Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) (27 page)

‘He still sees Soraya?’

‘He visits her when he can. He treats her like his own daughter. He’s an incredible man. Incredibly caring, incredibly kind, incredibly loyal.’

‘So you moved on to Scott?’

A sob, muffled under her hand. ‘Jesus, you make me sound so horrible.’

‘Is it a coincidence that Scott and Starkey are both in the Intelligence Corps?’

Nooria shook her head. ‘I went with Colin to an Intelligence Corps function and first met Nick there.’

‘And then you met him again at Bearwood?’

She nodded. ‘Lots of Army officers send their children to Bearwood.’

‘Why?’ Jessie asked. ‘Why Army men? Why the Intelligence Corps?’

‘Because I thought they could protect me. And I thought that they could sort him out.’

‘Him? Nightmare? Kheial?’

She nodded. ‘But I was wrong. All I did was put Nick in danger. It’s my fault that he was burn—’ A pain appeared to shoot through her, cutting off the end of her sentence. She took a breath, a heaving, sucking breath. ‘It’s my fault that Nick was burnt.’

Jessie waited a moment. ‘And Colin knew everything,’ she asked gently. ‘But Nick didn’t?’

‘Nick and Colin are very different characters.’ She spoke slowly, as if every word was an effort. ‘Colin grew up deprived. He had shit all day every day.’

Jessie nodded. A tough, deprived childhood could drive children in one of two directions – towards good or bad. Perhaps seeing his mother struggle with his sister that had made the difference for Colin, given him the will to make life better for others.

‘Colin is so principled.’

‘And Nick?’

‘Nick had a comfortable upper middle class upbringing: boarding school, ponies, cricket on the lawn. He’s never faced real adversity. Never had to stick his neck out as Colin has done and say, “This is what I believe in. This is what I’m going to fight for.”’

‘So what happened to Sami?’

Nooria rubbed a hand across her eyes, wiping away the tears. ‘Kheial left me alone for a couple of years after I married Nick. I thought that I’d got rid of him permanently, that marrying Nick had worked. Kheial was back in Afghanistan.’

‘Working with the Coalition. Negotiating with the Coalition to dam the Helmand River,’ Jessie said.

Nooria’s eyes widened. ‘He’s a civil engineer by training.’

Farmers not fighters.
Jigsaw pieces
slotting into place.
But the money never gets used for what it’s meant to … The farmers grow opium.

‘Negotiating with the Intelligence Corps,’ Jessie said.

Colin Starkey. Andy Jackson. Nicholas Scott.

So Andy Jackson’s death probably was manslaughter after all. Colin Starkey must have found out that Jackson had set Scott up to pay off Nightmare for his opium and for his silence. Run him into the desert at gunpoint to try to get him to talk. Run him until he turned and fought back in desperation, and his heart gave out. Maybe Starkey had pulled the trigger too, for good measure.
Jesus
, she thought.
The truth will set you free.
No wonder Colin Starkey hadn’t had any intention of telling the truth.

‘What happened then?’

‘He turned up again when Nick went to Afghanistan on his first tour of duty. Sami was two.’ Tears were flowing freely down her cheeks now. ‘The way he turned up – just arrived at our house – was like something out of a horror film. As if he was always watching me, knew exactly what I … what we were doing, when Nick was going to be away. He raped me and then he went upstairs. Sami was asleep in his cot. I begged him to leave Sami alone, but he reached into his cot and picked him up. I was crying and pleading with him to put Sami down. He smiled at me and said, “Whatever you want, Nooria,” and he dropped Sami. Just opened his hands and let Sami fall on to the floor. Then he walked out.’ Nooria’s face was drained white with the memory. ‘I rushed Sami to Accident and Emergency, and told them that he’d fallen down the stairs. They kept us in overnight for observation, but Sami was OK.’

‘Tell me about Nick’s last tour.’

Her face was grey, her eyes dull and desperate: a trapped animal. ‘He came back again, a few weeks after Nick had left. He was raping me on the kitchen floor. I turned and I saw Sami standing in the doorway. He had tears streaming down his face. I shouted at him to go back to bed. I was telling him that he was bad, that he had to go back to bed, stay in bed. I didn’t want him to see me like that and I didn’t want Kheial to get angry with him. Not after what he had done to him when he was a toddler.’

Go back to bed. Stay in bed. You’re bad, Sami.

‘Kheial said, “I own you, Nooria,” very softly, like a caress. Then he stood up, went over to Sami and kicked him, kicked him like he was a dog, and then he left. Left me lying there on the floor bleeding, Sami huddled in the corner crying.’

