A Lovely Way to Burn

by Louise Welsh

  Dr Ahumibe was still gazing at the ceiling.

  ‘I made a promise to myself when I was a child. I remember it very clearly. I was lying in my bed at school, listening to one of the boys in my dorm crying himself to sleep, and I pledged that when I grew up, I would remember what it felt like to be an unhappy boy.’

  ‘Very Peter Pan.’

  He looked at her again. ‘You’re wrong. Peter Pan didn’t want to grow up. I was desperate to reach an age when I would be in charge of my own life, my own destiny. But I kept my promise. I never forgot the misery of childhood and when I became a doctor I knew that I wanted to specialise in paediatrics.’ His voice cracked. ‘I have helped to save a lot of children’s lives.’

  ‘You also gave several children operations they didn’t need, and charged their parents money they couldn’t afford.’

  A tear leaked down the doctor’s cheek, but for the first time he sounded angry. ‘Every single one of them went home healthier than when they arrived.’

  ‘Including Joy Summers?’

  ‘Joy’s death was nothing to do with the treatment.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because I’m a fucking doctor.’ Dr Ahumibe buried his face in his hands as if he couldn’t bear her to see his expression. His breath juddered. After a moment he whispered, ‘The treatment may not have had the results we initially calculated, but it did no harm and it was on the cusp of doing a lot of good.’ He dragged his hands down his face. His cheeks stretched beneath the pressure and Stevie saw the red of his lower eyelids, the bags beneath, formed from a weight of sleepless nights. Dr Ahumibe splayed his fingers against the surface of the desk and stared at them. ‘The basic premise was sound but Buchanan needed to refine the drug. He was worried that if we suddenly withdrew, our sponsors would lose confidence. We had put everything we possessed, including our reputations, into Fibrosyop. We couldn’t afford to suspend the company.’

  ‘So you decided to subject already sick children to operations that you knew would be ineffectual, in order to protect your reputations.’

  ‘We operated on a very small number of children compared to the potential good we would be able to do in the future.’ He turned to face her. ‘In the very near future. It was only a matter of time before Xander found the correct formula.’

  ‘You were experimenting on children.’

  ‘You make us sound like Josef Mengele. It wasn’t easy, but in the end we acted for the greater good.’

  His tears were gone. In their place was the closed face of a disgraced MP, ready to fight his corner.

  ‘Where did Simon fit into all of this?’

  Pain puckered Dr Ahumibe’s brow, but he managed to inject some malice into his voice.

  ‘Simon had a hot date and didn’t turn up for the meeting, so we made the decision to continue without him. When he eventually checked in, a day or so later, I told him there was nothing to worry about. It was what Simon wanted to hear.’ Dr Ahumibe bent forward, clenched by some kind of spasm. The howl sounded again somewhere in the hospital, this time shadowed by a chorus of crazy laughter. ‘No one murdered Simon. I would have laid down my life for him. Both of us would.’ A crash of overturning furniture shook the floor. He said, ‘Aren’t you scared?’

  ‘Terrified, but I can’t afford to give in to it. Not if I’m going to survive.’ Stevie fingered the handle of the gun. ‘You keep telling me that the three of you were best buddies, but Simon’s note insisted the laptop went to Reah and no one else. He was adamant I wasn’t to trust you or Buchanan.’

  ‘All Simon was worried about was covering his own back. Xander and I took the strain for months before Simon noticed. He should have got down on his knees and thanked us for bearing his share of the pressure. Instead he threatened to go to the authorities or the press.’

  ‘And so you killed him.’

  ‘I never killed anyone, until today.’ Dr Ahumibe took another sip of the water on his desk and then held a hand out towards her. ‘I need the tablets.’ Stevie ignored his outstretched palm and after a moment he said, ‘Buchanan would have brought Simon round eventually. Si was the squeaky wheel, the one that demanded the most attention, but Buchanan always persuaded him in the end.’

  ‘What if he couldn’t, this time?’

  Dr Ahumibe took a handkerchief from his pocket. He splashed some of the water from the bottle on it and then held the handkerchief to his forehead.

