A Slow Fire Burning Read online

  “Someone has found out,” Laura said, her voice small. “You have.”

  Irene rolled her eyes; she felt quite cross. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, I’m not about to call the police, am I? And none of that explains all this,” Irene said, waving her hand in Laura’s direction. “None of it explains the state you’re in now.”

  “Oh, well.” Laura sat back down, crossing her legs. “There’s this woman, you see, who lives in one of the boats on the canal, and I know her a bit because she comes in the launderette sometimes. Her name’s Miriam, and she’s a bit weird, she looks weird, you know, like she’s always wearing a few too many clothes, do you know what I mean? In any case, she’s the one who found Daniel, found his body I mean, she was the one who called the police, and then the other day, she showed up outside the launderette, and I was in a bit of a state, nothing terrible, just . . . you know.” Irene didn’t know; she had no idea what Laura was talking about. “Anyway, so I went round to her place, to her boat, you see, because I owed her an apology—it’s a long story, you don’t really have to know about all this, but the point is, the point is, when I got to the boat, I found out that she had the key to my flat.”

  “She had your key?”

  “Exactly! Remember I said I lost it, well she had it.”

  “And she gave it back to you?” Irene wasn’t really understanding the point of this story.

  “No, no, she didn’t give it to me. She hid it from me. I found it in her boat, I was looking through her things, you see—”

  “You were looking for something to steal!” Irene said.

  “Yes, all right, I was, but that’s not the point, is it? The point is she had my key. And so when I found it, we had a bit of a . . . well . . .”

  “An altercation?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And she hit you? This woman hit you? Gave you that bruise?”

  Laura shook her head. “There was a bit of pushing and shoving. I was basically trying to get out of there, and I tripped. I fell.”

  “Do you think we ought to be calling the police, Laura? I mean, if this woman has your key, then . . .”

  “Oh, no—I have the key now.” She delved into her jeans pocket and pulled it out, along with one gold earring, which she peered at, before stuffing it back into her pocket. “I have the key, and I have this as well.” From the pile where she’d emptied out her backpack, she took a sheaf of papers, a bound manuscript, which she held out to Irene. “She gave me this—before we had our . . . whatchacallit, altercation, she gave me this. Her memoir,” Laura said, air-quoting with her fingers. “Suggested I read it. Which I’m never going to do. You might like it, though. It has a crime in it! She claims she was kidnapped by a madman when she was young. Or something like that, anyway.”

  “Good grief,” Irene said, accepting the manuscript with both hands. “How extraordinary.” There was a sudden flash of light accompanied by a particularly vicious crack of thunder, which had them both ducking their heads.

  “Fucking hell,” Laura said.

  “Indeed,” Irene replied. “Do you know,” she said, “I think you ought to go upstairs and get out of those wet things, hang them in the airing closet, and run yourself a nice hot bath. I think you should stay here with me this afternoon, don’t you?”

  Laura smiled, squeezing tears from her eyes. “I’d like that.”

  * * *

  Above the sound of the second downpour, Irene could hear Laura singing, her voice truer and sweeter than Irene would have imagined. She took her time; it was almost an hour before she came back downstairs, wrapped in a pink terry cloth robe that had been folded up in the airing cupboard, unused for the best part of a decade. Something about the sight of this tiny young woman in her old robe was extraordinarily touching to Irene. She felt a wave of emotion come over her, a feeling she imagined might almost be maternal.

  She said none of this to Laura, who she suspected might be embarrassed by such a declaration. Instead, she said: “Do you know, it’s very odd, this book”—she brandished the manuscript Laura had brought with her—“this memoir. I was reading through it and—”

  “You can’t have read it already,” Laura said, flinging herself lengthways onto the sofa and rearranging the cushions beneath her head.

  “Well, I was just skimming through it—it’s actually not badly written, a little overwrought, perhaps—but the odd thing is that some parts of it feel terribly familiar, though of course the idea of someone escaping from a serial killer isn’t exactly original, only . . .” She tailed off, frowning, peering up at her bookshelves over the rim of her glasses. “There’s something that’s bothering me and I just can’t put my finger on what it is, I . . .”

