Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) (22 page)

‘I could have driven back to the barracks.’

‘You couldn’t even walk across the street.’

‘Why didn’t you drive me in your car?’

‘Because I don’t want it smelling of puke.’

He laughed. ‘I didn’t need to ask, did I?’

Callan had had a shower, his blond hair was damp and he smelled faintly of Jessie’s lavender shampoo. He was wearing an old brown V-neck jumper of her dad’s that she’d kept in the back of her wardrobe for years – she couldn’t even remember why now, but probably teenage nostalgia – and his own jeans, which she had sponged down as best she could. She didn’t want to think about what they were doing to her cream chair. The jumper was too small for him, pulled tight across his chest and abs, a gaping hole under his left arm where the stitching had given way as it stretched over his bicep. But at least it didn’t smell of vomit.

She had driven his Golf back to her cottage, ignoring his complaints about the damage her gear changes were doing to his sport’s gearbox; insisted that he relax for an hour or two, have something to eat, before he went back to Wendy Chubb’s crime scene. Jessie passed him a beer and laid a plate of buttered toast on the coffee table, tucked herself in one corner of her sofa, facing him.

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Now?’ There was an amused glint in his amber eyes. ‘Sit here, drink beer and get dirt and vomit from my jeans all over your spotless white chair.’

Jessie gave him a wry half-smile. She realized that she should feel the hiss of the electric suit across her skin, the obsessive-compulsive tension grow until it was too strong to ignore – the need to clean overwhelming – but instead all she felt, looking back at him, was a deep ache in the pit of her stomach. Something to do with no food and too much wine? But she knew that wasn’t it.

‘About your problem,’ she murmured.

He looked straight back, all innocence. ‘My problem?’

‘So you were play-acting in the gutter outside the pub then – a cry for attention. Didn’t you get enough as a boy?’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Either that, or I assume that you have epilepsy?’

‘Seizures, my neurologist says.’

‘Isn’t that called splitting hairs?’

Callan shrugged. ‘Frontal lobe seizures is the official diagnosis.’ He tapped the scar on his temple. ‘Caused by the bullet that the Army surgeons decided was too risky to remove. A permanent gift from the Taliban.’

The ring of a mobile. Tilting sideways, Callan tugged his phone from his trouser pocket, glanced down at the name flashing on its screen. Without answering, he slid it back into his pocket.

‘And … so?’ Jessie asked, meeting his gaze once again.

‘And so I carry on – business as usual. I’m not about to tell the Army, if that’s what you’re asking. If they find out, they’ll kick me out, obviously, but I’m not going to hand it to them on a plate.’ He glared back at her and even as he glared his eyes looked thoughtful. ‘Do you remember when you came around to my mother’s house the last time?’

She nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘When you blew me out.’

Jessie laughed. ‘I didn’t blow you out. I terminated our professional relationship because you were refusing to be helped. I had a ton of other patients who were all willing to at least try. Your intransigence put you to the bottom of my list.’

She remembered clearly: he was the first patient she had treated since joining the Defence Psychology Service who she felt she’d entirely failed. She had been seeing him for four months, fortnightly visits to his mother’s house, where he was living – if it could be called living – after being discharged from Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey, where he’d been transferred to recover after a failed operation to remove a Taliban bullet from his brain at Camp Bastion’s field hospital. The surgeons had decided that removal was too risky, that leaving it in place was a safer option. The only lasting effects would be psychological, they had told him. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

‘Have you ever been to Afghanistan?’ his mother had asked her, that last time. The tiny sitting room they were standing in was dark, even though it was mid-summer, net curtains hanging across the windows filtering the bright July sunlight. The last time Jessie had been there – two weeks before – Callan’s mother had been well dressed, her hair brushed, had offered Jessie tea and biscuits. Now, dressed in a saggy drip-dry summer dress and plastic flip-flops, hair unwashed and unbrushed, she met Jessie’s gaze with barely concealed contempt in her eyes. She was in the place where nightmares came from. Couldn’t keep up the pretence any more that she could keep the show on the road while her twenty-eight-year-old son – her only child – shattered.

‘Yes, I have.’ Jessie nodded. ‘Twice.’

‘And it didn’t affect you?’ She sounded as if her insides were all sharp edges.

‘I don’t think anyone who goes out there comes back unaffected.’

