A Lovely Way to Burn

by Louise Welsh

  ‘I told you, Simon wasn’t a gambler.’

  ‘He was, if Hope paid him a visit. What’s his full name?’

  ‘Simon Sharkey. I thought perhaps he and Hope were seeing each other.’

  ‘Simon Sharkey the doctor?’ The man stared at her as if she had suddenly grown more interesting.

  Stevie nodded.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘They weren’t seeing each other.’

  Stevie smiled with relief. A thought occurred to her and she asked, ‘Did Hope have a sick child?’

  The man shook his head. ‘Not so’s you’d notice.’ He leant closer, the screen still between them, the ledger still resting on the counter. ‘I’ve got good news and bad news for you. Bad news first. I did know your boyfriend, knew him pretty well at one time. He was what you might call a regular. The good news is that I hadn’t seen him for a while. He made a heroic effort and kicked the habit. We did our bit by agreeing, at his own request I might add, that we wouldn’t serve him again, even if he begged us to.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. Which still leaves the question, given that she wasn’t one for social calls, why was Hope at his house?’ The bookmaker flipped open the ledger and began turning its pages.

  Stevie asked, ‘Are your computers down?’

  She thought again of Iqbal, a life half-lived on the Web, and hoped he was okay.

  The bookmaker gave her a grin. His face was long and thin, the kind of face Stevie realised she had always instinctively mistrusted, though she could think of no reason for her prejudice.

  ‘As the boss says, a book can be tossed in the furnace. A computer has magic ways of holding on to information that you might not want to share.’

  ‘Why write it down at all then?’

  ‘Even Old Nick makes you sign a contract, or so I’ve heard.’ The moving finger paused and he raised an eyebrow in an expression that made him look as if he might be on intimate terms with the man himself. ‘Okay, this is interesting. Naughty Hope.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It appears that my boss isn’t the cold-hearted harridan I cursed her for all these years. She seems to have lent the doctor rather a lot of money.’

  ‘How much money?’

  He turned the ledger round so that Stevie could see the entry his finger was resting on.

  ‘Over thirty grand.’

  Simon’s share of Fibrosyop had guaranteed big returns. He had his own flat and a secure job. There had been no need for him to seek out back-street loans.

  Stevie said, ‘Are you sure it wasn’t payment for a lucky bet?’

  ‘I don’t make mistakes about money. It looks like the good doctor stuck to his resolution, though a man who needs to borrow 30Gs from a bookie might not be entirely lily-white.’ He grinned. ‘No offence meant.’

  Stevie whispered, ‘So that’s why Hope was there. She’d come to collect.’

  The man looked up, all trace of cannabis mistiness gone.

  ‘You seen her?’

  ‘I meant that’s why …’ Stevie stumbled on the lie, ‘… that’s why she went there.’

  ‘No you didn’t.’ The man closed the ledger gently and said in a dangerously soft voice, ‘How did you get in? I thought Hope had forgotten to lock the door, but she didn’t, did she? You’ve got her keys.’

  Their eyes locked and there was a moment when she might have been able to lie, but it passed.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Stevie backed away from the counter. ‘She was dead when I got to Simon’s flat. Someone killed her. It was fast. She wouldn’t have felt a thing.’

  The man’s features buckled, but his voice was the same quiet whisper.

  ‘You stood there, chatting to me as if she was still alive.’

  ‘I didn’t know what else to do.’

  ‘So you consulted your sense of decency and found you didn’t have one?’ His voice had been rising, but he paused, as if struck by a sudden thought, and whispered, ‘What did you do with her body?’

  Stevie looked at the ground, ashamed.

  ‘I covered it with a sheet.’

  ‘You cold bitch.’ The man went to the door that separated the front shop from the back counter, stabbed at the security buttons and pulled the handle, but the lock stayed tight. ‘Fuck! Fucking thing!’ His voice was hoarse and he might have been crying. ‘I told her not to run around with cash on her. Told her and fucking told her.’ He slammed a fist against the door and stabbed another combination into the keypad.

