A Slow Fire Burning

by Paula Hawkins

  “Someone put it there,” Eyebrow repeated, very slowly. “You think someone placed the knife in your flat? Does anyone else have access to your flat, Laura? Anyone else have a key?”

  “What, aside from the butler?” Laura snapped. “Aside from my cleaning lady, and my personal trainer, and . . . oh, hang about. Miriam!” It came to her, just like that. “Miriam had my key!” The detectives exchanged a quick glance. “She must have . . . fucking hell. Look, I was joking about the butler, but there’s this woman, her name’s Miriam, she lives on the . . . oh, you know her, you’ve spoken to her, she said she found him, didn’t she? Well, she had my key.”

  Another look passed between the detectives before Eyebrow leaned forward and prompted, “You’re saying Miriam Lewis had your key?”

  “I don’t know her last name—she’s the one on the boat, who said she found him. How many Miriams can there be?”

  “Only one, and that is definitely Miriam Lewis,” Egg replied. He looked genuinely, gratifyingly baffled. “Why would you believe that Miriam Lewis had put this knife in your flat?”

  Laura’s breath was coming quick and shallow, she was seeing things as she hadn’t before, she was seeing a glimmer of light, she was feeling—what was this strange sensation?—hope. “My key,” Laura said. “You remember, I told you I lost it? I hurt my arm?” Egg nodded. “Well, it turns out she had it. She said she found it, in his boat, she didn’t say why she took it. . . . The point is she could have come into my flat, at any time since he died! And the thing is, you see, the thing is . . .” It was all becoming clear to her now, all of it. “The thing is, she has a grudge against the Myersons. Did you know that? Hates them, thinks they’re evil, not entirely sure why but she told me, right, she told me that she thought it was Carla—that’s Daniel’s aunt, yeah? She told me that she thought that Carla killed Daniel, which I thought was really weird at the time, but now I think it was because she was trying to deflect attention elsewhere. I mean, she says she found him, but how do you even know that’s true? Maybe she found him because she knew he was there to be found? Don’t they often say that it’s the person who found the body that did it? And I know it sounds maybe kind of far-fetched because she’s an old woman—”

  “She’s fifty,” Egg said.

  “Yeah, exactly, but just because she’s old, doesn’t mean she couldn’t have killed him. She’s . . . she’s seriously damaged, you know? I know, I know what you’re thinking, you’re looking at me like, look who’s talking, but sometimes it takes one to know one. Did you know she says she was abducted by a serial killer once? That she wrote a book about it? She’s”—Laura drew little circles in the air with her forefinger, pointing at her temple—“she’s fucking nuts.”

  The detectives, both of them, were leaning back in their chairs, their arms crossed. For a moment, Laura seemed to have stunned them into silence. Eyebrow was the first to recover. “This key you say she has, she—”

  “Had, not has. I got it back from her.”

  “You got it back from her? Yesterday, is that right? When you went to her boat, when you attacked her?”

  “When I what? No, I didn’t attack her, I didn’t—”

  “Ms. Lewis made a complaint against you, Laura,” Eyebrow said. “She—”

  “Oh, now this is bullshit. This is such bullshit. I did not attack her! She pushed me! Look!” Laura pointed to the bruise on the side of her face. “She pushed me, I fell, but . . . but that’s not even the point, is it?” Laura turned to Nervous Guy. “Shouldn’t you be doing something? Saying something?” She poked the plastic bag containing the knife with her finger. “Are my fingerprints on there? They’re not, are they?”

  “We’re still carrying out tests.”

  “Tests? For fingerprints?” She spluttered a derisive laugh. “You’ve found fuck all, haven’t you? Look, are you going to charge me with something or not? Because if you’re not—”

  “We are going to charge you, Laura.”

  Hopes, dashed. “But . . . but the key,” Laura said. “Doesn’t that say anything to you?”

  “You had motive, means, and opportunity,” Eyebrow said firmly, ticking items off on her fingers. “You lied to us about the seriousness of your altercation with Daniel. His blood was found on your clothing. The murder weapon was found in your possession.”

