A Slow Fire Burning Page 14

  Carla got to her feet. “You need to go back to bed,” she said briskly, carrying her mug back to the kitchen. “I’ve kept you up.”

  “Well, I don’t sleep terribly well anyway,” Irene said. “It’s all right, if you’d like to rest here, if—”

  “Oh, no,” Carla said, as though the idea were abhorrent. She was back from the kitchen, all trace of emotion wiped from her face. She stood in the doorway, back straight, chin tilted toward the ceiling moldings, her mouth a line. “Don’t get up, Irene, please,” she said. “Thank you for the tea. And I’m sorry about the disturbance, I’ll . . . I’ll be going home now, so I won’t bother you again.”

  “Carla, I . . .” Irene paused. She wanted to say something reassuring, something hopeful, something conciliatory. She couldn’t think of a single thing. Instead, she asked: “You will be all right, won’t you?”

  For a moment, Carla appeared not to understand that question, and then she blushed. “Oh, God. Yes, of course. You don’t have to worry about that. I’m not sure I ever would have gone through with it. The imagining of it is one thing, isn’t it, and then the reality . . .” She tailed off. “I brought the dog’s lead,” she said. Irene shuddered, her skin crawling from her tailbone to the nape of her neck, at the thought of it, of another body next door, waiting, undiscovered, behind those paper-thin walls.

  “Not my dog, of course,” Carla was saying, “I don’t have one. My ex-husband did, though, and I think that somewhere in my subconscious I was ensuring that I wouldn’t go through with it.” She smiled, a strange, private smile. “I think I must have known that I would look at the lead and I would think of his little dog, I would think of how much he loved the dog, and of how much he loved me, and that would pull me back.” She shrugged, her expression soft. “That’s what I think now, anyway.”

  “Oh!” Irene said, remembering all of a sudden. “I forgot to say. Your ex-husband, he came looking for you. He was here—”

  “Here?”

  “Well, outside, in the lane, knocking on Angela’s door. I didn’t recognize him at first, but then I remembered that he’d come before, I’d seen him out there talking to Angela, so—”

  Carla shook her head. “No, that couldn’t have been Theo.”

  “It was, it was definitely—”

  “You’re mistaken, Irene, there is no way that my husband—”

  “I saw him with her,” Irene insisted. “I saw them, out there, in the lane. She was crying. Angela was crying. I think they were arguing.”

  “Irene.” Carla’s voice rose, two spots of dark color appearing in her cheeks. “Theo didn’t speak to my sister, he would never—”

  “He had his little dog with him. A little terrier of some sort, black and tan.”

  Carla blinked slowly. “You saw him with Angela?” she asked. Irene nodded. “When?”

  “I’m not sure, it was—”

  “How many times?”

  “Just the once, I think. They were outside in the lane. Angela was crying.”

  “When, Irene?”

  “A week or two,” Irene said, “before she died.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Back upstairs in bed, Irene lay awake, watching a gray light creep through the gap in the curtains. It was almost morning. She’d returned to bed feeling exhausted, knowing it was unlikely she would sleep. It was true what she’d said to Carla about her wakefulness, short sleeping being yet another side effect of old age. But she doubted she’d have slept no matter how she’d been feeling or what her age; the stricken look on Carla’s face when Irene had mentioned Theo Myerson’s visit would have kept her awake no matter what.

  NINETEEN

  Will you just. Fucking. Let me in?”

  Half past nine in the morning in the pissing rain and Laura stood on the pavement outside the launderette, her breath ragged, only vaguely conscious of wage slaves beneath umbrellas hurrying past, keeping a wide berth of the nutcase on the street, the one who was now swinging her backpack around in the air, who was hurling it at the launderette door as hard as she could. “It’s not about the job,” she yelled. “I don’t care about the job, you can stick your fucking job! I just wanted to talk to Tania! Maya! For fuck’s sake! Let me in!”

  On the other side of the glass door, Maya stood, square-shouldered and impassive, her arms folded across her chest. “Laura,” she called out, “you need to calm down. I’m going to give you thirty seconds, all right, to calm down and walk away, and if you don’t, I’m going to call the police. Do you understand me? Laura?”

  Laura crouched down, she bit down hard on her lip, she felt a wave of nausea hit her as adrenaline flooded her system, her mouth filling with saliva, heart pumping fit to explode. She grabbed an empty beer bottle lying in the gutter and raised her arm.

  A hand grabbed her, pulling her arm sharply back behind her torso. She felt a painful twist at her shoulder and she cried out, dropping the bottle. The hand let go. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?” a woman’s voice asked and Laura turned, left hand rubbing her painful right shoulder, to find she’d been apprehended by the hobbit.

  That’s what they called her in the launderette, because she was short and hairy and she looked like she might live in a burrow or a warren or something, although it turned out she actually lived on a boat, which was in itself quite weird.

  “Well?” The woman was frowning at her, more confused than angry. Like when her dad got cross with her, only he tried to deny it and said, I’m not angry, chicken, I’m disappointed.

