Читать книгу Fire Damage: A gripping thriller that will keep you hooked - Kate Medina, Kate Medina - Страница 7

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.