  ‘Sorry.’ Stevie was still backing away, her eyes on the man, as if she could keep him there by strength of will. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Her feet entered a shaft of sunlight stretching across the betting shop’s dingy floor. The heat of the day touched her shoulders and the spell was broken. She turned and ran. For an instant, the brightness outside robbed her of her sight, then she saw it all: the empty road, the shuttered shops and the drawn curtains in the flats above them. The old man was still slumped against the side of the building, but this time she didn’t pause to check on him. Stevie kept on running until she reached Hope’s car, not daring to look back to see whether the bookmaker was chasing her.

  Thirty-Four

  Simon’s school photographs were tucked safely in her bag next to Hope Black’s gun. Stevie felt sure that whatever had happened to Simon was connected to the past, old loyalties reaching across the years to snare him in a scheme that had somehow resulted in his borrowing a small fortune from Hope, and finally, in his death.

  She tried phoning Iqbal again, but the only response was from his voicemail so she left a message: Iqbal, it’s Stevie. Please call me when you get this, I’m worried about you. She wondered if she should head south, return to Iqbal’s apartment and check that he was okay. She had programmed the satnav with Geoffrey Frei’s address in Swiss Cottage. It told her to turn left and she turned left. Iqbal had seemed keen enough to hope for more than a one-night stand. She couldn’t imagine him deliberately ignoring her calls. The satnav directed her to drive straight ahead for four hundred yards. Stevie kept her hands on the wheel of the Jaguar and her eyes on the road.

  Even if the key to Simon’s death lay in the past, instinct told her that the only way she would uncover it was to press on. The man who had attacked her, and killed Hope Black, might have come to the same conclusion and already be on his way to the Freis’ house. Even if she eluded him, the journalist’s wife might flee the city or succumb to the sweats, and then any chance of discovering what Frei had known would be lost. Stevie pushed Iqbal from her mind and kept on driving, a small knot of shame hardening in her chest.

  Geoffrey Frei had lived in the kind of house beloved of British sitcoms. There were rows of them, as anonymous and indistinguishable to a stranger as the lines of little boys in Simon’s early class photographs. The houses made Stevie think of a lost London where bowler-hatted men in pinstriped suits wielded umbrellas rolled as tight as their emotions as they headed for the 06.45 train. And of wives who stayed at home, gearing up for the first consoling gin of the day.

  The respectable-at-all-costs suburbanites had been replaced by a new type of middle classes. Journalists and TV producers, pilot fish to media sharks they mostly despised; senior lecturers hoping to make professor; Web designers and MBAs, looking for the next big app/craze/.com miracle, all passing through on the way to their next property upgrade, and all praying that the market didn’t collapse before they got there.

  The curtains were drawn in many of the houses, as if they were homes in mourning, or occupied by honeymooners who had decided to stay in bed all day. But there were also pockets of activity: men and women in crumpled Boden and GAP casuals, loading their four-by-fours and estate cars with children, supplies and pets. It would have looked as if the district had decided to go on a sudden holiday, were it not for the grim stares and drawn faces. Stevie drove past a man sitting on the edge of the pavement, his face shocked free of expression. She saw doors and windows clamped with steel shutte
rs. She heard screams and saw a woman being forced into a car by two men. Stevie slowed the Jag, wondering if she should intervene, until she saw that there were tears running down the men’s faces too.

  An oversized Subaru sat outside Geoffrey Frei’s house. Stevie parked alongside it, allowing other traffic a lane to pass by, but boxing in the Subaru. She opened the gate to the Freis’ garden just as a tall woman came out of the house carrying a box of groceries. Her task was made more difficult by the blond, curly-haired child clinging to her neck, his thin legs clamped around her waist in a way that confirmed Darwin’s theories about evolution. The child looked at Stevie with wide eyes and then buried his face in his mother’s chest, wrapping himself even more closely around her. Stevie said, ‘You look like you could do with a hand. Would you like me to take the box?’

  Sarah Frei had frozen on the doorstep, but the sound of Stevie’s voice galvanised her.

  ‘Get out of my garden and keep your distance.’

