A Lovely Way to Burn

Thirty-Four

Simon’s school photographs were tucked safely in her bag next to Hope Black’s gun. Stevie felt sure that whatever had happened to Simon was connected to the past, old loyalties reaching across the years to snare him in a scheme that had somehow resulted in his borrowing a small fortune from Hope, and finally, in his death.

She tried phoning Iqbal again, but the only response was from his voicemail so she left a message: Iqbal, it’s Stevie. Please call me when you get this, I’m worried about you. She wondered if she should head south, return to Iqbal’s apartment and check that he was okay. She had programmed the satnav with Geoffrey Frei’s address in Swiss Cottage. It told her to turn left and she turned left. Iqbal had seemed keen enough to hope for more than a one-night stand. She couldn’t imagine him deliberately ignoring her calls. The satnav directed her to drive straight ahead for four hundred yards. Stevie kept her hands on the wheel of the Jaguar and her eyes on the road.

Even if the key to Simon’s death lay in the past, instinct told her that the only way she would uncover it was to press on. The man who had attacked her, and killed Hope Black, might have come to the same conclusion and already be on his way to the Freis’ house. Even if she eluded him, the journalist’s wife might flee the city or succumb to the sweats, and then any chance of discovering what Frei had known would be lost. Stevie pushed Iqbal from her mind and kept on driving, a small knot of shame hardening in her chest.

Geoffrey Frei had lived in the kind of house beloved of British sitcoms. There were rows of them, as anonymous and indistinguishable to a stranger as the lines of little boys in Simon’s early class photographs. The houses made Stevie think of a lost London where bowler-hatted men in pinstriped suits wielded umbrellas rolled as tight as their emotions as they headed for the 06.45 train. And of wives who stayed at home, gearing up for the first consoling gin of the day.

The respectable-at-all-costs suburbanites had been replaced by a new type of middle classes. Journalists and TV producers, pilot fish to media sharks they mostly despised; senior lecturers hoping to make professor; Web designers and MBAs, looking for the next big app/craze/.com miracle, all passing through on the way to their next property upgrade, and all praying that the market didn’t collapse before they got there.

The curtains were drawn in many of the houses, as if they were homes in mourning, or occupied by honeymooners who had decided to stay in bed all day. But there were also pockets of activity: men and women in crumpled Boden and GAP casuals, loading their four-by-fours and estate cars with children, supplies and pets. It would have looked as if the district had decided to go on a sudden holiday, were it not for the grim stares and drawn faces. Stevie drove past a man sitting on the edge of the pavement, his face shocked free of expression. She saw doors and windows clamped with steel shutters. She heard screams and saw a woman being forced into a car by two men. Stevie slowed the Jag, wondering if she should intervene, until she saw that there were tears running down the men’s faces too.

An oversized Subaru sat outside Geoffrey Frei’s house. Stevie parked alongside it, allowing other traffic a lane to pass by, but boxing in the Subaru. She opened the gate to the Freis’ garden just as a tall woman came out of the house carrying a box of groceries. Her task was made more difficult by the blond, curly-haired child clinging to her neck, his thin legs clamped around her waist in a way that confirmed Darwin’s theories about evolution. The child looked at Stevie with wide eyes and then buried his face in his mother’s chest, wrapping himself even more closely around her. Stevie said, ‘You look like you could do with a hand. Would you like me to take the box?’

Sarah Frei had frozen on the doorstep, but the sound of Stevie’s voice galvanised her.

‘Get out of my garden and keep your distance.’

She sounded as if she had the authority of an army at her heels and Stevie took an involuntary step backwards.

‘I’ve had the sweats.’ Stevie held up a hand, remembering that Geoffrey Frei’s obituary had mentioned he was the father of twins, and wondering where the other child was. ‘I’m not contagious.’

‘I can’t afford to take that chance.’

‘I understand, but I’ve travelled quite a long way to see you. My name is Stephanie Flint. My boyfriend knew your husband and I think their deaths might be connected. If I promise not to move from here, can I ask you a few questions?’

Sarah Frei was wearing a pair of cropped jeans and a floral blouse over a dark blue vest. She was broad-hipped and large-shouldered, the kind of woman that men with a bit of land and a yen for descendants must once have prized.

‘Geoff was mugged. It was a random attack.’ The box was threatening to slip from the woman’s grasp and she bent and put it on the ground. A tin of tomatoes tumbled free, rolled across the garden path and into an overgrown border. She stared at the escaped tin, as if it was a problem beyond her capabilities, and then raised her eyes to look at Stevie. ‘I can’t tell you anything. I wasn’t there when Geoff was killed.’ She looked tired beyond tears, but there was a crack in her voice. ‘He was on his own.’

