A Lovely Way to Burn

by Louise Welsh

  ‘What would your solution be?’ Stevie asked. ‘Paint crosses on victims’ doors, or lock them up in concentration camps?’

  ‘Phrases like concentration camp are over-emotive. Infected people should volunteer for isolation. Anything else is selfish.’

  Stevie saw Simon’s face again, the way his mouth had hung open, gums receding to reveal the length of his teeth, the unnatural smile grinning at her from the rumpled bed, familiar and strange.

  Perhaps Iqbal also remembered Simon’s death, because his voice softened.

  ‘At least that way they wouldn’t take anyone with them.’

  Over by the barrier, the Scottish soldier was saying something into his radio. Stevie rolled the car window down a crack. She smelt the autumn scent of smoking wood and, beneath it, something sweet and familiar that made her think of compost and rotting leaves. The trees shifted in the wind and whatever the soldier was relaying was lost in the sound of their gusting branches. She slid the window back in place and asked Iqbal, ‘Do you think that’s why they’ve imposed a curfew? To avoid the sweats from spreading?’

  ‘I think the curfew’s about public order. The government don’t have the balls or the manpower to order people to stay in their houses indefinitely. Right now they seem more concerned with protecting property than lives.’ Stevie wondered how Iqbal, who had isolated himself in his home, knew more about the situation than she did. ‘I’ve got some good news for you.’ His voice was eager again. ‘I managed to hack into Dr Sharkey’s emails.’

  The sound of a diesel engine and heavy wheels rumbled into the early-morning stillness. Stevie looked up and saw an army lorry driving through the open checkpoint. The lorry was olive green, unmarked and without windows. One of the waiting soldiers removed his cap and lowered his head as it passed. The others followed suit.

  Stevie wondered if Iqbal had read any of the messages she had sent to Simon, but kept the thought to herself and asked, ‘Is there anything that stands out?’

  ‘It’s mainly medical stuff, way above my head, but Dr Sharkey kept an online scheduler that sent daily reminders of appointments to his inbox. I hacked into it too and cross-referenced his appointments with his emails, to see what he was up to before he died.’

  The ease with which Iqbal had managed to shatter the illusion of privacy appalled her, but Stevie asked, ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Dates with you were awarded an emoticon, a smiley face.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Three days before his Web presence ceased, Dr Sharkey was meant to meet a journalist, Geoffrey Frei.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

  ‘No?’ Iqbal sounded surprised. ‘He’s an investigative journalist who writes popular science pieces on medical corruption. His last book concentrated on the drug industry. It was a bestseller. I read it.’ Stevie heard the sound of paper being shuffled. ‘I compared some dates and discovered that Geoffrey Frei was in the news a lot the week Dr Sharkey died.’

  Stevie could still see the lorry in her rear-view mirror, travelling at the slow pace of a funeral cortège. The Scots soldier left his companions by the barrier and walked towards her car.

  ‘Iqbal, I’m sorry, but I’m about to be moved on,’ she said. The soldier pointed towards the road and mouthed something that might have been straight home. Stevie gave him a nod and gunned the engine into life. ‘I’m going to have to phone you back.’

  Iqbal kept talking. ‘Frei was mugged somewhere near King’s Cross Station the night before he was due to meet Dr Sharkey. He was a big guy, a rugby blue, whatever that is. It looks like he tried to fight the muggers off, but it would have been better if he’d just given them his wallet. They stabbed him in the neck, the jugular to be precise. By the time he was found, he’d already bled to death.’

  The soldier slapped the roof of the Mini, and she started.

  ‘Jesus!’

  Iqbal said, ‘What was that?’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing.’ Stevie was already rolling down the window. ‘I’ll phone you back.’

  She killed the call and looked up at the soldier.

  He said, ‘You’re free to go. If you take my advice you’ll stick to the main roads.’

  Stevie nodded. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Same to you.’ The soldier grinned, revealing a set of bad teeth, the bottom row as crowded and overlapping as drinkers in a station bar. ‘Here’s hoping neither of us end up priority traffic.’

