Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) (23 page)

Reaching across the table, Callan laid a hand on her arm. ‘Hey, come on, you can’t blame yourself.’

‘Why not? I was supposed to be looking after him, and I was out snogging my boyfriend on the common instead.’ She choked, the electric suit constricting her throat. ‘I let him be dropped home from school by someone else’s mum, to an empty house, on his own. And that was when he killed himself.’ Tears were running down her face now; she didn’t reach up to wipe them away.

‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘How the fuck do you know? You weren’t there.’

Stepping over the coffee table, Callan sat down next to her on the sofa. ‘You have to let it go.’

She shook her head mutely. He was sitting uncomfortably close. She tried to shift away, but she was at the end of the sofa. Folding her legs to her chest, she wrapped her arms around her knees, curling herself into a defensive ball.

‘You have to, Jessie.’

‘Jesus Christ, you sound like me.’

‘Sometimes – occasionally – you talk sense,’ he said softly.

‘Oh God.’ She shivered. ‘I’m so tired, so sick of living like this.’ Her eyes grazed around the room. ‘Like some fussy old biddy.’

The electric suit was snapping against her skin, the tension so acute now that she had the almost overwhelming urge to drag her nails down her face, her arms, to scratch away her skin and the feeling with it.

‘You were only a child yourself,’ Callan said. ‘You can’t keep shouldering the blame.’

Raising his hand to her cheek, he slid his thumb across her cheekbone, wiping away the trail of tears. Jessie stared at the middle of his chest where the threads of her father’s old jumper were stretched too tight across his abs, not meeting his eyes.

The sudden, shrill ring of a mobile.

‘Fuck, not again,’ he muttered, dropping his hand. Tugging his phone from his trouser pocket, he glanced at the name flashing on its screen. He paused, thumb hovering over the answer button, weighing up options. Finally, a terse ‘Callan’. His fingers tapped a tense, impatient rhythm on his knee as he listened. ‘Sure. I’ll come right now.’ Jamming his mobile back into his pocket, he sighed and pushed himself to his feet. ‘I’m sorry, Jessie, but I have to go. Marilyn needs my help.’

Jessie stood too. ‘Sorry, who?’ she asked.

A preoccupied half-smile. ‘Marilyn. You know, blonde, big tits.’

‘Lucky you.’

‘I felt pretty lucky here,’ he murmured, so quietly that she almost didn’t hear him. ‘But I do have to get back to Wendy Chubb’s crime scene.’

Jessie nodded, dropping her gaze, breaking eye contact. She felt unbalanced, caught off guard, by the sudden lurch from affinity to business.

‘Your shirt will still be wet.’

‘Can I keep your dad’s jumper?’

‘Sure, if you want to look like a dick in front of Marilyn.’

‘Believe me, Marilyn will look far worse than I do.’

They walked together to the front door, Callan reaching for his coat, Jessie fumbling with the door lock, neither catching the other’s eye.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning. I’ll pick you up at eight and we’ll go back and see Jackson’s wife,’ Callan said.

‘Fine. I’ll see you then.’ She held the door open for him.

On the doorstep, he turned back and their eyes met. Jessie felt her cheeks redden.

‘I’m sorry—’ He broke off with a shrug.

She smiled, a fleeting smile that she didn’t feel anywhere but on her face. ‘You better get going. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

He raised a hand. ‘Goodnight, then.’

‘Goodnight, Callan.’

She watched him walk back down her garden path to his Golf. Shutting the door, she tilted forward and laid her forehead against the hard wood.

The luminous green dial on Jessie’s watch told her that it was 2 a.m. She could – should – go to bed and try to sleep, but she felt a buzzing, nervous energy that was partly the fallout from Callan’s visit, and partly the knowledge that virtually half of the forty-eight hours Gideon had given her had passed and she’d made little progress. It was an energy that she needed to channel into something positive.

Jumping off the sofa, she slipped her trainers on and went outside to her car, remembered halfway down the path that she’d left it at the pub. Back inside, she kicked off her trainers by the doormat. She bent to line them up on the shoe rack, then stopped, deliberately stopped herself, straightening, biting her lip, staring down at the tangle of laces and white leather. She took a step back, felt the suit hiss, took another step, felt the hiss intensify, the claustrophobic electricity humming over her skin. But even as she consciously forced herself to back further away, the tension, the visceral need for order and control, didn’t rise to a level that she couldn’t bearably ignore.

She found a second
Ordnance Survey Atlas of Great Britain
in her desk drawer, aware, as she pulled it out that she was probably the only person in Great Britain under the age of fifty who used one. Grabbing her laptop from the bookshelf, she curled back on the sofa with the atlas and her computer in her lap.

A town near the south coast, Miss Appleby had said, reached via a single-lane road, not a dual carriageway. A road with the number eight in it.

