The Burning (46 page)

They were less than ten yards from the aircraft, and beads of sweat were running down Jenny’s neck, when she noticed Michael glance left. She instinctively did the same
and saw a figure stepping quickly out from the unlit interior of the hangar. It was Ryan, and he was holding a pistol.

‘Step away from her, Doyle.’ He was forty feet away and closing quickly.

Doyle reacted instantly, jamming the gun into Jenny’s spine. ‘Stop there or I’ll kill her.’

‘Go ahead,’ Ryan said, quickening his pace. He was now less than thirty feet away and still coming.

‘Ryan! Stop!’ Michael shouted.

‘I’ll kill her!’ Doyle yelled.

Jenny saw a flash from the muzzle of Ryan’s gun, and in the same moment Michael hauled Kelly and Robbie aside and rushed towards Doyle. As time seemed to slow to a fraction of its normal
speed, all Jenny could feel was rage at Ryan for being so thoughtless and letting it end like this.

He kept coming. Fifteen feet. Another flash. Ten.

Jenny braced herself for the blast she knew would blow her into the air, but in a split second she felt the hard muzzle of the gun sweep up past her shoulder, and a burst of intense heat against
her cheek accompanied by an explosion that felt as if it had cracked her head in two, as Doyle fired. He swung right towards Michael and fired again, but this time the shot went harmlessly into the
sky, as Michael rammed into him shoulder-first and sent him sprawling to the ground.

Jenny staggered sideways and fell as Doyle scrambled to his knees. Michael grabbed the shotgun before he could reach it and bludgeoned the butt into Doyle’s disbelieving face. He made a
sound somewhere between a short low groan and a grunt, and slumped like a slaughtered bull.

Michael straightened, tossed the gun aside, and went to Ryan, who was lying front-down on the tarmac. As he stooped down to turn him over, he stopped abruptly and stepped back.

‘What is it?’ Jenny said.

‘He doesn’t have a face,’ Michael answered quietly.

Jenny looked off to her right as she registered this news and saw Kelly running into the darkness, dragging Robbie behind her. In the far distance, several sirens started up.

‘You must have told him I called,’ Jenny said.

‘Of course. But I thought he’d bring the cavalry, not come alone.’

She felt strangely ambivalent. Ryan hadn’t cared if she lived or died. He’d just been trying to get a clean shot at Doyle. He was obsessed. This was his last chance to keep Kelly for
himself, and he’d thrown his life at it.

Michael leant down and helped her to her feet.

She turned in the direction of the approaching sirens. Three sets of headlights were speeding across the airfield. Kelly stopped running and stood paralysed as they raced towards her.

‘I thought I’d lost you,’ Michael said.

Jenny reached for his hand and closed her fingers around it. ‘You should be so lucky.’

T
HE VOICE ON THE TELEPHONE
the previous evening had been so faint and strained that Jenny had assumed it belonged to someone old and confused who had
dialled her number by mistake. She had been about to put down the receiver when she caught the wor. ‘Philip’ and realized that it was Clare Ashton speaking, and that she was asking
Jenny to come and visit her. It didn’t feel decent to refuse, and she arranged to call in on her way to the office.

Leaving Melin Bach as dawn broke, Jenny took some comfort from the fact that the rhythms of nature were as comfortingly dependable as human life was unpredictable. In the two weeks since the
night at the airport, the garden had become a carpet of snowdrops that carried a distant promise of spring, and the sun, which since before Christmas had travelled too low in the sky to touch her
crook of the valley, had reappeared above Barbadoes Hill to ripen buds and stir the crows. Meanwhile, far from certain that she was doing the right thing, Jenny had found it in herself to give
Michael another chance. But the Gods still had one more hand to play and only three days later she had found herself back in the doctor’s surgery with stomach cramps, to be told what in her
heart already knew: she wasn’t going to be a mother again. It was nothing she had done, she was assured, it was just that at her age the odds were stacked against her. Jenny had expected
Michael to sulk, at least a little, but surprising her again, he had told her that he loved her for who she was, and not for what she might give him. Whether or not he meant it from the depths of
his being, she couldn’t say – such intentions could only be tested against time and fate – but in her quiet moments she dared to think that they really might grow old
together.

