A Lovely Way to Burn

Thirty-Six

It was like going back to the beginning again, the smell of decay, the silent apartment, the slow patrol through empty rooms, except this time there was music softly playing, a repetitive not-quite melody she had never heard before, notes criss-crossing, as haphazard as colours on a harlequin’s costume. Everything in Iqbal’s flat looked as it had on her previous visit, its contents tidy and tastefully arranged, but the air was tainted. Stevie took Hope’s gun from her bag. The weight of it unnerved her, but she kept it in her hand, the barrel pointing away from her.

‘Iqbal?’

Stevie had meant to shout his name, but it came out barely above a whisper and was lost in a tide of notes.

The screens of the computers ranked along the desk beneath the stairs were dead. Stevie noticed Simon’s laptop amongst them, a small pile of printouts stacked neatly by its side. She ignored it.

‘Iqbal?’

The room was almost white with light, the brightness of the day cutting through the picture windows. She lowered the blind and saw that the reading lamp beside the couch was on, although the couch itself was empty, its cushions plumped as if no one had sat there for a while.

‘Iqbal?’

Stevie ran the tips of her fingers along the surface of the breakfast bar, raising a thin coating of dust. She brushed a hand along the wall as she climbed the stairs, though she had never been afraid of heights.

‘Iqbal?’

The music was fainter upstairs. Years ago she had gone on impulse to a boyfriend’s house and found him in bed with a woman she had never seen before. For some reason the moment came back to her, the feeling she had got when she had walked into his hallway, the sense that something was out of balance, the world not as it should be.

Iqbal’s bed was hidden behind a Japanese screen, white paper stretched on a cherry wood frame. A lamp glowed softly behind it. She said his name again softly, ‘Iqbal?’ The music rose in a wave and shattered, notes splashing around her, but nothing broke the gleam of light beyond the screen.

‘Jesus.’ Stevie ran a hand over her hair, still surprised to find it shorn. She could go downstairs, collect the laptop, bundle the papers Iqbal had left into her bag and head for Buchanan’s lab. If she went now, she might be able to convince herself that Iqbal was waiting out the sweats in comfort somewhere else. Stevie took a deep breath and stepped behind the screen.

In life, Iqbal had been lean, with features clean enough to be carved in stone. Death had robbed him of his beauty. Stevie saw the empty pill bottles on the bedside table and whispered, ‘Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.’ She had an urge to kick the bed, to shake his body back to life and slap some sense into it. ‘Why would you do this?’ She felt a pain in the palms of her hands and realised that she had clenched her fists so tightly her nails were digging into them. ‘Stupid.’ She had thought the sweats senseless, but to submit to the dark rather than taste even the first tide of suffering was worse.

Stevie pulled the sheet over the face that was no longer his and went downstairs. The music was coming from an iPad resting on one of the bookcases. She tried to close it down but the small screen confused her and the music rattled on, unbearable and pointless. Stevie took the tablet out on to the balcony, looked at the empty street below and then cast it down on to the concrete. She went back indoors and sank on to the couch. The gun was still in her hand. She stowed it in her bag, took out her mobile and phoned Derek. An automated voice informed her that the number she was calling was no longer available. He had gone to Norfolk, she told herself, to be with Francesca, the woman who had stolen him away from Joanie.

Somewhere on the other side of the city a pyre of black smoke was reaching into the sky. She watched it for a while and then went to Iqbal’s kitchen and searched through his cupboards. Although they were packed with enough tins and dried goods to keep a family for several weeks, there was no alcohol.

‘Stupid.’ She wondered why she hadn’t taken a bottle of malt from Simon’s flat. Why hadn’t it occurred to her that at some point she would need to get drunk? ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid.’ It was becoming a mantra. She went to the desk and looked at the printouts piled next to Simon’s laptop. An envelope neatly labelled with her name lay on top. There was déjà vu in that too. Stevie ripped it open and took out the letter inside.

Dear Stevie

Please don’t go upstairs. I have the sweats. I knew from the start that I wanted to have some control over the way I die, and so tea and biscuits weren’t the only things I stockpiled. Meeting you has made these last days better. It also makes leaving harder, but I’ve read how the final stages go. I hope you’ll mourn me a little, but please don’t be too sad. You gave me a wonderful gift. My gift to you is beside the laptop. I think Simon and his team made a genuine mistake, the kind that might happen to anyone. They tried to do something good. I feel jealous of Simon, but you can be proud of him, even though he got some things wrong. It’s the intention behind the act that counts, right?

I lost my faith a long time ago, but recently I’ve been thinking there might be something beyond all of this after all and that if there is some kind of deity they won’t mind whether we believe in them or not. What they will care about is whether we tried to do good in this world. I’m glad I had the chance to be some help to you before I go. Who knows, it might open a door in the afterlife.

Please pray for me.

