A Lovely Way to Burn

by Louise Welsh

  Would the killer continue to look for the laptop even if he believed that he had murdered her? Stevie wondered if he would try to discover what Geoffrey Frei had known. Maybe he would get ill and die, or take fright of the sweats and leave town. That would be the best solution. It would save her from having to kill him.

  Thirty-Two

  An album stamped with the name of some long-defunct photography studio lay half in, half out of Simon’s wardrobe. Stevie picked it up and carried it through to the lounge. The shape of the woman was still there, beneath the white sheet, and so she took the album out on to the balcony and rested it against the railing, squinting against the sun. A lone helicopter hovered in the distance, lingering magically in mid-air. Stevie stared at it, trying to work out whether it was the police or the press, but then she saw that it was flying away from City Airport and wondered if it belonged to some oligarch fleeing infection. She watched until it flew overhead, a rattling roar of propellers and engine that quickly faded back into silence, and then opened the album’s cover and peeled back the protective layer of tissue paper beneath.

  The album began with photographs of Simon as a baby. The first showed him cradled in his mother’s arms, a tiny face peeking from a white blanket that looked as if it had been crocheted by teams of spiders with a flair for detail. Simon’s mother’s hair was set in stiff curls and she was dressed in a formal suit and high-heeled court shoes, a combination that reminded Stevie of registry office weddings and going-away costumes. The new mother looked proud and worried. Stevie tried to see beyond her prematurely ageing perm and prim outfit and realised that she had been young when she had brought Simon into the world, in her early twenties at the most.

  Stevie flicked through the album, watching Simon growing from baby to toddler, the photographs going from black and white to Kodacolor. A second boy entered the pictures. Simon’s mother’s hair grew longer and loosened into honey-tinted waves. She had been a good-looking woman, growing younger as she aged, as had so many of her generation. The box-pleated skirts and twinsets she had favoured were replaced by flared trousers, cheesecloth blouses and miniskirts, which were in turn replaced by maxis. There was the occasional photograph of Simon’s father too, a smiling man wearing black-rimmed spectacles, who seemed to have a cigarette permanently clamped between his fingers. He had clearly preferred the other side of the camera: most shots were of his wife and two boys, at home, on holiday, posed in front of his Alfa Romeo, as if recording all of his prized possessions in one shot.

  It had been a privileged early life, but the photos stopped abruptly when Simon was around seven years old, leaving the final pages as blank as his suddenly curtailed future. Stevie turned to the back cover and found a cardboard pocket designed to hold photographs that were yet to be stuck into the album. Tucked inside was a series of school photos. Someone had filed them in the order they were taken, the earliest first. Row upon row of little boys in identical school uniforms, all aged about six or seven, posed in front of a castellated building, which reminded Stevie of Hampton Court. The boys’ ties, white shirts and blazers made them look like a shop display of ventriloquists’ dummies, stiffly alive and sinister. She searched for Simon amongst the faces but found it difficult to tell the boys apart; they were too young, their features unformed and lacking distinction.

  It wasn’t until she was several photographs in, that Stevie found him. Simon was standing in the back row near the centre, his face a miniature version of the man she had known, his features already marked with the combination of mischievousness and intelligence that had drawn Stevie to him. She remembered Buchanan telling her that he had joined the same school when he was twelve and flipped forwards, drawing a finger along the lines of straight-backed boys until she found what she thought was him.

  A thin boy, taller than the rest, Alexander Buchanan looked as if a growth spurt had robbed him of blood and energy. He was standing, pale and unhappy, at the end of a row and next to him, glancing away from the camera, was a boy who might have been John Ahumibe.

  The next image in the series confirmed it. This time the three boys were standing in the same row, Buchanan on Simon’s left, a curly-haired, bespectacled boy on his right, and next to him Ahumibe. Stevie slipped the school photos from the album and went back into the flat.

  The drawers of the writing desk Simon had kept in the corner of the sitting room had been tipped out, their contents dumped in a pile on the floor. Stevie knelt, looking for an envelope to put the photographs in, and saw a dash of gore on one of the desk’s sharp corners. She followed its progress to where it slid, oil-slick black, across the floor.

