Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) (19 page)

She used to take Jamie for walks on Wimbledon Common when he was feeling frustrated, confused, schoolwork spinning around in his brain, getting nowhere. Wrap him up and take him out – whatever the weather – to brush off the cobwebs with fresh air, climb trees, fish for frogs’ spawn in the ponds, make a camp in the trees, pull wet bark off fallen logs to find woodlice and tiny red spiders. For as long as she could remember, nature had been escape, space for Jamie’s brain, and hers, to work themselves out.

Leaving Bradley Court, she drove fast up to Farley Heath, right in the centre of the Surrey Hills, and parked her Mini at the side of the road, shoved her mobile in her coat pocket – though she wasn’t sure she’d answer it if anyone called – pulled on a woollen hat and set off through the trees. The forest closed around her as she walked, shutting out the grey sky, dampening the wind, cocooning her in semi-darkness, the smell of leaf mulch, moss and pine needles filling her nostrils. She took a left and then a right, found a narrow track that snaked through the trees and followed it, walking from memory; the last time she had been here, a couple of weeks before Christmas – when she’d been wrestling with guilt about not spending the holiday with her mother – the ground had been frosted white.

In the denseness of the trees everything looked and felt the same and there was something comforting about that: the unchallenging uniformity. She strode on without hesitation, making no sound on the dirt path, feeling as if she could be the only person left alive in the world, and comfortable with that thought.

After twenty minutes of fast walking, she reached the edge of the forest, where the trees opened out and the land fell away from her towards Jelley’s Copse. Tiny vehicles inched along the country lanes below her, houses looked shoebox-sized, cows and sheep miniature plastic replicas.

A toy land – Sami’s farm.

Finding a fallen tree, at the edge of the wood, she sat down.

Sami.

Looking at the toy land below her, she pictured his face, the abject terror written on it when his father had come to take him home.
I’m safe with you
.
Sami is safe with you.

Forty-eight hours.

Her only hope now was that past behaviour was a good indicator of future behaviour. Skeletons in cupboards, haunting the now. What skeletons did Scott and Nooria have?

Forty-eight hours. It would be gone in the blink of an eye.

Pushing herself up from the log, she turned and retraced her steps through the forest to her car and reality.

Just look at me. This is the truth. This is all there is.

Was it?

She had forty-eight hours to find out.

A blonde woman was jogging down the stairs. She pushed through the turnstile, into the fitness centre foyer. Her body, encased in tight black Lycra trousers that finished mid-calf and a lime-green racer-backed Lycra vest, was lean and muscled, tanned a rich, nut brown.

‘Jacqui,’ the woman behind the reception desk called out. ‘This lady wants to speak with you.’

Jacqui spun around on one toned leg like a ballerina, eyes finding Jessie’s.

‘I’ve got a five-minute break. I need a blast of fresh air before my next class. If you’re looking for some personal training, speak to Marion at the desk. They’ve got my diary. They can book you in for an introductory.’

She made to move past Jessie, reaching for the door handle. She would once have been a very beautiful woman – still was, but for the expression on her face. Her mouth turned down at the corners and a hard light shone in her pale blue eyes. Her blonde hair was scraped back into a tight ponytail, half a centimetre of mouse-coloured roots showing.

‘Mrs Scott, my name is Dr Jessie Flynn. I’m an Army psychologist. I want to talk to you about Nick Scott.’

Jacqui stopped, her hand on the door handle. A shadow crossed her face.

‘We’re not married any more.’

‘I know.’

‘So what do you want with me?’ she snapped.

‘Did you hear that he’s been injured in Afghanistan?’

Her body remained rigidly facing the door, but her head swivelled. She met Jessie’s gaze and her free hand went to her ear. Jessie watched her formulating the lie.

‘So you have heard,’ Jessie interrupted. ‘Who told you?’

Jacqui sighed. ‘Jesus, are you a psychologist or a bloody mind reader?’

Jessie gave a brief smile. ‘A bit of both, maybe. Who told you?’

Jacqui’s hand fell from the door, both hands found her hips and she sighed again, heavily. ‘A friend, OK. One of my friends told me. I have a few, though most of the bitches dropped me like a hot brick once he left.’

‘Can we talk? Please. I’ll brave the rain.’

Hands on her hips, she took a moment to answer. ‘Fine,’ she muttered wearily. ‘I hope you don’t mind the smell of smoke, because I’m having a cigarette whether you do or not.’

