KATE MEDINA
Fire Damage

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Copyright © Kate Medina 2016

Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photograph © Ashraful Arefin/Arcangel Images

Kate Medina asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780008132309

Source ISBN 9780008132279

Version 2018-02-13

Dedication

For Anthony Medina, with love

and thanks for everything

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Keep Reading …

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Kate Medina

About the Publisher

1

The little boy inched through the doorway, arms and legs jerking like a marionette. Stopping just inside, he scanned the room with frightened eyes. In his hands, he gripped a torch. A huge, black metal Maglite, which swung slowly back and forth in front of him as if he was feeling his way through darkness. The beam traced along the walls, was swallowed for a moment by the sharp winter light cutting in through the sash window. It scoured each corner, drifted over the furniture, stopping to inspect the alcove under Jessie’s desk, the corner where the filing cabinet housing her psychology books and journals cast shadow.

Kneeling down so that her face was level with his, but maintaining her distance, avoiding direct eye contact, Jessie smiled.

‘Hello, Sami. I’m Jessie Flynn,’ she said softly.

She had dressed in civvies this morning, a denim skirt, long-sleeved white shirt and simple, navy patent leather ballet pumps, ubiquitous clothes that communicated nothing about her, made no statement.

The little boy remained silent. He continued to rotate the torch, eyes twitching from side to side, nervously tracking its beam. Standing, Jessie stepped forward to close the door.

Sami shot back against the wall, his expression rigid with fear. A sob burst from his lips. Swinging the torch wildly, he made a harsh, throbbing noise deep in his throat, like the growl of a terrified dog.

Jessie moved away, hands spread calmingly.

‘I’m sorry if I scared you, Sami. I didn’t mean to.’ She sat down slowly in one of the two leather armchairs by the window. ‘I won’t move from here. You explore my office. Take as long as you like.’

He remained where he was, pressed against the wall, ramrod straight. His chest hollowed and heaved from the effort of drawing in breath. Jessie stayed silent, waiting. Gradually, he moved from the wall, the heavy torch hugged close to his body like a loved teddy bear. One step. Another. The movements jerky, uncoordinated. His face, hauntingly pale, began to take on colour.

The torch’s beam reflected off the patent leather of Jessie’s ballet pumps, was dull on the denim of her skirt, tinged the white of her shirt citrus. The beam found her face. She smiled, compelled herself not to blink. Knew that beyond the light that fuzzed her vision, Sami was watching her intently, obsessively focused on every cue.

The torch dipped. Jessie raised her eyes, and for a fraction of a second their gazes met.

‘The girl knows,’ he whispered.

Sami’s breath came fast and shallow; Jessie could feel it, hot and cold, damp against her cheek. Then came the soft touch of his fingers.

‘Grrrrr. Grrrrr.’

That growling noise again, from the back of his throat. She sat completely motionless, staring ahead, making no sound. With lightning quickness, his fingers touched her neck and were gone. Jessie forced herself not to flinch. She could sense him only millimetres from her, the heat of the torch beam mapping a circle on her skin.

His fingers again, touching her hair this time, butterfly wings. She had tied her hair up in a ponytail to get it out of the way. Usually she wore it in the regulation bun when she was at work, but she had felt that it was too formal, too severe for today’s patient. Reaching up, she tugged the elastic band from her hair. A jet-black curtain fell to her waist. The hair swallowed his arms, coating his hands and forearms to the elbows.

Sami froze.

‘Sami, what’s wrong.’

Without warning, he swung the heavy metal Maglite wildly at Jessie’s head, slamming its metal edge into her temple. He swung again, smashing the torch against the side of her head. Raising her hands to fend him off, she ducked. Another blow caught her cheekbone, glanced off her shoulder. Dizziness. The floor rose, the ceiling dipped. She managed to snatch the Maglite from his grip as she fell to her hands and knees. Blood streamed from the gash in her head, into her eyes, blinding her.

He was screaming. Dragging her sleeve across her eyes, she spun on to her back, searching for the noise, searching for Sami. He had slid to the floor, hands pressed over his ears, body curled tight into a foetal position. He was wailing and sobbing, his chest heaving as if there was not enough air in the room. Crawling over, Jessie wrapped her arms around him. Held him tight. Felt him struggle and kick, writhe and scream. Felt his heart beating, almost punching its way out of his chest. Didn’t let go.

Thought of another little boy, fifteen years ago, equally helpless and terrified. A little boy she had loved. Loved and failed.

‘Burnt,’ Sami sobbed. ‘Arms burnt.’

‘Nothing’s burnt. You’re safe.’

She could feel blood running down the side of her face, her cheek and neck slick with it.

‘The girl is burnt. The man is burnt.’ His voice was hoarse from screaming. ‘Sami torch? Sami torch?’

Jessie found his torch, fumbled it back into his grip.

‘Shadowman,’ he whispered, clutching the torch to his heart. ‘The Shadowman came. The girl knows.’

2

Jessie stood in the women’s toilets and stared at herself in the mirror. She was shaking, her stomach churning. The cut on her forehead was a deep scarlet slash against the milky white of her skin, still bleeding. Her temple was throbbing, an egg-shaped bruise already forming under the skin. Tugging some paper from the hand dryer, she soaked it under the hot tap, wiped it up her cheek and pressed it to the cut, wincing with the pain. She couldn’t stop trembling. What the hell had just happened? She cast her mind back over the referral notes she had been given.

Sami Scott. Four-year-old boy.

Four years and four months old – a July birthday – young for his year. But although he had been due to start school in September, he hadn’t, couldn’t.

Father: Major Nicholas Scott, Intelligence Corps, badly burnt in Afghanistan three months previously.

Mother: Nooria Scott, Persian-English, born and raised in England.

Preliminary diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder.

But was it?

What was with the torch?

‘The girl knows.’

Who was the girl? Was it Jessie? She was pretty sure it wasn’t her. She was twenty-nine, and to a four-year-old she would seem ancient, a woman, not a girl. Semantics perhaps, but she thought not. She’d had the sense that he was referring to himself, but that couldn’t be right. Despite the shoulder-length, curly dark hair, huge chocolate eyes, that chubby, cherubic appearance that could be either girl or boy, he was definitely a boy. The notes had clearly specified gender.

Referred to the Defence Psychology Service by his father who had been evacuated from Camp Bastion and repatriated to England in August, after suffering horrific burns in a petrol-bomb attack.

The face looking back at her in the mirror was ghostly, sallower even than usual, her eyes a blue so pale they were almost translucent. She looked wraithlike. Felt as though once she released her grip of the basin, there would be nothing to tether her to this earth; that she would float up into the chilly winter sky.

Looking at herself now, she was transported straight back fifteen years – a hospital mirror, the same ethereal being – just a traumatized girl then. So viscerally could she remember her helplessness, that she could taste it in her mouth. Acid vomit.

And now, another little boy who desperately needed her help. The last half an hour had stripped her raw. She felt completely out of her depth.

3

Jessie waited, engine idling, while the guards swung open the heavy metal gates. She gave them a brief, distracted wave as she drove out of Bradley Court Army Rehabilitation Centre, and joined the public road. The tension in her was so acute she could feel it physically: a skintight electric suit coating her body, clenched around her throat, the bare wires hissing and crackling against her skin.

There was no traffic on the narrow country road and her headlights cut twin beams through the gathering dusk, tracking the hedgerows, knotted with Elder and Dogwood, on one side, the dotted white line demarcating the oncoming lane on the other.

Winding down her window, she let the chill evening air funnel over her face and neck, cooling the heat from the electric suit, the rush of cold bringing tears to her eyes. She had felt like crying ever since the end of her session with Sami. She let them flow, needing the release.

Her mobile phone rang and she glanced at it. Gideon Duursema. She ignored it, couldn’t face the ‘how did it go?’ conversation. Reaching across to the CD player, she cranked up the sound, let James Blunt, full volume, assault her eardrums. Back to Bedlam. Appropriate. It was the only CD she had in the car, a Secret Santa departmental gift last Christmas. Everyone had laughed when she unwrapped it, uniform groans of Jesus, not him. But there was something about his voice that took her somewhere better, whatever she had been doing. She had played it on a constant cycle for a year, knew all the songs by heart, felt opera-singer talented when she sang along, but knew that the reality was closer to a stray cat’s chorus.

Slowing to twenty, she pulled into the single-track country lane that led to her cottage. It was windy, hemmed by high hedges, only a brief flash of open fields through the odd metal five-bar farm gate during the day. She’d had a close shave a few months before with the farmer and his herd of prize Friesians, and he’d promised to grind his tractor down the side of her beloved Mini if she ever drove that fast down his country lane again.

Rounding the final bend, her headlights picked out an unfamiliar car parked outside her cottage, a red Golf GTI, complete with spoiler and sports profiling. It looked like a pimp’s ride. A man she didn’t recognize was standing on her minute patch of lawn, arms folded across his chest, studying the leafless wisteria clogging the front wall. Behind him, her retired next-door-neighbour, Ahmose Rahotep, was standing on Jessie’s doorstep, leaning on his stick, mouth pressed into a thin, tight line.

At the sound of her engine, the man turned. He was about thirty, broad shouldered and long limbed, dressed in grey jogging bottoms, and a navy-blue hooded sweatshirt. She realized, suddenly, that there was something familiar about him. Something she couldn’t quite place.

Pulling up behind the Golf, Jessie cut her engine. Her head was still throbbing, Sami’s look of utter terror fixed in her mind. She had wanted to come home to a silent house and a glass of wine, space to think, to get a head start before she saw Sami again tomorrow and met his father, Major Nicholas Scott, for the first time.

No such luck.

With a sigh, she opened the car door. The man walked down the path as she climbed out and met her on the lane. Recognition dawned. Virtually all resemblance to his former self, the man she had last seen, a skeletal shadow, a hermit in his mother’s house, confined to those unusual amber eyes. Her gaze found the scar from the bullet wound on his temple, damaged, stitched skin like the brown petals of a dead rose.

Captain Ben Callan, Military Police Special Investigation Branch. The only patient she had treated since she joined the Defence Psychology Service, two years previously, who she felt she’d completely and utterly failed.

‘Ben … Captain Callan.’ Her gaze dipped to the red-and-gold Royal Military Police insignia on his blue hoodie. ‘You’re—’ She broke off.

‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m back.’

Pushing her hair from her face, wincing as her fingertips dragged against the cut Sami had inflicted with his torch, Jessie looked up at him. He was clean-shaven, his sandy-blond hair cut short. He looked as if he’d had a few proper meals since she’d last seen him in July, had added muscle at the gym. But vestiges of his Afghan experience, the last few months of the fight to reclaim his sanity, clung to him. He was still ten kilos lighter than the photographs she had seen on his mother’s mantelpiece. Black shadowed the skin beneath his eyes, which contained a watchfulness, a twitchy awareness of everything that was happening around him. She had seen that same look in many of the other veterans she had counselled, men and women who had survived long tours in a war zone – Afghanistan, Iraq – and frequent contact with a ubiquitous enemy. He clearly wasn’t sleeping properly, was most likely having ongoing nightmares.

‘How are you, Dr Flynn?’ He grimaced at the cut on her head. ‘Not good.’

She shrugged. ‘I had a run-in with a small boy. As you can see, I lost.’

‘Small boys can be dangerous.’ He met her gaze, the ghost of a smile crossing his face. ‘Big boys even more so.’

