Slip of the Knife (22 page)

“Is this the whole photo?”

“No, it’s an enlargement. That’s why it’s so grainy.”

“I was going to say, it’s not a very good photo of anyone.”

He sifted slowly through the other pictures.

Collins wasn’t as distinct in them—she wouldn’t have recognized him herself if his face hadn’t been emblazoned on her mind—but Donaldson didn’t seem to be looking at him anyway. She watched him examine the street, the buildings on either side, the fat man by the driver’s door, the car license plate, the slice of the black woman’s face at the edge of the photocopy.

Going back to the enlargement, he looked through all the pictures, one by one, stone faced. He pushed them across the table to her.

“Do you know him?”

“Never seen him before.” His tone was studiously flat, his eyes steady and expressionless.

“Yes you have.” She rolled the pictures up into a tight cylinder. “I’m not researching a story, Donaldson, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Journalists are always researching a story. They don’t wonder what time it is without researching a story.”

“This isn’t about a story.” She tapped the rolled-up sheets. “This cunt sent someone to my son’s school this morning. He’s been to my fucking house. I need to know what kind of threat he is.”

Donaldson’s expression didn’t waver. “We’ve all lost family.”

“You bastard.”

He blinked, lifted his glass, and swallowed three-quarters of a pint of Guinness, watching her over the rim. Placing his glass on the table, he did a clean sweep of his top lip with his tongue. Never once did his gaze waver. He was waiting for her to speak.

“If violence is a gamble . . .” she said carefully, “if it’s about who has the higher stake, remember that I’m talking about my son here.”

Donaldson stared through her, his fingertips turning the rim of the empty glass as white scum slid slowly down the inside.

“Do you hear me, Donaldson?”

“I can hear ye fine, girlie.”

She pointed across the table with the rolled-up sheets, leaned across at him, and poked him hard in his soft chest. “Tell your friend this and mark it well: neither you, nor he, nor the entire mustered armies of thugs who’ve hijacked the history of the Fenian Brotherhood of Ireland want to get between me and my young.”

Donaldson looked down at where she had prodded him and slowly raised his eyebrows in amusement, as if a threat from her was a joke.

Paddy could feel herself getting hot and angry; never a safe combination.

“Donaldson, for all I care you may be the king of the fucking Maze, you may have cut your own ear off in a bet—you might just be that fucking hard—but if there’s a whisper of a threat to my wean, I will find you and I will ruin you.”

She sat back and caught her breath, hoping she frightened him a little bit.

Donaldson smiled. “Miss Meehan, d’ye not think every wumman who’s ever lost a child thinks that? We’re all fighting for our children, they’re why we’re fighting.”

She stood up and leaned across the table, her nose an inch from his. “I’m not talking about the struggle. I’m talking about you. I’ll ruin you.”

He laughed a puff of grainy Guinness at her. “Are ye trying to threaten me?”

She sat back down and looked at him. A total miscalculation. He hadn’t flinched, hadn’t even bothered to keep his poker face on. In fact, he looked a little bored, as if he’d heard a hundred threats of bloody violence and ruin.

She sighed and looked out of the booth. “I was trying to, but it doesn’t seem to be taking.”

Donaldson chuckled to himself, shaking his tits at her, his neck folding over into two round rolls.

She held the sheets up. “I will find out who this guy is.”

He swatted her adamance away with a flick of his wrist. “Aye, ye maybe will. Ye maybe will.”

“Have you thought about the effect these killings are going to have on your organization? Killing teenagers in Ulster is one thing—”

“We don’t kill Ulster teenagers.” For a flash his nose wrinkled, mouth turning up at the corner, shoulder rising as if he couldn’t bear the accusation.

“Charles Love,” she said, referring to a sixteen-year-old Catholic boy accidentally killed earlier in the year by a remote control IRA bomb intended for soldiers.

“Love was an accident.” Donaldson narrowed his eyes. “Seamus Duffy wasn’t: the RUC shot him dead last year. He was fifteen.” He shrugged. “We could go on and on.”

“Killing journalists on neutral soil is going to undermine everything you’ve worked for. Even your Americans won’t fund this sort of thing.”

“We are not killing journalists on neutral soil.”

“Does that mean Scotland’s part of the civil war now?”