Flicking to the atlas’s index, she found the page that listed A-roads. The list covered pages and pages, hundreds of A and B roads, scores of them with the number eight in the name – a hopeless task to try to find the one road that Miss Appleby had been referring to by scanning this index.

Laying the atlas on the coffee table, Jessie sat back, casting her gaze to the ceiling, thinking. She knew a bit about homes for severely disabled children from her year as an NHS psychologist before she had joined the Army, knew that spaces in these homes were limited and that parents often had to take a place for their child wherever it was offered, several hours’ drive from their own family homes. But Nooria’s daughter would have been in the care home for eight or nine years by now, enough time to wait on lists, hassle the NHS, get her moved closer to home. Nooria had tried hard to keep her daughter, Miss Appleby had said.
But she was on her own, and still only seventeen when the baby was born. She couldn’t cope.
But she would keep fighting for her daughter, surely, even after relinquishing her everyday care?

Picking up the atlas, Jessie found the double-page spread that covered Surrey, found Aldershot, and then tracked a centimetre left to the narrow country lane on which the Scotts lived. There was a spider’s web of A-roads spreading in all directions from Aldershot, a depressing havoc of tarmac coating the countryside. Jessie squinted at the tiny road names going south, towards the coast. The A3, the dual carriageway that she and Callan had taken to and from Wandsworth – not the one – the A281, A283, the A285.

She paused, finger in mid-air, hovering above Godalming.

There – the A286.
The
A-something-eight-something. Funny the kinds of things that stick in your mind.

The A286 would fit. From Crookham, Nooria would be able to cut straight down Charles Hill, cross the A3 and pick up the A286 at Godalming. Jessie traced her finger down the A-road, imagining its meandering journey through the undulating West Sussex countryside. Picture-perfect England, the chocolate box towns of Haslemere and Midhurst, a magnet for retirees on weekend trips.
She used to complain that she got stuck behind old people out for their Sunday drive.

The A286. Ending up in Chichester.

A town on the south coast.

The cul-de-sac was less busy now, only Marilyn’s battered black BMW Z3, an antique he called it – a piece of junk, more like, Callan had always thought – a marked police car and a transit, and the white panelled van of the forensics team remaining. The Army vehicles had pulled out, Colonel Holden-Hough, agreeing with Marilyn that it was a civilian killing, and that Surrey and Sussex Major Crime team should take the lead, with Callan as military liaison because of the link with Major Scott.

Cutting his engine, Callan sat for a moment, collecting his thoughts, fighting the impulse to turn the car around, drive straight back to Jessie’s cottage. Opening the door, he climbed out, the flood of freezing air that enveloped him having the same effect as the proverbial bucket of cold water. Reaching back to grab his jacket from the passenger seat, he shrugged it on. Whatever Marilyn wanted, it had better be good.

Before he had even reached the end of the sandy trail that led from Birch Close to the Sandhurst training area, he saw the glow from the police arc lights, like a super-bright low-slung moon. The track that hugged the boundary fence was still cordoned off, would be for a few more days to preserve the scene until it had been mercilessly combed for clues. The forensic tent was also in place and Callan could see two shadows moving around inside. But it would be empty of Wendy Chubb’s body, by now transferred to the pathologist’s dissecting table.

A uniformed policeman was standing in front of the cordon, hands in his pockets, staring listlessly into the darkness. He looked cold and bored. There could be few duller jobs than maintaining the integrity of the crime scene for the night, while most of your colleagues were mainlining coffee and sharing bad jokes back in the office.

Beyond him, Callan could see the distinctive battered biker jacket, the ragged face above it. He jogged over.

‘Marilyn.’

‘Ah, Callan, thanks for coming.’

They shook hands.

‘I won’t say it’s a pleasure.’

Marilyn smiled, his eyes level with Callan’s chest. ‘At least I know that I didn’t drag you away from a beautiful girl – not wearing that jumper.’

Callan laughed. ‘You have no idea how beautiful. And isn’t that termed “the pot calling the kettle black”, criticizing my fashion sense?’ Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was a quarter past two. Would Jessie be asleep by now? He doubted it. She would, most likely, be awake, eking every moment from the twenty-four hours she had left before Gideon Duursema handed Sami Scott’s case to his Special Investigation Branch colleagues.

Marilyn clicked his fingers in front of Callan’s face. ‘So you
were
with a beautiful girl, Captain.’

‘What?’ Callan refocused, caught the amused glint in Marilyn’s eye.

‘You’re looking all dreamy, son.’

Callan smiled. ‘Get lost, Detective Inspector.’ Zipping up his jacket over the moth-eaten jumper, he stretched. ‘Now, what do you need from me?’

‘I need someone with a brain to mull things over with.’ They walked, side by side, towards the tent. ‘Because I have more than a nagging suspicion that this was not a random attack. But I am at a loss for motive, which means that I’m at a loss for pretty much anything more than that.’

