A Lovely Way to Burn (25 page)

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 began 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.

Would the killer continue to look for the laptop even if he believed that he had murdered her? Stevie wondered if he would try to discover what Geoffrey Frei had known. Maybe he would get ill and die, or take fright of the sweats and leave town. That would be the best solution. It would save her from having to kill him.

Thirty-Two

An album stamped with the name of some long-defunct photography studio lay half in, half out of Simon’s wardrobe. Stevie picked it up and carried it through to the lounge. The shape of the woman was still there, beneath the white sheet, and so she took the album out on to the balcony and rested it against the railing, squinting against the sun. A lone helicopter hovered in the distance, lingering magically in mid-air. Stevie stared at it, trying to work out whether it was the police or the press, but then she saw that it was flying away from City Airport and wondered if it belonged to some oligarch fleeing infection. She watched until it flew overhead, a rattling roar of propellers and engine that quickly faded back into silence, and then opened the album’s cover and peeled back the protective layer of tissue paper beneath.

The album began with photographs of Simon as a baby. The first showed him cradled in his mother’s arms, a tiny face peeking from a white blanket that looked as if it had been crocheted by teams of spiders with a flair for detail. Simon’s mother’s hair was set in stiff curls and she was dressed in a formal suit and high-heeled court shoes, a combination that reminded Stevie of registry office weddings and going-away costumes. The new mother looked proud and worried. Stevie tried to see beyond her prematurely ageing perm and prim outfit and realised that she had been young when she had brought Simon into the world, in her early twenties at the most.

Stevie flicked through the album, watching Simon growing from baby to toddler, the photographs going from black and white to Kodacolor. A second boy entered the pictures. Simon’s mother’s hair grew longer and loosened into honey-tinted waves. She had been a good-looking woman, growing younger as she aged, as had so many of her generation. The box-pleated skirts and twinsets she had favoured were replaced by flared trousers, cheesecloth blouses and miniskirts, which were in turn replaced by maxis. There was the occasional photograph of Simon’s father too, a smiling man wearing black-rimmed spectacles, who seemed to have a cigarette permanently clamped between his fingers. He had clearly preferred the other side of the camera: most shots were of his wife and two boys, at home, on holiday, posed in front of his Alfa Romeo, as if recording all of his prized possessions in one shot.

It had been a privileged early life, but the photos stopped abruptly when Simon was around seven years old, leaving the final pages as blank as his suddenly curtailed future. Stevie turned to the back cover and found a cardboard pocket designed to hold photographs that were yet to be stuck into the album. Tucked inside was a series of school photos. Someone had filed them in the order they were taken, the earliest first. Row upon row of little boys in identical school uniforms, all aged about six or seven, posed in front of a castellated building, which reminded Stevie of Hampton Court. The boys’ ties, white shirts and blazers made them look like a shop display of ventriloquists’ dummies, stiffly alive and sinister. She searched for Simon amongst the faces but found it difficult to tell the boys apart; they were too young, their features unformed and lacking distinction.

It wasn’t until she was several photographs in, that Stevie found him. Simon was standing in the back row near the centre, his face a miniature version of the man she had known, his features already marked with the combination of mischievousness and intelligence that had drawn Stevie to him. She remembered Buchanan telling her that he had joined the same school when he was twelve and flipped forwards, drawing a finger along the lines of straight-backed boys until she found what she thought was him.

A thin boy, taller than the rest, Alexander Buchanan looked as if a growth spurt had robbed him of blood and energy. He was standing, pale and unhappy, at the end of a row and next to him, glancing away from the camera, was a boy who might have been John Ahumibe.

The next image in the series confirmed it. This time the three boys were standing in the same row, Buchanan on Simon’s left, a curly-haired, bespectacled boy on his right, and next to him Ahumibe. Stevie slipped the school photos from the album and went back into the flat.

The drawers of the writing desk Simon had kept in the corner of the sitting room had been tipped out, their contents dumped in a pile on the floor. Stevie knelt, looking for an envelope to put the photographs in, and saw a dash of gore on one of the desk’s sharp corners. She followed its progress to where it slid, oil-slick black, across the floor.

Simon’s rug had been a bold geometric statement, intended to counter the minimalism he had favoured elsewhere. Its pattern could have been designed to camouflage blood, but Stevie wondered how she could have missed the drips and spatters, the road-map of her almost-twin’s death.

You didn’t need to be a forensics expert to reconstruct what had happened. The woman had been standing in the middle of the floor, or perhaps sitting on the chair by the window, when the man had entered the sitting room. Whichever it was, Stevie was sure that she had already been there when he arrived. Was she waiting for Simon, not knowing that he was dead, or had she also come in search of something?

Her death had been an accident. Nothing else made sense. The man was desperate to acquire the laptop and though Stevie had felt his willingness to kill her in the twist of silk around her throat, there was nothing a corpse could tell him.

He had hit the woman, to show he meant business, and she had fallen badly, smashing her skull against the unforgiving corner of the desk. Stevie wondered if the man had been sorry, or if he had merely felt the impatience of someone who had cocked up at work, the fuck-shit of a bad day at the office, and the embarrassment of having to report to the boss that things had gone out of kilter, sales figures were down, productivity lower than it should be, the bid rejected, a woman dead.

There was bile in her throat, and Stevie realised that it was her own head she saw slamming against the desk, her own blood soaking the carpet.

‘You’re alive,’ she whispered. ‘So get on with it, before you really do end up with your head staved in.’

She rooted gingerly through the mess on the floor, careful to avoid the traces of blood. For an instant she thought she had found an envelope, but even before she touched it she saw what it was: a small, beige clutch bag. She opened it and found a lipstick, a card wallet, a set of car keys, an iPhone and a small, old-fashioned-looking, snub-nosed revolver. Stevie tried to remember how movie gangsters and detectives opened their guns to check their bullets, but the only image that came to mind was a spinning chamber; a game of Russian roulette.

The wallet contained a clutch of credit cards in the name of Mrs Hope Black and several business cards bearing her name and an address in Kentish Town. Stevie knew the street. It was a short drive from Simon’s flat, the home of a deli where she had sometimes bought olives and wine for them to share.

Stevie stood at the foot of the woman’s veiled body, like a priest about to say a prayer. She whispered, ‘If I get the chance, I’ll kill him for you.’

But in her heart Stevie knew that if she killed anyone, it would be to make herself safe.

Thirty-Three

Hope Black’s Jaguar had leather seats, a walnut dashboard, a full tank of petrol and a satnav that had been carefully stowed in the glove compartment. Stevie walked the pavements around Simon’s building, pressing the key fob she had found in the dead woman’s bag, until she heard an answering chirp and saw the tell-tale flash of indicator lights. There was no one there to observe the theft, but the empty streets made her feel exposed and Stevie was glad when she was in the driver’s seat with the door safely locked.