A Slow Fire Burning Page 10

  Miriam had been working at the bookshop for no more than six months the first time Myerson appeared, strolling along the towpath with his dog, a small terrier, a tiresome yapper whom he would tether to a mooring while he browsed the books. Myerson and Nicholas, Miriam’s boss, would gossip about what was selling well and what was bombing, about who was getting savaged on the pages of the London Review of Books and who was in the running for the Booker. In the shadows behind a shelf, Miriam eavesdropped, unseen.

  She’d read his books—most people had. His first, published back in the mid-1990s, had moderate sales and good reviews; the second was a runaway bestseller. After that, he disappeared, not just from the bestseller lists but from bookshops altogether, his name cropping up in the odd Saturday supplement feature, the great literary success story of the nineties undone by personal tragedy.

  Miriam had always considered his writing overrated. But she found that even she was not immune to the glamour of a brush with celebrity—it was odd how quickly one began to reassess the quality of someone’s work once its creator was no longer an abstract, no longer just a smug photograph on a book jacket but a living, breathing person with a shy smile and a smelly dog.

  One day, a Wednesday morning in early summer, perhaps six months after he’d first started visiting the shop, Myerson turned up while Miriam was minding the shop alone. He tethered the dog as usual, and Miriam brought it a bowl of water. He thanked her graciously, asking whether they had in any copies of the new Ian Rankin. Miriam checked and discovered that it wasn’t published yet; it was due in the following week. She’d set aside a copy for him, if he liked. He replied that he would, and they began to chat. She asked if he was working on something new and he said that he was, that in fact he was thinking of trying his hand at crime. “Really?” Miriam was surprised. “I wouldn’t have thought that was your cup of tea.”

  He bobbled his head side to side, a wry smile on his face. “We-ell,” he said, “it’s not really, but I seem to find myself in something of a rut.” It was true, more than a decade had passed since he’d published anything substantial. “I was thinking I might try something completely different,” he said, tapping at the side of his temple with his forefinger. “See if I can shake something loose.”

  The following week, when the new Rankin duly arrived, Miriam set aside a copy. Only Theo didn’t turn up to fetch it, not that day, or the next, or the next. She had his address—they’d mailed books to him in the past—and she knew exactly where he lived, it wasn’t very far from her narrowboat, less than a mile farther along the canal, so she decided to deliver it by hand.

  She wasn’t sure if this would be an intrusion, but in fact, when he opened the door, he seemed genuinely pleased to see her. “That’s so kind of you,” he said, inviting her in. “I’ve been a bit under the weather.” He looked it. Dark circles under his eyes, whites yellowing around the pupils, his face flushed. The house reeked of smoke. “Difficult for me,” he said, his voice cracking, “this time of year.” He didn’t elaborate and Miriam didn’t probe. Awkwardly she laid a hand on his arm and he pulled away, smiling, embarrassed. Miriam had felt such tenderness toward him, when first she got to know Theo Myerson.

  They took their tea out onto the little patio outside his kitchen and talked books. It was the start of summer, evenings lengthening, the smell of wisteria heavy in the air, music playing softly on a radio somewhere. Leaning back, eyes closed, Miriam felt an immense sense of contentment, of privilege. To be sitting here, in this gem of a London garden, right in the middle of the city, conversing on myriad topics with this distinguished writer at her side! She glimpsed, opening up in front of her, the possibility of a quite different life from the one she currently led, a far richer (in the cultural sense), more peopled life. Not that she imagined anything romantic, not with Theo. She wasn’t stupid. She had seen pictures of his wife; she knew that she did not compare. But here he was, treating her as an equal. As a friend. When she left that evening, Theo shook her warmly by the hand. “Drop by anytime,” he said with a smile. And, foolishly, she took him at his word.

