Soul Fire (29 page)

‘What great places you take me to,’ I say with a half-hearted smile.

‘Travel broadens the mind, Ali.’

‘But why would Zoe want to live
here
?’

‘It’s cheap. And real. She was studying digital documentary at uni, wasn’t she?’

‘Was she?’ I realise that I never asked what she did before she dropped out of college.

‘Plenty to snap around here,’ Lewis says.

He’s right. We pass Chinese shops, Polish shops, halal butchers, and stores with signs in lettering that I don’t even recognise.

‘OK. Here we are,’ he says, stopping abruptly by an unlit glass doorway. ‘Act normal, right?’

Normal?
I don’t know if I can remember what that’s like. He pushes at the door, which rattles but doesn’t open.

My heart’s racing. ‘Don’t you have an app for burglary, Lewis?’

He smiles at me. ‘When it comes to breaking into buildings,’ he says, taking out a credit card and slipping it into the gap between the door and the frame, ‘you just need a
little finesse.’

I stare at the open door, not quite believing what he’s just done.

‘Come on, Ali. Unless you want us to get caught.’

Lewis pulls me into the hallway and uses his phone as a torch, checking the metal mailboxes on the wall. ‘Gonzales . . . Perrera . . . Bingo!’

He reaches into the gap where the post goes, and pulls something out. As we tiptoe up the stone steps, a cockroach scuttles out of our way. There’s a ringing in my ears from all the
fireworks. Or maybe it’s fear.

The stairs are steep and worn with age. I hold on to the banister but parts of it are missing, and there’s a slightly rotten smell.

‘Almost there. The mailbox says she’s got flat four. So the next landing should be her place.’ Lewis sounds short of breath. He climbs the last steps, then stops. The apartment
door is the same dirty-brown colour as the others, but this is the only one with a spy hole at eye level.

‘Lewis, we’re never going to get in there. We should go before the neighbours hear.’

‘Don’t be so defeatist,’ he says, and I hear a click, and then the door opens with a whiny squeak. ‘Open sesame.’

He pulls me inside and closes the door before switching on the light. ‘I’d like to pretend I’m some kind of lock-breaking guru,’ he explains, ‘but actually, she
kept a spare key in the letterbox.’ He holds it up.

‘How did you know?

‘Lucky guess.’

‘But she was so security conscious.’

Lewis nods. ‘Yeah, but she’d also only just moved here. And she’s not the type to trust people straight away. So she’d have had no one to call if she got locked
out.’

My eyes adjust to the light. ‘God, what a mess.’

The room is tiny, and both the floor space and the sofa bed are piled high with paperwork, newspapers and files. The only order is on a small table at the end of the bed, where two laptops sit
next to each other. Their power buttons glow orange.

‘Not exactly a room with a view, is it?’ Lewis says.

There
is
a window, no bigger than an A4 pad, but when I lift the blind, there’s a steep drop down to a yard where rubbish has collected. I turn back. Lewis is already switching on
the laptops, rifling through the paperwork. I try to imagine Zoe on that bed, working on Burning Truths. I notice the inside of the door has three bolts on it.

‘She was really scared, Lewis.’ I point at the door.

‘So we need to find out why. Keep looking, Ali.’

There’s a clothes rail loaded with empty wire hangers that clank together as I brush past it. I open the fridge, but there’s nothing inside except two bottles of water and some
yogurt. Ahead of me, there’s a plywood door, and when I open it, a damp, stale smell hits me.

‘I’ve found the bathroom.’

Except there’s no room for a bath, only a loo and directly above that, a showerhead. On the wall there’s a mirrored cabinet. My own face reflected in it is unfamiliar, my eyes wide
and wired.

And I look even more like Meggie.

I open the cabinet. There’s a toothbrush and paste, sun cream, and several brown bottles and boxes labelled with Spanish text. Medicines. I grab them, and take them into Lewis. He’s
managed to get one of the laptops working, and has attached a memory stick. ‘What do you think these are?’ I ask.

