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

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. Aschooltieandacurtainrail–whatJamiehadhadtohand.

‘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.’

‘And?’

Marilyn sighed and shrugged. ‘We reviewed all the evidence and found the same. Suicide.’

‘Cut and dried.’

‘Cut and dried. There was no evidence to suggest murder – and I promise you, I did look for it.’

‘But Malcolm didn’t accept your findings either,’ Jessie murmured.

‘No. No, he didn’t.’ His voice slipped to a monotone. ‘He kept on and on and on. Wrote back to the same cast of politicians, wrote to all the papers, tried to whip up a media storm, but there was nothing there, no story, so none of them bit.’

‘Why was he so determined?’

‘I don’t know. I just remember how mad he was with grief. Grief and anger. I was surprised that he was so damn angry. Grief, I expected, sadness, loss, guilt even, but not anger.’

Jessie was looking at the floor, her arms folded across her chest, defensive body language, she recognized, but too tense to unwrap. ‘Anger is often the go-to emotion that masks others. Sadness, grief, loss – they can all morph into anger, particularly if they’re mixed with frustration or perceived helplessness. It’s hard for family members to accept … suicide.’ She swallowed, eased the word out around the wad that had formed in her throat. ‘Because where there’s suicide, there is a deep, debilitating hopelessness that the victim can’t see a way around. The family often blame themselves because they didn’t notice, or didn’t realize the depth of despair. Guilt, blame, self-recrimination, self-blame – they can eat you up. It’s always easier to look somewhere else to lay that blame.’ She glanced up, met Marilyn’s gaze for a fraction of a second, couldn’t hold it. ‘Children shouldn’t die before their parents,’ she murmured, tracing the meandering crack in the grey lino with the toe of her ballet pump. ‘It flips the law of nature on its head. A parent is programmed to protect their child at all costs, to do anything to keep that child safe, however old the child is.’

A child. A son. Committing suicide.

Jessie had held on to her own grief, dealing with the pain the only way a fourteen-year-old knew: internalizing it, taking the blame for her brother’s suicide squarely on her own shoulders. She had the psychological scars to prove it. Danny Lawson’s father sounded to have done the opposite and looked for someone else to blame. Anyone else to blame. Either way, she knew exactly what he had been going through.

She felt the weight of Marilyn’s hand on her arm. ‘We should go in now, Jessie.’

She nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

9 (#ulink_f4c6d7c7-21b3-5c41-a579-59cd6cdb3f42)

Slipping on his Oakley’s, Callan walked slowly, collecting his thoughts with each step following the line of Blackdown’s chain-link, razor-wire-topped boundary fence, towards the thick wooded area where he could see Lieutenant Ed Gold and the scenes of crime boys.

Although he was still two hundred metres away, Callan could see the arrogant rigidity of Gold’s stance, recognize the disproportionate command in the staccato arcs of his gestures, hear each word of his barked orders clear as a bell. Gold was in his element, enjoying the control, even though the scenes of crime technicians were consummate professionals who needed no guidance. Callan would take pleasure in rescuing them, bursting Gold’s bubble.

Callan glanced at his watch. It was a quarter past ten. He was late to the scene, very late. He had received the call notifying him of a suspicious death at Blackdown training base sixty minutes ago, while he’d been sitting in his neurologist’s office, digesting bad news. He only hoped that Gold hadn’t fucked up the crime scene already, though the presence of Sergeant Glyn Morgan, his lead SOCO, a forest ghoul moving silently through the trees in his white overalls, gave him a modicum of confidence that some integrity may have been preserved.

Gold glanced over, caught sight of Callan and the next order died on his lips.