A Lovely Way to Burn

by Louise Welsh

  ‘What was he going to do?’

  ‘That was the problem. Geoff couldn’t expose the scandal without exposing his source, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to spare him anyway. He didn’t drink much, but we had wine with our dinner one evening, after the boys were in bed. Geoff got quite morose about the investigation. He didn’t go into details; like I said, he tended to keep the darker side of his work separate from family life, but it was something nasty.’ Sarah Frei stroked her child’s curls. ‘All the same, he had known the man when they were both children. They’d been friends when they were at school. That was why the whistleblower had got in touch with Geoff in the first place.’ She shrugged. ‘Geoff was going to write the article and alert the relevant authorities, but he didn’t feel good about it.’

  ‘Did he say whether he was going to warn his source of what he intended to do?’

  Sarah Frei put the cigarette to her lips, but drew on it less hungrily.

  ‘Geoff was Geoff. He liked to think he was very twenty-first century, but he had this big public-school chip on his shoulder about doing the honourable thing. I used to tell him, stuff the honourable thing. Just do the right thing.’

  ‘Did anyone else pick up the investigation, after he died? Any of his colleagues?’

  Sarah Frei paused and Stevie became aware of the noise in the street, the growl of engines as cars drove away, the burble of subdued goodbyes. Sarah Frei raised her hand in farewell to a departing Volvo and gave a sad smile. ‘That’s Max and Abigail’s mum and dad gone. We should leave soon too.’ She glanced at her cigarette and then turned her attention back to Stevie.‘The newspaper was going to send a courier to take Geoff’s computer and notes to his editor. I think they thought it would be insensitive to send one too soon, but they should have been quicker off the mark. The house was burgled while we were at Geoff’s funeral.’ Sarah Frei shook her head. ‘Can you believe it? At the very moment we were putting my husband into the ground someone was in our home, going through our things. Most of the neighbours were at the funeral so the burglars couldn’t have chosen a better time.’

  Stevie said, ‘That’s terrible.’ But she was remembering her own torn-apart flat and Simon’s ransacked apartment. ‘Did any of your neighbours get burgled too?’

  ‘No. I think some of them felt bad that they weren’t, as if it would have made things better if they’d lost something too.’ She gave a small, bitter laugh. ‘What I wanted was for one of them to have lost her husband instead of me. I wanted Geoff to be here so we could both lend a sympathetic ear while someone else tried to pick up the pieces of their life.’ Sarah Frei glanced at the chid and then raised her eyes to meet Stevie’s. ‘I’m sorry, that sounds terrible.’ She took an angry pull at her cigarette. ‘Geoff’s editor described the burglary as the last straw, but quite frankly I found it hard to care. The burglars took quite a few things of value, including Geoff’s computer, but so what? The boys were safe and they were all that mattered.’

  ‘Didn’t your husband keep a backup or store files online?’

  ‘Real people with real reputations were involved in Geoff’s investigations, so he was careful about where he stored his research. He had a pen drive that he kept in his jacket pocket and a laptop that he kept mainly at home. If he’d stored his research on the newspaper server his editor could have accessed it, but Geoff didn’t consider that secure enough.’ Sarah Frei rolled her eyes. ‘It’s lost. All of it.’

  ‘Did your husband say anything about the whistleblower, anything that might help to identify them?’

  ‘Like I told you, Geoff was always anxious not to expose his sources, even to me. But he was at the angry point in the investigation. The doing-it-in-sorrow-rather-than-anger stage would have come next. He told me that the people he was investigating thought they could apply a scale to suffering, as if life was an accounts ledger and relieving the pain of one group offset inflicting it on another.’ She shrugged. ‘Geoff loved being a journalist but I’m not sure it was the best job for him. He felt things too deeply. He’d had a couple of episodes of depression, not so bad that he was hospitalised, but bad enough. I felt it was my responsibility to protect him from that.’ She took another drag at her cigarette, smoking it down to the nub, like a homeless person unsure of where their next fag would come from. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t make a very good job of things that night. I tried to add a sense of proportion by pointing out that it was just what happened everywhere: big companies destroying the environment, or exploiting their workforce, then trying to make themselves look good by sponsoring some sexy charity. I made a bad joke about how it was essential that the charity be sexy – after all, no one wants a logo highlighting victims of anal fissures on their product. Geoff lost his temper and shouted at me. It was unlike him.’

