A Lovely Way to Burn (6 page)

I am about to set out for a meeting which I hope will make all of this superfluous but, if it doesn’t go as I intend, and I somehow wash up somewhere without a phone signal, I want to make sure that you get the package into the right hands.

I’m not used to writing from the heart, but I want you to know that you mean more than sex to me (and you know how important I consider sex). It seems a little crass to write this in extremis, but I hope we have a future together.

Stevie, you are clever, persuasive, persistent and resourceful and have enough nous to know that doing the right thing doesn’t always mean doing the obvious thing. Please make sure Malcolm Reah gets the package. It will sound melodramatic, but you might just save my life.

All
My Love,

Simon

Beneath his signature, in a wilder, more impulsive hand, Simon had scrawled,

Trust no one except Reah.

Stevie was surprised to find that she was crying. It had been unfair of Simon to write to her of the future just before he died. It was as if he had taken a portion of her life with him.

She took a tissue from the box on her desk and wiped her eyes. Simon hadn’t committed suicide, that much was clear. The letter didn’t mean he hadn’t died of natural causes though; weird coincidences did happen and stress could lead to sudden heart attacks, everyone knew that.

She reread the letter through a swim of tears. Her first thought was that Simon had misjudged her, and that she would leave the package where it was, telephone the police and show them the letter. Perhaps she could ask for the officer who had interviewed her after she had reported Simon’s death. He had been sympathetic, in a weary way. There was a phone on the corner of her desk. She reached out a hand and touched it.

Stevie pushed back the desk chair, went through to the hallway, dragged the stepladder from the cloakroom cupboard and set it beneath the small ceiling hatch that led to the loft space. If the package was hidden there she would telephone the police. No one would blame her for checking first.

The ladder’s rungs were cold against her bare feet. Stevie tipped the hatch open and put her head and shoulders into the loft. It was dark and spidery and she was forced to go back down and find a torch. She pointed its beam into the blackness and saw a shape, dark and flat, resting on one of the ceiling joists, beyond arm’s reach.

‘Fuck, Simon,’ Stevie whispered. ‘You’re not exactly making things easy for me.’

The days in bed had weakened her, and it took all of her strength to haul herself into the crawlspace that separated her ceiling from the apartment above. She lay there for a moment, gathering her resources, and then stuck the torch in her mouth and started to pull herself along one of the beams on her belly. Simon must have used a pole of some kind to push the package out of reach. He would never have fitted his body into the tight space. A tiny fleck of darkness scuttled away from her. Stevie gasped, but the torch in her mouth stopped her from crying out.

The telephone started to ring down in the flat below and Stevie remembered she had forgotten to call the TV station. She took the torch from between her teeth.

‘Shit, shit, fuck, fuck, fuck, shit.’

The beam of light swept the length of the narrow space. It was like being buried alive, sandwiched there in the dark. Something touched Stevie’s face. She gasped and flung a hand out, but she had come too far to turn back.

Now that she was closer she could see that the package was oblong and wrapped in a plastic bag. Stevie stretched out, gripped the edge of the plastic with her fingertips and pulled it slowly towards her. ‘Got you.’ She grasped it tightly with both hands. She had expected the package to contain some kind of manuscript, but it was too hard-edged and heavy to be papers. Stevie edged her way backwards until she was able to lower herself back, out of the hatch. Her feet groped for the ladder. It occurred to her that it would be ironic if she were to fall now and end up in the morgue beside Simon, but she managed the transition safely and set her burden on the top step.

The plastic bag was grimed with dust and cobwebs. She peeled it free to reveal a laptop zipped in an anonymous slipcase. Stevie tossed the empty plastic bag back into the loft, slotted the hatch cover back in place and carried the laptop down with her, realising she was as filthy as the bag she had discarded.

