A Lovely Way to Burn (34 page)

Stevie remembered something Derek had been fond of repeating, one in a series of self-composed homilies Joanie had christened ‘Sayings from the Policeman’s Notebook’. She said it out loud.

‘Families are the most dangerous units known to society. Most abuse, violence and murders happen inside families.’

Stevie unlocked the door and glanced into the corridor. The lights had gone out and darkness shrouded the ward, hiding the bodies still tucked tight beneath their sheets. She reached into her satchel, took out the boxes of pills and dropped them on the desk in front of John Ahumibe.

The doctor looked up at her. ‘I keep seeing the children’s faces. It was my duty. I couldn’t leave them to suffer on alone.’

Stevie turned her back on him and closed the door quietly behind her.

Thirty-Nine

The hospital was a nightmare of darkened corridors. Stevie had told Ahumibe that she could not afford to give in to fear, but terror fluttered in her chest. The building felt alive, as though the people who had died in the hospital wards had slipped into the fabric of its walls and were watching, and waiting.

Stevie wrapped her scarf around her face and counted each turn beneath her breath, trying to focus on the challenge of navigating her way to an exit. She kept her torch off and her hand on the gun. The sound of howling echoed up ahead and she corrected her route to avoid it. She saw other people ghosting through the dark, and pointed the gun straight ahead, both hands gripping the stock, so there could be no mistaking her urge for solitude.

Rats moved, swift and busy, along the walls, and Stevie knew that she would have to leave London soon, before other diseases took hold. Sudden footsteps charged along the corridor and she pinned herself flat against the wall, melting into the darkness, until the runner rushed by, a panicked breeze of pumping arms and pounding legs.

The dead were everywhere. They were slumped on waiting-room chairs, like a Tory indictment against NHS inefficiency, stretched out on beds, sprawled across desks, or lay where they had fallen, limbs tangled in positions impossible to hold in life.

Moans and harsh rattling breaths echoed from the shadows of abandoned rooms, and Stevie knew without a doubt that there was no God. If there were, he or she would have saved a better person than her, one who was ready to sacrifice themselves to the care of the dying, rather than continue a quest for the truth about an already dead man.

A man stepped out of the shadows, leading a little girl of around six or seven years old along an empty corridor. Stevie moved into the centre of the hall and aimed the gun at his head.

‘It’s all right,’ the man said. ‘She belongs to me.’

Stevie looked at the child and asked, ‘Is that true, sweetheart? Is this your daddy?’

The girl had one hand gripped in the man’s. The other was wrapped around a disreputable-looking toy monkey whose fur was matted from over-loving. She stuck her thumb in her mouth and shook her head.

‘I’m her uncle,’ the man said, his eyes on the gun.

Stevie looked at the little girl, who kept her thumb in her mouth and whispered, ‘Uncle Colin.’

‘Are you happy to go with Uncle Colin?’

The girl had the stunned stare of a road-accident victim. She nodded and the man looked relieved. He said, ‘You can come with us, if you like. There might be safety in numbers.’

Stevie thought he was probably right, but she shook her head. ‘No thanks.’ The man glanced nervously at the gun again and Stevie wondered if he was considering making a grab for it. ‘You’d best keep on going,’ she said, her finger on the trigger, the barrel still pointing at the man’s head. She watched until they vanished into the dark, like phantoms, the sound of her own breath loud in her head.

Once, a hand reached out, pale against the black, and a woman whispered, ‘Water,’ but when Stevie returned, with a plastic cup filled from a water cooler, the woman was gone. Her disappearance troubled Stevie and she upped her pace, holding on to the bannister as she ran down a darkened staircase towards the hospital exit, aware that to trip and break a leg now would mean a slow death.

