Slip of the Knife (17 page)

“Bacon sarnie?” asked Dub.

“Just, eh”—the guy looked embarrassed—“knocking up a quiche.”

“Can ye do that? I thought they were sterile.”

The guy mouthed a drumroll/cymbal clash and the two men smiled.

“Which room’s Terry’s?”

He pointed to the door next to the kitchen. It was sealed with a padlock small enough to fit on a suitcase. The key to it was on the string Fitzpatrick had given her, flimsy as paper. She fitted it in the lock and opened the door into a large room.

Two long windows at one end looked straight across the street into facing flats. The sun was shining in through them, filtered and softened by the dirty filigree on the glass. The floorboards were painted black, chipped and dusty.

Terry had pulled the wallpaper off. Small scraps were still clustered by the skirting board and powdery residue covered the walls. The paint underneath had been a dark green but it was chipped and faded, a South American wall. She could imagine markets being held in front of it, executions taking place against it, children idling at its foot.

Terry had been camping more than living there. His bed was a bare mattress with dirty crumpled sheets, his duvet coverless and gray. The room was too big for his meager belongings: a silver trunk sat by the near wall, an old ghetto blaster nearby. Next to the mattress sat a large blue duffel bag, already packed with his clothes. Paddy recognized it: he’d had that bag when she saw him off on the train to London eight years ago. Lined up along the bottom of one wall were novels, Penguin Classics mostly, the paper yellowed and battered from being lovingly read.

“I’m really sorry about Terry,” said the quiche maker. “He was only here a month or two, I didn’t really know him. Nice guy though.”

In the empty expanse of dusty black floorboards she could see footsteps picked out in the dust, a cleared muddle in the middle of the room and steps leading away and back from it.

“People have been in here,” said Paddy, pointing at the disturbances in the dust.

“Police.” The quiche maker had followed them into the room. “They went through everything. They were fucking obnoxious too, made us all leave the house for the night while they did it. As far as I can see they took nothing but his passport. And a journalist. Cross-eyed and rude as fuck.”

“Merki.” Paddy nodded. “Did he take anything?”

“No. Brought a bottle of whiskey, put it on the table and asked us about Terry for an hour, then put the bottle back in his pocket and fucked off.”

Dub laughed but Paddy didn’t. “Why did he live like this?” she said aloud. “He owned a big house in Kilmarnock.”

“Oh, was that true then?” The quiche maker was surprised. “I kind of thought that was bullshit.”

“There isn’t really that much here, is there?”

“There might have been more but we were broken into last week. That’s why we’ve got the new door. The other one was made of paper. This one’s sturdy new cardboard.” He laughed at his joke, unperturbed that no one else was joining in.

Paddy traced the pattern of the dust, looking for disturbances. A flat empty space by the trunk looked cleaner than the rest. “Did they take something from there?”

The quiche maker looked from her to the space. “No, Terry moved it. He had a portfolio there. He moved it after we got broken into.”

“Where to?”

He gestured for her to follow him out to the hall and led the way into the kitchen.

The room was moist and smelled gorgeous. A table was scattered with flour, a dusted work strip where he had been kneading the pastry. On one of the two gas cookers sitting side by side was a frying pan, with strips of prosciutto cooling in it. The cookers were fed by a gas pipe that hung loose from the ceiling. Under the window a precariously sloped unit housed the sink. Odd cupboards and a red-and-white larder from the fifties were lined up along the near wall.

In Victorian times the kitchen was the servants’ arena. It was customary to build a small wall recess for the maid to sleep in, soaking up the heat from the ever-warm cast-iron range. In bad modernizations the recess was walled in and converted into a cupboard or sometimes a windowless kitchen if it was large, but here it was being used as a communal area. A grubby settee faced away from the kitchen towards a boxy old television twittering in the corner. Above the television, hovering seven feet in the air, was a giant cupboard with sliding plywood doors.

“It’s a good wee attic thingummy but you’ll need a ladder to get up there,” he said. “Terry put stuff in the back in case we were burgled again.”

Paddy looked around. “Is there a ladder?”

“Aye, aye, we’ve got one.” He disappeared off into one of the rooms and came back with a rickety paint-splattered wooden ladder. “Chris is painting his room.” He set it open and pushed it up against the door of the cupboard.

