A Lovely Way to Burn

by Louise Welsh

  A Lovely Way to Burn

  Louise Welsh

  JOHN MURRAY

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by John Murray (Publishers)

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Louise Welsh 2014

  The right of Louise Welsh to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-84854-652-3

  John Murray (Publishers)

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  For Zoë Wicomb

  Contents

  Title Page

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Louise Welsh

  … love is strong as death;

  jealousy is cruel as the grave:

  the coals thereof are coals of fire,

  which hath a most vehement flame.

  The Song of Solomon

  Prologue

  London witnessed three shootings that summer, by men who were part of the Establishment. The first was the Right Honourable Terry Blackwell, Tory MP for Hove who, instead of going to his constituency as planned, sat in a deck chair on the balcony of his Thames-side apartment one sweltering Saturday in June and shot dead six holidaymakers.

  The first five were neatly dispatched, with shots to their heads. Terry Blackwell had been a sniper in his army days, and tourists, ambling by the river in bright summer clothes, were easy targets. The sixth was running for cover when Blackwell hit her in her right knee. He waited until the girl, Marina Salzirnisa from Latvia (visiting the city on a language course which her father hoped would improve her English), had almost dragged herself to the safety of a café, and then shot her four more times, wounding her in her left knee, both thighs, and finishing with a shot to the spine which wasn’t guaranteed to kill her, but did.

  After Marina, the MP had lost his touch, or perhaps people had simply succeeded in running for their lives, because although Terry Blackwell kept the streets and buildings in range pinned down for the rest of the day, he didn’t kill, or even wound, anyone else. Around six o’clock he botched his own shot to the head, lingering on alone, on the floor of his apartment, where the Rapid Response Team eventually found him. Police negotiators had located Blackwell’s ex-wife, Cynthia, and later there was speculation in the press that it had been her voice on the answering machine, telling Blackwell she still loved him, that had prompted the MP’s coup de grâce.

  Towards the end of June, John Gillespie, a hedge-fund manager for the Royal Bank of Scotland, let rip in an Underground carriage on the Circle line, with a gun he had concealed in his briefcase. Gillespie was known for his canny ability for risk assessment and had chosen a not-quite-full carriage between rush hours. He managed to kill all fifteen occupants before the train reached its next station. Gillespie waited for the doors to open, and the oncoming passengers to see the carnage, before turning the gun on himself. Witness statements mentioned the banker’s smart suit and neatly knotted tie, the professional smile he gave as he pulled the trigger.

  The following week the Reverend Matthew Sheppard, vicar of St Alban’s parish church in Ealing, mounted the altar, took a shotgun from beneath his cassock and attempted to gun down his congregation. St Alban’s worshippers were ageing, and had it been a normal Sunday, the Reverend Sheppard might have succeeded in sending them all to what they presumably believed was a better place. But it was the week of Aimee Albright’s christening and the church was packed almost to capacity. Aimee’s Uncle Paul, who had never been good enough to turn professional but had captained his local cricket team for the past eight years, bowled his hymnbook full square at Sheppard and knocked the gun from his grasp. Aimee’s father was wounded in the shoulder, but he and two of his brothers managed to wrestle the vicar who, now that he was unarmed, seemed dazed, to the floor. The Reverend Sheppard had remained dazed to the point of catatonia, right up to the moment when he succeeded in hanging himself with a sheet in the prison cell where he was on suicide watch.

  On the surface, the shootings were nothing to do with what happened later, but they stuck in Stevie Flint’s mind. Their details returned to her during the months ahead and she would begin to think of them as a portent of what was to come, a sign that the city was beginning to turn on itself.

  One

  Stevie Flint had lived in London for seven years. She no longer had the soundtrack to the movie of her life playing in her head, but had only just turned thirty and could still appreciate the buzz of the city as it headed towards night. She walked out of Tottenham Court Road Underground station, noticing a faintly sulphurous tinge to the air. Stevie shaded her eyes with Jackie O sunglasses, suddenly remembering Jasmine’s, the only smart dress shop in her home town, its window screened with yellow cellophane to protect gowns from a rarely existent sun. London had a hint of yellow to it today, she decided, a septic glare. She set out in what she hoped was the right direction for the private members’ club Simon had suggested. Her new sandals were too high for a long hike but she had traced her route earlier on Google Maps and been reassured that she could walk the distance without too much damage to her feet.

  Soho was full of pubs and all of them were full. Drinkers had spilled out on to the pavements and it seemed that everywhere there were pretty girls and men in suits, minus ties, all of them talking and laughing and all with a glass in their hands. Stevie caught snatches of conversation as she passed:

  ‘… smooth, like a billiard ball into a pocket …’

  ‘… six down and he refuses to call in a …’

  ‘… I told her if she don’t like it she can …’

  ‘… that’s me done in Deptford.’

