A Lovely Way to Burn (14 page)

‘Don’t be like that.’ She hung on, laughing more wildly now, as if this were some game between the two of them. ‘You’ll have me hand off.’

‘Let go.’

Stevie rapped at the fingertips again with the scraper, harder this time, and saw one of the false nails detach and land on the passenger seat.

‘Stop it.’ The woman laughed. ‘It hurts.’

And then suddenly a second pair of hands was inserting itself between the car roof and the window, trying to prise them wider apart. Stevie couldn’t see the person’s face, just a stretch of T-shirt and tracksuit bottom, a Nike logo. These hands were broader, with patches of hair on their fingers. The window started to give. The woman fell back laughing, leaving the man to it.

‘You’re for it now,’ she hooted. ‘Boots will get you. You should have ran me over.’

Stevie put the car in gear and drove towards the road. There was a bellow of pain, a sound of something dragging and a scream of protest from the whey-faced woman, but Stevie kept her eyes on the view ahead, and her foot on the accelerator.

When she glanced through the side window a mile or so down the road, she saw familiar streets through a smear of blood. It was only a smear, Stevie reassured herself; much less than there would have been had she severed one of the man’s fingers. She kept the window down the fraction she had already lowered it, letting the cool air hit her face, hoping it would be enough to keep her awake until she got home.

The pavements had the blighted look they took on after a heavy weekend, littered with the remnants of fast-food feasts and stained with piss and pakora sauce. Stevie stopped at a red light and a cleaner carrying a bucket and mop crossed the road. The cleaner’s hair was concealed beneath a dark blue headscarf, her clothes covered by a neat tabard. It was hard to believe there could be anything seriously amiss in a city where such women went calmly about their business.

The traffic lights flashed and then shifted to green. Stevie drove on slowly. There were other cars on the road now and she rolled the window open wider. This was one of the intersections of the day, when too-early-to-work businessmen and women crossed paths with the last of the staggering-home crew; the time when those easing themselves into the day, the early-morning joggers and sippy-cup-coffee crew, shared the streets with night workers and the beginning-to-come-down-from-whatever-had-kept-them-up-all-night crowd.

Stevie felt her eyes grow heavy and turned on the car radio. A farming programme was on, the presenter interviewing a scientist about the likelihood of the virus crossing species.
We all remember the panic surrounding the H1N1 virus commonly known as bird flu. The fear then was that the illness would pass from birds to humans. Are you worried that this current virus, which has been christened V5N6, might infect cattle and other livestock?

Stevie turned off the radio and stopped in front of another red light. A shoal of cyclists slid to a halt around her car. For the first time in ages she noticed the variety of the people, the assortment of skin colour and styles that had secretly delighted her when she moved to London. A pink-faced man in a business suit and cycling helmet put a hand on the roof of the Mini and leant insolently against it. Some other day she might have unlocked the handbrake and rolled gently forward just for the pleasure of seeing him wobble, but instead she gazed at the miracle of him: his crumpled fawn suit; the red sock revealed by his rolled-up trouser leg. She glanced up at his face and saw a white cotton mask stretched across his mouth and nose.

On the other side of the road the proprietor of a Turkish café flung a bucket of hot, soapy water across the pavement in front of his shop and began sweeping it into the gutter. Shelf stackers were busy unpacking boxes inside the Tesco Metro. The sun was fully up now. The warmth of it on her face seemed to soothe her grazes. The lights changed again. Stevie let the cyclists dash ahead. She kept her eyes on the road, reached a hand into the glove compartment, found her sunglasses and put them on.

It was as if morning had recalibrated the world. Everything looked so normal that, if it weren’t for her bruises, she would find it hard to believe the episode in the car park or her conversation with Derek had taken place. A bus stopped to let early-morning commuters aboard and Stevie glanced in her wing mirror, beyond the smear of blood, checking that she was free to overtake. Something on the passenger seat caught her eye. She passed the bus and then took a tissue, lifted the false fingernail from the seat and dropped it out of the window.

She hated Derek’s cynicism, his description of people as the scum of the earth, but suddenly she felt as if the wakening streets around her were an illusion that might be peeled back any time, to reveal another, shadow world that could suddenly drag you under without a by-your-leave.

‘You’re well out of it, Joanie,’ she whispered. ‘Well out of it.’

But she wished she had asked Derek how it had been; if Joanie had suffered, or if she had slipped away without the panic of knowing that it was the end.

Nineteen

The door to her apartment was ajar. Stevie crept down the hallway and rang her neighbour’s doorbell, but there was no response. She had been burgled once before, three years ago. When the police had eventually appeared, hours after she had phoned them, they had been coolly indifferent, as if their job was to verify the facts for the insurance company, rather than find the perpetrators. Stevie couldn’t imagine that their response would be any swifter this time, even if she told them she was afraid that whoever had broken in might still be lurking there.

She leant against the wall in the corridor. The best thing to do was to walk away, phone Derek and arrange to meet him somewhere else, or not to phone Derek at all, just dump the laptop at the hospital, get in the car and keep on driving. But if the man who had attacked her thought she was privy to whatever was hidden on the laptop, losing it might not be enough to free her of him.

Stevie took off her trainers, pushed the door tentatively open and peered inside. The coat stand had been felled. It lay on its side amongst her scattered coats and hats, but the hallway was empty, the flat silent. She thought again about walking away. There was a road-map of the British Isles in the car. It would be easy to close her eyes and stick a pin into a random destination, somewhere no one would connect her with, and drive there.

Stevie flattened herself against the lobby wall again, took out her mobile and pressed Joanie’s number.
Joanie, Joanie, Joanie
flashed onscreen but Derek didn’t pick up.

‘Fuck.’ Stevie mouthed the word.

