Читать книгу Fire Damage: A gripping thriller that will keep you hooked - Kate Medina, Kate Medina - Страница 10

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.