Incinerator by Niall Leonard

I’d lived all those years with my dad, and I wondered if the tenants in there would mind if I crashed on the floor. But when I thought about it, it wasn’t the house I missed. I couldn’t feel nostalgic about the place where I’d found my father slumped over a table with his head beaten in. It was Dad I missed, and his lovable, idiotic conviction that somehow everything would turn out all right in the end.
    I heard a wooden banging down below, andrealized someone was thumping on our bolted doors with the heel of their fist. I thought maybe another drunk had taken the place for a nightclub, and tried to ignore it, but the banging went on, faint and angry and persistent. I sighed, skipped back down both flights of stairs again, drew back the heavy bolts, swung the door open, and stared.
    “Where is she?” said Nicky.
    Except it wasn’t Nicky. She certainly looked like her—she had the same neat athletic build, and wore her hair about the same length, pulled back from the same delicate, intelligent features. But this woman was five years younger, and her hair was fairer.
    “If you mean Nicky Hale, that’s what I’d like to know,” I said.
    “You’re sisters?”
    She’d marched into the flat as if she’d expected Nicky to be hiding under my bed. Now the way she was looking around the place suggested she couldn’t believe a human being could live here.
    “Half-sisters. My name’s Susan Horsfall.”
    “Right,” I replied vaguely. “I saw yourname … on a holdall at her house.” I was still trying to get my head around this. Half-sisters? This woman didn’t just
look
like Nicky—she walked like her, spoke like her. I’d seen twins who looked less alike. “Nicky told you about me?”
    The look of amused disbelief she shot me blew away any lingering hopeful illusions.
    “No,” she said. “Harry told me you’d been round, when I went looking for her. Nicky was supposed to be coming to stay at my place, only she never turned up.”
    “Why was she coming to stay with you? Because they’d argued?”
    “They never stopped arguing,” Susan said. “She’d had enough. She said she was going to leave him. I never thought she really would … and certainly not this way. Harry says she cleaned you out.”
    “Just about,” I said. “Look, now you’re here, can I offer you something? A drink, or …?”
    She glanced towards the greasy stove and battered kettle on the corner unit. “I’m good, thanks,” she said. When I followed her look I could see why she’d wrinkled her nose. God, this place was a dump, I realized. But sheseemed to unwind a little, at least, and took a seat on my creaky old settee.
    “For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry. It’s hard to believe she’d do something like this, but she was desperate. She’d been so unhappy the past few months …”
    “So Harry really didn’t know what she was planning?”
    “Are you kidding? This is going to cause him an unbelievable amount of grief, especially at work. I suppose that was one of the upsides, for her.”
    “What does Harry actually do?” I said.
    “He’s an account manager for a private bank in the city. Makes loads; more than Nicky ever did. She always claimed she didn’t care about money.”
    “You didn’t believe her?”
    “She obviously cared about yours,” said Susan. I must have looked pathetic, because she smiled at me with pity. “I’m sorry, Finn,” she said. “I’m sure she liked you. You’re definitely her type. She’s always gone for big strapping men like you and Harry.”
    “Did she ever tell you about these?” I picked up Nicky’s phone from my rickety dining tableand unlocked it. It opened where I’d left it, on the nameless poison email, and I passed it to Susan. Her eyes widened as she scanned it.
    “There’s another half-dozen like that,” I said. “And twenty more in the Deleted folder. She was getting about three or four of them a day.”
    “Lawyers make enemies,” said