Slip of the Knife

I

Sean stopped the car at Glasgow Cross under the railway bridge. “This do you?” he whispered.

Paddy looked at Callum, sleeping in the back. He seemed to have grown during the drive, filling most of the backseat as his hands fell to the side and his knees relaxed and spread out. Although asleep, he remained upright, ready for an attack, like a bear.

Sean whispered again and nodded towards her door. “Can’t drop you any closer in case we’re seen.”

Paddy looked from Callum to Sean. Not wanting to wake him, she made a horrified face at Sean. “How does he know about Pete?”

“I must have mentioned it.”

She hissed at him, “I don’t want him knowing about Pete. I don’t want him knowing anything about him, understand?”

Sean said nothing but tipped his head at her, his eyes liquid disappointment.

“Peter’s your son. He’s five.”

They both turned sharply to look at the bear in the back. Callum hadn’t moved, hadn’t twitched or stretched or done any of the normal things people do when they wake up. He had opened his eyes so that the white showed all around the iris, and was staring at her like an accusing corpse.

She nodded, breathless, wondering whether he had ever been asleep at all. “Yes.”

He sat up, clenching and unclenching his hands. “Why don’t you want me to know about him?”

Sean was watching her. There was nothing he could do to save her from the situation but Paddy sensed that even if there was he probably wouldn’t anyway.

“I, um, my son…”

“Pete,” Callum reminded her.

“Yes, my son Pete has been ill…” She couldn’t think of a single plausible excuse. “He’s been ill…”

“So you don’t want me to know about him?”

He was sitting forward now, his face just inches from hers. His eyes were quite brown, chocolate, the lashes long and thick, but they were open a fraction too wide, a threat in them. “What do you think of me?”

She looked back at Sean but he was examining the crumbling rubber seal around his window, flicking it with a finger. “Dunno.”

“I’m not interested in your son.” Callum leaned forward. “Wonder what I think of you?”

As if sensing an impending explosion, Sean snapped, “Sit back.”

At once Callum threw himself back in his seat, sliding into the corner behind him.

Sean turned around to face Callum. “You’re only out four hours and already you’re threatening people.”

“I never.”

“You did so.” He looked at Paddy, angry at her too but trying not to let it show. “Apologize.”

Callum cowered, eyes flickering from one to the other as he kneaded his hands on his lap. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Sorry.”

“I’m overprotective of my son,” she said, quietly. “Callum, I don’t know you, I don’t know what you’re like but you just got out of prison for hurting a boy-what would I think?”

“Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry.” She reached across to him, touching his knee with her fingertips.

Callum looked at Sean, found him looking away out of the window. He looked back at Paddy and moved his leg a fraction, towards her and away, towards her and away, so that her fingertips were brushing his knee. She whipped her hand back as he slid down the seat; if she hadn’t her hand would have been on his thigh. He was smiling.

Her mouth was open in shock but Sean was oblivious. Callum had checked that Sean wasn’t watching before he did it. He knew it was wrong.

“You creepy wee prick,” she shouted, throwing the door open and stepping out into the street.

“Oi, wait.” Sean leaned over to look at her. “What the hell happened there?”

“Ask your fucking cousin.”

She stormed off up the road, her feet warmed by the hot pavement, her face flushed with panic and disgust, desperate to get away, not quite believing that a nineteen-year-old murderer had just tried to get her to feel him up.

She turned to look back at the car and saw Sean pulling out slowly and joining the line of traffic heading down the Gallowgate to the river. God help Elaine, trying to sleep under the same roof as him. Paddy wouldn’t sit next to him on a bus.

II

She walked up through the busy Cross, ducking across the road at the lights, aware that her shoulders were aching from tension. She had to hand one thing to Callum: he was wise to refuse an interview. She hoped for his sake that when the first photo was taken of him, he wouldn’t know. She could only imagine how mad he’d look otherwise. It was worth it, taking the money from Burns. Humiliating, but worth it to move Pete away from Rutherglen, where Callum would be staying.

As she walked up the road she could see busy shadows at the window of the Press Bar and hear a rumble of noise coming from inside. The presses were still; a dry dust was rising from the car park opposite the News building.

Paddy took the stairs, feeling relieved to be back where the fights were familiar and playful, back among her pack. She thought more calmly about Callum. He was nineteen. How many women would he have met in his adult life? Two? Three? Still, the parole board shouldn’t have released him, even if they’d run out of legal justifications to keep him in.