  “It wasn’t in my possession.” Laura started to cry. “The key, it must be . . . please.” She looked at Egg, who looked as though he might be about to cry too. He wouldn’t meet her eye; he looked down at the desk and then over at Nervous Guy.

  “We’ll take her down to hear the formal charge now,” he said.

  “No, please,” Laura said again. She held out her hands to Egg. She wanted to beg him, she wanted to fling herself at his feet, to offer herself to him, but there were other people in the room now, people in uniforms, someone helping her out of her chair. They were gentle enough but the gentleness made it worse; she started to push them away, started to fight.

  “Laura.” She could hear Egg’s voice, concerned, reprimanding. “Laura, come on, don’t do this.” But she wanted to do this, she wanted to fight, she wanted them to grab her, to throw her to the ground, to knock her out. She wanted oblivion.

  THIRTY

  Carla had changed her outfit twice, she had started and abandoned the letter she was writing to Theo three times, and finally, on the fourth draft, she thought she’d got it right. Instead of just doing a flit, she’d decided that she would go round to his for dinner after all, she would stay the night, as she usually did, and in the morning she’d slip away, leaving the letter on his desk.

  She had a car booked to take her to Kings Cross station at eleven thirty the following morning, allowing ample time for her to retrieve from Hayward’s Place the things that she had stupidly taken across and left there—the dog’s lead, the letters, and the notebook—things she could not bear for Theo to find. She didn’t want him to have to face reality as she did; he didn’t have her constitution. And look, after all, what it had done to her.

  * * *

  What a pity that Daniel wasn’t doing a bit more with his talents! That was what Carla was thinking on the day that she took the notebook from the boat, as she paged through it, sitting on her sofa at home. He drew so beautifully, rendered facial expression so vividly. He captured movement, he registered nuance, he was empathetic on the page in a way he never seemed to achieve in real life.

  She felt guilty for thinking this, guilty for looking at the notebooks at all—Daniel had always been clear that they weren’t for other eyes, that he drew for himself. A confidence issue, Carla had assumed, although now she wasn’t so sure. She felt distinctly uneasy as she dwelled on the pages on which her own image appeared, because she knew for sure now something that she’d only suspected in the past, that there was something wrong with the way Daniel loved her. Worse, she was afraid that the way she loved him was somehow wrong too. She felt all these things—guilt and unease and fear—and yet she couldn’t stop turning the pages, because what he had drawn was beautiful.

  It was idealized, all of it. The house on Lonsdale Square, where she and Angela had grown up and where Daniel had spent his early childhood, was now more castle than Victorian villa, the grounds more park than London garden. Daniel as a young man was broader of shoulder, more heavily muscled, and when she saw Ben, the breath caught in her chest. A dimpled cherub, doe-eyed perfection: Daniel had captured perfectly the generosity of his little smile, the soft curl of his hair at the nape of his neck; it almost stopped her heart.

  She put the book down.

  When she picked it up again, as she skipped back and forth through the pages, trying to make sense of where on earth this story was going, she realized that not everything was idealized. Angela, for example, was cruelly depicted, scrawny and scantily clad, a lush, a fall-down drunk. But Daniel, too, suffered in the telling. In Ares, although he
was physically beautiful, his character was rotten: he was malicious, he persecuted younger boys at school, occasionally incurring retaliatory beatings, he seduced and discarded young girls, who seemed to appear somewhere on the scale from naive to idiotic, he bullied and humiliated his mother. It was just so bizarre, Carla thought, so unnerving and yet so affecting to see Daniel depicted as monstrous, and to know he had drawn himself this way. What did it mean that instead of making himself the hero of his own story, he had made himself the villain? It cut her to the bone. But as she turned the pages, that bloody bloc of pain sitting just beneath her breastbone began to shift, to dissolve, and was replaced by a feeling of dread, a creeping certainty that she should put the book down, that she should close it and not look at it ever again. But then, around halfway through, she came across herself once more, arriving at Lonsdale Square on a sunny afternoon with Ben in her arms, and she knew immediately what day it was, and she could not look away.

