Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) (15 page)

Wendy walked to the end of the road and turned right into Birch Close, a short cul-de-sac of eight modern semi-detached houses. The last house in the row was owned by Pauline, a friend she had met dog walking. Wendy slowed; Pauline’s lights were off. She must be out at bridge or perhaps asleep.

Continuing to walk, Wendy reached the end of the tarmac where it petered to sand, a narrow trail leading away from the houses, before it branched left and right to run alongside the vast space of Paschal Wood and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst training grounds.

On cold, clear winter days when the deciduous trees had lost their leaves, she could hear the gunfire from the ranges, the mixed explosions of blank rounds and thunder flashes from the night-training exercises. When she had first moved into Saddleback Close, gardens backing close up to the Ministry of Defence boundary fence, the noises had kept her awake at night. Now, the sound was like an old friend, as comforting to her as leaving the radio on low while she slept.

Tonight the gorse scrub and woods beyond the fence were silent, deserted. Finding the space between her leather gloves and the thick sleeve of her Puffa jacket, Wendy glanced at her watch. It was nearly midnight. She hadn’t realized that it was so late. Rusty would have to make do with a short walk this evening. She’d make it up to him tomorrow, tell Nooria that she’d have to leave by five.

She started to sing, making the cocker spaniel glance up at her, his tail wagging. Reaching the sandy trail that cut off left and right from the end of the track she was on, Wendy bent and unhooked his leash. Darting across the trail, Rusty nosed under the Sandhurst boundary fence and streaked into the darkness. By the time Wendy had reached the wooden fence, he had disappeared completely. She couldn’t even hear him shoving his way through the tangled gorse, or the excited yaps that usually accompanied his runs.

Shivering, she pulled the Puffa’s collar up around her cheeks. She felt freezing suddenly and she really didn’t want to climb over the fence and search for him. It was MoD property after all, out of bounds to the public, and it wasn’t in her nature to break rules. Besides, tonight, the dark space of Paschal Wood and Sandhurst felt vast and watchful. A cold wind was making the pines emit an odd, high-pitched wail, barely audible, but there all the same.

‘Rusty,’ she called quietly. She couldn’t bring herself to shout, standing there, all alone on the track.

She waited. No sign of him.

‘Rusty.’

No answering bark. She felt vulnerable enough walking alone along pavements at this time of night and wished now that she had taken him for a lead walk around the housing estate instead. She had felt on edge since last night, when she thought she’d seen light in the Scotts’ garden. Though she had told herself that the flash had been a figment of her imagination, there was a tiny corner of her mind that remained unconvinced. The edginess she felt transported her straight back to when she was a girl. She’d always been nervous of the dark, had checked under her bed and in her bedroom cupboards before switching out the light at night, a habit that had endured right into her teenage years.

‘As if a murderer is going to bother to sit in your cupboard for hours waiting for you to switch out the light and go to bed before jumping out!’ her dad used to joke.

And even though her rational mind told her that her father would say the same in this situation – that no mugger or rapist in their right mind would be hanging around out here on a freezing November night on the off-chance that some crazy woman would walk by with her dog – something about the absolute impenetrability of the darkness made her heart rate quicken.

‘Rusty.
Rusty
.’

Hauling herself over the fence, snagging her sleeve on a nail head sticking out from the
Danger – MoD Property
sign, she dropped heavily on to the ground the other side. Something cut into her ankle, and she cursed under her breath.

‘Rusty
,’
she yelled.

Pushing her way forward, hands in front of her face to prevent the branches from scratching at her skin, she forced her way through the pines. Her eyes had accustomed to the gloom out there on the track, but here in the woods she could see nothing concrete on either side of her, just a sense of the trees and bushes layering into the distance, everything disfigured by the darkness. A branch raked across her cheek and she jumped back, pressing her gloved hand to her face, feeling a sting where the wood must have torn her skin.
This is madness.
If Rusty wouldn’t come when she called, he could find his own way home.

She stiffened. Was that a twig she’d heard breaking? Was something moving out there among the trees? Her heart pounded as she stared hard into the dense murk.

And there he was suddenly. Just Rusty. A wiggle of brown and white squeezing his way through the gorse, tongue lolling, eyes bright.

A balloon of air emptied from her lungs.

‘Rusty! Where have you been?’

And she realized now, as Rusty pressed himself against her leg, tired, shivering, obviously as keen as she was to get warm, as she felt the tension drain from her leaden limbs, that she had been more frightened than she cared to admit. Bending, she dragged a hand through Rusty’s matted fur.

‘Come on, boy. Let’s go home.’

Turning, she pushed her way back through the trees to the boundary fence, gloved hands up in front of her face so that she didn’t get scratched again. It was a relief to be out of the wood, the lights from the windows of the houses on Saddleback Close – the few that were on at this time of night – a welcoming beacon.

But as she hooked her foot on to the bottom rail and turned to make sure that Rusty was still behind her, something caught her eye.

A shape? Discrete from the swaying trees? A few metres away from her.

