Incinerator by Niall Leonard Read Free Book Online Page A

shut the door again, but from the outside. Slipping off my trainers I sprinted upstairs in my socks on tiptoe, trying not to make the treads creak.
    The upstairs landing was long and dimlylit and stretched on for half a mile, with about a hundred doors leading off. I didn’t know what I was looking for but reckoned whatever I found would tell me more than Anderson was going to. The door immediately ahead of me was the master bedroom, I discovered, and the bed was neatly made and scattered with plump shiny cushions. A book lay open on a bedside table—I didn’t have time to decipher the title—and the wardrobes were all firmly closed. If any clothes had been strewn about in a frenzy of packing, they’d all been tidied away now.
    I hurried up the landing and tried the furthest door. The air in there was slightly staler, as if the windows and the door were rarely opened. A guest room? The bed was made up like the first one, except instead of a pile of cushions a small holdall sat half sunk into the soft quilt. It was full, but not zipped up. Peeking inside I found several neatly folded blouses of the cut Nicky liked. There was a leather address label hanging off one handle. I lifted it and squinted at the name written on it … 
Susan Horsfall
.
    “Are you lost?” Anderson had come up the stairs even more silently than I had, and caught me red-handed. No point making feeble excuses, I thought.
    “Sorry, is this Nicky’s?”
    “I really think you should leave now.” Harry’s air of sympathy and commiseration had evaporated, and he had planted his feet wide apart as if he thought this might get physical. He was big and fit, but that didn’t worry me unduly—he didn’t look like he was used to getting smacked in the face, at least not by a bloke his own size.
    “If Nicky did do a runner, why would she have left this behind?”
    “If I ever see her again, I’ll ask her.” He stood to one side, pointedly. I raised my hands in surrender and left the room. As I walked back down the landing I could hear a mobile phone ringing from below in the hall, distant and muffled, as if it was in a coat pocket. The ringing stopped as I reached the foot of the stairs, Anderson a few steps behind me. As we headed in silence towards the front door the ringing started again. It was a ringtone I’dheard before, on Nicky’s phone, and it was coming from a drawer in a little side table near the front door.
    “Aren’t you going to answer that?” I said.
    “They can leave a message,” he said.
    “What if it’s Nicky?” I said. I didn’t know why Nicky would ring her own mobile number rather than the house landline, but I could tell I’d pricked Anderson’s curiosity. He pulled open the drawer, lifted out a smartphone in a distinctive silver sleeve—it
was
Nicky’s smartphone—and glanced at the screen.
    “It isn’t,” he said. He cancelled the call, threw the phone back in the drawer and slammed it shut.
    “Funny she didn’t take her phone,” I said.
    “Not really,” said Anderson. “She’d hardly want to keep in touch, given the circumstances.”
    “Shall I leave my number in case she does?”
    “I’m sure she already has it,” said Anderson, tugging open the door.
    “I’m terribly sorry, I can’t leave just yet,” I said, mimicking his public-schoolboy veneer of politeness. I could see him tense again, ready for an ungentlemanly scuffle. “I left my shoes.”
    Anderson looked back and saw my tatty grey trainers lying at the bottom of the stairs where I’d slipped them off. He strode over, picked them up gingerly, returned and slung them at me.
    “Thank you so much,” I said. I exited meekly, and when the door slammed shut I quickly pulled my trainers on and raced away into the gathering dusk without doing them up. The laces whipped at my shins, the gravel grated accusingly under my feet, and my heart was pounding. I didn’t want to hang around long enough for Anderson to discover I’d lifted