‘I think your husband was researching a story that somehow involved my boyfriend. They were due to meet the week Mr Frei died. Two days after your husband died Simon was dead too. I think their deaths might be connected.’

Sarah Frei had pinned her hair up in a careless knot. She pushed a strand away from her face.

‘Almost everyone has lost someone. I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey, but I have responsibilities.’ She lifted the box and took a step forward. ‘Get out of my way, please.’

The front garden was tiny, the only exit through the gate. They were all lepers now. It was a weapon of sorts, the force field of infection. Stevie held her ground.

‘My boyfriend didn’t die of the sweats. Someone killed him and tried to make it look like he died of natural causes. I only realised he’d been murdered when I discovered that he’d left me a laptop full of data. I couldn’t access it at first, and when I did it was too technical for me to understand. The problem is, the person who killed him doesn’t know that. They’re after me now. If they think you know something, you could be in danger too.’

The child whimpered. Sarah Frei jogged him up and down in her arms, in a dislocated, jerky fashion.

‘Don’t you get it? We’re all in danger.’

‘Your husband might have been murdered. Don’t you want to find out the truth about why he died?’

‘What the fuck does it matter any more?’ The child heard the emotion in his mother’s voice and started to cry. A man carrying supplies to his car down the path of an adjoining garden looked across at them, but he made no effort to intervene. ‘Shhhh, it’s all right.’ Sarah Frei resumed the jerky rocking. The child’s cries grew louder and more fractious. His arms and legs still stretched tightly around her, like a spider trying to subdue a much larger prey. ‘Shhhh.’ Sarah Frei put the box back down on the path and sank on to her doorstep. ‘See what you’ve done?’ She threw Stevie a defeated look, opened her shirt and put the child to her breast. ‘Shhhh.’

Stevie couldn’t stand the not-knowing any more. She said, ‘I read you had twins. Is the other one okay?’

Sarah Frei rested the child on her knees, cradling his head in the crook of her arm. She gave a small smile as he settled and Stevie caught a glimpse of the person she had been before the crisis: an untidy, capable woman, sexy despite her ample rear, rough heels and unshaven legs.

‘He’s with my mother.’ The child had quietened and the process of comforting him seemed to have soothed Sarah Frei too. ‘She was going to take both of them but Felix had a cold. We decided it was better to leave him with me and let Alex go with her. It was a mistake. I hadn’t realised how bad things were going to get.’ She looked at Stevie. ‘Can you believe what’s happening?’

It was a pause in hostilities, a Christmas football match before the fighting resumed. Stevie squatted on the ground. She saw Simon’s face, his eyes rolled back in his head, Joanie in her nest of tubes, Hope’s shattered skull.

‘No, it feels unreal.’

‘That’s where we’re going now, to my mother’s place in the New Forest, as soon as you let us.’ Sarah Frei reached into her jeans pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. ‘Geoff would go crazy if he could see me smoking and breastfeeding at the same time, but right now I think it’s the least of our worries.’ She lit up and took a long drag. ‘You’ve got until I finish this and then we’re leaving.’

The sun caught her strawberry-blonde hair, highlighting flecks of silver-grey amongst the gold. They looked like a mark of her widowhood and the sight of them made Stevie feel ashamed.

‘I’m sorry.’ She ran her hand over her own rough crop, surprised at the jaggedness of it against her palm. ‘I wouldn’t normally behave like this. It’s like I’m trying to outrun a landslide.’

‘We all are.’ Sarah Frei took a pull at her cigarette. ‘So you’d better get on with it. You only have until I finish my fag.’

‘Can you tell me anything about the story your husband was working on when he died?’

Sarah Frei took another deep drag. Stevie watched the tip of ash glow and grow, the cigarette shrink.

‘Normally Geoff doesn’t . . .’ Sarah Frei gave a dry smile. ‘Didn’t talk much about his work. He liked to leave it behind when he came home, but that last case blurred the boundaries between Geoff the family man and Geoff the journalist.’ Sarah Frei tapped the cigarette with the unconscious ease of a practised smoker and the ash crumbled to the ground. ‘He’d known one of the people involved. He didn’t tell me his name, but Geoff said they had gone to the same school; they even trained together for a while, back when Geoff still thought he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps.’ The child had fallen asleep. She fastened her blouse and then ran a hand softly over his curls. ‘He was too squeamish to be a doctor, not that he’d ever admit it to anyone except me. Geoff was a gentle man. I was the tough one in the relationship. He couldn’t stand pain.’ She looked up and her eyes met Stevie’s. ‘But he could kill with his pen, if he thought the cause justified it.’

