Page 59 of A Slow Fire Burning

“Oh, I know,” he said, nodding vigorously. “I know that. I know you couldn’t live with her again. I was thinking a bit further down the road, you know. After I’ve left her.” Laura smiled at him reassuringly. She wasn’t going to hold her breath.

Egg had come to see her too. Detective Barker, his name was; she’d finally got it into her head, though in her heart, he would always be Egg. He came to say how sorry he was that she’d been hurt, and also to say that Miriam from the canal had withdrawn her complaint about Laura. “She admitted having your key,” Egg told her. “We’ve had to talk to her about a number of statements she made during the investigation which turned out to be not quite accurate.”

“I’m shocked,” Laura said, smiling at him. “Truly shocked.”

He raised an eyebrow. “She had quite the story. She claimed to be trying to help you, who she believed to be guilty, while also trying to incriminate Carla Myerson, who she believed to be innocent but who was, in fact, guilty.”

“You really couldn’t make this shit up,” Laura said.

He smiled at her then. “You’ll be hearing from us, Laura,” he said on his way out. “There’s still the matter of this stolen bag, with the knife and the jewelry.”

“Don’t forget the thing with the fork,” Laura reminded him.

“Yes, of course. The fork.”

At night, lying in her single bed, threadbare sheets tucked tight around her body, Laura lay with her good palm pressed against the wall, on the other side of which was Daniel’s room. There was something uncannily circular about all this, how it started out with her in Daniel’s bed and finished with her separated from his bedroom by just a few inches of Victorian brick.

She returned often, in her mind, to the night on his boat, to themorning dawning, and the strange thing was that what tormented her was not him, not the sudden change in his behavior, the flick of a switch from charm to cruelty, it wasn’t the look on his face when she lunged at him, teeth bared.

No, the thing that she could not get out of her head was the moment she left the boat, the moment she stepped from the back deck to dry land and glanced up to her right, the moment she saw, in that gray dawn half-light, a woman up on the bridge looking down at her. The thing that tormented her now was that she could not if her life depended on it conjure up that woman’s expression; she could not say whether she looked sad or angry, broken or resolute.

EPILOGUE

A man has been found dead on a houseboat on the canal.

Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before.

Carla heard the rumors, the silly jokes from the other women, at lunchtime.He another one of yours, Cazza? Been a busy girl, incha?She went to the library that afternoon; she wasn’t permitted to read news stories about crimes on the internet, but she persuaded one of the guards (a “Myerson megafan!”) to print the story off for her at home and bring it in.

SUSPECTED KILLER FOUND MURDERED

The partially decomposed body of 58-year-old Jeremy O’Brien, who was also known as Henry Carter and JH Bryant, was found on a partially submerged boat on the Regent’s Canal. O’Brien, who was wanted in connection with the 1983 murderof teenager Lorraine Reid, had previously been assumed to have taken his own life after he disappeared within days of the Reid killing.

Police say it appears O’Brien had been living with his stepbrother in Spain since the 1980s, where he went by the name James Henry Bryant. O’Brien was badly injured in a car accident in 1988 where he suffered spinal damage; he used a wheelchair. Police say they believe he returned to England last year after the death of his stepbrother and has been living in sheltered accommodation in north London under the name Henry Carter.

Despite some similarities between the O’Brien murder and that of Daniel Sutherland, 23, six months ago—both bodies were discovered in boats on the canal and both died as a result of stab wounds to the chest and neck—police say they are not connecting the killings, pointing out that the woman convicted of murdering Daniel Sutherland, Carla Myerson, who has been imprisoned at HMP Bronzefield since July, pleaded guilty to the crime and made a full confession.

Carla stopped reading, folded up the piece of paper, and handed it back to the guard. “Thank you,” she said. “Theo’s said he’ll put a signed copy of his latest book in the post.”

A few days later, Carla received a letter from a criminologist, asking if she might visit her to talk about her case. Carla had no particular desire to talk to anyone about her case, but she did crave conversation with someone educated. She said yes.

The criminologist, a bright-eyed, freshly scrubbed, impossibly youngwoman who turned out to be a student with hopes of getting a first (and possibly even a book deal!) on the back of her thesis, of which she was hoping to make Carla the focus. There had already been one false confession in this case—was it possible that there had been two? Could Carla be a (self-harming) victim of a miscarriage of justice? Was there a serial killer targeting men living on or near the Regent’s Canal? Was there a serial killer targeting other killers?

The poor thing was so painfully earnest, Carla felt quite bad about bursting her speculative bubble. There was no miscarriage of justice, she told the young woman calmly. There is no serial killer operating on the canal. The one case has nothing to do with the other.

“But your husband, he thought—”

“Oh.” Carla smiled at her apologetically. “You’ve been talking to Theo. You need to take him with more than a pinch of salt, I’m afraid. He’s a dreamer; he lives in his own world.”

“So it was definitely... you definitely did it?” the young woman prompted, disappointment written all over her pretty face.

Carla nodded. “I did, yes.”

“Well...why? Could we talk about why?”

Carla shook her head. “I did say in my email that I wasn’t prepared to talk about the background in detail, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, really? But you’re soatypical—you’re middle class, you’re educated, you’re unmarried....”

---