“No.”

“So you don’t count Kevin and Terry as journalists? Why? They weren’t anything else. I’ve known Terry since he was a teenager and he would never work for British Intelligence.”

“You’d be surprised who’s working for British Intelligence.” It was an aside, a sad note to self more than a statement. Looking for a consolation drink, Donaldson tipped his pint glass a fraction, remembered it was empty, and set it straight.

“You’re wrong,” Paddy told him. “Two nights ago Kevin said there was no one after him. He thought Terry had been killed by someone he met in Liberia, for Christsake. If you’re justifying this by saying they were part of some big espionage plot, you’re wrong.”

Donaldson leaned over the table at her and spoke slowly. “We are not involved in this, officially, unofficially or in any of the gray areas in between. We didn’t do it. We wouldn’t do it. It wasn’t us.”

“As far as you know,” she said flatly, implying that he was nothing but a foot soldier.

“No.” He spoke slowly. “From on high. Not us. No way, in no capacity, under no circumstances.”

She sat back and looked at him. Donaldson was scruffy, fat, and smelled of Guinness, but he did have the assured demeanor of a man with power. She might need to speak to him again.

“I’m sorry for threatening ye, Mr. Donaldson.” She put her papers in her bag and noticed that his eyes followed them. “But I’m desperate.”

“It’s OK.” He nodded softly at the table in front of him. “I understand. A mother’s love’s a blessing.”

“No matter where you roam,” she said, filling in the next line of the hokey old Irish song she’d been hearing all her life.

He gave her the end of the chorus. “You’ll never miss a mother’s love ’til she’s buried beneath the clay.”

They smiled, each seeing the frightened Catholic child in the other.

“An anthem for emotional blackmail. Have ye kids yourself, Mr. Donaldson?”

“A son,” he said, and something seemed to snap shut in his eyes. “He died. On remand in Long Kesh.”

“Oh. God. I’m so sorry.”

Donaldson sighed down at the dirty tabletop in front of him. “Aye,” he said. “Me too.”

II

The summer street was blinding compared to the dark bar. Paddy walked along the busy pavement, stepping out onto the road to skirt around a lorry making a delivery of carpet rolls to a shop. She chewed her tongue to clear away the nasty taste of the cigarettes, thought about Kevin lying on the stretcher, wondering whether his parents were alive and whether she should phone them and let them know he was in hospital.

She didn’t look back along the street. She didn’t see the young man in the black tracksuit who had followed her from the bar, watching her as she stopped at her car, memorizing her number plate.

She drove aimlessly around the busy city center, thinking about Collins and Donaldson, hardly paying attention to the pedestrians dodging out in front of her. After a close shave with a small woman carrying heavy shopping bags, Paddy had a future flash of herself explaining to a policeman that she had run away from two officers at a serious assault, mowed down an innocent shopper, but didn’t mean any harm.

She pulled into a car park at the foot of the huge glass-tent shopping mall, found a space, and stopped.

Women in thin summer clothes flitted past, dragging reluctant children after them. A bigger car park sat between her and the flea market next to the river, the sharp sun glinting brutally off the bonnets and roofs. She took a breath, thought about lighting a cigarette but couldn’t face it.

She could be completely wrong about Collins. She didn’t have any evidence that the man watching the school was anything to do with him, or that he had hurt Terry. He had come to her door and asked about Terry, but that was all she knew for certain. Other than that, it was just a gut suspicion and she was off form anyway. Terry and Kevin might have known him, he could have been a strange pal of theirs; journalists often had contacts who appeared unlikely as friends, people they were working for stories. She’d had contacts herself when she was doing news, creeps and weirdos who’d scare you out of an alley if you met them on a dark night. Half the Press Bar was like that.

A skinny man brushed past her car, his plastic bag sweeping noisily over the bonnet, bringing her back into the bright day.

Kevin was in a hospital somewhere and she had no idea if he was alive or dead.

III

Standing outside the Albert Hospital, she smoked a cigarette she didn’t want and puzzled it over. It was unusual, to say the very least. The best she could come up with to explain the fact that Kevin Hatcher wasn’t registered in any of the four major hospitals with a casualty department in Glasgow was that they had misspelled his name on the registration form. But she had spent half a year doing the hospital rounds every night in the calls car and knew that they were meticulous when anyone came in. She had clearly told the officers who Kevin was and his name was on all the mail on the hall table.

