Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) (30 page)

Pointing the gun at Jessie’s heart, clutching Sami in her arms, Nooria backed down the shingle beach towards the sea.

‘Nooria, run,’ Jessie shouted. ‘Take Sami and go somewhere else. Move to France, to Spain. I’ve got some money, I’ll give you money. Enough to survive until you get yourself sorted.’

‘I’m a murderer, Jessie. They’ll find me. Wherever I go, they’ll find me.’ Her voice broke on a sob. ‘It’s too late. I’m tired. I can’t fight any more, I can’t hide any more.’ Dipping her head to Sami’s neck, she spoke softly, ‘Sami, Mummy’s here for you now. I’ll never let anyone hurt you again. We’ll be together, always. Together and safe.’

She took a step back, the shingle crunching under her shoes.

Another.

Cold realization overtook Jessie. ‘Nooria, no.’

‘I can’t let them take my son away from me, Jessie. You’ll understand one day, when you’re a mother. You’ll understand.’

Another step backwards and the black water swallowed her shoes.

‘
No!
’ Jessie yelled.

Nooria pointed the gun. ‘
Stay back.
’

Jessie saw her flinch as the freezing seawater lapped around her ankles.

A third step. A fourth.

The black water to her thighs now. Her gaze resolute. Tears running down her cheeks. Sami clinging to her; Nooria clinging to him, stroking his hair, talking to him all the time, words that Jessie couldn’t hear.

She started to run towards the water, not caring about the gun, seeing only Jamie hanging from his curtain rail, the terror in Sami’s face the first time she had seen him, inching into her office clutching his torch, the trust in his face now as he looked at his mother, the utter and total trust. The love.

The boy is safe with the woman.

‘
Get back
,’
Nooria screamed. ‘You can’t stop me. I can’t lose Sami.’

Jessie kept running.

Sirens, closer. Headlights.

She heard the crack of the gun, Sami’s scream, milliseconds before she felt the bullet tear into her leg, dived, a delayed reaction –
too late
– slammed into the sandy ground, hot daggers stabbing her thigh. Scrabbling to her feet, she stumbled, fell again, biting down the scream of pain, feeling blood running through her fingers, boiling hot against the frozen chill of her skin. Gritting her teeth, she pushed herself up again, balancing on her good leg. Dragging the other behind her, she hobbled down the beach and into the water, the pain in her thigh blinding.

The icy sea hit her like a wall. She gasped with shock, faltered.

‘Nooria, no,’ she yelled. ‘Please,
no
.’

Nooria was up to her waist now. Turning away from Jessie, from the shore, she pushed forward through the waves and over her shoulder Jessie saw the pale moon of Sami’s face, the trusting smile. His huge dark eyes met hers.

‘
Sami
,’
she screamed, reeling forward. Her injured leg snagged on something beneath the waves and she fell. Freezing water swallowed her whole – the shock of the cold and the sudden blackness so profound that her breath was knocked from her lungs. She was caught by a wave, turned over and over, salt water filling her mouth. Scrabbling for purchase on the slippery stones with her good leg, swimming upwards, she found her footing, broke the surface, disorientated, numb with cold, rubbing her stinging, blind eyes, coughing salt water from her lungs.

‘Sami?’

She was shaking so hard that her teeth were chattering.

‘
Nooria. Sami
,’ she screamed.

Where were they?

The salt spray clouded her vision as she staggered forward against the force of the waves, screaming for Sami, scanning the water, seeing nothing but the unbroken swell, black water, the shapes of two yachts bobbing at anchor, another flash of lightning over the ocean, the unbroken swell, black water.

Nothing but black water.

Black water, the shapes of two yachts bobbing at anchor, another flash of lightning out over the ocean – lighting the stream of tide around the buoys anchoring the yachts.

Out. The tide was going out. The force of millions of tons of water moving towards the harbour entrance, dragging everything with it.