  Twenty-Nine

  It was eerie, driving alone through the violet dawn blush, her car engine announcing her presence to the otherwise silent streets. Stevie took the Scottish soldier’s advice and kept to main roads. She found herself scanning the windows of houses and apartments, trying to fathom life from drawn curtains and lit rooms. She thought about the army lorry. Priority traffic, no one wanted to be; that had prompted the soldiers to bow their heads and remove their caps. She wondered where it would put its load to rest.

  Stevie had been fresh from college and working for a tabloid when foot-and-mouth had hit Britain. She was too green to get the assignment, but the crisis had been headline news and she had followed it, impatient for the day when her name would be a byline on the front page. Stevie remembered television footage of bonfires stacked with burning carcasses, plumes of black smoke drifting across villages. She wondered what arrangements Derek was making for Joanie and pushed the thought away. It was better not to dwell on these things. She had her task. It would be her compass through this crisis.

  A trio of teenage girls, weighed down with hastily packed carrier bags, were ambling along the pavement. The girls’ languid, after-the-party gait made her wonder if they were sick, or simply worn out by the excesses of the night before. Stevie glanced in her rear-view mirror as she passed and caught a fleeting impression of grey skin cowled in shadows.

  A petrol station gleamed up ahead, but when she got closer she saw that its entrance was coned off, its pumps clamped and marked Out of Use.

  ‘Shit.’

  Stevie glanced at her petrol gauge again. The tank was still more than half full, but she thought the dial had slipped a little. There were more cars on the roads now, though still a shadow of the traffic that would usually gridlock them at this time of the morning.

  Stevie thought about Geoffrey Frei, the proximity of his death to Simon’s. She wondered if the police knew of the two men’s assignation. There had been a spate of stabbings and Underground station muggings that summer, and the journalist’s death might easily have been another random attack that had ended tragically. But the coincidence remained: Frei and Simon had been due to meet, and now both of them were dead.

  Stevie pulled over, turned off the engine and tapped Frei’s name into the Internet search engine on her iPhone. The connection was painfully slow, but eventually a list of options appeared on the small screen. Stevie clicked on an obituary in the Sunday Times. It was as Iqbal had said: the journalist was the author of a regular column exposing scientific misrepresentations and scandals. His most recent book had been a crusade against corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. It had topped the non-fiction charts and he had been in the process of researching a follow-up. Geoffrey Frei was survived by his wife Sarah and twin sons.

  She returned to the search engine and found a report of Frei’s death in the Evening Standard. A photo of an open-faced man headed the article. Stevie took in the generous smile, the trendy, heavy-framed glasses and curly hair. Then she scrolled down and read that Frei had been discovered by refuse collectors, slumped between rows of dustbins, at the back of the railway station. The area around King’s Cross bristled with CCTV cameras; the journalist had been captured crossing the station concourse and in the street beyond, but his encounter with the muggers had taken place off-camera. Police were reported to be investigating, and there was a call for witnesses, but once it had disposed of the journalist’s celebrity, the article took on the weary, dead-end air of a much retold story whose conclusions were
already known.

  Stevie wished that Simon was there to tell her what was going on. She leant back in the driver’s seat and took from her pocket the photograph of the two of them laughing together in Russell Square. She traced a finger around the edge of Simon’s jaw, trying to remember the scent of him, the timbre of his voice.

  ‘Fuck, Simon,’ she whispered. ‘What were you up to?’

  Simon had been a good-looking man, with a responsible job, who had known how to play the fool. He had thick dark hair, a pleasantly broad body and lines at the corners of his eyes that suggested hard work and a good sense of humour. He had been clever too, of course. But it had been his faults, as much as his attributes, which had drawn her to him. The sense of style that had flirted with, but never completely embraced, vanity. The too-fast cars and gregariousness that had threatened to embarrass Stevie, even as it amused her. And then there had been the sex.

