Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) (9 page)

Clearly nothing of much excitement occurred in this corner of West Sussex, as the crime scene tape strung across the front of the Art Deco house was now home to a line of onlookers, dressed for endurance in wellies and all-weather gear. Many, from the red, pinched look of their faces, had been there for some considerable time, even though it was barely eight thirty in the morning. Marilyn remembered the same from the murder in Smuggler’s Lane last year: the constant stream of ‘near neighbours’, some of whom came from as far afield as Bognor Regis thirty miles to the east, or Petersfield, twenty north, every one of them professing concern at a murder on their own doorstep lest they be the next victim, every one all ears for the tiniest, goriest detail.

He watched from a distance – having no intention of getting close enough to be buttonholed by any of them – as the uniformed constable guarding the integrity of the tape waved them out of the way to let the ‘Police Dogs’ van through. From the rigidity of his stance to the way his hands were cutting staccato arcs through the air, Marilyn could tell that his patience was fraying. He chuckled. Manning the line was part of the police initiation ceremony: the police equivalent of downing a yard of ale or walking around for the day with one trouser leg rolled up to the knee and a sign saying ‘please kick me’ stuck on your back. The constable would be a better officer for it – more cynical, less patient, more able to cut through the crap and zero in on the details that mattered.

The specialist search team had arrived yesterday afternoon, spent the hours until sundown dredging ditches, going through the drains, searching culverts. Nothing had been found. They would be back soon to continue – more chattering fodder for the ‘neighbours’. Police divers would spend the morning searching the water close to the house, and then fan out into adjacent fingers of the harbour. Search conditions promised to be miserable for those on land and in the water: freezing cold, a chill twenty-knot wind cutting across the sea, thick grey clouds massed above their heads promising yet another downpour.

Tugging up the collar of his jacket, Marilyn crossed the gravel drive to meet the dog handlers. There were two, each with a springer spaniel. An experienced sergeant in his mid-thirties who had been handling dogs for fifteen years and a constable with eight years under her belt. Marilyn had worked with both of them before, rated them, trusted them to deliver the best that could be delivered under difficult circumstances, knew of no one on his or neighbouring forces who would do better. He shook hands with each, stepped back and waited while they struggled into their forensic overalls.

From the back of the van the dogs were whining and yapping, scratching to get out. The van had stopped, their handlers disembarked. They knew that something was up, were keen to get on with the job.

These were not ordinary search-and-rescue dogs that Marilyn had called in. These were cadaver dogs. Trained to find a corpse, irrespective of its state of decomposition. These two spaniels were ‘air-scenting dogs’, able to pick up the scent of rotting flesh carried on the breeze. Their sense of smell was so acute that they could follow a microscopic trail of flesh and bone fallen from the skin or clothes of a person who had carried a body to where they had dumped it a month before.

Through the open car door, Marilyn caught sight of a Treagust and Sons’ plastic bag in the passenger footwell, rotten lamb shanks or pigs’ trotters to call the dogs from the body once it had been found – prevent them from scoffing what was left of the corpse – or to quench their hunger when the search was called off if it wasn’t found. Treagust was his favourite local butcher, a family-run business based in Emsworth, a quaint fishing village on the harbour a few miles west, which sold fantastic local produce, most of it organic, grass-fed, free-range, traceable. Only the best for the cadaver dogs, he thought grimly.

The handlers opened the back doors of their van, opened the cages within and slipped leashes around their dogs’ necks.

‘So what are we after?’ the male sergeant asked.

‘Legs,’ Marilyn replied frankly.

‘Right.’ They nodded in unison, entirely unfazed; they’d heard and seen far worse.

‘A man’s legs,’ Marilyn added. Rubbing his nose, which he suspected had succumbed to frostbite a couple of hours ago, feeling nothing but faint pins and needles pricking in its tip, he looked across the sloping grass to the water. The autopsy was booked for two thirty this afternoon and he would like to present Dr Ghoshal, the pathologist, with a whole body, rather than the ravaged half that he currently had. ‘We have a torso. The legs are missing. I’d like to have the other half by the autopsy this afternoon if possible. The legs may be in some serial killer’s freezer, but my sense is that’s unlikely.’