She cocked an eyebrow. ‘So I’ve been told.’

‘I’m glad to see your patients aren’t letting you get the better of them, at least.’

‘Round two tomorrow, so we’ll see.’

She moved past him and he turned to follow her.

‘What do you want?’ she cast over her shoulder.

‘I need your help.’

‘My help? I thought you’d had enough of my help to last you a lifetime.’

‘With a case.’

She pushed open her garden gate. ‘As you can see from my war wound, I already have a case. In fact I have a five-centimetre-high stack of them sitting on my desk, begging for attention.’

‘Gideon told me that you’d argue.’

‘He was right.’ She swung around to face him on the garden path. ‘Look, it’s good to see you back on your feet and I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve had a long and relatively shitty day. Couldn’t we have had this conversation over the phone?’

His expression remained impassive. ‘I would have been happy to. If you’d picked up.’

Sliding her mobile from her pocket, she checked the display. Five missed calls from an unknown number and three from her boss, Dr Gideon Duursema.

She pulled a face. ‘Must have switched itself to silent.’

‘Must have done. Though you’d have struggled to hear a grenade going off over the sound of that singer-soldier crap you were listening to.’

‘How dare you. James Blunt is a god.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Let’s not go there. I don’t have a spare couple of hours to tell you how pitifully misguided you are.’ Holding out a file, he glanced across at Ahmose who was in place on her doorstep, leaning heavily on his stick, a tired, bent St Peter valiantly guarding the gates to heaven. ‘Look, I have a meeting tomorrow afternoon and I need a psychologist there. Gideon said to get you to call him if you want an argument.’ He paused. ‘Can we go inside to talk? It’s confidential.’

Jessie sighed. ‘Do I have a choice?’

His reply was curt. ‘No.’

Turning, she laid a hand on Ahmose’s arm. ‘Thanks for looking out for me, Ahmose, but it’s fine. Unfortunately it’s work. Cup of tea tomorrow evening? I should be back by six.’

Ahmose nodded. ‘I’ll put the kettle on soon as I hear your car. My sister sent me some ghorayebah biscuits direct from Cairo.’ Raising his hand to his mouth, he kissed the tips of his fingers. ‘We can share those too.’ He tilted towards her, lowering his voice. ‘He wasn’t polite. I didn’t want to leave him alone outside your place, just in case. You never know these days. He really wasn’t polite.’ Hooking his walking stick over his forearm, he reached for Jessie’s hand, gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘I’ll be able to hear if you shout.’

She gave Ahmose a quick peck on the cheek. ‘I’ll be fine. He’s police. If you’re not safe with the police then who are you safe with?’

‘Police.’ He almost spat out the word. ‘Now don’t you get me started.’

Jessie had chosen to buy her own house, rather than living in Army accommodation. As a single woman, even an officer, she would have got little more than one room and no privacy. And it made sense, given that her work took her to different parts of the UK and abroad, wherever a psychologist was required.

Her tiny farmworker’s cottage was the middle in a row of three, down a single-track country lane in the Surrey Hills, an area of outstanding natural beauty, fifty square miles of rolling hills that cut east to west from the sprawling satellite villages bordering southwest London, to meet with the Sussex Downs in the south. It was picture-postcard England: narrow, winding lanes, thatched cottages, flint stone churches, cricket greens, village pubs garlanded with hanging baskets of busy Lizzies and lobelia, fields of hot yellow rape seed in summer, cabbages and sprouts in winter.

Her cottage put her five miles from the Army rehabilitation centre, a converted former manor house near Dorking and a short drive from the town of Aldershot, ‘Home of the British Army’, where many regiments had their base, and where much of her work took her.

Ahmose lived alone on one side. Over one of their many shared teas, he had told her that he’d bought the cottage to retire to with his wife, Alice. She had died of a stroke within four months of their moving in, and he had continued to live there alone, his sitting room a photographic shrine to the woman who had shared the English portion of his life for almost thirty years. The cottage on the other side was owned by a childless, professional London couple who came down once a month at the most and kept themselves to themselves when they did, which suited both her and Ahmose perfectly.

Callan had to duck to get through her front door, which opened directly into the living room. She hadn’t noticed how tall he was, given that he had rarely been standing when she’d seen him at his mother’s house, or if he was, he’d been hunched and folded in on himself, both physically and mentally. He was well over six foot, and in the cottage built to house farmworkers from the eighteenth century, average height five foot four, he looked huge, a vision of Gulliver. Slipping off her ballet pumps, Jessie lined them up side by side at the edge of the mat, shrugged off her jacket and hung it on the hook behind the door, straightening the sleeves until they hung parallel, creaseless, aware all the time that Callan was watching, the creaking of the floorboards as he shifted his weight from foot to foot telegraphing his impatience. When she had finished, he bent to untie his shoelaces, kick his trainers off carelessly.

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.

She and Scott had not overlapped in Afghanistan, but she had probably passed him somewhere in the air over Europe last February, her coming back, him going out to the tour which would cost him so much. Scott was in his early forties, well respected, no nonsense, someone who got the job done, and well. He had seemed to command respect among senior Afghan figures, had achieved some successes where others, who came before, had failed.

The heavy sky cast little light and the low-ceilinged room, with its twin box sash windows, was dim. It was an austere room, masculine, a dark leather chesterfield sofa and two matching leather bucket chairs opposite, a plasma television on an oak stand in one corner, no books or photographs. Jessie had expected something more modern and feminine, but, except for a simple watercolour – a toddler Sami asleep in his cot, dressed in a pale yellow sleep-suit that made him look like a beautiful baby girl – Nooria’s influence seemed minimal. Major Scott was sitting by the window, in one of the bucket chairs, which he had turned to face the garden.

Approaching from his right side, Jessie caught a glimpse of the handsome man he would have been before the attack: blond-haired, well defined cheekbones and a square jaw, softened now with stubble a few days old, tall and well built, she could tell, even though he was sitting. The beige carpet muffled her footsteps; he seemed unaware of her presence. Halfway across the room, she stopped.

‘Major Scott.’

Jessie’s first, strong impulse when he stood and turned to face her was to recoil. Forcing her expression impassive, she held the gaze of his one good eye through the tinted lens of his sunglasses. The left side of his face was so badly burnt that the skin had melted, slid away from the bones underneath, leaving threads of brown, tortured tissue. Batman’s Joker dropped into a vat of acid. His nose resembled that of a skeleton: cartilage all that was left to form shape, scarred skin stretched over the nub and grafted into place. A pair of gold-framed aviator sunglasses covered his eyes. As he stood, Jessie caught the glimpse of his left eye through the side of their frame: an empty socket, the skin around it patchwork, only a glistening burgundy cavity remaining. He wore a blue polo neck jumper and jeans. The skin down the left side of his neck was like liquid, disappearing under the dark wool.

Jessie held out her right hand. ‘I’m Dr Jessie Flynn.’

He nodded, shook it briefly. ‘Thank you for taking on Sami.’ His voice was clipped, strained, at odds with his words.

‘It’s my job, and one I’m very happy to do. He’s a cute boy.’

‘But you probably signed on for adults, not for children.’

‘I did a master’s in Child Psychology before my Clinical PhD so it’s one of my areas of expertise.’ She attempted a joke. ‘Helpful for dealing with many of the adults I see too.’

Scott didn’t smile. He had already turned back to the chair, which he angled a little into the room, but not entirely, so that Jessie could see the good side of his face, but not make direct eye contact. She felt foolish for trying to lighten the moment – it had been inappropriate. She took a seat on the sofa where he had indicated.

‘Actually, Major Scott, I need to see the whole family, not just Sami.’

‘What?’ His voice was incredulous.

‘For a child like Sami, if I’m to understand what’s going on and to help treat him, I need to see all of you – individually.’

The animosity in his voice shocked her. ‘I didn’t refer him to an Army psychologist because I wanted someone poking around in our lives. I referred him because I had no choice. He was supposed to start school in September, and instead he’s raving. Your job is to sort him out. The rest of us are fine.’ The last sentence said bitterly. Scott was clearly anything but fine.

Jessie persisted. ‘His problems haven’t arisen in isolation and you and your wife need to deal with them. You’re the ones who are with him twenty-four hours a day.’

‘He has post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s bloody obvious. I’ve seen it in the field countless times and that’s with grown men.’ He spoke through gritted teeth, barely suppressed fury in his voice. There was an undercurrent of something else too, making his voice tremble. Fear? Fear and helplessness. Emotions Jessie knew well. ‘His mother’s always been overprotective, made him too sensitive. Seeing me in the hospital tipped him over the edge. Other kids might have been able to handle it, he couldn’t.’

‘It may be post-traumatic stress disorder – probably is – but it’s complex and very intense. He will be having nightmares, terrors, be imagining frightening images, while he’s awake and while he’s asleep. As you said, it’s hard enough for grown men and women to handle, terrifying for a little boy.’ Her mind flashed to Sami, writhing and sobbing in her arms. The man is burnt. The girl is burnt.

She wasn’t about to quote statistics to Scott, but she knew them by heart. For every hundred veterans of operations in Afghanistan, around twenty will have post-traumatic stress disorder. Disorder characterized by alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide. ‘He needs his parents to understand exactly what he’s going through, be there to help him appropriately when he needs it. Which is now. All the time, in fact, twenty-four/seven, until he’s over it.’

He sneered and curled his lip. ‘You can see Nooria. She’s the kid’s mother. She’s the one who cares for him day-to-day. Now do your job and leave me alone.’

He had turned back to the window – conversation clearly over – his gaze almost stretching out through the glass, as if he wanted to smash through it, run away across the fields and take possession of someone else’s life. Jessie couldn’t blame him. Standing silently, she made her way to the door. There was a macho cult in the military, one she had come across many times before, that forbade asking for help. She was surprised that he had referred Sami, but having seen the child, he had clearly had no choice. She’d go and see Sami now, but she wasn’t finished with Major Nicholas bloody Scott.

6

The second door on the right was closed. Jessie stood outside for a moment, her ear pressed to the cold wood to see if she could hear any noises. There were none. She knocked and when she received no reply, pushed the door open.

Her first glimpse of Sami’s bedroom revealed the polar opposite of what she had expected for a little boy, the only child, in a relatively affluent family. It was a good size, a decent double, with a single oak-framed bed pushed against the wall to her right, a window opposite and a large oak chest of drawers to her left. Beneath the window were four coloured plastic toy buckets, filled with toys. The walls were a soft sunshine yellow, the same shade as Sami’s sleep-suit in the watercolour Nooria had painted of him. That was the limit of where the room met with her expectation.

The curtain was drawn across the window, recessed overhead electric lights on full, giving the room a harsh, office-like glow. The yellow floral curtain must have been backed with blackout material, because not a single ray of natural light penetrated its folds. On his bed were a sheet and pillow, but no covers: no duvet or blanket. No Thomas the Tank Engine or Bob the Builder bed linen. There were no cuddly toys, not a single teddy bear, on the bed. It was bare, the whole room cold and institutional, similar to the Military Police holding cells she had seen last year while assessing a soldier who had broken his girlfriend’s jaw in four places with his fist and was on suicide watch.

Sami was sitting underneath the window playing with some toys, his back to her. Next to him on the floor was the huge, black metal Maglite torch. Even though the room was flooded with light, the torch was switched on, its beam cutting a pale cylinder to the wall, lighting floating motes of dust.

