The Fireman by Stephen Leather Page B

God I hate mornings. I could just about manage to look out of the window without heaving, but I had to squint to do it. Something was missing, and it took me a while to realize what it was before it hit me with a jolt – the bag containing Sally’s belongings had gone, the window seat was bare. I checked behind the chairs and under the bed and then I opened the dressing table drawer. Her watch lay there, with the money clip and the purse, next to a hardback New English Bible and a sewing kit in a white cardboard folder. Of course, the room had been tidied and I’d been too drunk to notice the night before.
    I found the bag, the dress and the shoes in the wardrobe. I slipped the dress off its hanger and held it up in front of me, imagining her wearing it, standing in front of me, looking up with laughter in her eyes. I held the blue material scrunched up against my face and breathed deeply, filling my nose and my throat and my lungs with the smell of her. The dress was cool and soft and felt like silk and I rubbed it gently up and down my cheeks. ‘Sally,’ I said out loud and then it suddenly hit me how perverse I must look, standing there kissing my dead sister’s dress. I screwed it up and threw it in the wastebin, along with her shoes, the money clip and the bag. The purse contained a couple of Hong Kong Bank credit cards and several hundred dollars. The money I left on the dressing table but the cards I tore in half and threw on top of the dress. The watch I’d have to think about. I didn’t want her things, I didn’t want my nose rubbed in her death, to know that all I’d ever have of Sally would be the objects she’d touched. Maybe I’d keep the watch for our mother. Or maybe I’d wear it. I dropped it into the inside pocket of my jacket in the wardrobe, remembering as I did that I still had to phone Mother. I’d been in no fit state last night, but now it was too late, she’d be asleep. Tomorrow.
    I showered and dressed and drank three strong cups of coffee and ate a Danish pastry with chopped up bits of green stuff on the top, but it didn’t make me feel any better.
    It was Sunday so there was hardly any traffic on the expressway and I was in the Post ’s office with Healy long before Jardines were firing their gun.
    He met me in reception on the second floor, a cigarette in his hand and ash down the front of his shirt. The shirt was dirty enough to have been the one he was wearing last time I saw him, and it was certainly the same tie. He’d shaved, though.
    He shook my hand and again my stomach turned as I felt the stub of his index finger press into my palm. The Post ’s office was pretty much the same open plan tomb as I worked in back in London, though here the glass cubicles were gathered together in the middle. There were about half the number of terminals around and most were unoccupied. All the windows had been blocked off and filters fitted over the fluorescent lights so that the VDUs wouldn’t give the journalists eye-strain by the end of an eight-hour shift.
    The desks were piled high with old newspapers, stacks of press releases and reference books. So much for the paperless office.
    An old Chinese lady in blue jeans and a purple apron was emptying the waste paper baskets into a plastic barrel on wheels that was almost as tall as she was. She pulled it after her on a piece of thick rope.
    Healy led me over to what I guess was his desk. It was covered in a thick layer of grey dust and there were cigarette burns all along the right hand side. An unhealthy looking china cup with a curved ‘S’ handle lurked behind an opened pack of Ritz crackers.
    ‘You want one?’ he asked, waving the box under my nose.
    ‘No, thanks,’ I said, and he took a handful and began slotting them into his mouth like coins into a vending machine.
    I sat down in front of the grey and white terminal, as familiar to me as an old sock. I’d been using the sodding things for four years and my eyesight had