  * * *

  The next time she came to see him, she had an offering. Something she thought might draw them together. A book, her book, telling her own story, a memoir she had been working on for years, but that she had never had the courage to show to anyone because she had never trusted anyone enough to let them see her secret truth. Until she met Myerson, a real writer, a man who also lived with tragedy. She chose him.

  She chose badly.

  She believed she was entrusting her story to a man of integrity, a man of good character, when in fact she bared her soul to a charlatan, a predator.

  You’d have thought she’d be able to recognize them by now.

  * * *

  The first predator Miriam ever met was called Jeremy. Jez for short. On a stifling Friday afternoon in June, he picked them up, Miriam and her friend Lorraine, in his pale blue Volvo estate. They were hitchhiking—people used to do that in the 1980s, even in Hertfordshire. They’d bunked off the last two periods at school and were headed into town to hang out, smoke cigarettes, try on clothes they couldn’t afford to buy.

  When the car pulled up, Lorraine got into the front seat, because why wouldn’t she? She was the slim one, the prettier one (although to be honest they were neither of them lovely). She was the one he stopped for. So, she got the front seat. Miriam climbed into the back, sat behind Lorrie’s head. The driver said hello and told them his name and asked for theirs, but he never looked at Miriam, not once.

  In the footwell of the car, empties rattled around Miriam’s feet, beer bottles and a whiskey bottle. There was an odd smell, underneath the smoke from Jez’s and Lorraine’s cigarettes, something sour, like old milk. Miriam wanted to get out of the car almost the second she got in. She knew they shouldn’t be doing this, knew it was a bad idea. She opened her mouth to speak, but the car was already moving, accelerating hard. Miriam wondered what would happen if she opened the door—would he slow down? Most likely he’d think she was mad. She wound down her window, breathed in the hot summer air.

  A song came on the radio, a slow one, and Jeremy reached out to change the station, but Lorraine put her hand on his arm. “Don’t,” she said. “I like this one. Don’t you like this one?” She started to sing.

  For the time I had with her, I won’t be sorry

  What I took from her, I won’t give back

  Jez didn’t take them into town; he took them back to his place, “for a smoke.”

  “We have cigarettes,” Miriam said, and Lorrie and Jez both laughed.

  “Not that sort of smoke, Miriam.”

  Jez lived in a shabby farmhouse a few miles outside town. The house was at the end of a long lane, a winding road to nowhere, the tarmac getting narrower and narrower until by the time they’d got to the gate, it had dwindled all the way to nothing and they were bumping along a dirt track. Miriam’s stomach was in knots; she thought she might actually shit herself. Jez got out of the car to open the gate.

  “I think we should go,” Miriam said to Lorraine, her voice quivering, urgent. “This is weird. He’s weird. I don’t like this.”

  “Don’t be such a wuss,” Lorrie said.

  Jez drove the car into the driveway, parked next to another car, an old white Citroën; when Miriam saw it, her heart gave a little leap. Her mother used to have a car like that. It was the sort of car middle-aged women drove. Perhaps his mum was here, she thought, and then she noticed that the car’s tires were flat, the chassis resting on the ground. Despite the heat, she shivered.

  Jez got out of the car first; Lorraine followed him. Miriam hesitated for a moment. Perhaps she should just stay in the car. Lorraine looked back at her, widening her eyes. Come on! she mouthed, gesturing for Miriam to follow.

  She climbed out, her legs trembling as she walked toward the house. As she stepped from bright sunlight
into shadow, she saw that the house wasn’t just shabby, it was derelict. The windows to the upstairs rooms were broken, the downstairs ones boarded up. “You don’t live here!” Miriam said, her tone indignant. Jez turned, and he looked at her for the first time, his face blank. He said nothing. He turned away, taking Lorraine by the arm as he did. Lorraine glanced back over her shoulder at Miriam, and Miriam could see that she was frightened.

