Slip of the Knife (39 page)

Out on the road, cars were speeding past at irregular intervals, more frequent on the opposite side of the road. Callum climbed into the passenger seat. Paddy could see Dub’s head flicking back and forth, worried about how to get across. Finally, Dub revved the engine, jolted forward, and hit the road going the wrong way. He sped off in the direction of Ayr. They’d have to turn at the roundabout.

The noise of the road died as she walked around to the back of the house. A low sun was setting over the lush green hills, the horizon baby-girl pink. It would be a long night.

She stood at the kitchen doorway, holding the frame to steady herself, and thought of her father. It was resisting death that made it painful. Con should have embraced it. She’d never thought about it before but his resistance was the ultimate act of defiance. She didn’t recognize it at the time, mistook it for fear because she’d never seen him resist anything before, but it took real guts to cling to life when the odds meant you’d die.

It was too dark inside, so she lifted one of the spindly-legged kitchen chairs and took it out, setting it against the back wall, on the spot where they had found Callum. She arranged her funeral coat around herself to keep warm, took the useless scissors out of her pocket and set them on her lap.

Then she lit another cigarette, leaned her head back against the crumbling wall, and waited for the sun to go down.

THIRTY-FOUR

DON’T GET OUT OF THE CAR

I

A car was approaching them from behind, coming out of the dark. Dub slowed to let it pass but it lingered behind them, wary of straying onto the midline of the road until they were out of the hills.

Callum looked at Dub, hunched over the wheel. He didn’t look as friendly as he did when Paddy was with them. His jaw was tight and his eyes narrower. His breathing was fast.

“This fucking road,” he mumbled, glancing nervously in the mirror.

He seemed angry and Callum was afraid that Dub hated him because of the mice. He thought back to Paddy at the cottage, worried, crying and not saying why, wanting him to leave. She said it wasn’t safe.

The car behind slid out to the side, peering around them, and slipped back, gathering speed, headlights growing in the mirror, shining a rectangle of blinding light into Dub’s eyes, before pulling out into the road and passing them in a flash.

“STOP!” yelped Callum, making Dub’s hands jump so the car swerved towards the grass verge.

“Fuck!” shouted Dub. “Don’t scream like that, this is hard enough.”

Frightened at the level of anger in his voice, Callum moderated his voice: “Stop the car.”

But Dub wasn’t listening. He wasn’t looking at him, he was watching the road, checking the mirror every few seconds, holding the wheel so tight his arms were pulling his body forward in a rigid curve. He slowed on the approach to the roundabout, the lights of the petrol station glistening in the dark.

Callum tried to explain. “I need you to stop the car. I need to go back. She said it’s not safe.”

Dub didn’t answer but pulled the car across the roundabout and veered left into the petrol station, blinking hard at the brightness and carrying on until they were around the side of the building, right around at the back, in the dark again. He slowed to a stop.

Callum was sweating. “This isn’t right. She’s not safe.” The words rattled around the inside of the car. The silence afterwards was suffocating.

Dub’s voice was barely a whisper. “She said she loved me. I don’t know how to handle myself. I’m not a violent man.”

Callum wanted Dub to think well of him, not because he could give him a good report or parole, just he liked the gentle way he had about him and how scared he was of the mice. “But I am,” he said quietly. “I am violent. I know how to handle myself. She’s on her own up there and she’s my family and I’m going back.”

Callum wouldn’t have thought someone as wet as Dub had it in him but his cheeks flushed a furious red and he leaned across the gear stick to press his face into Callum’s: “You fucking listen to me: you are a child.” He was pointing in Callum’s chest, poking his finger as if he wanted to stab him. “Sean Ogilvy didn’t take you to live with his family so you could get involved in rubbish like this, d’ye hear me? Paddy didn’t drive all the way up the fucking coast and take shit at her work so you could be a heavy for her. You are a child.”

“But I know how to—”

Dub leaned into his face, eyes bulging, as angry as Haversham. “If this guy does turn up and you batter lumps out of him, how fucking fast do you think they’ll whip you back into jail? You’ve been out for under a week, the world and his dog are looking for you, we’re all busting a gut to protect you. D’you think I’m going to let you wander up the hill to have a fight?”