Jessie felt her own eyes fill with tears. ‘The girl. That’s why you pretended that Sami was a girl, wasn’t it? Because you wanted to keep him safe from Kheial?’

Nooria nodded. ‘He would have been furious if he thought I’d had a boy with another man. But a girl—’ She broke off with a tiny, dispirited lift of her shoulders.

‘Why didn’t you tell Nick?’

‘I was trapped. I felt as if Kheial could destroy my life if he wanted to. That my situation was hopeless.’ Burying her face in her hands, she started to sob. ‘And I was right. He did. He destroyed my life and he destroyed Nick’s too. Sami’s. All our lives.’

‘And now?’

Face buried in her hands, she hunched her shoulders. ‘He’s done everything to me. There is nothing left. Nothing left that he can do.’

‘Do you have any idea where Kheial is now?’

‘No. But I hope to God that he’s in hell.’

Marilyn’s phone rang. He was standing next to a large sign bearing the black schematic of a mobile, a red line drawn through it, the words
Do Not Use Mobile Phones
written in unavoidably accusing capitals below.

Smothering the ringing hand grenade against his shirt, he jogged down the corridor, casting a quick, guilty smile at the pretty blonde nurse manning the intensive care ward’s reception, who he’d tried to chat up earlier, in a feeble bid to divert his attention from the shit-show that Wendy Chubb’s murder investigation had become, with paltry success. His smile was rewarded with a frown.

The double doors to the ward were locked. It took him another few seconds of scanning the walls either side of the door to find the lock-release button. Slamming it with his palm, he shoved through the doors and into the corridor.

‘DI Simmons,’ he snapped into the phone.

‘Detective Inspector, I was about to give up on you.’

‘I was in intensive care.’

‘Really.’ Dr Ghoshal didn’t sound overly interested. ‘The smoking and drinking have finally got to you,’ he added, in his trademark monotone. ‘I can’t say that I’m surprised.’

Very funny
. Marilyn wasn’t in the mood to rise to the pathologist’s bait. Dr Ghoshal was not renowned for his sense of humour and Marilyn found that they got on best when banter was kept to a minimum.

‘What can I do you for, Dr Ghoshal?’

‘The flesh.’

‘Yes.’

‘When you collected the autopsy report on your male cadaver on Wednesday, I told you that I believed the flesh didn’t look quite right.’

‘You did.’

‘I have results back from toxicology.’

Marilyn waited in silence, tapping his foot impatiently.

‘Vegetable oil.’

‘What?’

‘Vegetable oil.’ A pause. ‘Commonly used in cooking,’ Dr Ghoshal continued and Marilyn saw his earnest face in the words, no room for irony in the pedantic mind behind it.

‘Yes, thank you, Dr Ghoshal, I got that far myself. But how did it get on my murder victim?’

‘We found traces in a spatter pattern, mainly on the face and upper torso. To be honest, given the state of your victim, we were lucky to do that.’ Another pause. ‘It was hot.’

A woman’s voice suddenly from behind Marilyn. ‘Excuse me.’

He turned. An old woman was pushing a wheelchair down the corridor, its passenger even older, her body twisted like a wind-bent tree.
Granny pushing granny
. Christ, how he hated hospitals, probably because they made him feel that, at forty-nine and with his lifestyle, he wasn’t so far away from one himself. He stepped aside.

‘The door,’ the old lady pushing muttered.

‘Oh. It’s a buzz-in,’ he said, clutching the phone to his ear, hearing Dr Ghoshal’s voice, but not catching the words. ‘Press the speaker and the nurses will buzz you in.’

A pause.

‘Excuse me!’

‘What now?’ he growled and immediately felt guilty. Stepping forward he jammed his finger on the buzzer. ‘Two old la— DI Simmons. Open the door please.’

He held the door open while they trundled through.

‘Detective Inspector. Did you hear what I said?’ Dr Ghoshal’s voice was laced with impatience.

‘No, sorry.’

A heavy sigh. ‘I’ll repeat: the vegetable oil was hot – boiling hot – when it came in contact with your murder victim. Given the density, the location, face and upper torso and the splatter pattern, I’d say that someone threw a pot of boiling oil in your murder victim’s face.’

‘Jesus.’

‘It would have hurt, most certainly.’

Master of the understatement.

‘So he was burnt?’

‘Yes. Burnt with boiling vegetable oil. And then killed with several blunt blows to the head.’

