Scorched Heart (The Firebrand Series Book 4) Read online

  Scorched Heart

  Book Four of the Firebrand series

  Helen Harper

  Book Cover by Yocla Designs

  Copyright © 2021 by Helen Harper

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Helen Harper

  A sneaky peek at The Noose of A New Moon

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  I sat in Tallulah’s driver’s seat, clutching my already cold takeaway coffee, and gazing out of the window. The car park was busier than I’d expected. I watched as a tight-faced woman gripped the hand of the crying toddler beside her and marched back to her own car. A few spaces down, two grey-suited men stepped out of their vehicle with briefcases in one hand and phones in the other. They strode towards the entrance of the building with the sure-footed purpose of people who’d trodden this path many times before and knew exactly where they were going.

  It was my first time here, but I’d been to places like this during my two years of detective training. No matter how different each building looked, or which part of London or the surrounding countryside they were located in, they all maintained the same atmosphere. Desperation mixed with satisfaction. Hope combined with fear. Justice coupled with revenge.

  Her Majesty’s Prison Galloway was no different.

  My fingers itched and I was sorely tempted to turn the key in Tallulah’s ignition and speed away without looking back. I hadn’t expected that my visit request would be agreed so quickly. With no active investigation taking place, I’d assumed that the bureaucratic wheels of England’s correctional system would grind slowly and that it would be several weeks – if ever – before I gained the access I required. And yet here I was, less than seventy-two hours later, with an approved appointment to meet with my parents’ murderer.

  I’d told Lukas that I wanted to do this alone and that it would be easier without his brooding presence at my shoulder. That had been a mistake. I’d have given half the blood in my body to have him there right now. I shouldn’t have under-estimated the importance of moral support.

  The two men, who were probably solicitors, had passed through the main doors fifty metres ahead and were no longer in view. The woman had clipped her child into the back seat of her car and was muttering to herself with a dark expression as she climbed behind the wheel. She caught me staring at her and gave me a scowl and her middle finger. I didn’t react.

  ‘Is this a mistake, Tallulah?’ I asked aloud.

  Needless to say, the car didn’t respond. I sighed. Time to quit stalling and woman up. I stepped out and pulled back my shoulders. I was Detective Constable Emma Bellamy and I’d been face to face with murderers before. When I died, I was reborn twelve hours later in a cloud of burning, sulphurous flame. According to a certain book of enchantments that had caused as many problems as it had solved, I was the one and only phoenix. I spent my days immersed with supernatural beings who were far more powerful than any of those incarcerated in the building in front of me. And since last week, I spent my nights with the leader of the London vampires.

  I could handle one human male, no matter what he was responsible for. I was more than strong enough. I adjusted the waist on my best suit jacket and marched to the prison entrance.

  The interior was brighter than I’d expected, with cheerful walls painted in warm amber tones and artwork apparently created by the inmates, alongside posters detailing the prison rules for visitors. I dug out my visiting order and handed it over to a uniformed guard behind a perspex screen, together with my driver’s licence and warrant card.

  ‘Good morning, DC Bellamy,’ he said, with the same professional smile I’d received from the barista when I’d ordered my coffee earlier this morning. ‘We have a note of your visit. Before you enter, I must ask you to complete this form.’ He passed over a clipboard with a sheet of paper attached. I checked over the details and scrawled down my date of birth and address before signing it at the bottom.

  ‘And I must take your photo for our records as well.’

  I nodded and waited. Unfortunately, the flash was brighter than I expected and I was forced to blink rapidly to clear my vision. The guard smiled at me, clearly used to that reaction.

  ‘As this is an official visit,’ he said, ‘you’ll be directed to a room where you can talk to the prisoner privately. He has agreed to speak to you, but please note that he will be handcuffed at all times and that you will be separated by a screen. Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t be the case but, given the delicacy of your situation, such separation is appropriate. The allotted time for your visit is one hour. If you require longer, you will need to speak to the assigned prison officer and—’

  ‘I won’t need longer,’ I interrupted.

  The guard’s eyes met mine. There was a trace of sympathy in his expression that proved he knew exactly who I was and what Samuel Beswick had done to my family. ‘Very well.’ He licked his lips. ‘He doesn’t often get visitors, you know. His mother visited him for a time, but she’s in a care home now and doesn’t travel any more. Nobody’s been to see Mr Beswick for at least three years.’

  Maybe I was meant to feel some satisfaction at the tit-bit of information that there was no longer a single person who cared enough about Beswick to come and see him. Surprisingly, it only made me feel sad. He’d altered the trajectory of my life when he ended the existence of my parents, and I hated him to my core, but it made the brutal deaths of my mum and dad feel even more pointless.