Callan nodded. He suspected the same, but asked the question anyway:

‘Why do you think it wasn’t random? What does the evidence say?’

‘The evidence says not much. We’ve spoken to the handful of friends listed in her address book, all her near neighbours, and everyone else in Birch and Saddleback Closes, bar three who weren’t at home today or this evening. She was a quiet woman, considerate neighbour, didn’t go out much, few friends, although those friends she did have thought very highly of her. No boyfriend or significant other. She wasn’t an alcoholic or a drug user, she didn’t gamble, she wasn’t in debt and had no enemies as far as any of her friends knew. Your typical everyday, common or garden dull middle-aged woman.’

‘Steady.’

Marilyn threw up his hands. ‘Well, for God’s sake.’ His gaze rolled up to the black sky above them. ‘Give me something.’

‘What about shoe prints?’

‘Tons. Most of them washed to unidentifiable indents from the rain. None from which we could take a cast.’

‘Even around the body?’

Marilyn shook his head. ‘Your friendly Lieutenant Gold ensured that the area surrounding Wendy Chubb’s body had a good soaking before he let us erect the tent.’

Callan nodded. He wasn’t about to criticize a fellow officer in front of Marilyn, but he shared the frustration he could feel oozing from Marilyn’s every pore.

‘What about the Sandhurst training area?’

‘What about it?’

‘How far in did you go?’

‘Ten metres in past the body, a hundred metres either side along the boundary fence.’

‘Why not further in?’

‘Because I’m pretty sure that the murderer would have reached her via the path we’re currently standing on. We have one witness, an elderly man, who says that he heard a car drive to the end of Birch Close and park at around midnight. Half an hour later, give or take, he heard the engine start again and drive off.’

‘The same engine?’

‘He says it was a diesel. Distinctive rumble.’

‘What was he doing?’

‘Lying in bed trying to sleep. He has a prostrate problem, which he says gives him insomnia. His bedroom is at the front of the house. He lives directly opposite Pauline Lewis, Wendy Chubb’s friend. Theirs are the two houses right at the end of the cul-de-sac.’

‘He didn’t look out of his window?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s an old guy, he was already tucked up and it was only a car,’ Marilyn snapped.

They had reached the section of the fence by the forensic tent; voices from inside, talking shop, CSIs.

‘Did anyone else hear the car?’

‘No.’

‘Could it have been a resident?’

‘None of the neighbours on Birch Close or Saddleback Close were out driving their cars at that time – we have statements from virtually all of them.’

‘Virtually all.’

Marilyn sighed like a man close to the limit of his patience. He looked tired. Callan wasn’t surprised. He’d probably been awake for close to twenty-four hours straight with no let-up in sight.

‘We still need to speak to three households. Households of old people or families, because that’s basically it on this particular housing estate.’ Marilyn rolled his eyes. ‘It was cold, windy, the perfect night for sitting by the fire and watching TV or cuddling up under the duvet, which seems to be what most of the residents were doing at the time of Wendy Chubb’s murder.’

‘And it’s not a through road,’ Callan murmured. ‘And not well known.’

‘Not a place for cottagers, teenagers making out, drug dealers, none of that.’

Callan cast his gaze down the track, past Marilyn’s shoulder. What would he do if he wanted to kill someone? Would he park his car in some cul-de-sac? A housing estate like this one, made up of small semi-detached houses on the outskirts of Aldershot, was, as Marilyn had said, full of families with young children, and old people. Families with little kids who rose at 6 a.m. full of beans, who had better things to do than look out of the window at midnight on a week night because someone had parked a car. Old people who, once in bed, would be unlikely to climb back out just at the sound of an engine. A risk, sure, but a calculated one. Wendy’s murder smelt of opportunity. Her killer would need to be close, to spot the opportunity. He nodded.

‘So our murderer parks at the end of Birch Close …’ Hefting himself over the boundary fence, he dropped to the other side, landing silently on a bed of damp, sandy earth and pine needles.

‘There was a piece of her jacket on the fence. Here.’ Marilyn pointed. ‘A section from her sleeve.’

Callan stood, bouncing on the balls of his feet, next to the tent.

‘Right, so she’s about here. Maybe the dog ran off into the trees, wouldn’t come back. Why the hell else would she have climbed over the fence in the first place?’ He took a few steps into the trees and turned back to face Marilyn. ‘So the killer approaches her from the trees.’

Marilyn frowned. ‘I’m not with you, Callan. If her killer parked in the cul-de-sac, the quickest, easiest way is down this path. My theory is that she climbed into Sandhurst to try to hide, tore her jacket on the way over.’

Callan shook his head. ‘It doesn’t make sense. The nail is angled down and it’s only slightly raised from the wood.’

