A Lovely Way to Burn (26 page)

Better Bets was in the middle of a small parade of shops. She parked in an adjacent road and walked the final stretch, nervous of what might happen were someone to spot her driving Hope Black’s car.

A man and a woman were walking along the street towards her, both of them wearing white surgical masks over their mouths and noses, like Beijing citizens on a poor-air day. They saw her and crossed to the opposite pavement, the man’s hand cupping the woman’s elbow, as if to encourage her to walk faster. The woman had her head lowered but the man made eye contact with Stevie, and then quickly looked away, as if he couldn’t afford to risk any more empathy.

Stevie took out her phone and called Iqbal, and then Derek. Neither of them picked up. It meant nothing, she reassured herself, nothing. Batteries faded, people fell asleep, mislaid their phones, or simply chose not to answer. A missed call was not an intimation of death.

An elderly man was sitting on the pavement outside Better Bets, his back resting against the shop’s shuttered window, his cap lowered over his face. He was smartly dressed, in a brown jacket, checked shirt and tweedy trousers, as if he had set out for a long autumn walk rather than a summer stroll in the city. Stevie had passed by hundreds of rough sleepers, beggars, drunks and junkies in her years in London, but the old man’s carefully-put-together outfit reminded her of her dead granddad. She saw that the scuffs on the old man’s jacket were recent and squatted down beside him.

‘Are you okay?’

A wisp of white hair had escaped from beneath the man’s hat. It bent in response to the breeze, but his head remained sunk on his chest. Stevie had touched enough corpses for one day, but she thought she saw a faint flutter beneath the old man’s eyelids. Joanie, Simon and Hope had each been beyond help, but if the man was alive she might be able to do something for him. Perhaps there was an anxious relative she could phone. Stevie lifted his wrist and felt for a pulse. There was nothing.

‘You’re doing it wrong.’

‘Christ!’ Stevie jolted backwards. She remembered the way Django had leapt when the Taser hit him and hoped he had found his way back to Doris and John’s champagne. ‘Sorry, you gave me a fright.’

‘You need to press further down, on the artery.’ The old man’s voice was a raw whisper, catgut-stretched and dried. ‘You won’t feel nothing dicking around up there,’ he croaked.

‘Sorry.’ Stevie had jumped at the sound of his voice, but the knowledge that the man was dying didn’t shock her the way it would have done before. ‘Can I get you something?’

‘A blow-job.’ His laugh was a wheeze of old bones and stale air. ‘Sorry, love. Good of you to ask.’ He narrowed his eyes in an effort to focus on her face. ‘You healthy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Keep away from infected people like me.’

‘I’ve had it.’

‘Don’t matter. I was an ambulance driver. I know about these things. Pretty soon there’ll be rats, then cholera, typhoid, who knows what. Do yourself a favour. Keep your distance.’

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to get you some water, or phone someone to come and collect you?’

‘You just do as I told you. Being a Good Samaritan’s all fine and well, except for when it kills you.’ He gave her a smile that was all death. ‘You got any kiddies?’

‘No.’

‘Neither did we. Would have liked some. Now I reckon it’s a blessing we never did, things being as they are.’

She had seen very few children since the crisis began, Stevie realised. She imagined them, huddled in their houses, hidden from the sweats by their parents, the way Anne Frank’s mother and father had hoped to hide her from the Nazis.

‘It’s not so bad at the end,’ the old man said. ‘I saw it with my wife. You think you’re getting better, you stop being sick and the headaches take a back seat, then you realise you’re on your way out anyway. Another of nature’s little jokes. But it ain’t painful any more. That’s about the best you can hope for in this life, an easy death.’ A tear slipped its way down his cheek. ‘Piss off and give me peace to look at the sky.’

Stevie touched his shoulder and got to her feet.

The door to the betting shop was closed, its metal shutter rolled halfway down. Stevie banged against it and when there was no reply, pushed the shutter up and tried the door. It was locked. She rapped against the wood, then took Hope Black’s clutch from her bag, fished out her keys and tried each of them, until one turned smoothly in the lock.

‘Hello?’

She pushed the door open and stepped inside. The shop was dark. It smelt stale, like the house of someone who had become too old, or too ill, to take care of themselves.

‘Hello?’ She took another cautious step.

The flat-screen televisions ranged around the room glowed blue and silent, lit with error messages. The space behind the screened counter, where bookies must have calculated the odds, was empty. Stevie had stuffed the leather clutch at the bottom of her bag, wary of the awkward questions that might be asked, should someone recognise it. Now she wondered if she should have slipped the gun into her pocket. It was too easy to imagine someone leaping out from behind the deserted counter. She pushed against the door that would take her into the bookmaker’s stall and the private sanctum beyond. It was locked tight.

‘You need the code number.’