  Simon’s rug had been a bold geometric statement, intended to counter the minimalism he had favoured elsewhere. Its pattern could have been designed to camouflage blood, but Stevie wondered how she could have missed the drips and spatters, the road-map of her almost-twin’s death.

  You didn’t need to be a forensics expert to reconstruct what had happened. The woman had been standing in the middle of the floor, or perhaps sitting on the chair by the window, when the man had entered the sitting room. Whichever it was, Stevie was sure that she had already been there when he arrived. Was she waiting for Simon, not knowing that he was dead, or had she also come in search of something?

  Her death had been an accident. Nothing else made sense. The man was desperate to acquire the laptop and though Stevie had felt his willingness to kill her in the twist of silk around her throat, there was nothing a corpse could tell him.

  He had hit the woman, to show he meant business, and she had fallen badly, smashing her skull against the unforgiving corner of the desk. Stevie wondered if the man had been sorry, or if he had merely felt the impatience of someone who had cocked up at work, the fuck-shit of a bad day at the office, and the embarrassment of having to report to the boss that things had gone out of kilter, sales figures were down, productivity lower than it should be, the bid rejected, a woman dead.

  There was bile in her throat, and Stevie realised that it was her own head she saw slamming against the desk, her own blood soaking the carpet.

  ‘You’re alive,’ she whispered. ‘So get on with it, before you really do end up with your head staved in.’

  She rooted gingerly through the mess on the floor, careful to avoid the traces of blood. For an instant she thought she had found an envelope, but even before she touched it she saw what it was: a small, beige clutch bag. She opened it and found a lipstick, a card wallet, a set of car keys, an iPhone and a small, old-fashioned-looking, snub-nosed revolver. Stevie tried to remember how movie gangsters and detectives opened their guns to check their bullets, but the only image that came to mind was a spinning chamber; a game of Russian roulette.

  The wallet contained a clutch of credit cards in the name of Mrs Hope Black and several business cards bearing her name and an address in Kentish Town. Stevie knew the street. It was a short drive from Simon’s flat, the home of a deli where she had sometimes bought olives and wine for them to share.

  Stevie stood at the foot of the woman’s veiled body, like a priest about to say a prayer. She whispered, ‘If I get the chance, I’ll kill him for you.’

  But in her heart Stevie knew that if she killed anyone, it would be to make herself safe.

  Thirty-Three

  Hope Black’s Jaguar had leather seats, a walnut dashboard, a full tank of petrol and a satnav that had been carefully stowed in the glove compartment. Stevie walked the pavements around Simon’s building, pressing the key fob she had found in the dead woman’s bag, until she heard an answering chirp and saw the tell-tale flash of indicator lights. There was no one there to observe the theft, but the empty streets made her feel exposed and Stevie was glad when she was in the driver’s seat with the door safely locked.

  Better Bets was in the middle of a small parade of shops. She parked in an adjacent road and walked the final stretch, nervous of what might happen were someone to spot her driving Hope Black’s car.

  A m
an and a woman were walking along the street towards her, both of them wearing white surgical masks over their mouths and noses, like Beijing citizens on a poor-air day. They saw her and crossed to the opposite pavement, the man’s hand cupping the woman’s elbow, as if to encourage her to walk faster. The woman had her head lowered but the man made eye contact with Stevie, and then quickly looked away, as if he couldn’t afford to risk any more empathy.

  Stevie took out her phone and called Iqbal, and then Derek. Neither of them picked up. It meant nothing, she reassured herself, nothing. Batteries faded, people fell asleep, mislaid their phones, or simply chose not to answer. A missed call was not an intimation of death.

