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

‘Motive,’ Jessie murmured. She took another sip of wine and looked past him, to the window. It was dark now, the night so dense that it could have been made from liquid; the table lamp she had switched on a hot yellow sun reflected in the glass.

‘Have you talked to Starkey yet?’

‘Once today.’

‘With a Ministry of Defence lawyer?’

‘He didn’t want one.’

‘And …?’ She looked back to him.

His amber eyes were fixed on her face, head on one side, as if he was studying her, sizing her up. Though his bald scrutiny put her on edge, she wasn’t about to let him realize it. She met his gaze directly.

‘Did you get anything from him?’

‘Not much.’

‘Name, rank and number?’ Soldiers were notoriously tight-lipped; gave nothing away unless it was absolutely unavoidable.

He rolled his eyes. ‘That’s the polite way of saying it. Fuck-all is the less polite way.’

He’d finished his coffee, was looking around for somewhere to put the empty cup. Jessie jumped off the chair, took it from him and deposited it carefully in the kitchen sink, resisting the intense urge to wash it, dry it, stow it in the cupboard then and there.

‘This has the potential to get properly out of hand,’ he said, when she returned to the living room. ‘Jackson leaves a wife and two small children, under fives. His father is a troublemaker. He works as a shop steward at a factory in South London. Knows his rights – that kind of guy. He’s already spoken to the Daily Mail . The newspapers are all over the cutbacks in defence spending, how it’s putting lives at risk. They’re gagging for anything that makes the Army look bad. I need to get to the bottom of this quickly, keep a lid on the negative publicity.’

‘His son is dead. His grandchildren are fatherless. You can’t blame him.’

Callan didn’t hesitate. ‘His son joined the Army. It goes with the territory.’

‘But not to die like that, potentially at the hands of your own side.’

A grim smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. ‘We don’t get to choose how we die. Many people don’t even get to choose how they live.’ Tossing the file on to the coffee table, he pushed himself to his feet. ‘I’ll leave the file with you – not that there’s much of use in it. I’m interviewing Colin Starkey tomorrow at Provost Barracks.’ His will stretched out to her. ‘I’ll see you there at ten to four. Ask for me at the gate, they’ll let you through. I’ll meet you downstairs, main entrance.’

‘Fine,’ Jessie said simply. ‘One interview and then we’ll see.’

Jeanette Bass-Cooper stood on the narrow shingle beach and looked back up the wide stretch of lawn to the house. It was faux Greek, a huge and no doubt once grand villa, resplendent with fake colonnades, plastered and painted a sickly pale lemon, the paint peeling, plaster brittle and crumbling in places. It brought to mind one of the over made-up, ageing showgirls she had seen at a burlesque show in Paris a couple of weekends ago, gaudy and brazen against the sober Arts and Crafts on one side, the Georgian on the other. But it had potential. Six bedrooms, four bathrooms, three receptions, all with huge windows overlooking the water, décor that would have to be stripped back to its bare bones and redone, but its own private stretch of shingle beach and incredible views over the upper reaches of Chichester Harbour.

It had been empty for four months and the landline was disconnected. There was no mobile reception inside, which was why she had tottered in her heels through the garden – mobile held aloft, gaze fixed on the reception icon – and down on to the skinny stone beach to call the estate agent. On one hand she was pleased there was no reception: no telephone masts to spoil this rural idyll she had set her heart on acquiring. But on the other, the inconvenience made her feel impotent. Getting away from it all was one thing, but with a commercial property business to run, being incommunicado was costly.

Signal. At last. Only two bars, but it would have to do. This wasn’t going to be a long or complex conversation. All she needed from her estate agent was an explanation as to how – when she had bought a shopping centre in Liverpool for her business, the transaction complete from beginning to end in three days – it had taken five weeks and counting to fail even to exchange on this house. The owner was dead, for Chrissakes, so it clearly wasn’t him holding up the deal.

She found Gavin Maxwell’s number on speed dial. The frustration she felt at the prospect of speaking to him had already found its way to her shoulders, which had repositioned themselves up around her ears.

‘Come on, pick up,’ she muttered, starting to pace. She glanced at her watch: 12 p.m. Don’t tell me he’s gone to lunch. Not that she would be surprised. Nothing would surprise her with this deal. ‘Pick up .’

Seaweed caught in her heel and she bent to untangle it, still clutching the phone to her ear. In tight dress and heels, she felt like a hobbled calf, had to clench her abdominals to stop herself from toppling.

Mid-stoop, she stopped.

The first thing she noticed was the smell. Decomposing seaweed yes, but another overlaying it. Rotten and putrid. A dustbin full of refuse left fermenting in sun for a fortnight.

The second thing she noticed was the blackened stick, tangled in the seaweed that had snagged her heel. Had someone held a fire on the beach? Teenagers making the most of the empty property to hold a party? She grasped the stick; her fingers sank into mush.

Jesus … her eyes bulged. Was that a hand?

She sucked in a choking breath.

A hand, the fingers, entwined with seaweed, bent into a tortured claw. She ran her eyes up the blackened stick and somewhere in the recesses of her chilled brain, she realized that it was an arm.

The third thing she noticed was that the torso attached to the arm was just that. A torso. Distended. Bloated . Her gaze tracked down. There were no legs. Nothing below waist level.

‘Ohmygod!’ she groaned.

The fourth thing she noticed was the empty eye sockets above the mouth, cavities of blackened bone, nothing soft remaining. The mouth itself, a lipless hole lined with yellow teeth, opened wide in a silent, agonized scream.

Skin. Did it have skin? Or was that only muscle, sinew and bone?

‘Ms Bass-Cooper.’ A distorted voice came out of the phone.

Terror was like tin foil in her mouth.

‘Oh my God.’ Her voice thick with tears. ‘OH MY GOD.’

‘MS BASS-COOPER. ARE YOU OK?’

The phone clattered from her hand.

The house was a mile outside the village of Crookham, a few miles northwest of Aldershot, standing alone in a shallow valley where the country lane dipped, before rising again and curving away over the next hill.

Jessie had taken the Farnham road from Aldershot, a map spread out on her passenger seat. She had never bought a sat nav, preferring to be in control of where she was going, even if that meant getting lost. What that said about her personality, she hadn’t bothered to analyse.

She had passed a couple of other houses, but this one sat alone at the end of a short gravel drive, set back behind a column of clipped leylandii trees, planted tightly to form a hedge twenty feet high, shielding the house from the road. Unnecessary, Jessie thought, doubting that more than ten cars a day used this lane that came from nowhere important and led nowhere.

Her tyres crunched on gravel as she drove through the wooden five-bar gate, rotten, leaning drunkenly off its hinges, and parked in the circular drive behind a green mud-splattered Land Rover Defender. The house must have originally been three cottages that had been knocked into one. It was long and low, a couple of hundred years old at least: two storeys high, of red brick with wooden beams cutting through them, a clay-tiled roof which undulated like the surrounding hills. It looked to be – as was her own cottage, on a more modest scale – a money pit of maintenance. She passed two olive green painted front doors, the first with pot plants crowded around its base, the second, a rusting metal pig-trough filled with soil that looked as if it had been purchased as a garden feature and never planted out. The third door was clearly in use as the front door to the combined dwelling: a letterbox stuffed with an overlarge catalogue that prevented it from closing, and a hedgehog-shaped boot cleaner to one side, its bristles worn and caked in mud.