A Lovely Way to Burn (3 page)

Jirí squatted down and put his fingertips on the edge of the car window, as if settling in for a long conversation. His nails were broad and slightly ridged.

‘Thanks.’ Stevie pulled her seat belt across her body, but didn’t fasten it. ‘I’d better go or my boyfriend will wonder what’s happened to me.’

The security guard slid his hands from the window and rocked gently on his heels.

‘You never mention him.’

‘What?’

‘On the programme, the other woman talks about her husband, but you never mention your boyfriend.’

‘No, I don’t, do I.’ She put her hands on the steering wheel. ‘It’s been a long night. I really must go.’

Jirí rose slowly to his full height. He was tall, Stevie noticed, six two, or thereabouts. She put the Mini into gear and he stepped to one side as she guided it from the space. Stevie raised a hand in farewell and the guard said something, which was lost in the throb of the engine. He might merely have been telling her to have a good day, but Stevie thought she heard him mutter, ‘Bloody bitch,’ as the car pulled away. She glanced in the rear-view mirror before she turned out of the gate and saw him standing in the empty parking space, watching her go, a long, black shadow stretched out behind him.

Stevie pulled the car over, a mile down the road. She used her iPhone to find the number of St Thomas’s Hospital, dialled the switchboard, asked to be put through to the surgical department and then, after waiting for a long time, asked to speak to Dr Simon Sharkey.

‘Dr Sharkey’s on holiday until the end of the week.’ Stevie sensed the business of the hospital going on in the background, and heard the impatience in the woman’s voice. ‘Can I help you?’

‘No,’ she reassured the voice, it was nothing anyone could help her with.

Stevie forgot about the bed she had craved for the past three hours, executed a swift U-turn and drove through the early-morning traffic to Simon’s flat.

Three

Simon lived in an ex-council high-rise in Poplar which had been sold to private developers and upgraded into luxury apartments. There were things the new architects had been powerless to convert, and traces of the social housing it had once been lingered on. The building’s lifts and doorways had been designed with the proportions of the 1960s working classes in mind, and they remained on the economical side for the
Übermensch
who had displaced them. The covered walkways, that had been calculated to encourage social exchange, were vaguely embarrassing to the new occupants, who were forced to avert their gaze when they passed each other, in order to avoid eye contact.

Stevie ducked her head as she went past the CCTV cameras in the entrance lobby and took the elevator to the twentieth floor. Her intention was to put her keys through Simon’s letter box, no note, no nothing; the keys themselves would tell him all he needed to know. But she hesitated when she reached his front door.

Simon’s toiletries had been assuredly male and so Stevie had brought her own lotions, shampoos and cosmetics, all of them expensive. She had also left a dress in his closet, a red-and-purple silk sheath that she had bought in New York. She rang the doorbell and when there was no response, turned the key in the lock and let herself in.

Her first thought was that it was even hotter inside than it had been out in the sunshine and that Simon had forgotten to empty the wastebin. She closed the door gently behind her but the lock refused to catch and it slid open. Stevie swore softly under her breath. Simon had been reminding himself to get the warped door jamb fixed ever since she had met him. That was the kind of girlfriend he needed, one who dealt with domestic hassles, leaving him free to cure the sick. She locked the door to keep it closed and was struck by a sudden impulse to laugh.

Everything she had come to collect was in the bedroom, but Stevie ignored it and entered the long sitting-cum-dining room with its ultramodern kitchen. The room was cast in half-light, and though Stevie had decided not to touch anything, she went over to the glass doors that led out on to the balcony and drew the curtains wide.

She could see the Olympic Park, where the old docks had once been, and the city’s other new landmarks, the Gherkin and the Shard, in the distance, cutting free of the skyline. Stevie stepped out on to the balcony, enjoying the sensation of the outdoors against her skin. She looked down at the manicured green encircling Simon’s apartment block and at the bus stop beyond it, crowded with OAPs, young braves and glamorous mums. Simon had joked about the benefit of having a bus stop by your gate. But Stevie had grown up in a small council flat in a town that resented no longer being a village, and she had wondered why a surgeon inclined to fast cars, silk-lined suits and taster menus would want to live somewhere ringed by housing estates.

