A Lovely Way to Burn

by Louise Welsh

  Stevie had no memory of switching off the engine, or of leaving the car, but she was outside. Her hands were gripping the metal bars of the fence, and she was staring through them at the empty road beyond. The grass was wet against her bare feet, her satchel still strung across her body.

  ‘I’m sorry, he got away.’ Blood and saliva thickened Jirí’s accent. She turned and saw him standing behind her. His nose was bleeding and blood drenched the front of his white shirt. He raised a hand to his face; the other clutched his cap. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘He was trying to kill me.’

  ‘It looked that way.’ The security guard turned away, spat into the grass, coughed and spat again. Stevie found a tissue in her pocket and passed it to him. ‘Thanks.’ Jirí dabbed at his face but the tissue was too insubstantial and he untucked his shirt from his trousers and used its hem to wipe off the worst of the blood. ‘What is he? A jealous boyfriend?’

  He made it sound as if such things were only to be expected.

  ‘No,’ Stevie said. ‘My boyfriend’s dead.’

  Jirí shook his head. The blood was still leaking from his nose and he dabbed at it again with his bloodied shirt. His uniform trousers were too wide for him and he had belted them tight to take up the slack. Stevie said, ‘I need to go.’

  ‘That man, did he kill him? Your boyfriend?’

  The threads of car headlights still glimmered in the distance but they no longer seemed reassuring. It was three in the morning, yet they were queued along the motorway as if a mid-morning rush hour had been stalled by roadworks.

  ‘No, he was unwell.’

  Stevie thought Jirí would ask whether Simon had fallen victim to the sweats but the security guard merely looked at the ground and said, ‘I am sorry.’

  It was quiet in the car park after the shouts of the fight and the roar of the car engine, but the smell of petrol still hung, dark and chemical, in the air. It reached into her lungs, and then slipped down to her belly, evoking a memory of long car rides and travel sickness. Stevie bent over and threw up in the grass. Jirí took a step backwards.

  ‘Are you sick?’

  ‘No. I had it but I’m okay now.’ She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I got hit in the stomach.’

  She didn’t want to say that it was his boot that had found her ribs by mistake.

  ‘Why do you say you “had it”? What did you have?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  He looked bemused. ‘Why should I know?’

  ‘There’s a sickness, a virus, people are calling it the sweats. It’s been in the newspapers, on television, people are dying.’

  ‘I don’t see so much television, I watch your show and movies on DVD, and I study, that is all. After the summer I go back to university.’ News of the virus seemed to have no impact on the guard. He asked, ‘Why did he attack you?’

  Stevie’s hand tightened around her bag. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘There are crazy people about. Probably he saw your programme and decided to become a stalker. I feel bad I didn’t see him before he attacked you. You want me to call the police?’

  ‘No thanks. I’ll go to a police station on my way home.’ Stevie forced a smile. ‘I think you might have saved my life.’

  Jirí said, ‘You don’t owe me nothing.’ He transferred his uniform cap from one hand to another. ‘You shouldn’t be alone while he is still out there.’

  There was a proprietorial note in the guard’s voice that made her uneasy. The car keys were still in her hand. Stevie braced herself.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be okay.’

  ‘You should let me drive you.’

  ‘I told you, I’ll be fine.’ She opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat. The security guard was at her window and she was reminded of the first time they had met. She had been desperate to go home then too, but he had held her there, using her politeness against her. This time, though, she owed him. Stevie wound down the window and asked, ‘How about you? Will you be okay?’

  ‘Of course. I hope he comes back. I will be ready for him.’ Jirí crouched down, as he had before, his face level with hers. ‘Maybe this is not the right time. Your boyfriend has died and you are sad. But if I don’t ask now, I may never get another chance.’

  She started the engine.

  ‘Jirí, I’m not ready to go out with anyone yet.’