Forty

The satnav had stopped working. Stevie drove towards the industrial estate that housed Buchanan’s lab, slowing the Jaguar frequently to consult a dog-eared
A to Z
she had found in the glove compartment. She had sealed the car’s vents and made sure that its windows were closed tight, but an acrid smell that tasted of burnt cinders and melting plastic slipped inside and caught the back of her throat. The sky was full of fluttering lights and strange glows, and she was forced to alter her route twice to avoid fires that had taken hold of whole city blocks. There were fewer looters now, though traces of them lingered in smashed windows and abandoned booty. Shoals of carrier bags cartwheeled along empty streets, like plastic tumbleweed. Once she saw a man hanging from a railway bridge. The bridge spanned a main road and she had no choice but to drive beneath, aware of his body gently swinging above her, his feet pointing towards the earth like the arrow of a compass directing the way to Hell.

Stevie had programmed the car radio to scan the stations, but there was only one voice on the airwaves, a recording of a Scottish woman repeating a mantra about the need to
remain calm . . . stay indoors . . . drink fluids . . . avoid contact with anyone showing signs of infection . . . observe the curfew . . .
Stevie turned the radio off.

Dusk was shifting to full dark. The occasional streetlamp still glowed warm and miraculous, like a message from God, but most were out, and Stevie navigated by the beam of the Jaguar’s headlights. She wondered if John Ahumibe had been right about the virus originating in outer space, and pictured an asteroid, plummeting to earth, the way it must have lit up the sky. Stevie wished that she had witnessed the thrill of its arrival, before anyone knew what it would bring. Occasionally her headlights picked out figures by the side of the road, but she didn’t alter her speed, except once, when a man who looked like Simon stuck out a hand, hailing her as if she were a cab, and her foot hit the brake of its own accord. The man ran towards the Jaguar, but Stevie saw that he was a stranger, and left him behind in the darkness.

Her mobile sat charging on the dashboard. It glowed with calls from Alexander Buchanan, but she left them unanswered. She wanted her visit to be a surprise.

The industrial estate was a series of warehouses, factories and trade outlets housed in ugly low-rise buildings. Stevie dipped her headlamps and slowed the Jaguar to a crawl. The estate looked deserted, like a vision of death: the nothing that followed the pain and convulsions of dying. But she was sure Buchanan was inside his lab, fussing over a cure he would never find, and waiting for her to arrive. The chemist was a poisoner, a creep who killed slyly or got others to do his dirty work for him. She could feel his cowardice in his reluctance to admit his flawed calculations. She would do what she should have done before, point the gun at his head and make him tell her the truth about Simon’s death.

It took her a few circuits of the industrial estate, but finally she found Buchanan’s lab, the name
Fibrosyop
discretely etched on a sign attached to a locked and bolted gate. The laboratory was guarded by high railings that looked more permanent than the kit-built box they enclosed. A security camera, fixed too high for her to throw a blanket over the lens, was trained on the entrance. Stevie hoped it had succumbed to the power cuts sweeping the city. She got out of the car, walked to the gate and examined the padlock securing it. A heavy bolt cutter might be able to bite through the chain, but she had not thought to arm herself with one. Stevie felt a quick tremor of fear at the thought of all the things she had left undone. The city was falling apart and she was as unprepared as a lamb trotting blithely behind a Judas goat.

Stevie got back into the car and drove to the fence’s perimeter, hoping for a gap to slip through, but she had kept her headlamps off and the fence was just a presence in the blackness. She whispered, ‘Bloody useless,’ her words a hiss in the dark, but even as they escaped her lips, she saw a way in.

A lorry loaded with a shipping container was parked next to the perimeter fence. She drew in beside it and closed the Jaguar’s door quietly behind her. The only tool in the boot was a wheel jack. Stevie shoved it in her bag and climbed on to the car bonnet. The moon was full, the stars visible in a way she had never seen in London before. Stevie looked up at them for a moment, wondering if their sparkle heralded more asteroids, more viruses, and then scrambled on to the car’s roof. It was a stretch, but she managed to hop from there on to the bonnet of the lorry. A man’s head was resting against the steering wheel, his features slack, his mouth and eyes open. Stevie’s balance wavered and for an instant she thought she might fall, but she managed to regain control and clambered on to the top of the cab. She took a deep breath, climbed up on to the shipping container and ran along it, her footsteps ringing against the metal. She was level with the railings now. Their prongs curved away from her, hard enough to bruise, too blunt to impale. It was a long drop on to the tarmac on the other side and once she was over, there was no guarantee that she would be able to escape. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Stevie took it out, saw Buchanan’s number glowing on the display and knew that he was inside, waiting on her. She left the phone unanswered. Let the chemist wait. It was her turn to set the agenda.