  ‘It was the only way.’ He doubled over and retched into the wastepaper basket. ‘Simon would have recognised that, eventually.’

  Stevie looked away, trying not to gag. Ahumibe said, ‘Give me the tablets.’

  ‘I will. I promise you.’ She paused to let him recover and then asked, ‘What happened to Geoffrey Frei?’

  The doctor retched again. He looked up, his face puddle-grey, and whispered, ‘You’re torturing me.’

  ‘Your treatment cut sick children open and pumped them full of a useless drug. That was torture.’

  Ahumibe was slumped forward in his chair now. He whispered, ‘People like you see the world in one dimension. Things are either good or bad, no muddied waters. If it were up to you, there’d be no progress.’ The doctor wiped his mouth with his damp hanky. ‘I don’t know what happened to Frei. He was mugged. Or perhaps it was a pickup gone wrong. Geoff loved his wife, but he needed other forms of release. He knew cruising was risky. He would give up for a while, but sooner or later old habits always reasserted themselves.’

  ‘He was investigating you.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘You don’t think it’s a coincidence? Frei and Simon were both in a position to expose you and Buchanan and they both died under suspicious circumstances. Hope Black is dead too. I found her lying on the floor of Simon’s apartment. Her head had been smashed in.’

  ‘The whole world is dying. Everyone except for you.’ Dr Ahumibe leant over and retched into the wastepaper basket again. The sounds he made were dry and painful and Stevie felt her own stomach clenching in response. When the doctor looked up there was spittle on his chin. He wiped it on the sleeve of his shirt. ‘Xander was devastated by Simon’s death. He came to the hospital to break the news to me. At first he was too upset to speak. We’ve known each other most of our lives but I’d never seen him like that. I thought perhaps something had happened to William, his son. Later, after he’d broken the news, Xander told me that when he saw Simon curled up dead in his bed, it was like seeing him again as a boy, back when we shared a dorm at school. The image haunted him.’

  Stevie leant forward.

  ‘Buchanan said he saw Simon dead in his own bed? Are you sure he wasn’t referring to when he saw him at the morgue?’

  ‘No, it was before Simon was brought to the morgue. Xander told me there was a picture of the three of us, taken when we were students, hanging on the wall of Simon’s bedroom. He found it deeply moving. We were as close as family.’

  Stevie remembered something Derek had been fond of repeating, one in a series of self-composed homilies Joanie had christened ‘Sayings from the Policeman’s Notebook’. She said it out loud.

  ‘Families are the most dangerous units known to society. Most abuse, violence and murders happen inside families.’

  Stevie unlocked the door and glanced into the corridor. The lights had gone out and darkness shrouded the ward, hiding the bodies still tucked tight beneath their sheets. She reached into her satchel, took out the boxes of pills and dropped them on the desk in front of John Ahumibe.

  The doctor looked up at her. ‘I keep seeing the children’s faces. It was my duty. I couldn’t leave them to suffer on alone.’

  Stevie turned her back on him and closed the door quietly behind her.

  Thirty-Nine

  The hospital was a nightmare of darkened corridors. Stevie had told Ahumibe that she could not afford to give in to fear, but terror fluttered in her chest. The building felt alive, as though the people who had died in the hospital wards had slipp
ed into the fabric of its walls and were watching, and waiting.

  Stevie wrapped her scarf around her face and counted each turn beneath her breath, trying to focus on the challenge of navigating her way to an exit. She kept her torch off and her hand on the gun. The sound of howling echoed up ahead and she corrected her route to avoid it. She saw other people ghosting through the dark, and pointed the gun straight ahead, both hands gripping the stock, so there could be no mistaking her urge for solitude.

  Rats moved, swift and busy, along the walls, and Stevie knew that she would have to leave London soon, before other diseases took hold. Sudden footsteps charged along the corridor and she pinned herself flat against the wall, melting into the darkness, until the runner rushed by, a panicked breeze of pumping arms and pounding legs.

  The dead were everywhere. They were slumped on waiting-room chairs, like a Tory indictment against NHS inefficiency, stretched out on beds, sprawled across desks, or lay where they had fallen, limbs tangled in positions impossible to hold in life.

