Slip of the Knife

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-”

Aoife stopped her dead. “Who knows we’ve met?”

Paddy shrugged. “Anyone could know. The officers would have gossiped about Saturday night. Believe me about Kevin, it looks obvious but he-”

Aoife interrupted her again. “It doesn’t look obvious. It looks odd.” She stood up, suddenly, inexplicably angry. “Odd. Come you now with me.”

She grabbed a brown leather handbag off the floor by the strap, swinging it over her head and shouting out of the door into the corridor. “I’m going out for lunch. Don’t yous be tickling them in there.”

Paddy followed her out into the corridor and saw a man’s head looking back at her from the walk-in fridge. He shot her a smile and a thumbs-up.

“Follow me,” said Aoife, marching off down the corridor.

II

He stood in Lansdowne Crescent, hands tucked tightly into the pockets on his tracksuit trousers, taking in the general feel of the place. It was right next to a busy road but the houses were wrapped around a private garden, which seemed to absorb the noise. The old buildings faced each other with a quiet dignity. He had been up west loads of times, to Clatty Pat’s nightclub, choking with fanny on a Monday, but you wouldn’t really notice this place, not unless you were looking, not unless you’d got someone’s address from the phone book and come here deliberately.

The fat bird was two up, top flat. No security on the close door.

A big arch ran under the building, for carriages in the olden days, leading to a deserted backyard of overgrown gardens with tumbledown walls separating it from the lane. It would be dark at night.

III

The north bank of the Clyde was a godforsaken place. Paddy had gravitated here during smoky moments of self-pity and despondency. It was flyblown, paved over with cracked and stained concrete, and there was a sheer drop to the gray swirl of the water. There weren’t even very many seats.

Thin bushes separated it from the busy road, empty gold cans of superlager strewn at their feet. The sun though, the warm days and softness of the air, attracted a smattering of office workers there for their lunch.

They sat on the edge of a concrete box of bushes and Aoife offered her half her sandwich, a large baguette stuffed with enough egg mayonnaise to fill a skip. Someone in the office ran out with the lunchtime orders, she explained; it was all they’d had left with egg in it.

“Why would they even sell food this big?” She looked at it, puzzled. “It would do a coach party.”

“Yeah.” Paddy had eaten one of them herself once, and then had some biscuits. “So why did you say the thing with Kevin looked odd?”

Aoife took a bite and munched it into one corner of her mouth. “You see, a line is for snorting, inhaling. Vomiting cocaine means you’ve swallowed it. No one does both.”

“Do people swallow it?”

“Sometimes. Wrap it in a Rizla and swallow, just as effective but takes longer and it’s harder to pace yourself. But doing both is playing Russian roulette. It’s a hard enough balance to achieve through one method of ingestion.”

Paddy chewed a mouthful of creamy egg filling, enjoying Aoife’s accent, the hard nasal r’s and short vowels. “How could he disappear? Does that mean he wasn’t admitted to hospital at all? His hand was all curled up at the side.” She mimicked Kevin’s claw hand. “Could he have recovered before they got to hospital and gone to his parents or something?”

Aoife looked shifty. “Don’t think so. He may not have made it to hospital. He may have… you know… passed on.” When Aoife spoke again her voice was low. “They don’t trust me.”

Paddy looked at her. “Who?”

“Them. Upstairs. Graham Wilson was in with the bricks, one of the boys, they could trust him. That’ll be why your friend has disappeared: they knew I’d find traces in his nostrils and stomach and blurt it.”

“Who, though?”

The hard sun glinted on the water as two businessmen walked past, giggling and swinging their briefcases.

“Will we whistle after them lads there?” said Aoife, her mood lifting suddenly when she changed the subject.

“Yeah, go on,” Paddy dared her.

Aoife turned back to them and shouted under her breath, “Hey, you fellas: wheet whoow!”

They laughed to themselves, watching the businessmen retreat down the river.

“God, it’s been a hell of a morning,” said Paddy, and told Aoife about Collins coming to her house and the man watching her son’s school.

“This guy’s Northern Irish, ye say?”

“I’ve got a photo of him.” She opened her bag and took out the photocopies. “You might know him.”

“Aye, he’s probably my cousin or something, ’cause you know, Ireland ’s only twelve foot across.” Aoife looked at the enlargement of Collins and smiled. “You’re having a laugh.”

Paddy was bewildered. “Am I?”

They looked at each other, both searching for a clue.

“You know him,” prompted Aoife.

“Do I?”

“Don’t ye?”

Paddy shook her head.

“He’s famous, like you.” She could see Paddy didn’t know what she was talking about. “Martin McBree. He’s a major highheadjan in the IRA. Don’t you work in the papers?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know who this guy is.”

“Martin McBree?” she said again, as if that would clear it up. “The photo holding the guy on Bloody Sunday?”

“Never heard of him, sorry.”