  In Daniel’s version of events, Carla is wearing a dress, her hair is long and wavy, falling over bare shoulders, Ben—gorgeous, golden Ben—is smiling and laughing, perched on her hip. From the balcony, Daniel, his pinched face half in darkness, watches as Carla hands Ben over to Angela. Leaning out into the sunlight, over the balcony, Daniel calls and waves to his aunt but she has already turned away, without acknowledging him. His little face falls.

  Over the page, night has fallen. Daniel is watching television in the playroom, alone. He gets up and goes upstairs to his mother’s bedroom to look for her, to say good night, but she is not there. So he goes back down to his own room, where he finds that his little cousin has woken up, has climbed off the mattress on which he was sleeping and is now lying in the middle of the floor. He is drawing, scribbling in a book, surrounded by similar books strewn all around him, their pages covered in his ugly scrawl. The anguish on Daniel’s face is vividly drawn: Ben has ruined all of his books, his carefully drawn comic books! Distraught, he calls for his mother, but no one comes. He looks for her, searching room to room until, eventually, he arrives at the study. The door is shut, but he can hear someone inside, making a noise. Carefully, he pushes the door open, and there she is, straddling a man, some stranger, some man he’s never seen before. Her head is thrown back, her red-lipped mouth open wide. She turns, she catches sight of her horrified child and starts to laugh.

  Daniel flees the room.

  The next scene shows Daniel lying in bed, his imagination a cloud above him in which various scenes play out: in one, he imagines himself hitting his mother’s lover on the head with a champagne bottle; in another, he slaps his mother’s drunken face. Then, the cloud of his imagination dissipates. Daniel props himself up on one elbow and gazes across the room at the little boy, asleep on his side, his long lashes grazing his cheekbones, his head haloed with curls.

  In the morning, Daniel goes upstairs to his mother’s room. She is asleep, alone. He leaves her, closing her bedroom door behind him. He returns to the second floor, to his own bedroom where he gently shakes the little boy awake. The child, delighted to see his big cousin, smiles a huge, goofy smile. Daniel helps him from the bed, he takes his hand, he leads him to the study, opens the door. The pair of them cross the room, hand in hand, picking their way through the evidence of last night’s debauchery—clothes strewn around, ashtray overflowing, an empty bottle of champagne lying on its side. Daniel leads the child to the balcony, he opens the doors, and from behind his back he produces a toy—a bright red truck. He offers it to the child, who laughs delightedly, reaching out to grab it, and as he does, Daniel rolls the truck carefully out onto the balcony, toward the broken railing. He watches as the child toddles after it.

  In the final panel, Daniel is alone again, sitting on the edge of the balcony, with his feet dangling over the edge, a smile on his lips.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Irene sat perched on an uncomfortably hard chair in Theo Myerson’s living room. She could tell, before she sat down, that the chair was not going to be comfortable, but she sat in it anyway, because it was relatively high and she calculated that she’d be able to get out of it without help, which was important. She had no desire to be at Myerson’s mercy. With some difficulty, one hand gripping the chair and the other holding her handbag tightly to her lap, she managed to scoot the chair a few inches closer to the wood burner in the grate. It was fearfully cold; winter had returned, with some vengeance. On the radio that morning they’d talked about snow.

  Myerson was in the kitchen, fetching her a sherry. She didn’t want one—she’d never been much of a drinker—but when he offered, after only grudgingly inviting her in in the first place, she’d thought it best to accept. He was drinking wine. Alone, in the middle of the afternoon.

  While he was gone, Irene admired his bookshelves. Say what you like about Theo Myerson, he had beautiful bookshelves. Oak, Irene thought, and probably custom built, running from floor to ceiling on either side of the fireplace, with one of those nifty rolling ladders to allow you access to the very top shelves. From where she was sitting, she couldn’t read the names on the spines, which was frustrating. Irene liked few things more than a good nose through other people’s bookshelves, although now was clearly not the time.

