Slip of the Knife

I

The Pitt Street reception area was busy. Police officers, uniformed and plain clothed, bustled by, all with the same military-precision haircut and shoulders-back bearing. They greeted each other, waited for the lift, disappeared through doors behind reception or took the stairs, never pausing to consider Paddy and Dub, both in funeral clothes, both scruffy and frightened, waiting anxiously on the black leatherette chairs, sweating with the desire to see their boy.

The receptionist was a young man this time, officious and cold, anticipating their annoyance by deadening his eye every time they asked when the questioning would be over, when they would be able to see Pete. Burns was still being questioned. Pete and Sandra had been taken for a tour of one of the stations nearby but Paddy and Dub needed Burns’s say-so before the police could let them see him.

Paddy sat back, twitchy and sickened, thinking that it was a good thing really: she might have been an agent for McBree; they were keeping her boy safe.

Resting her head on the back of the chair, staring up at the stained polystyrene ceiling tiles, she tried to clear her mind. It had been a declaration of war. She had named McBree at the memorial service and some of the journalists who had been there would pick up on it. She’d given them his name, they’d make calls, he’d hear about it. He had the prints and the negatives but Knox would have told him that she had been brandishing photocopies. He had to come for her now. If he didn’t get the last few copies the IRA would kill him for his betrayal.

What she couldn’t understand was why McBree had turned. He was a lifelong Republican; it was his devotion and his career. He was a hero. It must have been his whole identity. The clippings said a bomb had gone off near his family home while he was in New York, she remembered. He’d left his wife and family to deal with the consequences of his commitment to a cause, while at the same time he took money and protection from the enemy. She didn’t know what the security services had over him but it must have been compelling. Blackmail was usually about sex or money.

McBree and Paddy came from the same background. She knew that with rigid moral laws all it took was a stumble on the path, a slip of the knife, unrepented, to put a person on the outside forever, looking in on their families and friends. Paddy herself had stumbled and slipped, scrabbling back but never quite making it. She’d spent most of her childhood on the outside looking in on that warm place. Eventually, when she was older, she had let herself career down the mountainside. It was a lonely journey, but when she came to the bottom she had found her own people in the newsroom, among friends like Dub.

She looked up at him. Dub was leaning on his knees, his back tense, head dropped forward and a big bony hand on his neck. She nudged him with her knee and he sat up and looked at her.

“This is taking fucking ages,” he said.

“He’s safe.”

Not comforted, he shrugged a little and looked around at three policemen waiting at the lift doors. They were all out of uniform but tall and clipped. One wore a green wax coat, the other two suit jackets over slacks. Dub leaned back to mutter to her, “Ye wonder how they ever manage to go undercover, don’t ye? They look so polis-y you could cash them in.”

A bad suit stopped at the corner of her eye, pale blue, slightly crumpled skirt. Paddy turned to find the policewoman who’d interviewed her for Knox standing just inside the doors, looking at her, wary. Paddy nodded. “Garrett.”

Garrett nodded back, hesitated, and came over. “Why are you here?”

Her abruptness made Dub snort indignantly but Paddy quite liked it about her. “Waiting,” she said, copying Garrett’s style. “My son was attacked by McBree.” Garrett’s eyes widened. “He was staying at his daddy’s and someone broke in and was interrupted trying to get into his bedroom with a knife.”

Garrett’s eyes jerked up to a higher floor and back. “ID parade?”

“Had a balaclava on. They haven’t picked him up. Even if they had a photograph of him leaning over Pete with a knife between his teeth they wouldn’t pick him up, would they?”

Garrett bit her bottom lip, her face as emotionless as Paddy remembered. “ Balaclava? So it might not be him?”

Paddy smiled miserably, shook her head and turned away.

Garrett persevered. “There is a chance it might not be him.”

Paddy looked back at her. “My son is five years old. He hasn’t had time to make many enemies.” She looked away again. “You’re not going to help me, so fuck off.”

But Garrett lingered. Eventually she spoke, dropping her voice to a breathy growl: “Fax it.”

Paddy looked up with renewed interest. She touched her fingertips to her handbag, showing she understood. Garrett nodded and walked past her, taking the stairs at a jog, her head down, ashamed.

“What was that last bit about?” asked Dub.

Paddy scratched her cheek as her eyes skirted the floor, thinking. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing.”

A fax. It was less of a plan than a slap on the wrist afterwards. McBree’d come for her and the best move she could come up with was that she should be alone so no one else got hurt.

The receptionist called out for Mr. McKenzie, telephone. Dub took the lobby floor in two enormous loping steps and grabbed the receiver from him. He smiled and turned back to her.

“Hello, wee man.”

II

They were led up one flight of stairs by a skinny young policeman with a lisp. He took them along a noisy corridor, through a set of doors marked INTERVIEW ROOMS, and into a side room with more black chairs, an instant coffee machine and a dead plant.

He left them there, flicking his hand vaguely to the machine, telling them to help themselves if they had fifty pence.