She stopped. ‘Hello?’

No response.

Nothing moving.

Nothing concrete. Just a sense. But something about the change in feel of the darkness told her that she and Rusty were no longer alone.

A chill shook Jessie, as if the temperature in her bedroom had suddenly dropped. Pulling her duvet up to her chin, she rolled on to her side and closed her eyes, trying to push the memories away. But they came anyway, forcing through the cracks and filling her mind. She saw the drawing that Roxy had done, her dead father at her feet, the family standing in those bright blue puddles of tears. And out of nowhere she smelled the cool spring morning, grass damp with dew, ash on the breeze. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, felt her cheeks dampen again immediately with tears. Burying her face in her pillow, she let the memories flood over her, the tears flow, helpless to prevent either.

Six months after Jamie’s death, she had woken in the middle of the night. Her pony alarm clock read 4.30 a.m. Her curtains were closed, but slightly too short for the window: moonlight cast a wavy pattern on to the wall below them. Sitting up in bed, she let her gaze accustom to the pale light. Her room looked tidy, unnaturally so. The efforts of a fourteen-year-old girl who had a notice board littered with Post-its bearing the phone numbers of school counsellors, child psychologists, child bereavement support groups, but hadn’t talked to any of them.

She’s a fighter,
her form teacher had told her mother. She turned up to school on time every day, played cat games with her friends at break, joined in all the games sessions with enthusiasm, got straight A’s.
She’s making excellent progress.
Ran home after school to manically clean the house, while her friends were heading to tennis or swimming lessons.
She’s winning.
Taking the days one at a time, sometimes hour by hour, she got through them somehow, with a smile on her face.

Inside, though, she was drowning.

Climbing out of bed, she found her dressing gown and wrapped it around herself. Quietly, so as not to wake her mother, she padded down the hallway to Jamie’s room. She stood in the doorway and everything in her soul told her to close the door and go back to bed.

The room was exactly as it had been before he died. Her mother had changed nothing, packed away nothing. Jessie had not been in here since his death, the memory of finding him hanging too sharp and cruel.

But standing here now, looking around the room in the pale moonlight, she had never felt such clarity before – it was blinding. She was lost and empty and the only thing that made sense to her was that she needed her mother back. Needed to shock her out of the mire. Nothing else mattered: not the perfect, tidy house or the straight A’s. All she wanted was her mum.

Tiptoeing down to the kitchen, she pulled a roll of bin bags from the cupboard under the sink. Returning to Jamie’s room, she began to fill the bags. She pulled his clothes from their hangers, opened his drawers and methodically emptied each one, took the duvet from his bed, and pressed it and his pillow on top of the clothes. Standing on his desk, she unhooked one end of the curtain rail and shunted the Batman curtains off the pole. She emptied the toy chest, the bookshelf, cleared the desk of its contents.

One, two, three, four, five full bin bags.

The only things she didn’t take were the Athena poster of the chocolate Labrador puppies – she couldn’t bring herself to – and Pandy, his favourite cuddly bear, one of the plethora of presents that had arrived to celebrate his birth, the giver long since forgotten. Leaving the poster on the wall, she carried Pandy back to her own bed and tucked him under her covers.

Out in the garden, the horizon was tinted pink with the promise of dawn, but the air was nighttime chill, the grass damp and cold on her bare soles. She piled the bin bags in the middle of the lawn, away from the house, the shed and the wooden fences, and went back to the kitchen for some cooking oil and a box of matches.

It was fifteen minutes before she heard the kitchen door creak open, footsteps running down the garden.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ her mother shouted. ‘What are you burning?’

‘The past,’ Jessie murmured. ‘I’m burning the past.’

With a wail of agony, her mother ran to the smouldering pile, tried to snatch a few scraps from it. She jumped back, the heat too strong, nothing left to salvage.

‘What have you done, Jessie?’ she moaned. ‘
What have you done?
’

‘He’s not coming back.’ Despite the heat from the fire, Jessie felt cold, bloodless, a tremor running through her body. ‘He’s never coming back. There was no point keeping all his things. They just reminded us—’

Her mother spun around, her face twisted in fury. ‘
Reminded us?
REMINDED US? He was my son. He was my
baby
.’

She turned back to the fire, stood there sobbing, the flames lighting her face, wet and screwed up, lips and chin stringy with slime from her running nose. Jessie’s insides constricted in agony. It wasn’t supposed to have worked like this. Everything was slipping away.

‘I want you back, Mum,’ Jessie said, her voice breaking on a sob. Sidling over, she slid her arm around her mother’s waist, rested her head on her shoulder. ‘I want my mum back.’

‘You’re fifteen in a few months. Almost an adult.’ Her mother’s body was rigid, her voice distant. ‘You don’t need a mother any more.’ Disentangling herself from Jessie’s embrace, she turned and walked back up the garden to the house without another word or a backward glance.

For weeks afterwards, if Jessie woke at night she would tiptoe to the landing window, which overlooked the garden, and see her mother standing by the pile of burnt grass and ashes, a statue made of stone.

