Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) (21 page)

‘She … she was born severely disabled,’ she replied quietly. ‘
Severely
disabled, both physically and mentally. Nooria tried to keep her, she really tried, but she was on her own and only seventeen when the baby was born. She couldn’t cope.’

‘What about her boyfriend? The baby’s father?’

‘She said that he didn’t care about the baby at all.’ Miss Appleby paused, glanced over to the door, as if she wanted to run straight through it.

‘Miss Appleby.’

‘He told her that they should drown it. “That’s what we’d do in my country,” he said.’

‘Where is the baby now?’

‘Girl. She’d be a girl now … nine or ten. I don’t know to be honest, but I assume she’s in the same home as before.’

‘Do you have the name by any chance?’

‘No, sorry, I don’t. Nooria never told me. All she said was that it was in a town on the south coast somewhere. It wouldn’t be too far from here, because she used to drive there and back every Sunday to see her daughter.’ She stood. ‘I’m sorry, but I really do have to go now.’

Jessie stood and held out her hand. ‘Thank you for seeing me. You’ve been very helpful.’

Miss Appleby gave a sad smile. ‘I won’t tell the dragon in reception that you lied.’

‘Not until I’m safely off the premises anyway.’

They walked together to the door.

‘Actually …’ Miss Appleby laid a hand on Jessie’s arm, ‘… I do remember Nooria complaining about the journey. She always said that she got stuck behind old people out for their Sunday drive because it was a single-track road, touristy and impossible to pass. I hate it, she used to say.’

‘Right,’ Jessie said.

‘The hate …’ A pause. Miss Appleby was looking hard at her. ‘Instead of eight.’

Jessie shook her head. ‘Sorry, I still don’t get what you mean.’

‘Eight. The road. It was the A-something-something-eight. Or something-eight-something. There was an eight in it, at least. Eight – hate.’

Jessie nodded. ‘Oh, OK. I get it now.’ She smiled. ‘I’m a bit slow sometimes. So do you remember any of the other numbers?’

Miss Appleby looked apologetic. ‘Sorry, no. It was so long ago. I’m surprised I even remembered that.’ She smiled. ‘Funny the kinds of things that stick in your mind.’

Jessie coasted to a stop outside the pub and cut her engine. Callan was already there – his red Golf parked on the other side of the narrow country lane, two wheels on the muddy grass verge. The night was silent and calm, the only noise the faint murmur of voices from inside the pub. Above her, dark clouds brushed across a sliver of moon, only a few stars tonight, sparsely dotted in a sea of jet black.

The pub was a small whitewashed country inn, with a red front door and red painted window frames. Baskets of red and white flowers hung from the eaves, and a low flintstone wall hemmed in a tiny garden. Though Jessie was only five foot six, the top of her head brushed against the top of the doorframe as she stepped through it. Callan must have had to shuffle through the door on his knees.

Inside, she was faced with a long wooden bar barely two arm’s lengths away, studded with taps bearing the names of local beers and bitters: Baldy, Surrey Hills Ranmore Ale, Old Speckled Hen, Sussex Best Bitter. A bench upholstered in worn burgundy velvet ran the length of the pub on the nearside wall, either side of the door, and tables were pushed up against it. The cream-painted walls were hanging with horse brasses and grainy black-and-white farm photographs from decades ago, the farmers working with horse-drawn ploughs. It was warm and cosy, the perfect winter pub.

Callan was sitting in the corner at a table for two close to the log fire. He was wearing jeans and a blue-and-white checked shirt, a pint of bitter in his hand, relaxed, off duty. Looking at him now, Jessie remembered the warmth of his lips on her cheek and felt colour infuse her face.

‘I’ll just get a drink, Callan,’ she called over to him. ‘Do you want another?’

‘Come and sit down, I’ll get one for you.’ He walked over, ducking so that he didn’t bang his head on the gnarled wooden beams holding up the ceiling. ‘What would you like?’

‘Sauvignon please.’

He smiled, an easy, familiar smile. ‘I should have known.’

‘All hail the resident wino.’

She slid on to the bench at the table while he bought her glass of wine. Setting it in front of her, he sat down opposite, stretching his long legs out beside the table to get comfortable.

‘Perhaps you should call me Ben as we’re having dinner together, Jessie. Shouting Callan across the pub makes it sound as if we’re work colleagues.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘We are work colleagues.’

‘It’s evening, after work hours, so how about we relax the formalities.’ His mouth tilted in a quizzical smile.

‘I thought you Redcaps never stopped working,’ she said coolly, holding his gaze, even though her stomach was constricting with nerves. She hadn’t had a relationship for fifteen years, since Adam, and she’d only been a girl back then. Sitting here, having dinner with a man, particularly one as attractive as him, was uncharted territory. Callan kept things strictly professional; Ben ventured into personal territory. Territory that she didn’t feel equipped to handle.