  ‘What do you think he meant about scales of suffering?’

  The child stirred in Sarah Frei’s lap and she stroked his head again.

  ‘I’m not sure. I got the impression it wasn’t simply whatever the people involved had done that had infuriated him, but some warped morality that they’d used to justify it.’ She dropped the cigarette on the ground and crushed it beneath the toe of her sneaker, even though it was already dead. ‘We need to go.’

  ‘One last quick question, please.’ Stevie held up the photograph again and pointed to Simon, Buchanan and Ahumibe.

  ‘Do you recognise any of these men?’

  ‘They’re not men, they’re boys.’ Something caught Sarah Frei’s attention and she leant in closer, putting her arms around her son to stop him rolling from her lap. ‘Is that John Ahumibe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was the only person from school that Geoff kept up with. They weren’t close – the occasional drink, the odd exchange of emails – they were both busy, but they touched base from time to time.’ She looked at Stevie. ‘Geoff said the whistleblower was someone he’d known at school, but I got the impression that it was someone he hadn’t seen for a long time. It never even occurred to me to ask if it was John. Was it him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Stevie pressed her finger beneath the young faces of Simon and Buchanan. ‘What about the other two?’

  ‘It’s hard to be certain, but I don’t think I met either of them. Like I said, schooldays weren’t the happiest days of Geoff’s life. Are they the people Geoff was investigating?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Including John Ahumibe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who are the others?’

  ‘One of them was my boyfriend.’ Stevie stroked the face of the youth that had been Simon. ‘The other was their colleague, Alexander Buchanan.’

  ‘Was your boyfriend involved?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. But if he was, I think he was doing his best to fix it when he died.’

  ‘Would you still think that if you hadn’t been in love with him?’

  It was on the tip of Stevie’s tongue to say that she hadn’t been in love with Simon, but she whispered, ‘I don’t know.’

  Sarah Frei blew on her son’s face, gently wakening him. He grumbled and turned away and she whispered, ‘Time to go now, Monkey.’ She looked at Stevie. ‘If you’d told me a week ago that Geoff had been murdered, I wouldn’t have rested until I’d found his killer, but things have changed. I still care, I care deeply, but the new priority is to stay alive. We’re leaving London until this virus or whatever it is burns itself out. You should do the same.’

  ‘There’s someone I need to check on first.’

  ‘Don’t leave it too long.’ Sarah Frei got to her feet, lifting her sleepy child with one arm and struggling with the box of groceries with the other. ‘Things are falling apart. Soon the sweats won’t be the only thing we have to worry about.’

  Thirty-Five

  ‘Stephanie, are you okay?’ Alexander Buchanan had known that it was Stevie on the other end of the line, before she said a word. The thought of her name blinking on the chemist’s phone was disquietin
g and Stevie wished she had acquired an anonymous pay-as-you-go mobile. Buchanan asked, ‘Where are you?’ His voice was as urbane as ever, but there was a note of anxiety beneath his charm.

  Stevie had forced her way through the jam of departing four-by-fours, urban jeeps and estate cars in the streets around Sarah Frei’s house and now the Jaguar was eating up the miles. She put him on the speakerphone and glanced at the satnav’s map, checking that she was on the right road for Iqbal’s flat. Buchanan was the third person she had called. Neither Derek nor Iqbal had picked up and she had an increasing sense of her life burning away, like a fuse on a bomb steadily fizzing towards an explosion.

  ‘What were you and Simon up to?’ Stevie didn’t bother with niceties or preliminaries.

  ‘We were helping sick children get better.’

  Buchanan’s voice sounded self-consciously reasonable, like the voice of a man who considered he had every right to be offended, but was refusing to rise to the bait.

  ‘There was more to it than that. You were making a lot of money.’