  They walked into the house. It was filthy, bottles and plastic bags and cigarette packets strewn over the floor. There was a strong smell of shit, and not animal shit either. Miriam put her hand over her nose and mouth. She wanted to turn back, to run back outside, but something prevented her from doing so; something kept her moving forward, one foot in front of the other, walking behind Lorraine and Jez, down a hallway, past a staircase, into what must have once been a living room, because there was a broken-down sofa pushed up against a wall.

  Miriam thought that if she acted normal, then maybe everything would just be normal. She could force it to be normal. Just because this felt like the kind of thing that happened in a horror movie didn’t mean it would be like a horror movie—quite the opposite. In horror movies, the girls never saw it coming. They were so stupid.

  They were so stupid.

  The One Who Got Away

  She wakes.

  Joints stiff, hip aching, part blind, unable to breathe. Unable to breathe! She jolts, rocks herself upright, into a sitting position, her heart thundering in her chest. She is dizzy with adrenaline. She inhales sharply through her nose. She can breathe, but there is something in her mouth, something soft and wet, a gag. She retches, tries to spit it out. Hands behind her back, she struggles, pushing through pain. Finally, she pulls her right hand free, takes the rag from her mouth. A T-shirt, she sees, faded blue.

  In another room, not too far away, someone is crying.

  (She can’t think about that now.)

  On her feet. Her right eye will not open. With her fingernails, the girl delicately picks a crust of blood from her eyelashes. That helps, a little. It opens, a little. Now she has perspective.

  The door is locked, but there is a window, and she is on the ground floor. The window is small, granted, and she is not slender. It is not quite dark. Toward the horizon, over to the west, a murmuration forms, dissipates, re-forms. The sky fills with birds, empties, fills again, and it is beautiful. If she stays right here, the girl thinks to herself, right here on this spot, if she watches, it will never grow dark, and he will never come for her.

  The sobbing grows louder and she steps back from the window. She can no longer see the birds.

  Like the door, the window is locked, but the glass is a single pane, breakable. Breakable but not silently breakable—will she have time to get out before he comes? Will she be able to force her flesh through that small space at all? Her friend would be able to. Her friend is slender, she did ballet until she was thirteen, her body bends in ways the girl’s does not.

  (She cannot think of her friend now, of the way her body bends, of how far it might bend before it breaks.)

  The crying stops, starts again, and she can hear a voice, saying, please, please. The funny thing is (not funny, not really) that it’s not her friend’s voice, it’s his voice. He is the one who is begging.

  THIRTEEN

  Laura woke up on the sofa, fully dressed, her mouth dry. She rolled over and onto the floor, grabbing her phone. She’d missed calls: from Irene, from two different numbers she didn’t recognize, from her father. She dialed her voicemail to listen to his message.

  “Laura,” a voice that was not her father’s said, “it’s Deidre here, I’m calling from Philip’s phone. Mmmm.” Among the many teeth-grindingly annoying things about Deidre was her habit of punctuating her speech with a weird humming sound, as though she was about to burst into song, if only she could find the right note. “We got your message, and the thing is, Laura, the thing is that we already agreed, didn’t we, that we wouldn’t just be handing over money every time you get yourself into trouble. You need to learn to sort these things out for yourself. Mmmm. My Becky is getting married this summer as you know, so we’ve considerable demands on our finances as it is. We have to prioritize. Mmmm. All right then. Good-bye, Laura.”

  Laura wondered if her dad had even heard the message, or whether Deidre listened to them first, and screened out the ones she didn’t deem important. She hoped that was the case; it was less hurtful that way, to imagine that he didn’t even know she was in trouble. She could call him. She could find out for sure. She just wasn’t quite sure she could stand to.

  Her heart in her mouth, she scrolled through the BBC news site looking for stories about Daniel’s murder but was disappointed. No updates since yesterday; the police were pursuing a number of different lines of inquiry, they were appealing for witnesses to come forward. She wondered how many there would be, how many people had seen her that morning, down on the towpath with blood on her lips.

