Slip of the Knife

I

The Shammy was certain of its clientele, that much was clear. The barman was all but wearing a buckle hat and hollering begorra.

They sold Guinness on tap, two kinds of lager, Irish whiskey and Tayto-brand crisps. Everything that wasn’t smeared yellow with cigarette tar was green, even the seats. Wizened paper shamrocks were strung along the back of the bar, a souvenir of a St. Patrick’s Day past, although what the noble-born stoic would have made of the filthy bar was anyone’s guess.

Along three walls a high shelf held memorabilia of a less benign kind. A brass armor shell had a blackened commemoration band around the bottom. Dusty flags of several Irish counties, Mayo, Galway and Cork, were propped up in among tankards. A plastic replica gun and a small, very badly executed model of an H block from the Maze prison made out of painted cardboard, with tiny men sitting on one of the roofs, were placed near the front.

The centerpiece of the bar was a brass engraving of Bobby Sands mounted on a block of wood, his eyes not quite matching, his long over-the-ears seventies hairdo just as misplaced on his square farmboy’s face as it had been in real life.

The smog of cigarette smoke made Paddy want to light up herself, if only to mask the smell. She took out her packet and pulled out a cigarette, lighting it with a match, inhaling halfheartedly, and thinking she probably looked shifty.

A row of men sitting at the bar turned to stare as she approached. She had thrown on clothes this morning, but she still felt wildly overdressed. They were all wearing T-shirts or sweatshirts under black leather jackets and denims that hung under their beer bellies. She nodded at them.

“Howareye?” she said, running the words together as the Irish did, meaning to be friendly.

Someone snorted cynically. She took a covering drag of her cigarette and felt foolish, stepping towards the rail. The barman was resting a half-poured pint of Guinness under the taps, patiently waiting for it to settle.

“Ah, hello, I’m looking for a guy called Brian?”

“No one called Brian here,” he said. Scottish with an Irish twang, an affectation members of her own family used sometimes.

“I spoke to him the other day. I have some photos of the gentleman he was telling me about.”

He looked her up and down. “And you are…? Detective Constable…? Detective Inspector…?”

Paddy held her hands out indignantly. “Do the polis take fat birds now? I’m five foot four, for fucksake.”

He shook his head and flicked the Guinness tap back on. “No one named Brian in here, love.”

“Well, when No-one-named-Brian gets here, tell him Paddy Meehan was in looking for him and I’ve got the photos to show him. He knows where I work.”

Wood screeched against stone as one of the lineup pushed his stool back, stepped off, and squared up to her.

Paddy guessed he would have been the pride of the pack once. Now, fat had gathered around his middle, and his round paunch, starting below two well-formed breasts, was vivid under his cheap white T-shirt. His black leather jacket was elasticated at the waist, drawing in where he spread out, showing off what would once have been fine legs. He stepped into the light and she saw that a tidy slice was missing from the top half of his ear.

Paddy half expected him to chase her to the door, but instead, he picked his pint up and flicked his index finger at her, beckoning her to follow him. She stubbed her cigarette out in a nearby ashtray and walked after him to the back of the bar.

The booth was set at ninety degrees from the room so no one could see into it from the floor. It was dark, dimly lit with a yellowed wall light, the heat from the bulb burning a brown oval on the plastic shade. The benches were worn wood, the table marked with water rings and cigarette burns. He slid along a seat, his paunch pressing against the fixed table, and nestled in the corner, resting one leg along the bench, motioning for her to sit opposite him.

“Nice of you to come in person.” His tongue slicked up the corner of his mouth like a sleepy lion’s. She knew his voice immediately. Brian Donaldson.

She took out her cigarettes and lit one, offered them to Donaldson but he refused, tipping his glass at her as if one weakness was enough. He was in his midforties and handsome beyond the scars. A square jaw, blue eyes and the manner of a man in charge. His face had wrinkled into the memory of a smile, tide marks around the eyes and mouth.

“Kevin Hatcher’s dead.” She didn’t want to tell him Kevin was injured. They might go to the hospital and finish the job.

He shook his head. “Who’s this?”

“Kevin Hatcher,” she repeated. “Hatcher and Terry Hewitt were working together on a book, about expats in New York.”

“Irish expats?”

“Scottish. They took photos of people, street portraits, and Terry wrote a little bit of text to go with them. A coffee-table book. A light thing really, an excuse so that they could go off on a trip to New York together.” She imagined Kevin and Terry eating peanuts on the plane, giggling together, and found herself tearful. “Two good guys. Now they’re both dead. I told you about the guy who came to my house? Michael Collins. Very threatening, said he spoke for your people.”

“He doesn’t.”

“You said you didn’t know him.”

“Neither I do, but I know who speaks for us.”

“I think you knew who I was talking about when I described him before, but I wanted to show you this.” She unrolled the photocopies. “I found him in the background of one of the portraits.”

Donaldson peered down at the grainy enlargement, flattened it and looked again.

Collins was laughing in perfect profile, and his glasses were perched on his nose.

“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.