A Lovely Way to Burn Read online

  Joanie produced some butter and a knife. ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for some breakfast.’

  Sales were speeding up as people across the country, in Leicester, Glasgow, Manchester, Cardiff and beyond, got out of bed, turned on their TVs, reached for their credit cards, and dialled in their orders. Joanie let out a moan as she chewed her toast, overdoing it now.

  Rachel, the producer of Shop TV, spoke into Stevie’s headpiece: ‘Try not to choke and then read out some of the tweets and emails.’

  Stevie bit into her carbonated slice, aware of the camera zooming in on her mouth. They were a man down today and Hector the cameraman was pulling a double shift. The bags under his eyes were a purple shade of black which Stevie would have described as damson if she had been selling them. She rolled her eyes and said, ‘Mmm, that’s perfect,’ sincere as a straying politician squeezing his wife at the garden gate. Hector shook his head and she tried not to laugh.

  ‘Emails and tweets,’ Rachel repeated in her ear and Stevie glanced at the autocue. ‘Shelley in Hastings has bought three Dual Action Toasters, one for each of her children. She’s gearing up for a day in the garden. Good idea, Shelley, I think it’s going to be another hot one. Maybe some Melba toast and a Pimm’s on the lawn this afternoon?’

  Bed, she thought. Bed, bed, bed.

  ‘Nice link,’ Rachel said in her ear.

  Stevie said, ‘Rowan in Southend-on-Sea has tweeted to say that the sun is shining and she can see the sea from her living-room window. And Hannah in Berwick thinks the Dual Action Toaster might just save her marriage.’

  The words were coming easily now, she and Joanie part of a conversation with the unseen viewers.

  ‘Lesley in Edinburgh has bought a Dual Action Toaster,’ Joanie said. ‘Lesley’s emailed to say her hubby likes his toast cremated but she …’

  Their sales were climbing on the LED display. Across the studio, out of camera range, two technicians were setting up the next line: beaded batwing sweaters, gaudy outsize numbers, ideal for the larger lady who didn’t mind drawing attention to herself.

  ‘I had an aunty who lived in Southend,’ Stevie said. ‘Starlings used to swarm off the pier and swoop across the bay. Sometimes they turned the sky black.’

  ‘Too creepy, Stevie. Keep away from swarms of black birds,’ Rachel whispered. There was a faint echo of laughter in the production booth, harsh, like static on the line, but she was on a roll now. ‘I don’t know if the camera’s picking this up, but the Dual Action Toaster has a lovely matt sheen, so it will fit with your decor whether you’re an up-to-date techno kind of person, or prefer the traditional, country kitchen look.’

  ‘I’m definitely a country kitchen kind of girl,’ Joanie said, looking as if she was about to let the washing machine repairman bend her over her stripped pine units.

  Their chat always circled back to the toasters, as viewers knew it must. Sometimes Stevie wondered if the audience bought their wares just to keep the presenters in a job. She said, ‘Just a few of these really unique items left. Do you have one of those households where everyone likes their toast done a different way? If you do, then this is the ideal solution.’

  Over on the other side of the studio, Aliah shimmered on to the fresh set, wearing a copper-and-green sweater patterned with banana leaves, like some jungle nightmare.

  Joanie said, ‘I’ve reserved one of these for myself. Derek likes his toast golden brown …’ The gold-brown skin on her arms glistened, and across the studio Aliah bobbed and turned, practising her twirls, the sequins on her top glittering like a mirror ball beneath the lights.

  Stevie felt the heat of the car park tarmac through the soles of her sneakers, the surface sticky and pliant beneath her feet. It was the seventh week of the hosepipe ban and the air was dry and gritty against her skin. She walked towards her Mini, rummaging in her bag for her sunglasses, remembering too late that she had left them on the hall table in her flat.

  ‘Shit.’