  “They won’t let me in,” Laura said limply, the red mist burning off, quick as it had descended. “She won’t let me in, and I didn’t even want to start any trouble, I only wanted to talk to Tania about something, it’s not even anything to do with the shop, it’s not even . . .” Laura stopped talking. It was pointless. All of it, pointless. She sank down onto the edge of the pavement, her knees up under her chin. “I didn’t want to cause any trouble.”

  The hobbit leaned heavily on Laura’s shoulder as she sat down at her side. “Well,” she said gruffly, “I’m not certain chucking bottles about is the best way to not cause trouble.” Laura glanced at her and she smiled, baring a mouth full of crooked, yellowing teeth.

  “I can’t remember your name,” Laura said.

  “Miriam,” the woman replied. She patted Laura on the knee. “I take it you’re not working there any longer? I’d noticed you’d not been around.”

  “I got fired,” Laura said miserably. “I didn’t turn up for two shifts on the bounce, and it wasn’t the first time I’d missed, and I didn’t call Maya to tell her, so she missed her grandson’s birthday, which is really shit, but the thing is that I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean any of it. It wasn’t my fault.”

  Miriam patted her knee again. “I’m so sorry. That’s horrible. Horrible to lose a job. I know how that feels. Would you like to go somewhere, to drink a cup of tea? I’d like to help you.” Laura shifted away from her slightly. “I’ve had to rely on the kindness of strangers myself, once or twice,” Miriam said. “I know what it’s like. It can be disconcerting at first, can’t it?” Laura nodded. “But I think,” Miriam said, smiling at her benevolently, “I think you’ll find that we’re really quite alike, you and me.”

  No we’re fucking not, Laura thought, but she managed not to say anything, because she could see the woman was only trying to be kind.

  * * *

  “So then four years after I got run over, my mother married the man who knocked me off my bike.” Laura paused, adding milk to the mugs of tea she’d made. She handed the less-chipped mug to Miriam. “It fucks you up, stuff like that, no question. I mean, obviously, being knocked down by a car fucks you physically, it leaves you with pain and scars and all sorts of impairments, doesn’t it?” She gestured downward, to her gammy left leg. “But the other stuff’s worse. The e
motional stuff is worse, the mental stuff. That’s what fucks you up for good.”

  Miriam sipped her tea and nodded. “I couldn’t agree more,” she said.

  “So now,” Laura said, collapsing into her chair, “I do stuff, stupid stuff sometimes, like this morning, or like . . . whenever, and it’s not like I even mean to, or sometimes I do mean to, only it’s like something’s been set in motion and I can’t stop it, and all I can do is react, try and minimize the damage to myself, and sometimes when you do that, you end up damaging other people, but it’s not deliberate. Not premeditated.” The hobbit nodded again. “People scoff, you know? People like my stepmother or my teachers or the police or Maya or whatever, when I say it’s not my fault. They’re like, well, whose fault is it, then?”

  * * *

  Janine, Laura’s mother, stood in the driveway in front of the house, looking over at the bird feeders in the apple tree. They needed filling up. She wasn’t sure they had any more feed, but she didn’t want to go to the shops now; it had been snowing for a while and the roads would be horrible. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, enjoying the pull of cold air into her lungs and the almost perfect quiet, which was broken suddenly and violently by a squeal of brakes. There followed a long, swooping silence and then a horrible, sickening crack. The drive was about two hundred yards long and tree-lined, and there was a hedge at the edge of the property, so there was no way of seeing what had happened in the road, but Janine knew. She told the police when they came that she just knew something terrible had happened.

  The car was gone. Laura lay in the road with her legs twisted around at a strange angle. As she sank to her knees at her child’s side, Janine saw a slow trickle of blood dripping from the back of Laura’s helmet onto the slick, wet tarmac. She reached into her pocket for her phone and found that it was not there and she started to scream and scream, but no one came, because the next house along was half a mile away.

  The police wanted to know what she had seen and heard—was she sure she didn’t glimpse anything of the car, perhaps a blur of color? Janine shook her head. “This was my fault. It was my fault.”

  “It is not your fault, Mrs. Kilbride; this is the fault of the driver of the car that hit Laura,” the policewoman said to her. The policewoman put her arm around Janine’s shoulders and squeezed her. “We’ll find him. Or her. We’ll find whoever did this. Don’t you worry, they’re not going to get away with this.” Janine pulled away from her, gazed at her in pale, wordless terror.

  They did find him. CCTV half a mile away captured two cars going past within minutes of Laura’s accident: the first belonged to an elderly woman whose car was found to be immaculate, without any sign of a collision. The second belonged to Richard Blake, an art and antiques dealer who lived a few miles away in Petworth and whose car, he said when the police tracked him down at work, had been stolen the night before. He had not reported it. As the police officers were leaving, Richard asked in a strangled voice, “Is she going to be all right?” and the policewoman asked, “Is who going to be all right?”

  “The little girl!” he blurted out, wringing his hands in front of him.

  “I mentioned a child, Mr. Blake. I didn’t say she was female. How did you know the victim was a girl?”

  A criminal mastermind Richard Blake was not.

  * * *

  That’s how it happened. That’s what Laura believed. That’s what she was told, so—she was ten years old, remember?—that’s what she believed.

