A Lovely Way to Burn by Louise Welsh Read Free Book Online

suicide, whatever she had said about the lack of evidence. Why otherwise would Simon have left a hidden note addressed to her? He had known he was going to die, guessed it would be Stevie who would find him and left the note as an apology, somewhere it would be found by his cousin, rather than by the police.
    ‘What if they’d made me a cup of tea? You didn’t think of that, did you, you selfish bastard?’
    Stevie flung the letter across the lounge and turned on the television.
    Ten minutes later she muted the screen, crossed the room and picked up the letter. Part of her wanted to put it in the kitchen sink and burn it, like microfilm that must be disposed of in a spy movie, but Stevie knew she would regret it. She turned her back on the TV screen where Naomi was demonstrating a range of bracelets and necklaces made from semi-precious stones, and went through to the spare bedroom.
    The bed was still unmade, and smelt faintly of sweat. She stripped the sheets, left them in a mound on the floor and opened the window. A pile of catalogues featuring forthcoming products was heaped on her desk. Stevie pushed them to one side. She had hung a framed poster above her workspace when she moved in, the alphabet in several fonts, pretty enough to be decorative, boring enough not to distract her too much. She sat staring at the print without seeing it, and then placed Simon’s letter in front of her. Her fingertips touched her name again. She could feel the indents beneath the letters where Simon had pressed hard as he wrote. How strange that the pressure he had exerted should still persist, when the man himself was dead. Stevie slit the seal, unfolded the sheet of paper inside and started to read.
     
    Dear Stevie ,
     
    I’ve never written you a love letter. I wish I was correcting that oversight now, but this is a letter I hope you never have to open. If you are reading it, it means I’m lying low and have an important request to make.
    I have left a package in the loft space of your apartment. My plan is to collect it myself without your ever knowing, but if circumstances make that impossible, I beg you to conceal it in your most frivolous bag and deliver it unopened to Mr Malcolm Reah at St Thomas’s. Do not entrust it to anyone else, no matter how polite, kind or authoritative they are. It may be that something has already happened and that your first instinct is to turn to the police. Please don’t . Malcolm will know what to do. He finishes his rounds at 3pm on weekdays and then goes directly to the ward office to write up his notes. Please deliver it to him there at your first opportunity.
    I am about to set out for a meeting which I hope will make all of this superfluous but, if it doesn’t go as I intend, and I somehow wash up somewhere without a phone signal, I want to make sure that you get the package into the right hands.
    I’m not used to writing from the heart, but I want you to know that you mean more than sex to me (and you know how important I consider sex). It seems a little crass to write this in extremis, but I hope we have a future together.
    Stevie, you are clever, persuasive, persistent and resourceful and have enough nous to know that doing the right thing doesn’t always mean doing the obvious thing. Please make sure Malcolm Reah gets the package. It will sound melodramatic, but you might just save my life.
     
    All My Love,
    Simon
     
    Beneath his signature, in a wilder, more impulsive hand, Simon had scrawled,
     
    Trust no one except Reah.
     
    Stevie was surprised to find that she was crying. It had been unfair of Simon to write to her of the future just before he died. It was as if he had taken a portion of her life with him.
    She took a tissue from the box on her desk and wiped her eyes. Simon hadn’t committed suicide, that much was clear. The letter didn’t mean he hadn’t died of natural causes though; weird coincidences did happen and stress could lead to sudden heart attacks, everyone