Louise Welsh
A Lovely Way to Burn
For Zoë Wicomb
. . . love is strong as death;
jealousy is cruel as the grave:
the coals thereof are coals of fire,
which hath a most vehement flame.
Prologue
London witnessed three shootings that summer, by men who were part of the Establishment. The first was the Right Honourable Terry Blackwell, Tory MP for Hove who, instead of going to his constituency as planned, sat in a deck chair on the balcony of his Thames-side apartment one sweltering Saturday in June and shot dead six holidaymakers.
The first five were neatly dispatched, with shots to their heads. Terry Blackwell had been a sniper in his army days, and tourists, ambling by the river in bright summer clothes, were easy targets. The sixth was running for cover when Blackwell hit her in her right knee. He waited until the girl, Marina Salzirnisa from Latvia (visiting the city on a language course which her father hoped would improve her English), had almost dragged herself to the safety of a café, and then shot her four more times, wounding her in her left knee, both thighs, and finishing with a shot to the spine which wasn’t guaranteed to kill her, but did.
After Marina, the MP had lost his touch, or perhaps people had simply succeeded in running for their lives, because although Terry Blackwell kept the streets and buildings in range pinned down for the rest of the day, he didn’t kill, or even wound, anyone else. Around six o’clock he botched his own shot to the head, lingering on alone, on the floor of his apartment, where the Rapid Response Team eventually found him. Police negotiators had located Blackwell’s ex-wife, Cynthia, and later there was speculation in the press that it had been her voice on the answering machine, telling Blackwell she still loved him, that had prompted the MP’s coup de grâce.
Towards the end of June, John Gillespie, a hedge-fund manager for the Royal Bank of Scotland, let rip in an Underground carriage on the Circle line, with a gun he had concealed in his briefcase. Gillespie was known for his canny ability for risk assessment and had chosen a not-quite-full carriage between rush hours. He managed to kill all fifteen occupants before the train reached its next station. Gillespie waited for the doors to open, and the oncoming passengers to see the carnage, before turning the gun on himself. Witness statements mentioned the banker’s smart suit and neatly knotted tie, the professional smile he gave as he pulled the trigger.
The following week the Reverend Matthew Sheppard, vicar of St Alban’s parish church in Ealing, mounted the altar, took a shotgun from beneath his cassock and attempted to gun down his congregation. St Alban’s worshippers were ageing, and had it been a normal Sunday, the Reverend Sheppard might have succeeded in sending them all to what they presumably believed was a better place. But it was the week of Aimee Albright’s christening and the church was packed almost to capacity. Aimee’s Uncle Paul, who had never been good enough to turn professional but had captained his local cricket team for the past eight years, bowled his hymnbook full square at Sheppard and knocked the gun from his grasp. Aimee’s father was wounded in the shoulder, but he and two of his brothers managed to wrestle the vicar who, now that he was unarmed, seemed dazed, to the floor. The Reverend Sheppard had remained dazed to the point of catatonia, right up to the moment when he succeeded in hanging himself with a sheet in the prison cell where he was on suicide watch.
On the surface, the shootings were nothing to do with what happened later, but they stuck in Stevie Flint’s mind. Their details returned to her during the months ahead and she would begin to think of them as a portent of what was to come, a sign that the city was beginning to turn on itself.
One
Stevie Flint had lived in London for seven years. She no longer had the soundtrack to the movie of her life playing in her head, but had only just turned thirty and could still appreciate the buzz of the city as it headed towards night. She walked out of Tottenham Court Road Underground station, noticing a faintly sulphurous tinge to the air. Stevie shaded her eyes with Jackie O sunglasses, suddenly remembering Jasmine’s, the only smart dress shop in her home town, its window screened with yellow cellophane to protect gowns from a rarely existent sun. London had a hint of yellow to it today, she decided, a septic glare. She set out in what she hoped was the right direction for the private members’ club Simon had suggested. Her new sandals were too high for a long hike but she had traced her route earlier on Google Maps and been reassured that she could walk the distance without too much damage to her feet.
Soho was full of pubs and all of them were full. Drinkers had spilled out on to the pavements and it seemed that everywhere there were pretty girls and men in suits, minus ties, all of them talking and laughing and all with a glass in their hands. Stevie caught snatches of conversation as she passed:
‘. . . smooth, like a billiard ball into a pocket . . .’
‘. . . six down and he refuses to call in a . . .’
‘. . . I told her if she don’t like it she can . . .’
‘. . . that’s me done in Deptford.’
Stevie stepped on to the road to avoid a crush of bodies and felt the skirt of her dress flutter in the slipstream of a passing moped. There was dust and laughter and petrol in air that had been breathed in and breathed out, breathed in and breathed out; it was better not to think about how many times because that might set her to thinking about the water she drank, or how much of the heat currently broiling the city came from the sun, and how much radiated from the strangers pressed around her.
Stevie paused, unsure if she was in the right street after all. She took a deep breath, feeling the air hot and tarry against the back of her throat. Her shift had ended at three that morning and a headache threatened at the back of her eyes. A drunk man in shirtsleeves slid free of the crowd and put an arm around her. She felt his body heat, the sweat of his underarms touching the back of her neck. ‘Do you fancy another one, just like the other one?’ the stranger whispered in her ear, his hop-scented breath warm against her face. Stevie would like to have slipped off one of her new sandals and stabbed its heel in his eye, but instead she gave the drunk a shove in the ribs and wriggled free of his grasp. He called after her, ‘Was it something I said?’ She heard his friends laughing, and fought the urge to go back and tip their pints from their hands.
‘See how much you laugh then.’
Stevie realised she had said the words out loud and glanced around to check if anyone had noticed, but she was alone on a crowded London street, and if anyone had, they paid her no mind.
Perhaps it was the incident with the drunk that made Stevie lose her way, or maybe it was her usual lack of direction that snared her in the maze of Soho streets. She phoned Simon and when he didn’t pick up, left a message, making an effort not to sound irritated. After all, it was she who was late and it wasn’t Simon’s fault that her bare sole was blistering. Stevie checked the route on her iPhone, retraced her steps and finally found the club, a discreet doorway with only a number to distinguish it.
The interior was self-consciously stylish, a dimly lit retro-Nordic exercise in design that would hang around for a few years, then be revamped in response to some new trend. Usually it amused her that Simon, a man whose business relied on cleanliness and precision, liked these desperately trendy dives, but they had not seen each other all week and tonight she would have preferred somewhere more intimate.