The Burning

JENNY TRIED AGAIN TO SWALLOW a mouthful of wine, but it tasted as sour as vinegar. She threw the rest of the glass into the sink in disgust. Everything had turned rotten in one afternoon, and now she couldn’t even drink to dull the pain. Alone, and with no more tears left to shed, she wandered listlessly from room to room, her emotions veering wildly from fury to self-pity. How could he? How could he? It didn’t matter that the girl who had left Michael the message had clearly been let down by him as well. It almost made it worse that he was as cowardly with the girls he picked up as he was with her. And if there had been one, she could be sure there had been more. Michael would insist they meant nothing to him, and he would probably mean it sincerely – what, after all, could be more meaningless and ultimately repellent than empty sex with someone you barely know? – but she would never again be able to trust him. And without trust, there was nothing. Jenny had become Michael’s middle-aged fantasy, that was all – a comfortable berth to return to after each new foray. A woman to love and mother him but who could never excite him like the silky-skinned young girls who still came willingly to his hotel bed.

No wonder he had been behaving oddly. She suspected he had got out of his depth with this particular conquest and that she had fallen in love with him; made demands; pricked his conscience. He wasn’t heartless – he could feel, all right; sometimes he could even cry like a child – he was just thoughtless. So ruled by a need to blot out all the pain of his past, with one young body after another, that he couldn’t see the damage he was causing. Maybe there was a woman somewhere prepared to take him on occasional loan, but Jenny was now sure beyond doubt that it wasn’t her.

No. She would rather see out her days alone than with a man who could never truly love her.

Along with this thought came a sudden sense of clarity. Over the course of the previous few days she had tried to convince herself that she could be part of a couple living under one roof again, but if she were honest, she had never completely surrendered herself to the idea. And now she knew why: she must have sensed his infidelity. She decided to act, to reclaim her dignity and let him know what she thought. She went through to her study, picked up the phone and dialled the number of Michael’s hotel. She got through to the same helpful receptionist she had spoken to before, who put her through to his room. Jenny readied herself for the confrontation, but the phone went unanswered and connected to voicemail.

She kept it short, her voice steady and composed: ‘Michael, your girlfriend – I assume that’s what she is, or was – left a message on your phone. She was most upset to hear from Pascale that you’re currently in Zurich and hadn’t called her. There we are. That was all.’

She dropped the phone back on the hook and felt a weight lifting from her shoulders. The sensation was as strange as it was unexpected. She felt almost elated and invincible, like a victorious fighter. Holding onto the feeling, she went upstairs, stripped the sheets from her bed that had remained unchanged since Michael had left on New Year’s Day, and ran herself a deep bath to wash his memory away.

Jenny had feared that her giddy feeling of indomitability was too good to last. It had sustained her through the night, but by the time she pulled up outside her office in Jamaica Street the following morning, the nausea that had driven her away the previous afternoon was threatening to return. Meeting it with angry exasperation, she headed inside, determined not to weaken.

Marching down the hallway and shouldering open the door, she found Alison with the workman who had been there the previous morning.

‘Mr Lafferty’s back to check everything’s in working order. That’s his story, anyway.’

‘Thank you, Mr Lafferty,’ Jenny said curtly and continued on into her office.

‘Don’t mind her,’ she heard Alison whisper. ‘She takes a little while to warm up in the mornings. Never had that trouble myself.’

Jenny closed the door on them, deciding that she really would have to do something about Alison’s behaviour. It would a mean a letter to her neurologist and all the emotional fallout and recriminations, but the alternative was risking a major professional embarrassment that she could ill afford.

Checking her emails, she ran her eyes down the list of thirty or more messages, but registered only one. It was from Michael and had been sent at 3 a.m. For that reason alone it would have been tempting to delete it unread, but after a moment’s indecision she clicked it open. It was thankfully short:

Jenny, I’m sorry. There is no excuse so I won’t insult you any more by attempting one. Yes, it happened just before Christmas – for the first and only time since I met you, I slept with someone else. The biggest mistake of my life. I feel sick with guilt and more certain than I have ever been that you are the only woman I could ever love.

For what it’s worth now, I meant everything I said to you this weekend and I just can’t imagine life without you. I’ve only myself to blame, but please believe me, Jenny – every word of this is true.

