Fire Damage: A gripping thriller that will keep you hooked

He straightened and she watched him surveying her sitting room, the pristine cream carpet, minimal furnishings – two cream sofas and a reclaimed oak coffee table, free of clutter – the fitted shelves empty of books and ornaments. Show-home spotless.

‘What did you say to Ahmose?’ she asked, when he joined her in the kitchen.

‘We were having a conversation about gardening. I told him that your wisteria needed cutting right back. It will flower much better in spring with a decent prune.’

‘Ah. That’ll be why he was looking at you as if you were the devil. He does my garden. Takes a huge amount of pride in it. You’ve just driven an articulated lorry through his ego.’

Callan smiled and shrugged. ‘I wasn’t entirely idle for the past six months. At least my mother now has a flourishing garden, even if her nerves are shot to shit.’

For an unexpected moment, Jessie’s mind flashed to Wimbledon, to the small sixties house she had grown up in. She had only seen her mother once since last Christmas, she realized, in March, when she had popped in with a present and cake to celebrate her mother’s birthday, taken her for lunch at a local pub. Her own birthday this year spent at home with Ahmose, pleading pressure of work to duck a visit. Guilt at that decision still hanging over her like a shroud, adding to the other accumulated layers of guilt and self-recrimination. Even more reason not to get in touch.

‘Coffee? Tea?’ Tugging open the fridge, she pulled out a bottle of Sauvignon. ‘Wine? I’m having wine – lots of it – if that helps your decision.’

He shook his head. ‘I’m on duty.’

The words ‘on duty’ surprised her, though she realized that they shouldn’t. He had, after all, come to ask for her help on a case. So he was back at work in the Military Police Special Investigation Branch then. Properly back. She was pleased for him. She glanced around, caught his eye and smiled.

‘Dressed like that?’

He smiled, an easy smile that lit his amber eyes the colour of warm honey. Despite the watchfulness, he seemed relatively comfortable in his own skin, a state that three months ago she would have happily bet a sizeable sum he was too far gone ever to reach.

‘I’ve been in the gym. I’m on call. I can work out and I can turn up to a crime scene looking like shit, but I can’t drink. I’d love a coffee.’

While she put the kettle on, he wandered into the sitting room. Jessie poured herself a large glass of wine, returned the bottle to the fridge with the label facing outward, replaced the kettle on its stand, angling the handle so that it was parallel with the wall, wiped down the work surface, picked up his coffee and her glass and followed him.

He was standing by the fireplace, studying the pictures on her mantelpiece. Just two. The only personal things on display in her sitting room, the only clutter. One of her brother, the other of Jessie, Jamie and their mother at London Zoo, all three of them happy and healthy looking, an image of her family that seemed so unlikely given what followed, that sometimes she felt as if the photographs had been mocked up on Photoshop.

‘Who’s this?’ He picked up the photograph of Jamie.

‘My brother,’ she said curtly. She willed him to put it back, leave it.

‘Younger or older?’

‘Younger by seven years.’

‘A lot.’

She shrugged. ‘He was a late addition.’ A Band-Aid baby. She didn’t say it.

‘So he’s … how old now?’

‘Nothing.’ She fought to keep her voice even, feeling the tension rise, the electric suit tingle against her skin. ‘He’s nothing. No age.’

Taking the picture from Callan, she put it back on the mantelpiece. It was her favourite picture of Jamie, taken when he was four, his mouth, ringed by a telltale brown smear of chocolate ice cream, wide open in a beautiful, innocent grin, his eyes clamped shut in the way that small children have of smiling with the whole of their faces. All teeth and gums. She remembered the occasion well. She had taken him down to watch the tourists queuing for entrance to Wimbledon tennis championships, the queue five thick and a kilometre long. Day 1. Back when Andre Agassi was limping out the last of his career. It had been punishingly hot and the atmosphere had felt like a street party, people handing around bottles of wine and juice, sharing golf umbrellas for shade.

She steadied herself against the mantelpiece, unprepared for the emotional vertigo of Jamie being so close, but not being there, feeling exposed in front of this virtual stranger.

The picture wasn’t straight. The electric suit was hissing and snapping against her skin. Realigning the picture, she checked the distance between the two photographs. She could sense Callan watching her, knew she should move away and straighten things once he had gone, but couldn’t. Just couldn’t.

She spun around to face him.