  She sounded as if she had the authority of an army at her heels and Stevie took an involuntary step backwards.

  ‘I’ve had the sweats.’ Stevie held up a hand, remembering that Geoffrey Frei’s obituary had mentioned he was the father of twins, and wondering where the other child was. ‘I’m not contagious.’

  ‘I can’t afford to take that chance.’

  ‘I understand, but I’ve travelled quite a long way to see you. My name is Stephanie Flint. My boyfriend knew your husband and I think their deaths might be connected. If I promise not to move from here, can I ask you a few questions?’

  Sarah Frei was wearing a pair of cropped jeans and a floral blouse over a dark blue vest. She was broad-hipped and large-shouldered, the kind of woman that men with a bit of land and a yen for descendants must once have prized.

  ‘Geoff was mugged. It was a random attack.’ The box was threatening to slip from the woman’s grasp and she bent and put it on the ground. A tin of tomatoes tumbled free, rolled across the garden path and into an overgrown border. She stared at the escaped tin, as if it was a problem beyond her capabilities, and then raised her eyes to look at Stevie. ‘I can’t tell you anything. I wasn’t there when Geoff was killed.’ She looked tired beyond tears, but there was a crack in her voice. ‘He was on his own.’

  ‘I think your husband was researching a story that somehow involved my boyfriend. They were due to meet the week Mr Frei died. Two days after your husband died Simon was dead too. I think their deaths might be connected.’

  Sarah Frei had pinned her hair up in a careless knot. She pushed a strand away from her face.

  ‘Almost everyone has lost someone. I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey, but I have responsibilities.’ She lifted the box and took a step forward. ‘Get out of my way, please.’

  The front garden was tiny, the only exit through the gate. They were all lepers now. It was a weapon of sorts, the force field of infection. Stevie held her ground.

  ‘My boyfriend didn’t die of the sweats. Someone killed him and tried to make it look like he died of natural causes. I only realised he’d been murdered when I discovered that he’d left me a laptop full of data. I couldn’t access it at first, and when I did it was too technical for me to understand. The problem is, the person who killed him doesn’t know that. They’re after me now. If they think you know something, you could be in danger too.’

  The child whimpered. Sarah Frei jogged him up and down in her arms, in a dislocated, jerky fashion.

  ‘Don’t you get it? We’re all in danger.’

  ‘Your husband might have been murdered. Don’t you want to find out the truth about why he died?’

  ‘What the fuck does it matter any more?’ The child heard the emotion in his mother’s voice and started to cry. A man carrying supplies to his car down the path of an adjoining garden looked across at them, but he made no effort to intervene. ‘Shhhh, it’s all right.’ Sarah Frei resumed the jerky rocking. The child’s cries grew louder and more fractious. His arms and legs still stretched tightly around her, like a spider trying to subdue a much larger prey. ‘Shhhh.’ Sarah Frei put the box back down on the path and sank on to her doorstep. ‘See what you’ve done?’ She threw Stevie a defeated look, opened her shirt and put the child to her breast. ‘Shhhh.’

  Stevie couldn’t stand the not-knowing any more. She said, ‘I read you had twins. Is the other one okay?’

  Sarah Frei rested the child on her knees, cradling his head in the crook of her arm. She gave a small smile as he settled and Stevie caught a glimpse of the person she had been before the crisis: an untidy, capable woman, sexy despite her ample rear, rough heels and unshaven legs.

  ‘He’s with my mother.’ The child had quietened and the process of comforting him seemed to have soothed Sarah Frei too. ‘She was going to take both of them but Felix had a cold. We decided it was better to leave him with me and let Alex go with her. It was a mistake. I hadn’t realised how bad things were going to get.’ She looked at Stevie. ‘Can you believe what’s happening?’

  It was a pause in hostilities, a Christmas football match before the fighting resumed. Stevie squatted on the ground. She saw Simon’s face, his eyes rolled back in his head, Joanie in her nest of tubes, Hope’s shattered skull.

  ‘No, it feels unreal.’