I love you.

Michael

Jenny stared at the screen knowing that the right response would be to fire back an email telling him to go to hell, but as her fingers reached for the keys they refused to obey. She realized that it wasn’t only anger that she felt, but disappointment, and not only with Michael, but with herself. He had represented something of a fantasy to her, too: a tough pilot, a man who had flown fighter jets, whom she had allowed herself to believe wasn’t afflicted by the usual human fears and weaknesses. A man who could make her feel safe. But he wasn’t that at all. He was as fallible as she was.

Her struggle to formulate a reply was interrupted by Alison bursting in unannounced.

‘Everything’s working fine. Shouldn’t be any more problems. He may have been cheeky, but he was cheap. Two hundred, cash.’

‘I went to the ATM on the way in. You’re always saying we need to save money.’

‘Hold on – didn’t he say this repair was being covered by his company? Something about frozen connections? Nothing to do with us?’

Jenny sighed. The feeling of sickness that she had temporarily managed to face down was returning with a vengeance. ‘Look, Alison, I’m very much aware that we haven’t dealt properly with your medical situation. I’ve given it some thought, and I think I’ll have to ask your neurologist for a report – just to make sure we all know where we stand.’

‘I didn’t have any problem dealing with Mr Burden after you’d gone yesterday.’ She dropped the document she was holding onto the desk. ‘I took his statement, and then I chased up the lab for the DNA results on Layla Hart.’

‘Thank you,’ Jenny said, feeling a twinge of guilt. ‘Did they find anything?’

‘Something and nothing. They got some usable samples from the tissue Dr Kerr sent over. It was too damaged to create a complete profile, but there was enough to compare with the sample we took from Ed Morgan after Susie Ashton went missing.’

‘He wasn’t the father. Not even close. The full report will be with us tomorrow.’

Jenny slowly absorbed the implications of this news. Just because Ed wasn’t the father didn’t mean he hadn’t behaved inappropriately with Layla, but it made the prospect of finding evidence to prove it close to impossible.

‘Oh, well,’ Jenny said, ‘I suppose that’s one small crumb of comfort for her mother. Tell me about your meeting with Mr Burden.’

‘He couldn’t have been any more ordinary. Works in the back office of a builders’ merchant down in Somerset. Married, two kids, boring car . . .’

‘Not exactly, but when you hear his story you can start to join the dots. Both brothers were put into foster care when they were teenagers. Usual tale – violent dad, mum not coping. Tony – that’s the older one – was sent to a family in Wells, who treated him like one of their own. Diana – as she then was – went from one family to the other and ended up in a home. Tony thinks she got into drugs while she was there and probably did what girls like that mostly do to pay for an expensive habit. She picked up a couple of juvenile convictions for possession, but somehow had the sense to join the Navy at seventeen and started to pull herself together. Her brother had no idea she had gender issues until she came out with it all in her early twenties. And once she’d made up her mind, that was it. She left the Navy, got a job in the civil service, and as far as he could tell, devoted her life to convincing the doctors she should be allowed the treatment. It took a few years, but she got there in the end.’

‘I asked him about that. He said he thought Daniel had been putting money by to have the surgery done in the US. Apparently that’s where you’ve got to go for the state-of-the-art procedures. That’s the only reason he was holding out.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Alison said. ‘See?’ She tapped her temple. ‘Not so empty after all. Read on – I took it down word for word.’

Jenny turned to the second and final page of the statement, and found a paragraph in which Anthony Burden gave his thoughts on his brother’s possible reasons for committing suicide:

All I can think of is that it was something to do with a relationship that went wrong. I know Dan had the occasional girlfriend, not that he introduced me to any of them, but there definitely was that side to his life and it was always women he was into. He’d changed sex, but his sexuality always remained the same. I’ve no idea why he would have been in touch with a Polish businessman. That makes no sense to me at all. I must have seen Dan five or six times in the last year, and there was no hint that he was unhappy. He used to spend a lot of time on his computer. Maybe you’ll find something there.

‘I’ve asked CID to bring it over today,’ Alison said. ‘I’ve arranged to send it for data retrieval.’

