A Slow Fire Burning

by Paula Hawkins

  “Laura?” Irene said again. “The girl who was arrested? The medal and the ring, they were in the bag that Laura stole from you. Carla? Does any of this mean anything to you?” Still, nothing. “You left the bag here, right here, in this hallway. The door was open. Laura saw it, and she snatched the bag. She felt bad about it, so she returned the things to me, only . . . oh, for God’s sake. Carla!” she snapped, and Carla looked up at her, surprised.

  “What?”

  “Are you really going to do this? Are you going to sit here and feign oblivion? Are you really going to let him take the blame?”

  Carla shook her head, her eyes returning to the gold medal. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  “Theo didn’t kill that boy,” Irene said. “You did. You killed Daniel.” Carla blinked slowly. When she looked back up at Irene her eyes were glassy and still, her face impassive. “You killed Daniel, and you were going to let Laura take the fall, weren’t you? You were going to let an innocent girl pay for what you did. Did you know”—Irene’s voice rose, trembled—“did you know that she was hurt while she was on remand? Did you know that she’s been so badly injured they had to take her to hospital?”

  Carla’s chin dropped to her chest. “That has nothing to do with me,” she said.

  “It has everything to do with you,” Irene cried, her voice echoing through the empty house. “You saw what he’d drawn, in his notebook. You can deny it, it makes no difference. I saw the pictures. I saw what he drew . . . what he imagined.”

  “Imagined?” Carla hissed, her eyes narrowing, her face suddenly vicious.

  Irene took a step back, away from the stairs and closer to the front door. There, in the middle of the empty hallway, she felt unmoored; she wanted desperately to sit, to rest, to have something to hold on to. Steeling herself, biting her lip and holding her handbag in front of her like a shield, she inched closer to Carla once more. “I saw what he drew,” she said. “You saw it too. So too did your husband, before he threw the pages into the fire.” Carla flinched at this, narrowing her eyes at Irene.

  “Theo saw?” she said, her brow knitted. “But the book is here, it’s . . . oh.” She sighed, huffed a sad little laugh as her head dropped to her chest again. “It’s not here, is it? You gave it to him. You showed it to him? Why?” she asked. “Why in God’s name would you do that? What a strange, interfering woman you are, what an utter pain in the arse. Do you realize what you’ve done?”

  “What have I done?” Irene demanded. “Come on, Carla, tell me!” Carla closed her eyes and shook her head like a truculent child. “No? Well in that case why don’t I tell you what you have done? You saw those pictures that Daniel had drawn and you decided that he was guilty of killing your child, and so you took his life. The knife you used was in the bag that Laura stole, which is how it ended up in her flat. And then your husband, your ex-husband who loves you more than life itself, for some reason I haven’t yet worked out, he stepped in and he took everything upon himself. And you! You just sit there and you say it has nothing to do with you. Do you not feel anything? Are you not ashamed?”

  Carla, hunched over her medal, her shoulders bowed, muttered, “Do I not feel anything? For God’s sake, Irene. Do you not think I’ve suffered enough?”

  And there, Irene thought, was the crux of it. After what Carla had endured, how could anything else matter? “I know that you’ve suffered terribly,” she said, but Carla wouldn’t have it.

  “You know nothing,” she hissed. “You couldn’t possibly conceive—”

  “Of your pain? Perhaps I can’t, Carla, but do you honestly think that because you lost your son in that terrible, tragic way, that gives you the right?” Before her, Carla crouched as though ready to spring at her; she was trembling now, with grief or with fury. But Irene would not be cowed. She went on, “Because you suffered that terrible loss, do you think that gives you the right to lay waste to everything, to do as you please?”

  “As I please?” With one hand on the banister, Carla pulled herself to her feet; standing on the third stair, she towered over Irene. “My child is dead,” she spat. “My sister, too, and she died unforgiven. The man I love is in prison. You think there is some pleasure for me in all of this?”

  Irene took a small step backward. “Theo doesn’t have to be in prison,” she said. “You could change that.”

