again.
Rounding the final bend, her headlights picked out an unfamiliar car parked outside her cottage, a red Golf GTI, complete with spoiler and sports profiling. It looked like a pimp’s ride. A man she didn’t recognize was standing on her minute patch of lawn, arms folded across his chest, studying the leafless wisteria clogging the front wall. Behind him, her retired next-door-neighbour, Ahmose Rahotep, was standing on Jessie’s doorstep, leaning on his stick, mouth pressed into a thin, tight line.
At the sound of her engine, the man turned. He was about thirty, broad shouldered and long limbed, dressed in grey jogging bottoms, and a navy-blue hooded sweatshirt. She realized, suddenly, that there was something familiar about him. Something she couldn’t quite place.
Pulling up behind the Golf, Jessie cut her engine. Her head was still throbbing, Sami’s look of utter terror fixed in her mind. She had wanted to come home to a silent house and a glass of wine, space to think, to get a head start before she saw Sami again tomorrow and met his father, Major Nicholas Scott, for the first time.
No such luck.
With a sigh, she opened the car door. The man walked down the path as she climbed out and met her on the lane. Recognition dawned. Virtually all resemblance to his former self, the man she had last seen, a skeletal shadow, a hermit in his mother’s house, confined to those unusual amber eyes. Her gaze found the scar from the bullet wound on his temple, damaged, stitched skin like the brown petals of a dead rose.
Captain Ben Callan, Military Police Special Investigation Branch. The only patient she had treated since she joined the Defence Psychology Service, two years previously, who she felt she’d completely and utterly failed.
‘Ben … Captain Callan.’ Her gaze dipped to the red-and-gold Royal Military Police insignia on his blue hoodie. ‘You’re—’ She broke off.
‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m back.’
Pushing her hair from her face, wincing as her fingertips dragged against the cut Sami had inflicted with his torch, Jessie looked up at him. He was clean-shaven, his sandy-blond hair cut short. He looked as if he’d had a few proper meals since she’d last seen him in July, had added muscle at the gym. But vestiges of his Afghan experience, the last few months of the fight to reclaim his sanity, clung to him. He was still ten kilos lighter than the photographs she had seen on his mother’s mantelpiece. Black shadowed the skin beneath his eyes, which contained a watchfulness, a twitchy awareness of everything that was happening around him. She had seen that same look in many of the other veterans she had counselled, men and women who had survived long tours in a war zone – Afghanistan, Iraq – and frequent contact with a ubiquitous enemy. He clearly wasn’t sleeping properly, was most likely having ongoing nightmares.
‘How are you, Dr Flynn?’ He grimaced at the cut on her head. ‘Not good.’
She shrugged. ‘I had a run-in with a small boy. As you can see, I lost.’
‘Small boys can be dangerous.’ He met her gaze, the ghost of a smile crossing his face. ‘Big boys even more so.’
She cocked an eyebrow. ‘So I’ve been told.’
‘I’m glad to see your patients aren’t letting you get the better of them, at least.’
‘Round two tomorrow, so we’ll see.’
She moved past him and he turned to follow her.
‘What do you want?’ she cast over her shoulder.
‘I need your help.’
‘My help? I thought you’d had enough of my help to last you a lifetime.’
‘With a case.’
She pushed open her garden gate. ‘As you can see from my war wound, I already have a case. In fact I have a five-centimetre-high stack of them sitting on my desk, begging for attention.’
‘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.