Page 36 of A Slow Fire Burning

As he leaves, he hums a tune, and in a voice full of tears, he sings

What I took from her, I won’t give back

TWENTY-ONE

Carla moved through her house, room to room, checking and rechecking wardrobes, cupboards, the backs of doors, anywhere she might have hung the bag with the Saint Christopher in it. Light-headed with exhaustion, she moved slowly and carefully, as if through mud. Every now and again, her phone rang. Every time it did, she looked at the screen and she saw that it was Theo and sometimes she hovered her finger over the green button, she willed herself to accept the call, but every time she wavered at the last minute, either replacing the phone in her pocket or pressing red instead.

What would she say to him if she answered now? Would she ask him the question straight out?What were you doing with my sister? What were you doing at her home?Those weren’t the questions she really wanted to ask, though. She hadn’t formulated the real question yet; she hadn’t allowed herself to do so.

She opened the storage cupboard in the upstairs hallway. Why would the tote bag be here? She never opened this cupboard, hadn’t opened it in months. It was filled with clothes she never wore, silk dresses and tailored suits, clothes that belonged to a woman shehadn’t been in years. She stared stupidly at it all, took none of it in. Closed the cupboard door.

In her bedroom, she lay down on the bed. She pulled a wool blanket over her legs. She was desperate to sleep, but every time she closed her eyes, she pictured it, she saw Theo with Angela, arguing outside her house. Then there was a cut, and they were inside the house, shouting at each other. In her mind they had gone back in time. Carla saw them the way they were the day Ben died, Theo raging, wild-eyed, Angela cowering, her delicate hands raised above her head, pale wrists exposed. She heard Theo’s voice asking,Was she jealous, do you think, of the way Ben was? You said she had a temper. Bloodthirsty, his voice said.You said she was bloodthirsty.That wasn’t what she’d said, was it? A bloodthirsty imagination, maybe? Carla’s own imagination took her elsewhere, to Angela’s house on Hayward’s Place, where now Theo appeared as he is today, his comfortable bulk pressing against Angela’s frailty, grappling at the top of the stairs. Carla saw him walking down the stairs, stepping over her sister’s broken body. She saw him out in the lane, lighting a cigarette.

She opened her eyes. What would it have done to him, Carla wondered, to see Angela again, after all this time? Had it been all this time? Or had there been other meetings that she didn’t know about? It hurt her to think about it, the two of them together, keeping things from her; she simply couldn’t fathomwhy. All this, on top of Daniel, it was too much. She was becoming numb, her mind fogged with misery.

She rolled herself off the bed. The Saint Christopher her son had never worn, she needed to find it. Itmustbe in this house somewhere, since it wasn’t in Angela’s. She started again, moving room to room, black spots moving in front of her eyes, a slow buzz in her ears, her limbs liquid. She tramped downstairs and back up again,back to the cupboard in the hallway, to the silk dresses, to the well-cut suits. The shelf at the bottom of the wardrobe was lined with a row of pale blue shoeboxes. She opened them one by one, revealing gray suede boots, red-soled stilettos, bright green sandals with black heels, and in the last one, no shoes but a plastic bag full of ash. Carla sat back on her haunches, breath leaving her lungs in a stuttering sigh.

There you are.She’d never made up her mind what to do with her. With Angela.

After the funeral, she and Daniel had come back here, to Carla’s home. They sat side by side on the sofa, drinking tea in virtual silence, the plastic bag in front of them on the coffee table. The air in the house felt heavy, the atmosphere thick with shame. Daniel was pale, thin, hollowed out, drowning in a dark suit that smelled of smoke.

“Where was she happy?” Carla asked him, staring at the bag in front of them. “It should be somewhere she was happy.”

Next to her, she felt Daniel’s shoulders rise and fall. “I don’t remember her happy,” he said.

“That isn’t true.”

He sniffed. “No, you’re right. I remember her happy at Lonsdale Square. But we can’t very well scatter them there, can we?” His head bent, his mouth opened, shoulders heaved. “She was alone fordays,” he said.

“Daniel.” Carla put her hand on the back of his neck, leaning closer to him, her lips almost against his cheek. “You couldn’t watch her all the time.”

She meant it, but she also meant:Icouldn’t watch her all thetime. “You have to live your own life, Dan. You have to. We cannotallbe ruined.”

He turned his face to hers then, buried it in her neck. “You’re not ruined,” he whispered.

Carla leaned forward, carefully lifting the bag of ashes from the shoebox, weighing it in her hands.

I am now.

TWENTY-TWO

Sorting through his mail, Theo discovered another letter from his fan Mr. Carter, who, Theo could tell, not just from the somewhat peevish tone but from the force with which the writer’s pen had been pressed into the paper, was irritated not to have received a reply.

I did leave my e-mail address, because I thought that meant you might respond to me quickly.

I understand that your probably busy.

In my last letter I talked about the fact that people said it was sexist that you put the point of view of the man forward and what would you say about that? I think its sexist when you only see the female point of view. Lots of crime books now are written by females so you often have only their point of view. I read in lots of amazon reviews that your book is “victim blaming” but isn’t the point that “he” has also been treated badly by many people in his life, including “the friend” and “the girl” so in some ways he is a victim too so he can’t be blamed one hundred percent? I think that maybe youmade him too weak though by end. Do you sometimes wish you had written a story a different way?

Please could you reply to my questions by e-mail. Thank you, kind regards, Henry Carter.

Theo tossed the letter onto the to-do pile with the others; he considered, briefly, what the most polite way might be to tell Mr. Carter that, while he agreed that many, many Amazon reviewers had misunderstood his intentions in telling his story the way he had, it looked very much as though Mr. Carter himself hadn’t a clue what Theo was trying to do either. He considered this, and then he forgot about it: he was, as Mr. Carter pointed out, very busy.

Not with work—he’d not done any proper work for days; he was too busy worrying about life. Eleven days had passed since Daniel died, five since he’d last spoken to Carla. She hadn’t been in police custody—he’d spoken to DI Barker on the phone; the detective told him that they were “pursuing a number of leads” (that again), but he also said they’d had no one new in for questioning, not since the girl they’d picked up and then released; they had made no arrests.

Theo was at once relieved and disappointed—what about the girl, he’d wanted to ask. What about the bloody girl? Relieved, though, that Carla did not appear to have fallen under suspicion.

And he knew that she was all right, that she was up and about, moving around the top floor of her home—he’d glanced her through the window when he had been round, that morning, to knock once more on her door. He’d knocked and waited and then stepped quickly back, looking up, to catch her slipping back behind the curtains. He was furious then; he wanted to scream at her, to beat his fists against the door. He couldn’t, obviously. There had been an incident, last year, when the neighbors complained about him making a racket outside. They’d had a row; he couldn’t remember what it was about now.

---