‘The case.’ It came out more roughly than she had meant. ‘Did you come to interfere with my things or did you come about a case?’

He held up his hands in a mock defensive gesture, but the expression on his face held no apology. Only query.

‘Can I sit?’

‘Sure.’

She indicated the sofa, curled herself into the chair opposite, folding her legs underneath her, wrapping her arms around her torso. Defensive body language, she knew, but too stressed now to unwrap herself. In the confined space of her living room his presence, those bright amber eyes fixed on her face, his easy confidence, so unexpected, made her feel gauche and claustrophobic in equal measures. The shift in the balance of confidence palpable, to her at least.

‘Last week, one of our Intelligence Corps non-commissioned officers, a Sergeant Andy Jackson, died in Afghanistan.’

‘He’s not the first and I’m sure he won’t be the last,’ she replied.

‘This was different. He was …’ he paused, as if trying to find the right words. ‘Being beasted, I suppose you’d call it, by one of the other Intelligence Corps sergeants, Colin Starkey. They were based at TAAC-South, headquartered in Kandahar Airfield, doing whatever secret squirrel stuff Intelligence Corps soldiers do. They went for a run in the desert around the airfield.’ He paused. ‘You’ve been to Afghanistan, haven’t you?’

‘Twice. The first time January to April 2014, to Camp Bastion, before our combat mission in Afghanistan ended and most of our troops were pulled out. The second time was for four weeks in February of this year. I was working with TAAC-Capital at Camp KAIA – Kabul International Airport.’

‘So as you know, we still have a few troops out there training, advising and assisting the Afghan Army and Security Forces.’

Jessie nodded.

‘What Starkey and Jackson did was insane given the security situation out there, more so given that it was the hottest time of the day, and even though it’s autumn the temperature would have been hitting the mid-thirties, with fifty per cent humidity. They were both dressed in combat kit and had no water with them.’ He sighed. ‘Jackson ended up dead.’

‘Dehydration?’

He shook his head. ‘A bullet wound to the stomach.’

‘From whose gun?’

‘Starkey’s.’

Jessie’s eyes widened. ‘And it isn’t cut and dried? Murder or manslaughter?’

‘The only viable print that was lifted from Starkey’s gun was a partial of Jackson’s on the trigger.’

‘And Starkey’s? There weren’t any of his?’

‘No. The gun was well oiled. It’s almost impossible to lift prints from a well-oiled gun. Forensics said that they were lucky to get the sliver of Jackson’s on the trigger.’

‘What about Jackson’s sidearm?’

‘It was holstered when he was found. It had recently been cleaned and oiled. No prints.’

Jessie took a sip of wine, rolled the stem of the glass between her fingers, thinking. ‘Who said that Jackson was being beasted? He could have gone voluntarily. There’s not much else to do out there during downtime and many of the lads are obsessed with fitness.’

Callan nodded. ‘So that’s where the picture gets muddy. A corporal who shared their quarters said that he walked in on them having an argument.’

‘What about?’

‘He didn’t catch the subject, just the raised voices. They stopped when he came in and left straight after, to go for the run. But he said that Jackson looked …’ He fell silent, searching for the right words. ‘… off. But not enough so as to make him step in.’

Jessie frowned. ‘And he was a corporal, so he would have had to feel on very solid ground to question two sergeants.’ Her legs were deadening, pins and needles. She shuffled them from under her, stretched out and put her feet on the coffee table. She saw Callan cast a quick look at her legs. Smoothing her skirt down below her knees, she continued: ‘Starkey and Jackson were the same rank.’

He looked up and met her gaze, unembarrassed. ‘Yes.’

‘So … what’s the psychology behind that?’

He shrugged. ‘You’re the shrink.’

Silence, which, after a moment, Callan broke. ‘Starkey had a black eye forming when he was found and bruising to his torso when he was stripped and searched back at camp.’

‘And Jackson?’

‘His autopsy is booked for the day after tomorrow.’

‘How did Starkey explain the black eye and bruising?’

‘He didn’t.’

‘But he radioed the medics after Jackson was shot?’

Callan nodded. ‘The shot was heard by the camp guards. Starkey radioed for help straight after.’

‘Is Starkey under arrest?’