A man was standing in the doorway beyond the counter. He took a drag from the cigarette in his hand and said, ‘You another joker wants to bet on whether you’re going to make it or not?’

‘Have you had a lot of those?’ Stevie smiled, as if it was normal to meet strange men in unlit betting shops, but her voice wavered like a flame caught in a sudden draught. The bookmaker held Stevie’s gaze for a moment, and she had a feeling of being weighed and measured, then he shrugged. He was handsome, if you didn’t mind your men scruffy and over fifty.

‘Some. More betting they’ll make it than not. Not much point otherwise. There’s a few wanted to bet the Queen would snuff it. I told them to sling their hook and learn a little respect. I did lay a few that the Prime Minister wouldn’t come through. He’s fair game. I even took an accumulator that the PM, the Mayor and the Chancellor would all shuffle off to Buffalo in the same week.’ The man’s voice was slow and monotone, as if he had been drinking. ‘Should have given it lower odds.’

Stevie said, ‘I’m not here to place a bet.’

‘We’re not taking any right now, as it happens.’ He looked at the cigarette as if he was surprised to see it in his hand and then took another drag. ‘What are you here for?’

‘I’m looking for Hope Black.’

‘She’s not here.’ His face was half hidden in smoke and shadows, but she thought the bookmaker might have smiled. ‘I’d say come back later but . . .’ He let the unfinished sentence hang in the air.

‘But what?’

He shrugged again. ‘She may not come back, or I may not be here when she does.’

Stevie couldn’t think how to ask why the woman had been in Simon’s flat. She said, ‘Do you mind me asking where she’s gone?’

‘Ask away.’

This time there was no doubt that the man was smiling, a small, unhappy twist of the mouth with nothing of joy in it. He lifted the cigarette to his mouth again and she saw that it was a joint. Stevie wondered if she should tell him that Hope was dead and that she had found her. She asked, ‘Are you Hope’s husband?’

The bookmaker took another drag from his joint, narrowing his eyes against the smoke.

‘Do I look like I’d want to get hitched to an Irish-Jamaican bookie? Hope and me are strictly colleagues, or should I say strictly boss and lackey, no prizes for guessing which is which. She inherited this place from her dad and me along with it.’

Stevie detected injury in his voice and wondered if he was closer to his boss than he was admitting.

‘I found her card in my boyfriend’s flat. She must have put it through the letter box. He’s dead. He died before all this happened, but he wasn’t into betting and I wanted to know why she had left it there.’

The man was wearing an antiquated beige cardigan that seemed more holes and tears than wool. He leant against the door jamb and pushed a hand deep into one of its pockets.

‘You know the best bit of advice I could give a young person like you?’

‘What?’

‘Learn when to take advice.’ He glanced towards the street, the sun blazing against the pavement. ‘I never took any when I was your age, but I could have saved myself a lot of bother if I had. See this scar?’ He leant forward and turned his face to the side so Stevie could see the white line that ran from the outside corner of his eye to the edge of his mouth. ‘I got that because I didn’t listen to a piece of advice.’

‘What was it?’

The bookmaker shook his head, as if she had missed the point.

‘It doesn’t matter what it was. My advice to you is, cherish good memories while you can and don’t go looking under too many stones. So Hope left her card at your boyfriend’s flat? So what? There’s enough trouble in the world – don’t go looking for more.’

‘I need to know.’

‘Why?’

‘Because . . .’ She paused, trying to think of an answer that would make him want to help her. ‘Because the past wasn’t the way I thought it was, and if I don’t find out what really happened I might go insane.’

Stevie didn’t bother to add that she was scared whoever had killed Simon and Hope might yet find her.

The man snorted. ‘Sanity’s overrated.’

Stevie held his stare, giving him the half-promise smile that had won her countless sales, and he let out a sigh and stepped out of the doorway. The security screen between them was grimed with a thin layer of dust and he looked spectral behind its fog.

‘People always think they need to know. What’s the betting the sweats were made in a test tube by someone who needed to know something?’ The bookmaker slid open a cupboard in the wall. ‘Just like Eve with that bloody apple. Look where it got her.’ He squatted and tapped a code into the small safe concealed inside it. ‘Flung out of Paradise, didn’t know a good thing when she had it. Like the rest of us, as it turns out.’ He took a ledger from the safe and set it on the counter. ‘Hope went out to collect outstanding debts.’ He must have seen the surprise on Stevie’s face because he said, ‘An excellent example of someone not taking good advice. I told her to leave it and sit tight until all this was over, but Hope got nervous at the prospect of creditors leaving town, especially the ones that were leaving in wooden boxes. She reckoned that even if they couldn’t take it with them, they sure as hell wouldn’t leave it behind to pay their gambling debts.’

‘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.’