Page 29 of A Slow Fire Burning

Would she tell Carla? he wondered. Would she tell Carla that she’d seen him today, or that she’d seen him before?Jesus Christ.He went back inside and, raising a finger to the young woman behind the bar, ordered another drink. The barmaid raised an eyebrow, almost imperceptibly. Almost.Mind your own business, he wanted to say. She placed the second drink in front of him with a smile. There you go. Maybe he’d imagined the eyebrow. Maybe he was being paranoid.

Maybe he was being paranoid about the old woman too. If she did say something to Carla, then what? Would Carla even believe her? Surely it was paranoid to believe that she would—didn’t she think the old dear was losing her marbles? Wasn’t that what she’d said?

Still. What if she did believe her? What would she think? If she knew that he had been with Angela, in what direction would that take her? Impossible to tell. Theo had known Carla close to thirty years and still, he was never quite sure which way, in any given situation, she might jump. He knew this: He had forgiven her all her trespasses and would continue to do so, always. But he was by no means certain that she would reciprocate.

He pulled his mobile from his pocket and called Carla again. Still, she did not pick up. He was tempted to order another drink, but the buzz from the first was already drifting into the dangerous fog of the second, and what if she did pick up? What was he going to say then? What was he going to tell her?

The last time he’d seen Angela, they had been standing out on Hayward’s Place, where he’d just been speaking to the neighbor. A gray day, a heavy sky, all of London monochrome. Theo had been looking for Daniel, but instead he found Angela. The old woman was right, she had cried, although he wasn’t sure it was accurate to say he’dmadeher cry. She’d just burst into tears the moment she sawhim. She invited him inside but he preferred to talk in the street. He couldn’t be in a room with her alone; he didn’t trust himself.

She looked shocking: painfully thin, spidery blue veins tracing their way through papery skin. Her hair was gray and very long; she looked like the wicked witch from a fairy tale. She looked hollowed out, a husk. Theo tried to ignore her appearance and her distress. He tried to speak to her matter-of-factly, to convey as directly as possible why he was there. That Daniel had come to his house asking for money, that he’d said he’d lost his job and had no one else to turn to. He didn’t want to bother Carla, he’d said. Theo thought that was probably a lie; he assumed there was something else at play, but he didn’t want to know what that was. Theo had written him a check for a thousand pounds. A couple of weeks later, Daniel came back—Theo was out, but he left a message.

“Can I listen?” Angela asked.

“Not on the phone,” Theo said. “He pushed it under the door.”

“What sort of note? What did it say?” Angela’s eyes were wide, the whites a jaundiced yellow. She’s ill, Theo thought. She might even be dying.

“It doesn’t matter what he said,” Theo replied. “I just need to talk to him about it.”

Angela said she didn’t know where he was, but that if she saw him, she would talk to him. “Won’t do any good,” she said, shaking her head. “He doesn’t listen to me. Carla’s the one,” she said, eyes filling with tears again. “He’ll usually do what Carla asks.”

Theo stood there for a while watching her cry; he tried to feel pity for her but failed. She clearly felt so much for herself already, his own seemed superfluous. He walked away from her before he could say something he regretted.

That wasn’t the last time he saw her, of course; that was the second to last.

EIGHTEEN

In the corners of the room, bodies formed from gathering shadows, faceless, shifting, approaching and receding, dissipating back to nothingness. Irene lay awake, listening to her breath come short and ragged in her chest, the sound of blood thick in her ears, dread weighing on her, pressing her body down into the bed.

Something had woken her. A fox in the churchyard? Or some drunkard out in the lane, shouting at nothing, or—there! No, there it was again, a sound. A creak on the stair? Irene held her breath, too afraid to reach over and turn on the light. A few seconds passed, a few more. Perhaps she had imagined it? Perhaps she had been dreaming? She exhaled, slowly, turning onto her side. There! Again! A tread. No doubt about it, and not—thankfully—on her stairs, but next door. She knew the sound well; she’d listened to Angela go up and down those stairs at all hours for years.

Was it an echo she was hearing, of Angela’s footsteps? Was this a normal response to grief, just like her visions of William, coming whistling along the lane in the evenings or standing over by thewindow when she woke, always on the point of turning, always on the point of saying,Fancy a cuppa, Reenie?

Around the edges of her vision, something moved; Irene gripped the bedcover so tightly her fingers ached.

How would Angela appear to her, Irene wondered, if she came? Would she be herself, always a little jittery, her knee forever bouncing as she sat, one skinny leg crossed over the other, chatting about the book she’d just finished, her hands always working away at something, rolling a cigarette or pulling at a thread from her linen shirt? Would she be herself, or would she be something else, would she come crooked, her neck broken, her sweet wine breath mingling with rot?

Then—there was no doubt about this now—Irene heard someone walk along the corridor on the other side of the partition wall. A soft tread, not like Angela’s drunken shuffle, and not some muffled, indistinct,imaginednoise, but footsteps. Careful and unmistakable.

There was someone next door, and it was not a ghost. It was an intruder. More than most things, Irene dreaded an intruder. She dreaded the moment at which the intruder would realize that there was someone home, a witness they would have to deal with. She dreaded the moment of reckoning, the moment at which she, the frail pensioner alone in bed, would come to understand the sort of intruder this was: an opportunist, out to snatch a wallet or a laptop computer, or something else. Someone in search of a plaything. Those terrible, pitiful stories you heard, of old ladies beaten, assaulted, eyes blackened, nightdresses soiled.

There, again! Another noise, someone moving back and forth, perhaps, along the corridor. Looking for something? Myerson, Irene thought. The man who’d made Angela cry. The man who’d lied about having ever been there at all. She’d not liked the look of him at all,not liked the way his eyes slid over her, underestimating her all the while. Stupid old fool, he’d thought. She could almost hear him muttering. Nosy old cow.

Well. She might as well fulfill her curtain-twitching destiny, then, mightn’t she? She felt in the darkness for the light switch and clicked on the lamp, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the light. Maneuvering herself into a sitting position, she reached for her spectacles. Her mobile phone, inevitably, was not next to her bed. The blasted phone was never where she needed it to be; no matter where she was or what she was doing, it was always in another room.

She crept down the stairs, feeling her way along the stairwell in the dark, not wanting to attract attention by turning on the downstairs lights. Stupid, she muttered to herself. Blundering around in the darkness—never mind twisting an ankle, you’ll break a hip.

As Irene reached the last step, as carefully she tested with one slippered foot that she hadquite definitelyreached the ground floor, she heard from next door a louder sound, a suddenwhump!as though someone had stumbled, and she cried out, “Who is that? I can hear you. I’m calling the police! The police are coming!” She sounded laughably indignant, even to her own ears. “Do you hear me?”

Silence answered.

Two police officers, one young, stocky, fresh-faced, the other older, a woman in her thirties, weary-looking, stood outside Angela’s house, hands on hips. “The door’s locked,” the stocky one told Irene. He tried the door handle again, just to show her. “No sign of anyone tampering with it. No sign of any damage to the windows.” He shrugged, apologetic. “There’s no sign of a break-in.”

“There’s someone in there,” Irene, shuffling over to join the police officers, insisted. “I heard them. I heard them walking around.”

“And you say the house is empty? You’re sure it hasn’t been rented out?”

“No, it’s definitely empty, they haven’t even finished clearing it, and the thing is, there was a man here today, and he lied about the fact he’d been here before, and I just... I just...”

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