Simon Beckett - Where There's Smoke

She felt the nausea begin to build as she sat on the tube. Anxiously, she counted the stations still to go. King’s Cross was still several stops away. She sat perfectly still, trying not to dwell on it. The train lurched and whined to a halt in the tunnel. The sudden jolt made Kate break out in a clammy sweat, a sign she had come to recognise as meaning that vomiting was imminent. She prayed for the train to move again, trying to think if she had anything in her bag to be sick into. There was nothing except the bag itself.

She closed her eyes, but that only made her feel worse. The train jerked forward, and with relief Kate saw the lights of a platform appear outside the windows. Without caring which station it was, she hurried off and pushed through the crowd waiting to board. Breathing as steadily as she could through her nose, she ran up the escalators, eyes scanning desperately for a toilet sign.

There was one on the upper concourse. She had a bad moment when she couldn’t find a twenty-pence piece for the turnstile, but then she was inside and bolting the cubicle door behind her.

The only thing to be said for it was that it was over quickly. Feeling wretched, but less so than before, she rinsed her mouth out at a sink and dried it on a paper towel. She looked at herself in the mirror above the taps.

Her face looked pale, the skin under her eyes bruised. You wanted this she told herself. Too late to feel sorry for yourself now.

The sickness left her blood sugar screaming for renewal.

She debated whether to call Clive and tell him she would be late, but decided he would work that out anyway, and went into a coffee shop just outside the station.

She ordered a croissant and jam, and a weak, milky tea. The coffee smelled wonderful, but she’d found that she had no stomach for it anymore. She wondered what else she would be giving up before the nine months was over.

She felt more like herself when she came out and went back down the escalator to catch a train. As if the break in her journey had set a precedent, she was in no rush now to get to work. It was almost eleven before she turned into the row of Georgian terraced houses. The light was on in the downstairs office of the agency, and through the window she saw Clive clutching a bundle of papers to his chest. She had time to notice the harried expression on his face before she opened the door and her greeting died on her lips.

The office was a shambles. The desks had been tipped over, and the filing-cabinet drawers had been pulled out and emptied onto the floor. Paper was strewn on the carpet like snow. Clive turned at the sound of the door opening, the armful of papers still held to his chest.

Josefina and Caroline were both kneeling down, gathering up more sheets.

Kate found her voice. “What’s happened?”

Clive set the papers down onto a chair. “We’ve been burgled. Well,” he amended, “we’ve been broken into. There doesn’t seem to be much missing.” He looked around, wryly. “So far as we can tell, anyway.”

She closed the door and walked inside, picking her way carefully through the turmoil. “Have you called the police?”

“Yeah, they’ve been. For what it’s worth. They want us to make out a list of anything that’s been taken. They’re sending somebody around to fingerprint, so we’ve got to try to avoid touching anything. But I thought we might as well start sorting out some of the mess.”

Kate just stared at it.

“Looks like they forced the toilet window at the back,” Clive went on. “The police say there was another break-in at the newsagent’s further down the road, but they don’t think there’s any connection. The alarm from there might have frightened off whoever did this, though, because there doesn’t seem to be much missing. They just trashed down here and in your office.”

“How bad?”

“You’d better see for yourself.”

She went upstairs, Clive following her. If anything, the chaos there was even worse. She reached out for the broken fan, lying smashed on a shelf, then remembered she wasn’t supposed to touch anything and let her arm drop to her side.

Clive pushed the door shut. “Look,” he began, uneasily, “I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing, but... well, the police were asking if I knew of anyone with any grudges against us, so I told them about Paul Sutherland.”

Kate looked around at the wreckage of her office. “I don’t think he did this.”

“If he was drunk he might have. He’s got a big enough chip on his shoulder.”

Kate kept her doubts to herself.

“The other thing is, did you take your Filofax home with you?” Clive asked. “The big one you keep on your desk?”

It was an unwieldy, black-leather thing, the size of a small briefcase. Lucy and Jack had bought it for her when she had first started the agency. She took it home occasionally, when she was working from her flat, but the rest of the time it stayed in her office. “No. It should be here.”

“Well, I suppose it might be hidden under a pile of papers somewhere, but I can’t see it.”

Kate went over to where the desk lay on its side. The paraphernalia from its top was scattered on the floor in front of it, lying where it had spilled off when the desk had been tipped over. The heavy black Filofax wasn’t among it.

“I thought it was the sort of thing Sutherland might have taken,” Clive went on. “Being as it’s got all the clients’ addresses in it. I can’t see it being much use to anyone else.”

Kate ran a hand through her hair, glad she hadn’t tied it back that morning. The beginning of a headache was already nagging at her temples. “I’d better clear up what I can, anyway,” she said.

She turned down Clive’s offer of help, and looked around, wondering where to start as he went back downstairs.

The violence seemed aimless and wanton. Her reference books had been swept from the shelf and she went to pick them up. As she did, something crunched under her foot.

She looked down. It was a box of matches.

The crematorium chapel was modern and austere. The walls were a dull, mustard yellow, with clear glass windows set high up near the ceiling. The pews were a pale oak, functional and straight-lined, like park benches. Hung on the wall at the far end, the bare wooden crucifix looked geometric and stark without the effigy of the pain-racked figure fixed to it.

Kate slipped into an empty pew at the very back. Most of those in front of her were full, lines of dark-clothed figures facing the plain pulpit that stood on a low dais.

She thought of Miss Willoughby’s funeral, where there had been only herself and a bored solicitor. To one side of the dais lay the coffin, surrounded on three sides by dark blue curtains. No one looked round as she quietly took her seat.

A Bob Marley track was playing through the wall-mounted speakers, helping to cover the echoing rustles and coughs. It faded as the white-surpliced vicar mounted the pulpit. He was a plump, youngish man with prematurely greying hair. He stood with his arms held loosely by his sides, waiting until the last strains of the music had died before speaking.

“We’re gathered here today to celebrate the life of Alex Turner.” His voice carried clearly in the bleak room. A choked sob came from a young woman in the front row. An older woman sat beside her, an arm around her shoulders.

“I know all of you here will have come with your grief, and your anger, at the manner of his passing. It is never easy when someone we love dies, and it is even less so when they are taken from us as Alex was, suddenly, and with violence. It is natural to feel shocked and bewildered. And it is easy to let those emotions give way to hate for the person who took Alex’s life. But today, I want you to put those feelings aside. We should remember that Alex dedicated his life to helping others. For him to lose his life in doing so is a cause for sorrow, but Alex himself would have been the first to urge us not to condemn. But to try to understand.”