  ‘I know that.’ Blood was beginning to crust his top lip, giving the illusion of a Chaplin moustache. ‘I wanted to ask if you can help me get a job. I’m happy to start off small. I am studying accountancy. I will graduate this year and I would like to stay in this country, but I need a better job. I thought maybe there might be something here. TV stations always need accountants.’

  Stevie forced a smile. ‘I’ll put in a word for you if I can. The way things are going, I have a feeling there may be some vacancies coming up soon.’

  She dimmed the lights, put the car into gear and steered it out of the car park, into the darkness of the road beyond.

  Fifteen

  The adrenalin from the fight wore off about a mile down the motorway. Stevie pulled on to the hard shoulder and surrendered herself to the shakes. Every bit of her hurt. She dragged a tartan travelling blanket from the back seat and draped it around her shoulders. There was a packet of paracetamol in her satchel. She dry-swallowed three and then ran trembling fingers over her face. Its contours were swollen and unfamiliar.

  The attack had been so sudden and so determined that there had been no time for fear. But the sense of dread that had shadowed her since she had found Simon’s corpse was stronger and Stevie realised that she was scared to look at her face. She took a deep breath, pulled down the sun visor and looked into the small vanity mirror.

  She explored her face in portions: eyes, cheeks, mouth, chin. A collage of cuts and contusions. She didn’t want to switch the Mini’s interior light on but Stevie could see enough to know that she looked a mess.

  She whispered, ‘Well, kid, if your face is your fortune I think you may have blown it this time.’

  There was a bruise on Stevie’s temple where the pot thrown by Rachel had met its mark. Her cheek was scuffed and there was a red bloom of broken veins across her nose. She looked at her hands. Her palms were grazed and stinging from where she had hit the tarmac, her knuckles red and scraped. Stevie cautiously touched her ribs, where Jirí’s boot had made contact. The pain made her gasp but she persisted, pressing into the tenderness, making sure nothing was out of place.

  When she was satisfied that nothing was broken she leant forward and ran her hands up each of her legs from ankle to thigh. Her jeans were ripped at the knee and her flesh felt mauve with bruises, but the thick denim had helped to save her legs from more abrasions.

  ‘You’ll live.’ Stevie gave a harsh laugh. ‘Talking to yourself … first sign of madness.’

  She slid the laptop from her satchel. It looked undamaged. Stevie considered taking it from its slipcase and switching it on to check but the thought of the screen’s electronic glow, illuminating her face, stopped her. It struck her that if her attacker believed she already knew what was in the laptop, she might no longer have the option of walking away.

  Stevie wondered if Simon had realised how dangerous a task he had set her. Had he genuinely thought it a simple courier job, a favour to release him from whatever intrigue he had been embroiled in, or had he been as careless of her safety as those men who secretly concealed drugs, or even bombs, in their girlfriends’ luggage?

  ‘Fuck, Simon,’ she whispered. ‘For a clever man you were a hell of an idiot.’

  Tears clouded her eyes. Stevie swore again and rubbed them away. There was no time for crying. She took a bottle of perfume from her bag, sprayed a little on the palms of her hands and dabbed it on her cheeks and her exposed knees, to disinfect her grazes. It stung, but it was a small sharp pain, a distraction from the rest of her hurt, and she welcomed it.

  She wondered if the man wh
o had attacked her was out there in the darkness, watching her now. The TV studio was on an industrial estate, badly served by public transport during the day, not served at all by it at night. He must have driven there. After Jirí had chased him off, her attacker could have made it to his own vehicle, waited for her to drive out of the car park, and then tailed her at a discreet distance. Leaving his headlights off might be risky, but it would guarantee that Stevie wouldn’t spot him in her rear-view mirror.

  She checked again that the car doors were locked and then held her hands up in front of her face. Her fingers were still trembling, but not as badly as before and she reckoned she was fit to drive. She would go back to St Thomas’s and check on Joanie before she decided on her next move. She turned the key in the ignition, gunning the engine into life, and glanced again in the rear-view mirror to make sure that the road behind her was empty. Her toe had just touched the accelerator when her mobile buzzed with news of an incoming text. Stevie took her foot from the pedal, pulled on the handbrake and fished her phone from her bag, glad of the distraction. Joanie’s name flashed on the screen.