Callan ejected the magazine from his Browning and filled the cartridge with 9 mm rounds. Raising the gun, hands wrapped around the butt, feet spread shoulder width apart, he took aim at the man-shaped target at the far end of the concrete range. His index finger found the trigger. Slowing his breathing until it was light and regular, he squeezed until he felt the trigger resist, waited for an out breath and pumped five rounds into the target, ripping out a neat circle at its heart.

He had to come clean with Jessie, particularly after she’d come to the Jacksons’ with him, something she hadn’t needed to do. He couldn’t keep stringing her along without giving her the whole picture. He realized that now.

His mobile rang – Val Monks on her office phone. Sliding on the safety, reholstering his weapon, he answered.

‘Working late, Val?’

He heard her smother a yawn. ‘No rest for the wicked, Callan.’

‘You can’t work twenty-four hours a day and be wicked, Val.’

She laughed, but the laugh was half-hearted, and Callan could tell that she had something on her mind.

‘I’ll make this quick, as I presume you’re tucked up. Either that or you have a hot date and I’m getting in the way.’

Callan looked down the range at the black cutout of a man charging towards him, clutching a rifle.
A hot date.

‘I’ve been waiting for you to call me back.’ She sounded irritated.

‘Call you back?’

‘Did you get the message?

‘What message?’

‘I left a message late this afternoon with one of your Special Investigation Branch colleagues, a Lieutenant Gold. Did he pass it on?’

‘No.’

‘Ah. I thought you were just getting slack in your old age.’

Callan didn’t reply. Ed Gold – the new guy – what was he playing at?

Val continued: ‘I’ve had the tox reports back. The tox reports on Jackson. I pulled some strings to get them processed quickly.’

Callan shifted closer to the range’s exit doors so that his signal acquired another bar. ‘I’m listening.’

‘Well, we found opiates in a sample of his urine and in a sample of his blood. In analysis of his hair follicles, we found both opiates and acetaminophen.’

‘Opiates?’

‘Yes. From opium. As in opium from poppies – and I won’t insult your intelligence by reminding you where lots of poppies are grown.’

Afghanistan.
One of the coalition forces’ big headaches. All this reconstruction money being pumped in by coalition governments, much of it diverted to purposes for which it was never intended. Western governments unintentionally funding the flood of narcotics into their own countries with taxpayers’ money. A very un-virtuous circle and naive in the extreme.

A sudden image of Starkey rose in his mind, leaning across the table, fists clenched, eyes wild:
We’re fucking amateurs compared to them. We think we’re playing them, but we’re the ones being played.

‘Opium in urine takes around twenty-four hours to be metabolized to a level where it is no longer detectable in tests, the exact time obviously depending on the individual’s metabolism. Opium in blood takes around three days to do the same.’

‘Jesus.’ Callan whistled between his teeth. ‘So he took opium within twenty-four hours of his death, while he was on duty in Afghanistan.’

‘Right.’

‘And the hair follicle?’

‘Opium in hair follicles is detectable for a minimum of four months, often up to six.’

‘So from the hair follicle analysis, you’re saying that he was a habitual user – that he’s had opiates in his system for months.’ Callan massaged his temple. He could feel the beginnings of another headache, right behind his eyes.

‘Yes, but it’s not quite so simple. Because we also found acetaminophen in the hair follicles, but not in the urine or blood samples.’

‘What the hell is acetaminophen?’

‘Acetaminophen, more commonly known as Tylenol, is a drug that pharmaceutical companies add to prescription-only opiate-based painkillers, to discourage users from abusing them and becoming addicted.’

‘How does that work?’

A sigh came down the phone. ‘Opiate-based painkillers available on prescription are very effective at dampening pain, but they are also highly addictive – opiates are highly addictive – and so drug companies add Tylenol, a drug which damages the user’s liver, in a morally questionable attempt to stop users from abusing their prescription painkillers.’

‘Abuse these and you screw up your liver.’

‘Right.’

‘Nice.’

‘That’s big business for you. They tick the “we’re doing all we can to minimize this prescription drug’s potential for abuse” box while, in fact, it’s a very cruel solution.’

Callan pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘So give me the summary, Val.’

‘What the tox results say is that Jackson took opium – pure opium – recently, in Afghanistan, multiple times – and before that, stretching back months, he was most probably on an opiate-based prescription painkiller.’

‘Jesus. So he was in a real mess.’

‘Took the words right out of my mouth, Callan.’ Another yawn. ‘Now have a lovely evening with that hot date. I’m locking up here. I’ll call you as soon as I hear from my heart specialist, but once again I don’t need to insult your intelligence by telling you that habitual drug use places a considerable strain on the heart.’

The phone clicked off. Callan shoved his mobile back in his pocket.

Opiate-based prescription painkillers. Opium.

Pulling the Browning from his holster, he slid off the safety and shot five more rounds at the target, carving out another perfect circle right in the middle of its forehead.