Louise Welsh - A Lovely Way to Burn

‘Don’t leave it too long.’ Sarah Frei got to her feet, lifting her sleepy child with one arm and struggling with the box of groceries with the other. ‘Things are falling apart. Soon the sweats won’t be the only thing we have to worry about.’

‘Stephanie, are you okay?’ Alexander Buchanan had known that it was Stevie on the other end of the line, before she said a word. The thought of her name blinking on the chemist’s phone was disquieting and Stevie wished she had acquired an anonymous pay-as-you-go mobile. Buchanan asked, ‘Where are you?’ His voice was as urbane as ever, but there was a note of anxiety beneath his charm.

Stevie had forced her way through the jam of departing four-by-fours, urban jeeps and estate cars in the streets around Sarah Frei’s house and now the Jaguar was eating up the miles. She put him on the speakerphone and glanced at the satnav’s map, checking that she was on the right road for Iqbal’s flat. Buchanan was the third person she had called. Neither Derek nor Iqbal had picked up and she had an increasing sense of her life burning away, like a fuse on a bomb steadily fizzing towards an explosion.

‘What were you and Simon up to?’ Stevie didn’t bother with niceties or preliminaries.

‘We were helping sick children get better.’

Buchanan’s voice sounded self-consciously reasonable, like the voice of a man who considered he had every right to be offended, but was refusing to rise to the bait.

‘There was more to it than that. You were making a lot of money.’

Stevie had expected to hear the bustle of the hospital in the background but Alexander Buchanan might have been answering her call from a soundproofed booth.

‘The treatment generated a profit, yes, but we put most of that into research, in the hope that we could eventually make it more readily available. I’m at my lab. If you come here I can show you some relevant paperwork.’

‘I’d prefer you to email it to me.’

‘All I have is hard copy, and right now I don’t quite have the time to scan and send it.’ The chemist’s voice had lost its veneer of tolerance. ‘Normally I’d ask one of our technicians to help out, but they seem to be either dead or otherwise occupied. So if you can’t examine it yourself, I’m afraid you’ll have to take my word for it.’

‘My sense of trust has taken a bit of a battering.’ Along with the rest of me, she thought, but didn’t say.

Stevie had expected to be snared in lines of traffic, but the roads were all but empty. Normally it would have been a relief, but she found herself hoping she would turn a corner and see a stream of vehicles, each one containing healthy, pissed-off travellers. Up ahead, traffic lights glowed red. Stevie slowed to check that there was nothing about to cross the intersection and drove through. She said, ‘Simon didn’t die of natural causes. He didn’t kill himself either. Someone murdered him, but perhaps you already know that.’

There was a pause on the line. The only sound the expensive purr of the Jaguar’s engine. After a moment Buchanan said, ‘It crossed my mind.’

‘It crossed your mind?’ She pressed her foot to the accelerator. ‘So all that guff about the possibility Simon had committed suicide was just an attempt to distract me. Who killed him?’

‘I said I suspected the possibility of foul play.’ He spat the words like a schoolteacher infuriated by a stupid answer from a bright pupil. ‘I didn’t say I was positive, and I certainly didn’t say I had a suspect in mind.’

‘But you seem to be extremely well informed.’

Somewhere in a quiet place beyond the car, beyond her imagination, Alexander Buchanan sighed.

‘I knew Simon for over thirty years. I also knew he had a weakness for exotic company, of a kind that could get you into trouble. Nothing personal, but you’re a case in point. At the risk of sounding like a terrible snob, surgeons don’t normally go out with salesgirls.’

Something dashed in front of the car, black and swift, a blur of legs and fur. Stevie swerved, bracing herself for the impact, but there was no bang, no sickening swell beneath her wheels, and when she glanced in the rear-view mirror she saw a dog running along the white lines in the middle of the road, as if they were a map that would guide it home.

She took a deep breath and said, ‘Going out with salesgirls isn’t a crime. Exploiting the families of sick children is.’

‘Agreed, but that’s not what we were doing.’

‘I heard otherwise.’

‘A-h,’ the doctor stretched out the vowel, like a dawning realisation. ‘You’ve been talking to Melvin Summers.’

‘He thinks you killed his daughter.’

‘Yes, he does. It’s a common delusion. Recently bereaved parents often find it impossible to absorb the senselessness of a child’s death. Some of them resolve their confusion by becoming convinced that the doctors were responsible. I wouldn’t say you get used to being a scapegoat, but for the most part you learn how to deal with it. Mr Summers is to be pitied. His wife committed suicide and he resorted to alcohol, not the best form of medication for a man already under great emotional strain, but he was a serious thorn in our sides. I’m afraid our diplomatic skills had failed and we were discussing the possibility of taking out an injunction against him.’

She was approaching another crossroads, another red light. Stevie pressed a foot to the Jaguar’s brakes again and, when there was no sign of an oncoming vehicle, sailed through. She said, ‘I might have bought that, if there weren’t other accusations against your team. Did you know Geoffrey Frei was investigating you?’

‘No, but he was perfectly welcome to do so.’

There was a school up ahead. A sheet drooped from its railings, QUARANTINE CENTRE painted across it in red. Whoever had made the sign had loaded their brush with too much paint and the letters were tailed by drips that made the words look as if they were bleeding. Stevie slowed the Jaguar to a crawl. The door to the school was open, the playground crammed with carelessly parked cars, but there was no other sign of life.

She put her foot back on the accelerator and said, ‘Frei’s investigation was brought to an abrupt halt. He was murdered and then someone broke into his house and stole his research.’

‘I heard about his murder, but I didn’t know about the burglary. Tell me, was that all that was taken, his research I mean?’

The sun cut into Stevie’s eyes, blinding her for an instant. She flipped down the sun visor. The Jaguar’s air conditioning was on, the space inside a comfortable fifteen degrees, but she had an urge to open the car windows and feel the air outside on her face. She kept them closed, the car sealed tight, like a space rocket speeding towards the unknown.

‘Other valuables were stolen, but that doesn’t prove anything. The killer would want the murder and burglary to appear unrelated.’

Buchanan gave a dry laugh. ‘That’s the thing about conspiracy theories; they rely on speculation and that makes them endlessly adaptable. Conspiracists can always come up with an explanation because they don’t have to stick to inconvenient facts. Tell me, what do you know about Frei?’

‘I know he went to school with you, Ahumibe and Simon. I spoke to his wife. She said he hated it. He was bullied.’

‘I’m afraid that was true. Frei was one of those boys that seemed to attract bullies. I never met his wife, but I’m glad to hear he found some happiness, even if he did intend to persecute us. Frei was a strange fish. Ahumibe kept up with him, but the rest of us had cut our ties long ago. He dropped out of medical school and seemed to have transformed his disappointment into a grudge against the profession.’