Slip of the Knife

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.”

“And now you’re working for the people who let your parents’ killers walk.”

McBree gave a small start, then laughed at her and twirled a finger at his ear. “You messing with my head, are ye?”

“How can ye? What have they got over you? Are ye gay, or a gambler or something?”

He laughed again, less certainly this time. “You’re very young for your age. Things are more straightforward when you’re young.”

“Have they got pictures of ye doing something nasty? Torn loyalties: betray the cause or be known as a gay boy? Or did you just forget what side ye were on?”

“What side I was on?” His voice was high and as he looked at her she could see the hate building behind his eyes, the loathing that would justify the attack. “Like there’s two sides in the world and you get to pick one, you stupid bitch.”

“There’s more than two?”

He sneered. “Whose side are you on, ye fat, ignorant cow, your mother’s or your wean’s?” His glance slid suddenly to the side and she knew instantly that he regretted saying it. He lifted his cigarette to his mouth, sucked smoke deep, deep into his lungs, the red tip flaring against his troubled face.

“It’s your kid?” she said softly. “They’ve got something on one of your kids?”

McBree held his breath, exhaled thick smoke, and looked back at her. “Ye’ve got the pictures?”

“I read about Donaldson’s boy being murdered in prison. Did they have something on your kid? Were they going to send him to prison?”

Eyes downcast, he held his hand towards her. “Just give us the fucking pictures.”

“And you such a big man, they’d try to kill him for sure. You’re doing all this for him. You’d kill Terry and Kevin and my five-year-old son to protect him?”

He dropped his hand, looked at the ceiling, composed himself. When he looked back at her he was smiling. “Will I come over there and get them from ye?”

She put the scissors in her pocket carefully, took the photocopies out, balled them in her fists, and threw them over to his feet.

He smiled wryly. “Is that your wee hidey-hole over there, wee mousey?” He bent down, scooped up the balled photocopies, and stood up again in a flash. He was more agile than he looked. He watched her as he pulled the paper straight, glanced at it, and took his lighter out.

“Now…” He touched his lighter to the edge of the sheet, holding on to the top corner while the flames took hold and then letting go, watching the flickering paper float to the floor. “Well, I for one feel much better.”

She didn’t see him coming. Didn’t see him drop his cigarette or take a step-just, very suddenly, he was across the room with one hand on her neck and the other on her wrist, pinning her against the wall, pressing her head into the crumbling plaster. He had seen the scissors in her hand. The fist around her neck tightened, squeezing the breath from her, making her tongue swell, lifting her off her feet.

Paddy swung her foot at his balls but missed, waved her free hand at his face and managed to knock his glasses off, but he didn’t flinch. He just pressed tighter and tighter until her eyes felt too big for her head, until her ears began to scream a high-pitched tone, and then he let her go.

Too stunned to go for the scissors, she stood, the very tip of her nose touching his, looking into his eyes wide with shock.

McBree dropped to his knees, bending forward, pressing his face into her groin like a man pleading for mercy. She raised her hands away from him, remembered her scissors, and fumbled to get them out of her coat pocket as McBree swayed first one way, then the next, and fell onto his side.

Callum Ogilvy was standing behind him, panting, holding a brick.

Behind him, framed in the kitchen doorway, furious and carrying a red petrol can, stood Dub. “I told you to wait in the fucking car!” he shouted.

III

Paddy, Dub and Callum sat close together along the wall, numbed, watching the man die. McBree’s right hand had landed on his chest but the left hand was thrown out to the side, palm open to the ceiling, like a singer reaching the crescendo. On the top of his head, facing the three of them, was a gash of bloody skin, a ragged split. Warm blood was still oozing lazily out of it, the puddle black in the dark of the kitchen, a slow-moving slick of ink that glistened silver as it split into tributaries on the uneven floor, making lakes of dips, looking for the sea.

The left hand was near to them, sitting in a diamond of the morning light coming through the window. Paddy could see a strip of soft white skin under his heavy wedding ring. His face looked strange without his glasses, naked, vulnerable. His eyes were smaller than she’d supposed, his lashes short and curled.

“We bury him in the garden,” said Callum.

Paddy was perturbed by his attitude. “He’s not dead.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” said Dub.

They sat in silence for a moment. Callum took a breath and spoke again. “We burn the place down with him in it. They come here and find the food and one sleeping bag. We leave a lighter near him and a packet of fags and they’ll think he was a jakey who was living rough and set fire to himself with a fag. The problem is the car out the front… We could drive it back, lose it in the city.”

Paddy and Dub looked at him. He was very calm, as if he had been born for this moment.

“Callum,” said Paddy, “the man is not yet dead. What part of that don’t you get? He’s not dead, he’s alive.”

