Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) (24 page)

Laying the map to one side, Jessie pulled her laptop on to her knee. Her tummy gurgled and she suddenly realized that she was starving. Apart from some grapes cunningly disguised as Sauvignon, nothing had passed her lips since her tea and biscuits with Miss Appleby, nine hours earlier. She reached for a slice of buttered toast, curled at the edges now and of cardboard consistency, but at least it was calories and she couldn’t be bothered to trog to the kitchen and make herself something decent. She had picked up a scent, needed to track it to its end, without interruption.

Switching on her computer, she navigated to Google. It took her ten minutes of searching, using different combinations of keywords, to find the right website: a list of National Health Service funded homes for severely physically and mentally disabled children. The list probably wasn’t exhaustive. The NHS had a habit of delivering half-arsed information, something that had driven her mad when she worked for them, the struggle for funding anything but essential services something the Army now shared, but hopefully the list would be comprehensive enough for her purposes.

There was only one home listed in Chichester. Scribbling down the number, she picked up her mobile. As she started to dial, she caught the time on the phone’s face – 2.45 a.m. What the hell was she thinking? Tossing the mobile back on the coffee table, she ground her fists into her eye sockets. What could she do now? Nothing, she realized. Nothing useful until morning. The frustration at being able to make no more progress, when every minute that ticked past was a minute closer to losing Sami’s case, felt physical, as if there was nothing but air and electricity between her neck and pelvis.

What now? Sleep? She might as well try to get some, so that she would, at least, be able to fire on all cylinders tomorrow. Setting the alarm on her phone for half-past six, enough time for a shower and a quick breakfast before calling the home at seven, she lay down on the sofa, reaching for the white wool blanket she kept folded over one of its arms. Pulling the blanket up to her chin, she closed her eyes and her thoughts drifted to Callan.

When Marilyn had walked away, Callan moved further into the trees, away from the flood of light from the electric arcs. He stood for a while, listening, letting his vision adjust to the darkness, his senses to the nuances of the dense undergrowth, as he had been taught to do on night patrols. It wasn’t as windy as last night, but a breeze shifted the branches around him, the air dead cold, the sky above him black paint.

He started to walk, slowly, slightly northwest, squatting every few paces. The bushes here were broken, a few pale brown hairs caught at the end of a sharp twig.
The dog.
He had been right. The dog had torn through here.

Standing, he moved forward again, angling left as he walked, calculating in his mind the trajectory a killer might have taken from where he or she climbed the boundary fence a hundred metres down.

Silence. Intense, almost unnatural silence. Then from somewhere behind him, murmured voices, his name being called.
Marilyn.
He didn’t reply, kept moving forward, eyes searching the ground as he walked.

A sudden glint, a tiny reflection of light that didn’t belong in the middle of this dense wood. He moved closer, lost the glint for a second – shifted back, trying to re-find his bearings. The glint again: a fragment of silver, coated in mud. Crouching down, he saw immediately what it was. A silver dog-tag key ring, with two door keys attached. The dog-tag was engraved; he could just make out the uneven ridges carved into its surface, but not the words written there. Pulling the sleeve of his jacket down over his hand, his fingers closed around the keys and he slid them into his coat pocket. It was an Army training area – things were forever falling from new recruits’ pockets and backpacks. Dropped keys probably meant nothing. But they might.

Pushing himself silently to his feet, he started to walk again, tracking the semicircle in his mind. An owl, which must have been close by, hooted, a single too-wit-too-woo. His name, again – Marilyn calling, clear as a bell in the silence.

Jesus.

He ducked, his heart leapt. The owl had darted right past his face, so close that he felt its feathers brush against his cheek.

Slowly, he breathed out.

He was about to stand when he experienced a sudden, strong sense that he was no longer alone in the trees. Staying low, he scanned the darkness around him for movement, a colour, different from the rest, a reflection of light, anything.

But there was nothing. He could see nothing out of place. Only the straight lines of the tree trunks, slightly blacker than the spaces between, bushes clogging the ground lower down. He listened. He couldn’t hear anything, only the sound of his own breathing, rhythmic, controlled, his pulse, slightly raised. The darkness so complete that even the trees threw no shadows.

Moving slowly sideways at a crouch, sidestepping one foot over the other, laying each sole softly so as not to make a sound, he reached the closest tree, stood slowly, pressing himself against the trunk, covering his back.

A shrill noise cut through the silence. His phone.
Christ, not now.
Fumbling it from his pocket, he pressed cancel.

A click right next to his ear.

His mind computed instantly.

A safety.

‘Put your hands where I can see them.’

Callan left his hands hanging by his sides. ‘You can see them where they are.’

He started to turn.

‘Don’t move.’ A voice that broke with tension.

‘I presume that you want the keys?’ he replied calmly.

‘I do.’

‘They’re in my left-hand coat pocket.’

‘Take them out and throw them on the ground behind you.
Slowly.
Do it slowly or I’ll shoot you.’

