Slip of the Knife (13 page)

Collins gave nothing away. He listened to answers politely, and all the while his hands sat flattened on the tabletop, unnaturally still.

He wasn’t flustered by Steven’s presence; it was a complication, not a bar. He might kill both of them, she realized suddenly as she picked the cups out of the cupboard. She needed to get to the phone. She flicked the kettle on, sat the cups on the table, and got the milk out of the fridge.

“Biscuits?”

Steven said yes, he’d love a biscuit, he hadn’t had his tea yet, and Paddy slipped out of the room.

She stepped into the study, the calm site of work. The debris of her uneventful Misty night lay on the table, the letter from Johnny Mac propped on the typewriter, the empty packet of crisps she’d had from Dub’s food cupboard. The time felt like a treat in hindsight. Steven was still rambling behind her but, she realized too late, his voice was carrying out to the hall, coming towards her, following the back of the man who was creeping after her. She lunged for the phone.

“I only want to talk to you.”

She clutched the receiver to her chest and spun to look at him. The dagger-shaped letter opener was on the right side of the desk; she could see the tip of it in the shadow of the typewriter.

“Honestly.” He stepped towards her, a creep, a liar, a true Apostle. “Just a talk.”

She was sweating, wanted to step back from the smell of his sour breath but hardly dared move. “What about?”

He looked around the dark room, at the pine bookcases, at her old desk, the leatherette top scarred along the edge with fag burns from before it was hers, at the discarded wrapper from a packet of wine gums lying under her chair. “Terry Hewitt, he wasn’t one of ours.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“That was a separate thing,” he said and corrected himself. “Nothing to do with us.”

“Separate thing?”

He blinked slowly, thinking his way through the implications before he spoke. “Someone else’s thing. Not ours.”

Still shielding her breastbone with the phone, she chanced a step towards the desk, her hand resting by the typewriter, inches from the dagger. “Do you know what that thing was?”

“So, are you Terry’s family? A cousin?”

“Ex-girlfriend. Terry had no family.”

He tipped his head back, showing her his throat, and laughed joylessly.

Behind him she could see Steven Curren at the kitchen table, bending sideways out of his chair to see them. Collins composed himself. “Lovely cornicing. My father was a plasterer. Later he ran a chip shop.”

“Who killed Terry?”

A smile slithered across his face. “Good-bye.” He stepped backwards out of the room. She didn’t hear him walk across the hall but the door opened and shut quietly. Steven smiled at her from the kitchen. “Is he off then?”

Paddy dropped the phone and looked out into the dark hallway. Gone. She looked in the hall cupboard, checked Dub’s room. He lived a curiously Spartan life. His books and precious collection of rare comedy albums were kept in cardboard boxes that he used variously as a bedside table, a desk and a lamp stand. She looked under the bed, and then skipped into Pete’s room. He was gone.

Steven was calling to her from the kitchen. “The kettle’s boiled. Shall I make the tea? D’you want one?”

Paddy stood in the dark bedroom. The room door had been open when Collins passed it. A pile of fresh boy’s clothes was folded neatly and sitting on the end of the little bed, a box of plastic trucks visible under the bed.

Collins knew she had a child. He knew where she lived, what she looked like, and he knew she had a child.

III

She heard his footsteps in the hall at two forty in the morning, rolled onto her back, an arm over her burning eyes, listening carefully to the rhythm and the distance, unable to shake her body awake enough to sit up.

Tiptoeing across the wooden floorboards, trying not to make a noise, he went to the kitchen, then to the bathroom, and finally into his own room. He hadn’t seen Pete’s door lying open or he would have come in to her.

She summoned the energy to throw the duvet off with a hand, paused, and sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, keeping her raw eyes shut.

She felt for her dressing gown at the end of the bed, pulled it on, and stood up unsteadily, staggering over to the door and out into the hall.

Dub had only just climbed into bed. He looked up at her, standing by the door, her hair a tangled mess, her head tipped back so that she didn’t have to open her eyes properly.

A sensual, sleepy smile bloomed on his face. “Hello, gorgeous.”