‘Because it’s real life,’ Simon had said. ‘The closest most of my colleagues get to a mugging is stitching a victim back together. I might meet one on my way home.’ And he had laughed.

A haze of pollution shimmered against the horizon. Stevie’s throat felt raw and she raised a hand to her neck, to check if her glands were inflamed. She would go straight to bed when she got home, or else she would be unfit for tonight’s show.

It was strange being alone in Simon’s flat without his knowledge, dangerous and powerful. All at once she understood why teenage burglars lingered in the homes they robbed, raiding the fridge, scrawling obscenities on walls, wreaking damage. Stevie stepped back into the sitting room, sliding the glass doors closed behind her. The smell was worse after her brief exposure to fresh air. The festering bin would be a nice welcome for Simon when he came back from wherever he had gone. She noticed the answerphone blinking with the weight of her messages and pressed play, but the voice on the recording belonged to a man.

Simon, if you’re there, pick up please.
The voice was English, upper class and tight with anger, or anxiety.
Simon, pick up the phone.
Whoever it was didn’t say anything else, but she could hear the man breathing on the other end of the line, waiting until the recording cut out. There were a couple of silent calls after that, which might or might not have been her, and then the messages she had been waiting on, her own voice stiff and nowhere near as relaxed as she had imagined, asking Simon if he was okay. She erased them, and after a moment’s indecision, her hand trembling above the delete button, wiped the stranger’s message and the silent calls too. As soon as she had done it, Stevie felt ashamed. She didn’t mind Simon knowing she had collected her things from his apartment, but the thought of him discovering that she had listened to his messages made her cringe. She drew the curtains, plunging the room back in gloom, and went through to Simon’s bedroom.

The bedroom blinds were also down, but she knew her way around and didn’t bother to raise them. The smell was worse in here and Stevie wondered if it was something to do with the drains rather than a neglected wastebin. There was a framed photograph on the wall, of a younger Simon standing in front of what looked like a university building, with his arms around two men. Each of the trio had floppy hair and a reckless smile. Simon was a good twenty years younger, but the generous mouth, a little too wide for his face, and high cheekbones that hinted at a Slavic connection somewhere in his family, gave a glimpse of the man he would become. Stevie turned the picture to the wall. She hadn’t minded that Simon had never introduced her to his friends, but now she supposed that she should have seen it as a sign.

She went into the en suite, ignoring the tumbled quilt and pillows heaped on the bed. They were another mark of how little she had known Simon, the man who had appeared neat to the point of obsession.

Stevie caught sight of her face in the bathroom mirror, drawn and slightly wild, and knew she should never have come. She shoved her toiletries into her bag anyway, feeling a prickle on the back of her neck as if someone was watching her.

‘Wrong,’ she whispered to her reflection. ‘Sometimes you are just so wrong.’

She felt the urge to giggle creeping up on her again. If she got away without being discovered she would tell Joanie and they would laugh about it together. After all, she reassured herself, what she was doing was no madder than some of Joanie’s adventures in the wake of Derek’s betrayal.

Stevie glanced in the mirror again. She had left the bathroom door open and could see the reflection of the bedroom beyond, the chair with Simon’s clothes neatly folded over its arms, his mother’s photograph angled on the chest of drawers, and above it the room re-reflected in the vanity mirror; the unmade bed with its familiar white duvet, the ugly abstract painting she would have persuaded him to replace if they had ever become a couple. The bed tempted her, but Stevie opened the cabinet above the basin, found the perfume she had stored there, and swung the mirrored door home.