  Laura closed her eyes and snuggled down on the sofa, pulling Irene’s robe down over her knees. “Oh,” she murmured, “this is, like, heaven. I am just so knackered, you know what I mean? I just want to lie here forever.”

  “Well, you’re welcome to stay. You could even spend the night,” Irene suggested, “if you like. I could make up the spare bed.”

  Laura didn’t answer, but with a smile upon her lips said, “I always feel safe here, you know? I feel like no one can get at me here.”

  “No one’s going to get you, Laura,” Irene said. “Why ever would you think that?”

  “Oh, they will,” Laura said, pulling the robe up so that it covered her chin. “They will. They always do.”

  * * *

  While Laura slept, Irene read. A number of the scenes in the manuscript were terribly familiar—two girls hitchhiking on a hot summer’s day, a chance encounter, a sudden descent into violence occurring at a remote farmhouse, tender young limbs slashed on broken windows—it was all standard horror film stuff, she supposed, but there was something that snagged on the memory, and that was the singing. A refrain played on the radio, sung by one of the characters (could you call her a character, if this was a memoir?), was familiar to her; it reminded her of something, rang a bell from somewhere.

  On the sofa, Laura stirred. She turned over so that she was facing away from Irene and began, very gently, to snore. Irene felt again the pull of affection, a twinge in her stomach that she thought of as maternal, but then what did she know? She couldn’t say what it was, only that she felt the same urge to protect the girl as she’d felt toward poor Angela.

  She cast her eye once more over Angie’s books, the ones she’d not yet finished sorting through. She really ought to get on with that because those books had been lying around for weeks. Perhaps she might ask Laura to take that first pile up to the Oxfam shop on Upper Street.

  And then she saw it. On the top of the charity shop pile: The One Who Got Away by Caroline MacFarlane. Theo Myerson’s crime novel! It was staring her in the face. She got out of her chair and picked up the book, a hardback copy, hefty and well bound. She turned it over, reading the words on the back cover, in bold blood red:

  On their way home from school, a girl and her friend were abducted.

  The girl made it home. The friend did not.

  This girl is a victim.

  This girl is grieving.

  This girl is damaged.

  This girl is vengeful.

  This girl is guilty?

  This girl is the One Who Got Away.

  Irene rolled her eyes—she’d thought it was drivel when she’d first read it on publication; her view had not changed. Returning to her chair, she opened the book, flicking through it to find the passage she felt sure she remembered, something about a song, a snatch of a lyric. It was there somewhere, though not at all easy to find in this novel, whose story jumped about, the point of view occasionally switching from victim to perpetrator, the timeline jumping about all over the place. Very confusing and, if you asked Irene, irritating. She remembered hearing Myerson, once he’d been unmasked as the author, defending it on a radio program, saying s
omething about playing with perceptions of guilt and responsibility, challenging the reader’s expectations, all that sort of guff. Nonsense. Experimentation for its own sake, who did that serve? What was wrong with the traditional crime novel, after all, with good prevailing, evil vanquished? So what if things rarely turned out like that in real life?

  Irene was interrupted in her reading by an odd buzzing sound. She looked up and saw a light flashing on Laura’s phone. It quietened and then, after a moment, started up again. On the sofa, Laura stirred. “Oh, that’s me,” she groaned, rolling over toward Irene and promptly falling off the edge of the couch. “Fuck’s sake,” she mumbled as she crawled across the carpet to pick up the phone, “I was completely out.” She squinted at the screen. “Yeah?” she answered. “Who? Oh, yeah, sorry. What’s that? Oh, no I’m not there at the moment, I’m with a friend. I can . . . but I . . . but . . . What, now?” She closed her eyes for a second. “Do I have to?”