Slipping his jacket off, Callan dragged the sleeve of Jessie’s dad’s jumper down over the nail, aping the motion of someone climbing over the fence. It caught, dragging out a loop of wool. Marilyn raised his eyebrows, gave a small, smug smile, but didn’t say anything.

‘The jumper’s saggy, loose wool,’ Callan snapped. ‘It’s going to catch on anything. You said she was wearing a black Puffa, slippery material. Here, give me your jacket.’

‘Fuck off, Captain.’

Callan smiled. ‘It is a murder investigation, Detective Inspector. Take it seriously.’

‘Fuck off all the same. I’ll get one of the uniforms to test it.’

Callan did, with his own waterproof jacket. The material slid right over the nail, three, four, five times. He cocked an eyebrow at Marilyn.

‘OK, so she’s a what … a fifty-five-year-old woman, overweight, unfit,’ he continued. ‘The houses are that way.’ He pointed over Marilyn’s shoulder. ‘Why climb away from them? Midnight, Wednesday night–Thursday morning, most people are in bed, many asleep. It’s winter, a cold, clear night. Sound travels much better in the winter.’

‘Windy.’

‘The wind was coming from which direction?’ He looked into the trees. ‘North to south that night, blowing towards the houses, carrying sound.’

Marilyn crossed his arms over his chest, tipped back on his heels. ‘Go on.’

‘If she’d seen someone coming down this path from the end of Birch Close cul-de-sac, late at night, a woman alone, it would have made sense for her to walk or run that way – along the path that backs on to the houses, and scream if she was frightened. She certainly wouldn’t have ended up here. And if she screamed, someone probably would have heard her.’

‘And yet she ended up here and no one heard a thing.’ Marilyn sighed. ‘What if she thought it was a jogger?’

Stifling a yawn with the back of his hand, Callan shook his head. ‘Middle of the night, cold and windy. Would you?’

‘Me? Jog? To the bar, maybe.’ Marilyn pulled a face. ‘OK, maybe you have a point. So what if she knew the person?’

‘She was stabbed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Front, back or side?’

‘The left side. A single stab wound, entry point just below her ribcage. The tip of the knife must have found her heart.’

‘Defensive wounds?’

‘The autopsy is continuing in the morning but preliminary results show no obvious defensive wounds.’

‘She was surprised. Quick, easy.’ Callan grinned. ‘If you have your head shoved up your arse, Detective Inspector, four out of your five senses aren’t working.’

‘I forgot for a moment why I hate you Army twats, but I’ve just remembered.’ Marilyn stifled a yawn. ‘So how would you do it, Callan, if you were going to top some old lady out for a midnight stroll with her pooch.’

Callan looked towards the trees. Which way would a killer have come? The mouth of the track cutting up from the end of Birch Close was a hundred metres or so to his left. If the killer had stopped his or her car at the end of Birch Close, he or she would have cut straight up the sandy track that ran from the end of the cul-de-sac to the boundary fence. What then?

He’d trained at Sandhurst, spent months yomping through these woods, crawling around on his belly in the dark waiting until dawn to launch an attack. Great cover, silent approach, footsteps muffled by damp ground and leaf mulch, shadows of trees moving, constantly moving. You’d get within centimetres of someone, particularly a civvy at night out here, without them even realizing they were no longer alone.

‘I’d climb the boundary fence a hundred metres down, cut in a semicircle through the trees on the Sandhurst side to where she was standing. Cover of sight and movement until the last moment. Her murderer would be right on top of her before she knew.’

Marilyn pulled a face. ‘Jesus, you trained killers.’

Callan looked hard at him. ‘You think the murderer’s Army, don’t you?’

Marilyn shrugged. ‘I think we both agree that it’s unlikely to be random. And having talked to her neighbours and friends, I’m struggling for a motive. I think you need to fill me in on Wendy’s employer, Major Scott. We haven’t interviewed him or his wife yet, but we’ll need to. You said earlier that he’s involved in a suspicious death.’

Callan nodded, but didn’t reply. He thought of Scott, the car crash that his life had become; thought of Jackson’s wife sitting at her kitchen table, sobbing for her dead husband; thought of Starkey, flashing his sharp-toothed grin
– the truth never set anyone free, Captain Callan.

Marilyn sighed. ‘I worked on a case last year. A woman of Wendy Chubb’s age, similar profile, who was house-sitting for a friend over Christmas. She was knifed to death in her bed in the middle of the night, her sister, brother-in-law and elderly mother also in the house, and none of them heard a thing. Turned out that the owner of the house was a swinger – married, of course – and he’d made too many promises to the wrong woman, promises he couldn’t keep because he already had a wife.’ Marilyn’s telephone went. Pulling it from his pocket, he glanced at the screen. ‘Dr Ghoshal, the pathologist.’ Turning, he stepped away. ‘Families, Callan,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘They’re complex, messy things. Best avoided, I’d say.’