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In the five days that Jessie had been in Royal Surrey County Hospital, Callan had erased every trace of Carolynn’s visit from her cottage. Carolynn had haunted her fitful, drug-fuelled dreams while she’d been in hospital and she had woken many times, shaking, drenched in sweat, but now that she was home, the woman could have been just a figment of her imagination. She glanced over to the mantelpiece, to Jamie’s photograph. Aligned to the millimetre, wiped clean of the smudged fingerprint – he had remembered to do that too – knowing that her OCD would be in hypersensitive mode when she got home, alert to every possible trigger.
Ahmose was still in hospital, would be for a couple of weeks more, recovering from the beating that Carolynn had given him with Jessie’s table lamp. Callan had spent much of the past five days flitting between Jessie’s hospital room and Ahmose’s. He had promised to tend to Ahmose’s garden until he was home, prepare it for an autumn that would soon be closing in around them.
A couple of days’ stubble shaded Callan’s jaw, and his sandy-blond hair curled over his collar, longer than army regulation. He’d need to get it cut before Monday, before he went back to work. He put Jessie’s overnight bag at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Coffee?’
She nodded. ‘I’d love one.’
Though he had spent hours sitting by her bedside in hospital, they hadn’t talked about anything substantive, just exchanged pleasantries. They’d talked about her mother and Richard’s wedding, which they’d postponed until Jessie was well enough to attend, discussed the mundanities of Callan’s job, talked about Marilyn and how he was tying up the loose ends of the Zoe Reynolds and Jodie Trigg murder cases. Now that they were home, the atmosphere between them was tense, polite, akin to new housemates. Her fault, because of the way she had treated him during the case and how she had acted in the five months since she’d been invalided out of the army, like an explosive device that needed kid-glove handling.
She followed him into the kitchen, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze directly, his amber eyes flitting around the room as if he was still checking that it would satisfy her extreme sense of order, stave off her OCD.
‘I’m sorry, Callan,’ she said simply, moving over to the crockery cupboard to extract two cups.
‘It’s fine,’ he said.
‘No, it’s not fine. I was obnoxious. A complete pain in the arse.’
The Princess wine glass was missing from her collection of glasses on the shelf above the mugs, she noticed. She looked across and he gave a small shrug. Another thing that Carolynn had defiled, banished. He’d ticked every box.
‘You were tied up in the case,’ he said.
‘“Obsessed” is the word I think you’re looking for.’
The ghost of a smile crossed his face. ‘You do like your obsessions.’
‘Yes, it’s one of my particularly unattractive qualities.’ Setting two cups on the sideboard, she turned to face him. ‘I should have listened to you and not trusted Carolynn.’
‘You were right about her, though. She didn’t murder her daughter.’
‘No,’ Jessie murmured. ‘She didn’t. But she was still box-of-frogs crazy, and I didn’t see it.’
Her gaze found the scar from the bullet wound on his temple, the stitched skin like the brown petals of a dead rose. She wanted to reach her arm out, stroke her fingers across it, down his cheek, bury her face in the crook of his neck, but the three metres of kitchen floor between them felt Grand Canyon wide.
He didn’t know about the baby. That she had lost his baby because of her own stupidity, because she wouldn’t listen to the father of that baby. Or Marilyn. Because she was the psychologist and when it came to understanding people, she knew best. Except that in this case – Carolynn’s case – she hadn’t. She had planned to tell him, to apologize, take whatever fallout came, but now that she was home alone with him, she knew that she wouldn’t. She realized, meeting his flitting amber eyes, how much she had missed him, how much she loved him. She would never forgive herself if she screwed up this relationship. What upside was there in sharing with him that she had been pregnant?
None. There was none.
Acknowledgements
It is always hard to know where to start with acknowledgements as the list of people who have helped me, both with this novel and along the way, is long and humbling.
Thanks, as always, to my amazing agent, Will Francis, who has been incredibly supportive throughout my writing career and to the rest of the wonderful team at Janklow and Nesbit (UK).
I am forever indebted to Julia Wisdom, my Publisher at HarperCollins for being such a great champion for the Dr Jessie Flynn Crime Thriller Series. Thank you to Finn Cotton, my fantastic Assistant Editor, for his enthusiasm and conviction, Hannah Gamon and Louis Patel, Felicity Denham, Anne O’Brien who has an unrivalled eye for detail, and the rest of the fabulous team at HarperCollins. It is a privilege to work with you all.
Thank you to my great friend Mel Fallowfield, for all your support for Dr Jessie Flynn and for not killing me (there is still time). I also wanted to mention Bettina and Sean, Laura Deegan (so lovely to be back in touch), Tanya Carter and Deya Thompson, Galyna for being amazing, Lilia Trigg, Kathleen McInerney, Paul and Katie Creffield for your wonderful friendship and your police and CSI knowledge, and my godson, Will. Huge thanks also to Carolynn and Roger Reynolds for not being horrified!
Thanks also to the Killer Women for being a hugely supportive and fun writing community to be part of.
Love always to my family, Pamela, Maggie, Daan, Charlie, William, Jo, Anthony, Isabel, Anna, Alexander, my late father, Derek, and Oddie the dog.
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