A Lovely Way to Burn

Forty-One

Stevie had intended to smash one of the building’s rear windows with the wheel jack, but when she got closer she saw that the windows were barred. She cursed and tried the fire escape and then the front entrance, but the doors to Buchanan’s lab were locked, as she had known they would be.

In movies, people picked locks, spun their tumblers home with a credit card, or took out a gun and blasted them into irrelevance. Stevie squatted in the doorway’s shadows, trying to plan her next move. The wheel jack was heavy in her bag, the gun snug beside it, but even if the door gave way, smashing it would take a while and make too much noise, and shooting at the lock was an invitation to a ricochet, a bullet in the face.

Her mobile buzzed with news of a text. Stevie took it out of her pocket and pressed the small speech bubble on the screen: Knock if you want to come in. She cursed. Buchanan must have spotted her on the surveillance cameras but his message gave a surreal, Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole edge to her fear. She tensed, unsure of whether to run, or wait for the chemist to come to her.

The door opened. Stevie reached for Hope’s gun, but strong hands grabbed her around her waist, pinned her arms behind her back and dragged her into a cocaine-white corridor that smelt of bleach. Stevie kicked and bucked, but her assailant held firm. She barely had time to register that he was dressed in protective overalls, his head and neck helmeted by breathing apparatus, like an investigator in a nuclear disaster zone, before a handkerchief was pressed over her mouth and nose, and a line of darkness sucked her down.

Stevie jerked awake. Her knees were drawn up to her chin and her eyelids felt as if they had been weighted with pennies. The thought forced her eyes open.

She was lying on a single bed in a small, white-painted, windowless room. The light was a searing fluorescent bright. Her head was foggy from whatever the stranger had sedated her with and her throat was Sunday-morning dry. Stevie massaged her temples with her fingertips. She looked up, saw a camera peering at her from a high corner, and resolved not to cry.

The collapsing world had made her think that Buchanan would give up his secrets as readily as Dr Ahumibe had, like a ship dropping its ballast as it neared port, but it seemed that the chemist was as obsessed with keeping his secrets as she was with uncovering the truth. Stevie looked up at the camera and said in a voice creaky from lack of fluids, ‘You win. Let me go and I promise to mind my own business.’ There was no sign that anyone had heard her.

She swung her feet on to the floor and sat on the edge of the bed until she was sure that she could stand up without falling over. Her legs felt numb and insubstantial, as if she had been on a bumpy long-haul flight that had confined passengers to their seats, but Stevie managed the three steps to the door. It lacked a handle but a small, reinforced window looked out on to a deserted, equally white corridor.

The only hiding place was beneath the bed, or in the small shower room attached to her cell. Stevie checked them both, but it was clear that her satchel had disappeared. She searched her pockets, but she had already registered the absence of the gun’s comforting weight and was unsurprised to find her mobile gone.

A second security camera observed her in the shower room. Stevie gave it the finger, then washed her face, used the toilet and drank some water from the tap.

The madness of the last few days crashed over her. If she had fled the city, as Derek had told her to, she might be holed up somewhere safe, ready to sit out the sweats. The thought brought hot tears to Stevie’s eyes, but she felt the surveillance camera shift and blinked them away. She looked into the lens and repeated her offer: ‘Let me go and I won’t bother you again.’ But the camera maintained its mute, unblinking stare. ‘Okay,’ she muttered. ‘Fuck you.’ Stevie went back into the bedroom, stripped the sheet from the bed and started to fashion it into a noose.

She had just managed to string her handiwork over the bathroom door when the man in the protective suit entered the cell. He shoved her on to the bed and swept the sheet away. Stevie had left the duvet lying on the floor and he scooped that up too. It was an awkward movement to make in the bulky suit and Stevie grabbed her chance. She kicked the stranger in the stomach, knocking him off balance, and dashed for the door. For a moment she thought she might make it, but her jailer flung out a gloved hand and caught her by the ankle, felling her smack against the floor. The fall knocked the wind from her and Stevie lay there for a long time after he had locked the door behind him.

The unwavering fluorescence of the overhead lights absorbed all concept of time, and Stevie wasn’t sure how long it was before the man returned. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the floor to avoid the camera’s stare and the dazzle of the lights, but raised her head when he entered. She ran her fingers through her hair, trying to coax it into some kind of a style. The man threw a tracksuit and some underwear on to the floor and said, ‘Shower and put these on.’

His voice was muffled by his head mask, but Stevie had felt his strength and knew that he was young. She gave him a modest version of her killer smile.

‘I’m not showering beneath a camera.’

‘Do it yourself, or I’ll make you.’ The mask made him sound like an asthmatic Dalek. ‘If you’d looked in a mirror lately, you’d realise no one’s interested in your skinny arse.’ He tossed a mobile phone on to the bare mattress. ‘When that rings, answer it.’

Stevie looked directly at the man’s mask. She could see her reflection in the visor, her head cartoon-large on its curved surface. She kicked her running shoes beneath the bed, pulled off Simon’s battered trousers and T-shirt, and stripped away her underwear. She forced herself to stand there for a second, naked and defiant, goose pimples rising on her flesh, and then scooped the fresh clothes from the floor and went through to the shower. She felt the man’s eyes following her. Her body trembled with fatigue and the uncertainty of whether his interest could be worked to her advantage, or if that would only add to the danger she was in.