  She ended the call with a heartfelt sigh. She looked sleepily up at Irene. “Told you,” she said, trying to smile despite the telltale crack in her voice. “I told you they always get me, didn’t I?” Wearily, she dragged herself to her feet. “I have to get going,” she said. “That was the police.”

  Laura left in a hurry, dismissing Irene’s concerns. “It’s nothing to worry about, mate,” she said as she ran upstairs to get her clothes. “Nothing to worry about,” she said again when she came back down.

  “This is about Daniel?” Irene said, and Laura pulled a face.

  “Yeah, of course it is! Of course it’s about Daniel—I haven’t slept with anyone else who’s carked it lately, have I? I’m a witness, that’s all; I was the last person to see him, you know, alive. It’s nothing to worry about.” Irene saw her to the front door. Helping her into her still-damp coat, she asked if Laura had a solicitor. Laura laughed, started off down the lane, limping a little more than usual, and then she turned back, a grin on her face, all traces of tears banished. “Does the pope shit in the woods?”

  * * *

  Irene was thinking, as she popped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster, how much William would have liked Laura. She would have made him laugh. He’d not been overly keen on Angela—he was never unkind to her or anything like that, he was just wary. She’s on the edge of something, that one, he’d said. And when she goes over, you don’t want to be anywhere nearby, she’ll catch hold of you and whoop! Off you’ll both go. William never really got to know Angela; he never got to see how kind she was.

  Toast buttered, Irene sat at the kitchen table with the memoir open in front of her and Theo’s novel next to it, for comparison. Something about singing, she was saying to herself as she flicked through the pages. Something about—oh.

  Right at the back of Theo’s book, tucked into the flap of the jacket, she discovered an envelope, addressed to Theo Myerson. Odd, since this was Angela’s copy of the book. Inside the envelope, she found a sheet of A4, apparently torn roughly from a pad, on which there was a pencil drawing of a woman sleeping, the bedclothes flung back to expose her naked torso. At the bottom of the page, in a spidery hand, was written, hello old man, been doing some sketching, thought you’d like to see. The note was unsigned, but the drawing looked very much like one of Daniel’s. And the woman in the picture was unmistakably Carla Myerson.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  On Carla’s bed lay her suitcase, half full. The wardrobe was open too, and bits and pieces of clothing were strewn all over the counterpane. She was having trouble making her mind up what to pack; she’d no idea how long she’d be gone, or what she’d need. The weather had turned cold here, but it would be warm farther south, wouldn’t it? Mindlessly, she grabbed things from her shelves, T-shirts and jumpers, a dress she’d not worn in years. Somewhere in the house her phone was ringing, but then, her phone was always ringing. It never stopped.

  She would have to speak to Theo at some point, she knew that, to ask him to forward her mail to wherever it is she decided to go, to deal with solicitors, with the estate, with the sale of Angela’s house.

  There would be an argument, inevitably, which is why she was considering taking the coward’s option and calling him from abroad. She wasn’t sure she could do that to him, to just leave, without seeing him again. She wasn’t sure she could do that to herself.

  She needed to tell him that she’d looked at his latest piece of writing too, that she didn’t like it, all the to-ing and fro-ing, all that jumping around in the timeline. Like the last one, the awful crime thing. Just start at the beginning, for God’s sake. Why couldn’t people just tell a story straight any longer, start to finish?

  * * *

  The year before Angela died, Daniel turned up on Carla’s doorstep one Sunday night around eight. He was upset and agitated, a graze across his cheekbone and a cut on his lip; he had a long and complicated story about an argument with a girlfriend, followed by a mugging—Carla couldn’t quite follow the thread, but he said he had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to call the police and he certainly didn’t want to go to his mother’s. “She doesn’t want me there,” he told Carla. “She’s never wanted me there.” Carla said he could stay. She opened a bottle of wine, which they seemed to drink very quickly, so she opened another. About halfway through that, she knew she had to stop.