  Stevie stepped on to the road to avoid a crush of bodies and felt the skirt of her dress flutter in the slipstream of a passing moped. There was dust and laughter and petrol in air that had been breathed in and breathed out, breathed in and breathed out; it was better not to think about how many times because that might
set her to thinking about the water she drank, or how much of the heat currently broiling the city came from the sun, and how much radiated from the strangers pressed around her.

  Stevie paused, unsure if she was in the right street after all. She took a deep breath, feeling the air hot and tarry against the back of her throat. Her shift had ended at three that morning and a headache threatened at the back of her eyes. A drunk man in shirtsleeves slid free of the crowd and put an arm around her. She felt his body heat, the sweat of his underarms touching the back of her neck. ‘Do you fancy another one, just like the other one?’ the stranger whispered in her ear, his hop-scented breath warm against her face. Stevie would like to have slipped off one of her new sandals and stabbed its heel in his eye, but instead she gave the drunk a shove in the ribs and wriggled free of his grasp. He called after her, ‘Was it something I said?’ She heard his friends laughing, and fought the urge to go back and tip their pints from their hands.

  ‘See how much you laugh then.’

  Stevie realised she had said the words out loud and glanced around to check if anyone had noticed, but she was alone on a crowded London street, and if anyone had, they paid her no mind.

  Perhaps it was the incident with the drunk that made Stevie lose her way, or maybe it was her usual lack of direction that snared her in the maze of Soho streets. She phoned Simon and when he didn’t pick up, left a message, making an effort not to sound irritated. After all, it was she who was late and it wasn’t Simon’s fault that her bare sole was blistering. Stevie checked the route on her iPhone, retraced her steps and finally found the club, a discreet doorway with only a number to distinguish it.

  The interior was self-consciously stylish, a dimly lit retro-Nordic exercise in design that would hang around for a few years, then be revamped in response to some new trend. Usually it amused her that Simon, a man whose business relied on cleanliness and precision, liked these desperately trendy dives, but they had not seen each other all week and tonight she would have preferred somewhere more intimate.

  Stevie smiled at the hostess, gave her name and watched the girl’s green-lacquered fingernail trace a path down the list of reservations. It wasn’t really a members’ club, just somewhere that people who had decided they wanted to be fashionable paid to get a table. The hostess’s finger paused and she put a tick next to Stevie’s name. Simon’s name was slanted beside hers, unadorned by ticks: Dr Simon Sharkey.

  ‘Am I the first?’

  The receptionist was signalling for a waiter to show Stevie to a table. She turned to reply and Stevie thought she saw a ghost of recognition flit across her face. The girl would work late too, Stevie realised, and for a moment she glimpsed a life not so different from her own: the high heels kicked off beside the couch, the calorie-counted snack eaten by the glow of the computer, the TV murmuring on, barely watched.

  ‘Yes,’ said the hostess, her smile wider than before. ‘You’re the first.’

  The smile told Stevie that the girl couldn’t place her. But no one had ever admitted to guessing where they knew her from, even when Stevie told them.

  By the time she had finished her second glass of wine Stevie knew Simon wasn’t going to turn up, but she ordered a third anyway. She didn’t bother to glance again at the bars on her phone. She had already checked them and knew that the signal in the club was fine. The door opened and two girls in short summer dresses entered. They were laughing, but the sound of their laughter and high heels was drowned by the heavy beat of the music.

  Something had probably come up. Things had come up already in the time she and Simon had known each other, his job made that inevitable, but he had always phoned, or got someone to phone for him.

  The two girls were buying drinks. Their skin and dresses were stained yellow for a moment and then shifted to pink, violet, aqua as the mood lights embedded below the bar’s glowing surface drifted through the spectrum. The barman turned towards the gantry, lifting a hand to his mouth to cover a cough, and as if in response, one of the girls also started coughing and raised a handkerchief to her mouth. The other girl said something that made all three of them laugh again.

  Stevie glanced at the five-minutes-fast clock above the bar. Her friend Joanie had been more available since her split with Derek. There was still time to call her and arrange to meet for a drink. She would be full of outrage at Simon’s defection and that would help to put it in perspective.

  On a video above the bar a rapper and his crew were making bad-boy gestures, while a group of skinny girls with inflated breasts and improbable rears, paraded behind them in high heels and bikinis. The rapper squatted low, his knees scissored far apart, and pulled the camera close to his face. Stevie thought he was repeating ‘ho’, ‘ho’, ‘ho’, ‘ho’, ‘ho’, ‘ho’, ‘ho …’ but the club was noisy and she might have been mistaken.