Upstairs, a crowd, back from an early lunch and full of patter and drink, had gathered inside the newsroom doors. As she pushed through, they greeted her warmly; a sub-ed put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a couple of hearty squeezes.

News of Paddy coming in in the middle of the night to write the copy about Terry had got around and everyone was assuming she’d done it out of decency and fellow feeling. Even being greeted on the basis of a misunderstanding felt warm and welcome. She wanted to turn to someone and tell them that she’d just met the most famous criminal in Scotland, and he was a car crash waiting to happen. But she didn’t. She stood with them, smiling sadly as they talked about Terry, letting the sub-ed squeeze her shoulder again, drop his hand and try for the waist before she pulled away, saying she needed to get something out of her pigeonhole.

“I have that trouble all the time,” said someone and everybody laughed.

She turned to the guy nearest her, a short, bald veteran. “Who’s our Home Secretary?”

“Billy, over there.”

Billy Over-There had his coat on and was smoking a cigarette with such robotic precision he was almost certainly very, very drunk.

“Billy, who can I talk to about the IRA?”

Billy’s eyes weren’t focusing properly. He blinked at her several times before rolling his mouth around a name: “Brian Donaldson.”

“Short, dirty blond hair, specs?”

He shook his head. “Five eleven, brown crew cut, fat, no specs.”

“Where could I get hold of him?”

“Shammy’s.”

She hesitated. “Are you drawling ‘Sammy’s’ or saying ‘Shammy’s’?”

Billy Over-There took an elaborate draw on his cigarette as he considered the question. A finger of ash tumbled down the front of his coat. “The shecond one.”

Paddy left him to his smoke and returned to the group. “Is there a pub called Shammy’s?”

A sports-desk guy raised his arms triumphantly and shouted yes to jeers from everyone else. Shammy’s was short for the Shamrock, a Celtic pub over in the Gallowgate. Glasgow had three football teams: Catholic Celtic, Protestant Rangers and Partick Thistle, for supporters who eschewed sectarianism and liked their football tinged with disappointment and hardship.

Paddy found the number in the phone book and asked the barman for Brian Donaldson. He asked who was calling, as if that was any kind of a security check, and Paddy wondered at the wisdom of it as she told him the truth. If journalists were being targeted maybe she should have used a pseudonym. But it was too late. Donaldson came to the phone.

“Wha’?” His voice was smoky and warm.

“Ah, Mr. Donaldson, I wonder if you can help me. A man came to see me at my home last night. He said he spoke for your organization and wanted to tell me that Terry Hewitt’s death was nothing to do with you-”

“Neither it was.”

“He was quite threatening. Can you tell me if it’s deliberate policy to target members of the press?”

“It is not. I’m sorry if you were troubled. Who was it?”

“He said his name was Michael Collins.”

Donaldson laughed softly at the other end.

“I know,” she said, “daft, I know it’s not his name. He’s wee, fair hair, wore steel-rimmed glasses and a blue jumper.”

“Right? OK, right.” She could tell by his voice that he knew who she was talking about. “I’ll, ah, ask around and see what I can do. Sorry, Miss Meehan, if you got a fright or wha’.”

He hung up.

Paddy made her way over to the pigeonholes.

The stack of wooden shelves was divided up into small squares, each with a name underneath. Those who had been at the paper since the sixties had their names picked out in italic calligraphy, while those who had joined in the seventies had a sticker with their name printed on it. Recent recruits had blue tickertape with their name punched out in white. Originally the most lowly members of staff were given the lowest shelves and moved up as they got promoted. As the staffing got more bloated, pigeonholes became scarce and everyone tended to hang on to the first one they were assigned. It was a mark of honor to be a senior member of staff with a pigeonhole near the ground.

Paddy’s hadn’t been claimed while she was away and her shelf was one of the lowest. She crouched down on her hunkers, not a very dignified stance but better than bending over and baring her arse to the room. Inside she found some flyers for union meetings. A talk by the new chair of the NUJ, Richards, who had been at the News. A blank sponsored-walk form. And a yellow note from one of the secretaries, a number, time of the call 9.15, McBride’s Solicitors and Notaries, ask for Mr. Fitzpatrick re Terry Hewitt.

