Page 58 of A Slow Fire Burning

“Jesus.” Theo exhaled slowly. “Do you mind?” He indicated the bed, and for a startling moment Miriam wasn’t sure what he was asking. He sat, perching his large bottom on the corner of the bunk, an inch or two from Miriam’s feet. “It can’t be, Miriam. He’s dead. Jeremy is dead, you said so, the police said so.”

“I wished him so, and the police made an assumption. People said they saw him, in all sorts of places—Essex, Scotland. Morocco. The police followed up, or at least they said they did, I don’t know how seriously they took any of it.... But you know all this, don’t you? It was in the book.”

Theo winced. “There was something about a foot?” he ventured, his face flushing.

Miriam nodded. “Some kids playing on a beach near Hastings found a human foot a few weeks after Jeremy went missing. It wasthe right size and the right color, it had the right blood type. This was all pre-DNA, so there was no way of checking for sure, but it was assumed that it was him. They thought maybe he’d been dashed against the rocks somewhere, or caught up in a boat propeller. That was the end of it, in any case. They stopped looking.”

“But...” Theo was shaking his head. “Think about it. If somehow he’d got away, faked his own death, changed his identity, there would have been others, wouldn’t there? Other girls, I mean, other women. A man like that, a man capable of doing what he did to you, to your friend, he doesn’t just do it once and then stop, does he?

“Maybe he does,” Miriam said. “Where is it written that theyallget a taste for it? Maybe he tried it and he didn’t really like it. Maybe it frightened him. Maybe it didn’t satisfy him in the way he thought it would. Or maybe...” The boat rocked in some other vehicle’s wake, and Miriam opened her eyes to focus on the ceiling once more. “Maybe hedidn’tdo it just once. Maybe he did it again and again, and people just didn’t make the connections. It was easier, back then, wasn’t it, for men like him to just keep going, to move around, to exist on the margins, to drift, to carry on for years? He could have gone abroad, he could have changed his name, he could be”—her voice faltered—“anywhere.”

Myerson shuffled along the bed so that he was no longer sitting next to her feet but at her side. He reached over and—she could scarcely believe this—took her hand. “I have his email address,” he said. “The police will be able to trace him using that. I can give them the letters, I can explain, we can explain—we can explain everything.” His eyes met hers. “Everything.”

Miriam withdrew her hand.Everything?He was offering, Miriam understood, an apology. An acknowledgment. If they went to the police with these letters, they would have to explain how it was that Theo came to be their recipient, how it was that the two ofthem deduced that only one man on earth could know about that song, about its significance, and in doing so, Theo would have to unmask himself; he would have to acknowledge Miriam as the inspiration for his story. She would geteverythingshe wanted.

She blinked slowly, shaking her head. “No,” she said. “No, that won’t do.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand. She propped herself up on her elbows. “You won’t contact the police, you’ll contact him. Respond to his questions. Some of his questions, in any case.” She paused for a moment to think things through. “Yes, you will get in touch with him, apologize to him for neglecting his letters. Arrange a meeting.”

Theo nodded, his lips pursed, rubbing his head. “I could do that. I could ask him to meet me, to talk about his questions. And when he comes, the police will be there, they’ll be waiting.”

“No,” Miriam said firmly. “No, the police won’t be waiting.”

For a long moment, Theo held her gaze. Then he turned away. “All right,” he said.

THIRTY-NINE

There she was, in the back bedroom of Irene’s house, looking at the neatly made single bed, a bright yellow towel folded neatly at its foot. There was a wardrobe and a bookcase and a bedside table on which Laura had placed the defaced photograph of herself with her parents. She looked at it a moment before turning their faces to the wall.

From downstairs, she could hear Irene’s surprisingly girlish laughter. She was listening to something on the radio, a program where people had to talk for as long as they could without repeating themselves or hesitating. Laura found it mystifying but it cracked Irene up, which was in itself hilarious.

Once Laura had finally finished unpacking her things—she didn’t own much, but she was doing everything one-handed—she sat down on the bed, propping herself up against the wall. Picking idly at the cast around her wrist, the edge of which was starting to fray, she listened to people moving about on the other side of the wall, their voices a low murmur. The house—Angela’s house—was up for sale, and there was a constant stream of viewers, none of whom had yetmade an offer. Or so the agent had told her. “Rubberneckers,” he’d complained to her when she met him outside in the lane, smoking furiously, “collecting material for their poxy true crime podcasts.”

A few of them had knocked on Irene’s door, but Laura had seen them off. They’d had real reporters coming too, but Irene wasn’t talking to anyone. She’d done her talking, to the police. She’d done the listening too, and the recording—Laura was insanely, stupidly proud of her; she felt prouder of her than she’d ever felt of a member of her own family. Laura had even started calling her Miss Marple, although Irene had put a quick and surprisingly irritable stop to that.

Now, in between listening to things on the radio and reading her books and helping Laura deal with all the legal stuff she had to do, her personal injury compensation claim and her forthcoming court appearance and all that, she talked about the two of them taking a trip. She’d always wanted to go to a place called Positano, apparently, which is where they set that film about Hannibal Lecter. Or something like that.

Laura said she couldn’t afford to go on holiday, or not until she got her compensation money anyway, but Irene said it wasn’t a problem. “We had savings, William and I,” she said, and when Laura said they couldn’t spend that, Irene just tutted.

“Why ever not? You can’t take it with you.”

Laura had to sit down for a moment; she felt quite light-headed. Low blood sugar, maybe, or perhaps it was the dizzying effect of watching her horizons, narrowed for so long, expanding once again.

They weren’t going anywhere just yet. Laura was still recovering from a concussion and a cracked rib and a seriously mashed-up lefthand. That girl, the big one with the nose ring, she’d stuck her great big size-ten foot on it and stamped away. “Twenty-seven bones in the hand,” her doctor had told her, pointing to the image on the screen to show her the extent of the damage, “and you’ve broken fifteen. You’re very lucky—”

“I certainly feel lucky,” Laura said.

The doctor smiled at her indulgently. “You’re lucky that the breaks were clean. With the right physical therapy, you should get back your full range of motion.”

Back in physical therapy. Just like old times.

“It feels like we’ve come full circle,” Laura’s mother said. She’d been keeping up a histrionic weeping at Laura’s bedside for what was probably just a few minutes but felt like days. “I can’t believe we’re back here again, you gravely hurt, in hospital....”

“Still, at least this time it’s not because your bit on the side ran me over with his car and drove off, is it?”

Her mother didn’t stay long. Her father didn’t either, because Deidre was in the car outside, parked on a double red line. “With any luck, they’ll tow her away!” he said with a nervous laugh, glancing over his shoulder as though worried she might overhear. He squeezed Laura’s good hand and kissed her on the forehead, promising to visit again soon.

“Perhaps when you’re better,” he said as he paused in the doorway on his way out, “we could spend a bit more time together. We might even get a place together, what about that, chicken?”

Laura shook her head. “Dad, I can’t, we tried that. Me and Deidre, it’s never going to work.”

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