Sucking a balloon of air into her lungs, Jessie dived again, swimming hard and fast, eyes and mouth clamped shut against the freezing, salty water breaking over her head. She was swimming blind, cutting away from the beach and the red-and-blue flashing lights of the police vehicles, the torches, the shouts and screams, swimming with the tide, feeling its irresistible pull out into the blackness of the harbour. Her head was throbbing, pain pulsing in her injured leg, and she felt faint from the cold and the blood loss, her sodden clothes dragging her down, stripping her arms and good leg of energy. How easy it would be to stop – stop swimming – let the cold and the darkness take her.

Drowning was a pleasant way to die.
Who had told her that?
She couldn’t remember, couldn’t think. Someone who hadn’t drowned, she realized in the recesses of her mind.

A sudden bright light above her. Lightning?

No.

A hot yellow disc of light and the water around her churning with white horses. Looking up, she saw the heavy red-and-white underbelly of a helicopter hovering above her, recognized the hammer of the rotor blades now over the rush of water in her ears. A man, dressed in an orange survival suit, was hanging from the helicopter’s open doorway. He was shouting something. Shouting and gesturing.

She couldn’t hear.

Paddling her arms and kicking to stay afloat, she looked hard in the direction that he was pointing. Nothing. There was nothing out there. She couldn’t
see
anything. Only white horses close by, black water beyond.

The circle of light moved away, and she was plunged into darkness again, just her retina shining bright white from the shock of the sudden brightness, its aftermath. Kicking hard again, she swam after the helicopter’s beam. She couldn’t feel her limbs at all, her teeth were chattering uncontrollably, her brain throbbing with the cold.
Give up.
She had to give up. Give up and sink.

With the last vestiges of her will, she reached the circle of light, stopped again, paddling frantically to keep her head above the waves, scanned the area of water lit by the helicopter’s beam.

And saw it.

Something floating on the surface a few metres ahead of her. A tiny bundle of sodden clothes.

One stroke. Two. A third, and she was reaching out, closing her fingers around the bundle, dragging it towards her, flailing with her free arm to keep herself afloat.

The pale moon of a face. Huge dark eyes. Unblinking eyes, staring without recognition.

Sami.

Wrapping her arm tight around him, she tilted his face clear of the water, kicked and flailed, watching the orange man swinging on the end of the wire, closing the distance between them.

The boy is safe with the woman,
she whispered into Sami’s hair, cold tears mixing with the salty spray on her face.
Say it, Sami.
Please
, say it.
The boy is safe with the woman. The boy is safe with me.

Eight days after Sami and Jessie had been airlifted to Southampton General Hospital and Nooria’s body had been pulled from the sea, Jessie was discharged, her leg healing well. Sami had left the day before, fully recovered from the hypothermia that had slowed his heart rate and, perversely, kept him alive in the water. He was released into the care of Major Scott’s sister, who had two young daughters of her own.

Marilyn collected Jessie from Southampton General himself in the dilapidated BMW Z3 that was his pride and joy, drove her the fifty miles home. Callan was in intensive care at St George’s Hospital, he told her. The surgery to repair the extensive trauma to his internal organs caused by the bullet from Scott’s gun had lasted twenty-two hours, and required three separate blood transfusions. It was only yesterday, a full week after the operation, that the surgeons were able to say for sure that he would live.

Ahmose was at his window, watching for Jessie’s arrival. He had tidied her garden, cleaned her cottage from top to bottom though it hadn’t needed cleaning, put a vase with fresh flowers in every room, made tea and a homemade chocolate cake to welcome her home. He had tears in his eyes when he hugged her.

The following day, Jessie drove her Mini to the tiny Hampshire church near to where Major Scott had been born, where Nooria was to be buried. The church was filled with men in uniform, their wives in black suits and dresses, a flock of sleek crows, showing solidarity with a fellow officer, even after disgrace. Jessie, wearing civvies and keeping her head down so that she wasn’t recognized, took a seat at the end of the last row, by the wall. In the front pew, Major Scott, flanked on either side by a uniformed police officer, sat dry-eyed and silent, too stunned to cry. Jessie remembered that feeling: staring at Jamie’s coffin, her brain and body numb with shock and grief.

As they left the church to line the path and a pay a final tribute to Nooria as her coffin was carried to the car that would take her to the crematorium, Jessie felt a hand on her arm. Turning, she saw a middle-aged woman, Scott’s features laid out plainly on her pale face.

