A Slow Fire Burning

by Paula Hawkins

  “Oh yes, that’s charming, isn’t it? I’ll bet your filthy mouth is not your fault either.” She turned to leave but thought better of it. “You know, Laura, you know what your problem is? You don’t value yourself enough.”

  Low self-worth was indeed one of Laura’s problems, but it wasn’t the only one. She had a whole host of others to keep it company, including but not limited to: hypersexuality, poor impulse control, inappropriate social behavior, aggressive outbursts, short-term memory lapses, and quite a pronounced limp.

  * * *

  • • •

  “There now,” the policewoman said, once she was done. “You’re all set.” She saw that Laura was crying and she squeezed her hand. “You’ll be all right, love.”

  “I want to phone my mum,” Laura said. “Is it all right if I phone my mum?”

  Her mum wasn’t answering her phone.

  “Do I get another call?” Laura asked. The officer at her side shook her head, but seeing Laura’s dismay, she glanced this way and that along the hall and then nodded. “Go on, then,” she said. “Quickly.”

  Laura rang her father’s next. She listened to the phone ring a few times, her hopes soaring as the call connected, only to be immediately dashed as she heard Deidre’s voice. “Hello? Hello? Who is this?” Laura hung up, meeting the officer’s inquisitive look with a shrug. “Wrong number,” she said.

  * * *

  The police officer took Laura to a tiny, stuffy room with a table at its center. The officer gave her a glass of water and said someone would bring some tea in a minute, but the tea never materialized. The room was overheated and smelled of something strange and chemical; her skin itched, her mind felt muddied with exhaustion. She folded her arms and laid her head down upon them and tried to sleep, but in the white noise she heard voices, her mother’s, Deidre’s, Daniel’s; when she swallowed she thought she could taste metal, and rot.

  “What are we waiting for?” she asked the police officer eventually, and the woman ducked her head, shrugged.

  “Duty solicitor, I think. Sometimes it takes a while.” Laura thought about her groceries, the frozen pizzas and the ready-meal curries she’d spent her last tenner on, sitting on the counter in her kitchen at home, gently defrosting.

  * * *

  After what felt like hours but was probably ten minutes, the detectives turned up, solicitor-less. “How long do you think this is going to take?” Laura asked. “I’ve got a long shift tomorrow, and I’m fucking knackered.”

  Egg looked at her long and hard; he sighed, as though he were disappointed in her. “It could be a while, Laura,” he said. “It’s . . . well. It’s not looking great, is it? And, you see, the thing is, you’ve got form on this score, haven’t you?”

  “I bloody have not. Form? What are you talking about? I don’t go around stabbing people, I—”

  “You stabbed Warren Lacey,” Eyebrow chipped in.

  “With a fork. In the hand. Fuck’s sake, it’s not the same thing at all,” Laura said, and she started laughing, because, honestly, this was ridiculous, this was apples and oranges, the one thing was not like the other in any way, but she didn’t really feel like laughing at all; she felt like crying.

  “It’s interesting,” Eyebrow said. “I think it’s interesting, in any case, that you seem to find this so amusing, Laura, because most people—in your situation, I mean—most people I don’t think would find this all that funny.”

  “I don’t, I don’t think it’s funny, I don’t . . .” Laura sighed in frustration. “Sometimes I struggle,” she said, “to match my outward behavior to my emotional state. I don’t think it’s funny,” she said again, but still she couldn’t stop smiling, and Eyebrow smiled back at her, horribly. She was about to say something else, but they were at last interrupted by the long-awaited duty solicitor, a harassed-looking, gray-faced man with coffee breath who failed to inspire much confidence.

  Once everyone was settled, introductions made, formalities out of the way, Eyebrow continued. “We were talking a moment ago,” she said, about how you struggle to match your outward behavior to your emotional state. That is what you said, isn’t it?” Laura nodded. “You have to speak up, Laura, for the tape.” Laura muttered her assent. “So, it’s fair to say that you cannot always control yourself? You have emotional outbursts which are beyond your control?” Laura said they were. “And this is because of the accident you had when you were a child? Is that correct?” Laura answered in the affirmative again. “Can you talk a bit more about the accident, Laura?” Eyebrow asked, her voice reassuring, coaxing. Laura jammed her hands underneath her thighs to keep herself from slapping the woman across the face. “Could you talk about the accident’s effect on you—physically, I mean?”