Iqbal

Stevie found an unopened bottle of bubblebath at the back of the bathroom cabinet. Its label was decorated with a jolly Santa Claus holding a sprig of holly in his hand. She wondered if it had been a Christmas present and, if so, who had given it to Iqbal. Had he simply never got round to opening it, or kept it for some other reason? She couldn’t find a basin and so she took a large bowl from the kitchen, carried it upstairs to the bathroom and filled it with warm water. She poured a capful of bubblebath into the bowl and splashed a hand around in the water. Foam frothed on its surface, the bubbles horribly festive. A familiar, clean scent rose from it, more suitable to a child’s bathtime than to a corpse’s laying-out.

Stevie set the warm water at Iqbal’s bedside, soaked a fresh flannel, and began to wipe his body with it. He had asked her to pray for him, but her mother and she had never been churchgoers. She didn’t even know what religion Iqbal had belonged to. In the end she settled for the Lord’s Prayer, stumbling a little over the final lines,

For thine is the kingdom,

the power, and the glory,

for ever and ever.

Amen.

When she was finished she patted Iqbal’s skin dry with a towel, and then found a clean sheet and wound him tightly in it. Were it not for the whiteness of the cotton, his body would have resembled a mummy’s, lifted free of its sarcophagus. Stevie had taken a piece of paper and a marker pen from the desk. She wrote his name clearly, IQBAL, and placed the paper on top of the body.

‘Not exactly a good send-off, I’m afraid, but the best I can do.’

Stevie touched her fingers to her lips and placed the kiss she had been too squeamish to give his dead skin, on to Iqbal’s parcelled forehead. She felt calm, as if the act of washing and binding him had soothed her.

There was a typewritten letter on top of the small pile of pages that Iqbal had left next to Simon’s laptop. Stevie saw a faint reflection of herself in the desk’s glass surface and slid the papers closer, erasing the gaunt face, the ragged hair. She set the letter aside, uncertain that she could survive the sound of Iqbal’s voice in her head again, so soon after reading his suicide note. The rest of the pages looked impersonal, reams of numbers cumulating into calculations. Stevie recognised the layout and realised that Iqbal had printed the data from Simon’s laptop. She worked her way slowly through it, careful to keep the pages in order. Iqbal had highlighted particular numbers and lines of figures, perhaps thinking that would make it easier for a non-statistician to understand. Despite his efforts, Stevie found it impossible to make sense of what was in front of her. She turned to the letter, dread in her belly, but as soon as she started to read, she knew that Iqbal had written it before the sweats had touched him, back when he had thought he might survive. There was no greeting and no leave-taking, no plea for her affection. This was the computer guru and statistician speaking.

A brief summary of findings

The research team analysed their original data in the usual way.

i.e. they attempted to ascertain whether positive results were due to their new treatment, or simply owing to chance. After studying the data, they concluded the possibility that the positive results were mere chance was one in a thousand. Drugs have been licensed on far lower probabilities. It was as close to proof that the treatment was effective as they could have hoped for.

What I believe Simon eventually realised, and what I discovered when I redid the team’s calculations, was that along the way someone had made a catastrophic statistical error. The error had been absorbed and repeated. There was in fact only a one in ten chance that the treatment had been effective, way below the balance of proof required.

This appears to have been a genuine mistake, a miscalculation in the figures.

I was helped in my own calculations by a coded mathematical summary Simon included amongst the documents, a sophisticated text it was a pleasure to grapple with. This suggests to me that he wanted to keep what he had found secret, but detectable to someone who would know how to look for it in the right way.

Stevie leant back in the chair and looked up at the ceiling. Simon had made a mistake, a costly, devastating mistake, but a mistake all the same.

She turned on the laptop and scrolled through the documents, searching for something else that might have made the computer a target, but it appeared that Simon had acquired the machine purely for the purpose of storing the drug trial data. The only unrelated document was the photograph of the two of them together in Russell Square,

Stevie looked up at the ceiling again. A small cobweb she was sure Iqbal would never have allowed hung gossamer-high above her head. She had seen photographs of Chernobyl: abandoned homes, factories and schools that had been overrun by nature until they looked as if they had belonged to some lost civilisation. It was easy to imagine London’s pavements cracked by weeds, colonies of deer roaming Oxford Street, dust gathering on the tables of Caffè Nero and Starbucks, posters for action movies wilting from bill-boards and Underground tunnel walls. She sat up. Those kinds of thoughts had the potential to drag her into the same shadows that had claimed Iqbal.

Buchanan had insisted that, if Simon had been murdered, then the blame lay with his gambling associates, but the chemist had also been adamant that the treatment was effective. If he was wrong about one, then he might be wrong about the other. The question was, did Buchanan genuinely believe what he had told her, or was he lying?

She still had Hope’s gun. She could go to the lab, put the barrel to Buchanan’s head and demand that he tell her the truth. Stevie tried to imagine what it would be like to use it and remembered the way Hope’s skull had bloomed red against Simon’s floor. Anyone who pointed a gun must be prepared to fire it.

Alexander Buchanan had been quick to push himself forward, quick too to provide explanations and offer help, but there had been a third man in the research team. Dr John Ahumibe had been more reticent. He had lost two friends and a work colleague, but Stevie wondered if there had been another dimension to the paediatrician’s reserve and if, behind the quiet façade, lay something he wanted to hide.