Callum sighed. “OK, call an ambulance then.”

She tutted, cutting him off, but Callum persisted. “If he lives will he kill you? Will he come back and get you and hurt Peter?”

“Maybe.” She thought about it. “Probably.”

“Grow up, then.”

“You should be in the fucking car,” said Dub, as if that helped anything.

Paddy covered her face with her hands. “God, I’m fucking starving. How could anybody get hungry at a time like this?”

“Adrenaline,” said Callum, calmly watching a bloody rivulet creep across the floor towards him. “You get a big whoosh of it and then it passes and makes you hungry.” He saw them looking at him curiously. “Anger management course. Prison.”

Paddy looked down at the crumpled heap on the floor. “Maybe he’ll bleed to death?”

Callum wrinkled his nose at her. “What if he doesn’t?”

Dub stood up and looked down at Callum. “The thing that really bothers me about this, I mean really fucking does my head in, is that you shouldn’t be here. Whatever happens, you shouldn’t be here, seeing this.”

“He’s right,” said Paddy, standing up, keeping her eyes on McBree’s wound, repulsed but afraid to take her eyes off him in case he leaped suddenly to his feet and came at her. “You should go back to the car.”

Callum got up, wiped the dust from his bum. “You’re trying to protect me but you’re too late.” He gestured down at the half-dead man. “This is what I understand. You two, you don’t understand this. You’re sitting watching him, hoping he’ll die, but we need to do something.”

He had a point but Paddy stepped between him and McBree’s body. “I need to do something.”

His eyes were imploring. “Let me do it. I know what I’m doing. You don’t.”

Paddy hesitated. “I want you to go back to the car with Dub. Most people, Callum, most of us come from a comfortable home, we grow up and then we see things like this. It’s going to be harder for you. You’ll have to do it backwards.”

“I’m not leaving you here, you don’t have a clue-”

“You WILL go to the car with Dub.” It was her warning-mother voice again. It had worked on the sports guys, it worked on Pete, but Callum had spent his whole life being shouted at. She could see him smiling a little, swithering. He suppressed a grin and dipped his eyes, glanced at Dub’s feet.

“I’ll go back to the car.”

IV

She lit a cigarette and looked down at McBree’s head. The wound had stopped bleeding, the pool of blood no longer slithering across the floor but still. She kept her eyes on his face as she skirted his feet, stepping towards his left arm. She should have felt for a pulse, seen if he was alive or dead, but she didn’t want to touch him, couldn’t bring herself to bend over him, afraid he’d sit up suddenly and grab her, pull her down, throttle her again.

She stood over him and thought about Callum’s unnatural calmness. He had been here before, stood in front of a person and made a decision to take their life. She imagined herself having to face this as a ten-year-old child. The man that made Callum kill the baby had been raping him. She imagined that threat hanging over her as she looked at McBree. She knew suddenly that if she’d been a frightened ten-year-old like Callum, she would have hurt the baby to save herself too.

Playing for time, she thought again of checking for a pulse but it didn’t matter whether he was still alive. She couldn’t exactly call an ambulance. She was waiting, she realized, for the decision to be made for her.

Outside, a lorry rumbled past on the road, birds began to call. The sun rose, the wind rustled the tops of the trees.

Quite suddenly she thought of her father lying in his hospital bed, the skin on his sunken face dry and thin as rice paper, clinging furiously to life.

She stepped forward to McBree, felt in his jacket pocket, fumbling past his cigarettes and a tissue to the car keys. Moving quickly, she picked up the spare sleeping bag, and skipped over to the petrol can. She lifted it carefully, trying not to get any on her hands or clothes, and gently spilled it on the floor around him, crouching as she worked her way around the body, circling it with the greasy fluid. The packet of coal left over from the barbecue was on the range and she stacked it under the table for kindling, throwing the firelighter bricks on top.

She stood and looked at the scene for anything out of place. The house was quiet; the calm morning filtered through the dirty windows, the smell of damp cut by the sharp tang of petrol. An animal hunger scratched at the lining of her stomach.

She stepped outside into the morning and lit a match, heart hammering in her chest as she reached into the kitchen. Her thumb left her index finger and the match dropped through space, flaming red and blue, spinning. She felt the muffled “whooph” pat her eardrum as the fire caught and a glittering carpet of flames rolled out across the bloody floor.

She was watching the firestarter bricks under the table burst into merry little lives of their own when a movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention: flames tickled around McBree’s left hand as the square fingers unfurled, graceful, flowering open to the ceiling, appealing for mercy.

Horrified, Paddy lurched forward to the door. She grabbed the handle and slammed it shut.