A Slow Fire Burning Page 3

  “Did I what?”

  “Find your key,” Eyebrow said, hint of a smile on her lips like she’d caught her out, caught her in a lie. “Did you find your key?”

  Laura took a last gulp of water, swallowed, sucked her teeth. Chose to ignore the question. “Do you mind?” she called out to Egg, elbowing her way past Eyebrow in order to follow him.

  “Not a bit,” he replied. He was standing in the middle of her living room now, looking at the room’s sole adornment, a framed photograph of a family, parents and a young girl. Someone had gone to the trouble of defacing it, drawing horns on the father’s head and a forked tongue emerging from the mother’s mouth; they’d put x’s over the child’s eyes, colored her lips blood red, before framing it and hanging it. Egg raised his eyebrows and turned to look at her. “Family portrait?” he asked. Laura shrugged. “Dad’s a devil, is he?”

  She shook her head, looked him dead in the eye. “Cuckold,” she said. Egg pursed his lips, nodding slowly. He turned to look back at the picture.

  “Well,” he said. “Well.”

  “I’m a vulnerable adult,” Laura said once more, and the detective sighed.

  “No, you’re not,” he said wearily. He turned away from the photograph and lowered himself heavily onto her sofa. “You live alone, you have a part-time job at the Sunshine Launderette on Spencer Street, and we know for a fact that you have been interviewed by the police on a number of occasions without an appropriate adult present, so let’s just leave that one, shall we?” There was an edge to his voice, his clothes were crumpled, and he looked very tired, as though he’d had a long journey, or a short night’s sleep. “Why don’t you sit down? Tell me about Daniel Sutherland.”

  Laura sat down at the little table in the corner of the room, the one where she ate her dinner while she watched TV. For a moment she felt relieved; she shrugged her shoulders up against her ears. “What about him?” she asked.

  “You know him, then?”

  “Obviously I do. Obviously he’s complained to you about me. Which is bullshit, can I just say, because nothing happened and, in any case, he started it.”

  Egg smiled. He had a surprisingly warm smile. “Nothing happened but he started it?” he repeated.

  “That’s right.”

  “And when did this nothing happen,” Eyebrow said, wandering into the room from the kitchen, “that he started?” She sat down next to her colleague on the ugly pleather two-seater sofa. Side by side, they looked ridiculous—little and large, him long and lean, Lurch to her fat little Fester. Laura smirked.

  Eyebrow didn’t like that; her face darkened as she snapped: “Is something funny? Do you think there’s something amusing about this situation, Laura?”

  Laura shook her head. “Fester,” she said, smiling. “You’re like Uncle Fester, but with hair. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  The woman opened her mouth to speak but Egg, deadpan, cut her off. “Daniel Sutherland,” he said again, louder this time, “didn’t tell us anything about you. We came to speak to you because we lifted two sets of fingerprints from a glass which we found in Daniel’s boat, and the set that wasn’t his, was yours.”

  Laura suddenly felt cold. She rubbed her clavicle with her fingers, clearing her throat. “You lifted . . . what? You lifted fingerprints? What’s going on?”

  “Can you tell us about your relationship with Mr. Sutherland, Laura?” Eyebrow said.

  “Relationship?” Laura laughed despite herself. “That’s a bit strong. I fucked him twice, Friday night. Wouldn’t really call it a relationship.”

  Eyebrow shook her head, in disapproval or disbelief. “And how did you meet him?”

  Laura swallowed hard. “I met him, because, you know, sometimes I help out this lady, Irene, she lives on Hayward’s Place, you know, just over by the church there, on the way to the little Tesco. I met her a few months back, and like I say I help her out from time to time because she’s old and a bit arthritic and forgetful and she had a bit of a fall a while back, twisted her ankle or something, she can’t always get to the shops. I don’t do it for money or anything, although she does tend to bung me a fiver every now and again, just for my time, you know, she’s nice like that. . . . Anyway. Yeah, Dan—Daniel Sutherland—he used to live next door, he hasn’t done for ages but his mother still lived there, at least until she died, which was when we met.”