‘Dr Flynn?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Pamela Taylor, Nick Scott’s sister.’

Jessie shook the extended, black-gloved hand.

‘How is Sami?’ she asked.

‘Better than I would have expected, given what he’s been through.’ She paused. ‘But he keeps asking to see you.’ Her tone was strained. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea, but he is very, very insistent. Will you come to my house tomorrow to see him?’

Jessie hated the word closure. It was used in too many pop-psychology books and television chat shows to make it sound anything other than pretentious and trite. However, the sentiment behind the word was solid. The last time she and Sami had seen each other was when their eyes had met as Nooria carried him into that freezing sea. It would help him to see her again on neutral territory, not at his old home or in her office. To see her, to chat and to play, as a normal child with an adult friend.

‘Yes, of course, I’ll come.’

Pamela Taylor’s house was in a quiet, pleasant suburb of Farnborough, one of a horseshoe of pretty semi-detached houses ringing a green, the grass a haze of silver in the morning frost. It was clear from the expression on her face when she opened the door to Jessie that she still doubted the wisdom of allowing this visit.

‘He’s upstairs in his room, playing with his toys,’ she said. ‘Shall I get him to come down?’

‘If he’s happy and settled playing upstairs, it would be better if I go up. It makes it less formal, less of an occasion,’ Jessie replied.

The door opposite the top of the stairs was ajar, and Jessie stood in the shadows on the landing for a moment, watching Sami through the opening. He was playing with cars and a three-storey garage – new toys. The room had been hastily decorated, clearly an office in its previous incarnation, as the notice board was pinned above a slightly darker, rectangular shadow on the white wall where a desk had stood. But navy-blue dinosaur curtains hung from a blue wooden curtain rail and the duvet on the bed was covered with a matching dinosaur cover. His plastic toy buckets had been replanted here, but Jessie could see no sign of his dolls – only Baby Isabel in her pink sleep-suit, lying on Sami’s bed, her head resting on a stegosaurus on his pillow. She was pleased that Scott’s sister had had the sense to keep Baby Isabel, that at least something Sami loved deeply was still with him. The doll would give him security, help speed his adjustment.

Her heart was in her mouth as she slowly pushed the door open, waiting in the doorway until he had registered the movement behind him and turned. She had been worried about his reaction on seeing her again, but she needn’t have been. Leaping up, he charged across the room and clamped his arms around her thighs. Dumping the farm box, which she had brought with her, on to the carpet, Jessie knelt, pulled him into her arms and hugged him tight.

‘I brought you a present, Sami,’ she said, after a moment, gently levering him away.

‘The farm,’ he cried.

Jessie smiled, relaxing into the moment, as he sat down in front of the heavy-duty printed vinyl box, a huge grin spreading across his face. She had taken a calculated risk in bringing the farm with her, even though she had removed the black donkey, but had desperately wanted him to have it. It was the farm that had allowed her to find the first chink in his protective psychological armour.

‘Go ahead,’ she said, echoing the words that she had used the first time she had showed it to him, back in her office. ‘Open it.’

They played for an hour, setting the animals in the fields, rearranging them, conducting fictional animal conversations, pretending to plough the fields with the tractor, sewing crops, harvesting them. When he reached to place the ducks in the pond, Jessie tensed, waiting for a reference to waves. But to her relief it didn’t come.

When she finally stood to leave, he started gathering the animals together, putting them back into the centre of the vinyl box, zipping up the sides.

‘No, Sami. The farm is yours now. I want you to keep it.’

She gave him a final hug, wrapping one arm around his torso, the other around his legs, lifting him off his feet and cuddling the whole of him, feeling the warmth of his little body, sucking in his smell one last time.

‘Remember you can always ask your aunt to call me and I’ll come. Whenever you want to see me, I’ll come.’

Her last view, as she pulled the door to his bedroom closed, was of him lying on his stomach in a pool of cool winter sunlight, bouncing the tractor over the cobbled bricks of the farmyard, making ‘vroom, vroom’ noises – just another typical four-year-old boy. A four-year-old boy who had experienced far too much trauma already in his short life, but who in time, she believed, would be okay.