  Laura glanced at her solicitor, trying to communicate a silent Do I have to? but he seemed incapable of reading her, so, sighing heavily, she reeled monotonously through her injuries: “Fractured skull, broken pelvis, compound fracture of the distal femur. Cuts, bruises. Twelve days in a coma. Three months in hospital.”

  “You suffered a traumatic brain injury, didn’t you, Laura? Could you tell us a bit about that?”

  Laura puffed out her cheeks, she rolled her eyes. “Could you not just fucking google it? Jesus. I mean, is this really what we’re here to talk about? Something that happened to me when I was ten years old? I think I should just go home now, because frankly, you’ve got fuck all, haven’t you? You’ve got nothing on me.”

  The detectives watched her, impassive, unimpressed with her outburst. “Could you just tell us about the nature of your head injury?” Egg asked, his tone polite, infuriating.

  Laura sighed again. “I suffered a brain injury. It affected my speech, temporarily, as well as my recall.”

  “Your memory?” Eyebrow asked.

  “Yes, my memory.”

  Eyebrow paused, for effect, it seemed to Laura. “There are some emotional and behavioral consequences to this sort of injury, too, aren’t there?”

  Laura bit her lip, hard. “I had some anger management issues when I was younger,” she said, looking the woman dead in the eye, daring her to call her a liar. “Depression. I have disinhibition, which means sometimes I say inappropriate or hurtful things, like for example that time I called you ugly.”

  Eyebrow smiled, she rose above it, she pressed on. “You have impulse control problems, don’t you, Laura? You can’t help yourself, you lash out at people, you try to hurt them—that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “And so, on the boat on Friday night, when Mr. Sutherland rejected you—when he was, as you put it, cold and offensive, you lost your temper, didn’t you? You attacked him, didn’t you? Earlier you said you hit him. You really wanted to hurt him, didn’t you?”

  “I wanted to rip his fucking throat out,” Laura heard herself say. Next to her, she felt the solicitor flinch. And there it was—the police didn’t, as she’d said, have fuck all, because of course they had her. They had Laura. They didn’t need a weapon, did they? They didn’t need a smoking gun. They had motive and they had opportunity and they had Laura, who they knew could be counted on, sooner or later, to say something really stupid.

  SIX

  In the armchair in her front room, her favored reading spot, Irene waited for Laura, who was late. The armchair, once part of a pair, although its partner had long since been consigned to the dump, was pushed right up against the window of the front room. It was the spot that trapped the sun for most of the morning and well into the afternoon too, the spot from which Irene could watch the world go by and the world going by could, in turn, watch her, fulfilling their expectations of the aged: sitting in a chair in a room, alone, musing on the past, on former glory, on missed opportunities, on the way things used to be. On dead people.

  Which Irene wasn’t doing at all. Well, not exclusively, in any case. Mostl
y, she was waiting for Laura to turn up to fetch her weekly groceries, and in the meantime, she was sorting through one of the three boxes of musty-smelling books that Carla Myerson had left for her. The books had belonged to a dead person—Angela. Carla’s sister and Irene’s neighbor, also Irene’s dearest friend.

  “They’re not worth anything,” Carla had told Irene when she dropped them off sometime last week, “just paperbacks. I was going to take them to the charity shop, but then I thought . . .” She’d given Irene’s living room a quick once-over, a wrinkle appearing at the bridge of her nose as she said: “I thought they might be to your taste.”

  A veiled insult, Irene supposed. Not that she cared, particularly. Carla was the sort of woman who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Not worth anything? Showed what she knew.