“Miss Meehan?”

She looked up to find Bunty’s sidekick standing formally in front of her. He had arrived at the News with Bunty, like a bonded servant. People called him Bunty’s Monkey behind his back but never knew what to say to his face. He hadn’t introduced himself or clarified his position to anyone but he moved and talked like a henchman, always gliding sideways, easing people around his master, human lubricant, making things run smoothly.

“Bunty would like to see you for a moment.”

Bunty, the paper’s editor, had arrived from an Edinburgh daily a year ago. He had promised the Daily News owners an economic miracle but after all the redundancies and reshuffling the paper was still leaking profit. Bunty wasn’t a happy man.

The walk across the floor of the newsroom felt very long. Paddy had time to panic about having been seen with Callum, about Sean losing his job and herself ending up with no job or home and Burns laughing at her as he drove away from her mother’s house with Pete on visitation days. She was very tired, she realized. The weekend had been less than restful.

The glass cubicle Larry Gray-Lips inhabited at night had the lights on inside and the blinds drawn down. The Monkey waved her towards the door with the grace of a butler. She knocked on the glass and opened the door quickly, keeping the advantage.

Bunty sat at a small corner of the big table, pencil in hand, shading in a big doodle. He was a small, bald man and as such didn’t like to be seen doing small, bald things. He stood up, cheeks flushed defensively, and covered the sheet with his hand. The Monkey slipped into the room behind Paddy and tiptoed up the table to his handler’s side.

“Hello, Patricia.” Bunty covered his annoyance with a flash of teeth. “Shut the door, would you?”

She clicked it shut and took a seat in front of the table. It was a surprisingly large room and housed the big table Bunty used for smaller meetings; the full news ed meetings were held downstairs. Despite the table being a good six feet long, the Monkey and Bunty were taking up barely three feet of one side and looked across at Paddy in unison, smiling, mock friendly.

Bunty made a pyramid of his fingers. He looked like a man with the shadow of professional death hanging over his shoulder, which he was. Sales of the Daily News were in a steady decline, and advertising was plummeting as more and more of the big spenders were going over to the Standard. The Daily News wasn’t making a loss but they weren’t turning a great profit either and the board of directors had been through four of the five stages of economic grief already: hope, disappointment, blame and fury. The next stage, Paddy knew, was good-bye Bunty.

“You’ll be pleased to hear that Terry Hewitt’s obituary is going in tomorrow. It’s a full half-page.”

As usual, Bunty had misheard all the office gossip and thought she was Terry’s girlfriend. Paddy thanked him anyway. “That’s good of you. He started here, same time as me.”

“So I read. Shocking business.” Bunty looked over at the Monkey. “It could bring the Irish Troubles over here.”

Everyone knew that twenty hours ago but Monkey took his henchman’s duties seriously and nodded as if he was just finding out.

“So. Yes. Oui, as it were.” Bunty chewed the inside of his mouth and scribbled hard on the sheet, a vicious doodle. “Alors. I heard a rumor about you.”

“There are a lot of rumors about me. I started many of them myself.”

He smiled courteously at her attempted joke. “I heard you were in Babbity’s last night with McVie and you haven’t handed in this week’s Misty. Anything I should know?”

She tried to look noncommittal.

“We’d hate for there to be any misunderstanding.” He looked to Monkey, who nodded and smiled, and Bunty turned back to her. “We value you tremendously.” He strained over the word, closing his eyes. “Just tremendously.” They looked at her expectantly.

“Good,” she said.

“Are you happy here?” Bunty waved across his desk, leaving his fingers wide as an opener for her to say something. Monkey copied his facial expression, as if he’d posed the question himself.

“I asked you for more money two months ago and I’m still waiting for an answer.”

Bunty leaned over the desk, narrowing his eyes at her. “Have you been offered more money elsewhere?”

She stared back at him. She could lie. “I want more money and to investigate Terry’s death.”

Bunty smiled and shook his head. “It’s a long time since you did a news story. We can’t assign stories to placate people. It might be too big.”

“But I want it.” Paddy thought she sounded like Pete.

Bunty sighed at his doodle: a lot of regal looping lines angrily shaded in with pencil. A potentate foiled. “You know,” he sighed, “McVie takes people on and buries them, d’you know that? Gets everyone on short-term contracts and dumps them.”