“But she’s my family,” he said weakly.

Dub sat back, eyes still wide. “You’re not her dad, you’re not her brother, so what are you?”

Callum shrugged.

Dub made a little circle with his finger. “In this family, in our family, you’re a child. And in this family, in our family, the big ones look after the wee ones.” He opened the car door and took a step out of the car. “If you get out of this car I will never speak to you again.”

“You’ll need a weapon,” said Callum.

Dub looked back at him. “I’m going to the petrol station. To get a knife.”

He shut the door behind him and walked off around the corner to the shop.

Alone in the car, Callum blinked burning eyes. He thought he was a nuisance to them, a problem. It hadn’t occurred to him until Dub said it: they were protecting him. He was their child. He hadn’t been a child since the dark night and the baby. They weren’t hiding him, they weren’t tolerating him. They were looking after him.

When Dub came back around the side of the station Callum groaned. He was carrying a red plastic petrol can. He opened the driver’s door and looked in, and repeated his warning: “I will never speak to you again.”

Callum shook his head. “Ye can’t use a can of petrol on him. It’s soft, ye can’t hit with it, and don’t try to set fire to him because you’ll get her too. You’ll set yourself on fire, probably.”

Dub looked uncertain for a moment. “Well, what then?”

“Get a brick. Hit him there . . .” Callum fingered the top of his head, where he knew the skull was weak.

Dub looked at him, softer this time. “Promise me you won’t get out of the car, Callum.”

“OK,” he whispered. “I’ll stay.”

II

The grass had been cut short all the way through the field. Long stripes ran up the hill and back again, marks of a mechanical mower, scything the grass to no more than an inch high.

Dub had to keep to the ditch at the far side from the road to avoid being seen by passing cars. It should have been easy to follow: a trickle of water had carved a gentle cleft in the soft, rich land for him to run along, keeping low. But the farmer had used the burn as a line for fencing, four wires topped with razor tips, the stakes deep in the black soil, and he had to go slowly or risk sliding down the side and cutting himself. He didn’t know how much time he had.

The can in his right hand swung heavily, the petrol sloshing against the sides, following the rhythm of his walk.

Water in the burn trickled melodically, high-pitched and playful, jarring with the dark night and the fat seagulls cawing overhead. His ankles were taking the strain of hurrying along an incline. He stumbled on loose ground once or twice, always stopping to check he hadn’t hurt himself, and then carrying on. He couldn’t see the house yet but knew it was there, at the top of the hill, beyond the clump of bushes and trees.

Reaching the edge of the short grass, he came to a fence into another field and climbed carefully over. The ground was looser here, strong grass that was razor sharp at the tips. He ran in a crouch, skirting the summit, his hand sweating around the plastic handle of the petrol can, making it slippery. He arrived at a tumbledown wall, two feet high, made of old stones, the mortar weatherworn and crumbling. He raised his eyes.

He had reached the old wall around the garden of the cottage.

And there at the far end, the flare of a match, a warm orange target in the dark. She was there, sitting in a chair, in the dark, quite alone.

He let his eyes adjust to the thin light. He could make out her face in the glow of the cigarette. She was smiling.

He watched her as he squatted on his haunches and set the petrol can on the uneven ground. Listening, alert to any noise he might make, he unscrewed the plastic lid, working his fingers slowly until it was quite loose. He lifted it off and set it on the ground.

And then he waited.

THIRTY-FIVE

INTO THE BAD FIRE

I

Paddy was on her third cigarette. It was quiet here and she didn’t like it. She could hear the grass waving in the wind, the scurrying of tiny feet back in the house, mice or rats, survivors of Callum’s killing spree. They seemed to have got into the roof and she was afraid they might drop down on her head, so she moved her chair out from the wall a bit.

She had been trying to think some momentous last thought, a great all-encompassing conclusion about the nature of existence, but her attention was drawn back by the mundane: she felt queasy after eating the Snickers bars, she was tired, she needed a pee. She might be here all night. For all she knew, Knox couldn’t get hold of McBree. She could be sitting here alone for ten hours.