  Stevie shaded her eyes with one hand and in the other she carried the jacket she had been wearing, when she had arrived at the studio in the cool of midnight. She hadn’t bothered to cleanse her face of the make-up she had worn for the broadcast. She imagined it melting from her face in one smooth mask: café au lait skin and red lips, a flutter of mascara trimming wide-set eye sockets, minus her brown eyes. The thought was grotesque. Stevie pressed her fingers to her forehead. Her headache was back, and the sun, surely too high in the sky for eight in the morning, felt strong enough to burn her eyeballs from her head.

  The air inside the car made her cough. Stevie opened all of its doors, and sat in the driver’s seat with her feet on the ground, hoping she wasn’t coming down with something. She checked her phone for missed calls. In the two days since Simon’s no-show, irritation had given way to anger, which had in turn been replaced by a faint prickle of doubt. Stevie dialled Simon’s landline, feeling like a stalker. The answering machine kicked in and she hung up. There was no point in calling his mobile. She had left enough messages there already.

  They had never talked much about their friends and family. Stevie remembered a brother who lived in Thailand, a father who had travelled a lot to America on business. Was Simon’s father still alive? She knew that his mother had died when he was a boy. He kept a photograph of her on the chest of drawers in his bedroom, a studio portrait of a smartly dressed woman hidden behind her make-up. Stevie couldn’t recall Simon mentioning any particular friends, but then neither had she. It had been part of the pleasure of their encounters, their disconnection with the rest of her life. She did know where he worked though. Simon had referred to St Thomas’s Hospital more often than Joanie mentioned Derek.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Stevie looked up, shading her eyes. She hadn’t noticed the security guard approaching the Mini and now the sun’s glare was conspiring with the shadows thrown by his uniform cap, so that she could barely make out his features.

  ‘I’m fine.’ She had been grinning for hours and it was an effort, but Stevie managed to raise a faint smile. ‘Just letting the car cool down before I drive off.’

  ‘It’s going to be another hot one.’

  The guard spoke with an accent, Polish or Russian. It made him sound like a movie villain, the Mr Big of a human trafficking ring. He moved into the shadow thrown by the car and she saw his face, pale and thin, the kind of skin that needed to be careful of the sun.

  ‘I should get going. It’s been a long night.’ Stevie swung her legs into the car and closed the door, then, in case it had seemed like an unfriendly gesture, she rolled down the window and said, ‘You’re new here. Is Preston on holiday?’

  ‘No.’ Sweat was beading the man’s forehead. He took a hanky from his pocket and wiped his eyes. ‘Preston’s sick. I’m Jirí, I usually work days. That’s how come we’ve never met before.’

  ‘Well, good to meet you now.’

  Stevie turned on the ignition and the engine growled into life, but instead of stepping away from the car Jirí moved closer.

  ‘I watch you. On television.’

  She wanted to be gone, somehow to cut out the journey home and arrive magically in bed, freshly showered and tucked between clean sheets, but Stevie resurrected another small smile.

  ‘I would have thought you’d get enough of this place at work.’

  ‘When I got the job I wanted to see what kind of shows they made and then I got hooked.’ He grinned, revealing a gold tooth behind his left incisor. ‘You’re my favourite.’

  Jirí squatted down and put his fingertips on the edge of the car window, as if settling in for a long conversation. His nails were broad and slightly ridged.

  ‘Thanks.’ Stevie pulled her seat belt across her body, but didn’t fasten it. ‘I’d better go or my boyfriend will wonder what’s happened to me.’

  The security guard slid his hands from the window and rocked gently on his heels.

  ‘You never mention him.�
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  ‘What?’

  ‘On the programme, the other woman talks about her husband, but you never mention your boyfriend.’

  ‘No, I don’t, do I.’ She put her hands on the steering wheel. ‘It’s been a long night. I really must go.’

  Jirí rose slowly to his full height. He was tall, Stevie noticed, six two, or thereabouts. She put the Mini into gear and he stepped to one side as she guided it from the space. Stevie raised a hand in farewell and the guard said something, which was lost in the throb of the engine. He might merely have been telling her to have a good day, but Stevie thought she heard him mutter, ‘Bloody bitch,’ as the car pulled away. She glanced in the rear-view mirror before she turned out of the gate and saw him standing in the empty parking space, watching her go, a long, black shadow stretched out behind him.