  It was true that when Irene opened up some of the more ancient Penguins, their bright orange covers tattered and worn, their pages began to crumble beneath her fingertips. Succumbing already to slow fire, the acidification of the paper destroying it from within, eating away at the pages, making them brittle and breakable. It was terribly sad when you thought about it, all those words, all those stories slowly disappearing. Those books, in any case, she’d have to throw out. But as for the rest of them—they were very much to her taste, so much so that she’d already read quite a few of them. She and Angela used to swap books all the time; they shared a predilection for the best sort of crime novels (not the bloody ones; the clever ones, like Barbara Vine, or P. D. James) and for the sort of book club fiction at which the likes of Carla Myerson no doubt turned up their noses.

  The fact that Irene had read most of them was beside the point. The important thing—the thing that Carla probably didn’t know, even though this was her own sister they were talking about—was that Angela was a vandal when it came to books: a cracker of spines, a dog-earer of pages, a scribbler in margins. So, when you leafed through Angela Sutherland’s copy of The Haunting of Hill House, for example, you might notice that she’d underscored certain lines (the poor girl was hated to death; she hanged herself, by the way); when you turned the pages of Angela’s well-thumbed A Dark-Adapted Eye, you discovered how strongly she sympathized with Vera’s feelings toward her sister: exactly this! she had scrawled in the margin next to the line that told us Nothing kills like contempt, and contempt for her came upon me in a hot flood. Every now and again, you might even come across some little scrap of Angela’s past—a bookmark, say, or a train ticket, or a scrap of paper with a shopping list on it: cigarettes, milk, pasta. In No Country for Old Men, there was a postcard purchased at the V&A, a photograph of a house with a white picket fence; in In the Woods, there was a scrap of paper with a drawing on it, two children holding hands. In The Cement Garden, she found a birthday card, blue and white with a picture of a boat on it, the paper creased, worn thin with handling. To darling Daniel, the message read, with all my love on your tenth birthday, kisses, Auntie Carla.

  Not worth anything? Showed what Carla knew. The truth was that when you read a book that had previously been owned and read by Angela Sutherland, you became part of a conversation. And since, tragically, there were never to be any more actual conversations with Angela, that, to Irene, was valuable. That was invaluable.

  If it weren’t for the nagging worry of the whereabouts of Laura, Irene might have been quite contented, basking like a lizard in the morning sunlight, sorting through the books, watching the office workers and the mums with their children hurrying past in the lane outside.

  Irene’s little two-up, two-down house sat on one side of Hayward’s Place, a narrow lane in the heart of the city. Not much more than a footpath cutting through between two larger roads, Hayward’s Place was flanked on one side by five small identical houses (Irene’s was number two), and on the other by the site of the Red Bull Theatre (which may or may not have burned down in the Great Fire of London and which had now been developed into an uninspiring office space). It offered a convenient shortcut and was, on weekdays at least, busy day and night.

  Where was Laura? They had said Tuesday, hadn’t they? She usually came on a Tuesday, because on Tuesdays she had a later start at the launderette. Was today a Tuesday? Irene thought that it was, but she was starting to doubt herself. She pulled herself up out of her chair, gingerly—she’d not long ago twisted an ankle, which was one of the reasons she needed help with the shopping in the first place—and with effort circumvented the little piles of books on the floor, the read and unread, the favored and the destined-for-the-Oxfam-shop. She pottered across her living room, furnished simply with her chair and a small sofa, a dresser on which sat an unfashionably small and rarely watched television set, and a bookcase atop which perched her radio. She turned the radio on.

  At ten o’clock, the newsreader confirmed that it was indeed a Tuesday—Tuesday the thirteenth of March, to be precise. The newsreader went on to say that Prime Minister Theresa May had given the Russian premier until midnight to explain how a former spy was poisoned in Salisbury; he said that a Labor MP had denied slapping a female constituent on the buttocks; he said that a young woman was being questioned in connection with the murder of Daniel Sutherland, the twenty-three-year-old man found dead on a narrowboat on the Regent’s Canal on Sunday. The newsreader went on to say a number of other things too, but Irene couldn’t hear him over the sound of blood rushing in her ears.