Whatever the general public thought from the plethora of police series and novels featuring serial killers, they were actually a rare beast and the likelihood that one was practising in this idyllic corner of West Sussex was remote. Then again, that was exactly what the Gloucestershire Constabulary had told themselves when Fred and Rosemary West’s first victim had escaped, reported them and been summarily dismissed as a hysteric. Complacency was the policeman’s worst enemy and playing statistics a dangerous game.

‘My sense is that the propeller of a gin palace or big yacht took this body apart. Tony Burrows is so convinced that an axe or butcher’s cleaver is responsible that out of sheer bloody-mindedness I have bet him a hundred quid that I’m right. Drinks on me if you find the legs.’

The dog handlers nodded again, well accustomed to the games that the coppers from the Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes Unit played to stop the brutal reality of the beatings, rapes and murders they dealt with from sinking too far under the skin.

‘We’ll do our best, sir, but this wind isn’t going to help,’ the sergeant said.

There were so many smells by the harbour’s edge – rotting seaweed; dead fish and seabirds washed up on the shore; the contents of yachts’ bilges, human excrement pumped into the water – a smorgasbord to excite a dog’s senses, that the smell of decomposition would be incredibly hard for the spaniels to detect.

‘The torso has been here for some time. Weeks rather than days, Tony Burrows reckoned, from the bloating and deterioration to the skin and flesh, though obviously until Dr Ghoshal confirms, that’s guesswork. It was covered with seaweed and in an advanced state of decomposition. If it was summer we’d have been left with a steaming puddle of God knows what, but at least the cold weather has some bonuses.’ He shivered in his leather biker jacket. ‘I imagine that the torso was dumped in the water, either from a boat or from a vehicle and then washed up here. There’s a number of places in the harbour where you can back a car right up to the water, particularly at high tide.’

The handlers nodded. The spaniels were straining at their leashes, noses to the air, fidgety to get on with the job. ‘What are you thinking?’ the constable asked. ‘Where shall we start?’

Marilyn sighed. Chichester Harbour was ten thousand acres of deep water, tidal mudflats and saltings, shaped like a giant hand, a village at the end of each finger, used by thousands of craft each year, visited by tens of thousands of people.

He sighed. ‘I’m thinking that we’ve got more chance of finding a needle in a haystack, but we need to give it a go. The more I have of the body, the greater chance I’ve got of finding out who he is, and then, of course, what happened to him. One of you goes one way along the shore, the other goes the other way. We’ve got five hours before I have to leave for the autopsy, in possession of the legs or not. I’m afraid I can’t be more helpful than that.’

They nodded in unison. The constable hauled her spaniel back to her side. ‘We’ll do our best, sir.’

The sky was battleship grey, clouds so low that Jessie felt if she stretched up her arm the tips of her fingers would be swallowed in thick, grey cotton. Rain was beginning to spit against her windscreen. Parking a hundred metres down the road from her mother’s house, beyond the line of sight, she switched off her headlights. Mothers in Volvos ferrying kids to school swished by on the wet road; a dog walker passed her, dragging a fat black Labrador on a lead, all sagging tongue and wagging tail, happy to be heading for the common whatever the weather.

Her mother still lived in the house Jessie had grown up in, a small, sixties detached house in a cul-du-sac in Wimbledon. Two doors down was a smart new whitewashed concrete and glass modernist box that towered over its neighbours, a ‘For Sale’ sign outside; a couple on from that, a huge hole in the ground, a yellow JCB, its tracks clotted with mud, parked beside it. Wimbledon desirable now, all the older, smaller houses like her mother’s being bought up by developers, bulldozed and replaced with looming new monoliths far too big for their modest plots.