After seeing Sami, she hit the A3, drove fast through the rolling Surrey Hills and London satellite villages to Tooting. St George’s Hospital was huge and rambling, a mini-town of grey concrete blocks sprawled over ten acres. It took her over half an hour to find the right intensive care ward, where she was told by the pretty blonde reception desk nurse that Callan was groggy with sedation.

‘Are you family?’

Jessie shook her head.

‘Girlfriend?’

‘No.’

‘Pity.’ The nurse laughed brightly. ‘He’s gorgeous, even with all the tubes.’

Jessie felt her cheeks colour. ‘I’m a work colleague.’

‘Oh. Well, I’m sorry, but only immediate family are allowed to visit. There’s a very significant risk of infection.’

Jessie nodded. ‘Thanks for your help,’ she murmured. Turning, she headed towards the exit doors.

‘There’s a newsagent’s in the main foyer. You could get him a card,’ the nurse called after her.

In the hospital foyer, she stood in front of the newsagent’s, staring at the racks of ‘Get Well’ cards – a few birthdays on the bottom row in case any of the patients were unfortunate enough to celebrate their birthday while incarcerated – dithering.
It’s only a card, for God’s sake.
Eventually, she chose the only one not embossed with pastel flowers or bandaged teddy bears, and spent the next fifteen minutes, back in the intensive care waiting room, flipping between the sorrowful puppy with the bleeding paw on the front and blank white paper inside, no idea what to write. Finally, she scribbled a bland,
Get well, Ben. Love from Jessie
, and handed the card to the nurse.

By the time she arrived at her mother’s house in Wimbledon, the day had slipped to evening, the winter darkness falling fast and solid as a curtain dropping at the end of a play. The little cul-de-sac she had grown up in was ablaze with electric lights. She parked right outside the house this time, walked straight down the path without hesitation.

She hadn’t been inside her childhood home for six months, but it still felt like home. Her mother, however, was different. She looked younger, healthier. Her skin had lost the grey pallor it had possessed since Jamie’s death, the look she’d had of living a half-life – half-human, half-ghost.

‘I came down to see you. Did Ahmose tell you?’

Jessie nodded. ‘I didn’t have time to come before. I’ve been working on a case.’ Tensing at the verbal attack she expected to follow.

It didn’t come. Instead, her mum lifted a hand to stroke her arm, sliding it down to her hand, squeezing Jessie’s cold fingers in her own soft, warm ones.

‘It’s fine, sweetheart, but I’ve missed you and you look exhausted.’

Jessie bit back the tears.

‘Tell me, Jessie.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m fine.’

‘I’m your mother.’

Jessie dipped her head, a single tear rolling down her cheek. ‘You told me fifteen years ago that I was too old to need a mother.’

Her mother’s eyes hung closed for a moment. ‘I’m ashamed of myself, Jessie. I’m ashamed at what I said and I am ashamed at the way I’ve treated you. I can recognize that now – fifteen years later than I should have done. I wanted …’ A catch in her voice. ‘I
needed
someone to blame. You were the only one here. I’m sorry, darling, more sorry than I can ever say, than I can ever make up to you.’

‘But if I hadn’t left him alone.’

‘He would have found another way. Another time.’ She pulled Jessie into her arms. ‘We both need to let it go now, sweetheart, to move on. We both need to live our own lives. We’ve spent long enough grieving, atoning.’

Back outside, Jessie stopped halfway to the gate. A tiny yellow flower, just one, was blooming on the winter jasmine by the side of the path. She looked at it, astonished, as if a flower was the last thing she expected to see brightening the sludgy brown earth in her childhood garden. A signal of new growth. New beginnings. She stood looking down at it for a long time.

And Jessie realized that her mother was right. Here she was: twenty-nine years old. Twenty-nine and she hadn’t lived. Instead, she had sat looking over her shoulder, back to the past, trying to make amends while her life played itself out without her. She could let it go on, continue to feed the guilt, to punish herself. Or—

New growth. New beginnings.