  At first, of course, she didn’t believe anything at all, because she was in a coma. Twelve days unconscious, and then when finally she woke, it was to a new world, one in which she had a broken pelvis and a compound-fractured femur and a smashed skull, a world in which, it seemed, someone had done a full factory reset, sent her all the way back to zero. She had to learn to speak again, to read, to walk, to count to ten.

  She’d no memory of the accident, or of the months preceding it—the new school, the new house, her new bicycle: it was all gone. She had a vague memory of their old house in London, of the next-door neighbor’s cat. After that, everything went blurry.

  Gradually, though, as time passed, things began to come back to her. A few weeks before she left the hospital, she said to her father: “The house we live in now, it’s at the foot of a hill. Is that right?”

  “That’s right!” He smiled at her. “Good girl. Do you remember anything else?”

  “Bungalow,” she said, and he nodded. She frowned. “The car. It’s green.”

  Her father shook his head, a rueful smile on his lips. “Red, I’m afraid, chicken. I’ve got a red Volvo.”

  “No, not our car. The car that hit me. It was green. It turned out of our driveway,” she said. “It was leaving our house, just as I was coming home.”

  The smile slid from her father’s face. “You don’t remember the accident, chicken. You couldn’t possibly remember the accident.”

  A few days after that, when her mother came to visit (they never visited together any longer, which seemed odd), Laura asked about the car that had hit her. “It was green, wasn’t it?” she asked. “I’m sure it was green.”

  Her mother busied herself with tidying the get-well cards on the windowsill. “You know, I’m not sure. I didn’t actually see the car.”

  Liar.

  * * *

  Janine, Laura’s mother, stood in the driveway in front of the house, shivering, wearing Ugg boots and wrapped in a bathrobe of chartreuse silk. Her skin was flushed with sex. They’d lost track of time; they were still entangled with each other when she looked over at her husband’s watch on her bedside and said, “Shit, Laura’s going to be home soon.”

  Richard had dressed in a hurry, he almost fell over putting his trousers on, the pair of them were laughing, making plans for next time. She saw him out and kissed him as he got into his car. He told her he loved her. She stood on the driveway, her head tilted back, watching the snow come falling down, opening her mouth so she could feel the flakes on her tongue. His words echoed in her head and then she heard it and she knew: something terrible had happened to Richard.

  She sprinted to the road. The first thing she saw was his car, his dark green Mercedes parked at an odd angle in the middle of the road and then, beyond that, Richard himself. He was kneeling with his back to her, his shoulders heaving, and as she reached him, she saw that he was sobbing, his tears falling onto the broken body of her child. “Oh God oh God oh please God no, please God no. She was in the road, Janine, she was in the middle of the road. Oh please God no please God.”

  Janine grabbed his arm, started to pull him to his feet. “You have to go,” she was saying, her voice sounding weirdly matter-of-fact even to her own ears. “You have to get in the car and go, go right now. Go, Richard, I’ll take care of her. Go on!”

  “She’s bleeding, Janine, it’s bad. Oh Christ, it’s bad.”

  “You have to go,” she said again, and when he didn’t move, she started to shout. “Now, Richard! Leave! Just go now. You weren’t here. You were never here.”

  Liar liar.

  * * *

  All that would come out later. Everyone told Laura (everyone being her parents and the doctor and her counselor) not to google what had happened, that it wouldn’t help, it would only upset her, frighten her, give her nightmares. Which Laura, who might have only just turned eleven but wasn’t born yesterday, thought was bollocks, also quite suspicious, and she was right about that, wasn’t she?

  The first thing she found when she googled herself was a news story with the headline man jailed for hit and run and a picture of her looking like a twat in her school uniform, grinning goofily at the camera. She started reading:

  Art dealer Richard Blake was yesterday sentenced to four months in prison for the hit-and-run accident which seriously injured local schoolgirl, Laura Kilbride, 11.

  Laura read that sent
ence again. Richard?

  But that couldn’t be right. She knew Richard. Richard was the man who taught the art classes her mum went to; Richard was nice. He had an open, friendly face; he was always laughing. Laura liked Richard, he was kind to her, they’d played football together once in the car park when she was waiting for her mum to finish up in the supermarket. Richard wouldn’t have done that to her. He would never have driven away without calling an ambulance.

  The revelation about Richard Blake was quickly forgotten, though, in the shock of what was to come:

  Mr. Blake, 45, who pleaded guilty to failing to stop and failing to report an accident, was conducting a relationship with the child’s mother, Janine Kilbride, at the time of the accident. Mrs. Kilbride, 43, who arrived on the scene shortly after the accident, called an ambulance to attend to her child, but told police she did not see the vehicle that struck her. Janine Kilbride was fined £800 for giving false information to the police.

  When Laura looked back on that period, she identified the moment that she read that paragraph as the beginning of the end. Her body was already broken, of course, her brain function already affected, but that was the sort of damage from which a person can recover. But this? The knowledge that she been lied to, by both of her parents, by everyone who’d been caring for her, that was a knockout blow, the sort that lays you out, the sort from which you do not get back up. That knowledge, the sense of betrayal that came with it, that changed her. It left her marked.