A Slow Fire Burning

by Paula Hawkins

  “Daniel?” she called out. “Are you here, Daniel?”

  He wasn’t, but she was clearly in the right place—the box of notebooks he’d taken from Angela’s house was sitting on the counter, some of its contents decanted onto the bench on the other side of the cabin. The boat itself was awful: the sink and hob were filthy, the main cabin stank of rot while the tiny sleeping area to the back of the boat reeked of sweat and semen. Daniel had obviously been keeping company, and the thought of it provoked a horrible twist in Carla’s stomach, followed by a flush of shame. Daniel was a grown man, he was twenty-three years old, there was no reason why the thought of him being with someone ought to make her feel uncomfortable. It oughtn’t make her feel any way at all.

  Retreating from the bedroom, she picked up one of the notebooks on the bench, guiltily flicking quickly through its pages. It was full of pencil sketches, unrecognized faces, disembodied limbs. She replaced it on the bench and picked up a second, this one full of pen-and-ink drawings, more detailed, sophisticated work, a full graphic novel, by the looks of it, with Daniel himself the protagonist. On the first page, she noticed, he’d written a title—The Origins of Ares—and her vision was quickly blurred with tears. Warlike Ares, the most hated of all the gods, the one even his own parents couldn’t stand.

  Oh, Daniel.

  She turned the pages, her stomach flipping queasily once more as she recognized herself, drawn young and luscious, more beautiful and certainly more voluptuous than she had ever been in real life. Her skin burning with embarrassment, she closed the book, put it back on the bench, and then, almost without thinking, picked it up again. It was still in her hand when she climbed off the back of the boat, when for a second she locked eyes with a woman watching her intently from the back deck of the handsome red-and-green barge moored a few yards away.

  * * *

  Carla zipped her suitcase shut, carried it downstairs, and left it in the hallway. In the living room, she listened to her messages, one from Detective Barker, asking her to call at her earliest convenience, and another from Theo, inviting her for dinner. “Your favorite, lamb chops. Not sure if you’ve heard yet, but there’s good news, Cee. At last. Good news.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Theo stood at the sink in his kitchen, his left hand under the hot stream, watching the water run red to pink in the bowl. He had sliced a millimeter, perhaps two, from the very tip of his left forefinger and it was bleeding a surprising amount. The culprit, his recently sharpened Santoku knife, lay bloodied on the counter, next to it a pink-tinged garlic clove. The Santoku was hardly the right instrument for thinly slicing garlic, but his little chef’s knife was missing from the magnetic strip on the wall, lost, no doubt, somewhere in the chaos of the miscellaneous cutlery drawer, never to be found again.

  Still, not to worry. There was good news. Good news, at last!

  Despite the sudden and bitter cold, Theo had been out for a walk that morning and had, by coincidence, bumped into the young policeman, the one with the shaving rash, standing in the queue for coffee from the café on the towpath. Theo’s attempt to slip by unnoticed was unsuccessful; the young man collared him, his face the picture of apprehension.

  “Mr. Myerson,” he said, sotto voce, “I was hoping I’d see you. There’s good news.”

  “Oh?”

  The young man nodded. “It’s not official yet, they haven’t put out a statement or anything, but I expect you’ll be hearing from them soon enough.” He took a deep breath, savoring his moment. “They’ve made an arrest.”

  Theo gasped extravagantly. “Oh,” he said, his adrenaline spiking, “that is good news. Who, uh, can you tell me who they’ve arrested?”

  “Laura Kilbride,” the police officer said. “The young woman you saw, the one . . . the one I mentioned before, the one I said”—he spoke from one side of his mouth—“had a history of violence?”

  “And they’ve charged her?” Theo managed to ask.

  “They will do. It’s only a matter of time. They found the knife,” he said.

  “They . . . what? You mean the weapon?” Theo’s heart was pounding so hard in his chest, he thought he might pass out.

  The young man grinned, ear to ear. “They’ve got her, Mr. Myerson, bang to rights.”

