Slip of the Knife (2 page)

Terry Hewitt’s corpse began the long melt back into the earth, and the world went on.

TWO

SAFE HOME

Paddy took a crouching step from her armchair to the television, pressed the button for STV, and sat back down. The adverts were still on. Dub’s long, skinny body was draped across the length of the settee and he smiled a slow, warm grin.

“This is the best point of the entire fucking week for me. The delicious moment just before the music starts and the half-hour car crash begins.” He slid his hand under his T-shirt, lazily scratching the skin on his belly. She pretended not to look at his flat stomach and the soft cushion of his pectorals. She was having to do that a lot.

“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” she said to the TV.

“No.” Dub raised a finger to correct her. “It’s getting much worse.”

They grinned in unison at the screen as the theme tune started, high-pitched, frantic, followed by the flat titles for George H. Burns’s Saturday Night Old Time Variety Show. The graphics were a rip-off of Monty Python’s Flying Circus but still they were the most original thing about the program.

A knock on the front door startled them. Dub sat up and looked out into the hall. “That’s not him, is it?”

“Doubt it,” said Paddy, acting casual as she got up. “Don’t turn over though, in case it is.”

She pretended not to care whether it was George Burns, but when she was alone in the big hall she straightened her pajamas and fluffed her hair up at the sides. She opened the door.

The man in the close was young, fresh faced behind his John Lennon glasses. His hair was pulled straight back into a ponytail at the nape of his neck, loose, thick. The notepad and poised pen were the real clues.

“Hi, sorry to bother you, I’m Steven Curren—”

Conscious of the loud paint job and messy boxes in the hall, Paddy almost shut the door so they were talking through a two-inch gap. This would be the first of a hundred door stops. She’d better get used to it. “Who are ye with?”

“Sunday Mail,” he said, a little proud. “When’s Callum Ogilvy getting out? Is he coming to stay with you?”

His accent was soft and rounded. Edinburgh or England, Paddy thought, maybe Scottish but educated in England.

“Son,” she whispered for the sake of the neighbors, “fuck off away from my door.”

“Come on, Miss Meehan, you must know when he’s getting released. Where’s he staying when he gets out? Is Driver Sean going to pick him up? Is he staying with him?”

He had a grasp of the basic facts but nothing he couldn’t have found in old clippings or picked up from office gossip. She waited for him to hit her with something else but he didn’t.

“Is that it?”

He shrugged. “Um, yeah.”

“This is a bullshit door stop,” she said. “You’ve got nothing to go on. Do the Mail even know you’re here?”

“McVie,” he explained, eyes dipping in shame. “He said I have to try.”

“McVie sent you to my door on a Saturday night?”

“He said to follow up the leads.”

She felt for him. A more practiced journalist could have challenged her or made up some fact to goad her into talking. Her own door-stop method had always been to wait until a few journalists had rung the bell and been thrown off the step. Then she’d open her eyes wide and pretend to be a rookie, forced to come here by an evil editor. She’d ask the householder permission to wait on the step for a little while, just so that her editor couldn’t sack her. Often they’d side with her against the paper and invite her in. Curren, by contrast, had started combative and then had nothing to back it up. He’d get his face kicked in doing that in Glasgow.

“You’re new at this, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.” He looked excited.

“New to Glasgow?”

He brightened. “Been here a week. Just finished my training. ‘Greatest newspaper city in the world.’”

Combative and then suddenly soft; it was the worst possible combination to use when prying into the affairs of very upset people.

“Maybe you should try being more aggressive,” she said, imagining him nursing a black eye in the Mail newsroom while explaining where he got the idea from to guffawing colleagues. “When you get to a door try to push it open, swear at them, do something that’ll make them think you’re in charge. No one’s going to buckle under gentle quizzing.”

Curren nodded earnestly. “Really?”

“Yeah, Glaswegians really respond to that kind of firm hand.”

Curren hummed at his feet. “OK.” He took a deep breath, steeled himself, and demanded, “When’s Ogilvy getting out?”

“Better. Definitely better.”

Confusion flickered on his face and Paddy felt a little bit guilty. In the yellow light of the close he looked young and embarrassed and fed up, while she, content and pajamaed, still had the taste of oaty biscuits bright in her mouth.