He moved – slowly – fishing the keys from his pocket, tossing them behind him, evaluating his options as he did so.

None. He had none. Only to play along, for the moment, at least.

‘And now I want you to get on your knees, Captain.’

No way.
He wasn’t about to do that for anyone. Not now. Not ever again. He had made that mistake in Afghanistan, played along, tried to buy some time and some mercy for himself and Tom. It had bought him nothing but shame and self-hatred.

‘Fuck you,’ he said.

The hand holding the gun shook. Callan’s, hanging loosely down by his sides, didn’t.

‘I’m sorry,’ the voice said.

‘I doubt that.’

He had no options. But he wasn’t giving in so easily, not this time. Taking all his weight on to his left leg, he kicked out backwards, suddenly, fast and hard, with his right. The jarring impact in his right foot, the ooff of expelled air and the groan of pain told him he had connected with muscle and bone.

Not hard enough.

A crack. Milliseconds later, an agonizing burn in his back as the bullet tore into him.

The only thing he thought of before he lost consciousness was that he should have stayed at Jessie’s to see where the evening led. That he would never now get the chance.

‘Callan,’ Jessie murmured, sitting up suddenly.

Her sense of him was almost as if he’d stepped back into the room. She looked around, her vision struggling to adjust to the darkness, picking out bulky black shapes in the room but nothing yet resolving into recognizable forms. She was confused, her head cloudy from lack of sleep and food.

‘Callan?’ she called out.

Had he come back from Wendy Chubb’s murder scene? Climbing off the sofa, she padded to the window, pulled back the curtain. It was as dark outside as in, just a sliver of moon and a scatter of stars. She squinted hard through the glass, but there was no Golf outside, no Callan. Only an empty country lane.

I’m going mad.

Reaching for her mobile, she checked the screen. She had no missed calls or texts. Tossing her phone back on to the coffee table, she lay down, pulling the blanket up to her chin and closing her eyes again.

Sounds from a long way off. Voices. Words he couldn’t recognize. A rhythmic clatter.
Helicopter blades.
He’d recognize the sound, that clatter, would recognize it anywhere.

He felt hot and cold. Hot in his chest and cold as ice in his bones. He tried to move, to open his eyes, but his lids felt heavy, like lead.

Where was he? He was aware of darkness, but a shifting darkness, shades of darkness flickering and moving above his head.

Then sudden light, right in his face. Blinding light. He moaned, tried to turn his head, felt hands holding him, a face hanging over him, the skin folded and pale.

Death.

Was it death? Had death come for him? He tried to raise his hands, to fight, but couldn’t move. He was tired, his body heavy, heavy as lead and icy cold, and he couldn’t fight any more. Surrendering to the hands, the voices, he let them pull at his clothing, go through his pockets, talking to each other all the time.
Tom? Where’s Tom? Is he already dead?
Talking, shouting, a field radio, he recognized that too, the distorted voices, the crackle, the rhythmic clatter of the helicopter blades.

He felt weightless now, as if his mind had left his body. He drifted, leaving it all: the hands, the voices, the radio’s crackle, the clatter of blades. Joining Tom. Leaving it all behind.

Jessie felt as if it was the middle of the night when her alarm woke her, as though she’d barely been asleep for five minutes. Her legs were stiff from being bent all night and her shoulder ached from lying on it for hours in the same position, unable to turn on the narrow sofa. She’d slept fitfully, aware in the recesses of her semi-conscious mind that she was uncomfortable, but lacking the motivation to drag herself from under the warm blanket and negotiate the cold, dark stairs to her bedroom.

Swinging her legs to the floor, she sat up groggily, reaching for her phone to shut off the alarm. Its ring was cutting straight through to some soft, fuzzy part of her brain that wasn’t yet ready to face the day. Particularly today, her last day before Gideon handed Sami and his family to the Special Investigation Branch.

Pulling the blanket around her shoulders, she padded into the kitchen. Standing on one foot on the cold tiles while the kettle boiled, she stared through the patio doors to the garden and the fields beyond. Sheep were huddled in groups, their dirty cotton-wool coats backlit a deep red from the glow of the rising sun, the sky above a depthless blue-black – still more night than day.

Coffee in hand, she went upstairs, rested her cup on the soap rack while she showered. She took a moment in front of her wardrobe, considering her choices, before she pulled out some clothes. She didn’t want to turn up to the Jacksons’ house looking too smart, when Rachel would be even more desolate, more wrecked, than she had been two days ago. Then, she was ratcheted to breaking point. Today probably wouldn’t have brought any release. She’d just be ratcheted two days’ tighter. But at the same time, Jessie wanted to look professional, to inspire confidence, even as she felt none herself. Eventually, she chose navy-blue trousers and a blue-and-white striped Breton jumper, tied her hair back in a high ponytail with a navy-blue scrunchie.