  Stevie pulled the car over, a mile down the road. She used her iPhone to find the number of St Thomas’s Hospital, dialled the switchboard, asked to be put through to the surgical department and then, after waiting for a long time, asked to speak to Dr Simon Sharkey.

  ‘Dr Sharkey’s on holiday until the end of the week.’ Stevie sensed the business of the hospital going on in the background, and heard the impatience in the woman’s voice. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘No,’ she reassured the voice, it was nothing anyone could help her with.

  Stevie forgot about the bed she had craved for the past three hours, executed a swift U-turn and drove through the early-morning traffic to Simon’s flat.

  Three

  Simon lived in an ex-council high-rise in Poplar which had been sold to private developers and upgraded into luxury apartments. There were things the new architects had been powerless to convert, and traces of the social housing it had once been lingered on. The building’s lifts and doorways had been designed with the proportions of the 1960s working classes in mind, and they remained on the economical side for the Übermensch who had displaced them. The covered walkways, that had been calculated to encourage social exchange, were vaguely embarrassing to the new occupants, who were forced to avert their gaze when they passed each other, in order to avoid eye contact.

  Stevie ducked her head as she went past the CCTV cameras in the entrance lobby and took the elevator to the twentieth floor. Her intention was to put her keys through Simon’s letter box, no note, no nothing; the keys themselves would tell him all he needed to know. But she hesitated when she reached his front door.

  Simon’s toiletries had been assuredly male and so Stevie had brought her own lotions, shampoos and cosmetics, all of them expensive. She had also left a dress in his closet, a red-and-purple silk sheath that she had bought in New York. She rang the doorbell and when there was no response, turned the key in the lock and let herself in.

  Her first thought was that it was even hotter inside than it had been out in the sunshine and that Simon had forgotten to empty the wastebin. She closed the door gently behind her but the lock refused to catch and it slid open. Stevie swore softly under her breath. Simon had been reminding himself to get the warped door jamb fixed ever since she had met him. That was the kind of girlfriend he needed, one who dealt with domestic hassles, leaving him free to cure the sick. She locked the door to keep it closed and was struck by a sudden impulse to laugh.

  Everything she had come to collect was in the bedroom, but Stevie ignored it and entered the long sitting-cum-dining room with its ultramodern kitchen. The room was cast in half-light, and though Stevie had decided not to touch anything, she went over to the glass doors that led out on to the balcony and drew the curtains wide.

  She could see the Olympic Park, where the old docks had once been, and the city’s other new landmarks, the Gherkin and the Shard, in the distance, cutting free of the skyline. Stevie stepped out on to the balcony, enjoying the sensation of the outdoors against her skin. She looked down at the manicured green encircling Simon’s apartment block and at the bus stop beyond it, crowded with OAPs, young braves and glamorous mums. Simon had joked about the benefit of having a bus stop by your gate. But Stevie had grown up in a small council flat in a town that resented no longer being a village, and she had wondered why a surgeon inclined to fast cars, silk-lined suits and taster menus would want to live somewhere ringed by housing estates.

  ‘Because it’s real life,’ Simon had said. ‘The closest most of my colleagues get to a mugging is stitching a victim back together. I might meet one on my way home.’ And he had laughed.

  A haze of pollution shimmered against the horizon. Stevie’s throat felt raw and she raised a hand to her neck, to check if her glands were inflamed. She would go straight to bed when she got home, or else she would be unfit for tonight’s show.

  It was strange being alone in Simon’s flat without his knowledge, dangerous and powerful. All at once she understood why teenage burglars lingered in the homes they robbed, raiding the fridge, scrawling obscenities on walls, wreaking damage. Stevie stepped back into the sitting room, sliding the glass doors closed behind her. The smell was worse after her brief exposure to fresh air. The festering bin would be a nice welcome for Simon when he came back from wherever he had gone. She noticed the answerphone blinking with the weight of her messages and pressed play, but the voice on the recording belonged to a man.

