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

‘Are you checking my car for neatness?’

She started, turned. Callan was right behind her, a look of amusement in those watchful amber eyes. He was wearing jeans and the same navy hoodie she’d seen him in yesterday, a black waterproof, undone, covering the hoodie.

‘You failed miserably,’ she said. ‘The coke can and crisp packets in the footwell aren’t going to win you any prizes.’

‘I’ll try harder next time, Doctor.’ His tone was teasing. Pulling the keys from his pocket, he unlocked the car. ‘Do you want a lift somewhere?’

‘Don’t I need to be a hooker to travel in a car like this?’

The ghost of a smile on his lips.

Jessie smiled back sweetly. ‘No, thank you. I’ve got my own car. Parked legally. Paid for.’ She indicated the sticker in his window. ‘Isn’t that called abuse of position?’

‘I was late for an appointment.’ He caught her questioning look. ‘Admin. Nothing exciting.’ His gaze slid away from hers. ‘I couldn’t find a space. There have to be some perks to the job.’ He walked around to the driver’s side, pulled open the door. ‘Four p.m. I’ll meet you at ten to, Provost Barracks main entrance.’

She nodded. ‘I remember. I’ll be there.’

‘Don’t be late.’ A shift in his voice – humour to tension.

‘I won’t.’

Standing on the pavement, she watched him pull on to the road and accelerate away, tyres churning up a plume of wet sleet from the tarmac. She started to walk back to her own car, then stopped. On impulse, she crossed the pavement to the brass plaque. A small business accounting firm occupied the ground and first floor, an IT business the second. At the bottom of the list, third floor, Mr John Rushton-Booth, Consultant Neurologist.

Jeanette Bass-Cooper looked hard at the detective inspector. She prided herself on being open-minded, but even she had limits. He looked as if he had been dragged out of some Soho rock club at 4 a.m., beer still in hand, and teleported down here to the seaside, kicking and screaming, blinking those disconcerting mismatched eyes against the daylight, smoky and feeble as it was.

His partner, on the other hand, the detective sergeant – Workman, Jeanette thought she’d said – was his antithesis. Shapeless black wash-and-wear trousers skimming solid ankles, chunky lace-ups that wouldn’t be out of place on a 1930s nanny, mousy hair cut into a low-maintenance bob. But she seemed sensible at least. Reliable.

Detective Inspector Bobby ‘Marilyn’ Simmons – Marilyn after Manson, he would hasten to add if questioned on the nickname his colleagues had bestowed on him the first day he joined the force, a nickname that had dogged him ever since – looked at the short, boxy woman in front of him in her black dress and high-heeled patent boots and felt the beginnings of a headache. The words ‘mutton’ and ‘lamb’ flashed into his mind. But at least she seemed intelligent, could string a sentence together that contained no swear words, a rare skill in the world he occupied.

A wind had picked up, whipping the water of the harbour into a frothy, gunmetal soup, cutting straight through his leather jacket. Hauling up his collar, he hunkered down, wishing that he’d brought a scarf, put on a windproof fleece, anything more sensible than his battered biker.

‘DS Workman. Take Ms Bass-Cooper to the Command Vehicle to get her out of the cold. Switch the engine on to get the blowers going. I don’t want our one witness freezing to death before we’ve drained her of information. Take a written statement while you’re there.’

As DS Workman led Jeanette Bass-Cooper back up the garden towards the gaggle of police vehicles haphazardly parked on the gravel drive, Marilyn turned and strode across the crispy, frostbitten grass towards the narrow strip of pebbles that Bass-Cooper had termed a beach. Not one he fancied sunbathing on.

Looking out across the water to Itchenor, he felt a shot of déjà vu. He had worked on another murder last spring, around the bay in Bosham, a small village of expensive detached houses like the one behind him. Murder in this part of West Sussex was so rare that it had made the national newspapers. A house-sitter, stabbed to death in her bedroom in the middle of the night; her sister, brother-in-law and elderly father in adjacent bedrooms who had heard nothing. It had him stumped for close to a fortnight, until he had found out that the sixty-year-old owner of the house, who had been on holiday with his wife at the time, had a penchant for swinging. Over the telephone from Florida he had explained to Marilyn that he had ‘absolutely no idea’ how photographs of himself, posing naked on a sandy beach, came to be posted on a swingers’ website under the moniker, ‘The Director of Fun’. It turned out that the murderer was a fellow swinger, a fifty-five-year-old woman who thought she was dispatching the director’s wife.

This case, Marilyn feared, would be tougher to crack.

The forensics teams, dressed in their identical navy-blue waterproof onesies, looked, on fleeting glance, like a group of harbour day-trippers – only the masks covering their mouths and noses dispelling that image. They had got here quickly and erected a forensic tent over the body – what remained of it at least. Marilyn didn’t fancy the tent’s chances if this wind picked up. The occasional white flash of the forensics’ camera crew lit it up from the inside, giving him some uncomfortable memories of last night. A nightclub in Portsmouth. He was too old to stay out until 3 a.m., should get sensible, get himself a girlfriend knocking forty, rather than Cindy, virtually half his age and beautiful, but sharp as a blunt instrument.

‘So what have we got?’

Tony Burrows, the lead Crime Scene Investigator pulled his hood back, slid a latex-gloved hand over his bald spot, fingertips grazing the dark hair that ringed his scalp. He reminded Marilyn of a Benedictine monk, the impression emphasized by his short legs and softly rounded stomach. ‘Male.’

Marilyn waited. When no more information was forthcoming, ‘Yup. And …?’

‘That’s about it, at the moment. The body is not what could be termed fresh kill, and we only have half of it.’

Marilyn winced. Despite his chosen profession, he didn’t have a strong stomach, had failed, even after nearly twenty years in Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, to fully acclimatize to the visceral assault on the senses that dead bodies rendered.

‘Where is the other half?’

‘Anybody’s guess. But the cut is clean, if messy. Chops—’ Burrows made a vertical hacking motion with his hand – ‘rather than tears or rips. An axe, perhaps? A butcher’s chopper, maybe. The body is very badly decomposed, most of the skin and a good part of the flesh missing, as you can see, so identifying the cause may be difficult.’

Marilyn’s eyes hung closed for a moment. ‘Do you think he was dumped here?’

‘Could have been. There’d be no traces left if someone had carried the body down the garden and tossed it on to the beach. Not given how long this Doe has been dead for. Unless he was stored somewhere else and then dumped recently.’ He paused, massaged the dome of his head, eyes raised to the grey sky in thought. ‘But that’s unlikely. Our victim has been exposed to the elements for some time, I think, by the looks of him. Dr Ghoshal will be able to tell you more once he gets him on the slab.’

Marilyn nodded. Cupping his hands in front of his face, he blew into them, stomped his feet to get the circulation going. The house had been vacant for four months, Ms Bass-Cooper had said. His mind turning inwards in thought, he moved away from Tony Burrows and his team, buzzing like flies around the corpse, followed the curve of shingle to the rotten wooden fence that signalled the extent of the garden. Leaning against a wooden upright, he gazed out across the water. Yachts and motor cruisers bobbed at anchor, straining against their moorings in the swell. Though he’d lived in Chichester for almost all of his working life, the best part of twenty years, he wasn’t a sailor – struggled to envision anything less appealing than squatting in a damp little boat being pushed around by the wind. But having lived and worked near the sea for so long, he knew something about tides.