Jessie remained in the doorway. If she had learnt anything from her experience yesterday it was to maintain her distance until he was entirely comfortable with her presence. The dull thud from her temple reminded her of that.

‘Sami, it’s Jessie Flynn. I’ve come to see you.’

For a moment, she thought that he hadn’t heard her: he made no movement, no sound, no indication that he had done so. Then, slowly an arm reached out, a hand closed around the shaft of the torch. Shuffling around on his bottom, dragging the torch with him, the little boy half-turned towards her.

Jessie smiled. ‘Hi, Sami.’

His face showed no expression. He didn’t smile back. He didn’t frown.

‘Can I come in?’

No expression still, his huge dark eyes fixed on her face. The scrutiny intense, unwavering. Then a barely perceptible nod.

‘Thank you.’

Stepping through the doorway, Jessie pushed the door closed behind her. She wanted privacy, a physical barrier to the sounds of their interaction floating down the stairs. Though she knew that she was putting her reputation at risk shutting herself into a room with a child, she had a strong sense it was important they weren’t overheard. For his freedom of mind; for her own.

‘What are you playing with?’

‘Dolly.’

‘Can I play with your toys too?’

Severe or not, she had secured her hair in a bun this time, but had softened her look with a pale blue V-neck jumper, white jeans and trainers.

Again, an almost imperceptible inclination of his head. Jessie crossed the room, lowered herself on to the carpet next to him.

One of the four plastic tubs lined in front of him was full of dolls: four or five of various sizes, plus their accessories: a pink potty, a couple of milk bottles, plates, bowls and spoons, bibs, a few changes of sleep-suits in pastel colours. Sami, cradling one of the dolls in his lap, was halfway through changing her clothes.

‘Could I play with one too?’

No verbal reply, but another tiny nod.

Jessie reached into the bucket and retrieved a doll. It was large, the size of a real newborn, dressed in a baby pink sleep-suit with a fairy castle embroidered on the front in lilac, underneath the castle the words ‘Baby Isabel’ stitched in gold cursive script. A glittery pink plastic dummy was jammed in her mouth; glassy pale blue eyes stared fixedly back at Jessie. She had not been a ‘dolly’ girl, or into princesses either, preferring Scalextric, or arranging her cuddly toys into intergalactic battle groups based on snatched episodes of Dr Who, lying behind the sofa, watching through her father’s feet, when she was supposed to be in bed.

‘Do you like dolls?’

He nodded. ‘Sami like dolls.’

He had finished changing the doll, was looking longingly at Baby Isabel. Jessie passed the doll to him.

‘The girl likes dolls.’

The girl.

‘Which doll is the girl’s favourite?’ Jessie asked softly.

Without hesitation, he held up Baby Isabel.

‘Why does the girl like Baby Isabel best?’

He shrugged.

‘Is it because she’s got beautiful blue eyes?’

Another shrug.

‘What about her sleep-suit? The castle? It’s very pretty.’

He ran his fingertips gently over the silky castle, but still didn’t reply.

‘Sami, who is the girl?’

He looked up, his brow furrowing. ‘The girl,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘The girl likes dolls.’

‘Is the girl you?’

He met her gaze blankly. She resisted the instinctive temptation to repeat the question with her hands spread, palms upwards, body language that would have tapped into an adult’s subconscious, urging them to respond.

‘Are you the girl, Sami?’

‘Grrrrrr.’ The growling sound, deep in his throat, a faint rumble.

Reaching out, he started gathering together his doll things, shoving them back into the plastic bucket, tossing each one in quickly as if it had become too hot to handle. A deep furrow had entrenched itself in his brow.

‘Sami, are you feeling frightened? There’s no need to be.’

‘The dolls are the girl’s.’ There was a quiver in his voice.

Hugging Baby Isabel tight to his chest, he stroked her hair, dipped his head and gave her a gentle kiss on the cheek, and then tucked her carefully back inside the plastic tub.

For a long time, Sami remained silent, the torch clutched to his chest, light radiating out from him like a lighthouse beam. His gaze was hooded, turned inwards on itself. Jessie had no idea what he was thinking, what emotions were churning through his fragile mind. But at least she had the sense that he felt more comfortable with her, was beginning to trust her.

Psychology with children was like watching a toddler learning to walk: a few baby steps forward, a totter backwards, a fall. Endless frustration. It couldn’t be rushed. Children’s minds were not robust enough to be actively delved into, forced, in the way that many adults’ could. Play was the only way to access the trauma a child of this age had experienced. Play enabled the child to reveal themselves at their own pace, as and when they felt comfortable to do so. It required extreme patience, not one of Jessie’s strongest points despite her chosen profession, and she sometimes wondered how she had ended up doing a master’s in Child Psychology at all.

No. She knew why.

7

‘What would you like to do now, Sami?’

He didn’t respond. Clutching the torch to his chest, he stared rigidly at the floor.

In one of the buckets was a plastic play-mat with fields and fences, winding lanes printed on it. There was also a farmhouse, and a collection of plastic farm animals.

‘How about we play farms?’ Jessie suggested.

‘Yes,’ Sami murmured. ‘Play farms.’

Jessie hefted the bucket over and set it in front of him. Pulling out the play-mat, she spread it on the floor between them. She placed the farmhouse in the centre of the printed cobblestone farmyard and sat back on her haunches.

‘Why don’t you get out some animals, Sami?’

He nodded, aped in a monotone, ‘Sami get animals.’

Both hands gripping the shaft of the torch, he hoisted it over the edge of the bucket, spotlighting each animal in turn.

‘Here is a sheep.’

Balancing the torch on the edge of the bucket with one hand, he reached in with the other and picked out the sheep. Placing the sheep in one of the fields on the play-mat, he reached back into the bucket.

‘Here is another sheep.’

He stood it next to the first.

‘Here is a cow.’

He repeated the process, his torch beam picking out a brown cow, a group of chickens, a dapple-grey carthorse, two pink pigs. Each animal was arranged carefully on the play-mat, the chickens in the cobbled farmyard by the farmhouse, the pigs in the sty, the cow and the horse in different fields. He seemed to be enjoying the game. For the first time since Jessie had met him, she heard animation in his voice, saw a flicker of light in his eyes.

‘You like the farm animals?’ Jessie asked.

Sami met her gaze and smiled a tiny, tight smile – the first hint of a smile that she had seen.

‘Sami like animals,’ he murmured. He looked back to the play-mat. ‘All the animals are in the farm. The sheeps, the cow, the chickens, the horse, the pigs, are all in the farm.’

Jessie glanced into the bucket; there was a dark shape at the bottom.

‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘Here, look, you’ve missed one.’

At the bottom of the bucket was a donkey. A black plastic donkey. Reaching in, she retrieved it, held the donkey out to Sami.

He cringed away, his face a mask of terror. Only his shoulders moved, their rise and fall exaggerated, as though he was struggling to catch his breath.

‘The donkey is dead,’ he whispered, through pale lips.

He stared at the donkey, unblinking. Shadows ringed his eyes, dark smudges in the pallor of his face.

‘The donkey is fine,’ Jessie said, her voice deliberately higher in pitch, jolly. She placed the donkey on the play-mat, in the same field as the carthorse. ‘Look he’s fine. He’s in the field with the carthorse.’ She turned the donkey ninety degrees so that it and the carthorse were nose to nose. ‘They’re having a chat. What do you think they’re talking about, Sami?’

He had started to tremble, his breath coming in quick, shallow bursts.

‘The donkey is burnt.’ Reaching out, he pushed the donkey on to its side with the tip of one finger. ‘The donkey is dead.’

‘No, Sami. The donkey is made from black plastic. It’s just a black plastic donkey.’

Sami shook his head. He rocked backwards and forwards on his haunches.

‘The donkey is burnt. The donkey is dead.’ He started searching frantically around him, eyes wide with fear. ‘Where is the blanket?’

Jessie wanted to touch him, to reach out and wrap her arms around him, keep him safe. But she couldn’t. Wasn’t allowed to. Modern political correctness made cuddling children – even distressed ones – forbidden. She had already taken a risk shutting the door.

‘Blanket? Why do you need a blanket, Sami?’

Ignoring the question, he delved into the dolls’ container, tossing dolls and pieces of equipment out on the carpet behind him.

‘Where is the blanket, where is the blanket, where is the blanket?’ he chanted in a singsong voice, almost under his breath. He found a pink doll’s blanket, a silky rabbit embroidered in one corner.

‘The girl knows.’

‘What does the girl know?’ Jessie asked softly.

‘Here is the blanket,’ Sami muttered.

Shuffling back across the carpet on his knees, he reached the play-mat. He laid the doll’s blanket over the donkey. Carefully, he tucked the blanket under the donkey, flipping it over so that the animal didn’t touch his skin, rolling the donkey up. He laid the roll of blanket containing the donkey on the carpet next to Jessie. Picking up the Maglite, he shone it on the roll.

‘The donkey is burnt. The donkey is dead.’

‘You think the donkey has been burnt? And the donkey is now dead?’

The little boy’s face looked suddenly old, lined with fear and sadness. ‘The donkey is dead.’

‘So you’ve covered it with the blanket?’

‘The torch can see. The donkey is burnt. The donkey is dead.’ Tears welled up in his eyes and a barely audible croak came from somewhere at the back of his throat. ‘The Shadowman came. The girl knows.’

8

Jessie found a parking space at the far end of Aldershot high street, shoved a couple of pounds in the machine and tacked the ticket to her windscreen. For a Tuesday afternoon, the high street was unexpectedly busy: shoppers, trussed up in padded coats, scarves and hats, gloved hands clutching bulging plastic bags, scurrying along, heads down against the chill wind cutting between the buildings.

She popped into Pret A Manger to grab a sandwich, ate it, sitting at a stool in the window, chewing but not tasting the malted granary bread, tuna and rocket – fuel rather than enjoyment. Back on the high street, she scanned the shops on either side of her, caught sight of the green triangular Early Learning Centre sign a hundred yards to her left.

There had been something about the animals in that farm that had resonated with Sami, both good and bad. In the two sessions she’d had with him, he hadn’t smiled once. The animals had achieved the hint of a smile at least, if only a fleeting one. They had also delivered the opposite: abject terror. From today’s observations, she believed that they might provide her with a way to access his mind; a door, ajar a fraction now, that she could perhaps push open. Particularly if she could recreate the farm, the timing and sequence in which he received the animals in the more controlled environment of her office at Bradley Court.

The Early Learning Centre was empty: the rush to stock up on large multicoloured plastic objects for kiddies’ Christmas presents had clearly not yet begun. A blonde sales girl, early twenties, was standing behind the counter, texting on her iPhone.

She glanced up and smiled. ‘Let me know if I can help you.’

Jessie returned the smile. ‘Thank you.’

The shelves bore a bewildering array of toys in all shapes, sizes and colours: dressing-up and pretend play, dolls and doll houses, vehicles and construction, art, music and creative play, a whole range of beach toys, incongruous given the single-digit temperatures outside and the chill rain that had begun hammering the shop’s plate-glass window.

‘The baby toys are on special, if you’re interested.’ The shop assistant had finished her text.

‘Oh, no, thank you. Actually, I’m looking for a farm.’

‘Action figures and play-sets … at the back,’ she continued, when Jessie couldn’t catch sight of the sign. ‘Follow me.’

At the back of the store were boxes of every conceivable kind of play-set: dinosaurs, pony club, police, army – tiny green plastic warriors in jungle camouflage – schools, hospitals and farms.