  An elderly man was sitting on the pavement outside Better Bets, his back resting against the shop’s shuttered window, his cap lowered over his face. He was smartly dressed, in a brown jacket, checked shirt and tweedy trousers, as if he had set out for a long autumn walk rather than a summer stroll in the city. Stevie had passed by hundreds of rough sleepers, beggars, drunks and junkies in her years in London, but the old man’s carefully-put-together outfit reminded her of her dead granddad. She saw that the scuffs on the old man’s jacket were recent and squatted down beside him.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  A wisp of white hair had escaped from beneath the man’s hat. It bent in response to the breeze, but his head remained sunk on his chest. Stevie had touched enough corpses for one day, but she thought she saw a faint flutter beneath the old man’s eyelids. Joanie, Simon and Hope had each been beyond help, but if the man was alive she might be able to do something for him. Perhaps there was an anxious relative she could phone. Stevie lifted his wrist and felt for a pulse. There was nothing.

  ‘You’re doing it wrong.’

  ‘Christ!’ Stevie jolted backwards. She remembered the way Django had leapt when the Taser hit him and hoped he had found his way back to Doris and John’s champagne. ‘Sorry, you gave me a fright.’

  ‘You need to press further down, on the artery.’ The old man’s voice was a raw whisper, catgut-stretched and dried. ‘You won’t feel nothing dicking around up there,’ he croaked.

  ‘Sorry.’ Stevie had jumped at the sound of his voice, but the knowledge that the man was dying didn’t shock her the way it would have done before. ‘Can I get you something?’

  ‘A blow-job.’ His laugh was a wheeze of old bones and stale air. ‘Sorry, love. Good of you to ask.’ He narrowed his eyes in an effort to focus on her face. ‘You healthy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Keep away from infected people like me.’

  ‘I’ve had it.’

  ‘Don’t matter. I was an ambulance driver. I know about these things. Pretty soon there’ll be rats, then cholera, typhoid, who knows what. Do yourself a favour. Keep your distance.’

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to get you some water, or phone someone to come and collect you?’

  ‘You just do as I told you. Being a Good Samaritan’s all fine and well, except for when it kills you.’ He gave her a smile that was all death. ‘You got any kiddies?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither did we. Would have liked some. Now I reckon it’s a blessing we never did, things being as they are.’

  She had seen very few children since the crisis began, Stevie realised. She imagined them, huddled in their houses, hidden from the sweats by their parents, the way Anne Frank’s mother and father had hoped to hide her from the Nazis.

  ‘It’s not so bad at the end,’ the old man said. ‘I saw it with my wife. You think you’re getting better, you stop being sick and the headaches take a back seat, then you realise you’re on your way out anyway. Another of nature’s little jokes. But it ain’t painful any more. That’s about the best you can hope for in this life, an easy death.’ A tear slipped its way down his cheek. ‘Piss off and give me peace to look at the sky.’

  Stevie touched his shoulder and got to her feet.

  The door to the betting shop was closed, its metal shutter rolled halfway down. Stevie banged against it and when there was no reply, pushed the shutter up and tried the door. It was locked. She rapped against the wood, then took Hope Black’s clutch from her bag, fished out her keys and tried each of them, until one turned smoothly in the lock.

  ‘Hello?’

  She pushed the door open and stepped inside. The shop was dark. It smelt stale, like the house of someone who had become too old, or too ill, to take care of themselves.

  ‘Hello?’ She took another cautious step.

  The flat-screen televisions ranged around the room glowed blue and silent, lit with error messages. The space behind the screened counter, where bookies must have calculated the odds, was empty. Stevie had stuffed the leather clutch at the bottom of her bag, wary of the awkward questions that might be asked, should someone recognise it. Now she wondered if she should have slipped the gun into her pocket. It was too easy to imagine someone leaping out from behind the deserted counter. She pushed against the door that would take her into the bookmaker’s stall and the private sanctum beyond. It was locked tight.

  ‘You need the code number.’

  A man was standing in the doorway beyond the counter. He took a drag from the cigarette in his hand and said, ‘You another joker wants to bet on whether you’re going to make it or not?’

  ‘Have you had a lot of those?’ Stevie smiled, as if it was normal to meet strange men in unlit betting shops, but her voice wavered like a flame caught in a sudden draught. The bookmaker held Stevie’s gaze for a moment, and she had a feeling of being weighed and measured, then he shrugged. He was handsome, if you didn’t mind your men scruffy and over fifty.

