Scared to Death: A gripping crime thriller you won’t be able to put down

‘LP 52 YBB.’

Her eyes rose again. ‘The 52, yes, but the rest … I’m sorry, but I really can’t remember.’

‘We’ve got this information from the DVLA, so it should be accurate.’

‘The car has a baby seat in the back seat, of course, for Harry. Red and black it is. A red and black baby seat.’

Marilyn made a note. ‘Does Malcolm own or have access to any other vehicles?’

She shook her head.

‘Do you have any idea where he could have gone. Any special places that he likes to go? Friends who he could have gone to visit?’

‘He had a few friends, but he lost touch with them after … after Daniel died. He spends all his time looking after Harry.’

‘Pubs? Clubs?’

‘No.’

‘A girlfriend, perhaps?’

‘No. Really, no.’ Her nose wrinkled. ‘He wouldn’t stay out all night and he wouldn’t leave Harry like that.’

Jessie leaned forward. ‘Where is Harry’s mother, Mrs Lawson?’

‘She’s … she’s in a home, Doc—’ Her voice faltered. ‘Doctor.’

‘Jessie. Please call me Jessie.’

‘She’s in a home.’

‘A home? A hospital?’ Jessie probed. ‘Is she in a psychiatric hospital?’

Breaking eye contact, the old lady gave an almost imperceptible nod, as if she was embarrassed by the information she’d shared.

‘She couldn’t cope when Danny died. She was always fragile and she broke down completely when Danny took his own life.’

‘Where is the home?’ Marilyn asked.

‘It’s … it’s up in Maidenhead somewhere. I remember Maidenhead …’ A pause. ‘I … I can’t remember the name. I’m sorry, I never visited.’

‘Don’t worry, Mrs Lawson,’ Jessie cut in. ‘The police can find out if they need to talk to her.’

‘You won’t get any sense from her.’ The words rushed out. ‘She hasn’t spoken a word of sense since she was admitted six months ago. Malcolm goes to see her, takes Harry along sometimes, but she says nothing to him. Nothing to Harry either.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Lawson. You’ve been very helpful.’ Marilyn cleared his throat again, the sound grating in the claustrophobic space. ‘We are, uh, we’re working on the assumption that Malcolm left Harry here deliberately, because he believed that the hospital was a safe place at that hour of the night, and then went on somewhere else, to a location that we have yet to determine.’

‘To commit suicide?’ Her voice rose and cracked.

Marilyn shuffled his feet awkwardly against the tacky lino, the sound like the squealing of a trapped mouse.

Jessie nodded. ‘It is our working theory at the moment, Mrs Lawson.’

The old lady raised a hand to her mouth, stifling a sob. Jessie’s heart went out to her. She could be sitting facing her own mother: decades older, but with the same raw grief etched on to her face.

‘Something must have happened to him. He wouldn’t have left Harry.’

‘He left Harry in a hospital, Mrs Lawson,’ Jessie said gently. ‘Somewhere safe.’

‘He wouldn’t have left him. Not here. Not anywhere.’ Jamming her eyes shut, she shook her head. ‘And he would never kill himself, not after Danny.’

‘Mrs Lawson, you told DS Workman that Malcolm has suffered from severe depression since Danny’s death,’ Marilyn said. He looked intensely uncomfortable faced with the mixture of defiance and raw grief pulsing from this proud old lady. Jessie wondered if he usually left Workman to deal with families of the bereaved. From his reaction, she concluded that he did, couldn’t blame him.

‘Malcolm believes in God, Detective Inspector. Suicide is a sin in God’s eyes.’

‘Mrs Lawson.’ Jessie waited until the woman’s tear-filled eyes had found hers. ‘Depression is complex and the symptoms vary wildly between people, but it is very often characterized by a debilitating sadness, hopelessness and a total loss of interest in things that the sufferer used to enjoy.’

‘Your own baby?’ Her voice cracked. ‘A loss of interest in your own baby?’

‘A sufferer can feel exhausted – utterly exhausted, mentally and physically, by everything. Little children are tiring enough for someone who is healthy. For someone with depression, having to take care of a young child, however much they love that child, would be incredibly hard, a Mount Everest to climb each and every day. Depression also affects decision-making because the rational brain can’t function properly …’ Jessie paused. ‘And a person suffering from depression can believe that the people they leave behind are better off without them.’

