Fire Damage: A gripping thriller that will keep you hooked. Kate Medina

heaved from the effort of drawing in breath. Jessie stayed silent, waiting. Gradually, he moved from the wall, the heavy torch hugged close to his body like a loved teddy bear. One step. Another. The movements jerky, uncoordinated. His face, hauntingly pale, began to take on colour.

      The torch’s beam reflected off the patent leather of Jessie’s ballet pumps, was dull on the denim of her skirt, tinged the white of her shirt citrus. The beam found her face. She smiled, compelled herself not to blink. Knew that beyond the light that fuzzed her vision, Sami was watching her intently, obsessively focused on every cue.

      The torch dipped. Jessie raised her eyes, and for a fraction of a second their gazes met.

      ‘The girl knows,’ he whispered.

      Sami’s breath came fast and shallow; Jessie could feel it, hot and cold, damp against her cheek. Then came the soft touch of his fingers.

      ‘Grrrrr. Grrrrr.’

      That growling noise again, from the back of his throat. She sat completely motionless, staring ahead, making no sound. With lightning quickness, his fingers touched her neck and were gone. Jessie forced herself not to flinch. She could sense him only millimetres from her, the heat of the torch beam mapping a circle on her skin.

      His fingers again, touching her hair this time, butterfly wings. She had tied her hair up in a ponytail to get it out of the way. Usually she wore it in the regulation bun when she was at work, but she had felt that it was too formal, too severe for today’s patient. Reaching up, she tugged the elastic band from her hair. A jet-black curtain fell to her waist. The hair swallowed his arms, coating his hands and forearms to the elbows.

      Sami froze.

      ‘Sami, what’s wrong.’

      Without warning, he swung the heavy metal Maglite wildly at Jessie’s head, slamming its metal edge into her temple. He swung again, smashing the torch against the side of her head. Raising her hands to fend him off, she ducked. Another blow caught her cheekbone, glanced off her shoulder. Dizziness. The floor rose, the ceiling dipped. She managed to snatch the Maglite from his grip as she fell to her hands and knees. Blood streamed from the gash in her head, into her eyes, blinding her.

      He was screaming. Dragging her sleeve across her eyes, she spun on to her back, searching for the noise, searching for Sami. He had slid to the floor, hands pressed over his ears, body curled tight into a foetal position. He was wailing and sobbing, his chest heaving as if there was not enough air in the room. Crawling over, Jessie wrapped her arms around him. Held him tight. Felt him struggle and kick, writhe and scream. Felt his heart beating, almost punching its way out of his chest. Didn’t let go.

      Thought of another little boy, fifteen years ago, equally helpless and terrified. A little boy she had loved. Loved and failed.

      ‘Burnt,’ Sami sobbed. ‘Arms burnt.’

      ‘Nothing’s burnt. You’re safe.’

      She could feel blood running down the side of her face, her cheek and neck slick with it.

      ‘The girl is burnt. The man is burnt.’ His voice was hoarse from screaming. ‘Sami torch? Sami torch?’

      Jessie found his torch, fumbled it back into his grip.

      ‘Shadowman,’ he whispered, clutching the torch to his heart. ‘The Shadowman came. The girl knows.’

       2

      Jessie stood in the women’s toilets and stared at herself in the mirror. She was shaking, her stomach churning. The cut on her forehead was a deep scarlet slash against the milky white of her skin, still bleeding. Her temple was throbbing, an egg-shaped bruise already forming under the skin. Tugging some paper from the hand dryer, she soaked it under the hot tap, wiped it up her cheek and pressed it to the cut, wincing with the pain. She couldn’t stop trembling. What the hell had just happened? She cast her mind back over the referral notes she had been given.

       Sami Scott. Four-year-old boy.

      Four years and four months old – a July birthday – young for his year. But although he had been due to start school in September, he hadn’t, couldn’t.

       Father: Major Nicholas Scott, Intelligence Corps, badly burnt in Afghanistan three months previously.

       Mother: Nooria Scott, Persian-English, born and raised in England.

       Preliminary diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder.

      But was it?

      What was with the torch?

      ‘The girl knows.’

      Who was the girl? Was it Jessie? She was pretty sure it wasn’t her. She was twenty-nine, and to a four-year-old she would seem ancient, a woman, not a girl. Semantics perhaps, but she thought not. She’d had the sense that he was referring to himself, but that couldn’t be right. Despite the shoulder-length, curly dark hair, huge chocolate eyes, that chubby, cherubic appearance that could be either girl or boy, he was definitely a boy. The notes had clearly specified gender.

      Referred to the Defence Psychology Service by his father who had been evacuated from Camp Bastion and repatriated to England in August, after suffering horrific burns in a petrol-bomb attack.

      The face looking back at her in the mirror was ghostly, sallower even than usual, her eyes a blue so pale they were almost translucent. She looked wraithlike. Felt as though once she released her grip of the basin, there would be nothing to tether her to this earth; that she would float up into the chilly winter sky.

      Looking at herself now, she was transported straight back fifteen years – a hospital mirror, the same ethereal being – just a traumatized girl then. So viscerally could she remember her helplessness, that she could taste it in her mouth. Acid vomit.

      And now, another little boy who desperately needed her help. The last half an hour had stripped her raw. She felt completely out of her depth.

       3

      Jessie waited, engine idling, while the guards swung open the heavy metal gates. She gave them a brief, distracted wave as she drove out of Bradley Court Army Rehabilitation Centre, and joined the public road. The tension in her was so acute she could feel it physically: a skintight electric suit coating her body, clenched around her throat, the bare wires hissing and crackling against her skin.

      There was no traffic on the narrow country road and her headlights cut twin beams through the gathering dusk, tracking the hedgerows, knotted with Elder and Dogwood, on one side, the dotted white line demarcating the oncoming lane on the other.

      Winding down her window, she let the chill evening air funnel over her face and neck, cooling the heat from the electric suit, the rush of cold bringing tears to her eyes. She had felt like crying ever since the end of her session with Sami. She let them flow, needing the release.

      Her mobile phone rang and she glanced at it. Gideon Duursema. She ignored it, couldn’t face the ‘how did it go?’ conversation. Reaching across to the CD player, she cranked up the sound, let James Blunt, full volume, assault her eardrums. Back to Bedlam. Appropriate. It was the only CD she had in the car, a Secret Santa departmental gift last Christmas. Everyone had laughed when she unwrapped it, uniform groans of Jesus, not him. But there was something about his voice that took her somewhere better, whatever she had been doing. She had played it on a constant cycle for a year, knew all the songs by heart, felt opera-singer talented when she sang along, but knew that the reality was closer to a stray cat’s chorus.

      Slowing to twenty, she pulled into the single-track country lane that led to her cottage. It was windy, hemmed by high hedges, only a brief flash of open fields through the odd metal five-bar