Slip of the Knife

I

Dub waited in the car, listening patiently to a comedy show on the radio, saying he didn’t mind.

Paddy checked her notes again, read the door numbers on the gates opposite, and turned back, certain that this was number eight. Dub always said that house envy was the one sure symptom of middle age. The sight of it made her mouth water.

It was everything she would have wanted Eriskay House to be: in the city, gloriously well kept and absolutely massive. A trellis arch from the street was hung with roses, the flowers faded and dropping onto the pavement, littering the path to the house.

The asymmetric façade had Arts and Crafts decoration on every finial and doorknob, small, perfect details that spoke of class and taste, oak leaves and acorns worked into the carving on the architraves, faces easing out of the stones, a lizard frozen midscamper across the door frame. To the right of the building was a glass conservatory, leaves of lush plants pressed hard against the greening windows. She paused to look in through the glass and saw trays of seedlings and flowering potted plants on a bench.

The doorbell was ceramic and chimed a timeworn gong into the hallway. She waited, looking back out into the street to see Dub alone in the car, laughing.

Suddenly the door was opened by a young girl with blond hair pulled up in a ponytail, her face fresh and welcoming, making Paddy feel shabby and fat and old.

“Paddy Meehan?”

“Hi.”

“Come in, come in.” She almost giggled with delight as Paddy shuffled in. “Mum’s still working, believe it or not.”

A square stairwell filled the hallway, carved in warm red wood, Gothic details elaborate enough for a church pew, with coats hung irreverently on delicate finials. A spindly jardinière held a chunky black Bakelite phone. The stone floor was littered with welly boots, sandals, leashes and mauled tennis balls. It smelled of dog.

The girl led her through a passageway to the left of the door, a narrow servants’ corridor that ran between the rooms, into a back office covered in papers and poster-sized book covers. French windows gave onto a garden and a golden Labrador was dozing outside in the early evening sunshine, tail dreamily batting the ground.

Smiling, Joan Forsyth stood up to meet her. She was a mannish version of the pretty girl, in her forties but still vigorous. She was dressed in a white tailored shirt with the collar standing up in the manner of rugby players. Her hair was carefully unkempt, thick and blond with traces of white around the temples. She wore expensively cut green slacks with a thin yellow check through them.

“Hello.” She leaned on top of her desk with one hand and took Paddy’s hand with the other, pumped firmly once and let go. “Do sit down.”

She let Paddy settle, flashing her another smile and offering tea.

“Oh, lovely, thanks.”

“ Darjeeling?”

“Fine.”

“Tippy.” She addressed her daughter. “Pot of Darj and two cups, please.”

Tippy twitched her head at Paddy, mock sulk. “She’s using you as an excuse to boss me, you know.”

Paddy pretended to give a shit. “Sorry.”

“Never mind,” Tippy said prettily and turned on her heels, disappearing back through the dark corridor.

“So, you’re Paddy Meehan?”

The Labrador was awake, nuzzling at the door, but Joan Forsyth ignored it.

“I am, yeah. I hope you don’t mind me coming to see you but I wanted to ask about Terry Hewitt’s book.”

“Right.” She nodded and waited for Paddy to continue.

“You knew Terry personally?”

“I knew Amy, his mother. We were at school together in Perthshire. He came to me with a book proposal and I thought it sounded good, the pictures were great, so, yes, I said yes.” She seemed a little defensive.

“But you didn’t really know Terry that well?”

“No.” She sounded very sharp. “I knew his mother.”

Paddy waited, listening to the dog whine at the door, snuffling hard at the joist.

“Get away, Mutley.”

The dog gave a whine and backed off. Paddy was almost afraid to speak again in case Joan shouted at her. “I see,” she said quietly. “I just went out to Eriskay House, you know? Where they lived?”

“Ayrshire?”

“Aye, Ayrshire. The road’s very dangerous. Did they die there?”

“Yes. At the end of the driveway. A lorry took the corner at seventy and lost control. Lucky Terry wasn’t in the car. He should have been. He was in the house at the time. First on the scene.”

Paddy saw him then, with his shaved head and scars showing on his scalp, standing in the thick grass staring wide-eyed at the end of the driveway. He’d never told her that he’d been there, never even hinted at it. He was all of seventeen.

“Poor little thing,” Forsyth said absently. “He was a lovely boy. She adored him.”

Paddy cleared her throat. “Terry and I went out together, not long afterwards, when he first moved to the city.”

“I see.” She seemed to soften. “You knew Terry?”

“Yeah, I knew him very well. He left me the house in his will.”

“Oh.” She leaned back in her chair. “I thought you were writing an article about him or something.”

“Well, I kind of am.”