Another sob, quickly stifled. His face wrinkling with concern at the sound, the little boy on the mat looked from his Bob the Builder phone to his grandmother.

‘You’re wrong, Doctor.’

‘Mrs Lawson.’ Moving to sit next to her on the sofa, Jessie laid a hand on her arm. Her skin was papery, chilled, despite the heat in the room. Jessie took a breath, fighting to suppress her own memories. ‘Mrs Lawson.’

‘No. No. You’re wrong.’ Tears were running unchecked down her cheeks. Unclipping her handbag, she fumbled inside and pulled out a crumpled tissue. ‘You’re both wrong. He would never leave Harry, not after Danny. He’s already lost one child, he’d never risk losing another. You need to find him.’ Her voice broke. ‘What are you doing to find him? Why are you sitting here? You need to find Malcolm now.’

11

Head down, Jessie walked swiftly down the corridor, forcing herself not to break into a full-on sprint. The heat and that ubiquitous hospital smell of antiseptic struggling to mask an odorous cocktail of bodily fluids felt almost physical, a claustrophobic weight pressing in on her from all sides. And the suit. The electric suit – she’d barely felt it while she’d been abroad – was tightening around her throat, making it hard to breathe.

‘Jessie.’

She took a few more steps, pretending that she hadn’t heard Marilyn’s call. The corner was an arm’s length away. If she swung around it, she could run down the next corridor, cut through A & E and disappear outside before he caught up with her. Escape.

‘Jessie, I know that you can hear me,’ Marilyn called, louder. ‘I don’t do jogging, so wait.’

She stopped, turned slowly to face him.

‘Jesus Christ, I need a drink after that,’ he muttered, catching up with her.

‘It wasn’t the best.’

‘So what do you think?’

Jessie focused on a patch of dried damp on the wall opposite, the result of a historic leak long since repaired but not repainted, avoiding meeting his eyes. ‘I think that you need to find Malcolm Lawson quickly.’

‘Isn’t it likely that he’s already dead?’

‘You can’t make that assumption. He has all sorts of conflicting emotions careering around in his head. Depression, exhaustion, hopelessness sure, but Mrs Lawson is right when she says that he also has a lot of positive emotions, pushing against those negative drivers. He believes in God, and suicide is a sin in the eyes of any Christian church. His older son committed suicide and he was horrified by that. And he has Harry, and for the past year that baby has been the centre of his world—’ She broke off with a shake of her head. ‘Mrs Lawson was adamant that he wouldn’t commit suicide.’

‘And you believe her?’ Marilyn asked gently.

Jessie sighed. ‘No … yes … no. I think that there is a lot of wishing and hoping that’s fuelling her belief. But I also know that suicide won’t be an easy choice for him. You can’t assume that he’s already dead.’

‘So we should be out looking for him?’

‘You should. Now.’

Marilyn tipped back on his heels and blew air out of his nose. ‘It would be a hell of a lot easier if I knew where to start.’

‘There’s no word on his car? If he left Harry here at around midnight, it makes sense to assume that he drove.’

‘It does, but we’ve had no word so far and every squad car in the county has been told to keep an eye out for it.’ Marilyn held out an arm. ‘Shall we get out of here, talk outside? This place is giving me hives.’

They walked towards the exit. Sweat was trickling down Jessie’s spine, pasting her shirt to her back. Marilyn was carrying his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, his lined face gummy with perspiration.

‘Why would Malcolm have decided now?’ he asked.

Jessie shrugged. She had asked herself that question virtually every day of the fifteen years since her little brother’s suicide and she still hadn’t come up with an answer that satisfied her. It seemed to come down to opportunity. Opportunity because she had left him alone, gone to Wimbledon Common with her boyfriend, leaving Jamie to be dropped home to a dark, empty house by someone else’s mother, while she had lied to her own, told her that she would be there to look after him.

‘The straw that broke the camel’s back.’

Marilyn smiled, a half-hearted attempt to lighten the moment. ‘Is that a technical term?’

Jessie returned his smile with one equally lacklustre. ‘You have to get all the way to PhD level before you can use it.’

‘So what was the straw?’

‘It could be any of a number of things. A significant date, the time of year, the weather. Despite what most people think, suicide rates peak in the spring and early summer – April, May, June.’

