A Lovely Way to Burn

by Louise Welsh

  ‘Good for you.’ The policeman’s smile was the dead calm of a sea just before a tsunami and Stevie was suddenly aware that they were alone. ‘But remember what I said: a lot of people are dying, one or two more’s not going to be missed.’ He looked her up and down. ‘You’re in a bit of a state, but you’re still a good-looking girl beneath those bruises. I’ve been very patient but I suggest you go home now, before someone decides they’d like a last thrill.’

  This time Stevie didn’t hesitate. The pain in her leg was still there, but she banged out of the police station and half jogged the short distance to her car, scanning left to right as she ran, like a soldier making for fresh cover.

  Seventeen

  Stevie slammed the driver’s door, checked the locks, took out her phone and found Joanie’s number. She hoped Derek still had his wife’s mobile with him and that it was turned on. She pressed call and listened, swearing under her breath as it rang out. She tried again. This time Derek picked up.

  ‘Stephanie, yes.’

  His voice was brisk and she could hear a bustle of activity in the background.

  ‘Derek, I’m sorry about Joanie.’

  ‘Me too.’

  There was nothing else to be said and not-quite-silence hung on the line for a moment, a blackbird starting off the dawn chorus at her end, a babble of voices at his.

  ‘I’m outside your station.’

  ‘I’m not there.’

  ‘I know. There’s no one there. Just a mad-looking policeman who told me he was dead.’

  ‘That’ll be Phil. He should be on sick leave by rights.’ Derek gave a bitter laugh. ‘By rights most of us should be on sick leave, but it’s all hands to the pump. The Guvnor reckoned Phil would be more of a hindrance than a help out in the field, so we left him to mind the fort. I take it he’s not doing a very good job?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Best to keep out of his way. Look, Stevie, it was good of you to phone but I need to go.’

  ‘Wait a moment.’

  ‘I can’t, sorry.’

  ‘Derek, someone killed my boyfriend.’

  His sigh sounded as if it had travelled across aeons to reach her. Stevie remembered what the policeman had said of Derek, ‘He’s dead too’, and the back of her neck tingled.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ His voice was heavy. ‘But things are in a bit of a mess, in case you’ve haven’t noticed. I’m afraid he’s not the only one.’

  ‘This is different. Someone deliberately organised Simon’s death and arranged things to make it look natural. Simon sent me a note, telling me he’d hidden a laptop at my flat and to deliver it to a colleague he trusted at the hospital, but his colleague caught the sweats and died before I could get it to him.’

  ‘Repeat that more slowly for me, please,’ Derek said. She did as he asked and he gave another sigh. ‘Are you sure?’

  The question bewildered her.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Joanie said you had a habit of hooking up with rich fuckwits, all flash and no heart was how she put it. Are you sure someone isn’t playing a joke on you? Some Hooray Henries have peculiar ideas of what’s funny.’

  ‘Simon wasn’t a Hooray Henry, he was a surgeon and yes, I’m sure. I found Simon’s body. I smelt him before I saw him. Is that authentic enough for you?’

  She thought Derek was going to find another objection, but he swore softly, ‘Jesus Christ,’ and asked, ‘What’s in the laptop?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t get past the password.’

  ‘Stevie, this is what a psychiatrist would call displacement activity. You’re fiddling while Rome burns. I’m sorry your boyfriend’s dead. I’m even sorrier Joanie’s dead. Whatever you think of me, I’d walk through fire to bring her back. But there’s nothing any of us can do. Forget it. Go home and keep safe. Someone told me vitamin C is good for staving off the sweats. Buy a few cartons of orange juice and then lock yourself in.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that, Derek. I think someone’s after me. I was attacked by a man outside work tonight. He pretty much kicked the shit out of me. I think he would have killed me if it hadn’t been for the security guard. He saw what was happening and managed to beat him off.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Derek sounded genuinely concerned and Stevie found herself blinking away tears.

  ‘A bit bruised, but I’ll live.’

  ‘What makes you think it wasn’t a straightforward mugging? The sweats is a call to all the scum of the earth to crawl out of their holes.’