  “What good would it do?” Carla asked. “What—oh—” She turned her face away in disgust. “There’s no point in trying to explain to you—how on earth could you possibly understand what it is to love a child?”

  That again. What it always came down to. You couldn’t understand, you’re not a mother. You’ve never experienced love, not really. You don’t have it inside you, whatever it is, the capacity for limitless, unconditional love. The capacity for unbounded hatred, either.

  Irene clenched and unclenched her hands at her side. “Perhaps I don’t understand love like that,” she said. “Perhaps you’re right. But sending Theo to prison? Where does love come into that?”

  Carla pursed her lips. “He understands,” she said, chastened. “If Theo did see Daniel’s notebook like you said he did, then of course he would understand why I had to do what I did. And you, standing there, outraged, consumed with self-righteousness, you should understand, too, because I didn’t just do this for Ben, I did it for Angela.”

  Irene shook her head in disbelief. “For Angela? You’re really going to stand there and say that you killed Daniel for Angela?”

  Carla reached out and, surprisingly gently, placed her hand on Irene’s wrist, closed her fingers around it, drawing Irene closer to her. “When was it,” she whispered, her expression suddenly earnest, almost hopeful, “when was it, do you think, that she knew?”

  “Knew?”

  “About him. What he’d done. What he was?”

  Irene pulled her hand away, shaking her head as she did. No, Angela could not have known. It was too horrible to contemplate, the idea that she’d lived with that. No. In any case, there was nothing to know, was there? “It was a story,” Irene said. “He wrote a story, perhaps to try to process something he lived through when he was a little boy, and for some reason, he cast himself as the villain. Perhaps he felt guilty, perhaps he felt he should have been watching Ben, or perhaps it was an accident. . . . It might have been a mistake,” she said, aware that in part she was trying to convince herself. “It might have been a childish mistake; he was so little, he couldn’t possibly have understood the consequences. . . .”

  Carla, listening to her, nodded her head. “I considered that. I considered all those things, Irene. I did. But consider this: he was a child, yes—then, he was a child, but what about later? Say you are right, say it was a childish mistake, or an accident, that doesn’t explain how he behaved later on. He knew that I blamed Angela for what happened, and he let me blame her. He allowed me to punish her, he allowed Theo to reject her, he watched her slowly crushed by the weight of her guilt and he did nothing. In fact”—Carla gave a quick shake of her head—“that’s not true. He didn’t do nothing. He did something—he made things worse. He told his psychologist that Ben’s death was Angela’s fault, he allowed me to believe that Angela was mistreating him, all of it, it was all . . . God, I don’t even know what it was. A game, perhaps? He was playing a game, with us, with all of us, manipulating us, for his enjoyment, I suppose. To give himself a sense of power.”

  It was monstrous, unthinkable. What impossibly twisted sort of mind could think that way? Irene caught herself suspecting that perhaps it was Carla’s mind that was monstrously twisted—wasn’t her interpretation of events every bit as disturbing as the images in Daniel’s notebook? And yet when she thought back to Angela, railing against her son, wishing him out of existence, Carla’s version of events rang horribly true. Irene remembered the missed Christmas dinner, when Angela spoke of envying Irene her childlessness; she thou
ght of her apology the next day. You’d see the world burn, she’d said, to see them happy.

  Carla had turned away from Irene, and now she walked slowly up the stairs, turning to face her once she reached the top step. “So, you see, it was in part for her. It sounds so awful, doesn’t it, when you say it out loud? I killed her son for her. But it’s true, in a way. I did it for me, for my son, for Theo, but I did it for her, too. For the ruin he made of Angela’s life.”