Her eyes were damp with welling tears. ‘But not like Ben.’

‘I didn’t go through what Ben went through. I wasn’t out there working with Afghans day in day out, not knowing if one of them was an insurgent waiting to kill me. And then realizing, one day, that my worst nightmare had come true. That one of the Afghans I had worked with day in day out, trusted,
helped
, was that insurgent.’

‘I want my son back.’ Her voice broke.

‘You’ll get him back.’ Jessie’s words sounded hollow, even to her own ears. ‘He needs time.’

‘He’s had time,’ she cried out. ‘
You’ve
had time.’

Silence swallowed them. Jessie bit her lip. What could she tell this woman? That she suspected there was something broken in her son’s brain that a psychologist couldn’t fix?

Callan had been standing in the sun-drenched garden, she remembered, wearing, despite the heat, an old navy jumper and shapeless navy cords. He was holding a spade, but didn’t seem to be doing anything with it, just clutching the handle, gazing, unfocused, into the distance. Despite everything though – the hunched body, skin the hue of dirty snow, eyes sunk so deep in their sockets that she could barely make out their colour – there was still something compellingly physical about him.

‘Captain Callan.’

He saw who it was, looked away.

‘You’re wasting your time.’ His voice was thick, the words uneven. ‘You can’t help me.’

‘I’m not sure that I want to try to any more,’ Jessie said quietly.

He glanced over again, his brow furrowing. The dull light in his eyes remained unchanged. ‘Aren’t you supposed to stick with me until the bitter end?’

‘Perhaps. But you know what? I can’t be bothered any more. I remember, a few weeks ago, talking with your mother about what an amazing man you are.’

‘Were.’

‘
Are
. She said are.’

He didn’t reply; wouldn’t meet her gaze.

‘The first from your family to get into a grammar school, the first to go to university. The first man from your family for – how many generations? – who hasn’t ended up working on the shop floor. So many firsts. Do you really want to be the first to flush your life down the can, all because you prefer to wallow in self-pity rather than get a grip?’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘So tell me. I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me.’

He bowed his head. ‘What good does talking do?’

‘You won’t know until you try.’

Jessie waited. No reply. Only the weight of the hot July day pressing down on them both, the air liquid with heat, the sound of a lawnmower chewing through grass a few houses down the street, a telephone ringing through an open window next door.

He started to talk, almost under his breath, so quietly that Jessie had to tilt forward to catch the words.

‘I lay on the concrete floor in that fucking Afghan police station with a bullet in my brain and the weight of my best friend on top of me and I thought that was it – the end. I could feel the coil of his guts in my hand. I was trying to hold them inside his stomach, while I lay there playing dead, wondering whether they were going to realize that I was alive and slit my throat or drag me outside and parade me to the world’s media, a bloody piece of pulp.’ The rise and fall of his shoulders was exaggerated, as if he was having trouble catching his breath. ‘I thought that if I held them in his body long enough, someone would rescue us before he died. It took an hour for him to die, and that hour felt like ten lifetimes. They were there all that time, the Afghans we had worked with for the past three months. Worked with and trusted. Rifling through our pockets, ripping off his wedding ring. He was moaning and talking about his daughter. She was six months old when he left for Afghanistan.’ He paused and his eyes hung closed. ‘I couldn’t speak, couldn’t comfort him because I was supposed to be dead.’

‘He wasn’t alone. You were there. He would have been able to sense that.’

‘Bullshit.’ Raising a fist to his head, he smacked it against his forehead. ‘I can’t get it out of my head. He died alone, in agony, because I was a fucking coward.’

Jessie’s gaze found the bullet wound; tortured skin, an unforgiving reminder of what he had been through.

‘Committing suicide isn’t bravery.’

His fingers whitened on the handle of the spade. ‘I should have died too,’ he muttered.

‘Where would that have got you?’

‘Away from my mind.’

‘You need to move on. Consign it to the past, even as you retain memories of the good bits of Afghanistan, of Tom.’

He let go of the spade, flinched when it clattered to the baked earth. ‘I
can’t
move on.’

‘You
have
to and you can. For yourself and for your mum. Can’t you see what you’re doing to her?’

He shook his head; tears were running down his cheeks.

‘You’re lucky. You have someone who loves you more than anything in the world, and you’re killing her. Many people would give everything they have for what you take for granted.’