  Simon, if you’re there, pick up please. The voice was English, upper class and tight with anger, or anxiety. Simon, pick up the phone. Whoever it was didn’t say anything else, but she could hear the man breathing on the other end of the line, waiting until the recording cut out. There were a couple of silent calls after that, which might or might not have been her, and then the messages she had been waiting on, her own voice stiff and nowhere near as relaxed as she had imagined, asking Simon if he was okay. She erased them, and after a moment’s indecision, her hand trembling above the delete button, wiped the stranger’s message and the silent calls too. As soon as she had done it, Stevie felt ashamed. She didn’t mind Simon knowing she had collected her things from his apartment, but the thought of him discovering that she had listened to his messages made her cringe. She drew the curtains, plunging the room back in gloom, and went through to Simon’s bedroom.

  The bedroom blinds were also down, but she knew her way around and didn’t bother to raise them. The smell was worse in here and Stevie wondered if it was something to do with the drains rather than a neglected wastebin. There was a framed photograph on the wall, of a younger Simon standing in front of what looked like a university building, with his arms around two men. Each of the trio had floppy hair and a reckless smile. Simon was a good twenty years younger, but the generous mouth, a little too wide for his face, and high cheekbones that hinted at a Slavic connection somewhere in his family, gave a glimpse of the man he would become. Stevie turned the picture to the wall. She hadn’t minded that Simon had never introduced her to his friends, but now she supposed that she should have seen it as a sign.

  She went into the en suite, ignoring the tumbled quilt and pillows heaped on the bed. They were another mark of how little she had known Simon, the man who had appeared neat to the point of obsession.

  Stevie caught sight of her face in the bathroom mirror, drawn and slightly wild, and knew she should never have come. She shoved her toiletries into her bag anyway, feeling a prickle on the back of her neck as if someone was watching her.

  ‘Wrong,’ she whispered to her reflection. ‘Sometimes you are just so wrong.’

  She felt the urge to giggle creeping up on her again. If she got away without being discovered she would tell Joanie and they would laugh about it together. After all, she reassured herself, what she was doing was no madder than some of Joanie’s adventures in the wake of Derek’s betrayal.

  Stevie glanced in the mirror again. She had left the bathroom door open and could see the reflection of the bedroom beyond, the chair with Simon’s clothes neatly folded over its arms, his mother’s photograph angled on the chest of drawers, and above it the room re-reflected in the vanity mirror; the u
nmade bed with its familiar white duvet, the ugly abstract painting she would have persuaded him to replace if they had ever become a couple. The bed tempted her, but Stevie opened the cabinet above the basin, found the perfume she had stored there, and swung the mirrored door home.

  The air seemed to leave her lungs and she dropped the bottle of scent into the sink where it shattered against the porcelain. Stevie ignored it. She paused, and then opened the cabinet again, slowly angling the mirror, until she captured the room as she had seen it in the flash of its swinging door.

  Stevie took in the scene, with a gasp that seemed to draw all the air in the room into her body. Simon lay cowled in the duvet, his mouth slightly open, his eyes almost, but not quite, closed. His face was peaceful. Were it not for the awkward hang of his head and his skin’s eau de Nil tinge, Stevie might have thought he was sleeping. The scent of her perfume mingled citrus and musk with the sweet-foul smell of decay, and she knew immediately that Simon was dead.

  Four

  The following hours had the unreal atmosphere of a movie watched while drifting in and out of consciousness on a red-eye flight. Stevie phoned the emergency services and sat in Simon’s living room until the police and paramedics arrived. She watched with dead eyes as the paramedics carried in a stretcher and what she supposed was a body bag.

  ‘So you don’t live here?’ The policeman had asked the same question already, but perhaps asking everything twice was part of the procedure. They were sitting opposite each other in the lounge. Someone had opened the curtains and Stevie could see the sky, blue and heat-hazed beyond the window. She wanted to drag the throw from the back of the couch, swaddle herself in it and sleep. She took a sip of the water someone had given her and tried to focus.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t live here.’

  The policeman wrote something down on the form he had rested on the arm of his chair. He was in his late forties, with creased eyes and a weathered face that made him look like a countryman, but his accent was the East End of barrow boys and futures traders.