Kate Medina - Scared to Death - A gripping crime thriller you won’t be able to put down

‘Drive slowly, mate. My shift ends in two hours and I don’t fancy spending it scraping anybody off the central reservation. Even a bloody MP.’

Callan held out his hand; the constable didn’t take it.

‘You’ve had your one favour,’ he muttered. ‘Next time, I throw the book at you.’

Callan stood by his Golf and watched the patrol car pull back into the flow of traffic and accelerate away. Twisting sideways, he retched on the grass. Retched and retched until only his stomach lining remained.

Squeezing her Mini on to the grass verge, the only spare inch of space available in the hospital car park, ignoring the dirty looks thrown her way by people in huge four-by-fours who were still circling, trying to find a space, Jessie jogged down the stone stairs and across the service road to A & E. Holding her breath as she ducked through the cigarette smoke fogging the entrance, she found Marilyn waiting for her inside. He was propping up the wall by the reception desk, one sole tapping impatiently against the skirting, thumbs skipping across the keys of his mobile. At the sound of her footsteps, he glanced up, his lined face creasing into a smile.

‘Thank you for coming, Jessie.’ A glance towards the packed A & E waiting room. ‘To the asylum.’

‘I won’t say that it’s a pleasure, but Gideon didn’t leave me much choice. For some reason your request shot straight to the top of my day’s admittedly short to-do list.’

‘I must have forgotten to tell you that Gideon and I play golf together every Sunday.’

Her gaze tracked from the black bed-hair to the sallow, ravaged face that made Mick Jagger look a picture of clean living, to those disconcerting eyes hiding the sharp, enquiring mind she’d got to know. He had bowed to pressure from above and replaced his beloved black biker jacket with a black suit which hung from his scarecrow frame, only the suit’s drainpipe trousers hinting that he was anything more than a straight-off-the-production-line policeman.

‘Funnily enough, I don’t see you in checked plus-fours.’

He grinned. ‘Masons?’

‘Ditto.

‘Yacht club?’

Jessie rolled her eyes. ‘Shall we get started? I need to be back at Bradley Court by lunchtime. I have work to do. Proper work.’

As they walked side by side down the corridor that cut from A & E to the main hospital, their rubber soles whispering in unison as they gripped and released the lino, Marilyn brought her up to date.

‘We’re not sure how long the baby has been here, but we know that he was left some time before midnight.’

‘Midnight? As in midnight ten hours—’

He held up a hand, cutting her off. ‘Don’t get me started.’

‘He was left by his father?’

‘That’s our working theory. DS Workman and a couple of constables are going through last night’s CCTV footage of the A & E entrance to confirm.’

‘Why would a father abandon his baby?’

‘He abandoned him in a hospital, safe.’

Jessie frowned. ‘A busy A & E department, all sorts coming and going? It’s hardly secure. The fact that the poor kid wasn’t noticed for … what …’ She glanced at her watch, mentally calculating. ‘Seven hours minimum suggests to me that it’s not the first place a caring parent in their right mind would look to deposit their baby for safekeeping.’

‘Right. So the rest of our working theory is that he wasn’t entirely compos mentis at the time.’

Jessie glanced over. ‘Why do you think that?’

They swung left into another corridor, identical to the first. Laying a hand on Jessie’s arm, Marilyn pulled her to a stop outside a door labelled ‘Family Room’. Tilting towards her, he lowered his voice.

‘There’s some history that you need to understand before we meet Granny.’

Jessie caught his tone and raised an eyebrow. ‘And I presume the history is why you wanted me here.’

Marilyn sighed. ‘The history and the story that I suspect may have played itself out last night, and what I fear might be the story going forward.’ He cocked his head towards the family room door. ‘The story that we need to break, as gently as possible, to Granny.’

‘Which is?’

‘The little boy is Harry Lawson. He lives with his father, Malcolm. Malcolm Lawson is also the father of Daniel Lawson.’ He paused. ‘Private Danny Lawson. Ring a bell?’

She shook her head. ‘Should it?’

‘Danny Lawson committed suicide at an Army training base near Camberley a year or so ago. He’d only been in the Army five months. He was sixteen.’

‘I was in Afghanistan with PsyOps around that time. Nothing was on my radar except for that. What happened?’

‘He went AWOL one night while his dorm mates were sleeping. He was found in the showers early the next morning.’

‘And?’

‘And – he had committed suicide.’

‘So you said. How?’

‘The how isn’t important.’

Jessie stared hard at him. ‘If it’s part of the backstory, it is important.’

‘Method isn’t relevant—’

‘Marilyn,’ Jessie cut in.

Marilyn shoved his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders. ‘He suffocated himself.’

‘With a pillow?’

‘Tape.’

A shadow crossed Jessie’s face. ‘Tape?’

‘Gaffer tape,’ Marilyn said in a low voice. ‘He wrapped it around his head, covered his mouth and nose with the stuff.’

‘Bloody hell, poor kid,’ she murmured, her eyes sliding from his, finding a crack in the lino at her feet, tracking its rambling progress to the wall, the image that Marilyn’s words had etched into her mind – how desperate sixteen-year-old Danny must have been, to end his life that way – filling her mind with memories. Memories she struggled, at the best of times, to suppress. A little boy hanging by his school tie from a curtain rail, his gorgeous face bloated and purple. This boy, older, but not by so much, making a mask of his face with black gaffer tape. She felt Marilyn’s eyes burning a hole in the top of her skull.

‘He wouldn’t have had unsupervised access to a gun,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘The tape was what he had to hand.’

Biting her lip, Jessie nodded. Gaffer tape – what he had to hand. A school tie and a curtain rail – what Jamie had had to hand.

‘You OK?’ he asked gently.

Looking up, meeting those odd eyes, she forced a smile, sure that it must look twisted and horrible. ‘What, apart from the dodgy hospital smell and the fact that it’s five hundred degrees centigrade in here? Of course, I’m fine.’

She had formed a friendship of sorts with Marilyn since he had pulled her from the freezing sea in Chichester Harbour four months ago; a comfortable relationship that was characterized by his occasional calls for advice when he felt his own force’s psychologist’s recommendations were way off the mark, the odd cheery email to her whilst she was serving on HMS Daring , emails that had transported her straight back from featureless sea to rolling hills with their description of evenings spent drinking Old Speckled Hen in country pubs, sometimes with Captain Ben Callan. But her own history was something that she didn’t choose to share with anyone besides Ahmose and, once only, in a weak moment, with Callan. She wondered if he knew though, anyway. If Callan had told him. She suspected, from Marilyn’s unease, that he had.

‘So what was Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes’ involvement if Danny Lawson was Army?’ she asked, breaking the laden silence.

‘The Military Police conducted the initial investigation and came to the conclusion that Danny’s death was suicide. But Danny’s dad, Malcolm, refused to accept the verdict. He wrote to his MP, the Defence Secretary, the Armed Forces Minister, even the bloody Prime Minister, anyone and everyone he could think of, calling for the investigation to be reopened by the civvy police. Police without prejudice, I remember he called it. He claimed that the Redcaps were covering up murder. That the Army had so many problems dealing with the Middle East that they didn’t want to admit kids were being murdered on their home turf. I got a call from the Surrey County Coroner telling me that we were to do another investigation.’