Simon Beckett - Where There's Smoke

“Don’t worry about that. Just take as long as you need.” She didn’t know what to say to him. “You didn’t have to come here to tell me. You could have just phoned.”

He adjusted his grip on the travel bag. “The train’s from King’s Cross, anyway. There’s one in half an hour that’ll get me there for dinnertime.”

“Have you got a ticket?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You’d better go. I don’t want you to miss it.”

Clive nodded but didn’t move. Kate came out from behind the desk, slipping the envelope into her pocket as she went over and gave him a hug. He returned it, then they broke apart.

“I’ll phone you.”

He went out. The umbrella still dripped onto the carpet, but more slowly now. Kate switched on the lights and started the coffee filter, then went down to the kitchen and stood her umbrella in the sink before going back upstairs to her office.

The letter from the Parker Trust crinkled in her pocket. She took it out and looked at the envelope without removing the letter. Abruptly, she tore it in half, ripping it into smaller and smaller pieces that she flung from her. They fluttered to the floor like dead moths as she snatched up her handbag and began pawing through it.

She pulled out the old packet of Camels. Her hands were unsteady as she put a cigarette between her lips and tried to get a flame from the lighter. It clicked, drily.

“Shit! Come on!” She banged it on the desk and shook it. The next flick produced a yellow smudge. She held it up to the cigarette, poised for a moment, and then with a sudden dip of her head put the tip into the flame.

It glowed brightly. A thin ring of fire chased towards her, leaving behind a fragile cylinder of pale ash as she drew the smoke down into her lungs. The cigarette was stale, but there was an instant nicotine hit. Her head swam, and for the space of a heartbeat she held her breath, letting the feeling soak through her. Then she was gagging. The smoke burned the back of her throat and nose as she choked and coughed. Eyes streaming, she stubbed out the cigarette in a half-empty teacup.

It died with a swift hiss. Kate pushed away the sludge of cold tea and ash and sank into her chair. Her mouth tasted foul. She dug in her bag until she found a screwed-up tube of mints. The peppermint sweetened her mouth, but didn’t take away the lung-deep feeling of pollution, or the fear that the single drag was already poisoning the foetus she carried.

Kate stared at the phone, then picked it up and dialled a number. It rang several times at the other end before she heard Lucy answer.

“Lucy, it’s Kate, look, I’m sorry—” she said in a rush, then broke off.

Lucy’s voice continued. Kate listened to the recorded message for a few seconds longer, then hung up.

Caroline and Josefina arrived downstairs. She heard them moving around, talking. Some time later the intercom beeped. Kate watched the light flashing on it, but didn’t move. Eventually it stopped.

Later still she took the tea cup with the cigarette in it and washed it out in the kitchen.

They lost several more clients in the wake of the newspaper story. One was a company that made maternity outfits. Kate almost smiled at the irony of that.

She was aware that the agency was approaching the stage where it was becoming more a matter of survival than of making a profit. She knew she should be taking a more aggressive approach, actively seeking out new clients as well as reassuring the remaining ones. But knowing that was one thing. Bringing herself to do it was something else.

Caroline and Josefina tiptoed around her at the office, hushed and deferential as nurses at a sick bed. They needn’t have bothered. Nothing touched her. Even when one or two clients phoned to congratulate her on being pregnant, her pleasure was a surface feeling, short-lived and shallow. It seemed barely conceivable that it was only a week since the first posters had appeared on the agency walls. Her world had contracted to the journey between her flat and the office. She no longer went to the health club. The one time she went to the supermarket, driven by an empty fridge and cupboards bare even of cat food, she had faltered outside the harsh arena of stacked shelves and fluorescent strip lights. When she had gone in, the brightness and colour was like a migraine. She pushed the trolley down the aisles, avoiding meeting anyone’s eye as she worked her way through the maze. Confronted with the profusion of cans and boxes her mind went blank. She stacked the trolley without any clear notion of what she was buying, walking faster and faster away from the faces that seemed to glance at her with recognition, and whispered conversations that became innocent as soon as she was close enough to hear. Once she heard someone behind her say, “Kate,” and she jerked the trolley into a display of tinned fruit. It teetered without falling, and she turned to see a little girl, laughing as she ran to her father with a bar of chocolate. While the child’s laughter turned to protests, Kate unsteadily steered her trolley from the tins and pushed it away. The nape of her neck was clammy with sweat as she bypassed the rest of the shelves and went straight to the checkout. She took a cab home. Sitting with the carrier bags at her feet, it occurred to her that taxis were a luxury she couldn’t afford now that the prop of the Parker Trust account had gone. She stared out of the window as the taxi pulled up at traffic lights near her home. A tramp entered the illuminated aura of a street lamp. Muffled by a bulky coat and scarf, his head was buried in his turned-up collar, so that only matted tufts of hair were visible. He clutched two carrier bags, and Kate had time to think that one looked as though it had porridge in it, before he passed from under the lamp’s glow. The taxi pulled forward with a brief scrape of gears as the lights changed to green. It came to a halt again almost immediately as a lorry up ahead tried to turn, blocking both lanes. The cab driver barged his steering wheel in annoyance. Kate looked at the ticking meter, then back out of the window. They had stopped by a building site, shielded from the street by a high plywood fence. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw the dark squares that ran along its length. The cab shunted forward a little, and some of the squares caught the light from the next lamp post. The words, KATE POWELL KILLED HER UNBORN CHILD seemed black in the yellow sodium glare. Kate saw how the paper glistened, wetly, and how the wood around each poster was dark with fresh paste. She twisted to look back through the rear window, trying to catch sight of the solitary tramp with his carrier bags. But the street was empty.

“It’s a threat, isn’t it?”

Kate stood over her desk. The smell of petrol filled the office. She had wiped her hands, but they still felt greasy. The telephone handset was slippery in her palm. Collins sounded unperturbed. “Just try to calm down.”

“Calm down!”

“He’s trying to rattle you, that’s all.”

“Well, he bloody well is doing!”

She stared down at the open Jiffy-bag on her desk as though it would ignite by itself. It had arrived with the post. The effect of seeing the poster the night before had faded a little in the daylight. As soon as she arrived back at her flat Kate had phoned the police incident room to tell Collins about the tramp. But the Inspector couldn’t be reached, and the policeman who had taken her message sounded uninterested and patronising. She had slammed down the phone before she shouted at him. Trying to put the incident from her mind, she had gone into work that morning and occupied herself with opening the post. There were no more large brown envelopes, and Kate had begun to relax. Until she had opened the Jiffy-bag. Collins was still unruffled. “He wants to scare you, that’s why he’s doing all this. You’ve hurt him, and now he’s trying to hurt you back by frightening you. If he was serious, he’d have done something by now.”