Название: Fire Damage: A gripping thriller that will keep you hooked
Автор: Kate Medina
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Полицейские детективы
isbn: 9780008132309
isbn:
‘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.
‘What did you say to Ahmose?’ she asked, when he joined her in the kitchen.
‘We were having a conversation about gardening. I told him that your wisteria needed cutting right back. It will flower much better in spring with a decent prune.’
‘Ah. That’ll be why he was looking at you as if you were the devil. He does my garden. Takes a huge amount of pride in it. You’ve just driven an articulated lorry through his ego.’
Callan smiled and shrugged. ‘I wasn’t entirely idle for the past six months. At least my mother now has a flourishing garden, even if her nerves are shot to shit.’
For an unexpected moment, Jessie’s mind flashed to Wimbledon, to the small sixties house she had grown up in. She had only seen her mother once since last Christmas, she realized, in March, when she had popped in with a present and cake to celebrate her mother’s birthday, taken her for lunch at a local pub. Her own birthday this year spent at home with Ahmose, pleading pressure of work to duck a visit. Guilt at that decision still hanging over her like a shroud, adding to the other accumulated layers of guilt and self-recrimination. Even more reason not to get in touch.
‘Coffee? Tea?’ Tugging open the fridge, she pulled out a bottle of Sauvignon. ‘Wine? I’m having wine – lots of it – if that helps your decision.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m on duty.’
The words ‘on duty’ surprised her, though she realized that they shouldn’t. He had, after all, come to ask for her help on a case. So he was back at work in the Military Police Special Investigation Branch then. Properly back. She was pleased for him. She glanced around, caught his eye and smiled.
‘Dressed like that?’
He smiled, an easy smile that lit his amber eyes the colour of warm honey. Despite the watchfulness, he seemed relatively comfortable in his own skin, a state that three months ago she would have happily bet a sizeable sum he was too far gone ever to reach.
‘I’ve been in the gym. I’m on call. I can work out and I can turn up to a crime scene looking like shit, but I can’t drink. I’d love a coffee.’
While she put the kettle on, СКАЧАТЬ