  * * *

  On the short walk home, Theo felt as though he’d scaled a mountain peak. His jellified legs could barely support him; he almost fell over twice trying to take evasive action from joggers. And yet at the same time he felt like dancing! It was over. They had her. It was over. And the thing that made his heart soar was that it was not just this particular mess that was over, not just this awful, brutal business with Daniel, but the whole thing. Daniel was gone and so was Angela. Carla would suffer, she would grieve, she would feel whatever it was she needed to feel, but after that, she could start to get better, without anyone to drag her back down. The Sutherland mess, all that poison they had injected into his family, into his marriage, it could start to drain away now.

  Theo knew they would never go back to what they had been—he wasn’t stupid—but he could see a way forward. He could see them building some sort of life for themselves, some sort of peace, and they could do it together now, with nothing and no one left to divide them.

  * * *

  With the blood finally stopped, Theo bandaged his finger, washed the knife, threw away the sullied garlic clove, and returned to his recipe. He left the chops marinating in oil, garlic, and mint, put on a coat, and took himself outside, onto the back porch to smoke a cigarette. He noticed, as he put the filter to his lips, that he still had blood in his nail beds. He thought, suddenly, of the morning he’d seen that girl outside—Laura, the one they arrested. After he saw her, he’d gone back to an empty bed and fallen asleep. When he woke, Carla was in the shower, and when she emerged, he called her over to him. He reached out his hand, tried to pull her back down onto the bed, but she resisted. He kissed her fingertips, the nail beds scrubbed pink.

  Back inside, he was just pouring himself a glass of red when the doorbell rang. Carla must have forgotten her key. He picked up the pile of mail on the mat by the front door, slung it onto the hall console, opened the door with a smile on his face and butterflies in his stomach, like the old days.

  “Oh,” he said, disappointed. “It’s you.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Some things were the same, some things were different. Laura sat, bent over, her head resting on top of her folded arms. Last time was late at night, this time was early morning, although really, who could tell? There was no natural light in the room; it could have been any time. It was a different room, but for all intents and purposes it might just as well have been the same. Last time it had been overly warm, this time it was bloody freezing, but there were the same bright lights, the same cheap furniture. A nasty gray carpet like the one in her hallway at home. (Don’t think of home. Don’t think of home, or you’ll cry.) Like last time, Egg was there, and Eyebrow too, sitting opposite her, expressions grave. Graver than last time, she thought. Whenever she caught Egg’s eye, he looked away, and that made her scared.

  She was exhausted. It seemed like days had passed, even weeks, since she’d received the phone call at Irene’s yesterday afternoon. She’d gone to meet the police at her home as per their request. She’d been cautioned, standing outside in the car park with all the neighbors watching, and they’d escorted her up the seven flights to her floor. There were people already there, waiting on the walkway outside, dressed in those white protective suits like you see on TV.

  “What’s going on?” Laura asked. “You’ve already done this, haven’t you? You searched here before—why do you have to do it again?” New evidence had come to light, someone said; they were going to have to search more thoroughly. There was a bit of waiting around, and then they brought her here, to the police station. It was late by that time. They put her in a cell and told her to get some r
est. She hadn’t slept a wink.

  “Laura?” Eyebrow placed a cup of water in front of her. “The duty solicitor’s just on his way now, all right? We’ll get started in a minute.”

  “Yeah, all right,” Laura replied. “Cheers.”

  That was the same—the polite, faux-friendly thing they did. They’d always done it; every run-in with the police she’d ever had, they did it. She’d imagined, though, that this time might be different, because this time was different. This wasn’t trespass, or disorderly conduct, it wasn’t public intoxication or petty theft. This was murder.

  Murder! Laura felt a giggle rising up in her chest. She jerked upright, biting her lip, but fight though she might, she couldn’t keep it down; a chuckle rose out of her. Egg looked up from his notes, surprised. Laura laughed some more. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t fucking funny. She laughed louder, longer, tears coming.