She walked down the road, pulling her hood up against the rain that was falling solidly. Reaching the gate, she stopped, shifting so that her body was shielded by the trunk of the flowering cherry tree in her mother’s front garden, a tangle of conflicting emotions stopping her from walking straight up the garden path and hammering on the front door. She could see her mother in the kitchen, leaning back against the counter, a cup of tea or coffee in her hand. She was wearing a new dressing gown, pink and fluffy. Jessie swung the gate open. She was about to step through when she stopped. A man had come into the kitchen. Wrapping his arms around Jessie’s mother, he dipped his head and kissed her neck. Tipping her head back, she pushed him away laughing. Laying her cup on the sideboard, she grabbed a tea towel and brushed it down the front of her gown. He must have jogged her cup, spilt some tea or coffee, when he’d hugged her. The mother Jessie knew would have snapped to anger, fixating fifteen years of anguish on to every tiny misdemeanour. This mother just laughed. Twisting the tea towel into a rope, she playfully whipped the man with it. Tossing the tea towel back on the sideboard, she glanced at her watch. Giving him another hug and a kiss, she left the kitchen.

The man was late fifties, Jessie guessed, grey-haired, tall and thin. He had a kind face, deep laughter lines etched around his eyes and the corners of his mouth that made him look as if he didn’t take life too seriously.

Stepping quietly back on to the pavement, Jessie pulled the gate closed. Intruding on this scene felt impossible: blundering into a scenario she didn’t recognize, one that she felt entirely unprepared for. It was the first time she’d seen her mum genuinely happy in fifteen years. She couldn’t barge in there with all the memories that were attached to her.

Another time. She would come and see her mum another time, catch her alone.

Jessie drove to Wimbledon station and parked in the underground car park. She had arranged to meet Nooria Scott, Sami’s mother, at the Royal College of Art, in Battersea, at ten o’clock this morning. Nooria was studying for a two-year master’s in Fine Art and had said that she was only a few days away from her first exhibition in the college galleries, was working flat out.

As the train rattled along the cutting, Jessie leaned her head against the headrest and gazed out of the window. London always felt like a city of two halves. Endless rows of terraced houses, dull and grey in the rain, postage-stamp back gardens studded with rusting climbing frames and trampolines, plastic children’s toys shiny with damp. Then, as the train got closer into central London, the terraces segueing into glass-and-steel apartment blocks, a studio flat costing over a quarter of a million pounds, the Fords and Vauxhalls of Greater London replaced by Porsches and Mercedes.

She got off at Battersea Park station and walked across the park, taking her time, unable to recall when she had last come up to central London, making a mental note to visit more often, though she knew she wouldn’t. She cut along the edge of the park to the Thames and followed the river path. Across the river, on the opposite bank, were the fine red-brick mansion blocks of Chelsea, directly in front of her was Albert Bridge, its pastel colours – pale yellow, baby pink, sky blue – incongruous in the slushy sleet, making her smile. This felt like London proper, a wide straight cut of the Thames, barges straining at their moorings, beautiful, historic buildings, the odd tourist with a camera, despite the weather, valiantly trudging through the park.

The Royal College of Art, Fine Art Department, was located inside the new Dyson building by Battersea Bridge, a modernist triumph of concrete and glass, square and utilitarian. Inside, the space was huge, more concrete and glass, the foyer, four storeys high, light and air filled, a concrete staircase snaking up to metal walkways suspended on cables. Students in black jeans and polo necks, baggy, paint-splashed dungarees, shirts and trousers in clashing primary colours, carrying huge black folios, jostled past Jessie.

She had sent Nooria a text as she left Battersea Park station, received one back asking her to wait in the foyer.

‘You must be Dr Flynn.’

Jessie turned to face a stunning woman, her skin the same olive as Sami’s, her face a perfect oval, deep green eyes under a heavy fringe, thick dark hair which she had pulled up into an untidy chignon.

‘Call me Jessie, please.’ She extended her hand. ‘Dr Flynn sounds way too formal in these surroundings.’ She smiled. ‘Am I so easy to spot?’

Nooria gave a slight shrug. ‘Nooria Scott. And yes, you are easy to spot. You’re the only one who has polished shoes.’

She wore navy-blue paint-splashed dungarees and a baggy white shirt, sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She was twenty-eight, Jessie knew, though her clothes gave her a casual, college-girl freshness, which made her look years younger. Jessie couldn’t imagine her as a mother, let alone the mother of that deeply disturbed little boy, or shut in that damp old house in the country. As if she was an exotic bird that had been stolen from its native rainforest and trapped in a tiny, dark cage.