  * * *

  As Irene let herself back into her own home next door she reflected on how, while it could be trying at times, at others it was fortunate that people like Carla looked at little old ladies like her and dismissed them as dim, distracted, forgetful, and foolish. It was, today at least, lucky that Carla saw her as waiting for death, not quite of this world, not up to speed with all its complicated ways, its technological developments, its gadgets, its smartphones, its voice-recording apps.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The weather had turned again, the freezing air of the past week suddenly banished by a blessed breath of warmth blowing up from the Mediterranean. Two days ago, Miriam had been huddling in front of her log burner with a coat and scarf on; now it was warm enough for her to sit out on her back deck, drinking her morning coffee and reading the newspaper.

  What was in the newspaper might well have been the stuff of fiction: Theo Myerson had been released from police custody, although he still faced charges for wasting police time and for perverting the course of justice, while his wife was the one now facing murder charges after the police were furnished (by an unnamed source) with a dramatic recorded confession.

  So, after all that, it turned out that the person Miriam had been trying to frame for the murder of Daniel Sutherland actually was the person who had murdered Daniel Sutherland. How about that? Didn’t say much for Miriam’s framing skills.

  The stuff of fiction! Miriam couldn’t help but laugh: Would Myerson try to wrangle a novel out of this mess? Perhaps she, Miriam, should try to wrangle a novel out of it. How would that be for a worm turning? For Miriam to take his life story and use it as material, to twist it any way she liked, to rob him of his agency, of his words, his power.

  Then again, there was perhaps an easier—and almost certainly more lucrative—way forward: What about a quick phone call to the Daily Mail? How much would they pay for the inside scoop on Theo Myerson? Quite a bit, she imagined, Myerson being precisely the sort of person—rich, clever, sophisticated, leftish, metropolitan-elite-made-decadent-flesh—that the Daily Mail loathed.

  She finished her coffee and pottered down to her kitchen table, where she opened her laptop and had just begun to type “how to sell a story to the newspapers” into Google when there came a knock at the window. She looked up and very nearly fell off her stool. Myerson! Bent over on the towpath, peering through her cabin porthole.

  Warily, she made her way out onto the back deck. Theo stood a few yards away, hands thrust into his pockets, expression glum. He’d aged since last she saw him, being led away by the police. Then he was still his portly, red-faced self; now he looked thinner, wrung out, hangdog. Miserable. Her heart twitched in her chest. She ought to be jumping for joy—wasn’t this what she wanted? To see him brought low, to see him suffering. Why on earth did she find herself feeling sorry for him?

  “Look,” he said. “Enough’s enough. All right? I just . . . I’m sure you realize that I’m going through something.” He shrugged. “I can’t even put into words what I’m going through. Yes, I see the irony. In any case, the point is, I don’t want to get the police involved. I’ve had quite enough of them over the past month. Enough to last me a lifetime. However, if you continue to harass me, you really will leave me no choice.”

  “I beg your pardon? Harass you? I haven’t come anywhere near you, I—”

  Theo sighed, an exhausted sound. He pulled from his inside jacket pocket a piece of paper, which, slowly and with great deliberation, he unfolded. He began to read from it in a flat voice, devoid of intonation. “Not responding to my letters is rude, it tells me you are very arrogant. That story wasn’t yours to tell, it was mine, you had no right to use it in the way you did. You should have to pay people for using their stories, you should have to ask permission. Who do you think you are to use my story . . . et cetera et cetera. There are half a dozen of them like that. Well, not quite like that, they started off as polite expressions of interest in my work, clearly designed to bait me into saying something about my inspiration for the story, but they quickly deteriorated. You get the gist. You know the gist. You wrote the gist. They’re postmarked Islington, Miriam, for God’s sake—I can see that you’ve tried to disguise who you are, but—”

  Miriam gawped at him, mystified. “That is not from me. Perhaps you stole someone else’s story? Perhaps you do it all the time.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s not from me!”

  Theo took a step back, exhaling in one long, shuddering breath. “Is it money you want?” he asked her. “I mean, you say here, you should have to pay people, so is that it? How much would it take? How much would it take for you to just leave me . . .” His voice cracked and Miriam was horrified to feel tears spring to her eyes. “To just leave me alone?”

