Read Online The Fireman by Stephen Leather - Free Book Online

were so high up that the sound of the piano was lost in the dull throb of faraway conversation. Howard pushed through heavy wooden swing doors into the health club’s reception area where a girl in a bright blue leotard and navy leg warmers bounced up to ask for our membership cards.
    Howard explained that we were thinking of joining and just wanted to take a look around to see what facilities were on offer. She nodded her head eagerly, long black hair jerking backward and forward across her shoulders. She was tiny, with flawless skin and a boy’s figure, no make-up or nail polish, just fresh and new and young. I felt a hundred years old. Howard put his wrinkled and liver-spotted hand on her arm like an over attentive Father Christmas and gave her a look that would have alarmed her parents, even if it had come from a fat man in a red suit with a white beard. Like a lamb to the slaughter she offered to show us around.
    ‘That’s all right, dear. We’ll just wander around on our own.’ He seemed reluctant to let go of her arm and eventually she pulled away, eyeing him like a frightened fawn.
    ‘Show me the pool,’ I said, and he took me through the exercise room where young girls and overweight middle-aged men were torturing themselves on chrome and black leather machinery that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a space station. A man wearing stars and stripes shorts puffed and sweated away on a jogging machine as he listened to a Sony Walkman while an attendant watched the dial that showed how fast he was running. I thought of getting one for Bill Hardwicke’s office but it would have been an expensive joke.
    The pool was a good size, about twenty metres by eight, I guess, with a diving board at the deep end. It was surrounded by bright green artificial grass and white plastic chairs which glinted in the sunlight streaming in through the glass overhead. It had the look of a greenhouse, as the walls too were transparent. The view was nothing special, just the tops of the nearby blocks of flats and shops, but it was bright and sunny and a good place to swim.
    Without my having to ask, Howard walked over to the far end of the pool, empty save for a matron in a plastic hat swimming a stoic breaststroke. He stood by one of the big glass panes behind the diving board.
    ‘Here?’ I said, and he nodded.
    I rapped it with my knuckles and it felt solid, more like wood than glass. There was no indication that it was a replacement.
    ‘You’d need some force to go through that,’ I said, stating the obvious. I pressed my nose against the glass and looked down.
    ‘She fell into the road?’ I asked and Howard said yes.
    ‘She didn’t jump,’ I said.
    ‘I know, laddie, I know.’ It sounded as if he was humouring me.
    ‘Did she use this pool a lot?’
    ‘She was a keen swimmer. If she wasn’t swimming here she’d use the pool at the KCC.’
    ‘KCC?’
    ‘Kowloon Cricket Club. It’s a few miles from here. They’ve an open air pool.’
    ‘Sally’s a member?’ The word ‘was’ still didn’t feel right on my lips.
    Howard laughed ruefully. ‘Sally wasn’t a joiner, but she could always find someone to sign her in. She had a lot of friends.’ He was having no trouble using the past tense and I could have hit him for that, driven my fist into his face and twisted it so that his lips would split and bleed because I didn’t want her to be dead.
    ‘What about enemies?’
    He shrugged. ‘I don’t know of anybody who’d want to kill her,’ he said quietly.
    We walked back along the pool side and the woman in the pool was Sally, her wet hair plastered to her head as she turned to float on her back and waved. I smiled and raised my hand but then the smile turned into a grimace and Sally turned into an old lady with a white plastic hat. My hand was half outstretched towards her. To cover my embarrassment I ran my fingers through my hair. ‘Christ, I need a drink.’
    The flight and the whistle-stop tour of