She staggered over to the bed, dropped her dressing gown on the floor, and found her way under the covers, wrapping herself around his warm naked body.

“Pete . . . ,” he said.

“Still at Burns’s.”

Dub kissed her hair, pushing it back from her face, the tender smell of sweat and cigarette smoke from his night engulfing her.

His hand slid down her bare hip, the backs of his fingers nestling in the warm, soft comma at the top of her thigh. He pressed his forehead to hers, their eyelashes touching at the tips.

“You’re the nicest landlady I’ve ever had.”

“Wake me up when you’ve had your fun,” she said and met his smile.

NINE

FAMILY UNIT

I

Paddy put her hand on the bonnet of a silver estate car that looked vaguely familiar, feeling for warmth. She’d been halfway around the car park, had felt so much cold metal that her fingers were numb and she couldn’t really tell if the engine had been running recently. She didn’t care if other journalists were here, hiding and waiting for Callum. She didn’t care about Callum at all or whether Bunty found out she was up here at the gates of the prison, planning to come home with no story, just doing her duty as the only person Sean knew who would be any kind of support.

She pulled her coat collar up. It was always colder at the coast. The chill came from the vicious North Sea and the glassy granite, locals said, from the cold hard stone under the rich black sod.

The thirty-foot-high wall was blackened and bleak. The roof of the main building was just visible, peering over it, the small barred windows like the eyes of a malnourished child. She knew this car park well, even though she’d never been here before.

One of the biggest scenes in Shadow of Death was set here but she’d been heavily pregnant as she finished it and had used file photos from the News library and showed them to Patrick Meehan on the pretext that a lot had changed at the prison since his day, could he just tell her what was different. Meehan was smart, not especially personable but he was fly. No real changes, he said, pretty much the same as it was on the day of release. He had a prisoner’s talent for spotting weaknesses in others. He knew she couldn’t be bothered going up there. He forgot, of course, that the railway to the quarry had been dismantled and several outbuildings had been added. He only remembered at the book launch.

No one else noticed the flaws in her retelling. The press were too interested in their role in his release, looking for themselves in bit parts. The public simply weren’t interested. Paddy’s book was the seventh written about the case and tastes in true crime had moved on from local miscarriages of justice to sex murderers and serial killers.

The day Patrick Meehan got his royal pardon a gray mist rolled in from a threatening sea, bringing the sky so low over the heads of the waiting pressmen that they cowered in their cars, expecting a deluge of rain. The Express had the deal sewn up: they paid Meehan tens of thousands for an exclusive, no one knew quite how much, and even years later he wouldn’t disclose the exact sum. Back then, before the details of a footballer’s sex life were considered a leader, the papers made stars of gangsters and murderers and Meehan was the ideal story. He was a gentleman criminal, a peterman of the old school, and wrongly convicted of a vicious attack on an elderly couple. He had been protesting his innocence for seven long years, had appeal after appeal knocked back by the judges while the real killers touted their story to the newspapers. The campaign for his release began in the papers, so everyone who’d ever written an article about him felt that they owned a little bit of him and his story.

Naive about the value of the man, the prison service gave all the details of his release in an official statement, so the mob outside the gates that morning could have constituted a Parliament of the fourth estate. It was the wait that caused the trouble.

Had they released him first thing in the morning, at seven fifteen, just as the night shift went off and the day officers came on, those who arrived overnight wouldn’t have had time to plan their moves. As it was, the gate opened at ten thirty and Meehan stepped out of the small door punched into the big metal gates, straight into the hot hands of the waiting press. A riot broke out.

The Express grabbed him by the arms and threw a jumper over his head so that no one else could get pictures. Jostled and battered by the crowd, he was bundled into the back of a car where his wife was waiting to be reunited and interviewed with him. They locked the car doors, shouting at him to get down on the floor. Meehan complied, lying flat, his face obscured by a gray jumper. The Express men jumped into the front seats of the car and started the engine as the crowd closed in around their bonnet. Excited that they had managed to pull it off and thrilled at the envy on their rivals’ faces, they drove into the crowd a little too fast, rolling over a snapper’s toes and causing a senior journalist from the Mail to fall awkwardly and bang his face on the car park surface.