‘This farm is wonderful.’ The sales girl held up a large vinyl box. ‘The actual box unzips down the sides … look … and flattens out to become the play-mat.’ She rotated it so that Jessie could see. ‘It’s got a farmyard, fields and even a pond, printed on both sides. There are ducks inside to go on the pond. And it comes with a plastic farmhouse, a tractor and all the other farm animals.’

But were any of the animals black? Could she ask the question without sounding committable? Did she have a choice?

‘It looks perfect.’ Jessie paused. ‘Are, uh, are any of the animals black?’ she asked in a voice so quiet that even she could barely hear herself over the patter of rain against the plate-glass window.

‘Excuse me?’ The sales girl eyed her, unsure whether to take the question seriously.

‘Are any of the animals black?’ she repeated. ‘I, uh …’ How to explain this so she didn’t sound insane. The truth was far too complex. ‘My nephew likes black animals. His … his cousin – my sister’s boy, not my brother’s … this farm is for my brother’s son. He has a black plastic donkey that Sami … that Sam loves, so I wanted to make sure that at least one of the animals was black. He, uh, he likes black animals …’ she tailed off.

The sales girl didn’t look convinced, not that Jessie could blame her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But you can always buy extra.’ With a tilt of her head, she indicated a row of narrow shelves, stacked one on top of each other, bearing small plastic toy animals of every description. ‘I know they’re a bit expensive, but they’re Schleich.’ She paused. ‘Hand-painted in Germany,’ she continued, ‘each one unique,’ when it was obvious that Jessie had never heard of Schleich.

‘Perfect, thank you. I’ll take the farm set and I’ll have a look at the Schleich animals.’

While the sales girl wandered back to the cash desk and her mobile, Jessie chose two from the Schleich set, a jet-black cow and a black-and-white collie dog, looking carefully through the dogs until she found one that had just a couple of small white patches on its body. How would Sami react to an animal that was mostly, but not entirely black? Would it engender the same horror in him as a wholly black animal?

She put the rest of the dogs back, ordering them one behind the other, so that, from the front of the shelf where customers stood to choose, they were perfectly aligned. She glanced at the other animals. They were in disarray, as if a tribe of kids had come in and trashed them, which they probably had. Looking at the mess in front of her, she felt the familiar crackle of electricity travel across her skin, a tightness around her throat.

Laying the cow and the collie on the floor beside her, she rearranged the horses, one behind the other in the same manner as the dogs, the foals, the goats, the sheep. She was so absorbed in the task that she didn’t hear the sales girl approach.

‘I can do that.’

Jessie started. ‘Oh, hi. It’s OK, I’m nearly finished.’

‘I can do that,’ she repeated, an edge to her tone. ‘It’s my job.’

‘I’ve only got the ducks to do and then I’m finished,’ Jessie said firmly. The electric suit was spitting against her skin, a pulsing tension that she had to assuage. She was aware that the sales girl must think she was a nutter. Would give anything to be able to walk away, leaving the ducks in a mess. Perhaps she should tell the sales girl that she was a psychologist.

‘I’ll leave you to it then.’ The sales girl retreated in angry, clicking steps, casting back over her shoulder, ‘As you’ve only got the ducks left to do.’

Jessie rested her head against the wall. She felt close to tears. I’m a psychologist who could give most of my patients a run for their money in the fucked-up stakes. Finishing quickly, she stood back and surveyed her handiwork. The animals were lined in perfect rows, parade ground squared-away. She felt calm; her pulse back to normal. Collecting the Schleichs from the floor beside her, she carried them to the cash desk, laid them on top of the farm box.

‘They didn’t look tidy,’ Jessie murmured.

The sales girl wouldn’t meet her eye. ‘Gift wrap?’

‘No. No, thank you.’

The rain had turned to damp sleet and the sky had darkened to charcoal, as if, while she’d been in the shop, someone had dimmed the ceiling light. Thunder grumbled on the edge of town. Pulling her hood up, Jessie stepped on to the pavement. She was pretty sure that the sales girl would be on her mobile phone the second she was out of sight, texting, ‘You’d never guess what …’ to a friend.

Head down, she jogged up the street, wet sleet sloshing against her hood. She was nearly back to her own car when she caught sight of a red Golf GTI parked crookedly, half on the pavement, a hand-scrawled ‘Military Police’ notice propped on the dashboard. Stopping, she looked around. She was beyond the shops, where they petered to small office buildings. Behind her was a modern brick building with a large black front door bearing a brass lion’s head knocker that would have looked more in place gracing the entrance to a stately home. A rectangular plaque beside the door bore engravings that she couldn’t read from this distance. Turning back to the Golf, she was debating whether to leave a note tucked under the wiper.

‘Are you checking my car for neatness?’

She started, turned. Callan was right behind her, a look of amusement in those watchful amber eyes. He was wearing jeans and the same navy hoodie she’d seen him in yesterday, a black waterproof, undone, covering the hoodie.

‘You failed miserably,’ she said. ‘The coke can and crisp packets in the footwell aren’t going to win you any prizes.’

‘I’ll try harder next time, Doctor.’ His tone was teasing. Pulling the keys from his pocket, he unlocked the car. ‘Do you want a lift somewhere?’

‘Don’t I need to be a hooker to travel in a car like this?’

The ghost of a smile on his lips.

Jessie smiled back sweetly. ‘No, thank you. I’ve got my own car. Parked legally. Paid for.’ She indicated the sticker in his window. ‘Isn’t that called abuse of position?’

‘I was late for an appointment.’ He caught her questioning look. ‘Admin. Nothing exciting.’ His gaze slid away from hers. ‘I couldn’t find a space. There have to be some perks to the job.’ He walked around to the driver’s side, pulled open the door. ‘Four p.m. I’ll meet you at ten to, Provost Barracks main entrance.’

She nodded. ‘I remember. I’ll be there.’

‘Don’t be late.’ A shift in his voice – humour to tension.

‘I won’t.’

Standing on the pavement, she watched him pull on to the road and accelerate away, tyres churning up a plume of wet sleet from the tarmac. She started to walk back to her own car, then stopped. On impulse, she crossed the pavement to the brass plaque. A small business accounting firm occupied the ground and first floor, an IT business the second. At the bottom of the list, third floor, Mr John Rushton-Booth, Consultant Neurologist.

9

Jeanette Bass-Cooper looked hard at the detective inspector. She prided herself on being open-minded, but even she had limits. He looked as if he had been dragged out of some Soho rock club at 4 a.m., beer still in hand, and teleported down here to the seaside, kicking and screaming, blinking those disconcerting mismatched eyes against the daylight, smoky and feeble as it was.

His partner, on the other hand, the detective sergeant – Workman, Jeanette thought she’d said – was his antithesis. Shapeless black wash-and-wear trousers skimming solid ankles, chunky lace-ups that wouldn’t be out of place on a 1930s nanny, mousy hair cut into a low-maintenance bob. But she seemed sensible at least. Reliable.

Detective Inspector Bobby ‘Marilyn’ Simmons – Marilyn after Manson, he would hasten to add if questioned on the nickname his colleagues had bestowed on him the first day he joined the force, a nickname that had dogged him ever since – looked at the short, boxy woman in front of him in her black dress and high-heeled patent boots and felt the beginnings of a headache. The words ‘mutton’ and ‘lamb’ flashed into his mind. But at least she seemed intelligent, could string a sentence together that contained no swear words, a rare skill in the world he occupied.

A wind had picked up, whipping the water of the harbour into a frothy, gunmetal soup, cutting straight through his leather jacket. Hauling up his collar, he hunkered down, wishing that he’d brought a scarf, put on a windproof fleece, anything more sensible than his battered biker.

‘DS Workman. Take Ms Bass-Cooper to the Command Vehicle to get her out of the cold. Switch the engine on to get the blowers going. I don’t want our one witness freezing to death before we’ve drained her of information. Take a written statement while you’re there.’

As DS Workman led Jeanette Bass-Cooper back up the garden towards the gaggle of police vehicles haphazardly parked on the gravel drive, Marilyn turned and strode across the crispy, frostbitten grass towards the narrow strip of pebbles that Bass-Cooper had termed a beach. Not one he fancied sunbathing on.

Looking out across the water to Itchenor, he felt a shot of déjà vu. He had worked on another murder last spring, around the bay in Bosham, a small village of expensive detached houses like the one behind him. Murder in this part of West Sussex was so rare that it had made the national newspapers. A house-sitter, stabbed to death in her bedroom in the middle of the night; her sister, brother-in-law and elderly father in adjacent bedrooms who had heard nothing. It had him stumped for close to a fortnight, until he had found out that the sixty-year-old owner of the house, who had been on holiday with his wife at the time, had a penchant for swinging. Over the telephone from Florida he had explained to Marilyn that he had ‘absolutely no idea’ how photographs of himself, posing naked on a sandy beach, came to be posted on a swingers’ website under the moniker, ‘The Director of Fun’. It turned out that the murderer was a fellow swinger, a fifty-five-year-old woman who thought she was dispatching the director’s wife.

This case, Marilyn feared, would be tougher to crack.

The forensics teams, dressed in their identical navy-blue waterproof onesies, looked, on fleeting glance, like a group of harbour day-trippers – only the masks covering their mouths and noses dispelling that image. They had got here quickly and erected a forensic tent over the body – what remained of it at least. Marilyn didn’t fancy the tent’s chances if this wind picked up. The occasional white flash of the forensics’ camera crew lit it up from the inside, giving him some uncomfortable memories of last night. A nightclub in Portsmouth. He was too old to stay out until 3 a.m., should get sensible, get himself a girlfriend knocking forty, rather than Cindy, virtually half his age and beautiful, but sharp as a blunt instrument.

‘So what have we got?’

Tony Burrows, the lead Crime Scene Investigator pulled his hood back, slid a latex-gloved hand over his bald spot, fingertips grazing the dark hair that ringed his scalp. He reminded Marilyn of a Benedictine monk, the impression emphasized by his short legs and softly rounded stomach. ‘Male.’

Marilyn waited. When no more information was forthcoming, ‘Yup. And …?’

‘That’s about it, at the moment. The body is not what could be termed fresh kill, and we only have half of it.’

Marilyn winced. Despite his chosen profession, he didn’t have a strong stomach, had failed, even after nearly twenty years in Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, to fully acclimatize to the visceral assault on the senses that dead bodies rendered.

‘Where is the other half?’

‘Anybody’s guess. But the cut is clean, if messy. Chops—’ Burrows made a vertical hacking motion with his hand – ‘rather than tears or rips. An axe, perhaps? A butcher’s chopper, maybe. The body is very badly decomposed, most of the skin and a good part of the flesh missing, as you can see, so identifying the cause may be difficult.’

Marilyn’s eyes hung closed for a moment. ‘Do you think he was dumped here?’

‘Could have been. There’d be no traces left if someone had carried the body down the garden and tossed it on to the beach. Not given how long this Doe has been dead for. Unless he was stored somewhere else and then dumped recently.’ He paused, massaged the dome of his head, eyes raised to the grey sky in thought. ‘But that’s unlikely. Our victim has been exposed to the elements for some time, I think, by the looks of him. Dr Ghoshal will be able to tell you more once he gets him on the slab.’