  “Carla should be along any minute,” Theo said when he came back into the room. He handed her a small crystal glass. “She’s coming for dinner.”

  Irene accepted the drink with a nod. “I didn’t know where she lived,” she said, vaguely aware that she’d already explained that to him. “But I found your address, as I said, on an envelope in a book.”

  Theo nodded. He sank down into an armchair quite some distance across the room. He took a large gulp of wine and glowered at her. “You need to speak to her urgently? Can you tell me what it’s about?”

  “I think it’s best we wait for Carla,” Irene said. She sipped her sherry. Theo raised his eyes briefly to the heavens, before glowering at her once more. He was not a subtle man. They sat in silence for a few moments and then, cracking under the pressure, Irene said, “I just need to speak to her about something I found in Angela’s house.” She took another sip of the sherry. “A notebook I found, one of Daniel’s.” She took it from her handbag and held it up briefly before thinking better of it and slipping it back into the bag.

  “And this is urgent, is it?” Myerson said, his voice flat.

  “Well, I . . . You haven’t seen it before, have you, Mr. Myerson?” Theo shook his head, thankfully uninterested. He shifted in his seat, patently irritated; he seemed on the point of asking her to leave. Nervously, she took another sip. “It’s what you’d call a graphic novel, I suppose. There was one on the Booker list, wasn’t there, not so long ago? Very odd, I thought—I mean, how on earth do you compare a comic with a real book?” Theo raised his eyebrows. He glugged his wine. He was starting to make her very uncomfortable. “Well, no accounting for taste, I suppose.” She fell silent a moment. “I found this in one of your books,” she said, holding up the envelope with his address on it. “The crime one.”

  In the long, tense silence that followed, Irene pondered the wisdom of bringing up the manuscript she’d read, the one that Laura had given her. But then, now was perhaps not the best time to accuse Myerson of plagiarism. She wouldn’t want to get distracted from the matter at hand. She once more raised her glass to her lips and was surprised to find that there was little more than a drop remaining.

  “This notebook,” Theo said eventually, frowning at her, “you said you found it in Angela’s house. What were you doing in Angela’s house?”

  “Well, you see, the thing is . . .”

  Irene tailed off. She did not have a good answer to this question. The short answer was she’d been nosing around next door. The longer version was that when she’d heard on the radio that Laura had been charged with Daniel’s murder, she knew at once that she must speak to Carla, because she was certain that a mistake had been made. She didn’t h
ave contact details for Carla, but she felt sure that there must be something in Angela’s house with a number or an address on it. Only when she got there, she was disappointed, because the house was completely empty. She walked from room to dingy room, noticing for the first time what a desperate state the place was in, the wallpaper bubbling and peeling off, the damp around the kitchen window, the frames in the bedrooms upstairs succumbing to rot. At the bottom of a wardrobe in the upstairs bedroom—pretty much the only remaining piece of furniture in the house—Irene discovered a pile of papers. Three or four letters, all addressed to Angela, and a notebook. Irene took them home with her. She didn’t find an address for Carla, but the notebook gave her something else. Not understanding—Irene wasn’t sure that was possible—but a glimpse of something else, a glimpse of the place where all this might have started, where the seed of destruction was first sown.

  Theo leaned forward. “Well? What were you doing in Angela’s house?” His voice was brittle now, his expression quite menacing. “As far as I’m aware, you don’t have any business there; that’s Carla’s property, it’s—”

  “Is it?” Irene asked. “Does the house belong to Carla?”

  Myerson got to his feet abruptly. “Oh for God’s sake! It’s none of your business who owns the house. Carla is suffering through a terrible time at the moment; the last bloody thing she needs is some meddlesome woman bothering her, interfering in her affairs.” He crossed the room toward her, holding out his hand. “Give the notebook to me,” he demanded, “and I’ll hand it over to Carla. If she wishes to discuss it with you, she’ll get in touch. I wouldn’t hold my breath.”