Pushing through the door from the foyer, they jogged across the grass, through the sheeting rain, to a group of white painted metal tables and chairs set on a small patio area under a dirty white free-standing awning with the name of the health club, ‘Start Fitness’, printed in navy-blue swirly writing across it. They sat at a table in the middle, the tables and chairs closer to the edge soaking wet. Pulling a packet of Silk Cut and a lighter from her handbag, Jacqui lit a cigarette and took a few long drags. The hand holding the cigarette shook.

‘So, Nicholas.’ Both her voice and her gaze were hard. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘I’m working with his son, Sami. He’s having some psychological problems, probably related to seeing his father badly burnt.’ Jessie was struggling to make the explanation sound convincing. The swerve to suspicion about child abuse had knocked her off kilter – made this visit necessary, but unorthodox – a blunt attempt to find out what the hell was going on in that family without calling in the Redcaps, blowing their lives apart irreparably, whether they were innocent or guilty. She would be hung, drawn and quartered if Scott ever found out that she had tracked his ex-wife down and interviewed her. ‘I want to … to understand him … Scott. Them. To understand them.’

Jacqui threw her head back and gave a bitter laugh. ‘What? And you come to me?’

‘You were married to him for twelve years.’

‘Twelve long years, two daughters, and then I get tossed out like a bag of trash, for that woman.’ She laughed again, acerbically. ‘I assume that he told you he left me? For her?’

‘Nooria. Yes.’

Jacqui nodded. ‘That woman.’ Then she added, ‘That Paki bitch,’ almost, but not quite, under her breath. She took a drag of her cigarette, blew the smoke through pursed lips. ‘Are your mum and dad together, Miss, sorry,
Dr
Flynn?’

‘Jessie. Please call me Jessie, and, no, they’re not together.’

Jacqui sneered nastily. ‘Don’t tell me, your father ran off with someone ten years younger?’

‘Twenty,’ Jessie said plainly. And in that one word, she felt a crack in the tough carapace Jacqui had cocooned herself in, a slight breaking down of the barrier between them.

‘Did he have any kids with her?’

Jessie shook her head. ‘I think they tried, but it didn’t happen.’

Jacqui nodded, but didn’t say anything. Tilting her head back, she blew another cloud of smoke up into the canopy above them.

‘That was the bit that killed me … fucking killed me,’ she said, after a moment. ‘That he had a child with her. I could have taken the leaving – humiliating as it was – but I could have taken it.’ Her nails, polished shell pink, drummed on the tabletop, an attempt, Jessie thought, to hide the stress she was feeling. Stress that the cigarette couldn’t quite calm. ‘But the fact that he then merrily created another family for himself, like my daughters were … like
our
two daughters were disposable – it made me furious. So angry. So … fucking
angry
.’ She broke off, took another fierce drag of her cigarette. ‘I know I shouldn’t say this to you, but I hope that little boy is fucked up. And I mean
fucked up
. I wish nothing but ill on him and that stupid little Paki bitch my Nick married.’ Anger pulsed off her like a living thing. She met Jessie’s gaze again, defiantly. ‘I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t fucking care.’

‘Are you still in touch with Scott?’

‘Not bloody likely,’ she hissed.

‘What about your daughters?’

‘He’s seen them five times in the six years since he left us. Five times and he lives three miles down the road.’

‘Have your daughters ever met Sami?’

‘Over my dead bloody body.’

‘And you?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve seen him a few times.’ Her eyes rose to the canopy again, following another wispy trail of smoke. ‘I saw him a couple of times in Aldershot, with that fat, loud woman – the housekeeper.’

‘Wendy.’

Jacqui hunched her shoulders again. ‘Whatever.’

‘How did you feel when he left?’

‘How do you think I felt?’ she snapped. ‘Ask your mum if you’re unsure how it fucking feels when your husband runs off with some teenage whore.’

Sucking another draught of smoke deep into her lungs, she closed her eyes, savouring the sensation. ‘That’s the problem with men in general and it’s magnified a thousand times in the Army. It’s all about posturing, isn’t it? Macho shit. Who’s got the biggest dick and who can stick that dick in the youngest …’ She paused. ‘Youngest … see you next Tuesday.’

Jessie took a moment.
See you next … C U N …
She got it finally, realized Jacqui had been watching her compute, a tiny smile on her face.

‘I’m a bit slow,’ Jessie said.

‘Better brought up than me.’ Jacqui crushed the cigarette out on the metal stem of the umbrella, had a quick glance around her before she tossed the butt under the table. ‘He was always a handsome bastard. That’s what did it for me. His looks. His looks and his self-confidence – he had that in spades. Too much, perhaps.’ She reached for the packet of Silk Cut and lighter, tucked the lighter back inside the packet. ‘I should have finished it myself. Should have had the guts. But by then I was kind of,
in it
, you know? Right in it. It’s a bit like being in prison, being an Army wife. You get used to having every part of your life regimented for you. No need to think, to make your own friends, to organize a social life. It’s all there on a plate.’