  At first she had thought Simon’s profession might put her off, that when he touched her she would be reminded of the snap of silicone gloves or the texture of blood. But Stevie had discovered extra assurance in the touch of hands that knew the secrets of flesh and bone.

  ‘You know how I look inside,’ she had once said to him, lying naked in the middle of his bed. He had traced her organs with his fingertips, here her heart, here her liver, gall bladder, stomach, rolling her on to her front so he could run his fingers around the outline of her kidneys, her lungs, and then trace a line down her spine that ended with his teeth sinking gently into the cheeks of her ‘gluteus maximus’, until she had laughed and turned on to her back; a move that he had rightly taken as an invitation.

  Stevie scrolled down the search engine results again. Frei’s death had prompted editorials on societal decay and a feature that charted his background and education against that of a youth convicted of stabbing a stranger to death. Frei had been born to parents who were both doctors. He had attended the same top public school as a former Prime Minister, and then followed in the family tradition, obtaining a medical degree. After he graduated, Frei had worked in a London hospital for a while, and then changed direction, taking a postgrad in journalism at the London School of Economics. A regular column in the Independent had followed. It had formed the basis of his first book.

  A movement outside in the street snagged the corner of her eye. Stevie looked up to see a group of dogs trotting along the pavement, so smartly paced that they gave the illusion of keeping in time with each other. She counted five of them, a motley selection of breeds that might have made a cute assortment, had they been drawn by a children’s illustrator. Each of the dogs was wearing a collar, but the pack occupied the pavement with an assurance, a dogged doggyness, that gave them a feral edge. A bichon frise let out a yelp and the rest of the pack set up a frantic chorus of barking. The dogs upped their pace, a slender greyhound at their head closely followed by a sleek Dalmatian. Stevie watched, glad she was in her car, as they dashed around a corner. A tiny chihuahua which was probably worth a lot of money was the last to vanish.

  She looked at her smartphone again, ready to close the Internet down, but a name she recognised jumped out at her from the list of hits. Dr John Ahumibe had written an obituary of Geoffrey Frei in the Lancet.

  The doctor began by saying that he wrote as a medical colleague, an admirer of Frei’s journalism and ‘finally as a friend’. He briefly mentioned their membership of the same rugby team at school and their subsequent friendship at university. Although in later years they had kept in ‘more sporadic touch’, Dr Ahumibe went on to say how much he had admired Frei’s work. The doctor’s prose was starched with formalities that might have indicated grief or respect or simply a poor writing style.

  Stevie breathed on the windscreen, fogging it with her breath. She drew a neat triangle on the hazed glass with her fingertip and added a name at each corner.

  She wrote Dr Ahumibe’s name in the middle, and after a moment’s hesitation put Buchanan’s beside it. Reah had died of the sweats and it wasn’t unusual for people who had gone to school together to enter the same professions and keep in touch. But Dr Ahumibe had known all three men, and now all three of them were dead.

  Stevie took a tissue from the glove compartment, rubbed the diagram away and then pressed dial on her phone. Iqbal picked up immediately and she said, ‘I’m sorry I hung up.’ She wanted to ask him if Frei’s death could be related to Simon’s, but any answer he could give her would only be speculation and so she said, ‘Do you think you could find Frei’s address?’

  ‘If you promise to come back in one piece.’ He gave a faint, awkward laugh. ‘I don’t mean come back to me. Not necessarily.’

  ‘I know.’ There was silence on the line. Stevie thought she could hear Iqbal willing himself not to ask her where she was. She could still see the faint outline of the crude diagram she had drawn on the windscreen: Simon, Reah and Frei constellated around Dr Ahumibe. She said, ‘If there’s an answer to why Simon died, I think it’s somewhere in the computer. Simon was determined to get it to Reah, and someone else was equally determined to get it off me.’

  ‘So why don’t you come back here and help me work through the data?’

