A Lovely Way to Burn

by Louise Welsh

  A male voice broke in, a tired drawl: ‘So you would leave people to rot, rather than release prisoners who’ve been convicted of non-violent crimes?’

  It was turning into a bright morning, but the sun was still low in the sky and the streets were cast in shadows. Stevie glanced in her rear-view mirror. There was no one on the road, or the pavement, behind or ahead of her. The district was usually busy with commuters battling their way towards the city centre, and mothers ferrying their children to school, but today it had a dull, Sunday-morning feel that deadened the spirits.

  ‘There’s no question of people rotting,’ the female voice said. ‘All we’re proposing is that prisoners give up some of their privileges …’

  ‘Privileges.’ The man stretched the word into a sneer.

  Stevie saw a space. She guided the car into it, turned off the radio, flipped down the sun visor and examined her reflection in the vanity mirror. Even if she had wanted to, her face was still in too much of a mess to appear on TV, but her bruises were shifting from blue-black to an easier-to-camouflage yellow. She ran a gentle finger across her skin, testing it, thinking for some reason of Rachel, her scarecrow body and fashion-sharp haircut. The memory of the producer’s plea for Stevie to stay and help broadcast another programme was touched with guilt. It had been an appeal for normality, a future to stay alive in. Her own quest to uncover the truth about Simon’s death was similar, except that it wasn’t only the virus Stevie was afraid of.

  She took her make-up purse from her bag, applied a smear of foundation, and then a layer of powder to her bruises. It was getting increasingly hard to care about the way she looked, but her face was a weapon that had served her well, and it was important for her to maintain it, just as it was important for a soldier to maintain his gun.

  A row of rough sleepers lay in the lee of a building, wrapped in sleeping bags like war dead zipped in body bags. Stevie’s running shoes were silent against the pavement but she could hear the sound of her own breaths, the blood pumping its way through her heart. It was as if a hum, that had been part of the city for so long no one noticed it any more, had suddenly been switched off, leaving an unnerving, white silence in its place.

  The sign on the door of the twenty-four-hour grocers declared it OPEN, but the shop had an empty, dead-eyed look. Stevie thought about going in, buying a newspaper and asking the shopkeeper if he had heard any news of the sweats, but some instinct told her to walk on.

  The top of Simon’s tower block appeared up ahead, rising sharp-cornered above the other buildings. Stevie took out her mobile and called his landline. She imagined the abandoned interior, the phone ringing unanswered in the neat living room, and in the bedroom where Simon had died. After a while an automated voice invited her to leave a message. She hung up, knowing it was no guarantee that the flat was empty.

  When she reached the path outside the tower block, Stevie pulled up the hood of her tracksuit jacket and quickened her pace, aware of the hundreds of windows staring down at her. Somewhere a bin had been overturned and rubbish was strewn across the green. A scattering of papers lay becalmed next to discarded tins and scraps of food. Stevie bent and lifted an official-looking document from the ground, but it was someone’s bank statement, nothing to do with her or Simon, and she let it fall again.

  She looked up to the twentieth floor. The building swooned towards her and it was as if she could see the earth moving on its axis. Stevie shook her head and fell into a slow jog, trying to outrun her own insignificance.

  A large man dressed in black cargo pants, a leather jacket and a knitted cap at odds with the sunny morning, bolted from the entrance, almost knocking her over as he barrelled past. He had a handkerchief wrapped around his mouth and nose. All she saw of the man’s face was a pair of grey-blue eyes, a fringe of straw-coloured hair and a scrap of white skin, but Stevie’s throat tightened with the memory of strong hands twisting her scarf around her neck. She hunched her shoulders and kept her head lowered, hiding it in the shadow of her hood, hoping he wouldn’t identify her.