The air seemed to leave her lungs and she dropped the bottle of scent into the sink where it shattered against the porcelain. Stevie ignored it. She paused, and then opened the cabinet again, slowly angling the mirror, until she captured the room as she had seen it in the flash of its swinging door.

Stevie took in the scene, with a gasp that seemed to draw all the air in the room into her body. Simon lay cowled in the duvet, his mouth slightly open, his eyes almost, but not quite, closed. His face was peaceful. Were it not for the awkward hang of his head and his skin’s eau de Nil tinge, Stevie might have thought he was sleeping. The scent of her perfume mingled citrus and musk with the sweet-foul smell of decay, and she knew immediately that Simon was dead.

Four

The following hours had the unreal atmosphere of a movie watched while drifting in and out of consciousness on a red-eye flight. Stevie phoned the emergency services and sat in Simon’s living room until the police and paramedics arrived. She watched with dead eyes as the paramedics carried in a stretcher and what she supposed was a body bag.

‘So you don’t live here?’ The policeman had asked the same question already, but perhaps asking everything twice was part of the procedure. They were sitting opposite each other in the lounge. Someone had opened the curtains and Stevie could see the sky, blue and heat-hazed beyond the window. She wanted to drag the throw from the back of the couch, swaddle herself in it and sleep. She took a sip of the water someone had given her and tried to focus.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t live here.’

The policeman wrote something down on the form he had rested on the arm of his chair. He was in his late forties, with creased eyes and a weathered face that made him look like a countryman, but his accent was the East End of barrow boys and futures traders.

‘And Dr Sharkey gave you keys to his flat?’

‘Yes.’

She had placed the keys on the coffee table between them and now she touched them lightly with her fingertips to show that she was leaving them there. She had strung them on a key ring, a red plastic heart that Simon joked made them look like the keys to a love-hotel bedroom. ‘How would you know?’ she had asked, and Simon had winked.

A paramedic called the policeman through to the bedroom and they had a murmured conversation. Stevie closed her eyes. Simon was dead and she had found him. She thought of how it must have been: the empty flat, her voice on the answering machine, hard and impatient while he lay curled up, beyond hearing, on the bed in the next room.

The armchair creaked as the policeman settled his bulk back into it. Stevie looked up. The policeman’s skin was pale beneath his tan, his eyes dark with lost sleep, and she wondered if he too was coming to the end of a long shift.

‘It appears that Dr Sharkey died of natural causes, but as you’d expect we have to wait for the coroner’s report for official confirmation.’ He leant forward, his hands clasped together, striving for an intimacy neither of them felt, and she saw that his forehead was speckled with tiny globules of sweat. ‘Just to be clear, there was no drugs paraphernalia, no bottles of alcohol, no note, nothing you cleaned up to save his relatives extra grief?’

The answerphone messages she had wiped snagged in Stevie’s mind, but she said, ‘No. Nothing like that.’ Her bag lay at her feet, full of the toiletries she had come to collect. She didn’t want them any more, would never be able to smell that brand of perfume again without remembering the whiff of decay she had mistaken for an overripe bin. ‘I don’t understand what you mean by natural causes. Simon was only in his early forties. He went to the gym three times a week.’

‘Like I said, we can’t be sure of anything until we hear from the coroner, but sadly it’s not as unusual as you might think. Young, healthy men do occasionally have heart attacks, or slip away in their sleep for no apparent reason.’

‘No apparent reason.’ She repeated his words under her breath, remembering a footballer falling to the pitch during an international match, felled by a heart attack. And hadn’t there been a girl in her class at school whose brother had been found dead in his bed by his mother? Stevie hadn’t thought of him in years. She said, ‘You’ve come across this before?’

‘Once or twice.’ His face told her nothing. ‘The only consolation is it’s peaceful. It looks like he fell asleep and didn’t wake up.’

The policeman placed the statement he had written on her behalf on the coffee table and she signed without bothering to read it.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said as he walked her to the door.