Marilyn nodded. Cupping his hands in front of his face, he blew into them, stomped his feet to get the circulation going. The house had been vacant for four months, Ms Bass-Cooper had said. His mind turning inwards in thought, he moved away from Tony Burrows and his team, buzzing like flies around the corpse, followed the curve of shingle to the rotten wooden fence that signalled the extent of the garden. Leaning against a wooden upright, he gazed out across the water. Yachts and motor cruisers bobbed at anchor, straining against their moorings in the swell. Though he’d lived in Chichester for almost all of his working life, the best part of twenty years, he wasn’t a sailor – struggled to envision anything less appealing than squatting in a damp little boat being pushed around by the wind. But having lived and worked near the sea for so long, he knew something about tides.

Where was the other half of that body? Had it been dumped in another part of the harbour and taken in a different direction by the tide? Or was it being stored in the killer’s freezer, a sick kind of trophy? Trophy-taking was a common feature when the victim and murderer were strangers: the killer wanting to keep the victim, the moment of death, clear in his or her memory, the trophy a physical tool to aid that process.

The cut was clean – chopped, Burrows had said. An axe? A butcher’s cleaver? For sure, a killer who meant business.

Shrugging his jacket sleeves down over his frozen hands, Marilyn sighed. A killer who meant business was all he needed right now.

10

He looked so different in his Military Police uniform – olive-green trousers, shirt and tie, a knife crease running down the front of each leg, the shirt buttoned up and starched resolutely, the red beret of the Military Police that gave them the nickname Redcaps, pulled low over his eyes – that Jessie almost walked straight past him.

‘Dr Flynn.’

She stopped, did a double take. ‘Oh, God, you scrub up … different.’

Callan smiled, but there was tension in the smile and it was gone almost before she’d registered it.

‘Ready?’ he asked.

‘Absolutely.’

They walked side by side up the grey vinyl-tiled stairs to the second floor, their twin footfall emphasizing the silence that had settled after their initial greeting, and the tension that crackled from him. Removing his beret, he held the door at the top of the stairs open for her, and then pulled up, turning to face her in the corridor. At the far end, she could see a room crowded with desks, hear the ambient hum of conversation drifting down the corridor towards them, the tap of fingers on computer keys, the ring of a telephone, a sudden burst of laughter.

‘You’ve read the file?’ He was all business now.

‘Yes.’

‘Give me a rundown.’

She met his gaze. ‘You are joking?’

‘I want to be sure that you’ve got the background.’

‘I’ve got the background and I’m not ten, so I’m not doing any damn test. You’re going to have to trust me.’

His tie wasn’t straight.

He sighed. ‘Fine. So the bit the file doesn’t include. Starkey was raised on a council estate in West London. Before his sixteenth birthday he had racked up a couple of minor criminal convictions, for stealing cars and selling cannabis. He was put under the control of social services, given the option of remaining with his family and seeing a psychologist rather than going to a young offenders’ institution.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Jessie interrupted. ‘Gideon Duursema?’

‘Your boss has a lot to answer for.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

His tie was driving her mad; the electric suit was hissing against her skin.

‘Callan, your tie’s, uh, your tie is crooked.’

‘What?’ His voice was incredulous.

‘The knot of your tie is crooked.’

He reached up and straightened it distractedly. ‘OK?’

Jessie grimaced; he’d made it worse.

‘As I was saying, reports from his commanding officer in Afghanistan, in fact every commanding officer he’s had since he joined up, have been exemplary. He seems to be highly regarded by everyone he’s worked with. The Army seemed to have straightened him out, though the man I met yesterday didn’t fit so well with what I’ve read.’

Jessie shuffled closer. ‘Here, let me straighten it.’

She reached up. She could sense him humming with impatience, but he stood unmoving, gaze fixed on some point down the corridor behind her, while she fiddled with the knot. Knew suddenly that he had realized – realized it wasn’t merely perfectionism that drove her to straighten his tie.

‘Did you listen to anything I said?’ he asked curtly, when she had dropped her hand.

‘Yes, all of it. Has he had any injuries? Was he involved in heavy action in Afghanistan?’

‘No. But—’ he broke off.

‘But it’s not easy out there for anybody.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not.’

A laden pause; Jessie broke it.

‘What was your sense of him?’

‘My sense?’ He shrugged. ‘Negative.’

‘You didn’t like him?’

‘It’s not about like. It’s about …’ Another shrug.

‘A bad feeling?’

He frowned. ‘Feelings shouldn’t come into it, right? Not in my job.’

‘We’re all human.’

‘We are that.’ He dipped his gaze, breaking eye contact. ‘Shall we go and see Starkey now?’

Sergeant Colin Starkey was standing by the window, watching something in the car park below, lights from one of the Military Police cruisers washing his face alternately blue, then red. The room was spartan, utilitarian: plain white walls, scuffed in places from the scrapes of tables and chairs, the odd black vertical streak of shoe rubber where occupants had rested their soles against the wall. Two overhead strip lights lit a single rectangular wooden table and three chairs, two on the near side, one on the far side nearest to the window and Starkey. One of the strip lights flickered on, off, on again, as if it was tapping out its own Morse code.

If Jessie had any expectations of what Colin Starkey would look like, they had not coalesced into specifics. Only a vague stereotype, which had rarely been matched by any of the sergeants or staff sergeants she had met since she’d joined the Army. Crew cut, tattoos, barrel chest, a voice that sounded as if the owner was broadcasting through a loud hailer.

Starkey turned from the window, his gaze locking with Jessie’s. He flashed a sharp-toothed grin.

‘Things are looking up for me.’

Ignoring his comment, Jessie sat down on one of the chairs on the near side of the table, laid her hands calmly on the tabletop. She was used to being baited in that way, had made the mistake of rising to the lure a few times early on in her Army career and had felt stripped naked because of it. She wasn’t planning on making that mistake with Starkey.

Looking past her to Callan, Starkey gave a sloppy salute, which Callan returned smartly.

Starkey was only a few years older than she was, early thirties, Jessie guessed, so he was doing well to have earned the three chevrons already. He was tall, almost as tall as Callan, and well built, with dark hair that curled over his collar, longer than regulation, dark brown eyes and a square jaw shadowed with dark stubble. A faint bruise shaded the skin under his right eye. He was hard looking, but very handsome. For some reason, she hadn’t expected him to be.

‘So you must be Jessie Flynn,’ Starkey said, with another grin.

‘Doctor to you, Sergeant Starkey.’

‘Come and sit down please,’ Callan cut in, indicating the chair opposite, waiting until Starkey had joined them at the table before he sat down next to Jessie. Pulling a digital recorder from his pocket, he laid it on the table and flicked the switch. It purred softly in the silence.

‘As we discussed yesterday, this meeting is a psychological evaluation. Sergeant Starkey, you have said that you do not want a Ministry of Defence lawyer appointed on your behalf. Is that correct?’

Starkey nodded. Callan indicated the tape recorder. ‘Say it out loud please, Sergeant.’

‘I agree that I do not want a lawyer appointed on my behalf,’ he replied in an American drawl, Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry.

Jessie noticed a muscle twitch in Callan’s jaw, but when he spoke his voice was measured, controlled.

‘Whatever you say between these walls may be used against you in any court martial that may follow.’

‘Why the hell would I say no to spending half an hour talking to a beautiful girl.’ A gleam had come into his feral eyes. ‘Even if it gets me banged up.’

‘So talk me through what happened.’ Callan had a hand on the file, but didn’t open it. He had clearly memorized the contents. ‘On the afternoon of Wednesday, 28th October – six days ago.’

‘I believe I did that yesterday, Captain Callan.’ Still the American drawl.

‘Go through it again.’

Starkey shrugged, glanced at Jessie. An instinct for self-preservation, establishing ground rules at the outset, made her hold his gaze across the tabletop; hold it until he looked away.

‘I suggested we go for a run and he agreed.’ His eyes rolled around the room, drifting up the walls, across the ceiling.

‘Who is “he”?’

‘He. Him. Are you trying to trick me, Captain Callan?’

Callan sighed, glanced at the tape recorder again. ‘Jackson. You are referring to Sergeant Andy Jackson.’

‘Right, Jackson. We’d both had a busy day, needed to run off the cobwebs.’

‘In 35 degree heat, in full combat kit.’

‘More heat, more sweat, releases more toxins. You should know that, Captain. You look like a bit of a fitness freak.’

‘What were you doing in Afghanistan?’ Jessie cut in.

‘I’m with the Intelligence Corps.’

‘Working on what, specifically?’

Starkey sighed. He tilted his head back and his gaze, under hooded eyelids, drifted to Callan. ‘You must have talked to my superiors, Captain Callan.’

‘I have.’

‘And what did they say?’

Callan didn’t answer.

Starkey laughed softly to himself. ‘Not much, I’m guessing.’ He raised his right hand, putting the tips of his index finger and thumb together to form a circle. ‘Need to be in the know. In the circle.’

‘Training ANSF? Drugs? Terrorism? Warlords and tribal loyalties?’ Callan said.

Starkey smirked. ‘You’re not in the circle, Captain.’

His eyes skipped off around the room again, came to rest on the window. It had started to rain. Lights from the courtyard reflected in globules of water on the glass, thousands of tiny bulbs. The strip light above continued to flicker, coating their faces white-grey-white and grey again, when the frail afternoon light was left to cope on its own for a fraction of a second. Callan glanced up at it, his brow furrowing in irritation. He looked back to Starkey.

‘Answer the question, Starkey.’

Starkey’s eyes snapped back from the window to rest on Jessie’s.

‘Do you know what frightens people, Dr Flynn?’

‘I’d say that real fear is different for everyone. We all have our secret demons. Isn’t real fear about tapping into that person’s individual demons?’ Jessie said. ‘Pressing their buttons.’

Starkey grinned. He seemed to like her answer.

‘So what was Andy Jackson’s demon?’ she asked.

‘You’re asking the wrong questions, Doctor.’

‘Am I?’

‘He was too stupid to have demons. He was a follower, plain and simple.’

‘Is that how you got him into the desert? Because he liked to follow?’

‘This isn’t about me,’ Starkey replied.

She could feel Callan shifting uncomfortably beside her, sense his impatience at this play of words.

‘So what is it about? Drugs? Terrorism? Warlords and tribal loyalties? Where do your loyalties lie, Starkey?’

Starkey crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Do you know what Afghanistan’s nickname is, Dr Flynn? The Graveyard of Empires.’ He smirked. ‘Have you ever been there? To the Graveyard?’

‘Twice,’ she said. ‘Both with PsyOps.’

He raised his eyebrows, clearly surprised. ‘I’m impressed.’

‘You needn’t be. It’s my job.’

‘So you know what a complete shit show it is out there then, ever since we demobbed to keep the politicians’ ratings up, keep Joe Public happy. But we’re still there, aren’t we – some of us suckers?’ He laughed, a bitter sound. ‘PsyOps? We’re fucking amateurs compared to them. We think we’re playing them, but we’re the ones being played.’

He started singing, softly, under his breath, ‘I’m a puppet just a puppet on a string.’

Jessie could sense that Callan was getting frustrated. His hands were clenched into fists on the tabletop, his legs jiggering underneath it. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the tense set of his jaw. It would be easier for him if Starkey refused to talk at all. At least he could then assemble evidence from other avenues, without having the water muddied like this. But it wasn’t so strange to Jessie. She had seen it a number of times – both before joining the Army and after. Patients who loved the wordplay, saw it as a game. Didn’t want to be tied down, or couldn’t be. Their heads a jumble of disassociated ideas, memories drifting loose, thoughts they couldn’t straighten into anything intelligible. Which was Starkey?

