Incinerator by Niall Leonard Read Free Book Online Page B

Nicky’s phone when he went to fetch my shoes.
    A few streets away I slowed down; there were still no angry shouts of pursuit or police choppers with night-sun searchlights circling. I stopped at a pub on the Thames towpath, sat down at a table and took out Nicky’s phone. Thirty-two missed calls, twenty-two voicemail messages. She’d always used a security code to lock it, but I’d seen the combination a million times, and when I tapped in the numbers the phone blazed into life. Lots of missed calls from me, Vora, and someone called … JoanBisham? Anderson had had a point … if Nicky had absconded, she would have had to abandon her phone—but why would she have packed a bag and then left it?
    Anderson hadn’t seemed deeply distraught that his wife had left him. Or even that surprised. If anything he came across as excited and a bit hyper, but maybe that had been the cocaine talking. I’d met enough coke users to recognize the twitching and the constant sniffing and the dilated pupils. I wondered how Nicky had felt about her husband’s drug use and the implications for her if their house had been raided.
    I couldn’t sit outside this pub all night. It was going to take me hours to go through this phone, reading all the messages to see if they offered any answers about what had happened to Nicky. I hated reading at the best of times—it felt like flossing my brain with barbed wire—and until she vanished Nicky had been doing most of the hard work for me. I felt a pang of self-pity that was immediately washed away in a surge of anger. Why the hell was I feeling sorry for myself when Nicky might be in danger?
    If she was in danger, and not halfway to some sun-kissed island on the Indian Ocean.
    Maybe I was refusing to believe the obvious explanation—that I’d been hung out to dry yet again by a good-looking woman. But something had been bothering Nicky that morning in the gym. Something had upset her or frightened her. Something had made her so furious she had lost all control in the ring, and her phone might hold the key to that something.
    Before heading home I quickly checked her email app. Most of it was densely packed text that gave me a headache looking at it, but halfway down one short subject line caught my eye. It read DEAD MEAT and the sender field was blank. Somehow I didn’t think it was a message from her butcher. I touched the header and the message opened. It too was short and to the point, and it didn’t take me long to figure out.
    UR GONNA DIE IN AGONNY NOSY BITCH

three
    The gym was dark and locked when I returned. When I stayed out after closing time Delroy usually left me a note—only a few words: he was as good at writing as I was at reading—saying he’d see me tomorrow, or something equally obvious, but it was always reassuring. Tonight there was nothing, although he’d tidied the place up and emptied the bins and wiped down the stark little kitchen. I should have called him, I realized with a pang of guilt. I knew he felt that he’d let me down and embarrassed himself, but it was nothing compared to how I’d made things worse that morning at Sherwood’s office. I wanted to tell him that, but first I had to make it right somehow, and not just dump more worries in his lap.
    I stomped on up the dim stairs, cursing the bulb overhead. It was about forty years old and gave off less light than a luminous watch, but it was too high up to reach without an extra-long stepladder, and we didn’t have one, and I was the only person it was a problem for anyhow. My little place, tucked under the sloping eaves of the building, was as cold and dark and empty as when I’d left it early that morning, which felt like months ago. A little more of the wallpaper had peeled off on the section above my bed; one night the whole lot would no doubt slop down onto me and give me nightmares about being a mouldy filling in a stale sandwich. For the first time I missed the ramshackle little house where