Page 18 of A Slow Fire Burning

TEN

Detective Barker, his bald pate shining like a new penny in the bright morning sunlight, watched as the uniformed policewoman pushed a plastic stick into Carla’s mouth, scraping it along the inside of her cheek, withdrawing it, dropping it into a clear plastic bag. When she was done, he nodded, satisfied. He asked the policewoman to wait for him in the car outside. The boat on which Daniel Sutherland had been staying, Barker had already explained to Carla, was a rental, and it was filthy. There were traces of at least a dozen people on it, probably more, so they were collecting DNA and fingerprints from anyone and everyone, he said, in order to rule out as many people as possible.

Carla, sitting at her dining room table, wiped her mouth with a tissue. “Well,” she said, rolling her shoulders back to ease the tension at the top of her spine, “there is every chance you’ll find mine.” Detective Barker raised his eyebrows, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “I lied,” Carla went on, “about not knowing that Danielwas living on the boat. I lied about not seeing him.” Barker said nothing. He crossed the room and sat down opposite Carla at the table, lacing his fingers together. “Only you already know that, don’t you? Someone’s said something to you, haven’t they? That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it? Did someone see me?” Still, Barker said nothing. That old trick again, to make you talk, to press you into filling the silence.

It was irritating in its obviousness, but Carla was too tired to resist—she’d not slept more than an hour or two at a time since the detectives had been here last, five days ago. She kept seeing things, starting at shadows, black spots moving in the corners of her vision. That morning, she passed a mirror and was startled to see her sister’s face looking back at her, cheeks hollow, expression fearful.

“Daniel told me he’d rented a boat when he came to pick up his things. He told me to drop by. Told me not to expect much. I went there. Twice. Don’t ask me when exactly, because I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell you.” She paused. “I lied to you because I didn’t want to admit in front of Theo that I’d been there.”

Barker leaned back a little in his chair. “And why,” he said, flexing his fingers so that the knuckles cracked in a disgusting way, “was that?”

Carla closed her eyes for a moment. Listened to the sound of her own breath. “Do you know what happened to my son?” she asked the detective.

He nodded, expression grave. “I do,” he said. “I read about it at the time. A terrible thing.”

Carla gave a stiff little nod. “Yes. My sister was looking after him when it happened, I’m not sure if they reported that? She was supposed to be looking after him, in any case. Theo never forgave her. He’s had nothing to do with her since, not from the day our sondied until the day she did. He wouldn’t have her in our lives. He wouldn’t have her inhis, in any case, which at the time was alsomine. Do you see what I’m saying? I saw my sister and Daniel in secret. Of course, Theo suspected that I saw her occasionally, and there were some arguments about it, but we divorced and I moved here, and it didn’t seem to matter so much any longer. I never mentioned them to him. There it is, I suppose. I’ve been lying to Theo so long about that side of my life that sometimes I forget when it’s necessary and when it isn’t. I didn’t want him to know that I’d visited Daniel on the boat.”

The detective scrunched his face into a frown. “So you lied to us, to the police,during a murder investigation, just because you didn’t want your ex-husband to know you’d seen your nephew?” He opened his palms to her, his fingers spread wide. “That seems extraordinary to me; it seems...” He raised his eyebrows. “Are you frightened of your ex-husband, Mrs. Myerson?”

“No.” Carla gave a brief shake of her head. “No, I just... I didn’t want to upset him,” she said quietly. “I try my best not to upset Theo, and me having a relationship with Daniel would upset him.”

“Does Mr. Myerson have a temper?”

Carla shook her head again. “No,” she insisted, exasperated. “It’s not... it’s not like that.”

“What is it like?” Barker asked. He’d the air of someone genuinelyinterested; he was looking at her as though she were a specimen, a curiosity. “Did Mr. Myerson think you were trying to replace your lost child? With your nephew? Is that why your relationship with Daniel upset him?” he asked.

Carla shook her head again but said nothing. She turned her face from the detective and stared at the sad, paved backyard, with its padlocked shed, its blackened plants, dead in their pots.