Nooria indicated the café, on one side of the entrance hall. They ordered two coffees, Nooria insisting that she pay for Jessie’s as some compensation for dragging her all the way up to central London. They found a table by the window and sat down facing each other.

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t have long,’ Nooria said. ‘As I mentioned when we spoke, I have my first exhibition which starts on Friday. We get a chance to exhibit in college galleries twice over our two-year master’s course and it’s during the exhibitions that artists get talent-spotted, so, as you can imagine, it’s very important.’

Jessie indicated her folio. ‘Could I have a look?’

‘I’d rather you didn’t. They’re only rough sketches – ideas.’ Her gaze skipped off to the window, the cars on Battersea Bridge Road streaming silently past, barely three metres away on the other side of the glass. ‘It’s a bit like baring your soul, showing someone paintings. Unfinished paintings even more so.’

‘What do you paint?’

‘Still-lifes mainly. People,’ she added. ‘Do you like art?’

‘Not modern art, like Tracy Emin’s. I’m probably being completely ignorant, but I don’t see the point or the skill in it. But fine art, yes, purely as an observer. It was never one of my great talents at school.’

‘But people were?’

‘I’m not sure that anything was. I just found my way into psychology.’ Jessie didn’t want to go there, to explain why. She reached for her cup, took a sip of coffee to give herself a natural reason to break eye contact. A little boy, about Sami’s age, trotted past the window, clutching tight to his mother’s hand. It reminded Jessie that Nooria hadn’t yet mentioned her son.

‘As you don’t have long, could we start?’ she said.

Nooria glanced away, chewing at a fingernail. ‘I have to be honest, I’m not very comfortable with the concept of being analysed. I don’t think it’s up to someone else to define what “normal” means.’ Tilting sideways, she pulled an electronic cigarette from her pocket and held it up, wrinkling her nose. ‘I have this thing, which I hate. It tastes disgusting.’ She had a faint East London accent; discordant, given her exotic looks. ‘If it wasn’t so utterly freezing I’d ask you to come outside so I could smoke properly.’

Jessie waited until Nooria had taken a couple of puffs of the electronic cigarette, seemed more settled, before she replied.

‘I’m not planning on telling you how to think. There is no normal.’
I certainly know that.
‘Psychology is about repairing things that have broken. A part of Sami is broken. He’s not being silly, or fanciful. His mind has been damaged by an experience—’

‘By seeing his father,’ Nooria cut in. Her brow furrowed as she took another suck of the cigarette. ‘It’s not surprising. It was horrible, absolutely horrible, seeing him in that hospital. Burnt. So … badly burnt.’ She took another tense puff, dragged on it for longer this time. ‘He was completely …’ she paused, searching for the right words. ‘Changed. Not just what he looks like, though God, that’s bad enough.’ Her gaze dipped. ‘He was strong, confident before. A real man, if you know what I mean. An alpha male. And now—’ She broke off, shaking her head. ‘That fucking place. I hate that fucking place. You have no idea how much.’

‘Afghanistan?’

She nodded. ‘Have you ever been there?’

‘Twice,’ Jessie said.

A pause. Nooria took another suck, the tip lighting red briefly.

‘Do you know that I’m half Persian?’ she murmured.

Jessie nodded; that information had been in Sami’s referral file.

‘My father,’ Nooria continued. ‘I never actually met him, at least not when I was old enough to remember.’

‘Was he Afghan?’

‘Yes, originally. My mother told me that he came to the UK with his parents when he was thirteen. Evidently Afghanistan suffered a terrible drought in 1971 and ’72 which destroyed the economy and his family decided to seek a better life in the West. He lived in England from then on. Still does, I presume. He walked out when I was nine months old, broke off all contact and left my mother without a penny, even though he was wealthy, an engineer.’

‘How did Sami react when he first saw his father in hospital?’

Nooria sighed. She looked exhausted, emotionally drained. ‘He started screaming. He was completely hysterical. I couldn’t calm him down. I had to take him out of the hospital. But then obviously when Nick got home, Sami had to face him. Face the reality of what he had become … what he looked like.’

‘And Sami was fine before that?’