A door opened out in the corridor. Paddy and Dub stood up, expecting Pete, but Burns peered in at them, looking like shit warmed up. He was flanked by a tall man in rolled-up shirtsleeves.

“That’s her,” Burns said. “She’s his mum.”

III

Pete had been having a lovely time. He told them who he had met and where the cells were and how they smelled of pee with bleach in it, like the time Cabrini took her nappy off and weed in the cupboard and Mrs. Ogilvy scrubbed it but made it worse. Like that. And he’d had a cake with raisins in it.

Paddy didn’t want to alarm him with a terrified burst of tearful affection. She gave him a hug but didn’t cling or cry, and let go so that Dub could say hello, but she couldn’t get her hand to leave him. She cupped his head, held his shoulder, tried to take his hand, which he didn’t like, even when they were crossing roads. He wriggled his fingers free but she couldn’t bear not to touch him and contented herself with resting her hand on the back of his shoulder.

A woman officer had been assigned to look after him. She kept putting her hands between her knees and bending down to patronize him, but Pete ignored her, caught up in the excitement of being in a police station with real-life actual policemen.

Burns took a seat across from them, tried the coffee machine, and lost his money. He had blue circles under his eyes and kept blinking slowly, telling them he’d had three hours’ sleep and felt sick. Sandra couldn’t bear the thought of going home. She had checked into a hotel. The most expensive in the city, Paddy noted, where the pop stars stayed when they came by on tour.

After a while Pete calmed down and sat on the floor playing with some leaflets about joining the police. Burns sagged in his chair and Dub leaned over and slapped his knee.

“Shouldn’t you be recording that piece-of-shit show tonight?”

Burns looked up, eyes reddened, and flashed him a filthy look.

Dub misunderstood. “OK, OK, ‘that show.’ Better? Shouldn’t you be recording it tonight?”

Burns blinked hard at the floor. “Canceled.”

“Hmm.” Dub tried not to smile. “Rough.”

Burns sprang to life, sliding over to Dub’s side and telling him that his manager had gone ahead and arranged a tour of the clubs without waiting for Burns to confirm and now half the gigs were sold out and his name was up everywhere.

Dub frowned at him. “But you haven’t signed the contract?”

“No, but I’ll be letting everyone down if I don’t do them.”

“Do you know what sort of backhander your manager’s getting? Above the ten percent?”

“Backhander?”

“If he’s pushing it this hard he’ll be getting a good few thou in cash, ten or twenty, you can guarantee.”

The thought hadn’t occurred to Burns and he was furious. “I’m only getting fifty-five gross.”

Dub reached forward with his foot and tucked it under Pete’s leg, lifting it and rocking him, making him smile at the pamphlets. “Flat rate? He didn’t offer you a percentage of the door?”

Paddy watched them talking, looked at Pete reading and smiling, saw the patronizing WPC sitting across with her knees clamped together, head tilted at a saccharine angle as she watched Pete.

She looked at the back of Pete’s head, at the perfect black whirl of hair at his crown. McBree didn’t want Pete. He wanted her.

She took out her cigarettes, lighting one, sliding away from Pete when Dub gave her a warning look. She sat on the edge of the long row of chairs, looking back at them, inhaling bitter courage.

As inevitable as daffodils, McBree would come for her. He was trained, brutal and desperate. It was unwinnable.

A strange calm came over her as she looked at the little family group. If she died, the mortgage would be paid off by the insurance. Dub would keep Pete-he did most of the child care anyway-and Burns would chip in when it suited him. And if all that broke down her mother would take him and his dream of living with BC full-time would be realized.

Ash dropped from her cigarette onto the industrial-gray carpet and she rubbed it in with the tip of her shoe. Unwinnable.

IV

They were released into the baby-killing world with assurances from the police that it was a random incident, that they would do all they could, that it was probably some nut who had become obsessed with Burns because he/she had seen him on telly. Good-bye and good luck.

Useless, lazy bastards was the gist of Burns’s rant on the pavement outside, as if it was only happening to him, as if Paddy wasn’t standing in a shit storm waving out.

They stood in the afternoon sunshine in Pitt Street, Pete pulling at Paddy’s arm as Burns related the traumas of the morning. More officers than necessary had tumbled into his house, all eager to have a look around; the incompetent forensics failed to find as much as a fingerprint; it had taken thirty minutes to get an ambulance for Sandra, and then she had to get a taxi from the hospital over to the station to subject herself to questioning. They gave her a Valium tablet at the casualty department and she wasn’t used to it.

He suddenly turned his anger on Paddy. “So what do we do now?”

“Well,” her hand was on Pete’s shoulder and she felt very calm, “you go to Sandra. Hide out for a bit. Stay in your hotel room. It’ll all be settled in a couple of days.”

Burns glanced at Pete, censoring himself. “What about the burglar?”

“That’ll be sorted out.” She looked away, sudden self-pitying tears nipping her eyes. Afternoon buses floated past the end of the road. A cyclist zipped down the hill, red hair fluttering out behind her. People walked, friends in twos and threes, contented, enjoying the warm weather, looking for lunch before they had to head back to work.

“I’ll sort it out.”