“He was over in New York last year, ambassadorial duties, restructuring the Noraid funding people. It was on the nine o’clock news at home. He shook them up pretty badly. Brought in a whole new management team and got rid of the old guard. Those old fellas’d send them nothing but guns and psychos. The Republicans are shifting their position, moving towards a negotiated settlement. What they want now is to put a raft of peace seekers into positions of power.”

“So McBree’s a good guy?”

Aoife nodded that she thought so. Paddy thought back to Sunday night and McBree in her hallway. She could have had it all wrong, really. It was just a gut reaction to the guy: he was there with an agenda, she gathered that much, but it didn’t mean he was violent.

She was pleased to have been so wrong.

They had both done as much damage to the baguette as they could so they abandoned it on the wall and Paddy got out her cigarettes. Aoife took one from her.

“He’s made a wild lot of enemies.”

“McBree? Surely everyone wants peace?”

“Ye’d think, wouldn’t ye? That’s the trouble with armed struggle. Even if it starts out very noble with good men putting their higher feelings aside it’s always going to be a magnet for thugs and sadists. There’s always going to be a faction who don’t want it to end, you know?” Aoife stretched out her papery white legs, catching the sun. “Pathology is the sharp end. We see it all.” She squinted at her cigarette. “My old boss at home, he dealt with the Shankill Butchers’ victims. You ever hear of them?”

“No.”

She took another draw and held it in. “They charged them with nineteen, but really there were about thirty murders. The Shankill Butchers were a gang of men, twelve or so of them, Protestant loyalists. They got hold of a black taxicab, drove around at closing time. Whoever hailed them got killed. They wanted Catholics but sometimes got their own side. They weren’t that fussy. What does that tell ye about the depth of their political convictions?”

Paddy tried to affect concern, but to her it was just a story about faceless men killing other faceless men. “It was an excuse?”

Aoife looked over at groups of workmen sunbathing their lunch break away, stripped to the waist across the glimmering water. “One fella, Thomas Madden, wee quiet man, forty-eight, unmarried, a security guard. They hung him up by his feet for six hours. One hundred and forty-seven stab wounds. Chipping away at him for hours.” She flicked her wrist. “All the work of the same hand, ye can tell that from the shape of the wounds. They put the time of death at about four a.m. Later, when they found him and saw where he’d been killed, they found a witness, a woman who’d been coming past around four. She was walking home after a party, she said, and heard a man’s voice. She thought someone was wild with the drink. He was shouting, ‘Kill me, kill me.’” Aoife flattened her hand to her chest wearily. “I don’t know why that hurts me so much.”

Paddy held her hand up. “That’s enough for me, actually.”

“Aye well, there’s my point: in peacetime the Butchers would just be sadistic serial killers, but to some people they’re folk heroes. And they’re the people the peace seekers have to go through. Both sides have their share of bastards. Any one of them can single-handedly break a ceasefire and keep the fight going. That’s who they need to weed out if there’s to be any hope.”

“And McBree’s doing the weeding?”

“So I’ve heard.”

Paddy leaned back on her elbows, letting the sun warm her face. “When you said they don’t trust you, who were you talking about?”

Aoife shrugged as if it was a silly question. “The bosses.”

“Why would the bosses want to hide how Kevin died?”

Aoife prodded Paddy in the shoulder. “That’s your job.”

IV

Helen, the chief librarian, was busy giving a junior member of staff a bollocking. She looked down her nose through her red plastic glasses.

“Tell him that the reason we need one or two keywords is so that an idiot like you doesn’t end up with a truckload of envelopes to lose on the way up the stairs.”

The copyboy was a teenager, his skinny legs hardly filling the smart trousers his mum had ironed for him. He was looking at the red beads on Helen’s glasses chain, trying to give the impression of looking at her without having the courage to actually do it.

“The next time they give you a clippings request, take them this form.” Helen held up a small yellow sheet with three questions on it. “Get them to fill it out. That way you won’t waste my time and yours.”

Paddy leaned over the copyboy’s shoulder and pointed at Helen. “She used to give me grief all the time too.”

He turned, afraid at first and then grateful at her comradely tone. Helen wasn’t pleased. She scowled after the junior as he shuffled out of the office and gave Paddy a cold smile. They were friends sometimes, when Helen forgot about office politics and power games, which was about once a year, usually when her heart had been broken by yet another separated or divorced man. She was on an earnest hunt for love.

Paddy had met a few of Helen’s dates when she bumped into her in bistros around the West End. Red-faced businessmen in expensive suits, mostly. She wondered Helen could eat looking at some of them, much less sleep with them. But although Helen was handsome she was a nippy cow and Paddy supposed that brought her trade value down a lot.

She glared through her glasses at Paddy. “I don’t appreciate you speaking about me in that manner in front of a junior member of staff.”