Callan stood suddenly, strode over to the light switch. Flicked it off, waited a couple of beats, flicked it on again. The strip light above them continued to flicker.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he snapped, returning to the table.

‘Is that what you and Jackson were working on?’ Jessie asked. ‘PsyOps?’

Starkey smirked. ‘I thought you were PsyOps.’

‘But you were working on something with Jackson?’

‘There’s a lot of intelligence to be gathered in Afghanistan. Some things I worked on with Jackson, other things not.’ A muscle in his jaw twitched. In anguish? With stress? ‘Fucking amateurs, and that’s how we get burnt,’ he muttered.

‘Burnt.’ Her mind flitted to Major Nicholas Scott, his skin like melted treacle. Scott was attacked in Afghanistan. A long shot, she realized. ‘Did you work with Major Scott?’

‘We only overlapped for a few days,’ Starkey said.

She felt Callan shift beside her, tilt forward in the chair.

‘I heard he was a good guy, though, Scott,’ Starkey said. ‘Committed to the cause.’

‘And he got burnt.’

Starkey’s fingers were tapping out a frantic tune on the tabletop. ‘Maybe he was too committed, did too much for the cause.’ He found her gaze across the table. ‘Just a puppet on a string.’

‘Do you have nightmares, Sergeant Starkey?’

‘Nightmares. My life’s turned into a nightmare.’

He leaned forward, stretching his hands across the table towards her, palms upwards, fingers cupped slightly as if he was holding them out to God. She resisted the urge to lean back, put distance between them. She could sense Callan next to her, muscles taut, tuned to make a move if Starkey did.

‘You know what really frightens me, Dr Flynn?’ Starkey’s voice was barely more than a whisper. ‘Injustice.’

‘Are you the subject of an injustice?’

‘Why don’t you ask Captain Stiff-as-a-fucking-board Redcap here, Doctor? Because I sure as hell don’t know what he’s thinking.’

Anger rippled across Callan’s shoulders. ‘Stop playing games and tell me the truth. Why did Andy Jackson die?’

‘The truth will set you free, Captain Callan.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Callan slammed both hands flat on the tabletop, making the voice recorder rattle.

Starkey grinned. ‘Temper temper.’

Shoving his chair back, Callan strode to the door. ‘What the fuck is wrong with the lights.’ He slammed his hand on the switch a couple of times, flicking the lights on and off. On again. Off. The frail afternoon light seeping through the window coated their faces in sepia, the colour of old photographs.

Jessie remained where she was at the table. Her gaze sought out Starkey’s; she looked him straight in the eye. She thought that his gaze might flicker, wander. It didn’t. The eyes that met hers were intelligent, astute.

‘If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,’ she said quietly. ‘John 8:32.’

Starkey raised his hands, clapped them together, a slow, deliberate handclap.

‘Very good, Dr Flynn. I didn’t have you down as the religious type.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Though I’d like to see you in a nun’s habit.’

Jessie stared back, unflinching. ‘Convent education does wonders for religious knowledge. Sadly, we wore drab grey uniforms, calf-length, but you can dream, Starkey. So what is the truth?’

Callan was leaning against the wall by the door. ‘This evaluation is terminated, Sergeant Starkey.’

Jessie glanced over at him. What the hell was he playing at? Something seemed to have ignited in his eyes: they shone, icy white, from the slits in his face. Icy white, but unfocused.

‘I have a few more questions, Callan.’

The muscles along his jaw bulged.

She turned back to Starkey.

Callan was suddenly beside the table. Grabbing Starkey by the collar, he hauled him off the chair, slammed him back against the wall and jammed his forearm into Starkey’s throat.

‘You’re a fucking little shit, Starkey, and if you have done something wrong, I will find out and I will hang you for it.’

Jessie jumped to her feet. ‘Let him go, Captain Callan. Now.’

He let go of Starkey, stepping back, raising his hands in front of him in a defensive gesture. He looked almost as shocked as Starkey. Starkey backed away, straightening out his uniform.

‘I could fucking hang you for that, Captain.’

Callan was shaking his head, but it didn’t look as if he was shaking it in denial of what Starkey had said. The movement was jerky, uncoordinated, as if he was trying to dislodge something from his brain.

‘Are you OK, Captain Callan?’ Jessie asked.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, through gritted teeth.

A hand caught her arm. Turning, she found Starkey right behind her.

‘The answer to your question about the truth, Jessie, is – I don’t know.’ His voice was quiet, a caress in her ear. She could feel his breath, hot against her cheek. She yanked her arm away, suddenly aware that she and Starkey were alone in the room, that Callan had left. ‘I never found out. But if you could ask a dead man, say please – nicely, mind – he might tell you the answer.’

11

‘What the fuck was that all about?’ She was so angry that she didn’t try to keep her voice down.

She had found Callan in the room at the end of the corridor, a Special Investigation Branch team room it seemed from the white boards bearing crime scene photographs, the hubbub of conversation, the manic clicking of computer keys. He was sitting behind a desk in the far corner, elbows on the desktop, cradling his head in his hands.

Looking up, he met her gaze. He looked wrecked. Utterly wrung out. His eyes were bloodshot and she wasn’t sure if it was a product of the sickly grey light seeping through the blinds from the window above his desk, but his skin looked greyish pale, his face drawn.

He shrugged. ‘It was about the fact that I don’t have time for cunts any more.’

‘Unfortunately dealing with cunts is always going to be part of your job. If you can’t handle it, perhaps you should do something else.’

‘Like what? Become a banker or a lawyer? I’ve probably left it a bit late, and I’m not sure the personality fit would be seamless.’

‘He could have you on a charge.’

‘He won’t.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘He’s not the type. He may be a murdering bastard, but I don’t think he’s a petty one.’

Jessie slumped down in the chair across the desk from Callan. ‘And he may actually be innocent.’

Silence. She let it stretch. Dropping his head to his hands again, Callan ground his fingers into his eyes sockets, grated them through his hair.

‘You’re right, I was out of order.’ His tone was sheepish. ‘And I do not have any preconceptions about Starkey’s guilt or innocence. He wound me up. After I … after what I went through in Afghanistan, I find that much harder to handle than I used to. Where is he?’

‘He’s left. Our conversation finished a short while after you disappeared. He said he’d see himself out. He’s not under arrest, after all.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think you should be straight with me.’

He ignored the inference. ‘About Starkey?’

‘About you.’

‘I just was straight with you.’

‘I think there’s more. I think there’s something you’re not telling me.’ Her gaze found the scar from the bullet wound on his temple.

‘And I think my life is no longer any of your business.’

‘You asked me here.’

‘To help with a case.’

She watched him in silence for a moment, caught between two conflicting desires – the first to tell him to go fuck himself for walking out and leaving her with Starkey, and the second, to press him for the truth. But he was right. It wasn’t her business. He was no longer her patient.

Crossing her arms across her chest, she sat back. ‘You said that the impression Starkey gives doesn’t reconcile with the glowing reports from his commanding officers, and I agree. But then he is Intelligence Corps.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s not mainline Army, is it? What they do, what they’re after, the methods they use.’

‘Is he sane?’

Jessie dropped her gaze to the floor, drawing a picture of Starkey to mind. The look in his eyes: intelligence definitely, but was there complete sentience? You know what really frightens me.… injustice. His fingers frantically tapping on the tabletop. Fucking amateurs and that’s how we get burnt.

‘He’s clever, but is he aware of what he’s doing? Yes, I believe he is.’

‘So he was playing with us?’

‘I don’t think it’s that simple.’ She sat forward. ‘If he’s deliberately playing a game, then he’s doing it for a reason. It’s not for fun. No one was having fun in that room, even him, whatever it looked like.’

‘So what’s his upside?’

‘He’s hiding something. Probably a whole range of somethings.’

‘The fact that he killed Jackson?’

‘I think it’s more complex than that. Why would he want Jackson dead? Because he didn’t like him? Everyone works with people they don’t like. And he has been in the Army long enough to have learnt self-control in the face of extreme provocation.’ She looked up. ‘Is there any history between them?’

‘Nothing formal. No disciplinary. Their commanding officer said that they got on fine. He also said that they were both based at TAAC-South, but weren’t working together at the time of Jackson’s death.’

‘What else did the commanding officer say?’

Callan put the tips of his index finger and thumb together to form a circle, aping the gesture that Starkey had made.

Jessie rolled her eyes. ‘Need to know.’

‘Right.’

‘Jesus. They’re certainly into protecting their own.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t think you’re going to get anything else out of Starkey. He clearly believes that he has too much to lose.’

‘So to move forward I need to find factual evidence.’

‘Yes. And if you find factual evidence, even if it’s not enough to charge Starkey, you can use it to put the thumbscrews on him. Force him to talk.’

‘What was that bit about “the truth will set you free”?’ The corners of his mouth twitched. ‘I didn’t know that you went to a convent school.’

‘There’s a lot that you don’t know about me, Callan.’

Their eyes locked across his desk. Jessie felt colour rise in her cheeks. Glancing at her watch, an excuse to look away, she slid her chair back.

‘If there’s nothing more you need, I’m off. I said I’d have tea with Ahmose at six. I have some smoothing over to do after your insults regarding his gardening prowess.’

Callan looked at his watch, too. ‘It’s only five. How about a—’ He broke off, seemed to be weighing up saying something, then changed his mind. ‘I’ll call you if I need anything else.’

Leaning over the desk she shook his hand, the gesture feeling strangely over formal, but too late now to retract.

‘I’m not sure that there will be much more I can help you with.’

He smiled, held her hand for a fraction of a second longer. ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.’

Jessie withdrew her hand. ‘Goodbye, Captain Callan.’

It was dark outside, a strong wind gusting clouds over a sliver of moon. Provost Barracks’ car park was deserted. Lights on inside the building cast yellow rectangles on to the tarmac next to it, but beyond was only blackness. Jessie wished she’d parked closer to the main door, if only so that she wouldn’t trip over or sink into a freezing puddle in her blind trog to her car.

Tugging her collar up around her neck, she dipped her head and crossed the tarmac at a jog. Pausing, she scanned the rows of cars ahead, found her Mini a couple further on from where she was standing, half the size of the other cars in the row, the only one that wasn’t black, white or silver. Its sunshine yellow paintwork made her smile.

She was about to walk towards it when something caught her eye. Movement? Was there something moving by the car a couple down from hers? She stared hard through the darkness, continuing to walk, but slowly, relaxing as she walked. No, she’d been wrong. The car park was silent and deserted. She was alone.

Reaching her Mini, she fished in her handbag for her car keys. Her fingers fumbled over object after object, none of them the keys. She should have got them out of her handbag inside the building where there was light.

A sudden noise behind her. Pressing herself against the driver’s door, she twisted around. As before, dark rows of cars. No lights, nothing moving. The only noise, her own breathing, the sound harsh and leathery in the chill evening air. In the distance, she could see the gate and guardhouse. Lights on, but all the guards inside – who could blame them? She couldn’t find her keys – they weren’t in the compartment where she usually put them. Her fingers, numb with cold, filtered through the contents again – lipstick, wallet, hairbrush, a collection of coins for parking clanking around at the bottom of her bag – wishing, not for the first time, that she had a sensible handbag with a compartment for everything, rather than this holdall leather rucksack that her mum had bought her for Christmas two years ago, that she only used out of a sense of duty. Her heart rate was raised and she was angry with herself for it.