‘No need to sound surprised, Mrs Cooper. I’ve got more for you, too. I had a word with one of my old colleagues in CID and managed to get hold of Daniel Burden’s bank details. I haven’t got detailed statements through yet, but according to his account manager he had nearly fifty grand put away. I called his brother last night to ask if he knew how he came by it, and he didn’t have a clue. He grossed just over thirty at the passport office, so it doesn’t seem likely it all came out of his wages.’

‘No,’ Jenny agreed, now more confused than ever by Alison’s many internal contradictions.

‘I’d bet my house on it being drugs,’ Alison said. ‘Maybe not Class A, but steroids, hormones, all that kind of stuff. That’s where all the smart money is these days. Back in the nineties it was heroin chic, now you’ve got to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.’

Jenny recalled how clean and orderly Burden’s flat had been. A considerate suicide. He hadn’t left a note, which sometimes – but not always – was an indication that the deceased had felt too ashamed of something to commit the details to paper. But even so, those who couldn’t bring themselves to write a note often inadvertently left a clue to the cause of their unhappiness. Burden’s laptop had been set to a pornographic website, which was so obvious a signal that Jenny found herself wondering whether it might not have been intended to throw her or the police off the scent.

‘There’s little point speculating now,’ Jenny said. ‘Let’s see what turns up.’ She reached for the file she had opened on Burden’s case and slotted his brother’s statement in next to those of the police officers who had discovered the body. Tempting as it would have been to spend time delving into Burden’s past, she needed to direct all her slender resources at the inquest she was opening in only five days’ time. And daunting as the prospect was, she had little choice but to continue to rely on Alison’s help. ‘Do you think you could manage a trip out of the office to take a statement?’ Jenny asked her.

Jenny had to acknowledge that she had. She put her doubts to one side. ‘Kelly Hart worked as a cleaner for a family called the Grants. Big house with a tennis court, just outside Blackstone Ley. Husband’s a solicitor. And according to Nicky Brooks, their seventeen-year-old son slept with Layla last summer.’

‘Nice to be eased back into the job gently,’ Alison said. ‘Good morning, madam, is it true your boy committed statutory rape?’

‘You’re right. I should go.’ Jenny climbed out of her chair, but found herself grabbing the edge of the desk as the blood rushed from her head. Stars appeared in front of her eyes.

‘It’s not completely unknown at your age, Mrs Cooper,’ Alison said. ‘My mother had my youngest brother at forty-five.’

‘I’m probably wrong, but I’d check if I were you – if only to put your mind at rest. I’ll pop off to see the Grants now, shall I?’ She went to the door ahead of Jenny and opened it for her. ‘After you, Mrs Cooper.’

There was a chemist’s shop in the small arcade that stood several doors along from Jenny’s office, but she walked on past, too embarrassed to purchase a test kit over the counter from the assistant who knew her by name. She didn’t believe for a moment that Alison could be correct in her diagnosis; it was unthinkable. She couldn’t have arrived in her late forties only to find herself pregnant by a man who had cheated on her. Life couldn’t be that unfair, not even hers. But however absurd, now the idea had been planted, she couldn’t rest until she had discounted the possibility. She made her way down Park Street, crossed over College Green and went on past the cathedral to the new development at the harbour-side. There she found a supermarket that served the residents of the neighbouring apartments. Moving between the aisles in comfortable anonymity, she sought out the pharmacy section, selected the most expensive product from the shelf and passed as quickly as she could through the self-service checkout. She emerged onto the street feeling like a shamefaced teenager, stuffed her secret purchase deep into her coat-pocket and turned back towards the office.

She had hardly gone ten yards when her phone rang. Dreading that it was Michael, she fetched it out, ready to switch it off immediately, but it was DI Ryan’s name on the screen. Fighting the urge to dodge the conversation, she told herself to be strong and took the call.

‘It was interesting, though not in the way we expected. Any chance of having a quick chat? I’ve just come from a meeting with colleagues at Broadmead. I could be at your office in ten minutes.’

Jenny stalled, not sure that she could survive a face-to-face meeting until she’d done her test.

Ryan persisted. ‘Or we could meet up for a quick coffee somewhere. That might be best – I’d like to keep what I have to say strictly between ourselves for the time being.’

He didn’t have to spell it out. Jenny knew that he meant he didn’t altogether trust Alison with sensitive information, and she didn’t blame him.