He expected Paddy to climb up but she pointed out that she didn’t know what they were looking for. Reluctantly, the quiche maker climbed the ladder himself. With great difficulty, he bumped the sliding door to the side. The cupboard was deep and black dark, at just the wrong angle to the strip light.

He reached into the black hole, pulling down a tent and poles, two sleeping bags tightly rolled in sleeves, and a cardboard box of dusty Christmas decorations, handing them down to Dub, who set them on the floor. Next came three black binbags of bedding, old duvets and pillows. The quiche maker then climbed off the top rung of the ladder, kneeling into the cupboard, his feet sticking out as he felt towards the back.

They heard a long sliding noise and he stepped carefully back onto the ladder, his knees gray with dust, screwing up his face as if he might sneeze. He was holding a large, square yew box. Although it was dusty the wood was still gorgeously yellow and leopard spotted, the edges perfectly dovetailed. A flat brass hook on the front held it shut. He handed it down to Paddy, who flicked the hook from the eye and opened it.

Inside were photographs, mostly old, of family members. One near the top looked like it might be Terry’s parents, a couple with their arms around each other standing under an apple tree in high summer. The colors had faded to orange and yellow, the white-framed edges worn from being held. Scratched in thin biro on the back it said “Sheila and Donald ’76.” Creepily, the mother looked a bit like her.

Dub looked over her shoulder, sighed onto her neck. “I’m not saying it.”

“Me neither.”

“Hang on.” The quiche maker reached farther in. “There’s this.”

He climbed out again, dragging a large black portfolio, A3 size, just like the one Kevin had shown Paddy on Sunday night. The quiche maker looked puzzled. “Didn’t want to lose it, I suppose.”

“It’s a book Terry was writing,” said Paddy. “He’d already been paid for it.” She reached up and took it off him. “Thanks so much. It’s really kind of ye.”

“No bother,” he said, taking the camping equipment back from Dub and chucking it into the black hole. “My pastry needs to rest anyway.”

He dragged the reluctant door back across the hole and climbed down the ladder, brushing his hands clean.

“We’ll empty Terry’s room and get out of your way.”

“If you could leave the keys for the next person.” He wrestled the ladder shut and put it over his shoulder. “There’s binbags in that cupboard on the wall there if you want something to put the stuff in.”

Back in the room Pete set up a little play camp by the window, taking marbles out of his pocket and chipping at them, chatting to himself, playing the audience to his own moves. “Wow, good one. Close, very close, wee man. Superb.”

Dub grinned at Paddy as he shook a black binbag open and dropped the Penguin Classics into it. “What’s in the portfolio? Why did he hide it so carefully?”

“Dunno,” she said quietly. “Could be just because it’s work. Could be he knew whoever’d broken in was after it.”

Dub put the binbag down, said hang on, and left her to it. She found a suitcase full of papers hidden in the trunk, Terry’s own clippings mostly.

“The guy out there says Terry’s room wasn’t the focus of the break-in. They nicked a bike and a penny collection, so it doesn’t look like a master burglar.

“Maybe Terry was just paranoid about it because it was his work. He’d never had a book published, had he?”

“No.”

“You know how different that feels. It might have really mattered to him.”

“Maybe.”

She went back to stripping the bed. When she raised the duvet up to fold it into a binbag, his smell enveloped her face. She poked it into the bag, shoving it in angrily, promising herself that she’d dump it in a skip on the way home.

They made a tidy pile of binbags in the middle of the floor, filled the trunk and shut it, put the duffel bag by the door. Quiche Maker said they could leave the mattress. The next person might use it.

They were ready to go.

“Come on,” said Dub, “Mary Ann’ll be there soon.”

Paddy gave Pete the portfolio to carry while she and Dub managed everything else in two trips up and down the stairs.

At the last they stood in the doorway to the huge dusty room. The sun was low and the lights were out in Lawrence Street. When they switched off the bare bulb, the big room was lit by the windows of the facing flats.

Across the street a family had gathered to watch their television set under the window, sitting in a line along a settee as if they were looking straight into Terry’s room. In another window a woman dusted a pristine front room, lifting doilies and straightening antimacassars. In another, an elderly woman looked out of the window into the street, watching for someone.

