Slip of the Knife (3 page)

The policewoman attempted a smile but it withered on her lips and she slipped Paddy’s eye. She hadn’t done many death knocks, hadn’t yet developed the cold skill of looking heartbreak in the face.

“Hello.” The portly officer took charge. “I’m PC Blane and this is WPC Kilburnie. Are you Paddy Meehan?”

They waited for an answer but Paddy was stiff with fright. She couldn’t seem to get the air to the bottom of her lungs.

“I know it’s you actually.” He half smiled at Paddy. “I recognize your face from the newspapers.”

Paddy did what she always did when a fan approached her. She bared her teeth politely and mumbled an irrelevant “thank you.”

Dub moved in front of her. “Is it Mary Ann?”

Blane blanked his question, stepping over the threshold and looking exclusively at Paddy. “Can we come in?”

She backed away, letting the officers shuffle in, trespassing death into her Wendy house.

Neither of them looked at Dub. Usually he was great at taking charge of a situation. He’d done stand-up for many years and was more than capable of demanding the attention of a nightclub full of drunk people but now, strangely, neither officer would acknowledge him.

“He’s my friend,” said Paddy, pointing at him.

Blane and Kilburnie glanced warily at each other. Blane cleared his throat. “Shall we go through?”

Paddy’s footsteps felt spongy and unsteady as she stepped across the boxes and walked the length of the hall. She slowed as she reached the living room, stalling, as if she could prolong the unknowing moment indefinitely, but Blane took her elbow, hurrying and supporting her at the same time.

“Please sit down.” He guided Paddy through the door and over to the settee. She saw Blane clock George Burns on TV, crouching down at the edge of the stage to talk to a busty woman in the audience.

“Burns,” he muttered dismissively, letting the comment write itself.

Burns had been a policeman before he became a comedian. Every copper in Glasgow had a story about him, usually derogatory—how there were ten guys on every squad funnier than him, how they’d done their training with him and he was a prick then too, anecdotes always delivered with a slightly thrilled smile that they knew someone on telly.

Determined to be spoken to, Dub dropped onto the settee right next to Paddy, reaching for her hand, but Kilburnie managed to squeeze her pointy little self into the space between them.

“Tell me,” said Paddy, taking a deep breath and holding it, bracing herself for the blow.

Kilburnie nodded her head to Dub and widened her eyes. “Maybe it would be better if we spoke to you on your own.”

“Tell me.”

“Well . . .” She looked uncomfortable. “I’m afraid we have some rather bad news, Miss Meehan.”

“What’s happened?”

“I’m afraid,” Kilburnie continued with the standard speech she had practiced in the car, “we found a body yesterday, in the countryside, near Port Glasgow . . .”

Two fat tears raced down Paddy’s cheeks. “Just say it.”

Kilburnie looked down at her lap, patting her knees with both hands, steeling herself. “Terry Hewitt is dead. A shot to the head, I’m afraid. We would have come sooner only he didn’t have any identification on him and we’ve only just found his flat and been through his effects . . .”

Paddy sat up. “Terry Hewitt?”

Disconcerted, Kilburnie glanced at Blane. “I’m afraid he’s dead. I’m very sorry.”

Dub sat forward. “Terry Hewitt?”

“Single shot to the head.” Kilburnie gave Blane a worried look. “He’s dead, I’m afraid.”

Dub reached across Kilburnie’s lap. “Paddy? Were you seeing him again?”

“No,” she muttered, “not since . . . before. I haven’t seen him since Fort William.”

“Why are you telling her this?”

Kilburnie turned to Dub. “I’m very sorry.”

“What are you saying sorry to me for?”

Kilburnie looked from Dub to Paddy. “I’m sorry for talking about this in front of your hubby.”

“Oh.” Dub looked at them both, smiling at the suburban phrasing. “Oh, no. We’re just flatmates. We’re friends.”

“I’m not married,” said Paddy. “Is Mary Ann OK?”

“Who is Mary Ann?” asked Kilburnie.

“My sister. She works in a soup kitchen. She’s a nun. When you said it was out in the country I thought she’d been abducted. I thought she’d been raped . . .” Paddy clamped her hand over her mouth to stop herself talking.