He examines the boxes, scans their barcodes with his phone camera. Then tuts. ‘Sleeping pills.’ He takes a second packet. ‘Sedatives. Blimey. This would knock out that mammoth
in the park.’

‘When did you go to the park?’

He shakes his head. ‘Yesterday. I didn’t spend the whole day with my brother geeks. I did do
some
sightseeing. Anyway, let’s focus on what’s important. If Zoe was
taking even a quarter of this lot, I’m surprised she could remember her own name.’

‘Sahara said she couldn’t sleep properly; hadn’t since Meggie died.’

‘The date on these is really recent.’ Lewis has opened the packets; more than half the pills are missing from each foil strip. ‘You know, this could be another explanation for
what happened tonight. If her reactions were slower, she might just have fallen and not been able to get up.’

‘Are you saying you think it could have been an accident?’

Lewis sighs. ‘No. It’s just so shocking: Meggie, Tim, now Zoe.’

It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him upset. But before I can say something, he turns back to the laptop screen. ‘OK. Let’s focus. What was Tim’s second name
again?’

‘Ashley.’

‘I’m downloading Zoe’s emails onto the stick. And her internet activity too. But there’s so much of it, I want to try to prioritise.’ He types in Tim’s name.
Hundreds of emails pop up. None has a subject line but, as I lean forward, Lewis arranges them in date order. ‘The last one was sent on the afternoon of the day Tim died.’

He opens it up.

‘Love? Did he
love
Zoe?’

Lewis shrugs. ‘They just sound like mates to me.’

I read it again: it’s exactly what I thought would happen with the killer. Yet Tim is dead, and now Zoe’s unconscious. Maybe we were wrong.

Lewis sighs. ‘Ade found him, what, six hours later?’

‘And he’d been drinking, but here he says he’d stopped. What would have made him start again that same day?’

‘Unless he was lying to Zoe,’ Lewis suggests.

‘Why would he—’ I stop. ‘Did you hear something? Outside.’

‘No,’ Lewis says, but then his face changes. ‘A siren?’

‘I think so.’

‘Ali, go and check while I finish this.’

I tiptoe out of the flat, into the stairwell. There’s a window on the next half landing, facing the street. I have to crane my neck to look through it.

‘Shit.’ I backtrack, into the flat. ‘It’s the police. They must be coming here.’ My voice is squeaky with fear.

Lewis blinks hard, but that’s as near as he comes to showing panic. ‘OK. We’ll just go to the top of the stairwell. Hide till they’re gone. They won’t be long.
They’ll probably be looking for something to help find her parents.’

His hands don’t even tremble as he pulls out the memory stick and closes the laptop lid. Then he reaches for the second laptop, the one he couldn’t log into, and puts it and the
power cable into his backpack.

‘What are you doing, Lewis?’

He holds his finger against his lips. ‘Shh.’

I follow him out of the flat and up the stairs, my own footsteps sounding as loud as a giant’s. We keep climbing, even though I can’t breathe.

Finally, just as we reach the top landing, I hear wood split and metal groan as Zoe’s front door is forced.

‘Now we wait,’ says Lewis, as calmly as though we’re waiting for a bus.

I have to clamp my jaw together with my hand to stop my teeth chattering.

The police stay less than twenty minutes though it feels like forever. Lewis and I don’t speak, though he holds my hand and after a while it stops trembling.

Finally we hear voices in the stairwell – two men and a woman, I think. They’re chatting, even laughing, as we hear drilling and clanking metallic sounds. Then the front door closes.
Lewis helps me up. My foot’s all pins and needles because I haven’t moved a muscle while we’ve been wedged into the corner on the cold floor.

‘Let’s see what they’ve done,’ he says.

When we get down to her landing, the door is bolted with a huge padlock and chain. We’re not getting through there again. We head down the stairs and back through the front door, into the
street, where traffic’s still passing and the ladies of the night are still chain-smoking, as though nothing’s changed.