Stevie opened her bag and flicked through the bundle of school photographs. She found the one that showed the trio of doctors together in the same row. The curly-haired boy in the glasses was sandwiched between Simon and Dr Ahumibe. She held it up so that the other woman could see it.

‘Is this your husband?’

‘I don’t know. It might be.’

Stevie took a step closer and held out the photograph.

‘Here, the boy wearing glasses?’

She pointed at the serious face beneath the Harpo Marx curls.

‘I think so. He looked so like Felix and Alex when he was little. It’s like fast-forwarding to how they’ll be when they’re ten or eleven.’ Sarah Frei grimaced as if she had just realised that she had spoken as if the future was assured. ‘Geoff was big on nurture over nature, all that Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man stuff. He reckoned the person you became was determined by how you were brought up.’

‘So, bad luck if your parents let you down.’

‘Very bad luck indeed, according to Geoff.’

Stevie looked at the turrets and dreamy spires of the school in the photograph’s background.

‘I guess your husband’s family didn’t let him down.’

A speck of steel entered Sarah Frei’s voice.

‘They worked very hard to help Geoff be what he eventually became, a good man.’

It was how the newspaper column had styled Geoffrey Frei: a good man, a campaigner against corruption.

Sarah Frei went on, ‘Don’t assume things were easy. His father worked overseas, his mother went with him and Geoff was sent to boarding school. He was horribly bullied. He hated it.’

Rich people always tried to assure you they had had it rough, Stevie thought. It was part of the way they misunderstood the world.

She said, ‘Perhaps that’s what helped him have empathy with people when he grew up. What did your husband tell you about the case?’

Sarah Frei formed her mouth into an O and breathed out a perfect smoke ring. It was a schoolgirl gesture, tough and sulky, but when she spoke her voice had lost the edge it had taken on when she had talked about her husband’s bullying.

‘Geoff had been contacted by a whistle-blower. That was often how it started. Someone who was aware of something going on in their workplace that they couldn’t stomach, but who didn’t know how to stop it, would contact Geoff. This whistle-blower was high up, but scared. They were implicated somehow and wanted Geoff to help them find a way out that wouldn’t wreck their career.’

‘What was he going to do?’

‘That was the problem. Geoff couldn’t expose the scandal without exposing his source, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to spare him anyway. He didn’t drink much, but we had wine with our dinner one evening, after the boys were in bed. Geoff got quite morose about the investigation. He didn’t go into details; like I said, he tended to keep the darker side of his work separate from family life, but it was something nasty.’ Sarah Frei stroked her child’s curls. ‘All the same, he had known the man when they were both children. They’d been friends when they were at school. That was why the whistle-blower had got in touch with Geoff in the first place.’ She shrugged. ‘Geoff was going to write the article and alert the relevant authorities, but he didn’t feel good about it.’

‘Did he say whether he was going to warn his source of what he intended to do?’

Sarah Frei put the cigarette to her lips, but drew on it less hungrily.

‘Geoff was Geoff. He liked to think he was very twenty-first century, but he had this big public-school chip on his shoulder about doing the honourable thing. I used to tell him, stuff the honourable thing. Just do the right thing.’

‘Did anyone else pick up the investigation, after he died? Any of his colleagues?’

Sarah Frei paused and Stevie became aware of the noise in the street, the growl of engines as cars drove away, the burble of subdued goodbyes. Sarah Frei raised her hand in farewell to a departing Volvo and gave a sad smile. ‘That’s Max and Abigail’s mum and dad gone. We should leave soon too.’ She glanced at her cigarette and then turned her attention back to Stevie.‘The newspaper was going to send a courier to take Geoff’s computer and notes to his editor. I think they thought it would be insensitive to send one too soon, but they should have been quicker off the mark. The house was burgled while we were at Geoff’s funeral.’ Sarah Frei shook her head. ‘Can you believe it? At the very moment we were putting my husband into the ground someone was in our home, going through our things. Most of the neighbours were at the funeral so the burglars couldn’t have chosen a better time.’

Stevie said, ‘That’s terrible.’ But she was remembering her own torn-apart flat and Simon’s ransacked apartment. ‘Did any of your neighbours get burgled too?’