‘For this one night only then, Ben,’ she murmured, shifting sideways, putting a few more centimetres between them.

‘Great.’ He took a swig of bitter. ‘How was your day?’

She was momentarily thrown. ‘My day?’

‘Yes. Your day.’

‘Well, it was, uh …’ she tailed off with a shrug.

‘It’s called making conversation, Jessie. It’s what normal people do. Particularly when they’re having dinner together in a romantic country pub.’ She caught the slight lift at the corners of his mouth.

‘Sadly, I don’t think either of us can be classed as normal.’

‘We can try.’

She took a sip of Sauvignon. It was cold and light and she savoured the taste on her tongue.

‘My day was … disturbing. But asking me about my day will lead straight on to why I wanted to see you.’

He sighed, held up both hands. ‘I give up. Why did you want to see me?’

‘I need your help.’ Unlacing her fingers from the glass, she found the stem, twisted it in the tips of her fingers, looking down at the little whirl she had made in the pale gold liquid. ‘I need your help with the little boy I’m working with, Sami Scott. He’s Major Scott’s son.’ She looked up. ‘You know Scott, don’t you?’

‘I’ve heard of him, yes.’

She gave him a rundown on her sessions with Sami: his utter terror at being burnt; the Shadowman; the girl; her suspicions that there was more than Scott’s injuries to blame for Sami’s condition; the criminal conviction his ex-wife had mentioned; Nooria’s ex-boyfriend and the little girl who Jessie thought had died, but who had been born severely disabled and was alive, in a home somewhere near the south coast.

‘I’m worried that he might be being abused.’

Callan sat forward. ‘Why?’

‘Because who is the Shadowman?’

‘His father.’

‘Perhaps. That’s certainly what both his parents say.’

‘You don’t agree?

‘I have a feeling that there’s more going on, that what the parents tell me doesn’t quite add up.’

‘Scott was severely burnt in Afghanistan. Put yourself in the little boy’s position – imagine if that was your father. You see him leaving and he’s fine. Six months later, he’s in hospital, burnt beyond recognition. It’s a classic driver for post-traumatic stress disorder.’

A shadow crossed her face. ‘I put myself in Sami’s position, try to get inside his head, every time I see him.’

‘But you don’t buy it,’ Callan murmured.

‘I don’t know what I buy. I’m stuck. The parents are stonewalling me. We had a horrible session today. Sami is terrified. Terrified of being burnt, terrified of the Shadowman. And
terrified
of going home. He was clinging to me and sobbing, just sobbing.’ She swallowed, feeling tears well in her own eyes, his desperation as he clung to her raw in her mind. ‘Sobbing and screaming that he’s safe with me. I wanted to bundle him up and run out with him, hide him somewhere, protect him.’

Reaching across the table, Callan laid a hand on hers. Jessie pulled hers away, angry at herself for becoming emotional. Callan dipped his gaze, looked embarrassed.

‘I need to find out what Scott was convicted for and I can’t do that on my own. I also want to find out where Nooria’s daughter is, who the ex-boyfriend is, the child’s father …’ she tailed off. ‘Because traumatic history like that can’t be contained, put in some box labelled “The Past”. It must continue to affect Nooria and that means it affects the whole family. As a psychologist, I don’t have access to any of that information, and that’s why I need your help.’

Callan looked away, across the bar, fixing for a moment on one of the photographs which showed a carthorse dragging a plough across a muddy field.

‘Scott’s housekeeper, Wendy Chubb, was murdered last night.’

‘What?’
Jessie sat quite still, staring at him.

‘That’s where I’ve been all day. At the crime scene.’

‘Oh, God, no.’ She put a hand over her mouth, an image filling her mind: Wendy Chubb opening the door to her two days ago, soap suds on a marigold glove, such mundane normality that the thought of her lying somewhere with her head bashed in or her throat cut was incomprehensible.

‘It could have been a random attack,’ Callan said.

‘But you don’t believe that, do you?’

Eyes fixed on the pint of bitter in his hands, he didn’t reply. Jessie nudged his arm. ‘Callan.’

He sighed. ‘It didn’t seem random, but it could have been.’ He didn’t sound convinced, or convincing.

‘How was she murdered?’

‘She was stabbed.’

‘Where? Where was she found?’

‘Close to her home. She lives … lived in a housing estate that backs on to Paschal Wood and the Sandhurst training ground. She was found by the boundary fence, inside Sandhurst. It’s close to the houses, but remote all the same, pretty much only used by dog walkers and cyclists during the day, families with kids at the weekends.’

‘What happened?’

‘She was walking her dog last night, around midnight.’

‘Do you have any idea who killed her?’

‘No. We’ve found no significant evidence so far.’