The same could not be said of Kelly Hart and Liam Doyle, who were both being held on remand on multiple charges of murder by joint enterprise. Jenny’s inquest had been stalled while DI
Ballantyne and his colleagues were given charge of fresh investigations into the deaths at Blackstone Ley as well as those of Daniel Burden and DI Ryan. Initially, Kelly and Doyle had resolutely
refused to answer any of the detectives’ questions, but Daniel Burden’s hard drive began to yield evidence that led to an email address Doyle had been using, which in turn led to
another belonging to Kelly. The forensic case had begun to mount, too: Dr Kerr confirmed that Doyle had shot Ryan with size-4 shot identical to that found in the bodies at Blackstone Ley, and the
Home Office laboratory had ascertained that fragments of his DNA had been detected on Nicky Brooks’s body.

It had been at the beginning of the previous October that the former teenage lovers had made contact for the first time in seventeen years, and it was largely as Doyle had described it. Having
failed to find a way of extracting money from Kelly, Daniel Burden had discovered Doyle’s whereabouts, following his release from prison, using the computers and facial-recognition software
at his office. It had been almost too easy. Doyle’s original image remained on the Home Office database and threw up a match with a photograph in a passport recently issued in the name of
Patrick Brennan.

But Burden’s cunning met its match in Doyle, who had seemed to understand instinctively that a blackmailer is by definition a coward, whose greed is a fatal weakness. Reeling Burden in by
elaborate promises of money raised against inherited properties, he extracted Kelly’s whereabouts and surprised her one autumn evening by walking into her bar and ordering a drink.

Jenny hadn’t yet seen the emails that had passed between them, but the snatches Ballantyne had shared with her had been chilling. It seemed they revealed that the 15-year-old Malia
Sanders, as Kelly then was, had been the instigator of the killings of Gabriella and Amelia Vallejo, spurring Doyle on and rewarding him with sex. When they became reacquainted, whatever had
possessed them all those years ago had surged up from its hiding place to consume them both again. It had been Kelly’s fantasy to leave her troublesome family behind and start again where
they had left off. It was she who had dreamed up the plan for the fire and taken Ed’s phone from him in order that Doyle could forge his final message.

Ballantyne’s theory was that it was all about primitive power: a woman who can make a man kill – especially when the victims were beautiful young girls on the cusp of maturity
– has exercised the ultimate control. He saw her as a human iteration of a queen bee or a she-wolf who savaged her female young. For him it also explained why Kelly had insisted Doyle keep
Robbie alive: unlike her daughters, Robbie posed no sexual threat, but was quite the opposite – another willing male to manipulate and control. Jenny was only partially convinced by
Ballantyne’s cod psychology. However you dressed it up, a spark of evil had jumped between the two and ignited something so perverted that Kelly had been willing to sacrifice her own
daughters and the man who had devoted himself to them, not to mention Nicky Brooks and the hapless Daniel Burden, just to feel the thrill again. In a strange way, Jenny found Doyle’s
motivation far easier to understand than Kelly’s: ‘Ask any killer, they’ll all tell you it puts sex and drugs in the shade,’ Ballantyne had pronounced at their last meeting,
‘and the more innocent the victim, the sweeter the taste.’

Ryan had been an unexpected snag in Kelly’s plan to reinvent herself. Like Darren Brooks before him, he had allowed himself to become captivated to the point of losing his reason. As far
as Ballantyne could work out, Ryan’s relationship with Kelly had only become physical in the past few months. Recent messages on his phone between him and Kelly showed that at first he had
been terrified that somehow Ed Morgan had got wind of their affair, but she had assured him that it wasn’t the case, and indulged his fantasy that when the inquest was over she and he might
start a life together.

Ryan had had no inkling that Doyle had reappeared, nor it seemed had Kelly let him in on her problems with Burden. It would have made her too dependent on him, Ballantyne thought, and would have
risked Ed finding out the truth about her past, should Ryan have judged the threat great enough to move her or change her identity once again. Kelly had never wanted that. Perhaps this was proof
that a small, decent part of her had been concerned to protect her daughters and Ed from the trauma of having to cope with who and what she had once been, but Jenny thought it unlikely. Beautiful.
Evil. Empty. These were the three words she returned to every time she thought of Kelly, with the emphasis on the last. There was a black space where her humanity should have been. Just as a
violent man might beat his way through life with his fists, Kelly had learned to caress and seduce.

