Fire Damage: A gripping thriller that will keep you hooked. Kate Medina

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