  She had read that people who had been assaulted saw their attackers everywhere, their features imprinted on strangers’ faces, like the ghost of a loved one conjured by a distant relative’s smile. But she knew without a doubt that the man who had just run past was the stranger who had tried to kill her in the Shop TV station car park. She stepped smartly into the shadow of the doorway and watched until the figure disappeared around a corner.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.’ Stevie closed her eyes for a second and wondered if now might be a good time to take up smoking, then she pushed one of the buzzers at random. When there was no response she tried the one above, and then the one above that, her eyes on the road outside, watching in case the man came back. Her finger was pressed to yet another buzzer when the intercom crackled and a voice trembled, ‘Hello?’

  Stevie made her own voice bright and efficient.

  ‘I’m a doctor on call. I’m here to visit a sick patient, but they’re not answering. Could you let me into the building, please?’

  ‘A doctor?’

  The voice was high and distorted by static. She couldn’t tell if it was male or female.

  ‘Yes.’ Stevie suddenly wished she had chosen a different identity: a meter reader, a florist or a postwoman, laden with parcels from Amazon. But she knew that none of these would command the same authority. ‘I’m visiting a patient. I need to get to them as soon as possible.’

  ‘If I let you in, will you see me too?’ The voice was rushed and desperate. ‘Please, I think I’m dying.’

  ‘Shit.’ She swore under her breath and then assumed her ‘doctor’s voice’ again, the edge of authority. ‘I’m sorry, but you’ll have to contact your own GP. Tell me who they are and I’ll call them for you.’

  The static on the intercom hissed and swelled into a snowstorm of sound and Stevie realised that the person on the other end was laughing.

  ‘Do you think I haven’t phoned my own GP? They’re not picking up.’ The blizzard of static died and the person on the other end said, ‘No one’s picking up.’ The coughing resumed, harsh and uncontrolled, and Stevie pulled back from the intercom, as if she was in danger of catching the virus. When the voice spoke again it was breathless but determined. ‘I won’t let you in unless you promise to see me.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Best isn’t good enough. Promise.’

  ‘Okay, I promise.’

  The lie was almost a whisper, but the person on the other end must have heard it because they said, ‘Apartment twelve, fifteenth floor,’ and buzzed her in.

  Stevie ignored the lift and started the long climb up the deserted stairwell to Simon’s landing. It had been a mistake to jog the path to the high-rise. Her legs were still sore from the scuffle in the car park, and the weight of the broken promise made every step an effort.

  Thirty-One

  Tape was still strung across the entrance to Simon’s apartment: POLICE. DO NOT CROSS. The door was ajar, as Stevie had hoped and feared it would be. She stood on the landing, her ears straining for any sound, but the building was as quiet as the street outside. She reached out and pushed the door. It swung open, a sly invitation. Stevie took a deep breath, ducked beneath the police tape and slid into the apartment, pulling the door shut behind her. The lock refused to click into place and she silently cursed Simon again for not getting it fixed.

  The gauzy, white curtains in the lounge were drawn across the large picture window and the room was drenched in soft, pearlised light. Some uninvited visitor had reduced the apartment to the same chaos as hers, but Stevie had been expecting that too. She trod cautiously, careful not to step on the mess of papers, CDs, books and photographs, the detritus of Simon’s life.

  A breeze cut across the room and the papers on the floor quivered. Stevie froze, like a deer sensing itself in a hunter’s sights, and looked towards the balcony. The white curtains fluttered and Stevie saw that the do
or was open a fraction. Too late she remembered the knife she had left in the car. She cast around, looking for something she could use as a weapon. Simon had decorated his apartment in a sleek minimalist style and there were no ornaments or convenient sporting trophies that would act as a club. She picked up a table lamp and tiptoed to the balcony door, holding its base level with her shoulder, ready to strike.

  The curtains blew softly towards her. Stevie reached out a hand to stop them and saw the sky beyond, pale blue and hung with clouds. A hawk was reeling high above. She watched it swoop and turn, allowing a dangerous dreamy vagueness to creep over her. All things must die, she too one day. It needn’t be a tragedy unless you were forced to go before your time, like Simon and Joanie. The hawk rose towards the clouds. She watched it climb across the unbroken blue and realised that there were no aeroplane trails scarring the sky. The curtains caught on the same gust of air that lifted the bird and pulled away from her. The balcony was empty. Stevie closed the door and turned her attention to the flat.