Paddy could smell Terry in the dust, could see him sitting on his bed drinking a cup of coffee and contemplating his day. He looked small and alone as she imagined him there, a speck, helpless as a dust mote floating gently away on invisible currents.

Dub cupped her elbow. “You’re not just shocked, pet. You’re really sad about this, aren’t you?”

Ambushed, Paddy drew a deep, wavering breath. “I don’t even know why.”

“Maybe it’s really about your dad.”

“Aye, maybe,” she said, “maybe.” But she knew it wasn’t.

TWELVE

THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF SOUP

I

It didn’t look very nice. The pasta had cooked too long and was soft and cloudy at the edges. Paddy dropped the contents of the sauce jar on it and stirred the pot. It still didn’t look very nice, but she knew she’d eat it. She put the lid on and took some ready-grated Parmesan out of the cupboard, setting the cardboard tub on the table.

Dub looked up from the free local paper, chewing his pen seriously. “ ‘Man’s best friend,’ three letters?”

She shrugged. “Jesus?”

She took plates and glasses out of the cupboard and set the table for four. Here, among the steamed-up windows, in the peaceful pocket of the house with all the workaday reminders of routine and pending chores, the threat of Callum Ogilvy and the horror of Terry’s death seemed faintly ludicrous.

She stood over the basket of fresh ironing on top of the washing machine, looking at the creases Dub had carefully worked into her office clothes and Pete’s spare uniform, telling herself not to think about it, just for the evening, until Mary Ann left. They saw little enough of each other and it was a shame to waste a whole evening on distractions.

The doorbell rang out a soft chime and Dub tried to stand up but banged his knees on the underside of the table. Paddy and Pete met in the hall, rushing for the door, a little throb of excitement in Paddy’s throat too. She let him get it.

Mary Ann was standing outside the front door, dressed in a plain blue button-down dress and carrying a plastic bag with a heavy tub in it, her blond ringlets newly and brutally cropped. She smiled wide, stepping into the hall, touching her head self-consciously. Pete wanted to touch it so she bent down to let him.

“Oh dear.” Paddy slipped her arm through her sister’s and tutted. “That is one terrible haircut. But you’re still prettier than me. It’s damnable.”

They came into the kitchen and found Dub standing proudly over the pot of hot pasta on the table as if he’d made it. He took the plastic bag Mary Ann offered him and pulled out a clear Tupperware box, setting it on the edge of the table. It was soup, yellow from the lentils, flecked with green peas and white chunks of potato. The lid wasn’t fitted on properly and a floury dribble had dried down the side. Pete pressed his nose against the box, trying to see through it.

“Soup,” said Mary Ann.

Paddy recognized the cut of the potatoes, the particular yellow tone Trisha got from soaking the dried split peas for two nights instead of one. She took it from Dub, disguising her irritation. “Did she come into the mission to give you this?”

“No.” Mary Ann touched her hair again. “I was home.”

Soup was Trisha’s secret language. Trisha’s soup meant love and home; it meant a mother managing on a poor income, passing on good nutrition to the children; it meant concern. If Trisha’s life had been a musical she would have ended up with all three daughters living a hundred yards from her, raising a dozen well-behaved children between them and gathering every morning to make soup together, to her recipe. As it was, her eldest daughter was divorced and living miserably with her; Mary Ann was a nun, which was good, but made soup from a sack of dried ingredients, which was terrible; and her youngest bought overpriced soup from delicatessens. Sending soup was a reproach to a daughter who couldn’t be trusted to look after herself or feed her illegitimate son properly.

Paddy took it and put it in the fridge. “We’ll have this later. We’ll have it tomorrow.”

Dub sat back down in his seat. “Or we’ll leave it in the fridge until it gets smelly and then chuck it down the toilet.”

Pete giggled because Dub had said toilet.

Mary Ann was shocked at the suggestion, frowning at her empty plate. Paddy sat down next to her, keen to change the subject. “What were you doing home anyway?”

Dub dropped a lump of overcooked red pasta onto Mary Ann’s plate. She looked down at it, the fusilli swirls reluctantly letting go of each other, tumbling down to the cold plate. Usually Mary Ann giggled at everything—a dog running past, a pencil dropped, an incongruous turn of phrase, anything could set her off—but tonight she wasn’t giggling. Tonight she looked down at her dinner settling on the plate and sighed like a grown-up.