  Samuel Beswick would die alone inside these prison walls. In the end, he’d achieved nothing more than tragedy for everyone involved, himself included. Nobody was a winner here.

  I passed through the metal detector and submitted to a further pat down before a prison officer escorted me down a wide corridor to a beige-coloured door marked with the number thirty-two. The prison officer unlocked it and gestured me inside.

  ‘Samuel Beswick will be here shortly,’ he said. ‘He’ll arrive via the opposite door. Although you will be able to see each other, you will be separated by the screen at all times.’ He spoke as though he were reciting a well-worn set of rules. ‘You are advised to remain in your chair throughout the meeting. I will be outside. When you are finished, knock on the door and I will escort you out. We will not be listening but, for your information, there is a camera in the corner of the room which will be recording proceedings.’

  I nodded, distracted. Unlike the warm tones of the entrance area, this room felt cold. It was painted in the same nondescript beige as the steel door. There
was, I decided, no colour more depressing than beige.

  The prison officer waited until I sat down on the uncomfortable metal chair that was firmly bolted to the floor. In front of me, stretching from wall to wall, was the aforementioned screen. The lower half was made out of steel but the top half was glass with a small vent through which conversation could travel. It was designed to prevent any physical contact between visitor and prisoner and it looked sturdy enough. Although I wasn’t afraid of Beswick, the screen was oddly reassuring. Beyond it was another chair and another door - the door through which my parents’ killer would emerge.

  ‘He’ll only be a minute or two,’ the officer said and left me alone.

  I crossed my legs then I uncrossed them. I put my hands in my lap, one loose on top of the other. A moment later, I changed my mind and intertwined my fingers. Relax, Emma. Breathe. He was only a man. The waiting and the anticipation would be far worse than the event itself. Probably.

  When the opposite door opened, I jumped. As I cursed myself for doing so, Samuel Beswick shuffled in and sat on the chair opposite.

  Illogically, I’d expected to be confronted by the same man who’d been photographed as he was bundled away from the Old Bailey after sentencing. But that had happened twenty-five years ago. I was no longer the small child he’d left in a pool of my parents’ blood – and he was no longer a young man with a bushy moustache and head of dark hair. For one thing he’d gone grey. Not the distinguished silver fox sort of grey you saw on the well-to-do streets where I lived, but the dank, stringy sort of grey that would be filed immediately under images of vagrancy if the internet had its way. His skin was pale after spending decades in the prison system, while his jowls sagged and his shoulders drooped. His blue eyes, however, remained sharp.

  I knew that he’d busied himself over the years. He’d taught himself Arabic and a smattering of Chinese. He’d taken A-levels in history and psychology and economics, and studied for a law degree with the Open University. Samuel Beswick might be a murderer but he wasn’t an idiot. I would do well to remember that.

  I wanted to lean across the table, smash through the screen, grab him by the shoulders and demand to know why he’d killed my parents. Instead I smiled pleasantly and kept my voice low. ‘Thank you for agreeing to meet with me.’

  ‘You have no idea, Miss Bellamy, how desirable any sort of break in routine can be to an old jailbird like me.’ His voice was croaky, as though he didn’t use it very often. I dropped my eyes to his hands and the yellowed stains around his fingers indicating his nicotine habit. Then I looked up again. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘it’s Detective Constable Bellamy.’

  Something passed across Beswick’s expression, an emotion too fleeting and nebulous for me to grasp. It wasn’t distaste or dislike; if I’d had to guess, I’d have said it was understanding. ‘My apologies, DC Bellamy. Should I infer that you’re here in a professional rather than a personal capacity, then?’

  I met his gaze without blinking. ‘I’m here about my parents.’ Such an admission would hardly be news to Samuel Beswick. He knew who I was. An odd light crossed his eyes. I watched him carefully and continued. ‘You’ve never admitted what you did to them, but I’m hoping that you will to me. After all, you’ve been here for twenty-five years because of your actions. You were found guilty in a court of law. Between the witness statements placing you in the area at the time and the traces of blood found on your clothes when they were examined, there’s no doubt that you murdered them in cold blood.’

  Beswick gazed at me then shifted his weight slightly. ‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘I did.’

  They were only three words, three simple words, but given how long he’d denied what he’d done, I hadn’t expected to hear them from his thin lips. I certainly hadn’t expected the surge of relief I would feel at his sudden admission.

  ‘You want to know all the details.’ He didn’t sound eager to tell me or that he was going to revel in the tale. To be honest, Samuel Beswick merely sounded tired. ‘Right?’

  I swallowed. ‘I want to know why. Why did you kill them?’

