt way out of her depth with the Sami Scott case and admitting that she had cried would only compound her failure. Untucking her hair from behind her ears so that it hung half over her face, she unlocked the door.

‘Dr Duursema.’ Her voice cracked, too high, too loud. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘You can let me in for starters and we can go from there.’ He strode past her, sat himself in one of the leather chairs by the window.

‘I have another session starting in five minutes,’ Jessie said, hovering by the door.

‘They can wait. Close the door, then come and sit.’

Jessie did as she was told: closed the door, sat down opposite him, hands gripping the worn leather arms of the chair to stop their obvious trembling. Gideon crossed his legs, folded his hands into his lap. ‘I want to tell you a story,’ he said. ‘No interruptions. Just listen.’

His voice was calm, unaccusing, not what she had expected. She had expected a bollocking. She was full of jittery energy, the electric suit hissing against her skin. But she forced herself to sit and meet his gaze, nod, go through the motions of being professional, in control. The charade.

‘Before I joined the Defence Psychology Service I worked in West London – Fulham, to be precise. When people hear the word Fulham, they think of two-million-pound houses, banker families who couldn’t quite afford Chelsea or Kensington. But actually it’s a surprisingly mixed area, huge swathes of council estates, very deprived in parts.’ He stroked a hand through his beard. ‘I spent day after day dealing with the scum of society, rescuing children from drug-addicted parents, from conditions so squalid you wouldn’t let a pig or goat live like that. So when the Welches were referred to me for assessment after their GP became concerned at injuries their toddler daughter had suffered, I was thrilled. The dad was a lawyer with one of the big London firms. He’d studied law at Oxford – he was in his final year when I was in my first, not that I ever met him there. The little girl’s mum was a housewife, a beautiful blonde woman, perfect mum, baked cakes, kept a tidy house, dressed the child in pretty outfits and walked her to nursery, entertained other City folk. It was such a pleasure to have those parents after the scum I’d been dealing with. I was enchanted with them.’

‘What happened?’ Jessie asked.

‘The mum drowned the little girl in a bath full of freezing cold water one evening. The father was at work, but he’d been on the phone to her the whole time. One of his colleagues had come into his office, caught him telling his wife to ‘hold the little cow under, teach her a lesson’. I’m not sure that they meant to drown her. I think it was a punishment that went too far. The mother called an ambulance, said she’d left her daughter in the bath to answer the phone and had found her floating, unconscious, when she got back. The little girl never regained consciousness. She died the next day, a week before her third birthday.’

‘Were they convicted of murder?’

Gideon rolled his eyes. ‘Of course not. Just like Baby P’s mother and her boyfriend, they were convicted of “causing or allowing her death”, that weird, nondescript category of crime the law has conjured up for parents who abuse and kill their children, that results in them being sentenced to seven or eight years, out in three or four for good behaviour. It was a travesty. They’ll have been out for a good ten years now, enjoying their lives, while that little girl rots.’ His expression was neutral, hadn’t changed with the telling, but Jessie was aware of the exaggerated rise and fall of his chest. ‘That’s what I found so hard to tell the trial afterwards. I
had
seen the child’s bruises. I had noticed the weight loss. But abuse – torture, it was, to give it its proper name – I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. The parents were too nice, too middle class, too
normal
. They had made her eat salt and chilli powder, bound her arms and legs for hours to cut off the circulation, locked her in the under-stairs cupboard in the dark all night. All the horrific details came out in the trial – and there I was, trying to defend my position. A position that, looking back, was completely indefensible.’ His eyes hung closed for a moment. ‘But at the time it
hadn’t
been obvious. They always had a plausible explanation for her injuries and though I knew it didn’t quite add up, I wasn’t brave enough to challenge them because they didn’t fit my profile of abusive parents. They could string a sentence together. They were friends with doctors and bankers. Their daughter went to one of the most expensive private nurseries in Fulham. I was young, like you, reasonably new to the game and I didn’t want to lose credibility by causing a big fuss over nothing.’ He gave a heavy sigh. ‘It was my fault that the poor little girl lived like she did and died like she did, and it’s something I’ve had to live with every day of my life since. My own personal ghost.’ He tapped his right hand on his left shoulder. ‘Sitting right here. Not one day has gone by since that little girl died that I don’t think of her, don’t see her face, don’t curse myself for being so naive.’ He sat forward, elbows on his knees, steepling his fingers. ‘You have to give the child the benefit of the doubt, Jessie. The
child
. Not the parents. Because if you are wrong about abuse, then the parents will hate you, the family will get monitored too closely by social services for a couple of years, the parents will argue and blame each other and they might even break up and that’s all shit. But if you’re right and you do nothing, the consequences will be far, far worse.’

He stood up.

‘Forty-eight hours, Jessie. That’s it. After that I call Colonel Holden-Hough, hand the Scotts over to the Special Investigation Branch.’

‘What do you think I should do in those forty-eight hours?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Jessie. But whatever you do, make it count.’