  It was the way Derek had always described the crowds he policed. Demonstrators, football supporters, rioters; he reduced all of them to zombies. Easier to push people around, Stevie supposed, if you thought that joining a crowd neutralised your brain. She couldn’t believe she was calling on him.

  ‘It wasn’t a random attack, Derek. There’s nothing and no one around the studio. This guy wasn’t just passing by, he was waiting for me. He wanted to get his hands on the laptop and he didn’t care if he killed me in the process.’

  ‘You should have given it to him.’

  For all his shtick about law and order, that had always been Derek’s advice: If you can’t outrun them, hand over your valuables and live to fight another day. Stevie tried to keep the irritation out of her voice.

  ‘Maybe I should, but he doesn’t know I’ve not seen whatever it was Simon hid on it. As far as he’s concerned, I’m in on the whole story.’

  She wanted to ask Derek to help her for Joanie’s sake, but Joanie was dead.

  ‘Hold on a minute, Stevie.’ She heard the faint sound of someone talking to Derek on the other end of the line. He said, ‘I’m going to put you on hold.’ And she was left with the hiss of dead air. When Derek returned he sounded out of breath.

  ‘You found one body. That was my twelfth. We’ve been in and out of houses all night checking on people reported missing.’

  ‘I thought you would be excused, because of Joanie.’

  ‘I told you, all leave’s cancelled. That includes compassionate leave.’ Derek sighed. ‘Not that I deserve much compassion.’ There was a pause and then he said, ‘You were a good friend to Joanie. You were always there for her.’

  Stevie knew what Joanie would have wanted her to say and so she said it.

  ‘She still loved you, Derek.’

  ‘I didn’t deserve her.’ The policeman’s voice was gruff. He cleared his throat and asked, ‘You really think you’re in danger?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have phoned you otherwise.’

  ‘I guess not.’ He took the phone away from his mouth and Stevie heard him ask someone, ‘Have you checked the other rooms?’ There was the sound of a dog barking. Derek shouted, ‘Could someone lock fucking Fido up?’ and then he was back on the line. ‘Are you still living in Camden?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go home, lock the door and don’t open it to anyone except me. If the doorbell rings, ignore it, same for the landline. I’ll get there as soon as I can, but it may not be for a while.’ Derek’s voice had regained the sense of certainty that used to exasperate her. Now it was reassuring. ‘I’ll call you on your mobile, so make sure it’s charged. I’m just a beat bobby so don’t expect me to be Sir Galahad. If you don’t answer, I’ll assume you’ve pissed off.’

  ‘Thanks, Derek.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, I’ve not done anything.’

  The line died abruptly and Stevie was left alone with the sound of birdsong. She sat there for a moment, watching the sunrise turning the tops of the high-rises pink. They looked mystical, like giant standing stones deposited there by some cosmic ancestor. She wondered if there would ever come a time when people would marvel at the civilisation that had created such giant structures, and ponder on what they had been trying to express.

  Eighteen

  A wind was rising and Stevie could hear the cord of the window blind tap, tap, tapping against the pane. She had kicked the covers o
ff in the night and a chill had crept into her bedroom and across her body. She reached out blindly and pulled the covers up. Tap, tap, tap, the sound of plastic hitting against glass. She knew she should get up and close the window before the storm arrived and rain blew in, but she was wearier than the dead, and sleep kept towing her under. Tap, tap, tap. Stevie looked towards the sound. The blinds were raised, the window closed. Simon stood on the other side of the pane, his face pale and slack, his index finger tapping against the glass.

  He mouthed, ‘Let me in.’

  Stevie made to move, but then she remembered that he was dead and floating miraculously outside her third-floor window.

  ‘No!’

  Stevie’s head shot up. She was still in her car outside the police station. Tap, tap, tap. She looked groggily at the passenger-side window and came face to face with a young woman.

  ‘It’s my Nan.’ The woman’s voice was muffled, her features absurdly close. ‘She’s not well.’

  Stevie rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. The woman was still tapping on the window, an insistent rhythm. Her short nails had been tipped with French-polished falsies, a few of which remained.