  ‘That’s where we’re going now, to my mother’s place in the New Forest, as soon as you let us.’ Sarah Frei reached into her jeans pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. ‘Geoff would go crazy if he could see me smoking and breastfeeding at the same time, but right now I think it’s the least of our worries.’ She lit up and took a long drag. ‘You’ve got until I finish this and then we’re leaving.’

  The sun caught her strawberry-blonde hair, highlighting flecks of silver-grey amongst the gold. They looked like a mark of her widowhood and the sight of them made Stevie feel ashamed.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She ran her hand over her own rough crop, surprised at the jaggedness of it against her palm. ‘I wouldn’t normally behave like this. It’s like I’m trying to outrun a landslide.’

  ‘We all are.’ Sarah Frei took a pull at her cigarette. ‘So you’d better get on with it. You only have until I finish my fag.’

  ‘Can you tell me anything about the story your husband was working on when he died?’

  Sarah Frei took another deep drag. Stevie watched the tip of ash glow and grow, the cigarette shrink.

  ‘Normally Geoff doesn’t …’ Sarah Frei gave a dry smile. ‘Didn’t talk much about his work. He liked to leave it behind when he came home, but that last case blurred the boundaries between Geoff the family man and Geoff the journalist.’ Sarah Frei tapped the cigarette with the unconscious ease of a practised smoker and the ash crumbled to the ground. ‘He’d known one of the people involved. He didn’t tell me his name, but Geoff said they had gone to the same school; they even trained together for a while, back when Geoff still thought he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps.’ The child had fallen asleep. She fastened her blouse and then ran a hand softly over his curls. ‘He was too squeamish to be a doctor, not that he’d ever admit it to anyone except me. Geoff was a gentle man. I was the tough one in the relationship. He couldn’t stand pain.’ She looked up and her eyes met Stevie’s. ‘But he could kill with his pen, if he thought the cause justified it.’

  Stevie opened her bag and flicked through the bundle of school photographs. She found the one that showed the trio of doctors together in the same row. The curly-haired boy in the glasses was sandwiched between Simon and Dr Ahumibe. She held it up so that the other woman could see it.

  ‘Is this your husband?’

  ‘I don’t know. It might be.’

  Stevie took a step closer and held out the photograph.

  ‘Here, the boy wearing glasses?’

  She pointed at the serious face beneath the Harpo Marx curls.

  ‘I think so. He looked so like Felix and Alex when he was little. It’s like fast-forwarding to how they’ll be when they�
�re ten or eleven.’ Sarah Frei grimaced as if she had just realised that she had spoken as if the future was assured. ‘Geoff was big on nurture over nature, all that Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man stuff. He reckoned the person you became was determined by how you were brought up.’

  ‘So, bad luck if your parents let you down.’

  ‘Very bad luck indeed, according to Geoff.’

  Stevie looked at the turrets and dreamy spires of the school in the photograph’s background.

  ‘I guess your husband’s family didn’t let him down.’

  A speck of steel entered Sarah Frei’s voice.

  ‘They worked very hard to help Geoff be what he eventually became, a good man.’

  It was how the newspaper column had styled Geoffrey Frei: a good man, a campaigner against corruption.

  Sarah Frei went on, ‘Don’t assume things were easy. His father worked overseas, his mother went with him and Geoff was sent to boarding school. He was horribly bullied. He hated it.’

  Rich people always tried to assure you they had had it rough, Stevie thought. It was part of the way they misunderstood the world.

  She said, ‘Perhaps that’s what helped him have empathy with people when he grew up. What did your husband tell you about the case?’

  Sarah Frei formed her mouth into an O and breathed out a perfect smoke ring. It was a schoolgirl gesture, tough and sulky, but when she spoke her voice had lost the edge it had taken on when she had talked about her husband’s bullying.

  ‘Geoff had been contacted by a whistleblower. That was often how it started. Someone who was aware of something going on in their workplace that they couldn’t stomach, but who didn’t know how to stop it, would contact Geoff. This whistleblower was high up, but scared. They were implicated somehow and wanted Geoff to help them find a way out that wouldn’t wreck their career.’