‘I would have thought winter. Winter is depressing.’

‘Yes, but everybody is depressed in winter. In spring, most people’s mood lifts. Warmer weather, flowers and trees coming into bloom, baby animals being born, new life – it makes everyone happier. Those people who are clinically depressed suddenly realize that they’re more alone, more isolated than they had thought. I know this isn’t helpful, but it could be one of a thousand things. He could simply have had enough. Reached the end, the point that he couldn’t go on fighting any more.’

They made it to the exit, stepped outside. Weaving through the crowd of smokers they surfaced into clear air and turned to face each other.

‘I appreciate you coming here today, Jessie.’

‘Find him, Marilyn. Find him quickly.’

Jessie was halfway to the car park when an April downpour came from nowhere and turned the tarmac into a boiling slick of bubbles within seconds. Breaking into a run, she reached her Mini, yanked open the driver’s door and dived inside, already soaked. Starting the engine, she flipped the wipers to maximum, heard them groan against the weight of water, clearing visibility, losing it. Scrubbing the condensation from the inside of the windscreen with the sleeve of her shirt, she eased the Mini back off the grass verge and crawled at snail’s pace to the exit. As she pulled out of the hospital car park on to the main road, the rain still sheeting, she saw Joan Lawson with Harry in his pushchair, waiting at the bus stop. There was no shelter and the old lady had obviously come out without an umbrella because she was standing, looking fixedly down the road in the direction of the oncoming traffic, rain flattening her silver hair to her head and pasting her white shirt to her body.

Passing the bus stop, Jessie flicked on her indicator and bumped two tyres on to the kerb. She couldn’t leave them standing there, getting drenched.

But what else could she do? She didn’t have a child seat and there was no way the pram would fit in her Mini. She didn’t even have an umbrella, a coat, anything to offer. Cursing her uselessness, she waited for a space in the traffic and eased back into its flow, watched them recede in the oval of her rear-view mirror, blurring under the downpour until they were toy people, the old lady still staring down the road, the bus nowhere in sight.

12

‘Captain Callan?’

The man who had manoeuvred himself in front of Callan in the doorway, who was now holding out his hand and fixing Callan with a limpid green gaze, was as Irish as Guinness and leprechauns. He was around Callan’s own age, but there the similarity stopped. Fine ginger hair feathered his head, freckles peppered his pallid face and the skin on his bare, extended forearm looked as if it would burn to a crisp in mid-winter. His body was soft and paunchy, his features slightly feminine looking. But the expression on his face was steadfast. Callan’s gaze found the purple pentagon bordering the black crown on his epaulettes, the purple band around the cap that he was holding in his left hand, and his heart sank. He took hold of the proffered hand firmly.

‘Chaplain. What can I do for you?’

‘I’m Michael O’Shaughnessy, the padre here at Blackdown. Could I have a quiet word please, Captain.’ He glanced past Callan to where a group of shock-faced sixteen-year-olds, last night’s guard detachment, fidgeted on chairs in the larger of the two rooms that Gold had secured for interviews. ‘In private.’

The only Army officers who didn’t carry standard ranks, chaplains could hail from any Christian religion or Judaism, but were expected to provide pastoral care to any soldier who needed it, irrespective of the soldier’s faith – or lack of it. All very worthy, but O’Shaughnessy’s presence in this room with Callan’s witnesses, his suspects, made him deeply uneasy. The last thing he needed was God or his earthly representative getting in the way of his investigation.

They stepped outside and Callan turned to face O’Shaughnessy. Though shards of sunlight were knifing through the grey clouds, it had started to rain, a soft patter on the tarmac around them. The chaplain gazed blandly up at Callan.

‘You’re leading the investigation into this poor, unfortunate boy’s death, I presume?’ His tone was soft, the lilt southern Irish, nothing hurried about his diction, no urgency.

Callan nodded, feeling impatience rear its head already. He resisted the urge to glance at this watch.

‘I would ask you to suspend your interviews for a few hours, send the boys and girls back to their accommodation blocks for a bit of downtime. You can resume later today, when they’ve rested. Perhaps even tomorrow morning.’

Callan frowned. ‘These “boys and girls”, as you call them, are witness to and potentially suspects in a suspicious death.’