The shed was empty save for a little red tricycle, bright blue tassels still attached to the handlebars. It was a present, for Ben’s third birthday. They’d had a party at their home on Noel Road, just family—Theo’s parents, Angela and Daniel, Theo’s older brother and his wife, their kids. After the cake, after the candles, they took the tricycle out on the towpath, Carla’s chest aching with tenderness as she watched Ben try it out, his chubby legs pumping up and down as he pedaled as fast as he could. Theo’s face! Hispride. “He’s a natural, see that?” And Angela, smoking, one eyebrow arched. “It’s atricycle, Theo. Everyone can ride a tricycle.” And on the way home, dusk falling, the crowds thinning, Daniel pushing Ben along. Theo’s mother saying, “Careful, Daniel, not too fast,” while Ben and Daniel ignored her completely, the pair of them shrieking with laughter as they careened around a corner, almost toppling over.

When Ben was gone, when the funeral was over and the god-awful mourners finally banished, Carla went to bed and stayed there. Theo rarely came to bed at all. He remained fiercely, angrily awake; through her medicated haze Carla used to hear him pacing in his study off the landing, stomping down the stairs and through the kitchen to the garden to smoke and then stomping back again. She heard him turning the radio on and off, flicking through the channels on the television, playing half a track of a record before sending the needle skittering across the vinyl.

Sometimes he came upstairs and stood in the doorway, not watching her but staring out the window opposite, his hand across his face, fingers working at his stubble. Sometimes he said things, statements that seemed to lead toward questions at which they neverquite arrived. Sometimes he talked about Angela, about how she had been as a child. “You said she had a temper,” he’d say, or: “You always talked about her crazy imagination.Bloodthirsty, you said. She had a bloodthirsty imagination.”

Occasionally, he asked direct questions. “Was she jealous, do you think? Of the way Ben was?”

It was discussed between them, when Ben was alive, how difficult it must be for Angela not to draw comparisons between their son and her own. Ben hit all his milestones early; he was talkative and agile, empathetic and numerate before his third birthday.He’ll be reading before his fourth,Theo liked to tell people. Carla had to tell him not to boast.

Daniel hadn’t been like that. He was a fussy baby, a poor sleeper, he’d taken forever just to crawl, he was two and a half before he started to talk. He was a clumsy, frustrated little boy, prone to epic tantrums.

“Do you think it bothered her,” Theo asked, “how special Ben was? Because Dan’s a bit of a weird kid, isn’t he? I know I’m not objective—no one is, not about their children—but even so, in this case, I think, objectively speaking, Ben was just the most wonderful little boy, he was—”

“What are you saying?” Carla’s voice sounded like it belonged to someone else, to an old woman. “What are you trying to say?”

He drew closer to the bed, his eyes wide, face flushed. “I’m asking you whether you think Angela was jealous. If, on some level, if she...”

Carla clutched at the bedsheets and drew herself painfully up to a sitting position. “You’re asking if I think my sister left that door open on purpose? Because she thought our son was more special than hers? You’re asking if I think she wanted Ben to die?”

“No! Christ, no. Not that shewantedhim to die, no. Jesus. I’mnot saying she did anything on purpose, I’m just wondering if on some subconscious level she—”

Carla collapsed back to her side, drawing the duvet up over her shoulders, over her head. “Leave me alone, Theo. Please leave me alone.”

It was a year before Carla redeveloped the habit of getting up every day, showering, dressing herself. It was eighteen months before she saw her sister again, in secret. She told Theo she had decided to join a yoga class. She dressed her weak, fleshy body in tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt and walked over to her sister’s flat on Hayward’s Place. When Angela opened the door to her, Carla recoiled in shock: Her sister had aged not by a year but by decades. She was emaciated, her sallow skin stretched tight over her skull. She looked hollowed out, desiccated.

Angela’s hair went white overnight. That’s what she said, in any case. Both sisters went gray young, but Angela claimed that she’d gone to bed on Tuesday a brunette and woken up on Wednesday almost completely gray. Just like that. She kept it long and didn’t dye it. “I look like a witch in a fairy tale, don’t I?” she said. “I terrify children in the supermarket.” She was joking, but Carla didn’t find it funny. Carla didn’t dye her hair either; she chopped it all off when it started to go. “You’re lucky,” Angela told her, and Carla flinched. “You’ve got a nicely shaped head. If I cut all my hair off, I’d look like an alien.”

It was a compliment, but Carla was annoyed. She didn’t like the sound of the wordluckyin her sister’s mouth, certainly didn’t appreciate it being applied to her. “You can’t go gray overnight,” she said crossly. “I looked it up. It’s a myth.” True, although it was alsotrue that she had read about young women, much younger than she and her sister, Soviet women fighting for the motherland in the Second World War, who’d faced such unspeakable terror they had grayed overnight. She’d read about Cambodian women who witnessed such horror they lost their sight.

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