  The understanding crease in Joanie’s brow would be too much tonight, Stevie decided. Maybe later she would be able to indulge in a post mortem, but for now she would leave her relationship with Simon on ice.

  Stevie slipped her mobile into her bag and slid from her seat, leaving the unfinished glass on the table and trying not to care that she had been stood up. She had done her own share of letting-down in the past, and there was still the chance that something had happened at the hospital, something so quick and so urgent that there had not been time for Simon to ring her.

  The barman’s grin was bright and consoling, the hostess’s smile sympathetic. Stevie’s smile outshone them both, but their pity embarrassed her, and it was an effort to make her eyes sparkle the way Joanie had taught her. She stepped from the bar into the warm evening haze of London in summer, and retraced her steps to the Underground station. This was their first broken date, but recently Simon had been prone to absences, even when they were together. Stevie had made a vow never to ask a man what he was thinking, but Simon’s long silences and distant gaze had tempted her to break it. Now she thought she knew what had been on his mind. She had been bored with the places where he liked them to meet. Simon, it seemed, had been tired of her.

  Stevie swiped her Oyster card, pushed through the turnstile and took the stairs down to the Central line platform. A breeze gusted from somewhere in the network of tunnels, rippling the skirt of her dress, touching the sensitive skin of her thighs. She clenched her hands, enjoying the dig of her nails against her palm. When Simon phoned, she would forgive their thwarted date; tell him it had been nice, but it was time for them both to move on.

  A train rattled into the station. Stevie waited for the doors to breathe open. The carriage was almost full and she had already taken a seat beside a teenage boy before she realised that he was bent under the weight of a summer cold. The boy coughed, not bothering to cover his mouth. Stevie considered moving, but stayed where she was and fished her phone from her bag. There were no missed calls. She switched it off, trying not to care. An abandoned Evening Standard was crumpled on the floor by her feet, the MP, the vicar and the banker splashed across its front page. Sometimes it seemed as if civilisation rested on a slender thread.

  Stevie forced herself to smile. She had been looking forward to seeing Simon, to sitting across the table from him, both of them aware of each other’s skin and of what would follow later in the cool of his apartment; the doors to the balcony open, the curtains shifting in the breeze as their bodies moved together in the bedroom. Disappointment was tempting her to get things out of proportion. Simon might yet have a good excuse for not turning up, and even if he didn’t, all that had happened was a man she liked had let her down. It wasn’t as if anyone had died.

  Two

  They were selling toasters, fucking toasters, at six in the morning. Stevie slid a slice of white bread into each of the four slots and pulled the lever down gently, mindful of the model she had broken in rehearsal. Beside her Joanie chirped, ‘I like my toast nice and crispy, not burnt but well-fired. My husband Derek, he likes his golden brown …’

  Beneath the stu
dio lights Joanie’s skin had a golden-brown shimmer, enhanced, Stevie suspected, by some product Joanie had sold herself. Joanie was the best kind of salesperson, one who fell in love with the merchandise, and then sold it on with a sincerity that was impossible to fake.

  Stevie said, ‘So with the Dual Action Toaster you can each have your toast the way you like it, and still sit down to breakfast together.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Joanie was beaming as if she had just discovered the secret to happiness in the crumb tray. ‘And we all know how important it is for families to eat together.’

  Stevie said, ‘Especially in the morning.’ And Joanie grinned at her. They were playing what Stevie thought of as their retro-porno-roles: Joanie the experienced but well-preserved housewife, initiating Stevie (newly married, not sure how to keep both her man and her sanity) into the ways of the world.

  ‘Yes,’ Joanie said. ‘Especially in the morning. Derek’s shifts are unpredictable but when we can, we sit down together in the morning, even if it’s only for ten minutes.’

  Derek had left Joanie for Francesca, a special constable he had been assigned to train, and Stevie wasn’t sure if her friend’s constant references to him on air were wishful thinking, sales technique, or an act of revenge. Joanie had once told her that Derek’s squad took turns to record the show. Joanie thought it sweet of them, Stevie suspected elaborate bullying. The tally on the LED board behind the cameras was climbing, but not quickly enough. The sales information appeared onscreen, Stevie read out the order number again, then the camera was back on her, and she was back on camera.

  The toast sprang from the toaster, one slice as pale as it had gone in, the other a shade short of charcoal. Joanie said, ‘That was quick, wasn’t it?’ in her horny housewife’s voice. ‘Just enough time to make a pot of tea while you wait. My Derek can’t start the day without a cup of tea.’

  Stevie lifted up the slices of toast, ebony and ivory, for the camera to zoom in on, almost dropping them as the heat seared her fingertips.

  ‘Whoops.’ Sometimes it amazed her how good she had got at not swearing on air. ‘That is most definitely toasted.’