‘Right. OK.’ He needed to think, get some clarity. Wendy Chubb’s murder, followed by Callan’s attempted murder, had sideswiped him, taken all his attention. He’d almost forgotten about the molten pile of flesh on Dr Ghoshal’s dissecting table. ‘Thank you, Dr Ghoshal.’

‘My pleasure. I’m starting Wendy Chubb’s autopsy now. I’ll be in touch. Have a nice day, Detective Inspector.’

The phone went dead in Marilyn’s hand.
Burnt? His Chichester Harbour murder victim had been burnt.
He hadn’t expected that.

Out of nowhere the tears came, fuzzing Jessie’s vision as she drove. She found herself clutching the steering wheel as if it was a lifebelt and crying for everything. Jamie. Her mother and father who Jamie had effectively taken with him. Her normal childhood –
before.
And Ben Callan.

Pulling into the petrol station on West Hill, she tucked her Mini into a corner and cut the engine. Slumping forward, she buried her head in the crook of her bent elbow and sobbed.

She was at the end, wasn’t she – had proven that Sami wasn’t the victim of abuse, by his parents at least – so why didn’t she feel even a tiny nugget of relief? She could walk into Gideon’s office when she got back to Bradley Court and tell him to call off the Redcaps’ Special Investigation Branch. The diagnosis that Scott had made – post-traumatic stress disorder – had been correct all along, only the cause needing to be uncovered, which she had done, the treatment plan developed – still to do. So why the hell did she feel as if her insides had been torn out, an icy vacuum installed in their place? She knew that a huge part of the feeling was due to Callan’s condition, and another part to do with what Nooria had told her, the trauma that she and Sami had suffered. But there was something else too. An emptiness in her head as well as in her heart, a lingering doubt that made her feel as if she had missed something.

A sudden knock on the window. Face stained with tears, she looked up.

‘Are you OK?’ the petrol attendant mouthed through the glass.

She nodded, couldn’t yet form words, was grateful when he stepped away.

Flipping down the rear-view mirror, she looked at the reflected sliver of her face: pale and puffy, streaks where the tears had cut wet tracks through the film of city grime on her cheeks. Rubbing her sleeve across her face, she smeared the tear tracks into the rest of the dirt.

Head down to avoid eye contact with the couple of other customers filling their cars, she crossed over to the shop, shivering in the cold wind cutting across the forecourt. She was hungry, realized that in the past twenty-four hours she’d eaten barely more than a biscuit and a couple of slices of toast.

Lined up outside the shop was a row of plastic flip-lidded newspaper containers, identical to those she had seen outside the newsagent’s by the Jacksons’ house. As she passed, her eye was once again drawn to the e-fit staring out from the front page of the
Daily Mail
. The man’s face – his features – blurry, so indistinct that it could have been an out-of-focus photograph that she was looking at. Bending down, she lifted the clear plastic cover and pulled out the newspaper, flicking to page five as instructed under the photograph, hurriedly skimming the words written there. Tossing the newspaper back into the holder she sprinted back to her Mini, yanking her mobile from her pocket as she ran.

A woman’s voice from behind Marilyn, businesslike, prepared to brook no dissent: ‘The trauma surgeon would like to speak with you, Detective Inspector.’

He turned. The blonde nurse was holding the door to the intensive care ward open for him. As he stepped forward, her arm shot out, blocking his way.

‘That phone needs to be off, sir.’

‘I’m expecting some important calls.’

‘I’m sorry. Hospital rules.’ A frown twisted her pretty features out of shape. ‘Right now. No exceptions, I’m afraid.’

Feeling like a five-year-old boy caught nicking sweets, Marilyn switched off his mobile, slid it into his pocket and dutifully followed the nurse back through the double doors. The waiting room was deserted. He cast her a questioning look.

‘I’ve moved Mrs Callan to the intensive care family room, so that you can have your conversation with the surgeon in private,’ she said. ‘She’ll be more comfortable in there anyway. The doctor will update her on her son’s progress after he’s spoken with you. He’ll be down in five minutes. He’s just cleaning himself up.’

Marilyn nodded. Her words made him feel slightly nauseous.
Cleaning himself up.
A bland euphemism for scrubbing his hands, his arms, his clothing, of Callan’s blood. He was pleased, though, that Mrs Callan was no longer here to listen, had singularly failed to offer her any meaningful comfort in the four hours since she’d arrived in intensive care, to be greeted by the news that, for the second time in a year, her son had a life-threatening bullet wound. Marilyn’s heart had gone out to the woman, standing alone in this clinical space, trying to hold it together in front of him. Offering commiseration wasn’t one of his strengths and he usually left the breaking of bad news and the succour required after to DS Workman. He had felt adrift in a small boat, watching a tidal wave accelerate towards him, in the face of Mrs Callan’s grief.