  ‘You’ve got to help me.’

  The stranger’s pupils were tiny. She was strung out, though whether it was from fear or something more chemical, Stevie couldn’t be sure. She lowered the window an inch.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I? I’m not a doctor. She needs to go to hospital.’

  It was a scam, Stevie was almost certain of it, but a small sliver of doubt niggled at her. She took her bag from the well of the passenger seat. There were three tens and a twenty tucked inside her purse. She slid the tens free and posted them through the gap in the window to the woman.

  ‘Take a taxi.’

  ‘The lifts are off. I need help to get her down the stairs.’

  The key was still in the ignition. Stevie started the engine.

  ‘Ask a neighbour.’

  ‘None of those bastards will help me.’

  The woman had tucked the money into the pocket of her jeans. Her fingers were back at the window, not tapping this time, squeezing through the gap, trying to force the glass down.

  ‘Let go.’ Stevie pressed the button to raise the window again, but the woman’s hands were in the way and it refused to close. She looked around for something to swat them with. All she could find was the ice scraper that had sat in the pocket of the driver’s door since last winter. She waved it at the woman. ‘I’m telling you to fuck off.’

  ‘Language.’ The woman was laughing now, a crazy sound, cutting through the dawn, but her fingers were persistent and the window shifted a little beneath their pressure. Stevie rapped the invading knuckles with the ice scraper and the woman shouted, ‘That fucking hurt.’

  Stevie took off the handbrake and let the Mini roll slowly back, but the woman was tenacious.

  ‘Don’t be like that.’ She hung on, laughing more wildly now, as if this were some game between the two of them. ‘You’ll have me hand off.’

  ‘Let go.’

  Stevie rapped at the fingertips again with the scraper, harder this time, and saw one of the false nails detach and land on the passenger seat.

  ‘Stop it.’ The woman laughed. ‘It hurts.’

  And then suddenly a second pair of hands was inserting itself between the car roof and the window, trying to prise them wider apart. Stevie couldn’t see the person’s face, just a stretch of T-shirt and tracksuit bottom, a Nike logo. These hands were broader, with patches of hair on their fingers. The window started to give. The woman fell back laughing, leaving the man to it.

  ‘You’re for it now,’ she hooted. ‘Boots will get you. You should have ran me over.’

  Stevie put the car in gear and drove towards the road. There was a bellow of pain, a sound of something dragging and a scream of protest from the whey-faced woman, but Stevie kept her eyes on the view ahead, and her foot on the accelerator.

  When she glanced through the side window a mile or so down the road, she saw familiar streets through a smear of blood. It was only a smear, Stevie reassured herself; much less than there would have been had she severed one of the man’s fingers. She kept the window down the fraction she had already lowered it, letting the cool air hit her face, hoping it would be enough to keep her awake until she got home.

  The pavements had the blighted look they took on after a heavy weekend, littered with the remnants of fast-food feasts and stained with piss and pakora sauce. Stevie stopped at a red light and a cleaner carrying a bucket and mop crossed the road. The cleaner’s hair was concealed beneath a dark blue headscarf, her clothes covered by a neat tabard. It was hard to believe there could be anything seriously amiss in a city where such women went calmly about their business.

  The traffic lights flashed and then shifted to green. Stevie drove on slowly. There were other cars on the road now and she rolled the window open wider. This was one of the intersections of the day, when too-early-to-work businessmen and women crossed paths with the last of the staggering-home crew; the time when those easing themselves into the day, the early-morning joggers and sippy-cup-coffee crew, shared the streets with night workers and the beginning-to-come-down-from-whatever-had-kept-them-up-all-night crowd.

  Stevie felt her eyes grow heavy and turned on the car radio. A farming programme was on, the presenter interviewing a scientist about the likelihood of the virus crossing species. We all remember the panic surrounding the H1N1 virus commonly known as bird flu. The fear then was that the illness would pass from birds to humans. Are you worried that this current virus, which has been christened V5N6, might infect cattle and other livestock?