  “You met him when his mother died?”

  “After,” Laura said. “I wasn’t actually in the room when she croaked.”

  Eyebrow glanced at her colleague, but he wasn’t looking at her; he was looking at the family portrait again, a sad expression on his face.

  “Okay,” Eyebrow said, “okay. You were with Mr. Sutherland on Friday, is that right?”

  Laura nodded. “We went on a date,” she said, “which for him meant two drinks in a bar in Shoreditch and then back to his crappy boat for a shag.”

  “And . . . and he hurt you? Or . . . pressured you into something? What did he start?” Egg asked, leaning forward, his attention fully focused on Laura now. “You said he started something. What was that?”

  Laura blinked hard. She had a memory, startlingly clear, of the look of surprise on his face as she went for him. “Everything was fine,” she said, “we had a nice time. I thought we had a good time.” Out of nowhere, she blushed; she felt an intense burst of heat spreading from her chest to her neck and up to her cheeks. “And then, he’s suddenly all like, cold or whatever, like he doesn’t even want me there. He was . . . offensive.” She looked down at her bum leg, sighed. “I have a condition. I’m a vulnerable adult. I know you said I wasn’t but I am. Vulnerable.”

  “So you argued with him?” Eyebrow asked.

  Laura nodded. She was looking at her feet. “Yeah, you could say that.”

  “Did you fight? Was it physical?”

  There was a stain on her trainer, right above the little toe of her left foot. A dark brown stain. She hooked her left foot behind her right ankle. “No, not . . . well. Not seriously.”

  “So, there was violence, but not what you would term serious violence?”

  Laura moved her left foot against the back of her right calf. “It was nothing,” she said. “It was just . . . handbags.”

  She looked up at Egg, who was rubbing his forefinger over his thin lips. He in turn looked over at Eyebrow and she back at him, and something passed between them, wordless. An agreement. “Miss Kilbride, Daniel Sutherland’s body was discovered in his home on Sunday morning. Can you tell us exactly when you saw him last?”

  Laura’s mouth was suddenly painfully dry, she couldn’t swallow, she heard a roaring in her ears, she squeezed her eyes tight shut. “Hang on . . .” She got to her feet, steadying herself on the table; she felt the world tip. She sat down again. “Hang on,” she said again. “His body? Are you saying . . . ?”

  “That Mr. Sutherland is dead,” Egg said, his voice quiet and even.

  “But . . . he’s not, is he?” Laura heard her own voice crack. Egg nodded, slowly. “Sunday morning? You said Sunday morning?”

  “That’s right,” Egg replied. “Mr. Sutherland was discovered on Sunday morning.”

  “But”—Laura could feel her pulse in her throat—“but I saw him on Friday night, I left Saturday morning. I left on Saturday morning. Seven, maybe, maybe even earlier than that. Saturday morning,” she repeated, one last time, for emphasis.

  Eyebrow started to say something, her voice light and musical as though she was telling a funny story and was just about to get to the punch line. “Mr. Sutherland died of massive blood loss; he had knife wounds to the chest and neck. His time of death is yet to be formally established, but our science officer felt it likely to be around twenty-four to thirty-six hours before he was discovered. Now, you say you were with Mr. Sutherland on Friday night, is that right?”

  Laur
a’s face burned, her eyes stung. Idiot. She was an idiot. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I was with him on Friday night.”

  “On Friday night. And you went back to his houseboat with him, yes? You had sex with him, you said? Twice, wasn’t it? And what time exactly on Saturday morning did you leave Mr. Sutherland?”

  A trap. It was a trap, and she’d walked straight into it. Idiot. She scraped her teeth over her lower lip, bit down hard. Don’t say anything, she imagined a solicitor would say to her. Don’t talk to anyone. She shook her head, a small sound coming from the back of her throat, seemingly without her volition.

  “What was that? Laura? Did you say something, Laura?”