  She was imagining things. She must be. Daniel Sutherland? It couldn’t be. Her hands trembling, Irene turned the radio off and then back on again, but the newsreader had moved on now; he was talking about something else, about the weather, about a cold front moving in.

  Perhaps it was a different Daniel Sutherland? How many Daniel Sutherlands were there? She hadn’t bought the newspaper that morning, she hardly ever did anymore, so she couldn’t check that. She’d heard it was possible to find anything on a mobile phone these days, but she wasn’t entirely sure she knew how, and in any case, she couldn’t quite remember where she’d seen the phone last. Upstairs somewhere, probably. Battery dead as a dodo, probably.

  No, she’d just have to do things the old-fashioned way; she’d have to go around to the newsagent to get the paper. She needed milk and bread, in any case, if Laura wasn’t coming. In the hallway, she shrugged on her coat and picked up her bag and house key, noticing just as she was about to open the front door, just in time, that she was still wearing her slippers. She went back into the living room to change her shoes.

  She was forgetful, that was all. Funny, though, how nervous she felt when she left the house these days—she used to be out and about all the time, shopping, going to the library, volunteering at the Red Cross shop on the high street, but you fell out of the habit quickly, after a period of being housebound. She needed to watch that. She didn’t want to end up being one of those old people, too frightened to walk out their old front door.

  She was, she had to admit, happy to avoid the supermarket—so full of the impatient, unthinking, distracted young. Not that she didn’t like young people. She didn’t want to become one of those sorts of elderly either—the bitter sort, closed-off and self-satisfied in their beige senior citizen sandals ordered from the back pages of the Sunday supplements. Irene wore blue-and-orange New Balance trainers with a Velcro strap. They were a Christmas present from Angela. Irene had nothing against the young; she’d even been young herself once. Only young people made assumptions, didn’t they? Some young people. They assumed you were deaf, blind, weak. Some of these things might be true (and some not—Irene had the hearing of a bat; she often wished, in fact, given the paper-thin walls of her house, that her hearing wasn’t so acute). Nevertheless, it was the assumption that rankled.

  Back home from the shops, she found nothing in the newspaper about Daniel Sutherland (and not only that but she realized she’d forgotten to buy marmalade to have on her toast, so the trip was a bust). She did eventually locate her phone (in the bathroom), but
its battery was (as she’d predicted) flat, and she couldn’t for the life of her remember where she’d put the charger.

  Infuriating.

  But she wasn’t losing her marbles. It wasn’t dementia. That was the conclusion to which people jumped when you were old and forgot things, as though the young didn’t also misplace their keys or forget the odd thing off their shopping list. Irene was certain it wasn’t dementia. She did not, after all, say toaster when she meant tablecloth, she didn’t get lost on the way home from the supermarket. She didn’t (often) lose the thread of a conversation, she didn’t put the remote control in the fridge.

  She did have turns. But it definitely wasn’t dementia; her doctor had told her so. It was just that if she let herself get run-down, if she forgot to drink enough water and eat regularly, she became tired and then she became confused and before she knew it, she’d quite lost herself. Your resources are depleted, Mrs. Barnes, the doctor told her the last time this had happened. Severely depleted. You have to take better care of yourself, you have to eat well, you have to stay hydrated. If you don’t, of course you will find yourself confused and dizzy! And you might have another fall. And we don’t want that, do we?

  How to explain to him, this kind (if ever so slightly condescending) young man with his soft voice and his watery blue eyes, that sometimes she wanted to lose herself in confusion? How on earth to make clear to him that while it was frightening, the feeling could also be, on occasion, thrilling? That she allowed herself, from time to time, to skip meals, hoping it would come back to her, that feeling that someone was missing, and that if she waited patiently, they’d come back?

  Because in those moments she’d forget that William, the man she had loved, whose bed she’d shared for more than forty years, was dead. She could forget that he’d been gone for six years and she could lose herself in the fantasy that he’d just gone out to work, or to meet a friend at the pub. And eventually she’d again hear his familiar whistle out in the lane, and she’d straighten her dress and pat her hair down, and in a minute, just a minute, she’d hear his key in the door.