  The thought of going into the bedroom where she had found Simon was like a stone in her chest, and so she went there first. A faint smell of decay still lingered. The sheets were the same ones she had found Simon swathed in, though they had been dragged from the bed and abandoned in a careless heap on the floor. Stevie checked the en suite, noticing for the first time the crack in the porcelain sink, where she had dropped her bottle of perfume. She ran a finger along it, avoiding the sight of her own face in the mirror.

  The other rooms were empty, all in confusion. She gave the walk-in cupboards and wardrobes a quick check, the lamp still in her hand, her heart still in her mouth. There was no one there, but Stevie had a sense that the search of Simon’s flat hadn’t been as thorough as the one conducted on her own place. There was something haphazard about the half-emptied drawers in Simon’s desk, the defeated suits hanging like suicides in the wardrobe, the mattress still square upon its frame. The red-and-purple dress she had come to collect the day she had found Simon, hung lopsidedly amongst his suits. She touched it and a memory stirred of her old self in the silk. Then she drifted back through to the sitting room, unsure if she was looking for evidence of why Simon had been murdered, or of who he had been beneath the charm.

  She was certain that the man who had run from the building was the person who had wrecked the apartment. What would he have done to her if she had arrived earlier? Would there have been a point when she gave in and took him to Iqbal and the laptop? She sank down on to the floor amongst the mess. They hadn’t spent a lot of time together in Simon’s flat. Simon could make a mean breakfast, a heart-attack special, but he had never invited her round for a dinner party or a romantic meal. Restaurants were for eating in; the flat was for pre-dinner drinks on the balcony and late-night drinks that ended with the two of them tangled together on the couch.

  Stevie pushed a muddle of books and papers aside, and lay back on the cleared strip of carpet, stretching her back against the floor. Simon had come to her place too, and twice he had booked them both into spa hotels, but most of their love-making had happened here. She ran a hand down her body, trying to replicate Simon’s sure touch.

  Stevie remembered a television show she had once seen about the London Blitz. The presenter had explained that during bombings strangers had coupled with each other in doorways and air-raid shelters, driven to lust by grief and fear. Were people all across the city getting down to it right now, compelled by a primal urge to make new life in the face of death? Stevie thought about the unlocked front door, but the flat was silent, the building so still it might have been abandoned. She slipped a hand below the waistband of her tracksuit bottoms, wondering at herself. Was this what she had come here for? She stretched her back and opened her eyes wide, looking at the upside-down living room. And suddenly she felt as if her heart had stopped.

  Whoever had searched the flat had pushed Simon’s large couch up against the wall. Protruding from it, stretched out slim and languid, as if its owner were sunbathing in some sheltered cove, was an arm. Some reflex was tightening a band around Stevie’s chest, but her lungs had been arrested, the air inside them held there, drowning her. Maybe it was the overload of oxygen in her lungs, the lack of it reaching her brain, that gave the scene a 3-D clarity. She took in the fingers curling from the palm like the fronds of a spider shell, the two plain silver rings, one on top of the other, the pink varnish so pale it made the fingernails look like flesh.

  Stevie slid her own hand out of her pants. She rolled on to her side, pulling her knees up to her chest, and breathed in and breathed out, breathed in and breathed out. The fingers remained still and outstretched, as if frozen in the act of beckoning someone closer. Stevie felt an urge to run away, out of the flat and back to her car, before the owner of the hand came to, alive and deathly. She fought it down and scrambled to her feet, almost falling as her foot slid on a framed photo of two young boys whose names she didn’t know. She righted herself against the arm of the couch, and dragged it away from the wall. The body flopped from its hiding place, soft and rag-doll limp, leaving a smear of blood against the white paintwork. Stevie averted her gaze, but not before she had seen the mass of blood, black and vital, coating the back of the skull. It looked desperate, but there was still a slim chance that the stranger was alive and so she dropped to her haunches, turned the woman on to her back and placed a hand against her cheek. The skin was cold and taut, the flesh beneath it spongy and swollen.