  ‘Thank Christ.’

  Joanie had recovered enough to send a text. They would convalesce together, Joanie from the sweats and Stevie from her beating. Her friend made a convincing act of being sweetly stupid, but she was the cleverest person Stevie knew. Joanie would tell her what to do about the laptop. The phone lit up and she saw the start of the message scrolling along the top of the screen: Joanie didn’t make it … Joanie didn’t make it … Joanie didn’t make it … Joanie didn’t make it …

  Stevie felt as if her own heart had stopped. She turned off the engine and pressed the speech bubble that opened her messages.

  Joanie didn’t make it.

  I thought you should know.

  Derek

  Stevie put her head in her hands and took a deep breath. There were ashes in her mouth. She wanted to cry but the tears that had threatened only a moment before refused to come. She whispered her friend’s name, ‘Joanie,’ but Joanie was dead and Stevie had never believed in ghosts.

  ‘Joanie.’

  Ancient Egyptians thought that repeating the names of the dead kept them alive, but no matter how many times you said their names, the dead were dead, and there was no bringing them back.

  ‘Joanie.’

  Stevie put her head against the wheel and closed her eyes. She was glad of her bruises, glad of the flesh-and-bone pain. She drew in a deep juddering breath. Light blasted into the car’s interior and Stevie’s eyes jerked open. She turned the key in the ignition, and pressed her foot to the accelerator, racing the car along the hard shoulder. A horn sounded and she saw a lorry speeding past, headlamps ablaze. Stevie braked. She let the lorry’s lights fade into the darkness, and then steered the Mini on to the motorway. It was best to keep moving.

  The road before and behind her was dark, but the opposite side of the carriageway glowed with the headlights of cars driving away from the city. Stevie pictured herself sitting at the breakfast bar in Joanie’s sunny kitchen, sipping a glass of the Cava she bought by the crate, telling her friend all that had happened. How Simon had looked, ungainly in death in a way he had never been in life; the spider that had brushed across her face as she had slid the laptop from its hiding place; the sympathy in Dr Ahumibe’s voice as he offered to take care of the package Mr Reah could no longer receive.

  Joanie’s first question would have been, ‘Was Dr Ahumibe handsome?’ Stevie smiled a smile that squeezed tears from her eyes. It would have been a ruse to distract her, a prelude to more important, more frightening questions.

  ‘Does the man who attacked you think you know what Simon was hiding in that computer, and if he does, how much danger does it put you in? Do you still believe that Simon died of natural causes, or do you think he was murdered?’

  The questions conjured a memory of Joanie’s laugh. The recollection was so strong that Stevie could almost smell her friend’s perfume.

  The Mini slid across the motorway, sickeningly fast, and Stevie suddenly came to. She turned the steering wheel hard left, correcting its course away from the central reservation and the stream of headlights blazing on the other side.

  ‘Jesus Christ. Fuck!’

  An LED sign above the motorway flashed, Tiredness Kills, and was gone. She sped on, laughing at the sign’s perfect timing, though none of it was funny. She knew she should find a service station, pull over and rest, but kept her foot hard on the pedal and let the car eat up the miles.

  Stevie knew what Joanie would have told her to do. It was what she should have done when she first opened Simon’s letter. She sailed down a slip road and off the motorway, the edgelands slid away and London started to rise around her. Stevie glimpsed the glow of a twenty-four-hour grocer’s, the shapes of rough sleepers curled in doorways, a young couple wobbling home, arm in arm, dressed in their nightclub finery. Joanie was dead, but the world was still going on.

  She slowed to a stop at a red light and punched her destination into the satnav. The road behind her was still empty of cars. Joanie’s death was final, as all deaths were, but the reasons for Simon’s might yet be unravelled. She would try to make sure he received some kind of justice, and find protection for herself in the process.

