A Lovely Way to Burn

Seven

Stevie put the coffee cups in the dishwasher, poured herself a glass of water and went back through to the lounge. The seat of the armchair was rumpled where Julia Sharkey had sat. She smoothed all trace of her visitor away, lay down on the couch and took Simon’s letter from the pocket of her sweatsuit.

It was sealed in an ordinary, white envelope. She ran a fingertip across her name and address, handwritten by Simon before he died. It occurred to Stevie that Julia must believe his death was suicide, whatever she had said about the lack of evidence. Why otherwise would Simon have left a hidden note addressed to her? He had known he was going to die, guessed it would be Stevie who would find him and left the note as an apology, somewhere it would be found by his cousin, rather than by the police.

‘What if they’d made me a cup of tea? You didn’t think of that, did you, you selfish bastard?’

Stevie flung the letter across the lounge and turned on the television.

Ten minutes later she muted the screen, crossed the room and picked up the letter. Part of her wanted to put it in the kitchen sink and burn it, like microfilm that must be disposed of in a spy movie, but Stevie knew she would regret it. She turned her back on the TV screen where Naomi was demonstrating a range of bracelets and necklaces made from semi-precious stones, and went through to the spare bedroom.

The bed was still unmade, and smelt faintly of sweat. She stripped the sheets, left them in a mound on the floor and opened the window. A pile of catalogues featuring forthcoming products was heaped on her desk. Stevie pushed them to one side. She had hung a framed poster above her workspace when she moved in, the alphabet in several fonts, pretty enough to be decorative, boring enough not to distract her too much. She sat staring at the print without seeing it, and then placed Simon’s letter in front of her. Her fingertips touched her name again. She could feel the indents beneath the letters where Simon had pressed hard as he wrote. How strange that the pressure he had exerted should still persist, when the man himself was dead. Stevie slit the seal, unfolded the sheet of paper inside and started to read.

Dear Stevie,

I’ve never written you a love letter. I wish I was correcting that oversight now, but this is a letter I hope you never have to open. If you are reading it, it means I’m lying low and have an important request to make.

I have left a package in the loft space of your apartment. My plan is to collect it myself without your ever knowing, but if circumstances make that impossible, I beg you to conceal it in your most frivolous bag and deliver it unopened to Mr Malcolm Reah at St Thomas’s. Do not entrust it to anyone else, no matter how polite, kind or authoritative they are. It may be that something has already happened and that your first instinct is to turn to the police. Please don’t. Malcolm will know what to do. He finishes his rounds at 3pm on weekdays and then goes directly to the ward office to write up his notes. Please deliver it to him there at your first opportunity.

I am about to set out for a meeting which I hope will make all of this superfluous but, if it doesn’t go as I intend, and I somehow wash up somewhere without a phone signal, I want to make sure that you get the package into the right hands.

I’m not used to writing from the heart, but I want you to know that you mean more than sex to me (and you know how important I consider sex). It seems a little crass to write this in extremis, but I hope we have a future together.

Stevie, you are clever, persuasive, persistent and resourceful and have enough nous to know that doing the right thing doesn’t always mean doing the obvious thing. Please make sure Malcolm Reah gets the package. It will sound melodramatic, but you might just save my life.

All My Love,

Simon

Beneath his signature, in a wilder, more impulsive hand, Simon had scrawled,

Trust no one except Reah.

Stevie was surprised to find that she was crying. It had been unfair of Simon to write to her of the future just before he died. It was as if he had taken a portion of her life with him.

She took a tissue from the box on her desk and wiped her eyes. Simon hadn’t committed suicide, that much was clear. The letter didn’t mean he hadn’t died of natural causes though; weird coincidences did happen and stress could lead to sudden heart attacks, everyone knew that.

She reread the letter through a swim of tears. Her first thought was that Simon had misjudged her, and that she would leave the package where it was, telephone the police and show them the letter. Perhaps she could ask for the officer who had interviewed her after she had reported Simon’s death. He had been sympathetic, in a weary way. There was a phone on the corner of her desk. She reached out a hand and touched it.

Stevie pushed back the desk chair, went through to the hallway, dragged the stepladder from the cloakroom cupboard and set it beneath the small ceiling hatch that led to the loft space. If the package was hidden there she would telephone the police. No one would blame her for checking first.

The ladder’s rungs were cold against her bare feet. Stevie tipped the hatch open and put her head and shoulders into the loft. It was dark and spidery and she was forced to go back down and find a torch. She pointed its beam into the blackness and saw a shape, dark and flat, resting on one of the ceiling joists, beyond arm’s reach.

‘Fuck, Simon,’ Stevie whispered. ‘You’re not exactly making things easy for me.’

The days in bed had weakened her, and it took all of her strength to haul herself into the crawlspace that separated her ceiling from the apartment above. She lay there for a moment, gathering her resources, and then stuck the torch in her mouth and started to pull herself along one of the beams on her belly. Simon must have used a pole of some kind to push the package out of reach. He would never have fitted his body into the tight space. A tiny fleck of darkness scuttled away from her. Stevie gasped, but the torch in her mouth stopped her from crying out.

The telephone started to ring down in the flat below and Stevie remembered she had forgotten to call the TV station. She took the torch from between her teeth.

‘Shit, shit, fuck, fuck, fuck, shit.’

The beam of light swept the length of the narrow space. It was like being buried alive, sandwiched there in the dark. Something touched Stevie’s face. She gasped and flung a hand out, but she had come too far to turn back.

Now that she was closer she could see that the package was oblong and wrapped in a plastic bag. Stevie stretched out, gripped the edge of the plastic with her fingertips and pulled it slowly towards her. ‘Got you.’ She grasped it tightly with both hands. She had expected the package to contain some kind of manuscript, but it was too hard-edged and heavy to be papers. Stevie edged her way backwards until she was able to lower herself back, out of the hatch. Her feet groped for the ladder. It occurred to her that it would be ironic if she were to fall now and end up in the morgue beside Simon, but she managed the transition safely and set her burden on the top step.

The plastic bag was grimed with dust and cobwebs. She peeled it free to reveal a laptop zipped in an anonymous slipcase. Stevie tossed the empty plastic bag back into the loft, slotted the hatch cover back in place and carried the laptop down with her, realising she was as filthy as the bag she had discarded.

She stripped off her tracksuit, went naked into the spare bedroom and set the laptop on her desk. There was nothing for it but to phone the police; anything else would be foolish. She unzipped the slipcase and slid the laptop free. Simon had been devoted to a slim ultra-fast tablet, small enough to slip into his jacket pocket. This machine reminded her of her own computer, top of the range a few years ago, but not up-to-date enough for someone as techno-chic as Simon. Stevie opened the lid, pressed the power button and watched the screen glow into life. The manufacturer’s logo sailed towards her, followed by Windows’ four-coloured pane. The display shifted to black, Stevie saw her own naked torso reflected in it for an instant, and then the start page invited her to enter the password.

She typed in different variations of Simon’s name, St Thomas’s Hospital, her own name, his cousin’s name. Each try elicited an irritating wobble on the screen.

‘Simon, you are really pissing me off now,’ Stevie muttered. She was going to have to stop these whispered appeals to the dead, especially when it seemed she had never really known the living man.