‘He’s back in the UK, relieved of duties and confined to barracks for the moment, but he hasn’t been charged with anything. We don’t have enough evidence either way. I need to work out whether it’s murder, manslaughter, suicide or an accident borne of plain fucking stupidity. As well as collecting physical evidence, I need to understand what Colin Starkey was thinking – what they were both thinking.’

‘Motive,’ Jessie murmured. She took another sip of wine and looked past him, to the window. It was dark now, the night so dense that it could have been made from liquid; the table lamp she had switched on a hot yellow sun reflected in the glass.

‘Have you talked to Starkey yet?’

‘Once today.’

‘With a Ministry of Defence lawyer?’

‘He didn’t want one.’

‘And …?’ She looked back to him.

His amber eyes were fixed on her face, head on one side, as if he was studying her, sizing her up. Though his bald scrutiny put her on edge, she wasn’t about to let him realize it. She met his gaze directly.

‘Did you get anything from him?’

‘Not much.’

‘Name, rank and number?’ Soldiers were notoriously tight-lipped; gave nothing away unless it was absolutely unavoidable.

He rolled his eyes. ‘That’s the polite way of saying it. Fuck-all is the less polite way.’

He’d finished his coffee, was looking around for somewhere to put the empty cup. Jessie jumped off the chair, took it from him and deposited it carefully in the kitchen sink, resisting the intense urge to wash it, dry it, stow it in the cupboard then and there.

‘This has the potential to get properly out of hand,’ he said, when she returned to the living room. ‘Jackson leaves a wife and two small children, under fives. His father is a troublemaker. He works as a shop steward at a factory in South London. Knows his rights – that kind of guy. He’s already spoken to the Daily Mail. The newspapers are all over the cutbacks in defence spending, how it’s putting lives at risk. They’re gagging for anything that makes the Army look bad. I need to get to the bottom of this quickly, keep a lid on the negative publicity.’

‘His son is dead. His grandchildren are fatherless. You can’t blame him.’

Callan didn’t hesitate. ‘His son joined the Army. It goes with the territory.’

‘But not to die like that, potentially at the hands of your own side.’

A grim smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. ‘We don’t get to choose how we die. Many people don’t even get to choose how they live.’ Tossing the file on to the coffee table, he pushed himself to his feet. ‘I’ll leave the file with you – not that there’s much of use in it. I’m interviewing Colin Starkey tomorrow at Provost Barracks.’ His will stretched out to her. ‘I’ll see you there at ten to four. Ask for me at the gate, they’ll let you through. I’ll meet you downstairs, main entrance.’

‘Fine,’ Jessie said simply. ‘One interview and then we’ll see.’

4

Jeanette Bass-Cooper stood on the narrow shingle beach and looked back up the wide stretch of lawn to the house. It was faux Greek, a huge and no doubt once grand villa, resplendent with fake colonnades, plastered and painted a sickly pale lemon, the paint peeling, plaster brittle and crumbling in places. It brought to mind one of the over made-up, ageing showgirls she had seen at a burlesque show in Paris a couple of weekends ago, gaudy and brazen against the sober Arts and Crafts on one side, the Georgian on the other. But it had potential. Six bedrooms, four bathrooms, three receptions, all with huge windows overlooking the water, décor that would have to be stripped back to its bare bones and redone, but its own private stretch of shingle beach and incredible views over the upper reaches of Chichester Harbour.

It had been empty for four months and the landline was disconnected. There was no mobile reception inside, which was why she had tottered in her heels through the garden – mobile held aloft, gaze fixed on the reception icon – and down on to the skinny stone beach to call the estate agent. On one hand she was pleased there was no reception: no telephone masts to spoil this rural idyll she had set her heart on acquiring. But on the other, the inconvenience made her feel impotent. Getting away from it all was one thing, but with a commercial property business to run, being incommunicado was costly.

Signal. At last. Only two bars, but it would have to do. This wasn’t going to be a long or complex conversation. All she needed from her estate agent was an explanation as to how – when she had bought a shopping centre in Liverpool for her business, the transaction complete from beginning to end in three days – it had taken five weeks and counting to fail even to exchange on this house. The owner was dead, for Chrissakes, so it clearly wasn’t him holding up the deal.

She found Gavin Maxwell’s number on speed dial. The frustration she felt at the prospect of speaking to him had already found its way to her shoulders, which had repositioned themselves up around her ears.