‘Is it definitely murder?’

‘I won’t know for sure until the autopsy, but it looks that way.’ His tone was curt, deliberately so. He still felt like shit, didn’t have the mental or physical energy to exchange niceties with the chaplain. He wanted this conversation over, wanted to get back to doing his job.

‘This is a training base, Captain, for the Royal Logistic Corps, as you know. These are kids, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, for the most part. They are all tired and scared. You will get far more sense from them if you give them a chance to sleep, to get some rest.’

‘This is an Army base, Chaplain. These kids joined voluntarily and were legally old enough to make that decision.’

A shadow crossed O’Shaughnessy’s face. ‘They’re hardly Parachute Regiment or SAS, though, are they?’

‘They’re still Army, none of them conscripts.’ Still witnesses. Still suspects.

The rain was getting heavier; Callan could feel cold water funnelling down the back of his neck. He flipped up his collar and hunched his shoulders in his navy suit. O’Shaughnessy appeared not to notice the burgeoning downpour. Coming from Ireland, he was no doubt used to it. ‘Nobody is going anywhere, until I, or one of my team has spoken with them. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’ Callan turned to go inside.

‘Captain.’

Callan paused, his hand on the door, but didn’t turn. ‘Chaplain.’

‘I will be around, Captain Callan. The welfare of the living in this case is as important – more so, I would venture – than the welfare of the dead.’

Don’t tell me. Your God will look after the dead.

‘And it is my job to ensure that these teenagers’ welfare is not compromised.’

Callan’s hard gaze met the chaplain’s insipid green one.

‘Of course, Chaplain, I would expect nothing less. Just as it’s my job to find out what happened.’ He paused. ‘Did you know him, Chaplain?’

‘The victim?’

‘Stephen Foster. He was called Stephen Foster.’

‘My conversations are entirely confidential, Captain, you know that.’ His soft voice didn’t rise. ‘I cannot divulge the names of those that I give counsel to. I need to be indisputably trustworthy, above reproach. No names, no comebacks, as they say.’

Callan’s jaw tightened. ‘This is potentially a murder investigation.’

‘Potentially.’

‘Whichever way you look at it, Foster is dead. Surely your professional and ecclesiastical responsibility are discharged on death.’

‘The dead leave behind families, they leave behind loved ones and they leave behind their reputations.’

‘And they need justice,’ Callan snapped. ‘He needs justice.’

‘If this is found to be murder, Captain Callan, unequivocally murder, feel free to come and speak with me again.’ His gaze slid from Callan’s and found the low cloud ceiling above them, his brow creasing into a frown as if he had finally noticed that he was getting wet.

Callan gave a grim nod. ‘The autopsy will be tomorrow morning. Don’t go anywhere, Chaplain, and don’t discuss this case with anyone. I will see you again soon, no doubt.’

‘No doubt.’

Yanking the door open, Callan pushed through, leaving the chaplain standing outside in the rain, his mouth puckered into a moue of distaste. At the rain? At him? Callan couldn’t tell and couldn’t care less either way.

13

From her office window, Jessie watched the opaque curtain of another spring storm barrel across the lake at the bottom of the wide sweep of Bradley Court’s lawn, turning the glassy water to froth. The leaves on the copper beech trees lining the pathway by the manor house twisted and bowed before they were engulfed, flattened under the weight of the downpour, and suddenly her view was misted, the glass opaque.

A knock on the door. The blond teenager standing in the corridor was barely taller than Jessie’s five foot six, narrow-shouldered and thin. His soft hazel eyes looked huge in a pale face, framed as they were by the dark rings of insomnia. He looked very young.

‘Private Jones, I’m Doctor Jessie Flynn.’ She held out her hand. ‘Please come in.’

Ryan Jones slid through the door, glancing sideways at her, a look of suspicion etched on his face. He didn’t move to take her proffered hand. Jessie recognized that reaction, had come across it before with young soldiers a few months in who spent every day being drilled: woken up at first light and run for miles in their platoons, publicly belittled for every minor misdemeanour, their rooms swept with eagle eyes for dust specks, clothes checked for razor-sharp creases, even the shine on their boots studied forensically for signs that they weren’t measuring up. And even if they were, imaginary holes picked in order to break down their confidence. Everything about Army basic training was designed to remove individuality and mould a team in its place. These recruits often found their initial visit to Bradley Court a destabilizing experience, no longer accustomed to being treated as an equal, a unique individual.