  She went upstairs, showered, teetered unsteadily straight from the shower to bed, still wrapped in her towel. She woke with a fright, the way she often did from drink. She lay still, her heart hammering in her chest, and it took a while for her to realize that she’d thrown off the covers, thrown off her towel. It took a while for her eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness and for her to realize that she wasn’t alone. That he was sitting on the floor next to the door, looking up at her, his sketchbook in his lap. “Daniel,” she whispered, pulling the covers up sharply, “you scared me.” In the gloom, she could not make out his expression, only the whiteness of his teeth. “Couldn’t help myself,” he replied.

  In the morning, she found him sitting at the counter in her kitchen, drinking coffee. “Morning!” he greeted her without a trace of embarrassment. “I was just wondering,” he said as she busied herself filling the kettle, putting the glasses from last night into the dishwasher, “if you could put me up for a few days?”

  Carla turned to face him. He was smiling at her, guileless and beautiful. “I’m sorry, Daniel,” she said. His smile faltered for only a second. “I would, it’s just . . . Theo,” she said. “He wouldn’t . . .” She turned away.

  “It’s fine,” Daniel said. “I get it. It’s fine.”

  * * *

  When, a month after his mother died, Daniel came to Angela’s house to pick up his things, he looked tired and unhappy. He didn’t want to come into the house; they almost argued about it. “You need to see what there is, Daniel. I can’t sort through everything for you. I can’t choose for you.”

  “I just want my things, my notebooks, my stuff. I don’t want anything of hers.”

  When eventually he did enter the house, he walked straight up the stairs and into his bedroom without looking once askance. He picked up the box into which Carla had placed all his notebooks. “You haven’t looked at these, have you, because”—he pulled a face—“they’re not great.”

  Carla shook her head. “No, you’ve always been clear that they were private.”

  He smiled. “Thanks, Aunt Carla.” It always tugged at her when he called her that. It reminded her of him as a little boy, those enormous eyes in his pinched face, wary and vulnerable. The poor little savage. She stepped forward to kiss him on the cheek, and he moved his head at the last minute, brushing her lips with his. “I’ve rented a boat,” he told her as he turned to go, “on the canal, just by the Whitmore Bridge. It belongs to a friend of a friend, so I get mate’s rates. It’s a shithole, but it’s all I can afford at the moment. You’ll come by and visit, won’t you?” he asked. Carla watched him wa
lk out of the room, the box in his arms, watched him scuff the carpet at the top of the stairs with his trainer.

  He turned to her and smiled. “Be careful, yeah?”

  * * *

  A day or two later, maybe three. Carla was at Angela’s, doing a final check of the rooms to make sure everything was clear before the cleaners came in, when she discovered a batch of letters in the bottom of Daniel’s wardrobe. Three of them sent by her sister to Marcus, Daniel’s father, the envelopes marked returned to sender, but the letters themselves well handled, read and reread, conceivably by Angela, but since she was the person who’d written them, it seemed more likely that the person who had pored over them was Daniel.

  And when she thought of him reading them, she imagined little Daniel, she imagined looking down on his neat head, on his bruised neck. It was that Daniel she imagined reading his mother’s words, not the strange man he’d become, and the thought of it, it hurt her heart.

  It hurt her heart to think of him reading all the hurtful words his mother had written to the father who had rejected him. It hurt her heart when she saw how Angela had begged for help for her “impossible” son, a boy who was never framed as anything but a problem, something about which something needed to be done. I am going out of my mind, she wrote. I cannot stand to be near him. You have to help me Marcus, I’ve no one else to ask.

  * * *

  • • •

  On her way to the canal, she bought a bottle of wine. She tried not to think about why it was she didn’t want to talk to him without a drink in her hand. She tried not to think about the night of the funeral, tried not to think about him scuffing the carpet, which meant nothing anyway, did it? She made her way down to the canal, and next to the Whitmore Bridge she saw two canal barges, one a beauty, freshly painted in racing green with a dark red trim, the next one along a shabby, rusting mess in blue and white. She knocked on its windows, climbed up onto the back deck, and knocked again on the cabin door, which swung open.