‘OK, if we’re quick,’ Jenny said. ‘I can meet you at No. 1 Harbourside in ten minutes.’

From her seat at the window, Jenny watched the gang of kids on the dockside throw snowballs onto the hard-frozen surface of the harbour, where they exploded amongst the other missiles that passers-by, excited at the novelty, had tossed onto the ice: tin cans, stones, several traffic cones, and a half-submerged shopping trolley, the back half of which jutted into the air at an incongruous angle.

Jenny looked up to see DI Ryan approaching with a cup of coffee. ‘I did wave. You were lost in thought.’

‘I must have been,’ Jenny said, puzzled by how she had failed to see him. ‘I don’t think it’s a sculpture, just a trolley some drunks threw in. It does look a little surreal, though.’

‘One would be polemical,’ Ryan said, pulling up a seat. ‘I’d argue it would take two or more to make it surreal.’

He gave an apologetic smile. ‘I took a third-year module in the psychology of art. You’re one of very few people to whom I’ve ever confessed that.’

‘One of them.’ He cast a subtle glance around the cafe tables and saw only a smattering of student and arty types. No one to cause him any concern. ‘We didn’t get anywhere with the coat, sadly. but something else turned up.’ He brought a clear plastic bag with a tag attached. Inside was a mobile phone. ‘It was jammed into a stack of felled timber on a forest track about a quarter of a mile down the road from Kelly’s place.’

‘Who else? It’s got his Facebook on there, but no emails or texts, no contacts, nothing – they’ve been wiped. SIM’s missing, too. It’s as if he wanted it to be found, but only to wind us up some more.’

‘Let’s face it,’ Jenny said, ‘no one annihilates their family on a whim.’

‘I guess not.’ He nodded to the bag. ‘You can keep it. I’ll send you over a finder’s statement later. How about you – anything useful at the Brookses’ place?’

‘What I mostly learned was that Darren Brooks has spent the last ten years hoping Kelly would come running back to him.’

‘We suspected that,’ Ryan said, taking a sip of his coffee, ‘but I doubt he got lucky. Kelly doesn’t strike me as the kind to repeat her mistakes.’

Ryan nodded. ‘Point taken. But until he blew, Ed was a quiet, dependable type. I think that suited her. As she told us, she had enough going on with three kids without more excitement.’

Jenny noticed the careful way Ryan was holding his cup. He had gentle hands, not quite womanly, but almost. She kept expecting to come up against the tough side of his character that had attracted him to his profession, but she hadn’t seen much evidence of it yet.

‘Self-contained women drive men more crazy than any other kind,’ Ryan said, as if thinking aloud, ‘especially ones as attractive as Kelly. The less of herself she gives away, the more room there is to fill with fantasy – like a model in a magazine.’

‘And more than a little painful experience.’ He finished his coffee and glanced at his stylish wristwatch. ‘Much as I’d like to stay for another, I should be getting back to Gloucester. When’s the inquest?’

‘I’ll try not to trouble you unless I have to.’ She lifted her coat from the back of her chair.

‘Would it be inappropriate of me to ask if you might be free for a drink one evening?’

Blind-sided by his question, Jenny looked away, finding herself unable to answer.

‘Sorry – I didn’t mean to embarrass you. It’s just that you seem such an interesting person. And a little sad.’ He calmly buttoned his coat. ‘Good luck with the inquest. Any time.’

Jenny remained by the table as Ryan walked out of the cafe and disappeared along the quay. She caught her reflection in the glass: she barely recognized the bewildered, middle-aged face looking back at her. What would a good-looking young man like Ryan see in her? She looked so tired. She looked like her mother.

It was the strangest of days and surely couldn’t get any stranger. Jenny pulled on her coat, thrust the bag containing Ed Morgan’s phone in one pocket and felt her fingers tighten around the small cardboard package in the other. She threaded her way between the cafe tables and went through the door decorated with painted flowers.

Pregnancy tests had changed in twenty-three years. There were no ambiguous blue dots to interpret; a small digital display pronounced the result with unerring certainty: Pregnant. 3+. She had been pregnant for nearly a month, which meant it had happened during Michael’s last overnight visit in early December. Jenny had been carrying his child while he cheated on her.

Now what? She didn’t have an answer. She simply stared at the back of the cubicle door and sobbed.

EIGHTEEN