She knew they’d repeat every word of the interview back at the station. A minor provincial celebrity caught off guard wearing ripped pajamas. There were a lot of pauses in police work, opportunities for gossip. They’d describe the purple and yellow hall, her non-hubby flatmate, how they were watching Burns’s show and Paddy was eating biscuits instead of having dinner. They’d tell people about the rip in her pajama bottoms.

“The thing is . . .” Kilburnie tailed off. “I’m afraid we need you to identify his body.”

“Why me? There must be someone who’s seen him more recently than me. I haven’t seen Terry for six months.”

“But you were the next of kin on his passport. We found it in his house. That’s how we got this address.”

“He had me down at this address?”

“Yes.”

Dub watched the back-and-forth, interested now that he knew Mary Ann was safe.

“But we just moved in two months ago.” She looked around the living room, at the orange walls, the sparse furniture, carefully chosen from junk shops and auctions. Terry had never been here; she hadn’t thought he knew the address.

“So you’re not related?”

“No. Terry’s parents died years ago. I don’t know if he had anyone else. He was a foreign correspondent, traveled, didn’t make many friends. I suppose that’s why. I’m not completely surprised, to be honest. He wasn’t happy.”

Paddy stood up. It occurred to her that she should get to the Daily News and file the story of Terry’s suicide. It wasn’t a great story but the thought of work calmed her. She felt the steel nib pierce her heart, felt her muscles relax, her blood slow. With a notebook in her hand she could walk through fire and feel nothing.

The woman officer stood up to meet her. “We need you to come and have a look at him, if you would.”

“Just let me get changed.”

As she passed Blane on her way out of the living room he looked down at her and blurted, “I love your column. I always agree with it. You write things before I’m even thinking them.”

Paddy bared her teeth politely. “Thank you,” she said.

THREE

REGAL AND BRU

I

Paddy kept her window down. The warm breeze caressed her face, carrying the high-summer smell of dust and rotting vegetables as she followed the red taillights of the police car.

Blane and Kilburnie were in the car ahead, sniggering about her purple hall no doubt, passing tasty morsels back and forth about her and George Burns. Everyone would know what Terry’s suicide note said by morning. They’d extrapolate every detail: Terry shot himself because of her, she loved Burns and that’s why she was watching his show, she’d painted her hall purple and yellow, Dub was a boyfriend or a beard. Rumors of her lesbianism increased in direct proportion to her success. It was intended to belittle her, but she quite liked the suggestion that she was impregnable, literally and metaphorically.

A green traffic light switched to orange as the police car passed beneath it. Paddy slowed unnecessarily, stopping before it changed to red. Out of the empty street, a sudden rush of people crossed the road in front of her. She looked back. They were pouring out of the Ramshorn Kirk, a church she’d never even noticed before this year, converted into a theater for Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture.

For a century Glasgow had been a byword for deprivation and knife-wielding teenage gangs but in the past few years the thick coat of black soot had been sandblasted off the old buildings, revealing pale yellow sandstone that glittered in the sun, or blood orange stone that clashed with blue skies. International theater companies and artists had started coming to the city, colonizing unlikely venues, old churches, schools, markets and abandoned sheds, places the locals failed to notice every day. Glaswegians no longer felt as defensive of their home, began to look around with renewed interest, like a partner in a stale marriage finding out that their spouse was a heartthrob abroad.

The lights changed to green but Paddy sat still, watching the pedestrians crossing in front of her. They were young for a theater crowd, smoking now that they could, chatting animatedly about the piece they had just witnessed.

Some of the men cast admiring glances at her car. It was a big white Volvo saloon, a vanity car, bought to show the world of men she moved among that she was doing well and had the readies to buy a big motor. She didn’t like it. It handled like a tank and was too big and boxy to park in the handy little spaces she used to manage in her Ford Fiesta. Parking it anywhere slightly rough was to invite a key along the paintwork.

The crowd began to thin and she let the handbrake off, gently nudging forward. Ahead, the police pulled out slowly, making sure she stayed with them, as if she couldn’t find the city morgue herself.

They drove on, turning down the steep winding High Street, once the spine of the city, now a road through plots of dark wasteland. The seven-story Tollbooth sat on its little traffic island, all that remained of a medieval prison where witches were hanged and the debtors voted in their own mayor.