  Miriam quickly wiped her face with her sleeve and climbed down off the boat. She held out her hand. “Could I see those, please?” she asked. Theo handed the pages over without question.

  The paper was thin, of poor quality, the handwriting careful but childlike.

  Myerson,

  Why won’t you answer my letters? The problem with people like you is they think their above everyone. That story wasn’t yours to tell, it was mine. You had no right to use it in the way you did!!! You should have to pay people for using their stories. You should have to ask permission. Who do you think you are to use my story without asking. You didn’t even do a good job. The killer in the story is weak. How would a weak man do what he did? What would you know about it anyway. You didn’t show respect.

  She was shaking her head. “This isn’t from me,” she said, turning the page over in her hand. “You can’t possibly think this is from me—this person is barely literate.”

  She started on the next one.

  The police took you away so maybe your not so much better than everyone else after all? Maybe I should talk to the police about you taking my story. There should be a fee at least but the thing that’s really bugging me is how you knew about Black River.

  Miriam’s breath caught in her chest.

  I will leave you alone and wont’ write anymore if you tell me how you knew about Black River.

  Beneath her feet, the earth shifted.

  She read the line out loud. “Tell me how you knew about Black River.”

  “It’s a song,” Theo said. “It’s not a reference to the place, it’s—”

  “I know what it is,” Miriam said. The world was turning black, the darkness closing in too fast for her to push it back. She opened her mouth but she could draw no air into her lungs; her muscles weren’t working, not her diaphragm nor the muscles in her legs or her arms. She was trembling violently, her vision gone almost altogether; the last thing she saw before she collapsed was Theo Myerson’s startled face.

  * * *

  “It was on in the car, on the radio. The song. I remember him fiddling with the tuner, he was trying to change the station, but Lorraine asked him not to. She was singing. She was singing, and she said, don’t you like this one? ‘Black River.’ ”

  Myerson set a glass of water down on her bedside table and then stood awkwardly, looking down at her. It should have been embarrassing, Theo Myerson helping her up from where she’d collapsed on the towpath, the two of them shuffling like an old couple back to the boat, where he put her to bed, like a child. Like an invalid. Miriam would have been mortified if she’d been capable of feeling mortifi
cation, if she’d been capable of feeling anything other than a sort of bewildered terror. She lay on her back, her eyes trained on the wooden slats of the ceiling, trying to concentrate on her breathing, in and out, trying to concentrate on the here, on the now, but she couldn’t, not with him there.

  “Who else did you show it to?” he asked. “Your . . . uh, your manuscript. Who else read it?”

  “I never showed it to anyone else,” Miriam said. “Except for Laura Kilbride, but that was only very recently, and according to the newspapers she’s not in a fit state to write anyone any letters. I never showed it to anyone else.”

  “That can’t be true! You showed it to a lawyer, didn’t you?” Theo said, towering over her, rubbing his big balding head. “You must have done! You showed it to my lawyer, certainly, when you made your, uh, your complaint.” He shifted from one foot to another. “Your claim.”

  Miriam closed her eyes. “I didn’t send anyone the whole manuscript. I selected a number of pages, I pointed to various similarities. I never mentioned the singing, even though it was . . . even though it was perhaps the clearest evidence of your theft.” Theo grimaced. He looked as though he wanted to say something but thought better of it. “I didn’t want to mention her singing, I didn’t even want to think about it, about the last time I heard her voice like that, the last time I heard her happy, carefree. The last time I heard her unafraid.”

  “Jesus.” Theo exhaled slowly. “Do you mind?” He indicated the bed, and for a startling moment Miriam wasn’t sure what he was asking. He sat, perching his large bottom on the corner of the bunk, an inch or two from Miriam’s feet. “It can’t be, Miriam. He’s dead. Jeremy is dead, you said so, the police said so.”

  “I wished him so, and the police made an assumption. People said they saw him, in all sorts of places—Essex, Scotland. Morocco. The police followed up, or at least they said they did, I don’t know how seriously they took any of it. . . . But you know all this, don’t you? It was in the book.”