She breathed out slowly; her fingers had closed around the cold, heavy bunch of keys.

‘Doctor Flynn.’

‘Jesus!’ She spun around.

He was right behind her. How the hell had he got so close without her realizing? He smiled, his gaze tracking down her body, lingering on her breasts. Not that he was getting much of a look, she figured, small as they were at the best of times, now camouflaged under a shirt, jumper and coat.

‘Is there anything that you want, Sergeant Starkey?’

‘Lots of things, but perhaps we shouldn’t go there now.’

‘If that’s a “no”, I’m leaving. I’ve got someone to see.’

Clicking the lock, she tugged open the driver’s door. He leant his forearm on its top.

‘It will be interesting to see if you can break me. I’ve been Intelligence Corps for twelve years. If there’s a psychological game in town, I know how to play it.’

‘I’m not trying to break you.’ She was about to add, I’m trying to help you, but realized that would go down like a lead balloon with someone like Starkey. ‘What do you want?’

He tilted towards her. ‘I think that the devil offered Jackson a deal and I think he took it,’ he hissed.

‘We’re off the record here, Starkey. No tape recorder. No witnesses. I looked into your eyes in that room and I know that you’re entirely sane. Why don’t you drop the act.’

Starkey’s tongue moved around inside his mouth. ‘You’re a tough lady, Dr Flynn.’

Jessie didn’t reply. She didn’t trust her voice not to betray her lack of confidence. She looked past him to the guardhouse: the guards still inside, playing poker or swapping dirty jokes.

‘Jackson and some other Int. Corps were working with an Afghan government official who runs the water board – don’t know his name,’ Starkey began. ‘Americans gave them a shitload of money to dam the Helmand river so they could manage their water supply, irrigate the land. Farmers not fighters. Make them richer and they’d have the independence to make their own decisions as to whom they supported. And then of course, they’d support the puppet government of Hamid Karzai, not those Taliban scumbags.’ He laughed softly to himself. ‘Problem with all this shit is that money never gets used for what it’s supposed to.’

‘What do you mean?’

He shrugged, grinned. ‘That’s the end of the fairy story, young lady.’

‘The truth will set you free, Starkey. Isn’t that what you said?’

His gaze swung away from hers; she noticed a muscle above his eye twitch.

‘You think if I tell you what happened – everything – I’ll be free,’ he continued, suddenly nervous. He tapped a finger to his temple. ‘Free of a mental burden, at least. But I won’t.’

‘Explain. I don’t understand.’

Shoving his hands inside his pockets, he shrugged, refusing to meet her eye. ‘There’s nothing more to tell. I don’t know shit.’ He almost spat out that last word. ‘I didn’t find out shit.’

Jessie stared back at him. She was freezing cold and tired. She’d had enough of the word games. ‘I think we’re done here, Starkey.’

Tossing her rucksack into the car, she slid into the driver’s seat, reached to pull the door closed. It wouldn’t budge; he was holding it open with his foot.

‘Excuse me,’ she said.

He didn’t move. Swinging her leg out, she kicked his foot away, slammed the door shut. She was tempted to lock it, but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing that he’d rattled her. As she started the engine and pulled away, she glanced in the rear-view mirror, and their gazes locked in reflection. He lifted his hand in a slow, regal wave, smiled a faint, knowing smile.

12

The light was on in Ahmose’s cottage, and she could see him inside, sitting in his stiff wing-backed chair – the one he favoured because he didn’t have to lower himself too far to get into it – by a roaring log fire, reading the paper.

Ahmose had obviously spent the day gardening because some of the plants in her tiny front garden, across the low flint wall dividing the properties, were wrapped in what looked like white woollen coats, protecting them from the winter freeze.

He pulled open the door, a wide smile spreading across his face.

‘Perfect timing. I put the kettle on when I heard your engine. It should be boiled.’

She gave him a kiss on the cheek and stepped into the hallway, immediately felt herself relax as the warmth of the little cottage enveloped her, the woody charcoal smell of the open fire filled her nostrils.

While Ahmose busied himself filling the china teapot, getting the cups and saucers from the cupboard, arranging them all on the floral tray that had been Alice’s favourite, Jessie found a plate and fanned out the biscuits his sister had sent him from Cairo in a neat semicircle. She spent a moment adjusting them, so that an exact portion of each biscuit showed from under the next.

Their weekly tea was a ritual that they had developed over the five years they’d been neighbours. Jessie’s heart had sunk the first time Ahmose had appeared on her doorstep the day after she moved in – clutching a miniature indoor rose, full of advice on how to keep it flowering – imagining a nosy old man who’d never give her any peace. The reality, she quickly found, was the opposite. She sought him out more often than he sought her, had learnt to value his calm, sensible views, his clear-headed take on her problems, his stories and his humour. Their weekly tea was now a sacred part of her calendar: civilized, to be savoured, a deeply companionable, uncompetitive couple of hours. Ahmose felt more like family now than her blood relatives, certainly far more than the father she had only seen five times in the past ten years.

Curling on the sofa, Jessie wrapped both hands around the piping cup. With the open fire the cottage was warm, but she felt chilled to the bone from standing too long in the car park playing verbal games with Starkey. She reached for a biscuit.

‘You must let me pay for the plant warmers, Ahmose.’

‘Most certainly not. A nice garden makes both our cottages look beautiful, adds value.’

She smiled. ‘You sound like a Home Counties estate agent.’

‘And it gives an old man something to do, some exercise,’ he replied. ‘Oh, and before I forget, your mother dropped by a couple of hours ago.’

‘My mother?’ Jessie was surprised. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother had popped around. Years ago, it was – three at least.

She rolled her eyes. ‘She seems to think that I don’t actually have a job. That I’ll be here in the middle of the afternoon.’

‘It’s a mother’s job to believe that their child is forever too young to be gainfully employed and to worry about them constantly. I offered for her to wait in your house – I thought that you wouldn’t mind – but she said that she needed to get home for six.’

Jessie nodded, took a sip of tea. ‘Did she want anything specific?’

‘I don’t think so. I think that she just wanted to see you. She said that it has been a long time.’

Jessie bit her lip. It had been a long time, eight months – her mother’s birthday. The weather had been unseasonally hot and she’d been wearing a T-shirt and jeans. She remembered her mother asking if she couldn’t have dressed up a bit for lunch – even though they were only going to a pub on Wimbledon Common. Chafing against each other even now, fifteen years later. None of the life-changing events they had lived through talked about in detail. Nothing resolved.

‘You should go and see her, Jessie, whatever has gone under the bridge.’ And when she didn’t reply, he continued: ‘The mother–daughter relationship is …’ A pause as he searched for the right world. ‘Irreplaceable. Difficult, challenging, of course, but irreplaceable.’

Jessie shrugged. ‘It was always more mother–son for my mother.’

Ahmose took a biscuit from the plate, chewed in silence. Jessie watched him warily over the lip of her cup.

‘Alice and I never had the chance to have children,’ he murmured, dropping the half-finished biscuit into his saucer. ‘It was before all that IVF was widely available.’ He waved his hand towards the window, as if encompassing all the modern inventions of the last thirty years. ‘It broke Alice’s heart. She never got over it. I saw it in her eyes most when she smiled, when she was happy …’ A pause. ‘There was always something missing, as if sadness was sitting right behind her eyes, taking some of the light from them, even when she was smiling.’ Reaching across, Ahmose laid a hand on Jessie’s arm. ‘Losing a child must be worse than never having had one at all, because you know what a fantastic human being they would have made, how incredibly unique and wonderful they would have been. That is what your mother lives with every day.’

Jessie felt tears prick her eyes. ‘It’s not so great losing a brother.’

She had spent fifteen years dodging memories. How much longer could she maintain it?

‘Go and see her,’ Ahmose said gently. ‘Please. If only because I have asked you to.’

13

The morning of Jamie’s funeral, she had risen at 4.30 a.m. – pitch-black outside, even though it was nearly mid-summer – and tiptoed downstairs. She had expected to be alone with her thoughts of Jamie, the burden of her guilt, but her mother was already awake, sitting at the kitchen table in her towelling robe, clutching a cup of coffee that had grown a milky film it had sat so long, untouched.

She was holding Jamie’s school jumper, pressing it to her face, drinking in his smell. Jessie was surprised how small it was. The images she retained of Jamie, despite his illness, were larger than life, a personality that occupied a vast, fizzing space. Looking at her mum clutching his jumper, fingers stroking the balled wall, she realized how young he was, how little. Seven years, gone in a heartbeat. A life snuffed out before it had properly begun.

‘I thought you were asleep,’ Jessie murmured. She couldn’t meet her mother’s gaze.

‘How could I?’ The words barely audible.

Distractedly, her mother took a sip of coffee, her face wrinkling in surprise at its coldness. How long had she sat here, cradling the cup?

‘I’ll make you another,’ Jessie said.

She padded over to the kettle. While she was waiting for it to boil, she pulled back the kitchen curtain expecting, for some reason, to see dawn breaking; startled when all she saw was her own pallid reflection. Though she had been in the kitchen for barely two minutes, each second had elongated until it was nanometre thin, filling an hour of memories, of self-recrimination. The ticking of the kitchen clock sounded like a hammer on steel, the dim overhead lights, half the bulbs missing, interrogation-chamber bright. She was hypersensitive to every movement, her mother’s every tic.

Filling two cups, Jessie moved back to the table.

‘I’ve been trying to remember Jamie before the illness.’ Her mother’s voice wavered. ‘But all I can remember is him without colour, pale and sickly. He used to have the most beautiful complexion, the most vibrant look about him.’ She plucked at her own sallow, papery skin. ‘You both did … do. Perfect Irish roses. Your father’s look.’

Leaning over, she cupped Jessie’s chin in her fingers, their first physical contact since Jamie’s death. ‘You’re so like your father. Beautiful, like him. He was … is beautiful … on the outside, at least.’

‘Will he … will he be there?’

‘What?’

‘Dad? Will Dad be at …’ Jessie’s tongue felt like a wad of cotton wool in her mouth. ‘At the funeral?’

A vague shrug. ‘How would I know?’ Her mother’s hand moved to stroke her cheek. Her touch like a chill breeze. ‘Yesterday, in the supermarket, I imagined holding Jamie when he was just an hour old. I was in bed, in hospital, my knees bent, and he was lying in the dent between my thighs. I closed my eyes, standing in the middle of the aisle, and I could feel him. Actually feel the warmth of him. The shape of his skull under my fingers, that duck’s fluff of baby hair. He clutched my hand with his tiny fingers. I remember studying his nails in wonderment. They were so perfect, every nail a perfect crescent. It always amazes me that something so small, a baby’s hand, can work at all.’ Her words ran out, her face closed down. A single tear squeezed from her eye and ran down her cheek.

‘Mum?’ Jessie bit her lip to stop herself from crying. ‘It’ll be all right.’

‘No. It won’t be all right.’ Her mum rose, turned towards the door. ‘I’m going to get dressed.’

‘Mum. Please.’

To stop talking meant that time would start ticking again, the unstoppable slide towards the inevitable: a black car at the front door, the slow journey down the A3 to the crematorium, the impatient flow of traffic cutting around them, brake lights flashing as drivers caught sight of the little coffin smothered in flowers and slowed to stare, the black-garbed crowd waiting outside the crematorium, children and parents from school, children who had teased and taunted Jamie when he couldn’t run any more, couldn’t play football – Thought your sister was the Jessie, jessie.