Glasgow City Mortuary was an unobtrusive single-story building on the corner of the High Court. Built in red brick, it had windows on either side of a deep doorway like a punched-in nose. The business of the building was conducted belowground, in the white-tiled cellar.

The squad car pulled up right in front, on a double yellow line, so Paddy followed their lead and drew up behind them. Kilburnie and Blane were waiting for her on the pavement, their mood lighter than it had been before, distant and observing. They had been talking about her, she could smell it on their breath.

The mortuary faced Glasgow Green, an ill-lit expanse of grass cut through by the River Clyde, bordered on one side by the damp highrises in the Gorbals and on the other by the crumbling tenements of the Gallowgate. At night it was populated by roving prostitutes and the drunk men who came to fuck them or rob them. Shadows routinely rose out of the moist night and tried the door of the mortuary. It was assumed they were attracted by the lights or looking for drugs but no one really knew why they came, banging on the oak or scratching at the windows.

The narrow porch was a tight fit for the three of them. Blane’s looming bulk swallowed the light. They heard the entry buzzer fizz as he pressed it.

“You two do a lot of death knocks?” Paddy used the police term to show them she wasn’t just a punter off the street.

“Not that often,” said Blane.

“Well, I’m afraid I’m Family Liaison.” Kilburnie smiled sadly and tipped her head to the side, putting Paddy in her place as the bereaved. “I have to come here quite often, I’m afraid.”

“You’re afraid of everything,” said Paddy quietly.

Blane smirked at his shoes. Tell your pals that, Paddy wanted to say: Meehan cracking jokes at the door of the mortuary, coming to view a corpse.

She’d been avoiding thoughts of Terry all the way into town, filling her head with Pete and decorating the new house and how soon she could get into the office to file the story. No amount of anticipating could make her ready for the sight of a dead body. She knew that from experience.

When her father, Con, died, the family held the nightly rosary around his open coffin. The gray simulacrum of Con Meehan became just that: not the man, but an impostor wearing her daddy’s best suit. She clung to her grief, knowing that it was the very last emotion her dad would ever provoke in her.

It was a terrible death. He was fifty-eight, riddled with tumors, but the physical pain was nothing compared to his anger in those last few ragged months. He died scratching at the clod walls of his grave, tearful, never accepting that his time was up. Everyone in the family made of Con’s uncharacteristic anger what they needed to. Trisha, his wife, thought it was because of the way things had gone with Paddy and Caroline, because the boys weren’t devout. Caroline put his fury down to his long-term unemployment and a lack of counseling. The boys said it was the medication, Mary Ann said pain. But when Paddy looked into his eyes she saw a great roar of regret. Con was a timid man. He had spent his life avoiding conflict, let everyone through the door before him, waiting in a holding position, and then, suddenly, his time was over.

She gave up trying to get her head around the fact of death. She developed the mental trick of pretending that Con had gone away on a long, happy trip, that she would see him again one day and everything would be better, he’d be tumor free, the regret and all the space between them gone. It was later that she realized her mother used exactly the same mental trick but called the destination heaven.

Blane glanced nervously out at the misty Green and cursed under his breath as he pressed the hissing intercom again. Kilburnie looked at Paddy, blank faced until her training kicked in: her face softened and she reached supportively for Paddy’s arm, retreating when she saw the snarl on her face.

Paddy thought she was coming over too hard. “Did he leave a note?”

Blane looked puzzled. “Who?”

“Terry. Did he leave a note saying why?”

Blane’s jaw dropped in realization. “No, no, sorry. He didn’t do it to himself.”

Kilburnie stole a pinch of Paddy’s elbow. “He was murdered.”

“You’re shitting me?”

“Oh yes, definitely. There were tire marks at the side of the road but no car around and we haven’t found the weapon. He was naked and we never found his clothes. He was murdered.”

“Terry was naked?”

Blane nodded. “Stark, bollock naked.”

She knew it had to be murder: even if the gun wasn’t missing, Terry wouldn’t want to be found naked. He was a bit pudgy, had some fat around his arse, and was ashamed. He wanted the lights off before he would undress in front of her. It was one of the things she’d liked about him. “But who’d want to kill Terry Hewitt?”