Slumping down on one of the plastic-covered chairs in the waiting room, he pulled out his mobile and looked hard at the blank screen, as if the intensity of his gaze might miraculously cause it to show signs of life. Shoving it despondently back in his pocket, he glanced over at the television screen on the wall – BBC News 24 – an unremitting stream of the violent and depressing acts that humankind could perpetrate on one another, acts he saw quite enough of in his day-to-day job without feasting on more. Tilting back in the seat, he closed his eyes, was asleep before the news anchor had moved on to the next story.

Twenty minutes later, he woke with a start. A doctor of about his own age, wearing pressed navy-blue scrubs, his salt-and-pepper hair covered by a pale blue cloth hat like an old-lady’s rain bonnet, was sitting opposite. He looked as grey-faced and frayed around the edges as Marilyn felt.

‘Tough day, Detective Inspector?’

Marilyn yawned into his sleeve. His eyes felt as if they had been taken out, rubbed in salt and jammed back in their sockets.

‘Tough night-day-night.’ Marilyn held out a hand. ‘Bobby Simmons. Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes.’

‘Simon Baines, Consultant Surgeon in trauma/emergency surgery.’

‘You’ve been operating on Captain Callan?’

Baines nodded.

‘How is he doing?’ Marilyn asked, craving information but at the same time dreading what he might be about to hear.

‘I’m afraid that we’re not out of the woods by a long shot.’

Baines spoke quickly, in a soft, sing-song voice, which Marilyn recognized. It was the same tone he used to speak with the relatives of victims of crime. He steeled himself.

‘Captain Callan arrived with extensive internal injuries and haemorrhaging, and severe damage to his right lung and liver. He had also lost over half of his blood volume,’ Baines said. ‘We have successfully removed the bullet from his abdomen and sewn up his lung. At the moment, we’re working to repair the damage to his liver.’

‘No drinking then,’ Marilyn muttered.

‘Huh.’ Baines raised an eyebrow.

‘No. Nothing. Sorry.’
Jesus
, what was wrong with him? Too used, he realized, to anaesthetizing stress with inappropriate behaviour. ‘Continue, please, Doctor.’

‘If it hadn’t been for the air-ambulance bringing him in, I’d be telling you that he was dead. Another five minutes getting here – less, even – and he would not have made it this far. That’s how close it was. But he is alive now, and my team will continue to do all we can to keep it that way. We have a very experienced major trauma team here at St George’s Hospital. One of the best in the UK.’

‘Thank you, Doctor.’

‘It’s my job.’ He gave a weary smile. ‘And one that I am very privileged to do.’

Marilyn couldn’t muster a return smile. Not even a poor imitation of one.
Just as it’s my job to catch the bastard who did this.

Baines extended an open right hand and Marilyn looked down at the gold round nestling in his bare palm. The bullet was unmistakably a 9 mm, standard at first glance, no visible modifications. Plenty of them out in the criminal network, but 9 mm was also Army handgun ammunition, an abundance of which he knew went missing from MoD armouries every year.

‘The bullet was clean – didn’t fragment, at least,’ Baines said. ‘Pretty lucky, considering.’

‘I’m going to need your fingerprints, Doctor.’

Baines gave a weary nod. ‘Sorry. I didn’t think.’ He yawned. ‘God, I must be more tired than I thought.’

‘Don’t try napping on these chairs. They’re crucifying for the lower back.’

Taking an evidence bag from his pocket, Marilyn slid his hand in, picked up the bullet, reversed the bag, sealed and pocketed it.

Baines rose. ‘I need to speak with Mrs Callan and then I must get back to the operating theatre.’

‘Thanks again, Doctor,’ Marilyn said. ‘I need to get going now too, but I’ll leave my mobile number with reception so you can call when you have more news. I’ll send someone in to fingerprint you later today too, if that’s OK.’

Baines nodded. ‘I’ll be here all day. They may have to wait if I’m in surgery.’

They stood and shook hands. Baines headed to the family room, Marilyn to the exit. The moment that the intensive care ward’s double doors clicked shut behind him, he pulled his phone from his pocket and switched it on.

Four beeps in quick succession. A missed call from DS Workman and three other missed calls – all from the same number, he noted – a number that he didn’t recognize.

Who the hell was trying to get hold of him so urgently?