‘He was a bit quiet. Nick had been away for six months and he missed him. Sami loved … loves his dad. But apart from that he was fine. Normal.’ She gave a slight smile. ‘Even though there is no “normal”.’

Jessie’s mind cast back to her conversation with Wendy.
When he saw his father in hospital he started wailing, screaming and crying. Wouldn’t go near him.
She made a mental note to seek her out again, get her talking.

‘Sami keeps mentioning a girl. I can’t work out whether he’s referring to himself or to someone else, but I do have the sense that he’s talking about himself.’

Nooria shrugged. ‘He’s four. I insisted that I was a boy when I was four. I wanted to be a train driver. Nobody gave a hoot. We take things too seriously these days, what children say, too seriously.’

Jessie tried and failed to catch Nooria’s eye. She was surprised at her cavalier comment. As Sami’s mum, she needed to take the time to understand his psychological problems, to engage with what he was feeling. Jessie approached the issue another way.

‘I saw him yesterday, at your house. I was playing with him in his room, playing with his dolls. He loves them.’

‘He does.’ Dropping the electronic cigarette with a clatter on the table, Nooria looked up. Her gaze was direct, challenging. ‘You’re going to tell me that’s odd too now, aren’t you? A boy playing with dolls.’

Jessie shook her head. ‘When I was his age, I lined all my cuddly toys up and killed them with laser beams because I’d watched too many episodes of
Dr Who
,’ she said. ‘I used to love playing with Scalextric because I could make the cars spin off and crash at the corner. My brother on the other hand …’ Jessie paused, a catch in her voice. ‘My brother asked the Father Christmas at our local shopping centre for a doll when he was five because he loved mine so much. Father Christmas said, “You’re a boy. You shouldn’t be asking for dolls.” It made me so sad for him, being shoved in some stereotypical box. I think children should be able to play with whatever they want to play with. But that’s not the issue here, is it? Sami kept telling me that the dolls were “the girl’s”. Who is the girl, Nooria?’

Nooria shrugged. Her fingers found the electronic cigarette on the table, but she didn’t pick it up, just fiddled with it on the tabletop. ‘I’ve already said that I don’t know.’ She gave a brittle laugh. ‘Don’t tell me, your brother is now a transvestite.’

Jessie glanced out of the window. She wished that she hadn’t mentioned Jamie. She swallowed, eased the words out around the lump that had formed in her throat.

‘No, he’s not.’

Silence. Several moments slipped by while neither of them spoke. Nooria glanced at her watch.

‘How is your relationship with Sami?’ Jessie asked.

‘Mine?’ She sounded surprised.

‘You are his mother.’

‘Yes, but I’m not the issue. My husband is.’

Jessie’s mind went back to her first meeting with Major Scott.
Speak to Nooria. She’s the boy’s mother.
She’s the one who looks after him.

‘Sami is in a relationship with both of you and you are in a relationship with your husband. They’re all interrelated. You can’t isolate one and ignore all the others. Not if you want Sami to get better.’

Nooria’s shoulders sagged. ‘Wendy is more of a mother to him than I am at the moment.’

‘Young children are hard work. Even ones without the issues that Sami currently has. It’s not a crime to get some extra help, and Wendy seems calm and loving.’

Tears had come into Nooria’s eyes and she brushed them roughly away.

‘To be honest, I can’t really cope with him – not at the moment. I love him. I love him to pieces, more than anything else in the world, but a large part of me struggles to cope with where he is.’

Jessie sensed a rare chink in her armour, dived for it.

‘Both times I’ve met him, he talks about the Shadowman.’

Nooria pushed her chair back so suddenly that it clattered to the floor. She scooped it up, ducking her head self-consciously from the looks cast her way by the other diners.

‘The Shadowman? That’s Nick. He started saying it when he saw Nick.’ She raised a hand to her mouth. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but I do need to go.’ Fresh tears glistened in her eyes.

‘Nooria.’

She tucked her folio under her arm. ‘Send me a text to arrange our next meeting, if you want. Might not be for a couple of weeks though.’ She shrugged. ‘The exhibition.’

Jessie stood. ‘I need to see you sooner than that.’

But Nooria had turned away, was lost in the artsy crowd crossing the foyer and channelling up the stairs.