‘You fucking psychologists. You’ve never faced any adversity and yet you tell other people how to live, how to think.’

Jessie bit her lip. ‘You have no idea what I’ve faced. You know nothing about me and you know nothing about the life I’ve lived.’

He gave a harsh half-laugh. ‘So perhaps you’ve had a really shit time and you’re just braver than I am.’

‘Perhaps bravery is for people who don’t have enough to lose,’ she had snapped back.

Callan’s mobile rang again. Ignoring it, he took a sip of his beer, winked at Jessie over the lip of the bottle. ‘Jesus, you were a bitch that day.’

‘Did it work?’

‘No.’ He paused, smiled. ‘Maybe a little.’ His amber eyes were the colour of honey, warm and alive. ‘After you left, I did nothing for days. Then I started thinking a bit, just a bit at a time. I remembered, back then, in Afghanistan, when I was lying on the floor of that police station, how desperate I was to live. How desperate I was not to die, particularly not there, at their hands. I wanted to come out of that nightmare alive and try to get Tom out of it alive too. And then I realized that, though I’d technically lived, I wasn’t living at all. I was in some kind of half-life that was utterly pointless, and if I was going to live like that, make my mother live like that, I might as well have died in Afghanistan. You made me realize what I was doing to my mother, at least.’ He paused. ‘It still took weeks. I went to see Tom’s wife and daughter. I hadn’t seen them since I got back from Afghanistan, since he died. She was devastated, obviously, but she was OK. Better than I’d expected.’ He smiled and shrugged. ‘Far better than I was. Tom’s little daughter was beautiful and she looked exactly like him. His wife said that even though Tom was no longer there, he’d given her the most amazing gift in Lily. It made me realize that I was giving nothing but shit to the person who loved me most.’ Draining the bottle, he put it back on the coffee table. ‘So that’s me.’ Uncrossing his legs, he sat forward, fixed her with a steady gaze. ‘I met this psychologist once who said that it’s good to talk.’ His eyes glinted; they looked almost predatory. ‘Tell me the truth, Jessie, because I’m pretty sure that your brother didn’t die in a car crash.’

Jessie didn’t reply. She pretended to be absorbed in rearranging the cushions on the sofa behind her, cushions that she had already plumped and laid out with precision.

‘For fuck’s sake, Jessie, leave them.’

She stopped and her shoulders sagged.

‘He killed himself,’ she murmured
.
‘He hung himself from the curtain rail in his bedroom. He was seven years old.’

‘Jesus. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have pressed you if I’d known—’

She waved a hand in the air, trying to make light of it, but she could feel hot tears pricking the back of her eyes.

‘Why did he do it?’ he asked gently.

‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged, paused. ‘No, you know what, I do know. But I don’t know what the trigger was – why that day. He was born with a heart condition. Restrictive cardiomyopathy, it’s called. Basically it’s when the muscles of the heart get harder and harder until the heart can’t pump any more. The only cure is a heart transplant. We found out when he was two. He was put on the transplant list immediately and then he was constantly in and out of hospital for tests and medication. We couldn’t go anywhere. We couldn’t go on holiday because a child has to be taken off the transplant list while they’re abroad, and my parents would never have forgiven themselves if a heart had come up when we were sunning ourselves on a beach somewhere. The whole family ended up in limbo, our lives about waiting and hoping. Child heart donors are rare, for obvious reasons, so we waited and we hoped. Our father couldn’t cope with the stress. Two years after Jamie’s diagnosis he met someone else, an agency nurse at the hospital where Jamie was being treated, who was years younger. Years younger and a whole lot happier.’ She paused, heard the choppy sound of her own breathing. ‘A couple of weeks before Jamie committed suicide, we were told that he would need to go into hospital to be put on an artificial heart. A donor hadn’t been found and his heart was failing.’ She felt hollow with the telling, overcome by emptiness. ‘He seemed to have accepted that news because at least it was progress in some direction and once in hospital, he’d be moved to the top of the transplant list, would have a much better chance of getting one. He seemed happier and more optimistic than he’d been in weeks.’ She broke off. Her mouth was bone dry, her skin tingling with tension – the electric suit. She swallowed to help ease the words out. ‘I keep wracking my brains for the trigger, why then, why that day. The only thing I keep coming back to is that he felt abandoned. Abandoned and alone – because
I
left him alone.’