She looked up at the dark sky. A thick band of navy blue rain was moving in from the sea, chasing seagulls inland. The distant landscape was becoming indistinct, melting into the dark.

She tried not to think about Pete or her mother or Terry Hewitt, just to smell the crisp evening air and feel the nicotine pulsing softly through her, pushing the weariness away and making her skin tingle, but her thoughts kept flipping back to her house and her son and all the deeds left undone, all the kindnesses unrepaid. If she had been at home she would have wandered into the office and filled her mind by doing some work.

She smiled to herself. IRA in Pay of British. Brits Pay IRA. Terror Boss Works for Us. She jumbled the headlines around; none of them worked all that well but she had fun doing it. Then she started on the article, imagining what Merki would make of the materials she had left him. Terror boss. They’d use that for sure.

Very slowly she became aware of a low droning engine on the road. At first it sounded like any other car slowing as it broached the sharp turn, but it didn’t speed up when it was past the danger spot. The wheels left the tarmac, began a tentative slide into the driveway, became a muffled crunch over grass.

Long shafts of white light glared around the side of the cottage, bleaching the grass blue. And then they cut out.

Paddy dropped her cigarette, opening the scissors, trying to find a way of holding them that wouldn’t mean pressing her fingers to the blade. She stood up stiffly, turning to the mossy path around the side of the house, expecting McBree to appear.

A soft breeze blew the hair from her face. Silence. He wasn’t coming around the side. He was going to creep up on her.

She felt horribly dismayed. It would have been less frightening if he had walked around to face her, spoke to her first, but McBree was planning to leap out of the dark and startle her like an old spinster. The thought that her last words on earth might be an undignified whoop of surprise was too humiliating.

She turned her back to the wall, took a step sideways, and was swallowed by the darkness of the house.

II

The floor objected to every trespassing footfall so they both stood still, Paddy in the kitchen, hanging on to the cold metal of the range, feeling the greasy dust beneath her fingers and the cut of the scissors as she held them tight. He was near the front of the house, in one of the bedrooms or the bathroom, off to the left somewhere. She could hear his feet crunching on something, leaves or glass. The sound traveled through the warped walls, bouncing and distorting.

A floorboard groaned as he took a step and corrected himself. Cloth brushed a wall. He was hanging on to the wall because the floorboards would be better attached there. Smart. Following his lead, she slid around the room, taking careful steps, tiptoeing silently along the edge of the room, past the back door, around to the side of the dresser where it was dark. He would come in here, look around from the door, searching at head height. So she crouched, keeping her feet exactly where they had landed, twisting her knees to keep in the shadows.

She heard a breath, a nasal exhalation, coming from the living-room doorway. A congested smoker’s breath. And then McBree spoke, not whispering, just in a normal voice. As if he was asking for a paper.

“Well, you called me here.”

He was right. She slid up the crumbling wall to stand. He stepped around and looked at her, flashed a smile as if they were friends of old.

“Come out here,” he said, sounding kind.

But she didn’t. “Do you know who lived here?”

He gestured for her to come over.

Again, she stayed where she was. “Terry Hewitt grew up here.”

There was no flicker of recognition. “It’s like a lot of the old houses at home.”

“’S a bad road out there, isn’t it?”

“Bad, aye. Blind turn out there.” McBree looked around the room, as if there was anything to see in the inky dark. He reached into his pocket and took something out. She didn’t realize it was a packet of cigarettes until he lit one. He held them out to her, trying to goad her out of her corner.

She ignored the offer. “Terry’s parents died on that driveway. He was seventeen. Only child. First on the scene.”

“Aye.” He lifted his cigarette to his face, inhaling greedily, the glow casting a vibrant red over his glasses, masking his eyes. “My parents’ chip shop got bombed. That’s how they died. Ripped limb from limb, my daddy was.”

“Are you an only child?”

“God, no.” He looked at her pointedly. “There’s hundreds of us.”

“Did they get the bombers?”

“Who? The police?” He chuckled. “No, never got them. Knew them but never bothered arresting them.”