Stevie tossed her bag over the fence, took off Simon’s jacket and spread it over the railings. Then she moved back, as far as she dared, to the edge of the lorry’s roof, stepped into a short run and launched herself over the fence in a rolling leap, half recalled from high jump at school. Stevie landed on her feet, staggered and fell flat against the tarmac, skinning her hands and knees. Simon’s jacket was snagged on the railings above. A breeze caught the sleeves and it twisted gently, a broken silhouette, too much like the hanging man on the railway bridge for her to look at it for long. Stevie spat on her palms, trying to get some of the dirt out of her grazed skin. There was no point in regretting things that were beyond reach. She swung the strap of her bag over her shoulder and jogged towards Buchanan’s laboratory.

Forty-One

Stevie had intended to smash one of the building’s rear windows with the wheel jack, but when she got closer she saw that the windows were barred. She cursed and tried the fire escape and then the front entrance, but the doors to Buchanan’s lab were locked, as she had known they would be.

In movies, people picked locks, spun their tumblers home with a credit card, or took out a gun and blasted them into irrelevance. Stevie squatted in the doorway’s shadows, trying to plan her next move. The wheel jack was heavy in her bag, the gun snug beside it, but even if the door gave way, smashing it would take a while and make too much noise, and shooting at the lock was an invitation to a ricochet, a bullet in the face.

Her mobile buzzed with news of a text. Stevie took it out of her pocket and pressed the small speech bubble on the screen:
Knock if you want to come in.
She cursed. Buchanan must have spotted her on the surveillance cameras but his message gave a surreal, Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole edge to her fear. She tensed, unsure of whether to run, or wait for the chemist to come to her.

The door opened. Stevie reached for Hope’s gun, but strong hands grabbed her around her waist, pinned her arms behind her back and dragged her into a cocaine-white corridor that smelt of bleach. Stevie kicked and bucked, but her assailant held firm. She barely had time to register that he was dressed in protective overalls, his head and neck helmeted by breathing apparatus, like an investigator in a nuclear disaster zone, before a handkerchief was pressed over her mouth and nose, and a line of darkness sucked her down.

Stevie jerked awake. Her knees were drawn up to her chin and her eyelids felt as if they had been weighted with pennies. The thought forced her eyes open.

She was lying on a single bed in a small, white-painted, windowless room. The light was a searing fluorescent bright. Her head was foggy from whatever the stranger had sedated her with and her throat was Sunday-morning dry. Stevie massaged her temples with her fingertips. She looked up, saw a camera peering at her from a high corner, and resolved not to cry.

The collapsing world had made her think that Buchanan would give up his secrets as readily as Dr Ahumibe had, like a ship dropping its ballast as it neared port, but it seemed that the chemist was as obsessed with keeping his secrets as she was with uncovering the truth. Stevie looked up at the camera and said in a voice creaky from lack of fluids, ‘You win. Let me go and I promise to mind my own business.’ There was no sign that anyone had heard her.

She swung her feet on to the floor and sat on the edge of the bed until she was sure that she could stand up without falling over. Her legs felt numb and insubstantial, as if she had been on a bumpy long-haul flight that had confined passengers to their seats, but Stevie managed the three steps to the door. It lacked a handle but a small, reinforced window looked out on to a deserted, equally white corridor.

The only hiding place was beneath the bed, or in the small shower room attached to her cell. Stevie checked them both, but it was clear that her satchel had disappeared. She searched her pockets, but she had already registered the absence of the gun’s comforting weight and was unsurprised to find her mobile gone.