“Not that awful column? You insulted a very good friend of mine in that rag-you know, Margaret Hamilton, the newsreader? Said her hair was made from wood.”

Before Paddy could apologize Tippy clattered in with the tea on a wooden tray and a plate of digestive biscuits,. Paddy thanked her as she unloaded the things onto the desk, trying to think of a new approach. But she was too tired to be subtle. She asked Tippy for milk in the tea, not lemon, bit off a mouthful of biscuit, and waited until Tippy had retreated before coming clean.

“Look, I’m sorry about your friend, Misty’s a bit scurrilous sometimes but this is important. The photographer, Kevin, he’s been killed too.” Forsyth’s jaw fell open. “They had a photograph of a major player in the IRA in that book, in the background of one of the shots, and he’s hanging about Glasgow. It can’t be a coincidence. If it was about the picture, if someone wanted the book stopped, I need to know who could have seen it before it was published. Could you have shown it to anyone?”

“No!” Joan thought hard and her eyes opened wide in surprise. “No! Kevin’s dead?”

“Did you know Kevin?”

Forsyth looked wildly around the walls of her office. “God, how awful. What a dreadful- God!”

“Who got to see the pictures from your side?”

“Well, I didn’t show them to anyone, but everyone in the book got their own picture. Kevin was a news journalist, so he didn’t know that much about the portraiture business. We had to send them all a copy with a release form to get consent to use their images.”

“Everyone in the book got a copy of their own photograph?”

“Sure.”

“But they only got their own photograph?”

“Yeah. God-”

“Who sent the photographs out to people?”

“Me.”

Joan didn’t seem able to make the next logical leap so Paddy had to spell it out for her. “Maybe we can trace the person who got that photograph. Do you have all the names and addresses somewhere?”

“Um-yes, but I don’t know who got what. We put a release form in each envelope, addressed them, then Terry came in with a small six-by-four of each portrait and put the right one in each before we sent them off.”

She still had the list of addresses though, a messy sheet of lined foolscap with Terry’s handwritten list on it, thirty-four names and addresses. Over half of them were men’s names. It shouldn’t be too hard to find the black woman.

Paddy smiled at the jagged, childish scrawl. Like herself, Terry was spoiled by the speed of shorthand and his letters tumbled messily over each other. She remembered a note she left on the notice board at work once, when she wanted to sell her old car. Someone drew a speech bubble, attaching it to the last letter on the page: “Stop pushing at the back!” Journos doing interviews often wrote notes without looking at the page, keeping eye contact with an interviewee. Terry had forgotten to look at the page sometimes while he was copying the addresses and his writing escaped the lines, soaring upwards.

She folded the sheet and put it in her bag. “Look, can I be a terrible bother and borrow your phone to make a quick call?”

Forsyth was still stunned about Kevin’s death. She waved a hand vaguely over the phone on the desk but Paddy stood up. “I’ll use the one out in the hall, on my way out. I don’t want to interrupt your work.”

“Sure, sure.” Joan stood up to shake Paddy’s hand again. “If you ever have an idea for a book come to me.” She looked her up and down. “You’re very marketable.”

Paddy wasn’t altogether sure it was a compliment. “Tell your friend I’m sorry for insulting her hair.”

“No.” She waved the offense away. “She had it cut because of you, no bad thing.”

“And I’m sorry the book won’t come out.”

“Are you joking?” Forsyth managed a weak smile. “With a story like this attached to it, it bloody well will come out.”

Paddy remembered Kevin sitting in his living room on a quiet Sunday night, proudly showing her the portfolio, saying Terry had offended someone in Liberia and nothing would happen to him.

“Joan, I’d keep that really quiet for a while if I were you.”

II

Tippy was playing music upstairs somewhere, and Paddy was alone in the hall. She rang Burns.

Sandra picked up, putting on a breathy telephone voice and answering as “the Burnses’ residence.” Paddy kept her voice down and asked for Pete. Sandra leaned away from the phone and called, “Peter, Peter,” into the kitchen. Paddy could hear the theme to Ghost Train playing on the video in the background.

“All right, son? What are you doing?”

The sound of his voice made her relax, resting her forehead on the cool wall above the telephone table. He was monosyllabic, probably looking into the kitchen where the video was, but he sounded happy and said he’d been to a neighbor’s kid’s party and had a lot of Coke and crisps. His dad said Pete didn’t need to have a bath tonight and he’d had toast for dinner.

“No veg?”

“Crisps are made from potatoes,” he said, quoting BC, who compounded his fatness by being a smart-arse.

“Are you quite happy staying there tonight? Have you got a clean shirt for school?”

“Yes and yes,” he said, succinct because he wanted to get off the phone. “The video…”

She made him promise to phone her at home and say good night before she let him go. She hung up and let herself out into the cool of the evening.