  “Are you all right, Laura?” Egg asked her. She leaned forward, placing her forehead on the desk, chewing the inside of her cheek. Stop laughing stop laughing stop laughing stop fucking laughing.

  The door opened and Laura stopped laughing. She looked up. A small, slender man with ginger hair and very pale skin held out a limp hand for her to shake. The duty solicitor, different from the one before. He gave her his name, which she immediately forgot, and a quick, nervous smile. Why was he nervous? That wasn’t a very good sign, was it?

  Egg said something; he was introducing them all, for the record. Laura listened to everyone’s names and then forgot them (again): Egg, Eyebrow, Nervous Guy. Laura Kilbride. They started asking questions, the same as last time. Where she had met Daniel, when, what time they’d gotten to the boat, what they’d done when they got there. All the same stuff they’d been over before, first in the flat and then at the police station.

  “Fucking hell, change the record, won’t you?” Laura said at last. “We’ve done this already, haven’t we, we’ve sung this duet. Quartet?” She looked at Nervous Guy. “Would this be a quartet? You’re not really contributing all that much, though, are you? Do you do harmonies?”

  Egg pursed his lips, his expression pained.

  “Do you think this is funny, Laura?” Eyebrow asked. “Do you think this is a joke?”

  “It is a fucking joke, yes! Because I’ve already told you about Daniel Sutherland. I’ve already told you, we argued, shoved each other around a bit, and that was it. I did not stab him. We’ve been over all this and you’ve got nothing—you’ve got fuck all, haven’t you, it’s just that you haven’t found anyone else, so now you’ve got me back in here, and you’re harassing me?”

  She turned to Nervous Guy. “They need to put up or shut up, don’t they?” Nervous Guy looked down at the notepad in front of him, its pages blank. Fuck’s sake, he really wasn’t much use, was he? “You need to charge me or let me go.”

  Egg leaned back in his chair and looked her in the eye as he calmly explained that, in addition to a witness who had seen her, bloody and agitated, leaving the scene of the crime around the time of Daniel Sutherland’s death, they had her DNA on his body, and his on hers. They also had the fact that she had stolen a watch from him. Moreover, he said, the analysis that had been carried out on her T-shirt showed that, although the majority of the blood present in the fabric belonged to her, a small but significant amount had been detected that belonged to Daniel Sutherland.

  “Can you explain that, Laura?” Egg asked. “If, as you say, Daniel was still alive and well when you left, how do you explain the presence of his blood on your clothing?”

  * * *

  • • •

  Turns out, Daniel had said, sometime in the early hours, when he’d finished for the second time, gimp-fucking isn’t really my thing. It came out of nowhere, that. She hadn’t been ready for the casual cruelty of it. She knew Daniel wasn’t exactly a nice guy—she wouldn’t have gone with him if he had been, she didn’t like nice guys, nice guys usually turned out to be the worst—but she hadn’t expected that. She hadn’t expected him to push her away, to laugh when she stumbled and fell—not a forced laugh either, a real one, as though he genuinely thought it was funny. When she got up, she could hardly see for rage; she went for him so fast she caught him off guard. She saw the look on his face. For a moment, just a fraction of a second, he was afraid.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Laura?” Eyebrow this time, leaning forward over the table. “Can you? Can you explain the presence of Sutherland’s blood on your T-shirt?”

  “I bit him,” Laura said.

  “You bit him?” Eyebrow repeated, deadly serious, and as hard as Laura tried to mirror Eyebrow’s straight face, she just couldn’t; she started to laugh again, because how could she not? This was serious, it was deadly fucking serious, and she looked across the table at the detectives and she laughed and laughed and they, for their part, looked unhappy (Egg) and self-satisfied (Eyebrow).

  At her side, Nervous Guy twitched. He raised his palms, spread his fingers, and looked at her as if to say, What the fuck? “I bit him hard, here”—Laura pointed to a place on her neck, above the clavicle—“and I drew blood. I had blood in my mouth, on my lips, I wiped it away. I must have got it on my shirt.”

