The Burning Read Free Page B

over from where the Burning Man left off. If nothing else goes wrong between now and Christmas. If all the criminals in London take the rest of the year off .
    I was looking for shoes, my medium-heeled courts that didn’t so much as nod to fashion but hey, I could wear them from now until midnight without a twinge of complaint from my feet. I could even run in them if I had to. One was in the corner of the room, where I’d kicked it off. The other I eventually found under the bed, and had to sprawl inelegantly to retrieve it.
    ‘I hate the way they whistle and you come running.’ He sounded wide awake now, and cross. My heart sank.
    ‘It’s my job.’
    ‘Oh, it’s your job . Sorry. I didn’t realise.’
    ‘Don’t do this now,’ I said, stabbing my feet into my shoes and grabbing my towel. ‘I’ve got to go. It’s important and you know it.’
    He’d sat up, leaning on one elbow, blue eyes hostile under thick eyebrows, his brown hair uncharacteristically untidy. ‘What I know is that I haven’t seen you for weeks. What I know is that I’ll be ringing up Camilla to say you can’t come to supper after all, and is that OK, and I’m really sorry if it’s mucked up her seating arrangement. What I know is that your job always seems to come first.’
    I let him rant, towelling most of the water out of my hair and then dragging a comb through it, trying to get it into some sort of order. No time to dry it; it would dry on the way to the hospital. A few wisps, a lighter brown than the rest, were already curling around my face.
    ‘Camilla works in an art gallery. She has nothing to do all day but rearrange the seating plan for her little dinner parties. It’ll be a challenge for her.’
    He flopped back down and stared at the ceiling. ‘You always do that.’
    ‘What?’ I shouldn’t have asked.
    ‘Put down my friends because their jobs aren’t as important or as worthwhile as yours.’
    ‘For God’s sake …’
    ‘Not everyone wants to save the world, Maeve.’
    ‘Yeah, it’s just as important to make it look nice,’ I snapped, and regretted it as soon as I’d said it. Camilla was sweet, sincere, a wide-eyed innocent that brought out the protective instinct in everyone who knew her, including me. Usually. The sharpness in my voice had been partly exhaustion and partly guilt; I had been thinking of skipping the dinner party she was throwing. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Ian’s friends – it was just that I couldn’t stand the questions. Any interesting cases lately? Why haven’t you caught the Burning Man yet? What’s the most hideous thing you’ve ever seen on duty? Do you wish they still had capital punishment? Can you sort out this speeding ticket for me? It was tedious and predictable and I found it acutely embarrassing to represent the Metropolitan Police to Ian’s friends. I was just one person. And traffic tickets were definitely outside my purview.
    ‘Ian …’
    ‘Aren’t you in a hurry?’
    I checked my watch. ‘Yes. Let’s talk about this later, OK?’
    ‘Can’t wait.’
    I wanted to point out that I hadn’t brought it up in the first place. Instead, I leaned across the bed and planted a kiss on the bit of Ian’s chin I could reach easily. There was no response. With a sigh, I headed to the kitchen to pick up a banana, then grabbed my bag and my coat and ran down the stairs. I closed the front door with the key in the lock so I didn’t wake the neighbours, though if they’d slept through my shower and relationship issues, they probably wouldn’t notice the door banging. If they were at home, and not on a pre-Christmas shopping trip to New York or a winter break in the Bahamas.
    I stopped for a second on the doorstep, head down, my mind whirling.
    ‘What am I doing? What the hell am I doing?’
    I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, and I wasn’t talking about work. I could handle work. My boyfriend was another matter. We’d been together for eight months, lived