Scared to Death: A gripping crime thriller you won’t be able to put down

She took a few more steps, pretending that she hadn’t heard Marilyn’s call. The corner was an arm’s length away. If she swung around it, she could run down the next corridor, cut through A & E and disappear outside before he caught up with her. Escape.

‘Jessie, I know that you can hear me,’ Marilyn called, louder. ‘I don’t do jogging, so wait.’

She stopped, turned slowly to face him.

‘Jesus Christ, I need a drink after that,’ he muttered, catching up with her.

‘It wasn’t the best.’

‘So what do you think?’

Jessie focused on a patch of dried damp on the wall opposite, the result of a historic leak long since repaired but not repainted, avoiding meeting his eyes. ‘I think that you need to find Malcolm Lawson quickly.’

‘Isn’t it likely that he’s already dead?’

‘You can’t make that assumption. He has all sorts of conflicting emotions careering around in his head. Depression, exhaustion, hopelessness sure, but Mrs Lawson is right when she says that he also has a lot of positive emotions, pushing against those negative drivers. He believes in God, and suicide is a sin in the eyes of any Christian church. His older son committed suicide and he was horrified by that. And he has Harry, and for the past year that baby has been the centre of his world—’ She broke off with a shake of her head. ‘Mrs Lawson was adamant that he wouldn’t commit suicide.’

‘And you believe her?’ Marilyn asked gently.

Jessie sighed. ‘No … yes … no. I think that there is a lot of wishing and hoping that’s fuelling her belief. But I also know that suicide won’t be an easy choice for him. You can’t assume that he’s already dead.’

‘So we should be out looking for him?’

‘You should. Now.’

Marilyn tipped back on his heels and blew air out of his nose. ‘It would be a hell of a lot easier if I knew where to start.’

‘There’s no word on his car? If he left Harry here at around midnight, it makes sense to assume that he drove.’

‘It does, but we’ve had no word so far and every squad car in the county has been told to keep an eye out for it.’ Marilyn held out an arm. ‘Shall we get out of here, talk outside? This place is giving me hives.’

They walked towards the exit. Sweat was trickling down Jessie’s spine, pasting her shirt to her back. Marilyn was carrying his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, his lined face gummy with perspiration.

‘Why would Malcolm have decided now?’ he asked.

Jessie shrugged. She had asked herself that question virtually every day of the fifteen years since her little brother’s suicide and she still hadn’t come up with an answer that satisfied her. It seemed to come down to opportunity. Opportunity because she had left him alone, gone to Wimbledon Common with her boyfriend, leaving Jamie to be dropped home to a dark, empty house by someone else’s mother, while she had lied to her own, told her that she would be there to look after him.

‘The straw that broke the camel’s back.’

Marilyn smiled, a half-hearted attempt to lighten the moment. ‘Is that a technical term?’

Jessie returned his smile with one equally lacklustre. ‘You have to get all the way to PhD level before you can use it.’

‘So what was the straw?’

‘It could be any of a number of things. A significant date, the time of year, the weather. Despite what most people think, suicide rates peak in the spring and early summer – April, May, June.’

‘I would have thought winter. Winter is depressing.’

‘Yes, but everybody is depressed in winter. In spring, most people’s mood lifts. Warmer weather, flowers and trees coming into bloom, baby animals being born, new life – it makes everyone happier. Those people who are clinically depressed suddenly realize that they’re more alone, more isolated than they had thought. I know this isn’t helpful, but it could be one of a thousand things. He could simply have had enough. Reached the end, the point that he couldn’t go on fighting any more.’

They made it to the exit, stepped outside. Weaving through the crowd of smokers they surfaced into clear air and turned to face each other.

‘I appreciate you coming here today, Jessie.’

‘Find him, Marilyn. Find him quickly.’

Jessie was halfway to the car park when an April downpour came from nowhere and turned the tarmac into a boiling slick of bubbles within seconds. Breaking into a run, she reached her Mini, yanked open the driver’s door and dived inside, already soaked. Starting the engine, she flipped the wipers to maximum, heard them groan against the weight of water, clearing visibility, losing it. Scrubbing the condensation from the inside of the windscreen with the sleeve of her shirt, she eased the Mini back off the grass verge and crawled at snail’s pace to the exit. As she pulled out of the hospital car park on to the main road, the rain still sheeting, she saw Joan Lawson with Harry in his pushchair, waiting at the bus stop. There was no shelter and the old lady had obviously come out without an umbrella because she was standing, looking fixedly down the road in the direction of the oncoming traffic, rain flattening her silver hair to her head and pasting her white shirt to her body.