  Eyebrow smirked, shaking her head as she did. “Is that it?” she asked. “Is that your explanation?”

  “It is, yeah. Ask your forensics people,” Laura said. “Ask them if there was a bite on his neck.”

  “Given the position of his stab wounds,” Egg said quietly, “it’s possible that we wouldn’t be able to tell—”

  “Hah!” Laura barked, leaning back in her chair with a smile, victorious.

  “But I don’t think it’s very likely that a bite would account for the blood that we found, unless the bite was extremely deep. Was it?” Egg asked.

  Laura swallowed. “Well, no. I’m not a fucking vampire, am I? There was a bit of a scuffle. Something broke, maybe a plate, a glass, I don’t know. A glass. Was there glass on the floor? Bet there was. He had blood on his . . . on his hand, I think, and he pushed me—yes, he pushed me in the face, because I remember, I had it, I had blood on my face, when I got home. He pushed me in the face, and maybe again on my chest, as he moved past me.” Beside her, Nervous Guy scribbled furiously on his notepad.

  “You didn’t mention this before, Laura,” Egg said. “Why didn’t you say any of this before?”

  “It didn’t matter,” Laura said. “It didn’t—”

  “Of course it mattered—it matters when you lie to the police,” Egg said, his voice strained. “Why wouldn’t you just tell us that? Why would you lie about something like this?”

  “Why wouldn’t I lie?” Laura snapped. “I was already in trouble—I’m always in fucking trouble—I just didn’t want to make it worse. I lied, all right?” She was shouting. “I lied then but I’m telling the truth now.”

  From somewhere—Laura couldn’t say where; perhaps she had a bag of tricks beneath the table—Eyebrow pulled out a plastic bag, which she placed on the table between them. Laura stared at it.

  “What can you tell us about this, Laura?” Eyebrow asked.

  Laura opened her mouth and then closed it again. “What can I . . . ?” She was going to laugh again; she bit down hard on her lower lip. “What can I tell you about it? It’s a knife, by the looks of things. It’s a small . . . smallish knife. It has a black handle. Wooden, I suppose. There’s something on the blade. I have no idea what it is, but I’m guessing—”

  “Don’t guess,” Nervous Guy interjected sharply.

  “Yeah. Okay. Good point. What can I tell you about it? I can tell you it looks like a knife that I’ve never seen before.”

  Egg nodded. “All right. Well, would it surprise you to hear that we found this knife in your flat?”

  Laura shook her head. “No . . . I mean, yes! Yes, of course it would fucking surprise me, I just
told you I’d never seen it before, it’s not mine. It’s not.” She got to her feet. “It’s not!”

  “Please sit down, Laura,” Egg said gently.

  She sat. “Why would I . . . ?” She started again. “No, okay, say, say for the sake of argument—”

  “Ms. Kilbride, I—” Nervous Guy had woken up at last.

  “No, it’s all right, it’s all right. Say, for the sake of argument, it was in my flat. Why would I leave it there? Do you think I’m insane? A moron? Why would I just leave it lying around for you to find?”

  “You left Daniel’s watch lying around,” Eyebrow pointed out.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, you don’t kill people with a watch!”

  “But you do kill people with knives?”

  Laura rolled her eyes. “You see this?” she said, turning to her solicitor. “You see? Trying to put words in my mouth, trying to trick me. Typical fucking rozzers. That knife is not mine. I don’t know where it comes from; it isn’t mine.”

  “So . . . what?” Eyebrow prompted. “What are you saying? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, so tell me what you think happened.”

  Laura opened her mouth and closed it again, like a fish. She threw her hands in the air. “I don’t fucking know, do I? Someone put it there. One of your lot, maybe. Trying to stitch me up. Desperate, aren’t you, because it’s been two weeks since he died and you’ve got fuck all.”