‘Druggies? Could she have disturbed someone criminal? A burglar?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s a middle-class housing estate, elderly people and families with small children. No way it’s a druggy hangout. Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes told me that there have been no burglaries on the estate for over a year. It’s secure. One road in, one road out, people keeping an eye on their neighbours, no major wealth. It’s not a good target for burglars.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘It was pouring and the crime scene was pretty much drenched by the time I got there. No footprints, no trace evidence.’

‘Why wasn’t the scene preserved?’

He gave a grim smile. ‘Because some fucking idiot … sorry, Jessie.’

She touched his arm. ‘It’s fine.’

‘Some idiot lieutenant was given the case. I’ve taken it back off him.’

Sighing, he took a long draught of bitter, and his gaze drifted back to the far wall, fixing again on that photograph of horse and plough.

‘What is it Callan, uh, Ben?’

‘Nothing,’ he murmured. But he wouldn’t meet her eye.

‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

A pause before Callan shook his head, the movement slight, unconvincing. ‘It could still have been a random attack. Wrong place wrong time.’

‘You don’t believe that.’

Silence.

‘Tell me, Ben. Tell me what’s bothering you.’

The dim ceiling light cast shadows across his face as he looked back and met her gaze. His amber eyes were dark, hooded. ‘I haven’t been entirely honest with you, Jessie.’

‘What do you mean?’

A sigh. ‘Colin Starkey was driving the car Scott was in when he was attacked. They were on their way to some rendezvous with an Afghan government official. The car was flagged down in a street in Kandahar – there was a body in the road and they thought that the Afghans needed help, so they pulled over. Scott wound down his window. One of the Afghans threw a petrol bomb into the car.’

‘What?’ She stared back at him, incredulous. ‘Why the
hell
didn’t you tell me that Starkey and Scott were so closely connected?’

He opened his mouth to reply, but Jessie cut in. Holding her hand up, thumb and index finger meeting to form a circle, she said, ‘And don’t you fucking dare say, “need to know”.’

‘I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think it was relevant. What can possibly be the connection between a case you are working on with Scott’s son and the why’s of a petrol bomb attack on him three months ago?’

‘That’s not the point. You asked me to interview Starkey with you. You—’ She broke off, her mind whirring. ‘You think there’s a connection between Jackson’s death and the attack on Scott, don’t you?’

Callan shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I think, which is why I wanted you to meet Starkey with no preconceptions.’

‘You think that Starkey is the link.’

‘There may be no link. They may be … probably are … totally unrelated events.’

‘And that would mean that Gideon Duursema also knows, because you would have given him the whole picture, wouldn’t you? Before asking him to assign me to interview Starkey with you.’

He didn’t answer.

She stood up. ‘I don’t work with people who lie.’

Callan gave a harsh half-laugh. ‘You work with people who lie all the time.’

‘
Patients.
Patients who can’t help themselves. You’re not my patient.’

‘I was your patient.’ Reaching across the table, he grabbed her hand.

‘Let go of me,’ she said through gritted teeth.

He held on. ‘There’s something else.’

‘I don’t want to hear it.’ She wriggled her hand free.

‘I’ve got the tox reports back on Jackson.’

‘I don’t think you heard me.’ Her voice rose; other customers looked over. ‘I’m not
interested.’

‘Jessie, listen.’

Standing, she made her way down the pub without looking back, walked out of the front door and into the night.

Rising to follow her, Callan banged his head hard against one of the beams. ‘Fuck.’

‘The feisty ones can be a nightmare.’

‘What?’

The barman was grinning at him over the bar. ‘Beautiful, though.’

Ignoring him, rubbing his head, Callan left the pub.

‘Jessie. Wait.’ He jogged up the lane towards where she was fumbling in her handbag, trying to find her car keys. He reached her just as she slid into the driver’s seat and yanked the door closed.

His head was killing him; thumping like a bass drum.

‘OK. I was wrong.’ He mouthed, pulling the handle. She’d locked it.
Fuck.
‘I should have told you.’

He stepped back, but there must have been something on the road behind him, a bump or pothole in the tarmac because he stumbled, fell hard on to the kerb. His head was spinning, his heart rate was through the roof, and he was suddenly ice cold.

He knew what was coming, realized an instant before sentience went. His vision clouded: he couldn’t see the moon or the stars above him any more, couldn’t see anything, only a kaleidoscope of grey and black checks, swirls, lines crisscrossing, swimming in front of his eyes. His body was jerking, slamming against the rough tarmac. He felt arms close around him.

‘Jesus Christ, Callan … Ben …
Ben
.’

He could hear her voice, as if through deep water.

‘Ben, can you hear me?’

Slowly, the fit subsided. He lay still for a moment, panting, trying to catch his breath. Rolling on to his stomach, he retched into the gutter.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked, laying her coat on top of him. He felt her hand, stroking through his hair. He was sweating, shaking and icy cold, stinking of vomit.

‘I’m not your patient any more,’ he muttered, laying his head on the rough tarmac. ‘It’s none of your fucking business. I’m not your patient.’