  Come on, come on, come on, come on …

  Stevie didn’t know if she was muttering to herself or to the stranger. She put her hand between her own breasts, found the frantic thud of her heartbeat, and then pressed her palm against the same point on the other woman’s chest. There was no answering rhythm. Stevie felt the stillness within the body and knew it was dead, the same way that you can tell a house is empty simply by entering it, but she pressed her fingers against the inside of the woman’s right wrist and then her left, feeling for a pulse. There was nothing.

  Stevie leant back on her heels, her own breathing harsh and ragged in her ears. She had been close enough to the man to feel his slipstream as he ran from the building.

  ‘Christ,’ she said to the woman, ‘what did he do to you?’

  It was a stupid question and Stevie realised with shame that what she really meant was, It might have been me. She took another deep breath and slid her hands into the pocket of the woman’s jeans, looking for something that might identify her, but the jeans were slim-fitting, their pockets empty. It felt wrong, touching the corpse so intimately, another violation after the indignity of murder.

  The woman had probably been good-looking, but death had done her no favours. Whatever mechanism kept the muscles of the face in place had stopped working and the skin slumped softly away from her features, giving the corpse a blurred look. Stevie forced herself to stare, wondering if she had seen the woman somewhere before. Some ghost of a recollection flickered palely in her mind, but it was too insubstantial to grasp. After a long moment she went through to Simon’s bedroom and took a clean sheet from a pile tumbled on the floor.

  It was as she came back into the living room and saw the body from a distance that Stevie realised who the woman reminded her of. The two of them shared the same athletic build, the same colouring. The woman’s hair was a similar length to Stevie’s, almost, but not quite, touching her shoulders. Their faces and dress sense were different, the woman around a careful decade older, but a killer in a hurry and unfamiliar with both of them might not have had time to notice that.

  ‘Who are you?’ Stevie whispered and then, ridiculously, ‘I’m sorry if I got you killed.’

  She unfolded the sheet, shaking it in the air, the way she might shake bedclothes fresh from the washing line, and draped it over the dead woman.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said for a second time. ‘Sorry.’

  Stevie found a pair of scissors in Simon’s kitchen drawer, took them into the en suite and slowly b
egan to chop careful slices from her hair.

  Was the dead woman another of Simon’s secrets? The sight of her ruined skull had made jealousy impossible. Instead Stevie felt the kind of pity a wife might feel on discovering that her husband’s mistress had been tricked into thinking he was single. The woman could be her way out, Stevie realised, her chance to slip away and wait for the sweats to take their course.

  Stevie hadn’t given herself a haircut since she was a teenager and the result looked like a hatchet attack, but the short crop brought out the angles in her face. She had lost weight in the past few days and now her features seemed to be a series of corners: sharp cheekbones, hinged jaw and bright eyes set deep in their sockets. It was a skull face, without the grin, her expression nervous in a way that skulls have no need to be.

  Somewhere in the tower block a door slammed. Stevie gripped the scissors in her fist like a knife, her heart pumping. She looked at the room beyond the mirror, ready to react to the first sign of movement, but the building sank back into silence. Stevie let out the breath she had been holding in and caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She saw the panic on her face and realised that this was how it would be if she ran, a life shadowed by fear.

  Stevie went back into the bedroom and took one of Simon’s white shirts from his wardrobe. She put it to her face and breathed in, but it was freshly laundered and held no consoling scent of him. She pulled off her tracksuit top, put the shirt on over her vest and then flicked through the hangers in the wardrobe until she found a lightweight, black linen suit she had never seen Simon wearing. It was an inch too long and several sizes too wide, but she rolled up the trouser legs, belted the waist tight and let the shirt hang loose on top. The combination looked absurd.

  Stevie pulled off the shirt, replaced it with a dark blue V-necked T-shirt and put the suit jacket on top. The effect was early eighties New Wave, hip and androgynous, not Stevie’s style at all, but she no longer looked like herself, and that was what she was aiming for.