  “I’m sorry he’s dead and everything,” she said, ignoring the advice coming from within her own head, “but I didn’t do anything. You hear me? I didn’t do anything. I didn’t stab anyone. Anyone who says I did is a liar. He was . . . I don’t know, he said stuff to me, stuff I didn’t like. I didn’t do anything. Maybe I hit him, maybe . . .” She could taste blood in her mouth; she swallowed hard. “Don’t . . . just don’t try to say that I did this, because I had nothing to do with it. Maybe there was some pushing and shoving, but that was it, you know, and then he was gone, so that was that, you know. That was that. It’s not my fault, you see, it’s not my fault, even . . . the fight or whatever, it’s not my fault.”

  Laura could hear her own voice going on and on and on, rising higher and higher. She could tell what she sounded like, like a mad person ranting, like one of those crazy people who stands at a street corner and shouts at nothing, she knew that was what she sounded like and she couldn’t stop herself.

  “Gone?” Eyebrow said. “You said, ‘Then he was gone.’ What did you mean by that, Laura?”

  “I mean he was gone. He left, walked out, what d’you think? After we fought—not really fought, but you know—after that, he just put on his jeans and his shirt and he walked out and just left me there.”

  “In his house . . . on his boat, alone?”

  “That’s right. I suppose he was the trusting sort,” she said, and she laughed, which she knew was completely inappropriate and yet still, she couldn’t stop herself, because it was funny, the thought that he was trusting, wasn’t it? Under the circumstances? Not funny ha ha, maybe, but still. Once she’d started laughing, she found that she couldn’t stop; she felt herself going red in the face, as though she were choking. The detectives looked at each other.

  Eyebrow shrugged. “I’ll just go and get her a glass of water,” she said at last.

  A moment later, Laura heard the detective call out, not from the kitchen, but from the bathroom. “Sir, do you want to come through here a minute?”

  The bald one got up, and as he did, Laura felt a wave of panic rise, chasing the laughter clean out of her chest. She said, “Hang on a minute, I didn’t say you could go through there,” but it was too late. She followed them to the threshold of the bathroom, where Eyebrow stood, pointing first at the sink, where Laura had left the watch (the one belonging, unmistakably, to Daniel Sutherland, his initials engraved on the back), and then to Laura’s bloodstained T-shirt, scrunched in a ball in the corner of the room.

  “I cut myself,” Laura said, her face burning red, “I told you that. I cut myself when I climbed through the window.”

  “You did tell us that,” Egg said. “Do you want to tell us about the watch, too?”

  “I took it,” Laura said sullenly, “obviously. I took it. But it’s not what you think. I just did it to piss him off. I was going to . . . I don’t know, throw it in the canal, tell him to go fetch. But then I . . . I don’t know, I thought it might mean something, you know, when I saw the engraving on the back and I thought, like, what if his mother had given it to him before she died or whatever and it was irreplaceable? I was going to give it back to him.”

  Egg looked at her sadly, as though he had some very bad news, which in a way he did. “What’s going to happen now,” he said, “is that we’re going to take you over to the police station to answer some more questions. You’ll be answering questions under caution, you understand what that means? That you have the right to remain silent if you wish to, you don’t have to answer the questions. There will be a solicitor there if you like, to explain it to you. And we’re also going to take some samples from you, for comparison with what was found at the scene.”

  “Samples? What does that mean?”

  “An officer at the station will scrape under your fingernails, comb your hair for fibers, that sort of thing. It’s nothing invasive, nothing to worry about.”

  “What if I don’t want to?” Laura’s voice quavered. She wanted someone to help her and she couldn’t think who it was she should call. “Can I say no?”

  “It’s all right, Laura.” Eyebrow’s voice turned soothing. “It’s all very simple and easy; there’s nothing to be frightened of.”

  “That’s a lie,” Laura said. “You know that’s a lie.”

  “The other thing we’re going to do,” Egg said, “is apply for a warrant to search your home, and I’m sure you realize that under the circumstances we’re not going to have any trouble getting one, so if there’s anything else you think we need to know about, it’d be a good idea to tell us now, okay?”