Back downstairs she glanced at her watch. Five past seven, time to make the telephone call she’d been waiting all night to make. Finding the piece of paper bearing the scribbled children’s home number, she laid it on her knee and picked up her mobile. A second later, she laid them both back on the coffee table. What the hell was she going to say? Her brain, clouded from lack of sleep, the caffeine not yet kicked in, fumbled for a viable option. She could claim to be an NHS psychologist asking after Nooria’s daughter’s welfare, but that was tenuous at best. Once children had been placed in a home, their needs were catered for by the home, and perhaps also by a social services caseworker, who would be well known to both the home and the child’s parents. There was no reason for a random psychologist to call out of the blue, asking questions. And Jessie didn’t even know the child’s name. Had Nooria taken the father’s surname, kept her maiden name – not that Jessie had any idea what that was – or given the child her new husband’s name, Scott? Her mind went full circle again, grasping at possibilities, discarding them, came up with only one option.

And though she hated to lie, particularly so blatantly to people who didn’t deserve to be lied to, she realized that she had absolutely no choice.

Opening the back door, holding her mobile out in front of her, she walked to the end of the garden. Full reception, wherever she stood. Climbing over the fence into the farmer’s field, she walked clockwise, skirting around the field’s perimeter, stopping only when the reception icon on her phone had reduced from five bars to two. She was a couple of hundred metres from where her back garden adjoined the field, standing in a slight depression where a twisted tangle of stunted trees, leafless and skeletal against the lightening sky, grew from the boggy ground. Steeling herself, she dialled the number she’d written on the scrap of paper.

A ringtone. She waited, scuffing the soles of her trainers in the damp soil, feeling the cold air cut straight through to her bones, wishing now that she’d put a coat on. She could imagine the telephone ringing in some small office, the staff too busy to bother to answer it.

After a full two minutes of ringing, when she was debating cutting off the call to trudge back to her cottage and hug a radiator to defrost herself, the dial tone was replaced by a woman’s voice, clipped and efficient.

‘Brooklands. How can I help you?’

‘Hello. It’s uh, it’s Nooria Scott.’

‘Pardon? Sorry, I can’t hear you too well.’

Jessie raised her voice against the interference she had deliberately engineered to disguise her voice. ‘It’s Nooria. Nooria Scott.’

‘I can’t hea … keep cutting out.’

‘It’s Nooria Scott,’ Jessie repeated, louder. She tried to mimic Nooria’s elongated vowels, her faint East End accent. ‘I’m on my mobile. The reception’s not great.’ She had received no recognition from the woman, no sign that she was calling the right children’s home.

‘Mrs Scott.’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you OK? You don’t soun …’ The woman’s voice broke up.

Shit.
Jessie was shivering with cold. A sneeze was working its way up into her nose – she let it come. ‘I’ve got a cold. I’m fine. How is …’ She wished that she had a name. ‘How is my daughter?’

A moment of silence. She waited, hardly daring to breathe. If this woman had spoken to Nooria a number of times, there was no way that Jessie’s poor attempt at her accent would be convincing.

‘Is there a problem, Mrs Scott?’

‘No. No problem. I haven’t seen her for a couple of weeks.’ She hoped it was true, knew that the more information she gave, the more chance she had of tripping herself up. ‘I was just checking in.’

‘Well, she’s fi …’ The woman’s voice fading to an unintelligible jumble of noise. ‘… breakfast, so I can’t take the phone to her.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Her dad came to see her yesterday.’

‘Her dad?’ Jessie was too startled to hide her surprise.
She said that he didn’t care about the baby at all. He told her that they should drown it. ‘That’s what we’d do in my country,’ he said.
‘Her dad came to see her?’

‘Yes.’ A wariness in the woman’s tone. ‘He was here for an hour. Lovely he is with Soraya. Really lovely.’
Soraya.
Her dad.
A pause. ‘I do need to go and help with breakfast now, Mrs Scott, but I’ll tell Susie Wingrove that you called, ask her to call you back after breakfast.’

‘Hold on. I, uh—’

‘—llo. HELLO.’

‘Yes,’ Jessie shouted. ‘I’m here.’ She couldn’t afford to lose the woman now, risk Susie Wingrove, whoever the hell she was, calling Nooria back on her own mobile.

‘Mrs Scott?’

‘Yes.’ She was virtually yelling now, turning as she did, scanning the field around her for the nearest patch of higher ground. Clutching the phone to her ear, she started to run – run and talk. ‘You don’t need to ask Susie to call me back. I know that she’s extremely busy. I’m planning to come down this Sunday anyway, so I’m sure I’ll see her then.’ Breathing hard, she held her hand over the mouthpiece, to muffle the sound.

‘I’m sure it won’t be a problem for her to call.’

‘OK, but I lost my mobile. I’ve got a temporary number,’ Jessie shouted.

‘Now I really do have to go.’

‘It’s 07720 287712. Ask her to call me on that.’

Jessie heard the click, stared at the blank phone in her hand. Had the woman registered her number? She had no idea.