‘Come on, pick up,’ she muttered, starting to pace. She glanced at her watch: 12 p.m. Don’t tell me he’s gone to lunch. Not that she would be surprised. Nothing would surprise her with this deal. ‘Pick up.’

Seaweed caught in her heel and she bent to untangle it, still clutching the phone to her ear. In tight dress and heels, she felt like a hobbled calf, had to clench her abdominals to stop herself from toppling.

Mid-stoop, she stopped.

The first thing she noticed was the smell. Decomposing seaweed yes, but another overlaying it. Rotten and putrid. A dustbin full of refuse left fermenting in sun for a fortnight.

The second thing she noticed was the blackened stick, tangled in the seaweed that had snagged her heel. Had someone held a fire on the beach? Teenagers making the most of the empty property to hold a party? She grasped the stick; her fingers sank into mush.

Jesus … her eyes bulged. Was that a hand?

She sucked in a choking breath.

A hand, the fingers, entwined with seaweed, bent into a tortured claw. She ran her eyes up the blackened stick and somewhere in the recesses of her chilled brain, she realized that it was an arm.

The third thing she noticed was that the torso attached to the arm was just that. A torso. Distended. Bloated. Her gaze tracked down. There were no legs. Nothing below waist level.

‘Ohmygod!’ she groaned.

The fourth thing she noticed was the empty eye sockets above the mouth, cavities of blackened bone, nothing soft remaining. The mouth itself, a lipless hole lined with yellow teeth, opened wide in a silent, agonized scream.

Skin. Did it have skin? Or was that only muscle, sinew and bone?

‘Ms Bass-Cooper.’ A distorted voice came out of the phone.

Terror was like tin foil in her mouth.

‘Oh my God.’ Her voice thick with tears. ‘OH MY GOD.’

‘MS BASS-COOPER. ARE YOU OK?’

The phone clattered from her hand.

5

The house was a mile outside the village of Crookham, a few miles northwest of Aldershot, standing alone in a shallow valley where the country lane dipped, before rising again and curving away over the next hill.

Jessie had taken the Farnham road from Aldershot, a map spread out on her passenger seat. She had never bought a sat nav, preferring to be in control of where she was going, even if that meant getting lost. What that said about her personality, she hadn’t bothered to analyse.

She had passed a couple of other houses, but this one sat alone at the end of a short gravel drive, set back behind a column of clipped leylandii trees, planted tightly to form a hedge twenty feet high, shielding the house from the road. Unnecessary, Jessie thought, doubting that more than ten cars a day used this lane that came from nowhere important and led nowhere.

Her tyres crunched on gravel as she drove through the wooden five-bar gate, rotten, leaning drunkenly off its hinges, and parked in the circular drive behind a green mud-splattered Land Rover Defender. The house must have originally been three cottages that had been knocked into one. It was long and low, a couple of hundred years old at least: two storeys high, of red brick with wooden beams cutting through them, a clay-tiled roof which undulated like the surrounding hills. It looked to be – as was her own cottage, on a more modest scale – a money pit of maintenance. She passed two olive green painted front doors, the first with pot plants crowded around its base, the second, a rusting metal pig-trough filled with soil that looked as if it had been purchased as a garden feature and never planted out. The third door was clearly in use as the front door to the combined dwelling: a letterbox stuffed with an overlarge catalogue that prevented it from closing, and a hedgehog-shaped boot cleaner to one side, its bristles worn and caked in mud.

Jessie yanked out the catalogue, knocked and waited. The whole place had an air of isolation and neglect. The utter silence was oppressive; she couldn’t even hear birdsong. Though she loved her own cottage, she also liked having Ahmose next door, within shouting distance, if she ever needed him. This place was too secluded, felt as if it could almost be alone on the planet. Being a psychologist hadn’t anesthetized her to imaginary fears. It was actually the opposite. Accessing the dark side of other people’s minds had made her imagination more feverish. She knew that if it were she out here alone, in darkness, every sound would be a window being cracked open from the outside. Shivering, she rubbed a hand over the back of her neck. It was cold today, the sky flinty-grey with clouds and she wished that she had put a thicker coat on.

A woman of around sixty opened the door. She wore an apron, bearing the legend, You must be confusing me with the maid we don’t have, accompanied by a photograph of a cone-breasted woman in a pencil skirt and twinset.