It was a scurrilous lie.

He scratched in another loop with his pencil as the Monkey watched her for a reaction. “I think, Bunty,” she said carefully, “that you must have been a fucking good journalist.”

Bunty looked up and smiled wide at her. His yellow teeth were gappy, the gums receding. She suddenly, inexplicably, liked him enormously.

He straightened his face. “OK, we’ll give you the money but you’re not getting the story.”

“But I’ve-”

“NO!” His hand was up and that was that. “If you want it you’ll have to do it in your own time. I’ll put someone else on it too. You beat them to it, all well and good.”

“Who?”

“Merki.”

She snorted. “Merki?”

“Merki. Get out.”

Merki was good at finding leads. He could get into a house but people didn’t take to him, no one wanted to talk to him because he was funny-looking. It would be a walkover and she was getting the raise. She stood up quickly and put one knee on the table, clambering across the highly polished wood on all fours, and before the Monkey could intervene to stop her, she planted a wet, noisy kiss on Bunty’s bald head. The skin was smooth and papery.

He laughed, embarrassed, brushing the kiss off coyly as she climbed down off the table and pulled her skirt straight.

“Long live the King,” she said, making her way to the door.

The Monkey called after her. “We’ll have your copy today?”

“I’ll phone it in to Larry tonight,” she called back.

III

She used a phone on Features and called Terry Hewitt’s solicitors. First the receptionist had to put her through to his secretary, then his secretary wouldn’t put her through to the lawyer, then she tried to get Paddy to agree to an appointment two weeks hence.

Paddy said that was a real shame because she wrote for the Scottish Daily News and she’d been hoping to speak to him about doing a series profiling prominent lawyers.

The secretary hesitated. Paddy assumed she was a little awestruck. She was feeling smug and cozy, tricking a slippery lawyer into an early appointment with the promise of an ego rub, when the secretary said, “But he’s only twenty-three.”

“Ah.” Her feeling of superiority evaporated. “Well, you know, up-and-coming lawyers, the future and all that…”

Thirty seconds later she was talking to the squeaky-voiced boy and he agreed to see her in half an hour. She thought he sounded a little breathless.

IV

By day Blythswood Square was an elegant square of Georgian town houses, now offices, set around a private garden. The curbs were high to the road, the step steep to accommodate descent from a carriage. At night the square became the working route of roving prostitutes, bare-legged girls with poor hair and prominent bosoms, faces dripping rank misery, ready to be peered at and pawed.

McBride’s Solicitors was in one of the older houses but the impression of elegance was lost at the door, where a cheap black punch-hole board was hanging with the names of the resident companies picked out in white plastic lettering. McBride’s Solicitors and Notaries were on the very top floor.

Paddy was panting and damp by the time she reached the sixth flight of stairs, leading to what had once been the servants’ quarters, shallow and sagging wooden steps worn in the middle, the banister sticky from trailing, sweaty fingers. She caught her breath on the top step, embarrassed, as she always was when she lost her breath, to be a fat woman, sweating.

McBride’s office was a fading brown nod to the seventies. A motherly receptionist was dressed accordingly, in a brown skirt and matching jumper with a modest rope of pearls at her throat. The fittings in the reception area looked as old as she was: the phone was two-tone brown, the appointments book a battered black-leather puff of paper.

She was impressed when Paddy introduced herself, clutched her neck and said she was a big fan.

“Thanks,” said Paddy and looked for somewhere to sit.

“No, no, go through. Mr. Fitzpatrick’s waiting for you.” She pointed to a flush dark-wood door.

Inside, a chubby teenager in a suit was standing stiffly by his desk. Mr. Fitzpatrick was not only pleased to see her but seemed to have had a shave just before she got there. As she stepped forward to shake his hand she could smell soap and see that the skin on his cheeks was glossy smooth, a small nick at his ear still oozing white blood cells. He fussed her into a chair.

“I don’t know how you could even have heard of me. Did someone give you my name?”

She bit the bullet and admitted the ruse: she needed to find out about Terry and couldn’t get an appointment for two weeks so she’d fibbed. His disappointment was palpable.

“But I phoned my mum.”

Paddy cringed in sympathy. “I thought you were older,” she said. “I thought I was playing a trick on a smug big lawyer who couldn’t be arsed seeing me. I’m really sorry.”