She gave him permission to do what he’d do anyway. “Listen, just go back and tell your editor I’m a total bitch and you tried really hard.”

Resentment flashed behind his glasses. “I’ll tell McVie he’s a fat poof.”

She tutted. Brutal insults were the custom of their profession, but she didn’t like McVie’s homosexuality used as a slur. “Nah, don’t say that to him, he might get a bit, you know . . .” she searched for the word, “. . . stabby.”

He grinned. Nice teeth. “Stabby? Is that an intransitive verb? Only in Glasgow . . .”

“Adjective.” She’d never heard of that kind of verb. Even tea boys had degrees these days. “Well, fuck off anyway.” She shut the door, felt a pang of guilt at her mis-advice, and called through the wood, “Safe home.”

“Thanks,” he answered, his voice muffled. “By the way, I saw your Misty column about dope. Brilliant.”

Paddy felt vaguely ashamed. She had stolen the argument that no one started a fight in a bar because they’d smoked pot, but that alcohol provided so much tax revenue it couldn’t be outlawed.

“Thanks,” she said to the door. “It was Bill Hicks’s line actually. I took it and didn’t give him an acknowledgment.”

“Good for you,” replied the door. The kid would go far.

She listened as his foot dropped to the first step, followed the echo of his trail as he walked down two flights and left the close. The outside door slammed behind him.

Lucky her. The biggest crime story in the last twenty years hadn’t so much landed in her lap as grown up under her feet. Callum Ogilvy and another small boy had been found guilty of the brutal murder of a toddler nine years ago. At the same time Paddy, a hungry young reporter, was engaged to Callum’s cousin Sean. It was because of Paddy’s investigation that the men who goaded the boys to do it were found and charged. Callum and James were done for conspiracy instead of murder and it carried a shorter sentence. Even she didn’t know if it was a good idea to release them, but there was no legal basis on which to hold them any longer.

She hadn’t met Callum since he went to prison. She knew very little about him, other than the sanitized snippets Sean passed on from his prison visits and the occasional articles about his life there. Sean wanted her to write Callum’s big interview when he got out. Working in newspapers for the past six years, he was savvy enough to know that Callum would be hunted down and eventually caught, probably by an unsympathetic journalist who’d print a picture and ruin what little anonymity he had. Most journalists would have bitten Sean’s hand off for the opportunity but Paddy had her doubts about writing it: she couldn’t guarantee a sympathetic story, and anyway, Callum didn’t want to talk to anyone.

She loitered in the hall, looking down at the boxes of Dub’s records and a cardboard rack of her work clothes. Unpacking had ground to a halt a month ago and now they only noticed the boxes when they saw them from an unusual angle.

The ceilings were high in the flat. The early Victorians took tenements seriously, built them on a grand scale with servants’ quarters and drawing rooms that could accommodate dance parties, and Lansdowne Crescent was one of the oldest tenements in the West End of Glasgow.

It was a student flat before Paddy bought it. The hall was still purple with canary yellow trim, the detailing on the magnificent cornicing obscured under a century and a half of pasty emulsion. The three bedrooms were painted in colors that would exacerbate a hangover and the kitchen ceiling was so nicotine stained that it was hard to tell whether it had been painted white or kipper yellow.

At twenty-seven, she was in her first home away from her family and she was still gliding around it like a triumphant child in a longed-for Wendy house.

Back in the living room Dub smirked up at her. Paddy could tell by the crumbs on his T-shirt front that he’d stolen some of her biscuits.

“Who was it?”

“A wee journalist from the Mail. Asking about Callum Ogilvy. How’s the show this week?”

“Oh, bliss, it’s even worse.”

“Can’t be.”

They watched as George H. Burns demanded a welcoming round of applause from the audience, his eyes flashing angry as he backed offstage to the wings. The curtain rose on a sweating ventriloquist with a cow puppet sitting upright on his knee, its impertinent pink udders quivering in the spotlight.

The Saturday Night Old Time Variety Show was arse-clenchingly poor. George H. Burns’s compèring style revolved around insulting the audience. He guessed where they were from, told jokes about skinflints from Aberdeen and half-wits from Dundee. His material was obvious, the intervening acts mediocre, the musicians plodding.

“Even the curtains look tired,” said Dub.