  Moans and harsh rattling breaths echoed from the shadows of abandoned rooms, and Stevie knew without a doubt that there was no God. If there were, he or she would have saved a better person than her, one who was ready to sacrifice themselves to the care of the dying, rather than continue a quest for the truth about an already dead man.

  A man stepped out of the shadows, leading a little girl of around six or seven years old along an empty corridor. Stevie moved into the centre of the hall and aimed the gun at his head.

  ‘It’s all right,’ the man said. ‘She belongs to me.’

  Stevie looked at the child and asked, ‘Is that true, sweetheart? Is this your daddy?’

  The girl had one hand gripped in the man’s. The other was wrapped around a disreputable-looking toy monkey whose fur was matted from over-loving. She stuck her thumb in her mouth and shook her head.

  ‘I’m her uncle,’ the man said, his eyes on the gun.

  Stevie looked at the little girl, who kept her thumb in her mouth and whispered, ‘Uncle Colin.’

  ‘Are you happy to go with Uncle Colin?’

  The girl had the stunned stare of a road-accident victim. She nodded and the man looked relieved. He said, ‘You can come with us, if you like. There might be safety in numbers.’

  Stevie thought he was probably right, but she shook her head. ‘No thanks.’ The man glanced nervously at the gun again and Stevie wondered if he was considering making a grab for it. ‘You’d best keep on going,’ she said, her finger on the trigger, the barrel still pointing at the man’s head. She watched until they vanished into the dark, like phantoms, the sound of her own breath loud in her head.

  Once, a hand reached out, pale against the black, and a woman whispered, ‘Water,’ but when Stevie returned, with a plastic cup filled from a water cooler, the woman was gone. Her disappearance troubled Stevie and she upped her pace, holding on to the bannister as she ran down a darkened staircase towards the hospital exit, aware that to trip and break a leg now would mean a slow death.

  Forty

  The satnav had stopped working. Stevie drove towards the industrial estate that housed Buchanan’s lab, slowing the Jaguar frequently to consult a dog-eared A to Z she had found in the glove compartment. She had sealed the car’s vents and made sure that its windows were closed tight, but an acrid smell that tasted of burnt cinders and melting plastic slipped inside and caught the back of her throat. The sky was full of fluttering lights and strange glows, and she was forced to alter her route twice to avoid fires that had taken hold of whole city blocks. There were fewer looters now, though traces of them lingered in smashed windows and abandoned booty. Shoals of carrier bags cartwheeled along empty streets, like plastic tumbleweed. Once she saw a man hanging from a railway bridge. The bridge spanned a main road and she had no choice but to drive beneath, aware of his body gently swinging above her, his feet pointing towards the earth like the arrow of a compass directing the way to Hell.

  Stevie had programmed the car radio to scan the stations, but there was only one voice on the airwaves, a recording of a Scottish woman repeating a mantra about the need to remain calm … stay indoors … drink fluids … avoid contact with anyone showing signs of infection … observe the curfew … Stevie turned the radio off.

  Dusk was shifting to full dark. The occasional streetlamp still glowed warm and miraculous, like a message from God, but most were out, and Stevie navigated by the beam of the Jaguar’s headlights. She wondered if John Ahumibe had been right about the virus originating in outer space, and pictured an asteroid, plummeting to earth, the way it must have lit up the sky. Stevie wished that she had witnessed the thrill of its arrival, before anyone knew what it would bring. Occasionally her headlights picked out figures by the side of the road, but she didn’t alter her speed, except once, when a man who looked like Simon stuck out a hand, hailing her as if she were a cab, and her foot hit the brake of its own accord. The man ran towards the Jaguar, but Stevie saw that he was a stranger, and left him behind in the darkness.

  Her mobile sat charging on the dashboard. It glowed with calls from Alexander Buchanan, but she left them unanswered. She wanted her visit to be a surprise.

  The industrial estate was a series of warehouses, factories and trade outlets housed in ugly low-rise buildings. Stevie dipped her headlamps and slowed the Jaguar to a crawl. The estate looked deserted, like a vision of death: the nothing that followed the pain and convulsions of dying. But she was sure Buchanan was inside his lab, fussing over a cure he would never find, and waiting for her to arrive. The chemist was a poisoner, a creep who killed slyly or got others to do his dirty work for him. She could feel his cowardice in his reluctance to admit his flawed calculations. She would do what she should have done before, point the gun at his head and make him tell her the truth about Simon’s death.

