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.
Jessie yanked out the catalogue, knocked and waited. The whole place had an air of isolation and neglect. The utter silence was oppressive; she couldn’t even hear birdsong. Though she loved her own cottage, she also liked having Ahmose next door, within shouting distance, if she ever needed him. This place was too secluded, felt as if it could almost be alone on the planet. Being a psychologist hadn’t anesthetized her to imaginary fears. It was actually the opposite. Accessing the dark side of other people’s minds had made her imagination more feverish. She knew that if it were she out here alone, in darkness, every sound would be a window being cracked open from the outside. Shivering, she rubbed a hand over the back of her neck. It was cold today, the sky flinty-grey with clouds and she wished that she had put a thicker coat on.
A woman of around sixty opened the door. She wore an apron, bearing the legend, You must be confusing me with the maid we don’t have, accompanied by a photograph of a cone-breasted woman in a pencil skirt and twinset.
‘I won’t shake your hand,’ she said, holding up a marigold-gloved hand coated with soapsuds. ‘I was in the middle of washing up.’ Jessie noticed a slight Midland twang underneath a voice that was brisk and efficient. ‘I’m Wendy Chubb, and you must be Dr Flynn.’
Jessie smiled. ‘Please call me Jessie.’
‘Come in, won’t you.’ She closed the door behind Jessie, face wrinkling at the cold air that blew with them into the room. ‘Sami’s upstairs in his bedroom playing with his toys. Major Scott’s in the sitting room. He asked me to tell you to pop in and see him first before your session with Sami.’ Wendy smiled. ‘Must be interesting being a psychologist. Satisfying too, sorting out people’s minds for them. I could do with a bit of that myself.’
Jessie laughed. ‘If only it was that easy. Sometimes I think that we psychologists create more problems than we solve.’
‘Well, I hope you can help Sami. He’s a delightful little boy, he is. Intelligent too. He helped me make a cake the other day. Managed to weigh all the ingredients out with hardly any help.’ She met Jessie’s gaze, pale eyelashes blinking. ‘What do you think is the matter with him?’
Jessie shrugged. She wasn’t about to break patient confidentiality, even if she did have a clue at this early stage, which she didn’t.
‘I’ve only seen him once.’ Subconsciously, she touched a hand to the scar on her head. ‘He seems scared and very troubled.’
Wendy nodded. ‘Been in the wars?’
‘A brief scuffle with my car door,’ Jessie lied.
‘Car doors can be dangerous. Any doors can be dangerous. I got my thumb jammed in one of Nooria’s kitchen cabinets. Some of them were damaged and she asked me to help her replace them, make it nice for when Major Scott got back from Afghanistan. I thought I’d taken my thumb clean off it was so painful. Luckily it was only bruising, but even so.’ She gave quick bright laugh, canted towards Jessie and lowered her voice. ‘Shocking thing, what happened to the Major. Affected Sami terribly badly. Scared of being burnt, he is. While we were making that cake, he was fine, but as soon as I lit the gas on the cooker he got awfully frightened. Ran up to his room crying and wouldn’t come back down.’
Jessie’s face remained impassive, but she was now listening intently. Patient confidentiality and her own moral code prevented her from giving out information, but she could gain some. Everything she learnt about a patient helped her construct a picture of causation and of what intervention they would need to help heal them. Some sources were more reliable than others, but every bit of information was a segment in the ten-million-piece, incredibly complex, opaque jigsaw that made up the human mind.
‘He was talking about being burnt when I saw him yesterday.’
Wendy frowned. ‘Can’t blame the little lad. It was terribly traumatic for him when his father got back from Afghanistan. He was already in a bit of a state, frightened like, when his mum brought him to the hospital. Probably because they’d been alone out here every