The viewing figures were spectacular: every single week the numbers halved. But it wasn’t really funny. If Burns’s career took a nosedive he’d stop giving Paddy money, even sporadically, and she was stretched tight enough as it was.

Dub had been George’s manager when the TV company approached them and offered the show. He advised Burns not to host it on the grounds that it would be absolutely fucking shit. Burns, greedy and headstrong, sacked the guy who’d brought him to the brink of stardom and replaced him with a manager who wore shiny suits and couldn’t talk to a woman without staring at her tits. Now even he knew the show was crap. He was angry, blaming the producer, the writers, the quality of the acts, but the flaw was in the concept: variety theater needed revival because it was dying, and it was dying because it was patchy and dull. Worse for George, going mainstream had alienated all his comrades on the alternative comedy circuit. Far from being alternative, the circuit was suddenly all there was, apart from guest spots and workingmen’s clubs.

“Mother of God,” muttered Paddy, dropping into her chair. “Where are they finding these people? Backstage must be like the bus to Lourdes.”

“They’re all actual performers. Dinosaurs. Actually, mini-saurs. Baby saurs.” He lay there, grinning, his chin folded into his neck, the sole pocket of fat on his entire six-foot-two frame. She’d been flat sharing with him for two months and saw how much he ate. She’d always hoped that thin people were lying, that they didn’t eat giant meals and keep their figures just the same, but Dub ate peanut butter sandwiches before his dinner, snacked on entire packets of biscuits, and was still rake thin. Paddy felt the hefty roll of fat on her middle bulge as she sat down. It was just unfair.

A slow knock echoed out from the deep hall. Paddy sighed as she stood up again. “Tell him to get lost,” Dub said.

But it didn’t sound the same, didn’t sound like a journalist’s jaunty, faux-friendly beat. “I’ve told him to fuck off.” She brushed her hands clean on her pajama trousers. “I’m just after telling him that.”

As she stepped back over the boxes the knock was still going, a rhythmic, steady tap on wood, slow and grave. Paddy’s heart jolted a warning.

Her hand hesitated on the handle. It could be a lost drunk who’d wandered up the close, or a journalist from a serious paper looking for news of Callum Ogilvy’s release date. Or George Burns on a downer. Or Terry fucking Hewitt. God, not Terry, please.

She slipped the safety chain on noisily, hoping it sounded more substantial than it was, and opened the door an inch.

Two unfamiliar police officers, a man and a woman, stood shoulder to shoulder, wearing full uniform and looking grimly back at her.

Paddy slammed the door shut in their faces.

Alone in the hall, her knees buckled. She had shadowed the police often enough to know what a death knock looked like: two uniformed officers, stony faced, one of them a woman, turning up at an unexpected hour.

When Paddy was on night shift she’d arrived at the door with them, faked sympathy along with them, never once thinking they would come to her. With them, she kept her face straight during the interview and sniggered at the jokes in the car afterwards, laughing at the clothes and the décor, at the family setup and undercurrents, dead wives found in a boyfriend’s bed, car crashes caused by drink, once a husband found dead in a ladies’ changing room at a department store, trying on girdles. They laughed, not because any of it was funny, but because it was sad.

Someone close to her had died. They had died violently, or she would have been called by a hospital, and they had died alone, or a family member would have phoned her. It had to be Mary Ann.

“Dub?” Her voice was high and wavering. “Could ye come out here a minute?”

Dub took his time. When he appeared he stood in the doorway; he was still looking back at the TV. “What?”

“Two police. Outside. I think something’s happened.”

They looked anxiously at the door, trying to read an answer in the lumpy yellow paint.

Dub came over, standing too close, even jumpier than she was. “Couldn’t be a noise complaint? A mistake? The journalist, the wee guy, was he noisy on the way out?”

Paddy pressed her hand to her mouth.

“It could be Mary Ann.”

“Let them in then.” Dub reached over swiftly, slipped the chain off, and pulled the door wide.

The male officer was a big shed of a man, fat and broad, blue shadow on both his chins, his chest still heaving from the effort of lumbering up the stairs. The woman was blond, hair scraped back so tight it looked as if it had been painted on. She was birdlike: a pointy nose, beady eyes, thin lips. Family Liaison. They always sent out a woman from Family to hold the person’s hand when they sobbed.