Jamie’s body being interred in fire.

‘Mum.’

Her mother paused at the door; her dead eyes found Jessie’s. ‘When your dad left us, I thought that the unrequited love I had for him was the hardest I’d ever experience.’ Her voice cracked. ‘But I was wrong. When someone dies they can’t love us back. However hard we love them, they can never, ever love us back.’

14

Wendy Chubb rubbed a hand against the window. Steam from the washing-up bowl had clouded the glass, but even so she was sure that she had seen a flash of light in the garden. She stared hard through the smeared circle she had rubbed clear. Only darkness now.

The light from the house washed the patio next to it with a feeble glow, but beyond that the night was thick and black, the hills that rose up on either side of the house seeming to suck whatever moonlight there was from the garden.

What had made her look out the window anyway? A noise? Had it been a noise? Tilting her head, she listened. She heard the old house creaking, the walls murmuring to each other, the knock of air in the pipes, the gurgle of hot water filling the radiators. Wind bristled the trees in the garden. Her gaze swept left to right through the glass, straining to make out the line of leylandii shielding the house from the road, the knot of apple trees in the centre of the garden, the pots lined up at the edge of the patio, plants in them dead from cold and neglect.

Suddenly she leapt back, her hand flying to her mouth, smothering a gasp of surprise and fear. A bright flash. Right up close to the house, barely five metres from where she was standing. She breathed hard, trying to settle the hammering of her heart. What on earth was there to be afraid of? Now that she thought for a moment, fear felt ridiculous. She was inside a locked house, Major Scott in the sitting room across the hallway. And there was clearly a rational explanation for the light.

Sami? Was he outside with his torch? She hurried to the bottom of the stairs.

‘Sami.’ No answer. She leaned against the banister, shouted, ‘Sami.’

Silence.

‘Sami.’

Light hurried footsteps, the boards creaking above her head.

‘Yes.’ His voice sounding timid.

Poor kid.

‘Oh. I wondered if you’d …’ she broke off. ‘Don’t worry, darling. You carry on playing. I’ll be up in five minutes to put you to bed.’ Stupid woman. Of course he hadn’t gone outside. He couldn’t reach the lock and the Yale was far too stiff for him, even if he could. She stuck her head into the sitting room. Major Scott was in the leather chair, asleep he looked to be, breathing heavily, mouth open, a globule of saliva gathered on his bottom lip. Wendy glanced at her watch. Nooria’s train wasn’t due into Aldershot for another half-hour.

Back in the kitchen, she hung by the door, not wanting to approach the window, feeling ridiculous at the tight knot of fear in her stomach. Stepping firmly across the kitchen, she pressed her face to the glass.

No lights. Nobody out there. Just the soupy darkness, wind moving the trees, black outlines shifting and twitching, but purely due to the wind. And transposed over it all, the pale, frightened moon of her own face.

15

Back in her own cottage, Jessie took off her shoes, lined them up in the shoe rack by the door, removed her coat and hung it on the hook, straightening the sleeves. Taking a step back, she checked their alignment, straightened again, millimetre by millimetre, until they were exactly level.

She was hungry, in need of something more than biscuits to eat. Padding into the kitchen in her socks, she tugged open the fridge. Rows of clear plastic Klip-It boxes faced her on the shelves, each one labelled with its contents, the labels hand-printed in neat, black capitals. Cheese, salad, eggs, beans, apples, red peppers … The product of her weekly shop debagged and decanted, nothing entering the fridge in its original packaging. No foreign dirt, no mess, no uneven shapes to knock her sense of order off kilter. Everything organized and in its place.

Her gaze ranged along the uniform black capitals, nothing taking her fancy, her heart sagging under the weight of the disorder spelled out by the codified containers. Reaching out, she picked one up and reversed it, grabbed the bottle of Sauvignon and poured herself a glass. Returning the bottle without bothering to line up the label, she slammed the fridge door.

She was halfway across the kitchen when she stopped. She could feel the electric suit hiss. Ignoring the rising tension, she forced herself to keep walking, into the lounge. Jamie’s photo caught her eye – that chocolate-ringed smile. Her limbs felt on fire, her throat so constricted that breathing was a struggle. She felt as if she would explode with the tension building inside her.

Fighting back tears, she retraced her steps to the fridge. Hauling the door open, shivering at the blast of cold air that enveloped her, she realigned the box, turned the wine bottle until the label faced exactly outwards, exactly – to the millimetre – and pushed the door closed. Sliding down the fridge, she folded herself into a ball on the kitchen floor and burst into tears.

OCD. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. She knew all about it. Had studied it at university, read case after case in her spare time. She knew everything there was to know and still she was helpless to fight the disorder in herself. A disorder that was now as much a part of who she was as her black hair or blue eyes, it had inhabited her for so long. She was a character in a sick and twisted play. Knew exactly how the performance would play out and wanted no part of it, but had no ability to resist. She was consumed by the need for order, for control, even as she had no control over her own mind.

When she was all cried out, she pushed herself up from the floor and went over to the sink. Letting the cold tap gush until the water was freezing, she doused her face, let the water run down her neck and chest. As the water numbed her skin, her brain spun with thoughts, memories, memories on memories. Love. Guilt. Helplessness. Self-hatred.

She had never realized that so much love could exist for another person until she had seen her mother grieving for Jamie.

16

Downstairs Mummy and Daddy were arguing – he could hear their raised voices. Wendy had put him to bed, put him in his woolly sheep pyjamas and dressing gown, put socks on his feet. Keep you warm. Told him that Mummy and Daddy were tired tonight, stressed. Be a good boy. Go to sleep.

He had gone to sleep, like Wendy had asked him, but the shouting had woken him. He liked Wendy, felt safe when she was here. Now she was gone. He had seen her from his bedroom window, hurrying to her car, head down, glancing around her as she walked. He had heard her engine puttering out of the drive.

It was only him, Mummy and Daddy in the house. Him upstairs alone, and their raised voices coming up through the floor.

Daddy was shouting: I don’t want people interfering in our lives.

Sitting up in bed, he looked towards the window. Wendy hadn’t pulled the curtains all the way across – they didn’t join in the middle. A sliver of moonlight cut through the gap, glinting across his room like a knife. He wanted them closed, wanted the knife gone. But he didn’t want to go near the window, to pull them closed himself. He was scared of what might be outside the glass. He had seen the light in the garden, flashing close to the house, had asked Wendy about the light. Light? I didn’t see a light. You must have imagined it. Go to sleep now, like a good boy.

Sami swallowed. A lump was stuck in his throat and it wouldn’t go up or down. Inching silently to the end of his bed, dragging his torch with him, he slid on to the floor. He sat for a second, panting, his chest tight with fear. Was he alone? The darkness in his bedroom seemed to be moving.

On hands and knees, he crawled silently into the corner, squeezing himself behind the toy buckets, curling himself into a tiny ball. He could see nothing but the smooth coloured plastic of the buckets. Red. Blue. Yellow. Green. He couldn’t see the void of darkness beyond; the darkness couldn’t find him.

Mummy and Daddy were arguing. He pressed his hands over his ears, could still hear them.

Mummy was shouting. Daddy was angry.

He wanted to curl up in Mummy’s arms, like he used to before Mummy got sad.

Quietly, he tugged Baby Isabel out of the dolls’ toy bucket, shrunk back into the corner, clutching her tight to his chest.

‘The boy is bad,’ he whispered into Baby Isabel’s ear. ‘The girl … the girl is good. The boy is bad.’

He felt for his torch. It was next to him. Having it there made him feel safer. He wanted to switch it on, but he was too frightened to move again.

‘The bad girl has got out of bed.’ His lips moved silently against Baby Isabel’s ear. ‘Stay in bed. Don’t get out. Bad girl.’

He breathed in – a deep, sucking breath – trying to make his heart stop drumming in his chest. The noise of his heart was too loud. Someone would hear. The darkness would hear. Shadowman would hear. Pressing his hand to his chest, he tried to hold his heart to stop it from thumping. He couldn’t. Jamming his eyes shut, he started to cry.

Daddy was shouting. Mummy was sobbing.

He had to switch his torch on, had to keep himself safe.

‘Go away, Shadowman,’ he whispered. ‘Go away, Shadowman, goway, Shadowman, goway, goway, goway.’ Chanting under his breath, clutching Baby Isabel tight with one hand, he swung the beam of his torch back and forth across the room with the other. ‘Stay in bed. Gowayshadowman, goway, goway, goway.’

17

Nineties bubble-gum music pumped from the doors as Jessie pushed them open. Britney Spears. Was she still knocking out tunes?

It was a typical Mc-bar in a side street in Aldershot, one that could be lifted and replanted in any small-town high street in England and look as if it belonged. Modern brushed gold fittings, pale wooden bar, mushroom-coloured walls, pairs of fat leather sofas for chilling arranged either side of low wooden coffee tables, booths heaving with twenty-somethings clutching alcopops and bottles of Becks, eyeing each other up.

Jessie pushed her way over to the bar and slid on to a stool, ordered herself a vodka and tonic. She had dressed with intent: wore a thigh-length red dress and nude stilettos, a slash of Ruby Tuesday lipstick and statement eyes. A jet-black curtain of hair hung almost to her waist. It was a tried-and-tested outfit, though one she rarely wore, dragged from the back of her wardrobe and dusted down when cleaning the house had failed to keep her demons at bay. She knew that she looked hot. Hot and available.

Crossing her legs, she spun the stool, tilted back against the bar and scanned the crowd. In less than a minute, she had locked eyes with a man standing near the door with a few of his mates. He looked a couple of years younger than her – twenty-six or -seven, perhaps. He wore a tight white long-sleeved T-shirt that hugged his abdominals and navy-blue jeans. He was tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, good looking enough, with a nice smile. Nice enough. She didn’t intend to marry him.

Dropping her gaze, she twisted a lock of hair around her finger. Looking up, she found his gaze again. The corners of her mouth tilted in a tiny smile. She took another sip of her vodka and tonic, eyes locked with his, then twisted back to the bar.

Thirty seconds later, a voice in her ear. ‘Can I get you another?’

Turning, she laid a hand on his chest. ‘Why not.’

Jessie ran her hands up the man’s torso under his T-shirt, feeling the hard ridges of his abdominals, the muscles of his chest warm and solid under her fingers. He worked out three times a week, he had told her proudly. She could tell.

They had left the bar, walked down a side street to the car park at the back. The air was freezing, a light layer of frost coating the tarmac, silvery in the moonlight, the car park, unsurprisingly, deserted.

She could feel him, already hard, pressing against her thigh. Sliding her hand to the back of his neck, Jessie moulded her body to his and slid her tongue into his mouth. With her other hand, she found his belt buckle.

The rough brick sandpapered her back through her leather jacket as he shoved up inside her. She closed her eyes and her mind locked on to the feel of him, the rhythmic movement, the sensation. Nothing else mattered. Only the pure, uncomplicated, animal feeling. She bit her lip, felt heat building. For a second her mind filled with an image of Callan, looking at her across his desk, looking wrecked. Pushing the image away, she blanked her mind, focused only on the man, the feeling of him inside her. Closing her eyes, she clung to him as the orgasm came, tucking her face into the crook of his neck, drawing in his smell, feeling his warmth, the twin manic beats of their hearts.

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