Passing the bus stop, Jessie flicked on her indicator and bumped two tyres on to the kerb. She couldn’t leave them standing there, getting drenched.

But what else could she do? She didn’t have a child seat and there was no way the pram would fit in her Mini. She didn’t even have an umbrella, a coat, anything to offer. Cursing her uselessness, she waited for a space in the traffic and eased back into its flow, watched them recede in the oval of her rear-view mirror, blurring under the downpour until they were toy people, the old lady still staring down the road, the bus nowhere in sight.

12 (#ulink_03ad48e2-ad67-52ed-a5bb-8f293f78d873)

‘Captain Callan?’

The man who had manoeuvred himself in front of Callan in the doorway, who was now holding out his hand and fixing Callan with a limpid green gaze, was as Irish as Guinness and leprechauns. He was around Callan’s own age, but there the similarity stopped. Fine ginger hair feathered his head, freckles peppered his pallid face and the skin on his bare, extended forearm looked as if it would burn to a crisp in mid-winter. His body was soft and paunchy, his features slightly feminine looking. But the expression on his face was steadfast. Callan’s gaze found the purple pentagon bordering the black crown on his epaulettes, the purple band around the cap that he was holding in his left hand, and his heart sank. He took hold of the proffered hand firmly.

‘Chaplain. What can I do for you?’

‘I’m Michael O’Shaughnessy, the padre here at Blackdown. Could I have a quiet word please, Captain.’ He glanced past Callan to where a group of shock-faced sixteen-year-olds, last night’s guard detachment, fidgeted on chairs in the larger of the two rooms that Gold had secured for interviews. ‘In private.’

The only Army officers who didn’t carry standard ranks, chaplains could hail from any Christian religion or Judaism, but were expected to provide pastoral care to any soldier who needed it, irrespective of the soldier’s faith – or lack of it. All very worthy, but O’Shaughnessy’s presence in this room with Callan’s witnesses, his suspects, made him deeply uneasy. The last thing he needed was God or his earthly representative getting in the way of his investigation.

They stepped outside and Callan turned to face O’Shaughnessy. Though shards of sunlight were knifing through the grey clouds, it had started to rain, a soft patter on the tarmac around them. The chaplain gazed blandly up at Callan.

‘You’re leading the investigation into this poor, unfortunate boy’s death, I presume?’ His tone was soft, the lilt southern Irish, nothing hurried about his diction, no urgency.

Callan nodded, feeling impatience rear its head already. He resisted the urge to glance at this watch.

‘I would ask you to suspend your interviews for a few hours, send the boys and girls back to their accommodation blocks for a bit of downtime. You can resume later today, when they’ve rested. Perhaps even tomorrow morning.’

Callan frowned. ‘These “boys and girls”, as you call them, are witness to and potentially suspects in a suspicious death.’

‘Is it definitely murder?’

‘I won’t know for sure until the autopsy, but it looks that way.’ His tone was curt, deliberately so. He still felt like shit, didn’t have the mental or physical energy to exchange niceties with the chaplain. He wanted this conversation over, wanted to get back to doing his job.

‘This is a training base, Captain, for the Royal Logistic Corps, as you know. These are kids, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, for the most part. They are all tired and scared. You will get far more sense from them if you give them a chance to sleep, to get some rest.’

‘This is an Army base, Chaplain. These kids joined voluntarily and were legally old enough to make that decision.’

A shadow crossed O’Shaughnessy’s face. ‘They’re hardly Parachute Regiment or SAS, though, are they?’

‘They’re still Army, none of them conscripts.’ Stillwitnesses.Stillsuspects.

The rain was getting heavier; Callan could feel cold water funnelling down the back of his neck. He flipped up his collar and hunched his shoulders in his navy suit. O’Shaughnessy appeared not to notice the burgeoning downpour. Coming from Ireland, he was no doubt used to it. ‘Nobody is going anywhere, until I, or one of my team has spoken with them. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’ Callan turned to go inside.