She stripped off her tracksuit, went naked into the spare bedroom and set the laptop on her desk. There was nothing for it but to phone the police; anything else would be foolish. She unzipped the slipcase and slid the laptop free. Simon had been devoted to a slim ultra-fast tablet, small enough to slip into his jacket pocket. This machine reminded her of her own computer, top of the range a few years ago, but not up-to-date enough for someone as techno-chic as Simon. Stevie opened the lid, pressed the power button and watched the screen glow into life. The manufacturer’s logo sailed towards her, followed by Windows’ four-coloured pane. The display shifted to black, Stevie saw her own naked torso reflected in it for an instant, and then the start page invited her to enter the password.

She typed in different variations of Simon’s name, St Thomas’s Hospital, her own name, his cousin’s name. Each try elicited an irritating wobble on the screen.

‘Simon, you are really pissing me off now,’ Stevie muttered. She was going to have to stop these whispered appeals to the dead, especially when it seemed she had never really known the living man.

Eight

Stevie turned off the laptop, pulled on clean underwear, a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, took the telephone through to the sitting room and phoned the TV station, hoping to God it wasn’t Rachel who was producing the show that night.

‘Hello?’

Rachel had recently abandoned the mockney accent she had cultivated for years and reverted back to the clear, well-formed vowels of public school and Oxford. Her
hello
hung in the air like a challenge.

‘Rachel, it’s me, I’m sorry I didn’t ring earlier but . . .’ Stevie paused, unsure of what to say.

‘But you know I run a relaxed ship and that it’s easy come easy go around here?’

‘I asked Joanie to call you. My boyfriend died and I’ve been throwing up for the past few days.’

There was a pause on the line, and then Rachel said, ‘I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.’

‘I don’t any more. I found him dead in his bed on Wednesday.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Rachel’s voice was surprisingly gentle. ‘I had a cousin who accidentally took an overdose at a party. My sister and I found her the following morning. It was horrible.’

‘It wasn’t drugs. He was a doctor.’

‘Either way it’s a tragedy.’

Rachel’s tone suggested that doctors were far from being above suspicion.

‘He didn’t do drugs.’ Stevie wasn’t sure why she was so anxious to labour the point. ‘The police think it was something called sudden adult death syndrome. You go to sleep and never wake up.’

Rachel sighed. ‘I was about to send someone round to check on you.’

‘To check on me?’

‘You live on your own, you phoned in sick and then we heard nothing, complete radio silence. I got young Precious to phone, but you didn’t pick up. I was worried.’

‘I’m touched.’ Stevie silently cursed Joanie. She was probably off on one of the short-lived romantic adventures that had become a feature of her life since her Derek’s defection.

‘I’m genuinely sorry to hear about your boyfriend, Stevie,’ Rachel continued. ‘Believe me I wouldn’t do this if I had any choice, but you’re on shift tonight.’

Stevie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She had calculated the consequences of walking out on her job so many times that the urge to tell
Shop TV
to shove it automatically conjured the aura of unpaid bills and lawyers’ letters. But proximity to death had made her reckless. She opened her eyes.

‘Rachel, Simon died. I found him. I don’t think I can go on live television and pretend to be wet about whatever crap it is we’re punting tonight. Cut me bit of slack, just this once, please.’

‘I would love to, believe me I sympathise. I’ll never forget finding my cousin Charlotte, it took me years to get over it. I’m not sure my sister ever recovered, but we’re three presenters down, including Joanie who’s in hospital.’

The guilt that had sat on Stevie since she had discovered Simon screwed itself tighter in her stomach.

‘What’s wrong with Joanie?’

‘The same thing that’s wrong with the rest of them, only more so, sickness, vomiting, diarrhoea, high fever, hot and cold sweats. Don’t you watch the news?’

‘I told you, I was sick. I thought it was the shock of finding Simon.’

‘The great washed and unwashed of London are going down with the lurgy, as are a good portion of Paris, New York and anywhere else you care to mention. People have died. That’s why I was going to send someone round to check on you. I was worried you might have shuffled off this mortal coil.’