  It was a good question. Stevie closed her eyes and tried to picture herself at Iqbal’s desk, trawling through computer printouts. She had managed to calculate her sales figures and commission percentages without any trouble on Shop TV. Perhaps she would discover a talent for a different type of statistics. The idea of a siege made her chest tighten, but that wasn’t the only reason she was focused on staying on the road. She spoke slowly, trying to order her thoughts.

  ‘Simon obviously believed Reah would understand the information on the computer straight away. I thought Simon was trying to tell Reah something, but what if he already knew what the computer held? The data you’re examining might be evidence that supports something both Simon and Reah were already aware of.’ Realisation quickened her voice. ‘The laptop is crucial, but we may never know why, without putting it into context. That’s what I have to focus on.’

  ‘I know it’s none of my business, but I don’t like you being out there on your own.’

  ‘We’re a team. You’re the brains and I’m the foot soldier.’ Stevie injected a smile into her voice, to hide her irritation at the paternal edge in his, and related a version of her meeting with Melvin Summers that excluded the pub lock-in and police raid. ‘Summers was bitter, and he had the means, but I’d be surprised if he was the killer. He struck me as the kind of man who would give himself up if he’d done the deed. Broadcasting the reasons why he’d murdered Simon would be part of his revenge.’

  ‘Killing the man wouldn’t be enough. He’d want to kill his reputation too? It sounds like your boyfriend knew how to make enemies.’

  Stevie considered telling Iqbal there was no point in being jealous of the dead, but she knew from experience that jealousy, like love, didn’t conform to reason. She said, ‘Perhaps Melvin Summers simply needed someone to blame for his losses and Simon was the obvious target.’ A convoy of army lorries rattled past, green tarpaulins shivering on their frames. Stevie asked, ‘How is it going with the data? Have you made any progress?’

  ‘I’m working my way through it, but the only way to go is slowly if I’m going to avoid errors. I can tell you one thing though. I did a search and it looks like the team didn’t submit all of their studies for publication.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Some of the trials showed more positive results than others. They ditched the negative ones and only published outcomes that endorsed their treatment. Those are the ones I’m concentrating on.’

  ‘Is that legal?’

  ‘According to Geoffrey Frei’s book, inconvenient results are routinely suppressed. I wouldn’t have thought to look for it otherwise.’

  ‘What’s the difference between only publishing positive results and publishing false ones?’

  ‘Limiting your publications to positive result
s is legal, but being caught publishing false results would be professional suicide.You could end up in jail.’

  Stevie knew Simon would never have done anything that might endanger his career. She said, ‘Simon would never have risked harming children,’ and wondered at the gap between what she had thought and what she had said aloud.

  She could hear Iqbal’s fingers rattling against computer keys.

  ‘In that case, maybe he had faith in the treatment and didn’t want to cloud its chances of being approved by publicising trials that were less than a hundred per cent.’ The key strokes stopped. ‘It looks like Frei was ex-directory, but here’s his address.’ He read out a street and house number in Swiss Cottage and Stevie punched it into her satnav. Iqbal said, ‘Will you keep me updated on where you are?’

  ‘Philosophically or geographically?’

  His voice was serious. ‘Both.’

  Stevie hung up and turned on the engine. Only a moment ago she had felt close to Simon, but now she was losing her picture of him. The man she thought she had known was fading and a new one was taking his place. Did her hunt still make sense if he was someone else?

  She was kidding herself. It had never made any sense. Nothing did.

  The route suggested by the satnav would take her close to Simon’s apartment block. Simon had loaded the laptop with coded data he had wanted her to deliver to Reah, but perhaps there was information he was less inclined to share still stored in his flat. Stevie checked her mirrors, steered the car away from the kerb and started to drive.

  Thirty

  The streets around Simon’s building were lined with parked cars. Stevie drove a slow circuit in search of a free space, taking left turns that drew her gradually further from her destination. She had tuned into Radio London, hoping for local news, but a panel of people she didn’t recognise were discussing prisons.

  ‘Criminals are incarcerated because they’re a danger to society,’ a plummy female voice said. ‘To truncate their sentences would not only be an affront to justice, it would be dangerous.’