  Laura considered the question. She tried to think whether there was anything she should tell them, but her mind was a blank. Eyebrow was talking to her, touching her arm, and she flinched. “Your clothes, Laura? Can you show us what you were wearing on Friday night?”

  Laura plucked random items of clothing from the floor in her room. She handed them a pair of jeans, which she may or may not have been wearing, she flung a bra in their general direction. She went to the loo, leaving the two of them in the hallway, Egg’s head bent down to listen to whatever it was Eyebrow was saying. Laura paused at the bathroom door, heard the woman mutter something about engraved and something odd and not really all there, is she?

  Sitting on the loo, her knickers around her ankles, Laura smiled ruefully to herself. She’d been called worse. Not all there? Not all there was nothing, not all there was pretty much a compliment by comparison to all the other things she’d been called over the years: mong, freak, spaz, cabbage, retard, nutter.

  Fucking psycho was what Daniel Sutherland had called her, when she’d gone for him, properly gone for him, kicking, punching, clawing at him. He grabbed her, digging his thumbs into the flesh of her upper arms. “You fucking psycho, you . . . crazy bitch.”

  It all turned so fast. One moment she was lying there on his bed smoking a cigarette and the next she was on the towpath with blood on her face and his watch in her pocket. As the detectives escorted her down seven flights, Laura wondered how she could tell them the truth of the thing, that she’d taken the watch out of spite, yes, but strangely out of hope too. She’d wanted to punish him, but she’d also wanted to give herself an excuse to return, to see him again.

  No chance of that now, though, was there?

  FIVE

  At the police station, a policewoman—a young woman, with a kind smile—scraped beneath Laura’s fingernails, took a swab from the inside of her cheek, combed her hair, slowly and gently, a sensation Laura found so soothing and so deeply reminiscent of childhood it brought tears to her eyes.

  * * *

  • • •

  In Laura’s head, Deidre spoke again. You’ve no self-worth, that’s your problem, Laura. Deidre, the scrawny, hard-faced woman in whose arms her brokenhearted father had sought solace after Laura’s mother left, could, if pressed, come up with a whole litany of Laura’s problems. Low self-worth was a particular favorite. You don’t value yourself enough, Laura. Fundamentally, that’s your problem. If you valued yourself a little more, you wouldn’t just go with whoever paid you any attention.

  A few days after Laura turned thirteen, she went to a party at a friend’s house. Her father caught her sneak
ing back into the house at six in the morning. He grabbed hold of her shoulders, shaking her like a doll. “Where were you? I was going out of my mind, I thought something had happened! You can’t do that to me, chicken. Please don’t do that to me.” He hugged her close to him; she rested her head on his broad chest and felt as though she were a child again, normal again. “I’m sorry, Dad,” she said quietly. “I’m really sorry.”

  “She’s not in the slightest bit sorry,” Deidre said an hour or so later, when they were sitting at the breakfast table. “Look at her. Just look at her, Philip. Like the cat that got the cream.” Laura grinned at her over her bowl of cereal. “You’ve got that look,” Deidre said, her mouth pursed in disgust. “Hasn’t she got that look? Who were you with last night?”

  Later, she heard her father and her stepmother arguing. “She’s got no self-respect,” Deidre was saying. “That’s her problem. I’m telling you, Phil, she’s going to end up pregnant before she’s fifteen. You’ve got to do something. You’ve got to do something about her.”

  Her father’s voice, supplicating: “But it’s not her fault, Deidre, you know that. It’s not her fault.”

  “Oh, it’s not her fault. That’s right. Nothing’s ever Laura’s fault.”

  Later still, when Deidre came upstairs to Laura’s room to call her for dinner, she asked: “Did you use protection, at least? Please tell me you weren’t stupid enough to do it without a condom?” Laura was lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Without looking, she picked up a hairbrush from her bedside table and hurled it in her stepmother’s general direction. “Please just fuck off, Deidre,” she said.