Outraged that the Express men were looking so smug and had damaged a couple of them, the rest of the press didn’t stand by and watch the car roll out onto the main road. They leaped into their own cars and gave chase. Meehan told Paddy that he saw a guy on a Triumph motorbike coming up the side and the Express driver shouted at him to get down, it was a snapper, cover yourself and get down. He was pulling the jumper over his head when he saw the Triumph veer too close to the side of their car, get a fright, overcorrect and swing out, crashing into a ditch. Paddy knew the guy; he’d shattered his ankle, still walked with a limp, and swore that the car had bumped him.

The Express car and its pursuers roared down uneven back roads to a field, and still covered with a jumper, Meehan was made to run blind to a waiting helicopter. God, they had budgets in those days, but not a lot of access to weather forecasts: almost as soon as it took off the chopper was forced down in a field by the heavy mist, and they had to hitch a lift to the hotel they’d booked for the interview. Luckily for them, they didn’t meet anyone on the way and secured their exclusive.

Telling her about it afterwards, Meehan managed to imply strongly that everyone was at fault but himself, that his advance hadn’t been as much as everyone said, and that he somehow had a right to sell his story exclusively to a newspaper. A bloody farce, he said of it, but he was always angry about everything, and the details of the day got lost in the list of his other complaints.

That was how motivated other journalists were and Callum Ogilvy was just as big a story as Meehan. Journalists from all over Britain had contacted Sean and sent letters to Callum, offering money and the chance to tell his story. They suggested he could blame it all on James. Callum told them he didn’t want the money and he didn’t want to talk. They offered more: higher rates and a picture with his eyes blacked out. He didn’t want it. He wrote back to some of them, always saying the same polite thing in a childish scrawl: he wanted to live within a loving family unit and to work in a factory. One of the papers printed the reply under the banner “Our Letter from a Murderer.”

Paddy did a second tour of the car park. No one was hiding, as far as she could see, but they would only find out for sure when Callum came out of the gate. She made her way back to the News car.

Sean was eating his sandwiches, laboriously peeling back the top slice and extracting a limp lettuce leaf with a pinched thumb and forefinger, holding it up as if it was a dead slug, cursing Elaine under his breath.

Paddy watched as he dropped the leaf out of the car window. “She worries because of your folks.”

“They died young because they’d a hard life.”

She looked out of her own window at the big gray sky. “I think you’ve forfeited the right ever to slag that woman off again, after what she’s doing for you.”

“It’s not that big a deal.”

“She’s got four kids.”

Sean closed his eyes patiently. “They wouldn’t be letting him out if he hadn’t changed.”

Paddy didn’t answer. The prison authorities were letting Callum out because they couldn’t keep him in. A sudden gust of wind buffeted the side of the car, rocking them slightly. Sean reassembled the sandwich and held it up, glaring at it spitefully. “Turkey ham. What is that anyway?”

Paddy considered the sandwich. “It’s turkey made to taste like ham.”

“Why couldn’t she just get ham?”

“It’s cheaper than ham. It’s better for you.”

“I don’t want stuff that’s better for me.” His brow darkened.

She pulled herself upright. “You want to make your own fucking sarnies then. A guy came to my door last night. Creepy guy who stank of fags and was something to do with the IRA.”

“What did he want?”

“Dunno. Called himself Michael Collins.”

“Maybe that’s his name? Lots of people are called that.”

“No.” She looked out of the window and bit her nail. “I think he was trying to scare me.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Dunno.”

The car phone trilled abruptly, making them both start and laugh at how jumpy they were. Sean picked up, straightening the mangled coil of flex.

“Aye? No, I’m at the Makro for my missus. I’ll get Beefy onto it.” He looked at Paddy. “Yeah, I’ll see her later. OK, I’ll pass it on.”

He hung up, holding the flex away as he set the phone carefully back on its cradle. “A lawyer rang the work for you.”

“A lawyer?” She immediately thought of Burns and the child support. “What about?”

“Terry Hewitt. His lawyer. You’ve to ring back.”