Where There's Smoke

Kate said goodnight. Clive went back downstairs, and a little while later the front door slammed. In its aftermath, the office sank into the hollow quiet of an empty building. She tried to continue working, but found herself listening to the stillness until it seemed to be soaking into her. She cleared her desk and went home.

The sun was setting when Kate arrived at her flat. As she went down the path, she took her keys quietly from her bag, hoping to get in for once without being intercepted by Miss Willoughby. But as she reached out to unlock the front door, it swung open of its own accord. Cautiously Kate pushed it open the rest of the way. The door to her flat was still closed and unmarked, she saw with relief, and afterwards she would recall with guilt that her first concern had been a selfish one. Then she saw that the old lady’s door was ajar.

“Miss Willoughby?” Warily, she stepped into the entrance hall and knocked on the half-open door. “Hello?”

Silence greeted her. Kate gave the door a gentle nudge. The flat’s hallway yawned in front of her. At the far end a doorway led into what looked like the lounge. A noise was coming from it, a low murmuring, indistinct but constant.

“Miss Willoughby? Are you there?”

There was no answer. Kate stood uncertainly, not sure whether to close the front door or not, torn between wanting a quick means of escape and not wanting anyone else to walk in. Finally, she shut it. Then she went into the old lady’s flat.

A fusty smell of boiled vegetables and camphor, a distillation of old age, closed around her. Kate slowly made her way down the hallway towards the lounge. She stopped just before she reached it, suddenly struck by the absurdity of what she was doing, wondering if she shouldn’t simply run upstairs and call the police. But the silence of the place mocked that as cowardice. She stepped forward and pushed open the lounge door.

The noise she had heard came from the television, playing a quiz show at low volume in one corner. Light from it flickered over the dark Edwardian furniture, and over the parlour palms, aspidistras and rubber plants that filled the room. Their profusion was so great that it took Kate a moment to see that the drawers on the old bureau were pulled out. The cupboard doors of a sideboard were also open, their contents strewn untidily on the floor.

“Miss Willoughby?”

There was a low moan. Kate turned to where it came from and saw a pair of thin, stockinged legs sticking out from behind the drop-leaf table.

She ran over to them.

The old lady was lying on her back. Her head was turned sideways, and her forehead and cheeks were smeared with blood that looked like black oil in the dim room. One eye was swollen shut. The wig she always wore had slipped off, exposing a bony scalp covered with thin strands of white hair. She looked like a baby bird fallen from the nest.

The eye that wasn’t swollen flickered open as Kate crouched beside her. She muttered something indistinct.

“Don’t try to talk,” Kate told her, frightened that the effort would cause the ragged breathing to slow and stop. She looked wildly around, both for a telephone and to make sure that no one was behind her. But there was neither. She hesitated a moment longer. Then, as the eye slid shut and the voice slurred into silence, she turned and ran upstairs.

Chapter 5

The running machine whirred at a higher pitch as Kate stabbed her finger on the touchpad to increase its speed.

The rubber belt of the treadmill whipped away from under her feet, almost throwing her off it. She picked up her pace, arms and legs pumping, chest heaving as she went into the final sprint.

Of all the equipment in the gym, Kate liked this the best. There was something faintly absurd about running as fast as you could without actually getting anywhere, like a hamster on a wheel. It was exercise reduced to its most basic, most pointless form, yet she still found it satisfying. Its repetitive nature relaxed her, loosened the kinks in her mind.

In the early post-Paul days, she had tried different types of meditative techniques, from simple deep-breathing to yoga. She had abandoned them all, finding the effort of sitting still too taxing. But pounding away the miles on the treadmill, Kate found she could pass whole chunks of time either thinking about nothing at all, or concentrating on a particular problem while her body exercised itself.

It didn’t help now, though. There seemed too many strands, all plucking her in different directions at once.She had slept badly after finding the old lady the night before. The hospital had told her that morning that, as well as suffering from severe shock, Miss Willoughby had a broken hip, broken wrist and concussion. From what the police could gather, two youths, one white, one black, had knocked on her door claiming that one had been taken ill.

Once inside, they had punched her and then ransacked every drawer in the flat. Probably looking for money for drugs, the police had said.