‘Why?’

Jacqui’s brow furrowed. ‘Why what?’

‘Why should you have ended it?’

Jacqui looked down at her hands, laid flat on the tabletop. Her nail polish, catching what little light there was, looked like ten pink pearls against the drab white tabletop.

‘Because he had two affairs before Nooria,’ she murmured.

A brief smile crossed her face at the look of surprise on Jessie’s.

‘You couldn’t read his mind, then.’ Her shoulders shook as she chuckled. ‘One of them was the wife of a private in his platoon – Nick was a captain, the poor sod’s platoon commander. She was only seventeen, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Did the Army know?’

‘The husband found out, but it was all hushed up. Poor kid was nineteen, married his childhood sweetheart and found her spreading her legs for his boss. There wasn’t much he could do about it. And the Army brass don’t care about that kind of thing. Integrity is supposed to matter, but they’re all men at the end of the day, aren’t they?’ Scooping up her handbag, she tucked the cigarettes in a side pocket and zipped it up. ‘I suppose I should thank my lucky stars that he didn’t run off with one of my daughters’ friends.’ She didn’t smile when she said it. ‘Bit young back then, even for Nick. But now …’

Ten and twelve.

‘He thinks I hate him,’ she murmured.

‘Do you?’

‘Love and hate.’ She sighed. ‘Aren’t they two sides of the same coin?’ Looking across the tables under the canopy to the sheet of rain beyond them, she fiddled with the catch on her handbag. ‘Is he badly injured?’

Jessie nodded. ‘Yes, I’m afraid he is.’

‘I tried to see him. I went to the hospital, but they wouldn’t let me in because we’re not related any more. I’m nothing in his life now. A nobody.’ She paused, looked as if she was about to continue, but changed her mind.

‘So you went to the house,’ Jessie said quietly.

‘You are a mind reader.’

‘When?’

She shrugged, evasively. ‘A few times.’

‘When? When was the last time?’

A heavy sigh. ‘A couple of evenings ago. I was on my way back from work. Thought I’d pass by on the off chance.’

‘Did you see him?’

She shook her head. ‘I saw that silly fat housekeeper at the kitchen window. And the boy … Sami … peeping out from upstairs. The curtains are always drawn. And well … I didn’t want to be seen there, did I? Not by
her
or the housekeeper.’ Her eyes locked with Jessie’s. ‘Tell me what happened to him. Please.’

‘It was a petrol bomb attack. He was a passenger in a car. He’s burnt down the left side of his face, missing his left eye. His arm – his left hand and arm – were also badly burnt.’

‘He’ll have to leave the Army then.’ Her voice was laced with sadness. ‘They only look after their own so long as their own can deliver.’

‘Yes, he will.’

For a moment, she looked as if she might cry. Lifting a hand she wiped the back of it across her eyes. Then the shutter fell back over her face, and the hard, brittle cheer came on to it, as if Jessie was watching two halves of different plays, a tragedy and a comedy.

‘What goes around comes around,’ she said. Pulling a mint spray from her pocket, she held it to her open mouth and depressed the top a couple of times, shooting a minty haze on to her tongue. ‘The clients would be horrified if they knew I smoked. All about the image, like most things these days. All about the image.’ She pushed the chair back and stood. ‘I’ve another class starting now. Got to go.’ She hooked her handbag on to her shoulder and then paused. ‘Oh, one thing I forgot to mention – Nick’s conviction.’

‘Conviction?’

‘Yes. He has a criminal conviction. Is it not in his Army file?’

Jessie shook her head. ‘No.’ She frowned. ‘What was it for?’

Jacqui smirked. ‘The mind reader’s at a loss.’

‘Come on, Jacqui, don’t play games.’

‘Oh fuck …’ Jacqui’s eye had caught the clock on the wall above the entrance. ‘Fuck,
fuck
,
FUCK
.’ Spinning around, she shoved through the tables.

‘Jacqui
,’
Jessie shouted, but Jacqui didn’t turn.

‘My class started five minutes ago,’ she yelled back over her shoulder. ‘They’ll all be waiting. I’ll be strung up if management find out. I can’t afford to lose this job.’

Jessie watched her make the short dash through the rain and slam through the door into the foyer, the dark glass swinging closed behind her.