Honestly, stop reading this sentence and go back to the part you were at before jumping to this bit.

Have you done that?

Really?

Honestly?

You’re going to spoil the story if you don’t stop here . . .

All right, good. There are sections of this book that are far more personal to me than the other stories I have written, largely because I have been in a house fire. It was nowhere near as serious as the one described here but a lot of the after-effects were similar. For instance, I inhaled a large gulp of black smoke and felt that moment of confusion and dizziness where your head just won’t clear. For anyone who has experienced it, you’ll know what I mean. I spent weeks coughing up little bits of black ‘stuff’ and simply became used to that heavy feeling in my chest. That was from one gulp.

At the time, I was living in a large house which had been converted into flats. I lived on the top floor in the attic, while beneath me were three apartments on the ground floor and another three on the first. The fire started in the kitchen shared by everyone on the bottom floor. The electricity in my flat went out and, for some reason I’ll never know, I went to the window to see if there might be an explanation. What I saw was around half-a-dozen people pointing and staring at the house.

Obviously that wasn’t a regular occurrence.

I went down the stairs, where there were small amounts of grey smoke and a young Polish girl screaming and crying. She pointed to the kitchen door and said she had put some chips on to fry and then gone back to her bedroom and fallen asleep.

No, I’m not making that up.

Stupidly, I shunted open the kitchen door, which is when the thick cloud of black smoke poured out into the hallway. It took me a few seconds to clear my head and it’s only since then that I’ve been able to understand why people say it’s the smoke that kills you. You can feel it inside you, like a parasite. Your breathing feels heavy, your voice doesn’t sound right and you simply can’t stop coughing.

Luckily, the door was the type that swings back into place, so it closed itself. I managed to call 999 and told the girl to get out and then left the house myself. With the fire brigade on their way, it only then dawned on me that others might still be inside, so I went back into the building and knocked on every door.

At first I thought it was fine but in the flat directly below where I lived another Polish woman, who was around twenty or so, answered the door. You might think that ‘fire’ is a universal word. Either it isn’t, or she simply didn’t understand my dulcet West Country tones.

Some people have told me that they think Jessica sometimes doesn’t appear to take things too seriously. That maybe a fair criticism – but then I am a person who has stood in a burning building playing what can only be described as a piss-poor game of charades with a half-asleep woman in her pyjamas who didn’t speak English.

Either way, through a combination of me waving my hands around and saying the words ‘fire’, ‘flames’, ‘hot’ and ‘out’, I somehow managed to convince her it was a good time to leave the house.

What has that to do with the story? I’m not sure. Perhaps this is just my public safety message telling you all to check your smoke alarms?

In any case, I hope you enjoyed book five in the Jessica Daniel series.

Kerry Wilkinson

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

Afterword

1

Cameron Sexton’s finger hovered over the standby button on the television remote control. He thought about calling upstairs to see if his wife was almost ready but figured if he kept quiet he might at least be able to watch the kick-off before having to leave the house.

He glanced at the teenager fidgeting nervously in the armchair across the room.

‘Are you all right, Ollie?’ Cameron asked.

The young man looked up from the television, nodding a little too enthusiastically. ‘Yes, Mr Sexton,’ he said. ‘Thanks for calling me.’

‘It’s Cameron and thank you. It’s always nice to have a reliable babysitter. How are your mum and dad doing?’

Oliver nodded, offering a vague ‘all right’, which Cameron thought could mean either ‘they’re absolutely wonderful, never been better’, or ‘they’ve split up and are living at opposite ends of the country’, depending on which way the teenager’s hormones were raging.

The sound of a whistle and an overly excited commentator took Cameron’s eyes back towards the television screen. If he had remembered that the football was on, he would have suggested a different night to go out for a meal with his wife.

Cameron leant back into his seat as the commentator’s voice plus the oohs and aahs of the crowd broke the uneasy silence between him and Oliver. He tried to focus on the screen, resisting the urge to tug his suit trousers into a more comfortable position. They were feeling a little tight around his waist, although he tried to tell himself it was because they must have shrunk slightly at the cleaners, as opposed to his forty-something stomach being less forgiving nowadays.

The match was dull and Cameron felt his mind wandering. It was strange to be leaving your child at home in the hands of someone else, especially a person you didn’t know that well and who wasn’t technically an adult. Using Oliver had been his wife’s idea. Eleanor knew his mother and, because he was about as polite and sensible as a teenager could be, they had asked him to look after Lara for an evening a few months ago while they went to the pub around the corner for a meal.

That had now become a monthly event that was both enjoyable and tentative. If anything, Cameron would have thought his wife would be the one nervous about leaving Lara – but she kept saying they were going to have to get used to it, which was true but also a bit of a shame.

Cameron squinted so he could read the match time in the top left corner of the screen and was surprised to see the game had already been going for five minutes. He stifled a sigh before standing and reaching across to hand the remote to Oliver.

‘Here, you take this. We should be off out any minute. Well, whenever Eleanor is ready. You’ve got all this to come with girls and the like . . .’

Oliver took the control, shuffling in his seat, clearly uncomfortable with the topic. Cameron didn’t know if the teenager had a girlfriend, or possibly even a boyfriend. The young man didn’t seem overly confident but Cameron knew from his own experiences of being that age that very few seventeen-year-old lads had the bravado to talk to girls first. The ones that did were usually the biggest prats going, covered in gel and too much deodorant, not realising they were a couple of years away from ending up in some dead-end job for the rest of their lives.