For the first time Stevie thought she could detect a note of panic beneath Rachel’s posh bonhomie. She walked to the window. The parade of shops in the street below looked as busy as ever. Rachel had a reputation for exaggerating, but she wouldn’t lie about Joanie being in hospital.

‘Do you think that might have been what got your boy?’ the producer asked.

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell Rachel that Simon hadn’t been her boy, not really, but Stevie merely said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘If you can get here for seven, I’ll get Precious to go over the briefings with you, and you can go on at eight.’

‘I look like shit.’

‘We’ll all look like shit by then. I’m covering for Brian, and then doing my own gig tonight. Put your trust in make-up, darling. You’ll look a million dollars by the time you go on.’ Now that everything had been settled, the producer was back to her usual brisk self. ‘I’ll email you the product line-up so you’re not entirely in the dark when you arrive. We’ve got some top-notch stuff.’

Rachel always described their merchandise as ‘top-notch stuff’. Joanie, whose father and grandfather had worked the markets, called it swag.

Stevie asked, ‘Which hospital is Joanie in?’

‘I’m not sure, hang on.’ Rachel had a muffled exchange with someone and then came back on the line. ‘St Thomas’s. She’s in intensive care, but I’d keep away if I were you. This thing seems to be catching and we can’t afford to lose another presenter.’

‘You forget I’ve already had it.’

‘That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re immune. My cousin Charlotte thought she was immune. Look where it got her.’

Nine

Rachel had spoken as if London was in meltdown, but the Jubilee line showed no sign of crisis. The carriage was full and Stevie was forced to stand, her body just one of many sardined together, hurtling through the depths. Perhaps the trains were brightly lit to take people’s minds off how dark the tunnels outside really were. The Underground carriage’s fluorescence drained the passengers’ complexions of any lustre. The dark skin of the business-suited man beside her had turned grey, and the woman leaning against the pole by the door had taken on a jaded sheen that reminded Stevie of the print of Tretchikoff’s green lady that had hung in her grandmother’s hallway.

Stevie felt the weight of the city above her and wondered how deep beneath the ground she was.
West Hampstead . . . Finchley Road . . . Swiss Cottage . . . St John’s Wood . . .
The automated announcer declared the stations in her machine-plummy voice, not bothering to warn them to
mind the gap
. Londoners didn’t dwell on the people who had died on the Underground: the navvies sacrificed to its construction, the suicides and careless drunks crushed against the tracks, the terrorist bombings, Jean Charles de Menezes murdered by police marksmen. They walked past the memorial to those who had died in the King’s Cross fire without a glance, because to remember too often would be crippling. Londoners were the blood of the city and the city went on, regardless of the Black Death, the Great Fire, the Blitz, and terrorist bombings. It was only occasionally, when the train stopped between stations, that passengers caught each other’s eye and wondered if their luck had run out.

Simon’s laptop was in a satchel slung across Stevie’s body. The weight of it pulled at her shoulder blade. The carriage shuddered to a halt and an elderly man’s hand grazed her right breast. He gave her a half smile that might have been an apology or an invitation. Stevie’s foot tensed with the urge to stamp on his toes but she merely shifted her bag to her other side, making a barrier between them.

Stevie thought she could scent the lingering smell of her illness beneath the blend of body odours and rubber that permeated the carriage. A droplet of sweat slid down her spine and she hoped her shirt wouldn’t cling to it. She noticed an ex-member of the Cabinet further down the train. Cartoonists had made a feature of his hair, which was usually gelled in a blond quiff, but it had lost its bounce and was slumped greasily against his forehead. Stevie wondered how he dared to use public transport in the wake of failing wars, austerity and job cuts, and then she spotted the trio shadowing him, men whose sharp suits needed no padding to broaden their shoulders. They looked tired, as if a life of being on the alert had taken its toll.