She had called in to all four hospitals, flashed her NUJ card, told them she was from the News. No Hatcher, Catcher or Thatcher was registered anywhere.

EIGHTEEN

MAKING HEROES OF BUTCHERS

I

Noise moved strangely in the busy morgue. The tiled walls shattered and amplified sound so that drills, metallic clangs and strange muted calls ricocheted down corridors, distorting and warping, masking everyday sources and turning them into growls from monsters, saws through skulls.

Through the effort of not ingesting the smell, Paddy found herself breathless by the time she reached Aoife’s office.

The door was open but the chair was empty. A lone cigarette smoldered in an ashtray, the sour tang a welcome interruption to the vivid yowl of disinfectant.

The office was a mess. Storage boxes of papers and files took up most of the floor space. A stack of brown files on the desk threatened to spill on the floor.

“I was surprised when the desk said you were here.” Aoife McGaffry was standing behind her. “Kind of thought I’d offended ye, to be honest.”

She was smiling, genuinely pleased to see her, and Paddy felt a pang of guilt. She had been offended. Now everyone was a potential source of information.

“Auch, it takes a lot more than that to offend me.”

Aoife bought it and looked relieved. “Well, come on in anyway.”

She gestured into the office with a roll of address labels in her hand and they shuffled in and shut the door after themselves. A saw started up some distance away, a high whine, and Aoife saw Paddy wince. She hid a smile and held up the roll. “I need to go through all the files and change the serial numbers. They’ve been put in out of sequence.”

“Does that matter?”

“Does if it comes to court.”

“What are you doing this for? Shouldn’t you have an assistant?”

“I have got one, somewhere, but she never comes in to work and the managers don’t seem to care. I was wondering if she’s the Provost’s daughter or something.”

“Oh yeah, the City Council is a lazy bastard’s dream employer. Both my brothers worked for the Parks Department. Spent their days hiding behind trees.”

“Aye, well, it’s weird moving somewhere new. All the unofficial regulations and rules. I think I’ve offended half of Glasgow and I’ve barely been here a week. It’s a personal best, even for me.”

Aoife took the desk chair and offered Paddy the examination bed to sit on. Box files were propped all along it and rather than move them and get comfortable she perched her bum on the edge.

“So . . .” Aoife looked at the files on her desk, patting her work space with both hands, remembering where everything was. “What can I do for ye?”

Paddy nodded at the files. “Sorry for interrupting.”

“No, you’re fine.” Aoife turned to give her her full attention. “I never really said it the other night: I’m awful sorry about your friend. It was a rotten thing to happen.”

“Brutal,” said Paddy. She took a breath. “I came to see you because you did your training in Belfast.”

Aoife gave her a wary look. “You’re not thinking of writing an article, are ye? I don’t know what it’s like here, but back home we’re not allowed to be interviewed.”

“No, not an interview.” She didn’t quite know how to phrase it. “A friend of Terry’s had a stroke this morning. He was only thirty or so. I found him.” She looked away, her mind back in the messy hall, seeing the dried chalky saliva. “They said he’d taken coke and given himself a stroke, but I don’t honestly believe he’d use drugs.”

“A lot of users are secretive, you wouldn’t necessarily know if he was using drugs.”

“No, it looked staged.” Paddy felt certain now when she thought about it. “There was a line of cocaine out on the table, I think it was cocaine—”

“If it was a line and it was white it probably was. Speed’s the only other thing people snort and that’s kind of yellow.”

“Thing is, Kevin drank for years. He was a wild man in the drink, famously wild. He drank everywhere, from first light to home time. And then he stopped a few years ago. If he was taking drugs everyone would know. He wouldn’t hide it. He’d be mad with it.”

Aoife nodded. “Right? But there was a line out on the table?”

“Yeah,” Paddy conceded, “and he’d vomited chalky powder in his saliva. I know it looks as if he’d—”

“Wait.” Aoife had a hand up. “He’d vomited white powder and there was a line for snorting on the table?”

Paddy hesitated. “Aye, I know it looks as if he was using but an ambulance took him away and he wasn’t admitted to any of the casualty departments—”