Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

Harbour.
    It had been empty for four months and the landline was disconnected. There was no mobile reception inside, which was why she had tottered in her heels through the garden – mobile held aloft, gaze fixed on the reception icon – and down on to the skinny stone beach to call the estate agent. On one hand she was pleased there was no reception: no telephone masts to spoil this rural idyll she had set her heart on acquiring. But on the other, the inconvenience made her feel impotent. Getting away from it all was one thing, but with a commercial property business to run, being incommunicado was costly.
    Signal. At last. Only two bars, but it would have to do. This wasn’t going to be a long or complex conversation. All she needed from her estate agent was an explanation as to how – when she had bought a shopping centre in Liverpool for her business, the transaction complete from beginning to end in three days – it had taken five weeks and counting to fail even to exchange on this house. The owner was dead, for Chrissakes, so it clearly wasn’t him holding up the deal.
    She found Gavin Maxwell’s number on speed dial. The frustration she felt at the prospect of speaking to him had already found its way to her shoulders, which had repositioned themselves up around her ears.
    ‘Come on, pick up,’ she muttered, starting to pace. She glanced at her watch: 12 p.m.
Don’t tell me he’s gone to lunch.
Not that she would be surprised. Nothing would surprise her with this deal. ‘Pick
up
.’
    Seaweed caught in her heel and she bent to untangle it, still clutching the phone to her ear. In tight dress and heels, she felt like a hobbled calf, had to clench her abdominals to stop herself from toppling.
    Mid-stoop, she stopped.
    The first thing she noticed was the smell. Decomposing seaweed yes, but another overlaying it. Rotten and putrid. A dustbin full of refuse left fermenting in sun for a fortnight.
    The second thing she noticed was the blackened stick, tangled in the seaweed that had snagged her heel. Had someone held a fire on the beach? Teenagers making the most of the empty property to hold a party? She grasped the stick; her fingers sank into mush.
    Jesus
… her eyes bulged. Was that a hand?
    She sucked in a choking breath.
    A hand, the fingers, entwined with seaweed, bent into a tortured claw. She ran her eyes up the blackened stick and somewhere in the recesses of her chilled brain, she realized that it was an arm.
    The third thing she noticed was that the torso attached to the arm was just that. A torso. Distended.
Bloated
. Her gaze tracked down. There were no legs. Nothing below waist level.
    ‘Ohmygod!’ she groaned.
    The fourth thing she noticed was the empty eye sockets above the mouth, cavities of blackened bone, nothing soft remaining. The mouth itself, a lipless hole lined with yellow teeth, opened wide in a silent, agonized scream.
    Skin. Did it have skin? Or was that only muscle, sinew and bone?
    ‘Ms Bass-Cooper.’ A distorted voice came out of the phone.
    Terror was like tin foil in her mouth.
    ‘Oh my God.’ Her voice thick with tears. ‘OH MY GOD.’
    ‘MS BASS-COOPER. ARE YOU OK?’
    The phone clattered from her hand.

5
     
    The house was a mile outside the village of Crookham, a few miles northwest of Aldershot, standing alone in a shallow valley where the country lane dipped, before rising again and curving away over the next hill.
    Jessie had taken the Farnham road from Aldershot, a map spread out on her passenger seat. She had never bought a sat nav, preferring to be in control of where she was going, even if that meant getting lost. What that said about her personality, she hadn’t bothered to analyse.
    She had passed a couple of other houses, but this one sat alone at the end of a short gravel drive, set back behind a column of clipped leylandii trees, planted tightly to form a hedge twenty feet high, shielding the house from the road. Unnecessary, Jessie thought, doubting