  Beswick shrugged. ‘What can I say? They had everything and I had nothing. It was pure jealousy. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  I hadn’t requested the full murder files; I hadn’t wanted to. I remembered nothing from that time, nothing of the murders and nothing of what happened afterwards. I’d been questioned at length as a five year old, and I hadn’t been able to offer up anything useful. Eyewitnesses were notoriously unreliable but I didn’t even have false memories of that time. However, I’d read what my uncle had kept as well as the old newspaper reports, and I knew all the basic details of Samuel Beswick’s crime off by heart. All the same, I wanted to hear them from his own mouth.

  ‘You lived in the same village,’ I stated.

  He grinned, baring his stained, crooked teeth. ‘Barchapel. The very definition of Middle England.’ His voice had an oddly manic edge. ‘More of a prison than prison itself. They call Kent the Garden of England. That might be true of some places in the county, but not of Barchapel. It’s more like a cesspit than a rose-filled garden.’

  I hadn’t been to Barchapel since the day my parents died, but I doubted Beswick’s description. I’d seen photos of the place: it was small and quaint, not without its faults, but hardly a sewer. Probably the worst thing you could say about it was that it was dull. Apart from the occasional double murder, of course.

  ‘You knew my parents before you murdered them?’

  ‘I saw them around the place. In the pub sometimes, out walking. I spoke to your mum once when she was selling cakes at the local fête.’

  I leaned forward. I couldn’t help myself. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That it was beautiful weather. That she liked my T-shirt. That she was excited about the prize she’d won at the tombola.’ He raised his thin eyebrows. ‘You were there, too. You didn’t speak so much as babble. Something to do with creepy-crawlies at the bottom of your garden, if I remember.’

  I’d been barely five years old; it was hardly any wonder that I’d not engaged him in a deep philosophical conversation. ‘So she was nice to you,’ I bit out. ‘But you still killed her.’

  Beswick shrugged and looked away. ‘It wasn’t personal, not really. I saw two people who had a better life than I did and I wanted to punish them. I could have picked on anyone. It’s merely unfortunate for you that I picked on your parents. I’d been in London and caught the bus home. I got into Barchapel just after half-ten at night and didn’t feel like going to bed. I went for a walk and saw the lights on in your cottage. Your parents were in there with you.’ He offered me a benign smile. ‘If it helps, they died quickly. They didn’t suffer.’

  A hard knot was forming in my chest. ‘That’s not what the coroner’s report said.’ My uncle had kept a copy of the report and I’d read it several times over the last week. It didn’t get any easier to stomach, no matter how familiar the details became.

  Beswick looked down at the table. ‘All I can tell you is that it didn’t take long,’ he said quietly. ‘I was there. Not the coroner.’ He paused. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I was in a bad place back then. Your parents didn’t deserve what happened to them. Neither did you.’

  ‘You killed them,’ I pressed. ‘Why didn’t you kill me too?’

  His shoulders jerked. ‘I wouldn’t have done that. You were a kid – it wouldn’t have been fair.’

  Fair? Fair? The numbness which had served me so well deserted me in a rush, and a red-veiled mist descended. ‘You broke into our house. You stabbed my father. You slit my mother’s throat. You left me in the kitchen with their bodies. You left me sitting in their blood.’

  Beswick winced. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I did all that.’

  ‘Tell me what’s fucking fair about any of that.’ I gripped the arms of the chair, my knuckles turning white. ‘Tell me!’

  He didn’t answer.

  I almost spat at hi
m, ‘You pleaded not guilty at your trial. You’ve always claimed innocence.’

  He shifted in his chair again. ‘I didn’t want to go to prison.’

  My chest constricted; it was becoming difficult to breathe. In that moment, I knew with sudden clarity that I couldn’t do this. I had thought that I could sit across from this man and calmly question him, that I was strong enough to deal with whatever he said, but nothing could have been further from the truth. I couldn’t even bear to breathe the same air as him. If I stayed here, I would break through the screen that separated us and kill him. I’d do it with my own bare hands, long before the prison officer outside managed to open the door again and stop me.

  I should never have been allowed to speak to Beswick alone. No matter what the prison authorities thought about my situation and their own precautions, I was very aware that I possessed the supernatural strength and the human will to murder the man opposite me. I was so much more than another victim.

  ‘I have to get out of here,’ I muttered. I sprang to my feet, walked to the door and hammered on it. ‘Let me out!’ I yelled. ‘Let me out of here!’

  Beswick didn’t move. He watched me from his chair, those blue eyes burning a proverbial hole into my back. I thumped harder. Where the fuck was that prison officer?

  The heavy steel door swung open. ‘Is everything alright?’

  I gulped in air. ‘I need to leave.’

  The man’s eyes snapped to Beswick behind me, narrowing in accusation, but I was the one he needed to be wary of. I closed my hands into tight fists and repeated my words more calmly. ‘I just need to leave.’