Fire Damage: A gripping thriller that will keep you hooked

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.