Jenny had to admit to having felt a certain cruel satisfaction when, as these facts came to light, Simon Moreton had appeared with his tail between his legs to offer an apology and the
congratulations of the Chief Coroner. He had clearly hoped to escape back to London after a few soothing words offered over lunch on expenses, but Jenny had refused to let him off lightly. To his
credit, he had behaved honourably. He accepted Jenny’s word that it must have been Doyle who, attempting to isolate Jenny further, had hacked into Alison’s Facebook account, and they
struck a deal to allow her to come back to work part-time. He also listened to what Jenny told him about the help Falco had given her. He promised to have discreet words with the CPS, and soon
afterwards the charges against Falco and Tomasz Zaleski were quietly dropped. The prospect of Falco being free to return to the bosom of the organized-crime fraternity troubled Jenny’s
conscience a touch, but she consoled herself with the thought that for every Falco that fell by the wayside there was always another ready to take his place in the back of a gangster’s
limousine. Better the devil you know, especially one who owes you a very big favour.

Jenny’s usual route into Blackstone Ley was blocked by roadworks, requiring her to follow detour signs through even smaller lanes, some with grass growing up their
middle, that threaded through the fields to the east of the village. As the spire of the church appeared in the near distance, she turned the corner and passed the driveway to Blackstone House
Farm, the home of the Grant family. A ‘For Sale’ sign had been erected on the verge outside, advertising an eight-bedroom family home with ninety acres of mixed farmland. Despite the
fact that a DNA test had finally proven Simon Grant was not the father of Layla Hart’s child, mud had stuck. Harry Grant, a man who had devoted his career to helping others remain in the
shadows, and made himself enemies in the process, had found his family the unwelcome subject of prurient newspaper articles. Local teenagers had been persuaded to tell stories of Simon’s
sexual exploits with underage girls, and desperate to prove this wickedness was inherited, a tabloid had dredged up a former secretary who claimed Harry Grant had plagued her with lewd remarks and
unwanted advances. As hatchet jobs went, it had been thorough and ruthless; Jenny had heard rumours that the Grants’ already shaky marriage had been hurled onto the rocks.

It was a fresh and pleasantly freckled face framed by reddish hair that greeted her at the door of the Ashtons’ cottage. The young woman was casually dressed in jeans and a practical
shirt, but her sunny practicality immediately identified her as a nurse.

‘Mrs Ashton said she was expecting you,’ she said, after Jenny had introduced herself. ‘I’ll see how she is. I’m afraid she’s very sleepy at the moment
– she’s on a lot of medication.’

Jenny waited in the hall while the nurse went upstairs to talk to Clare. The atmosphere had changed profoundly since her first visit. The house smelt vaguely of antiseptic and felt more like a
clinic than somebody’s home.

It was several minutes before the nurse reappeared and beckoned Jenny upstairs.

‘Is it all right if I leave you alone? I’ve rather a lot to get through.’

‘That’s fine,’ Jenny reassured her, and knocked lightly on Clare’s bedroom door.

Clare was propped up on several pillows in the middle of the double bed. Her eyes were the only part of her that hadn’t shrunk or withered, and they stared at Jenny from dark, hollow
sockets; her skull was painfully visible beneath the powder-white skin of her face.

‘Good morning, Mrs Ashton.’ Jenny sat in the chair at the bedside. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard all that’s happened.’

‘Philip’s told me,’ Clare said in a reedy, fragile voice. ‘I had no idea. Though I suppose it explains a lot about her.’

Jenny waited for her to enlarge.

‘I wanted to apologize, Mrs Cooper.’ Her bony fingers scratched nervously at the edge of the duvet drawn up to her chest. ‘You were only doing what you had to.’

‘That’s all right. I understand.’

‘I thought I’d die that day, but – ’ She let out a sigh. ‘Well, I didn’t. It wasn’t going to be that easy.’

Her fingers continued to move for a moment longer, then stopped, as if something inside her had stilled. Her eyes seemed to grow even larger as she slowly turned her head and fixed Jenny with a
look of total desolation.