Incinerator by Niall Leonard

I said. “I’ll send it back. Once I’ve copied it.” I clicked on the file and dragged it to my desktop. The laptop grunted and wheezed as it started copying the file. It would only take it most of the night, I reckoned. “How much communion wine do you have to neck to pull a stunt like that?” I asked Susan. She was flicking through another printed report.
    “About a crateful, I’d imagine,” she said. “But this says his blood-test results are awaiting confirmation.” She stood up and promptly banged her head on the low ceiling.
    “Mind the low ceiling,” I said.
    “How the hell do you put up with it?” She rubbed her scalp. “You must be what, six foot three?”
    “I generally move about on my hands and knees,” I said.
    Susan chucked the folder back into its crate. “I can’t see how this stupid vicar can have anything to do with Nicky disappearing.”
    “Neither can I, right now,” I said, “but I’d like to find him and ask him.”
    “And what about Nicky’s phone?”
    “What about it?”
    “Do you still have it?”
    “Why?” I said.
    “Shouldn’t we show it to the police?”
    “When I’ve finished with it,” I said.
    “But don’t they need to know about these threatening messages?”
    “They already do,” I said.
    And that was true, because according to Vora, Nicky had told them. Knowing the cops, of course, they’d never make that connection now. They’d have stuffed Nicky’s original complaint down the back of a filing cabinet and forgotten about it. If I wanted to know the truth, that meant finding it out for myself—not passing the buck to a bunch of uniformed jobsworths whose most urgent priority was a cup of tea and a biscuit.
    “You liked Nicky, didn’t you?” asked Susan.
    “She was a friend,” I said. “Is.”
    “I got the impression she was more than that.”
    I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t know what the truth was, so I said nothing.
    “Because you’re taking a hell of a risk for her. Interfering with evidence. We could becharged with perverting the course of justice, even.”
    “Maybe, if the cops ever find out.” I looked at her. She laughed. She resembled Nicky so much I felt as if I’d known her for months, instead of days; and for a moment I wondered if she was doing it on purpose.
    “I’m not going to tell them,” she said. “You need me to help, I’ll help.”
    “Could you dig out an address for this arsonist property developer?”
    Joan Bisham’s place was in a quiet, prosperous suburb a twenty-minute bus ride away. I had thought a property developer would live in something flash and sleek, maybe designed by an architect, but I was wrong. Hers was a huge rambling, crumbling red-brick house that had been divided into a dozen dingy flats not long ago—one stretch of wall still bore a crudely painted 14A and a wobbly arrow pointing to the basement. There were two front doors to choose from, but I went for the one that looked the cleanest, and heard a bell ring somewhere in the distance. A few minutes later the door was jerked open by a smartly dressedwoman in her forties with big brown eyes and shoulder-length chestnut hair that didn’t quite conceal intricate earrings of blue stones on gold wire. We hesitated a moment, surprised to recognize each other, and I realized where I’d seen her before—on one of my visits to Nicky’s office she’d been leaving as I arrived.
    I could tell Joan Bisham couldn’t place me, and not knowing seemed to make her anxious and irritable. Or maybe she was like that anyway; last time I’d seen her face it had worn an expression of bitterness and disappointment. It did again now, and I realized bitterness was becoming permanently etched on her features, which was a shame because she was still quite a looker.
    “Hello again,” I said, with what I hoped was a charming smile.
    She eyed me with distrust, wondering if I was going to produce a religious magazine and start hectoring her about the