  Stevie turned off the radio and stopped in front of another red light. A shoal of cyclists slid to a halt around her car. For the first time in ages she noticed the variety of the people, the assortment of skin colour and styles that had secretly delighted her when she moved to London. A pink-faced man in a business suit and cycling helmet put a hand on the roof of the Mini and leant insolently against it. Some other day she might have unlocked the handbrake and rolled gently forward just for the pleasure of seeing him wobble, but instead she gazed at the miracle of him: his crumpled fawn suit; the red sock revealed by his rolled-up trouser leg. She glanced up at his face and saw a white cotton mask stretched across his mouth and nose.

  On the other side of the road the proprietor of a Turkish café flung a bucket of hot, soapy water across the pavement in front of his shop and began sweeping it into the gutter. Shelf stackers were busy unpacking boxes inside the Tesco Metro. The sun was fully up now. The warmth of it on her face seemed to soothe her grazes. The lights changed again. Stevie let the cyclists dash ahead. She kept her eyes on the road, reached a hand into the glove compartment, found her sunglasses and put them on.

  It was as if morning had recalibrated the world. Everything looked so normal that, if it weren’t for her bruises, she would find it hard to believe the episode in the car park or her conversation with Derek had taken place. A bus stopped to let early-morning commuters aboard and Stevie glanced in her wing mirror, beyond the smear of blood, checking that she was free to overtake. Something on the passenger seat caught her eye. She passed the bus and then took a tissue, lifted the false fingernail from the seat and dropped it out of the window.

  She hated Derek’s cynicism, his description of people as the scum of the earth, but suddenly she felt as if the wakening streets around her were an illusion that might be peeled back any time, to reveal another, shadow world that could suddenly drag you under without a by-your-leave.

  ‘You’re well out of it, Joanie,’ she whispered. ‘Well out of it.’

  But she wished she had asked Derek how it had been; if Joanie had suffered, or if she had slipped away without the panic of knowing that it was the end.

  Nineteen

  The door to her apartment was ajar. Stevie crept down the hallway and rang her nei
ghbour’s doorbell, but there was no response. She had been burgled once before, three years ago. When the police had eventually appeared, hours after she had phoned them, they had been coolly indifferent, as if their job was to verify the facts for the insurance company, rather than find the perpetrators. Stevie couldn’t imagine that their response would be any swifter this time, even if she told them she was afraid that whoever had broken in might still be lurking there.

  She leant against the wall in the corridor. The best thing to do was to walk away, phone Derek and arrange to meet him somewhere else, or not to phone Derek at all, just dump the laptop at the hospital, get in the car and keep on driving. But if the man who had attacked her thought she was privy to whatever was hidden on the laptop, losing it might not be enough to free her of him.

  Stevie took off her trainers, pushed the door tentatively open and peered inside. The coat stand had been felled. It lay on its side amongst her scattered coats and hats, but the hallway was empty, the flat silent. She thought again about walking away. There was a road-map of the British Isles in the car. It would be easy to close her eyes and stick a pin into a random destination, somewhere no one would connect her with, and drive there.

  Stevie flattened herself against the lobby wall again, took out her mobile and pressed Joanie’s number. Joanie, Joanie, Joanie flashed onscreen but Derek didn’t pick up.

  ‘Fuck.’ Stevie mouthed the word.

  She was tired, bruised and filthy, the grit of the car park mixed with blood and sweat on her skin. Joanie’s death mingled with Simon’s in her mind. Stevie knew she wouldn’t win in a physical fight against her car-park attacker but part of her wanted to have a go. She pushed open the door to her apartment and slipped inside. Her satchel was heavy and awkward but she kept it strapped across her body. Somewhere outside a drill started up; the soundtrack of the city. Stevie tiptoed along her hallway, breathing in as she passed each open door.

  She shifted her bag to her back, stepped over the coat stand and crept into the kitchen. Cupboards had been swept clean, crockery and glasses shattered on the floor, but the knife block was still sitting in its place next to the cooker. Stevie trod carefully, cursing her bare feet, and slid the carving knife from its slot.