‘No. I think some of them felt bad that they weren’t, as if it would have made things better if they’d lost something too.’ She gave a small, bitter laugh. ‘What I wanted was for one of them to have lost her husband instead of me. I wanted Geoff to be here so we could both lend a sympathetic ear while someone else tried to pick up the pieces of their life.’ Sarah Frei glanced at the chid and then raised her eyes to meet Stevie’s. ‘I’m sorry, that sounds terrible.’ She took an angry pull at her cigarette. ‘Geoff’s editor described the burglary as the last straw, but quite frankly I found it hard to care. The burglars took quite a few things of value, including Geoff’s computer, but so what? The boys were safe and they were all that mattered.’

‘Didn’t your husband keep a backup or store files online?’

‘Real people with real reputations were involved in Geoff’s investigations, so he was careful about where he stored his research. He had a pen drive that he kept in his jacket pocket and a laptop that he kept mainly at home. If he’d stored his research on the newspaper server his editor could have accessed it, but Geoff didn’t consider that secure enough.’ Sarah Frei rolled her eyes. ‘It’s lost. All of it.’

‘Did your husband say anything about the whistle-blower, anything that might help to identify them?’

‘Like I told you, Geoff was always anxious not to expose his sources, even to me. But he was at the angry point in the investigation. The doing-it-in-sorrow-rather-than-anger stage would have come next. He told me that the people he was investigating thought they could apply a scale to suffering, as if life was an accounts ledger and relieving the pain of one group offset inflicting it on another.’ She shrugged. ‘Geoff loved being a journalist but I’m not sure it was the best job for him. He felt things too deeply. He’d had a couple of episodes of depression, not so bad that he was hospitalised, but bad enough. I felt it was my responsibility to protect him from that.’ She took another drag at her cigarette, smoking it down to the nub, like a homeless person unsure of where their next fag would come from. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t make a very good job of things that night. I tried to add a sense of proportion by pointing out that it was just what happened everywhere: big companies destroying the environment, or exploiting their workforce, then trying to make themselves look good by sponsoring some sexy charity. I made a bad joke about how it was essential that the charity be sexy – after all, no one wants a logo highlighting victims of anal fissures on their product. Geoff lost his temper and shouted at me. It was unlike him.’

‘What do you think he meant about scales of suffering?’

The child stirred in Sarah Frei’s lap and she stroked his head again.

‘I’m not sure. I got the impression it wasn’t simply whatever the people involved had done that had infuriated him, but some warped morality that they’d used to justify it.’ She dropped the cigarette on the ground and crushed it beneath the toe of her sneaker, even though it was already dead. ‘We need to go.’

‘One last quick question, please.’ Stevie held up the photograph again and pointed to Simon, Buchanan and Ahumibe.

‘Do you recognise any of these men?’

‘They’re not men, they’re boys.’ Something caught Sarah Frei’s attention and she leant in closer, putting her arms around her son to stop him rolling from her lap. ‘Is that John Ahumibe?’

‘Yes.’

‘He was the only person from school that Geoff kept up with. They weren’t close – the occasional drink, the odd exchange of emails – they were both busy, but they touched base from time to time.’ She looked at Stevie. ‘Geoff said the whistle-blower was someone he’d known at school, but I got the impression that it was someone he hadn’t seen for a long time. It never even occurred to me to ask if it was John. Was it him?’

‘I don’t know.’ Stevie pressed her finger beneath the young faces of Simon and Buchanan. ‘What about the other two?’

‘It’s hard to be certain, but I don’t think I met either of them. Like I said, schooldays weren’t the happiest days of Geoff’s life. Are they the people Geoff was investigating?’

‘I think so.’

‘Including John Ahumibe?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who are the others?’

‘One of them was my boyfriend.’ Stevie stroked the face of the youth that had been Simon. ‘The other was their colleague, Alexander Buchanan.’

‘Was your boyfriend involved?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know. But if he was, I think he was doing his best to fix it when he died.’

‘Would you still think that if you hadn’t been in love with him?’

It was on the tip of Stevie’s tongue to say that she hadn’t been in love with Simon, but she whispered, ‘I don’t know.’

Sarah Frei blew on her son’s face, gently wakening him. He grumbled and turned away and she whispered, ‘Time to go now, Monkey.’ She looked at Stevie. ‘If you’d told me a week ago that Geoff had been murdered, I wouldn’t have rested until I’d found his killer, but things have changed. I still care, I care deeply, but the new priority is to stay alive. We’re leaving London until this virus or whatever it is burns itself out. You should do the same.’

‘There’s someone I need to check on first.’

‘Don’t leave it too long.’ Sarah Frei got to her feet, lifting her sleepy child with one arm and struggling with the box of groceries with the other. ‘Things are falling apart. Soon the sweats won’t be the only thing we have to worry about.’