  ‘Some. More betting they’ll make it than not. Not much point otherwise. There’s a few wanted to bet the Queen would snuff it. I told them to sling their hook and learn a little respect. I did lay a few that the Prime Minister wouldn’t come through. He’s fair game. I even took an accumulator that the PM, the Mayor and the Chancellor would all shuffle off to Buffalo in the same week.’ The man’s voice was slow and monotone, as if he had been drinking. ‘Should have given it lower odds.’

  Stevie said, ‘I’m not here to place a bet.’

  ‘We’re not taking any right now, as it happens.’ He looked at the cigarette as if he was surprised to see it in his hand and then took another drag. ‘What are you here for?’

  ‘I’m looking for Hope Black.’

  ‘She’s not here.’ His face was half hidden in smoke and shadows, but she thought the bookmaker might have smiled. ‘I’d say come back later but …’ He let the unfinished sentence hang in the air.

  ‘But what?’

  He shrugged again. ‘She may not come back, or I may not be here when she does.’

  Stevie couldn’t think how to ask why the woman had been in Simon’s flat. She said, ‘Do you mind me asking where she’s gone?’

  ‘Ask away.’

  This time there was no doubt that the man was smiling, a small, unhappy twist of the mouth with nothing of joy in it. He lifted the cigarette to his mouth again and she saw that it was a joint. Stevie wondered if she should tell him that Hope was dead and that she had found her. She asked, ‘Are you Hope’s husband?’

  The bookmaker took another drag from his joint, narrowing his eyes against the smoke.

  ‘Do I look like I’d want to get hitched to an Irish-Jamaican bookie? Hope and me are strictly colleagues, or should I say strictly boss and lackey, no prizes for guessing which is which. She inherited this place from her dad and me along with it.’

  Stevie detected injury in his voice and wondered if he was closer to his boss than he was admitting.

  ‘I found her card in my boyfriend’s flat. She must have put it through the letter box. He’s dead. He died before all this happened, but he wasn’t into betting and I wanted to know why she had left it there.’

  The man was wearing an antiquated beige cardigan that seemed more holes and tears than wool. He leant against the door jamb
and pushed a hand deep into one of its pockets.

  ‘You know the best bit of advice I could give a young person like you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Learn when to take advice.’ He glanced towards the street, the sun blazing against the pavement. ‘I never took any when I was your age, but I could have saved myself a lot of bother if I had. See this scar?’ He leant forward and turned his face to the side so Stevie could see the white line that ran from the outside corner of his eye to the edge of his mouth. ‘I got that because I didn’t listen to a piece of advice.’

  ‘What was it?’

  The bookmaker shook his head, as if she had missed the point.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what it was. My advice to you is, cherish good memories while you can and don’t go looking under too many stones. So Hope left her card at your boyfriend’s flat? So what? There’s enough trouble in the world – don’t go looking for more.’

  ‘I need to know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because …’ She paused, trying to think of an answer that would make him want to help her. ‘Because the past wasn’t the way I thought it was, and if I don’t find out what really happened I might go insane.’

  Stevie didn’t bother to add that she was scared whoever had killed Simon and Hope might yet find her.

  The man snorted. ‘Sanity’s overrated.’

  Stevie held his stare, giving him the half-promise smile that had won her countless sales, and he let out a sigh and stepped out of the doorway. The security screen between them was grimed with a thin layer of dust and he looked spectral behind its fog.

  ‘People always think they need to know. What’s the betting the sweats were made in a test tube by someone who needed to know something?’ The bookmaker slid open a cupboard in the wall. ‘Just like Eve with that bloody apple. Look where it got her.’ He squatted and tapped a code into the small safe concealed inside it. ‘Flung out of Paradise, didn’t know a good thing when she had it. Like the rest of us, as it turns out.’ He took a ledger from the safe and set it on the counter. ‘Hope went out to collect outstanding debts.’ He must have seen the surprise on Stevie’s face because he said, ‘An excellent example of someone not taking good advice. I told her to leave it and sit tight until all this was over, but Hope got nervous at the prospect of creditors leaving town, especially the ones that were leaving in wooden boxes. She reckoned that even if they couldn’t take it with them, they sure as hell wouldn’t leave it behind to pay their gambling debts.’