  She distracted herself by texting Irene. So so sorry I’ve had some problems on my way now get yr shopping list ready see you v soon . Usually, she’d ask Irene to text her shopping list so she could pick up the groceries on her way over, but this time, she was going to have to ask for the money up front.

  A woman, familiar in some vague way, opened Irene’s door when Laura knocked. “Oh,” Laura said. “Is . . . is Mrs. Barnes in? I’m Laura, I’m . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence because the woman had already turned away and was saying, “Yes, yes, she’s here, come in,” in a tone that suggested annoyance. “Looks like your little helper has turned up after all,” she heard the woman say. Laura stuck her head around the living room door.

  “All right, gangster?” she said, grinning at Irene, who usually laughed whenever she said this, but not this time. She looked quite anxious.

  “Laura!” she exclaimed, raising her crooked little hands into the air. “I’ve been so worried. Where have you been?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, mate.” Laura crossed the room to give Irene a kiss on the cheek. “The week I’ve had, like, you would not believe. I’ll tell you all about it, I will, but how are you? You doing all right, yeah?”

  “Since your friend is here,” the other woman was saying, her voice clipped, cut-glass, “I think I’ll get on. Is that all right?” she asked, tilting her head to one side. “Irene?” She slung what Laura judged to be a very expensive handbag over her shoulder, collected a couple of shopping bags from the doorway, and thrust a piece of paper in Laura’s direction. “Her list,” she said, fixing Laura with a withering look. “You’ll see to that, will you?”

  “I will, yeah,” Laura said, and she glanced at Irene, who pulled a face.

  “I’ll show myself out,” the woman said, and she stalked smartly from the room, slamming the front door behind her. A moment later, Laura heard another door slam.

  “Who is that?” she asked.

  “That’s Carla,” Irene said, raising an eyebrow. “Carla Myerson, my friend Angela’s sister.”

  “Warm, isn’t she?” Laura said, giving Irene a wink.

  Irene harrumphed. “Somehow in Carla’s presence, I always feel looked down upon, and I don’t just mean because she’s tall. She talks to me as though I’m a fool. An old fool. She drives me potty.” She paused, gently shaking her head. “But I shouldn’t be unkind. She may not be my favorite person in the world but she’s had an awful time of it. Her sister passing away, and then her nephew.”

  “Oh yeah,” Laura said as the truth dawned on her. That was why she looked familiar; she looked a bit like him. Something around the eyes, the set of the mouth, the way she tilted her chin up a little when she spoke. “Oh God. I didn’t think about that. So she’s his aunt?”

  “That’s right,” Irene said, her eyebrows knitting together. “I take it you heard about what happened to Daniel, then?” she asked, and Laura nodded.
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  “Yeah. Yeah, you could say that.”

  “It’s been all over the news, hasn’t it, and they haven’t caught the people who did it.”

  “Early days, I suppose,” Laura said, her gaze slipping away from Irene’s, gratefully casting her eye over the list that the woman had given her, frowning as she did. “Is this your list? Did she write this?”

  Irene nodded. “Oh, yes, she didn’t have the patience to wait for me to think of the things I needed, she just went into the kitchen and looked in my cupboards and deduced.”

  Laura rolled her eyes. “Muesli? You don’t like muesli, you like crunchy nut cornflakes.”

  “I did tell her that,” Irene said, “but she wasn’t having it.”

  “Wild rice? What the actual . . . Jesus Christ.” Laura ripped up the list, tossing the pieces into the air like confetti. “What you should do, yeah, when you think of something you need, is make a note on your phone—”

  “Oh, I can’t type on those things, it’s all too small and I can’t see what’s going on even with my glasses, and half the time the damn thing changes your words without you asking, so you end up with gibberish—”

  “No, no,” Laura protested, “you don’t have to type anything. What I do, see, is record stuff. I’ve got a terrible memory so as soon as I think of something I need to do or buy or whatever, I just use the voice recorder so you don’t need to type, you just need to say stuff—”