  Stevie had expected to hear the bustle of the hospital in the background but Alexander Buchanan might have been answering her call from a soundproofed booth.

  ‘The treatment generated a profit, yes, but we put most of that into research, in the hope that we could eventually make it more readily available. I’m at my lab. If you come here I can show you some relevant paperwork.’

  ‘I’d prefer you to email it to me.’

  ‘All I have is hard copy, and right now I don’t quite have the time to scan and send it.’ The chemist’s voice had lost its veneer of tolerance. ‘Normally I’d ask one of our technicians to help out, but they seem to be either dead or otherwise occupied. So if you can’t examine it yourself, I’m afraid you’ll have to take my word for it.’

  ‘My sense of trust has taken a bit of a battering.’ Along with the rest of me, she thought, but didn’t say.

  Stevie had expected to be snared in lines of traffic, but the roads were all but empty. Normally it would have been a relief, but she found herself hoping she would turn a corner and see a stream of vehicles, each one containing healthy, pissed-off travellers. Up ahead, traffic lights glowed red. Stevie slowed to check that there was nothing about to cross the intersection and drove through. She said, ‘Simon didn’t die of natural causes. He didn’t kill himself either. Someone murdered him, but perhaps you already know that.’

  There was a pause on the line. The only sound the expensive purr of the Jaguar’s engine. After a moment Buchanan said, ‘It crossed my mind.’

  ‘It crossed your mind?’ She pressed her foot to the accelerator. ‘So all that guff about the possibility Simon had committed suicide was just an attempt to distract me. Who killed him?’

  ‘I said I suspected the possibility of foul play.’ He spat the words like a schoolteacher infuriated by a stupid answer from a bright pupil. ‘I didn’t say I was positive, and I certainly didn’t say I had a suspect in mind.’

  ‘But you seem to be extremely well informed.’

  Somewhere in a quiet place beyond the car, beyond her imagination, Alexander Buchanan sighed.

  ‘I knew Simon for over thirty years. I also knew he had a weakness for exotic company, of a kind that could get you into trouble. Nothing personal, but you’re a case in point. At the risk of sounding like a terrible snob, surgeons don’t normally go out with salesgirls.’

  Something dashed in front of the car, black and swift, a blur of legs and fur. Stevie swerved, bracing herself for the impact, but there was no bang, no sickening swell beneath her wheels, and when she glanced in the rear-view mirror she saw a dog running along the white lines in the middle of the road, as if they were a map that would guide it home.

  She took a deep breath and said, ‘Going out with salesgirls isn’t a crime. Exploiting the families of sick children is.’

  ‘Agreed, but that’s not what we were doing.’

  ‘I heard otherwise.’

  ‘A-h,’ the doctor stretched out the vowel, like a dawning realisation. ‘You’ve been talking to Melvin Summers.’

  ‘He thinks you killed his daughter.’

  ‘Yes, he does. It’s a common delusion. Recently bereaved parents often find it impossible to absorb the senselessness of a child’s death. Some of them resolve their confusion by becoming convinced that the doctors were responsible. I wouldn’t say you get used to being a scapegoat, but for the most part you learn how to deal with it. Mr Summers is to be pitied. His wife committed suicide and he resorted to alcohol, not the best form of medication for a man already under great emotional strain, but he was a serious thorn in our sides. I’m afraid our diplomatic skills had failed and we were discussing the possibility of taking out an injunction against him.’

  She was approaching another crossroads, another red light. Stevie pressed a foot to the Jaguar’s brakes again and, when there was no sign of an oncoming vehicle, sailed through. She said, ‘I might have bought that, if there weren’t other accusations against your team. Did you know Geoffrey Frei was investigating you?’

  ‘No, but he was perfectly welcome to do so.’

  There was a school up ahead. A sheet drooped from its railings, QUARANTINE CENTRE painted across it in red. Whoever had made the sign had loaded their brush with too much paint and the letters were tailed by drips that made the words look as if they were bleeding. Stevie slowed the Jaguar to a crawl. The door to the school was open, the playground crammed with carelessly parked cars, but there was no other sign of life.