‘That padlock. That’s because it’s a crime scene, isn’t it?’ I whisper, once we’ve gone a whole block.

‘You watch too much American telly, Alice Forster. It’s because they forced the door, that’s all.’

‘How can you be so sure? Do you do this kind of thing regularly?’

‘Clearly not.’ And then he chuckles to himself.

‘Why the hell is that funny, Lewis?’

‘Because if I really was a career burglar, or spy, or whatever, I definitely wouldn’t have broken in and left my bloody fingerprints all over the flat, would I?’

‘What?’

‘We should have worn gloves, Ali. But never mind, it’s too late now and they’ve got no reason to dust her place for prints.’

As we walk back towards the sea, the moments in Zoe’s flat seem completely unreal. So do Lewis’s actions. He was so detached, like a burglar or something.

Except for that one moment when he had to admit that Zoe’s death couldn’t have been an accident.

‘I think I should go back to the others,’ I say, when we reach the point where we’d turn right for his hotel and left for the hostel. ‘Thanks. Like always, I don’t
know what I’d do without you.’

‘Life’s never boring with you around, kid,’ he says.

I frown.

Lewis hits himself on the forehead. ‘Yeah. Mr Insensitive, that’s me. But the truth is, Alice, I don’t know Zoe. Obviously it’s totally bloody awful that she’s
hurt, but if it’s a choice between her being trampled or you, then . . . I can’t pretend I’m not thankful
you’re
OK.’

Back in our room, no one is asleep, but we’re pretending to be. And at least we’re all here: Cara, Sahara, Ade. The way everything else is right now, that feels
like something to be grateful for.

At about four in the morning, someone squeezes into my bunk with me.

‘I had a bad dream,’ Cara whispers. Her skin is damp and she smells of wood smoke. I guess we all must smell the same but it’s more noticeable on someone else.

I cling on to her and she clings on to me. Her breathing slows and I catch another smell, of alcohol. A cocktail. Tequila sunrise?

And then I remember:
Javier
.

I freeze. If it’s four here, then he may have left the Beach already. How could I have forgotten?

Except I know how I could have forgotten. What happened with Zoe was about the living. I can still have some influence there. What’s happening to Javier between dusk and dawn is now beyond
my control.

Rest in peace, Javier.

I close my eyes but the tears still escape, running down my cheeks and onto the sheet. I try to sob silently, so I don’t wake Cara.

Somehow the night ends and daylight comes. The four of us sit on plastic chairs outside the hostel, waiting for the police to arrive. The beach is busy again, with smart pensioner couples taking
the early sun, suave family men with immaculate wives and toddlers, the
chiringuito
owners opening up.

‘It was very modern,’ Cara says, when no one else seems to be able to find words. ‘The hospital. The doctor seemed to know what he was doing. Maybe she’s better off in
that place than she would have been in a grotty old hospital at home.’

Except none of this would have happened at home.

The city is every bit as beautiful as it was yesterday, but my eyes are raw from crying and lack of sleep and I’m desperate to leave. Though even that’s not logical, because if
someone
did
attack Zoe, then it must have been one of the people coming home to London with me.

The police are excessively polite, the way teachers are when they secretly want to
scream
at you for driving them mad.

When they call out my name, I have to remind myself to breathe. A male and a female detective show me into a cramped office at the hostel. I’m the last one in.

‘Were you drinking before you went to Via Laietana?’ the woman asks. I think she’s already decided the answer is yes.

‘We went to a bar, but I didn’t drink. The others had beers. Nothing stronger. And Zoe didn’t drink anything there. She arrived late, so we went straight to the
festival.’

The man looks sceptical. ‘So you are telling us everyone was not drunk when they left the Irish bar?’

‘I can’t talk for the others, but I was definitely sober. I thought the fireworks would be a buzz . . . exciting enough without having to have a drink. Zoe herself said it could be
quite edgy.’

‘It is perfectly safe,’ the woman snaps back, ‘or at least it is if you are raised with respect for fire.’