“Yeah, OK.” Paddy was looking back into the library, at the big table where women with scissors used to cannibalize endless copies of each edition, cutting out stories and filing them in small brown envelopes under subject headings. Nowadays it was all done electronically: the copy was typed into computers to be set and sent to the print room downstairs, and a disk of the articles went to a company with expertise in these things. Helen was alone in the library, general of a dispersed army, and it had made her more unpleasant.

“OK: Brian Donaldson.” Paddy smacked her lips and leaned across the desk. “Martin McBree. Independent and joint.”

Helen sucked her teeth at Paddy to show that she wasn’t happy, turned, and went down to the clippings drum to call up the search. She punched in the names to the panel, the metal drum churned and clanked, and slits opened up along its body. She lifted the envelopes out and slapped her hand with them, thinking for a moment. She looked at Paddy, a smug thought shimmering across her face, came back to the desk, and stamped them.

“These cross-ref for IRA and Northern Ireland.” Helen handed her the envelopes, trying not to smile. “Did you see Merki’s copy last night? Contradicts your IRA theory a bit, doesn’t it?”

Paddy nodded politely. “Yes. I’m a fool, Helen,” and she walked out of the room.

In the corridor she looked at the dates stamped on the front of the clippings envelopes. No one had had either of them out for over eight months. Merki wasn’t following the same trail because he was convinced the IRA weren’t involved.

She ran upstairs to the newsroom, clutching the envelopes and pulling her narrow skirt up to her thighs so she could move faster.

V

She found a space on a desk in a quiet corner and opened the first envelope that came to hand.

Martin McBree was IRA royalty. His career was outlined in two separate full-page profiles. He joined the organization when he was little more than a boy, pledging his loyalty three years before the Troubles began in the North, in the balmy days when IRA was said to stand for I Ran Away. He came through as part of the generation of Northern Irish Republicans who ousted the old guard when the Troubles began, turning the IRA into a significant paramilitary force.

On the second Bloody Sunday, British soldiers, unprovoked, had fired upon a peaceful civil rights march and killed thirteen unarmed civilians. McBree had been in the crowd that day and a photographer captured him in a moment of such tender glory that the image was published in newspapers all over the world. He was carrying another man, one arm under his shoulders, the other under his knees, leaning backwards to counter the weight. He was small, only five foot seven or so, but he must have been all muscle and sinew. The man had an open chest wound, was probably dead already. He had a black coat on and the photo was in black and white, but there was no mistaking the thick black blood on his chest, running down his arm and dripping from his limp hand. McBree’s pale shoes were splattered with blood. It was a good picture but what made it famous was the wild-eyed priest standing in front of them, holding up a white hankie in surrender, begging safe passage through the government snipers.

Paddy read down: the dead man was a plumber. He had four sons and a daughter. He was thirty-one.

She looked at the picture more closely. McBree didn’t look frightened. His jaw was clenched tight at the strain of the weight he was carrying. Here was a man used to blood. Here was a man who could face a hard task without flinching.

She found his name in an article about the first round of hunger strikes: he had been imprisoned many times for arms offenses and was the prisoner representative at the Maze for a year. Talks broke down when he left.

More recently he had been arrested and released for traveling on a false passport. He was on his way back from Lebanon. She checked the dates, counting back to Pete’s spell in hospital. Terry had been reporting from Beirut at the same time.

Later clippings reported that McBree admitted to attending a training camp in Lebanon, and they cited off-the-record speculation that he had been training both PLO and ETA guerrillas in hand-to-hand combat.

McBree was pictured in New York, a stolen snapshot of him at an airport. Just as Aoife had said, he was sent there with a mandate to restructure Noraid, ostensibly to make it more efficient but actually to shift power to a new raft of soldiers. He was ruthless in taking power away from the factions supporting the armed struggle and giving it to those who wanted a negotiated settlement. McBree’s hand-to-hand combat training must have come in useful, Paddy thought. His wife had stayed home in Ireland while he was gone and a bomb had gone off near his house. Police suspected infighting in the Republican movement.

He had been in her house. She thought back to the blunt letter opener, imagined herself trying to stab him, and realized how lucky she had been. Sweating lightly, she sat back and saw Bunty’s Monkey watching her, his arms crossed, looking smug.

The Donaldson clippings told her little of interest. He was pictured at a couple of press conferences, looking slimmer, less debauched. His son had died in the Maze and Donaldson himself was forced out of Northern Ireland after a turf war.

The joint clippings filled out his story. His son, David Donaldson, had been stabbed to death aged nineteen by a junior member of a Loyalist paramilitary group just two days after he was brought in on remand. The assassin had been given an amnesty under Martin McBree’s orders, only to be found with his throat cut the day after his release. Rumor had it that McBree averted a gang war to give his group leverage with the prison authorities, and to afford the Donaldson family the courtesy of killing the assassin themselves.

Donaldson owed McBree. He would have phoned him the minute she left the Shammy, reiterating every detail of what she had said, telling him that her son’s safety was her only concern.

She sat back and thought about what Aoife had said: McBree was a good guy but only compared to the likes of the Shankill Butchers.