  It took her a few circuits of the industrial estate, but finally she found Buchanan’s lab, the name Fibrosyop discretely etched on a sign attached to a locked and bolted gate. The laboratory was guarded by high railings that looked more permanent than the kit-built box they enclosed. A security camera, fixed too high for her to throw a blanket over the lens, was trained on the entrance. Stevie hoped it had succumbed to the power cuts sweeping the city. She got out of the car, walked to the gate and examined the padlock securing it. A heavy bolt cutter might be able to bite through the chain, but she had not thought to arm herself with one. Stevie felt a quick tremor of fear at the thought of all the things she had left undone. The city was falling apart and she was as unprepared as a lamb trotting blithely behind a Judas goat.

  Stevie got back into the car and drove to the fence’s perimeter, hoping for a gap to slip through, but she had kept her headlamps off and the fence was just a presence in the blackness. She whispered, ‘Bloody useless,’ her words a hiss in the dark, but even as they escaped her lips, she saw a way in.

  A lorry loaded with a shipping container was parked next to the perimeter fence. She drew in beside it and closed the Jaguar’s door quietly behind her. The only tool in the boot was a wheel jack. Stevie shoved it in her bag and climbed on to the car bonnet. The moon was full, the stars visible in a way she had never seen in London before. Stevie looked up at them for a moment, wondering if their sparkle heralded more asteroids, more viruses, and then scrambled on to the car’s roof. It was a stretch, but she managed to hop from there on to the bonnet of the lorry. A man’s head was resting against the steering wheel, his features slack, his mouth and eyes open. Stevie’s balance wavered and for an instant she thought she might fall, but she managed to regain control and clambered on to the top of the cab. She took a deep breath, climbed up on to the shipping container and ran along it, her footsteps ringing against the metal. She was level with the railings now. Their prongs curved away from her, hard enough to bruise, too blunt to impale. It was a long drop on to the tarmac on the other side and once she was over, there was no guarantee that she would be able to escape. Her phone buzz
ed in her pocket. Stevie took it out, saw Buchanan’s number glowing on the display and knew that he was inside, waiting on her. She left the phone unanswered. Let the chemist wait. It was her turn to set the agenda.

  Stevie tossed her bag over the fence, took off Simon’s jacket and spread it over the railings. Then she moved back, as far as she dared, to the edge of the lorry’s roof, stepped into a short run and launched herself over the fence in a rolling leap, half recalled from high jump at school. Stevie landed on her feet, staggered and fell flat against the tarmac, skinning her hands and knees. Simon’s jacket was snagged on the railings above. A breeze caught the sleeves and it twisted gently, a broken silhouette, too much like the hanging man on the railway bridge for her to look at it for long. Stevie spat on her palms, trying to get some of the dirt out of her grazed skin. There was no point in regretting things that were beyond reach. She swung the strap of her bag over her shoulder and jogged towards Buchanan’s laboratory.

  Forty-One

  Stevie had intended to smash one of the building’s rear windows with the wheel jack, but when she got closer she saw that the windows were barred. She cursed and tried the fire escape and then the front entrance, but the doors to Buchanan’s lab were locked, as she had known they would be.

  In movies, people picked locks, spun their tumblers home with a credit card, or took out a gun and blasted them into irrelevance. Stevie squatted in the doorway’s shadows, trying to plan her next move. The wheel jack was heavy in her bag, the gun snug beside it, but even if the door gave way, smashing it would take a while and make too much noise, and shooting at the lock was an invitation to a ricochet, a bullet in the face.

  Her mobile buzzed with news of a text. Stevie took it out of her pocket and pressed the small speech bubble on the screen: Knock if you want to come in. She cursed. Buchanan must have spotted her on the surveillance cameras but his message gave a surreal, Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole edge to her fear. She tensed, unsure of whether to run, or wait for the chemist to come to her.