She was tired, bruised and filthy, the grit of the car park mixed with blood and sweat on her skin. Joanie’s death mingled with Simon’s in her mind. Stevie knew she wouldn’t win in a physical fight against her car-park attacker but part of her wanted to have a go. She pushed open the door to her apartment and slipped inside. Her satchel was heavy and awkward but she kept it strapped across her body. Somewhere outside a drill started up; the soundtrack of the city. Stevie tiptoed along her hallway, breathing in as she passed each open door.

She shifted her bag to her back, stepped over the coat stand and crept into the kitchen. Cupboards had been swept clean, crockery and glasses shattered on the floor, but the knife block was still sitting in its place next to the cooker. Stevie trod carefully, cursing her bare feet, and slid the carving knife from its slot.

Outside the drill rumbled on in sporadic bursts. She let its noise mask the sound of her progress, moving when it moved, freezing when it stopped, all the time holding the knife firmly in front of her.

Someone had taken her flat apart. There had been no malice in the act. There was no graffiti on the walls as there had been last time, no turd coiled on the rug. The break-in had been carried out thoroughly and methodically, by someone looking for something.

Books and CDs had been spilled from their shelves in the sitting room, cushions tossed free of the couch and easy chairs, the furniture itself turned on its back to make sure nothing had been hidden below, or taped to its base. Drawers were pulled from the sideboard, their contents dumped on the floor. Stevie saw her mother’s rings, her own cheque book and emergency credit card, and realised that nothing had been stolen.

Shirts, trousers and dresses were tumbled together in her bedroom like massacre victims. The duvet had been dragged from the bed, the mattress tipped to the floor. The wardrobe door was ajar, a few dresses still hanging drunkenly on their hangers.

The drilling stopped and Stevie stopped too, holding her breath until the racket resumed. She managed three steps forward, three steps closer to the darkness behind the half-open door, before the drilling paused again. She primed herself, like a sprinter waiting for the starter’s gun.

Her mobile phone chirped news of a message, loud as an aeroplane crash.

Stevie lunged forward and yanked the door wide, holding the knife high above her shoulder, plunging it into the darkness, letting out a yell she had never heard before.

There was no one there.

She leant into the wardrobe’s empty shadows, laughter bubbling from within her. She wanted nothing more than to close the closet door and sit there in the must and the black, but she forced herself to check her office and the bathroom. When she was sure there was no one lurking anywhere in the flat, she pulled her mobile from her pocket. The message had come from Joanie’s phone. It was short and to the point:
Take the laptop to Iqbal.
An address in Clapham followed.

Stevie texted back:

I’ll get there ASAP

Thanks

The front-door lock was beyond her ability to repair, the door itself splintered but still sure on its hinges. Stevie closed it and put on the security chain. She dragged the Ercol sideboard she had been so proud of from the living room and set it against the door. Some empty wine bottles had been dumped on the floor with the rest of her recycling. She gathered a few and put them on the table. The arrangement wouldn’t stop an intruder but it would make a racket if anyone disturbed it.

Stevie undressed and stood in the shower, letting the water course over her body. She dried herself, smeared her cuts with antiseptic cream and swallowed two anti-inflammatory pills. Normally she would have walked naked through the rooms of her flat, letting the air soothe her skin, but now she went straight to the bedroom and sorted through the muddle of clothes until she found underwear, a running vest and a black tracksuit. Even stripped of its sheets the bed looked like the perfect haven, but she ignored it, pulled on fresh clothes and went through to the shattered kitchen. There were two ill-assorted Lean Cuisines, a beef chow fun and a shrimp Alfredo, in the freezer. Stevie packed a dishtowel with ice cubes, blasted both of the ready meals in the microwave, and ate standing at the worktop, holding the ice to her swollen face.

The apartment had meant a lot to her. It had been her touchstone, the sign that she had made something of herself since she had first arrived in London, armed with only her journalism degree. Now she wondered if she would ever live there again.

It was half an hour since Derek’s text. Stevie put a bottle of water, some energy bars, a packet of painkillers, her phone charger and the carving knife in the satchel beside Simon’s laptop. She covered the worst of her bruises with make-up, then went through to the living room, slipped her mother’s rings over her grazed knuckles, and left the apartment. Stevie pulled the door shut behind her, but didn’t bother to look back and check if it stayed closed.

Twenty

Stevie had just tucked her satchel under the passenger seat of the Mini when her phone jangled into life. She scrabbled it free from the side pocket of her bag and saw a number she didn’t recognise flashing on the screen.

‘Stephanie Flint?’ The voice was male and unfamiliar.

Stevie had heard of spy software that could follow you via your mobile phone, tracing your movements across virtual maps, and an image flashed into her head of her car parked at the side of the road, while her attacker gazed down on it, huge and godlike. She slid her key into the ignition.

‘Who is this?’

‘Alexander Buchanan from St Thomas’s Hospital. Is that Ms Flint?’

She remembered him. The chemist, Simon’s other colleague, a pale man with translucent eyes, some kind of handsome in his strangeness.

‘Yes. Do you have some news about Simon?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’ Buchanan sounded assured, but there was an underlying hesitation in his delivery, as if he was uncertain of how much he should tell her. ‘I wondered if you might be available to meet. As you may have gathered from the news, we medics are rather pushed at present, but I’d prefer to discuss this face to face if possible.’

Stevie held the phone away from herself for a moment, trying to weigh up her priorities. She had parked in a side street round the corner from her flat, but she could see a glimpse of main road from where she was sitting, the parade of shops that the estate agent had described as ‘convenient’ when she had bought her flat. She lifted the phone to her ear again.

‘I’m sorry.’ She made her words crisply efficient, trying to match Buchanan’s public-school-followed-by-Oxford-or-Cambridge confidence. ‘I’ve an appointment I mustn’t miss.’