‘I won’t shake your hand,’ she said, holding up a marigold-gloved hand coated with soapsuds. ‘I was in the middle of washing up.’ Jessie noticed a slight Midland twang underneath a voice that was brisk and efficient. ‘I’m Wendy Chubb, and you must be Dr Flynn.’

Jessie smiled. ‘Please call me Jessie.’

‘Come in, won’t you.’ She closed the door behind Jessie, face wrinkling at the cold air that blew with them into the room. ‘Sami’s upstairs in his bedroom playing with his toys. Major Scott’s in the sitting room. He asked me to tell you to pop in and see him first before your session with Sami.’ Wendy smiled. ‘Must be interesting being a psychologist. Satisfying too, sorting out people’s minds for them. I could do with a bit of that myself.’

Jessie laughed. ‘If only it was that easy. Sometimes I think that we psychologists create more problems than we solve.’

‘Well, I hope you can help Sami. He’s a delightful little boy, he is. Intelligent too. He helped me make a cake the other day. Managed to weigh all the ingredients out with hardly any help.’ She met Jessie’s gaze, pale eyelashes blinking. ‘What do you think is the matter with him?’

Jessie shrugged. She wasn’t about to break patient confidentiality, even if she did have a clue at this early stage, which she didn’t.

‘I’ve only seen him once.’ Subconsciously, she touched a hand to the scar on her head. ‘He seems scared and very troubled.’

Wendy nodded. ‘Been in the wars?’

‘A brief scuffle with my car door,’ Jessie lied.

‘Car doors can be dangerous. Any doors can be dangerous. I got my thumb jammed in one of Nooria’s kitchen cabinets. Some of them were damaged and she asked me to help her replace them, make it nice for when Major Scott got back from Afghanistan. I thought I’d taken my thumb clean off it was so painful. Luckily it was only bruising, but even so.’ She gave quick bright laugh, canted towards Jessie and lowered her voice. ‘Shocking thing, what happened to the Major. Affected Sami terribly badly. Scared of being burnt, he is. While we were making that cake, he was fine, but as soon as I lit the gas on the cooker he got awfully frightened. Ran up to his room crying and wouldn’t come back down.’

Jessie’s face remained impassive, but she was now listening intently. Patient confidentiality and her own moral code prevented her from giving out information, but she could gain some. Everything she learnt about a patient helped her construct a picture of causation and of what intervention they would need to help heal them. Some sources were more reliable than others, but every bit of information was a segment in the ten-million-piece, incredibly complex, opaque jigsaw that made up the human mind.

‘He was talking about being burnt when I saw him yesterday.’

Wendy frowned. ‘Can’t blame the little lad. It was terribly traumatic for him when his father got back from Afghanistan. He was already in a bit of a state, frightened like, when his mum brought him to the hospital. Probably because they’d been alone out here every night for the six months his father was on tour. Major Scott prefers it to family accommodation on base, but I wouldn’t want to be out here at night without a man around.’ A shadow crossed her face. ‘When he saw his father in the hospital, he started wailing, screaming and crying. Wouldn’t go near him. He hasn’t been right since. Eight weeks or so ago that was now.’

‘So you’ve worked here a while?’

She nodded. ‘Nooria employed me nine months ago. Late February it was, shortly after Major Scott left for Afghanistan. I do a bit of housework and help out with Sami. Nooria loves to paint. She’s doing a foundation course in fine art at the Royal College of Art in London.’ Wendy pointed to a framed graphite sketch on the wall, Sami as a baby, with that trademark curly hair and huge dark eyes.

‘It’s wonderful.’

‘She certainly is talented. That’s where she is now. She goes to college on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.’

Wendy continued to talk about Nooria’s painting, but Jessie tuned out. She glanced surreptitiously at her watch. She had agreed to meet Ben Callan at ten to four for the session with Starkey, wanted to have a good look through the file Callan had given her before the meeting. It was half-past twelve now.

‘Is the Major …?’ She let the words hang.

‘Oh course, yes. Sorry. I’m a talker. Always have been, always will be. In there, the sitting room.’

Jessie had never met Major Nicholas Scott, but she had heard about him when she was working with PsyOps – 15 Psychological Operations Group – in Camp KAIA, the second of her two tours of duty in Afghanistan. PsyOps was a tri-service, ‘purple’ military unit, parented by 1 Military Intelligence Brigade, of which Major Scott was part, but they drafted in psychologists from the Medical Corps to advise.