Closing the door behind him, Jessie indicated one of the two leather bucket chairs, separated only by a low coffee table that she used for her sessions. The chairs were deliberately placed underneath one of her office’s two sash windows so that patients could relieve the pressure, if only momentarily, by looking at the view of nature beyond the glass. Ryan sat down, crossing his legs and folding his arms across his chest, nothing open or accommodating about his posture.

‘Would you like a drink? Tea, coffee, water?’

Without making eye contact, he shook his head. Jessie grabbed his file and a pen from her desk and took the seat opposite. She had re-read the single typed sheet the file contained shortly before he arrived.

Ryan Thomas Jones

Sixteen and five months

Joined the Army on 2 November last year, the day of his sixteenth birthday

Phase 2 trainee, Royal Logistic Corps

Referred by Blackdown’s commanding officer, Colonel Philip Wallace, because of concerns about his mental health

Nothing more than that: a vague, unspecific brief. She looked up from the file. It felt strange to be back in her consulting room, facing another patient who, from his body language and the shuttered look on his face, would give a lot to be somewhere else.

‘Can I call you Ryan?’

A tiny lift of his shoulders, which Jessie translated as a teenager’s ‘Yes.’

‘Thank you for coming in to see me.’

Another weary shrug. ‘I wasn’t given a choice.’ A soft regional accent that Jessie couldn’t place. She ploughed on. ‘You’ve been in the Army five months?’

‘Yes.’

‘With the Royal Logistic Corps?’

‘Yes.’

‘How is it going?’

‘OK.’

‘Are you enjoying it?’

‘It’s not an exciting choice, is it, logistics? Not brave.’ There was sneer in his voice.

‘Don’t knock it. An Army runs on good logistics.’ Jessie racked her brains for the famous quote – something about wars being won or lost on the contents of soldiers’ stomachs – but try as she might she couldn’t summon it, or its author, to mind. She still felt vague and headachy, half her brain mid-flight somewhere over the Persian Gulf, the other half in that small, depressing hospital room, hoping with all her heart that Joan Lawson was right when she said her son would never commit suicide, all her professional knowledge, her gut feeling, telling her that the old lady was wrong, the parallels with her own past deeply unsettling.

‘An Army marches on its stomach, Napoleon Bonaparte.’

Ryan’s face remained impassive.

‘Logistics. The importance of logistics. Napoleon Bonaparte?’ Logistics, catering, near enough. ‘Military general, the first Emperor of France, Battle of Waterloo?’

Still no reaction.

‘Never mind. So why did you choose the Logistic Corps then?’

He shrugged, a careless movement that brought to Jessie’s mind a teenaged schoolboy sitting at the back of the class, thinking about smoking behind the bike shed and sticking his hand up girls’ skirts rather than whatever subject the teacher was wittering on about at the front of the classroom.

‘Do you want to be brave, Ryan?’ Jessie asked softly, tilting forward, trying, and failing, to catch his eye.

Kids of this age should be still at school. She didn’t believe that they had the emotional maturity, the mental robustness to handle rigid institutions like the Army, even in relatively soft options like logistics. The Army could be tough and isolating, the necessity of fitting in, of being accepted as one of the lads, stressful, particularly for people who were not natural team players. She suspected that Ryan was not a natural team player.

‘Ryan.’

He had started to fidget, fingers picking at a thread that had come loose from the stitching of his navy-blue beret. His nails had been bitten to the quick, the cuticles raw, Jessie noticed.

‘No.’ His voice so low that it was almost inaudible. ‘Not particularly.’

‘So why the Army? Why did you join?’

He sighed, like a teenager whose mother was hassling him. ‘Because people like me don’t have choices. The Army seemed like a good way of getting out.’

‘Getting out from where? Where did you grow up?’

‘Birmingham.’ The soft accent. Midlands – of course. She should have recognized it.

‘Do you have family?’

‘A mother.’

‘Father?’

‘He died when I was three.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It didn’t affect me. I never really knew him.’

Jessie knew that wasn’t true. Abandonment always affected children, however it happened. She knew that well enough from her own childhood.