“What’ll I tell my mum?”

“Can’t you tell her it didn’t come off? That’s what I always tell mine.”

“She’ll call the paper.”

“You could say the article is about left-wing lawyers so we had to leave you out?”

He considered it for a moment. “Yes, that might work.”

“Tell her it was for the Star or some paper she won’t see. Or the Daily Mail.” She didn’t want to be presumptuous, but guessed his mother wouldn’t take the Daily Star.

Having resolved his angst over his mother’s disappointment, Mr. Fitzpatrick turned to the matter of Terry, far more kindly than she would have done in the circumstances.

He took out a file and opened it. Terry had left her everything: there was a car, an old model, worth a couple of hundred pounds, all his papers and books, some clothes and the house.

“Which house?”

“Eriskay House.” He peered at his notes. “A two-bedroomed house with three acres of land in Kilmarnock. It’s an old house of the family’s. I don’t know what sort of condition it’s in but it must be pretty good: we’ve already had an objection lodged by Mr. Hewitt’s cousin, a Miss Wendy Hewitt.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that she’s challenging the validity of the will. In short, we can’t execute.”

Paddy shifted uncomfortably. A house. She didn’t want anything to do with Terry, didn’t think she could stay in a house he’d lived in or owned, but it was, after all, a house. Not one that Burns paid for either. And it had land around it for Pete to play in.

“Could I sell it to her?”

“No. You need to own it before you can sell it. You don’t own it at the moment.”

“Well, who does own it?”

“Mr. Hewitt’s estate owns it.”

“So…?”

“Mm.” Fitzpatrick looked at his notes again. “So we’ll have to wait to see what happens.”

“How long could that take?”

He blew his lips out. “Months? A year? Longer?”

Paddy glanced at her watch. It was five past three and Pete got out of school at half past. She had to get a parking space near the gates or he’d try to cross the road himself. The lollipop lady sometimes hid behind a tree for a cigarette and the road was busy.

“OK.” She stood up. “Fuck it. Let me know what happens.”

“There are these papers…” He waved his hand towards a folder on the table. It was brown, made of soft cardboard, fraying all around the edges. She could see that it was stuffed with well-thumbed sheets of notes, yellowed newspaper clippings folded over on themselves, a bit of a magazine. Her name was written on the outside cover, “Paddy,” in a blue felt pen, the pigment faded into a yellowed green. If Fitzpatrick had been trying to lure her into a cave full of tigers, he could have done worse than leave the folder at the mouth. Paddy could feel herself salivating. “Where did it come from?”

“He left it with me, in the safe.”

“When?”

“A year ago.”

It might be nothing to do with his murder. Her interest blunted, she looked at him, but Fitzpatrick was working a move. He licked his bottom lip, looking back at her with a steady, distracted eye.

“What’s in it?”

“I couldn’t say.” He almost smiled.

She pressed him further. “Can I look at what’s in it?”

“No. I could give it to you now, to take away, but you’d need to sign off the claim to the house.”

He waited. She waited. His eyes slid to the side. With every second thudding past, the realization dawned on Fitzpatrick that she wasn’t that hungry for the folder.

She cleared her throat. “You know Wendy Hewitt then, do you?”

His eyelids contracted momentarily, eyes widening. “Not personally, no.”

“Do you represent her professionally?”

“No,” he said, too quickly.

She suddenly didn’t give a shit anymore. She stood up. “Fuck this, I’m off.”

Fitzpatrick stood up to meet her. “But his effects, you need to clear out his flat.”

“What?”

“His effects. The landlord wants the flat emptied or he’ll have the house cleared…”

“Well, that’s your responsibility, surely?”

“It’s a tiny amount of stuff. Rubbish. You could bin it.”

Paddy had the impression that he’d had a first scan of the belongings and thought it was all worthless. But he wouldn’t know, and whatever it was, it was stuff Merki wasn’t being offered.

She thought of sitting in the house tonight with Pete playing in his bedroom, listening always for Michael Collins’s soft knock at the door. “OK,” she said. “Where is it?”

“Partick.” He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a set of keys on a round of dirty string with a paper tag. “ Forty Lawrence Street. Here are the keys.”

Paddy snatched them from his hand. “This is your job, Fitzpatrick. I know it is. Don’t think I don’t know.”