Page 56 of A Slow Fire Burning

“Theo didn’t kill that boy,” Irene said. “You did. You killed Daniel.” Carla blinked slowly. When she looked back up at Irene her eyes were glassy and still, her face impassive. “You killed Daniel, and you were going to let Laura take the fall, weren’t you? You were going to let an innocent girl pay for what you did. Did you know”—Irene’s voice rose, trembled—“did you know that she was hurt while she was on remand? Did you know that she’s been so badly injured they had to take her to hospital?”

Carla’s chin dropped to her chest. “That has nothing to do with me,” she said.

“It haseverythingto do with you,” Irene cried, her voice echoing through the empty house. “You saw what he’d drawn, in his notebook. You can deny it, it makes no difference. I saw the pictures. I saw what he drew... what he imagined.”

“Imagined?” Carla hissed, her eyes narrowing, her face suddenly vicious.

Irene took a step back, away from the stairs and closer to the front door. There, in the middle of the empty hallway, she felt unmoored; she wanted desperately to sit, to rest, to have something to hold on to. Steeling herself, biting her lip and holding her handbag in front of her like a shield, she inched closer to Carla once more. “Isaw what he drew,” she said. “You saw it too. So too did your husband, before he threw the pages into the fire.” Carla flinched at this, narrowing her eyes at Irene.

“Theosaw?” she said, her brow knitted. “But the book is here, it’s... oh.” She sighed, huffed a sad little laugh as her head dropped to her chest again. “It’s not here, is it? You gave it to him. You showed it to him? Why?” she asked. “Why in God’s name would you do that? What a strange, interfering woman you are, what anutterpain in the arse. Do you realize what you’ve done?”

“What have I done?” Irene demanded. “Come on, Carla, tell me!” Carla closed her eyes and shook her head like a truculent child. “No?Well in that case why don’t I tell you whatyouhave done? You saw those pictures that Daniel had drawn and you decided that he was guilty of killing your child, and so you took his life. The knife you used was in the bag that Laura stole, which is how it ended up in her flat. And then your husband, your ex-husband who loves you more than life itself, for some reason I haven’t yet worked out, he stepped in and he took everything upon himself. And you! You just sit there and you say it has nothing to do with you. Do you not feel anything? Are you not ashamed?”

Carla, hunched over her medal, her shoulders bowed, muttered, “Do I notfeelanything? For God’s sake, Irene. Do you not think I’ve suffered enough?”

And there, Irene thought, was the crux of it. After what Carla had endured, how could anything else matter? “I know that you’ve suffered terribly,” she said, but Carla wouldn’t have it.

“You know nothing,” she hissed. “You couldn’t possibly conceive—”

“Of your pain? Perhaps I can’t, Carla, but do you honestly think that because you lost your son in that terrible, tragic way, that gives you the right?” Before her, Carla crouched as though ready to spring at her; she was trembling now, with grief or with fury. But Irenewould not be cowed. She went on, “Because you suffered that terrible loss, do you think that gives you the right to lay waste to everything, to do as you please?”

“As Iplease?” With one hand on the banister, Carla pulled herself to her feet; standing on the third stair, she towered over Irene. “My child is dead,” she spat. “My sister, too, and she died unforgiven. The man I love is in prison. You think there is some pleasure for me in all of this?”

Irene took a small step backward. “Theo doesn’t have to be in prison,” she said. “You could change that.”

“What good would it do?” Carla asked. “What—oh—” She turned her face away in disgust. “There’s no point in trying to explain to you—how on earth could you possibly understand what it is to love a child?”

That again. What it always came down to. You couldn’t understand, you’re not a mother. You’ve never experienced love, not really. You don’t have it inside you, whatever it is, the capacity for limitless, unconditional love. The capacity for unbounded hatred, either.

Irene clenched and unclenched her hands at her side. “Perhaps I don’t understand love like that,” she said. “Perhaps you’re right. But sending Theo to prison? Where does love come into that?”