  Sixteen

  The police station was a squat, two-storey building, dwarfed by the trio of tower blocks that loomed behind it. The station had small high windows, barely larger than arrow slits, which combined with its breezeblock architecture to make the building look as if it was expecting a sudden siege. Joanie had nicknamed it ‘Precinct 13’ and the name had stuck. Stevie imagined Derek sitting beside Joanie’s body, holding her hand, and felt an unexpected stab of jealousy. She pushed it away. Derek had followed his dick, and broken Joanie’s heart, but policemen were clannish and dropping his name to someone in his squad might mean Stevie was taken seriously, or at least given a hearing.

  The police-station door was locked. Stevie swore. Derek had long complained that under-manning had rendered his station a part-time concern, but she had thought it was just another of his gripes. She pressed the doorbell anyway and when there was no response hammered against the door’s reinforced glass. There was a shadow of movement somewhere beyond the reception desk. She put her finger back on the bell, kept it there, and continued banging on the door with her other fist.

  ‘Hello!’ Her voice was still raw from where the man had tried to strangle her and it sounded weak in the early-morning darkness. ‘Hello!’ Stevie’s hand was aching, but she thought she could see a silhouette, vague in the gloom beyond the glass. ‘I want to make a statement.’

  There was another movement behind the reception desk, a white face hazed into focus and the lock buzzed open.

  ‘Thank fuck.’

  Stevie pushed through the door and into the station. She had slipped her bare feet into the running shoes she kept in the boot of the car, but something had happened to the muscles in her right calf and she was limping. The station smelt of cheap disinfectant and too many bodies sweating poverty and fear. There was a poster on the wall behind the counter stating the police’s right to do their job without being subjected to violence or verbal abuse. The text was illustrated by a photograph of a trio of good-looking officers of assorted ethnicities, two men and a woman, each one blandly fit. Were they real, or recruited from some model agency? It was bizarre, the thoughts that came into your head when you were in fear of your life.

  ‘Sorry, love, normal service has been suspended.’

  Derek had often boasted that police officers retired early, but the man behind the counter looked beyond pensionable age. Stevie placed the bag containing the laptop on to the counter.

  ‘I need to speak with someone. I’ve got evidence that might be crucial in a murder investigation.’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling.’ The policeman glanced at the bag but made no move to take it from her. ‘I can see you’ve been through the mill, but there’s no one h
ere that can be of use to you tonight. The best thing you can do now is go home, lock your doors and stay put.’

  Stevie clenched her grazed palms; the pain felt good.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The policeman’s stubble was a day or two old and a shade greyer than his hair.

  ‘I mean there’s no one here to take a statement from you.’

  It was an effort not to vault the desk and shake him.

  ‘There’s you.’

  ‘No,’ the policeman said with the kind of patience usually reserved for children or the mentally challenged. ‘I’m not here.’

  His hands rested on the reception desk, fingers splayed on the plastic countertop. Stevie touched one. The flesh was cold, but it was alive.

  ‘Yes you are.’

  He slid his hand free.

  ‘No I’m not. Everyone here is dead.’

  She looked into his eyes, and she could almost believe he was a ghost.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’d go now, if I were you. Before anything else happens to you.’

  His tone was gentle but Stevie thought she could detect a threat in his words. She shouldered her bag and took a step backwards.

  ‘I know an officer who works here, Derek Caniparoli.’

  ‘Yes,’ the policeman nodded, ‘he’s dead too.’

  ‘No, he’s not.’ Her voice was rising. ‘He sent me a text ten minutes ago.’

  The man’s smile slid into a smirk.

  ‘A lot can happen in ten minutes.’

  ‘Fuck you.’ Stevie turned on her heels. ‘Fuck you and fuck your police force.’ She halted at the door and faced him. ‘First sign of trouble and you fall apart. I’ve witnessed more shit in the last three days than you’ve seen in your whole career and I refuse to let it beat me.’