  She put her foot back on the accelerator and said, ‘Frei’s investigation was brought to an abrupt halt. He was murdered and then someone broke into his house and stole his research.’

  ‘I heard about his murder, but I didn’t know about the burglary. Tell me, was that all that was taken, his research I mean?’

  The sun cut into Stevie’s eyes, blinding her for an instant. She flipped down the sun visor. The Jaguar’s air conditioning was on, the space inside a comfortable fifteen degrees, but she had an urge to open the car windows and feel the air outside on her face. She kept them closed, the car sealed tight, like a space rocket speeding towards the unknown.

  ‘Other valuables were stolen, but that doesn’t prove anything. The killer would want the murder and burglary to appear unrelated.’

  Buchanan gave a dry laugh. ‘That’s the thing about conspiracy theories; they rely on speculation and that makes them endlessly adaptable. Conspiracists can always come up with an explanation because they don’t have to stick to inconvenient facts. Tell me, what do you know about Frei?’

  ‘I know he went to school with you, Ahumibe and Simon. I spoke to his wife. She said he hated it. He was bullied.’

  ‘I’m afraid that was true. Frei was one of those boys that seemed to attract bullies. I never met his wife, but I’m glad to hear he found some happiness, even if he did intend to persecute us. Frei was a strange fish. Ahumibe kept up with him, but the rest of us had cut our ties long ago. He dropped out of medical school and seemed to have transformed his disappointment into a grudge against the profession.’

  ‘I don’t think there was anything personal about it. His wife said he was torn between old loyalties and an urge for justice.’

  Buchanan let out a guffaw that made her sit back in the driver’s seat.

  ‘You’re right. He was torn, but not for those reasons. It used to make me laugh when I saw his column in the newspaper, his “good man” image, a crusader for the forces of justice in an unjust world. Oh, I daresay Frei did some good, but the man was a congenital liar. His whole life was predicated on deceit.’ Buchanan took a deep breath, as if considering what to say next. ‘Frei was a rather old-fashioned creature, a closeted, married homosexual with children. He and Ahumibe may have had an on-off dalliance; there were certainly rumours to that effect when we were at school. It was the source of some of the bullying. I don’t care what people get up to in their private lives. But I do know Frei had a
weakness for casual pickups. When I read the news of his death, I couldn’t help wondering if it was the result of a brief encounter that had gone awry.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘Ms Flint.’ Buchanan’s voice was exasperated. ‘I am getting rather tired of being called a liar. If you don’t believe anything I say, there doesn’t seem to be much point in our having this conversation.’

  ‘Please, don’t hang up.’ An army lorry passed her, headed in the opposite direction. Its sides were dusty and mud-spattered, as if it were in the middle of some campaign. Stevie stared at the road ahead, determined not to make eye contact with the other driver. She heard Buchanan breathing on the end of the line and wondered what was keeping him there. She said, ‘If there’s no truth behind Summers’ allegations or Frei’s investigation, why would anyone want to murder Simon?’

  ‘Let me ask you a question. How did you and Simon meet?’

  It had been an Internet date. A week of late-night flirting online, that had led to a drink in Soho and ended in the bed of a hastily booked hotel room.

  Stevie said, ‘We were introduced at a party.’

  ‘Did he tell you much about his background?’

  ‘Bits and pieces.’

  ‘I’ll interpret that as not much. Didn’t it strike you as funny that he never introduced you to his family or friends?’

  ‘Not really. I didn’t introduce him to mine.’

  ‘In that case perhaps it was a marriage made in heaven.’

  ‘We weren’t married.’

  ‘No, Simon wasn’t really the marrying kind. None of us were, although I had a disastrous attempt at it. Our little gang were the lost boys, the ones whose parents boarded them through the holidays because it was too far to fly us to wherever they were. None of us found it easy to make relationships, but we became some kind of family. Later we shared a flat and then, later still, we worked together. Simon was best man at my wedding. When my son was born I asked Simon to be his godfather, and when I got divorced he let me move into his apartment for a while.’