Carla pursed her lips. “He understands,” she said, chastened. “If Theo did see Daniel’s notebook like you said he did, then of course he would understand why I had to do what I did. And you, standing there, outraged, consumed with self-righteousness, you should understand, too, because I didn’t just do this for Ben, I did it for Angela.”

Irene shook her head in disbelief. “For Angela? You’re really going to stand there and say that you killed Daniel forAngela?”

Carla reached out and, surprisingly gently, placed her hand on Irene’s wrist, closed her fingers around it, drawing Irene closer toher. “When was it,” she whispered, her expression suddenly earnest, almost hopeful, “when was it, do you think, that she knew?”

“Knew?”

“Abouthim. What he’d done. What hewas?”

Irene pulled her hand away, shaking her head as she did. No, Angela could not have known. It was too horrible to contemplate, the idea that she’d lived with that. No. In any case, there was nothing to know, was there? “It was a story,” Irene said. “He wrote a story, perhaps to try to process something he lived through when he was a little boy, and for some reason, he cast himself as the villain. Perhaps he felt guilty, perhaps he felt he should have been watching Ben, or perhaps it was an accident.... It might have been a mistake,” she said, aware that in part she was trying to convince herself. “It might have been a childish mistake; he was so little, he couldn’t possibly have understood the consequences....”

Carla, listening to her, nodded her head. “I considered that. I considered all those things, Irene. I did. But consider this: he was a child, yes—then, he was a child, but what about later? Say you are right, say it was a childish mistake, or an accident, that doesn’t explain how he behaved later on. He knew that I blamed Angela for what happened, and he let me blame her. He allowed me to punish her, he allowed Theo to reject her, he watched her slowly crushed by the weight of her guilt and he did nothing. In fact”—Carla gave a quick shake of her head—“that’s not true. He didn’t do nothing. He did something—he made things worse. He told his psychologist that Ben’s death was Angela’s fault, he allowed me to believe that Angela was mistreating him, all of it, it was all... God, I don’t even know what it was. A game, perhaps? He was playing a game, with us, with all of us, manipulating us, for his enjoyment, I suppose. To give himself a sense of power.”

It was monstrous, unthinkable. What impossibly twisted sort of mind could think that way? Irene caught herself suspecting that perhaps it wasCarla’smind that was monstrously twisted—wasn’t her interpretation of events every bit as disturbing as the images in Daniel’s notebook? And yet when she thought back to Angela, railing against her son, wishing him out of existence, Carla’s version of events rang horribly true. Irene remembered the missed Christmas dinner, when Angela spoke of envying Irene her childlessness; she thought of her apology the next day. You’d see the world burn, she’d said, to see them happy.

Carla had turned away from Irene, and now she walked slowly up the stairs, turning to face her once she reached the top step. “So, you see,it wasin part for her. It sounds so awful, doesn’t it, when you say it out loud? I killed her son for her. But it’s true, in a way. I did it for me, for my son, for Theo, but I did it for her, too. For the ruin he made of Angela’s life.”

As Irene let herself back into her own home next door she reflected on how, while it could be trying at times, at others it was fortunate that people like Carla looked at little old ladies like her and dismissed them as dim, distracted, forgetful, and foolish. It was, today at least, lucky that Carla saw her as waiting for death, not quite of this world, not up to speed with all its complicated ways, its technological developments, its gadgets, its smartphones, its voice-recording apps.

THIRTY-EIGHT

The weather had turned again, the freezing air of the past week suddenly banished by a blessed breath of warmth blowing up from the Mediterranean. Two days ago, Miriam had been huddling in front of her log burner with a coat and scarf on; now it was warm enough for her to sit out on her back deck, drinking her morning coffee and reading the newspaper.

What was in the newspaper might well have been the stuff of fiction: Theo Myerson had been released from police custody, although he still faced charges for wasting police time and for perverting the course of justice, while his wife was the one now facing murder charges after the police were furnished (by an unnamed source) with a dramatic recorded confession.

So, after all that, it turned out that the person Miriam had been trying to frame for the murder of Daniel Sutherland actually was the person who had murdered Daniel Sutherland. How about that? Didn’t say much for Miriam’s framing skills.

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