Slip of the Knife

I

Paddy kept her window down. The warm breeze caressed her face, carrying the high-summer smell of dust and rotting vegetables as she followed the red taillights of the police car.

Blane and Kilburnie were in the car ahead, sniggering about her purple hall no doubt, passing tasty morsels back and forth about her and George Burns. Everyone would know what Terry’s suicide note said by morning. They’d extrapolate every detail: Terry shot himself because of her, she loved Burns and that’s why she was watching his show, she’d painted her hall purple and yellow, Dub was a boyfriend or a beard. Rumors of her lesbianism increased in direct proportion to her success. It was intended to belittle her, but she quite liked the suggestion that she was impregnable, literally and metaphorically.

A green traffic light switched to orange as the police car passed beneath it. Paddy slowed unnecessarily, stopping before it changed to red. Out of the empty street, a sudden rush of people crossed the road in front of her. She looked back. They were pouring out of the Ramshorn Kirk, a church she’d never even noticed before this year, converted into a theater for Glasgow ’s year as European City of Culture.

For a century Glasgow had been a byword for deprivation and knife-wielding teenage gangs but in the past few years the thick coat of black soot had been sandblasted off the old buildings, revealing pale yellow sandstone that glittered in the sun, or blood orange stone that clashed with blue skies. International theater companies and artists had started coming to the city, colonizing unlikely venues, old churches, schools, markets and abandoned sheds, places the locals failed to notice every day. Glaswegians no longer felt as defensive of their home, began to look around with renewed interest, like a partner in a stale marriage finding out that their spouse was a heartthrob abroad.

The lights changed to green but Paddy sat still, watching the pedestrians crossing in front of her. They were young for a theater crowd, smoking now that they could, chatting animatedly about the piece they had just witnessed.

Some of the men cast admiring glances at her car. It was a big white Volvo saloon, a vanity car, bought to show the world of men she moved among that she was doing well and had the readies to buy a big motor. She didn’t like it. It handled like a tank and was too big and boxy to park in the handy little spaces she used to manage in her Ford Fiesta. Parking it anywhere slightly rough was to invite a key along the paintwork.

The crowd began to thin and she let the handbrake off, gently nudging forward. Ahead, the police pulled out slowly, making sure she stayed with them, as if she couldn’t find the city morgue herself.

They drove on, turning down the steep winding High Street, once the spine of the city, now a road through plots of dark wasteland. The seven-story Tollbooth sat on its little traffic island, all that remained of a medieval prison where witches were hanged and the debtors voted in their own mayor.

Glasgow City Mortuary was an unobtrusive single-story building on the corner of the High Court. Built in red brick, it had windows on either side of a deep doorway like a punched-in nose. The business of the building was conducted belowground, in the white-tiled cellar.

The squad car pulled up right in front, on a double yellow line, so Paddy followed their lead and drew up behind them. Kilburnie and Blane were waiting for her on the pavement, their mood lighter than it had been before, distant and observing. They had been talking about her, she could smell it on their breath.

The mortuary faced Glasgow Green, an ill-lit expanse of grass cut through by the River Clyde, bordered on one side by the damp highrises in the Gorbals and on the other by the crumbling tenements of the Gallowgate. At night it was populated by roving prostitutes and the drunk men who came to fuck them or rob them. Shadows routinely rose out of the moist night and tried the door of the mortuary. It was assumed they were attracted by the lights or looking for drugs but no one really knew why they came, banging on the oak or scratching at the windows.

The narrow porch was a tight fit for the three of them. Blane’s looming bulk swallowed the light. They heard the entry buzzer fizz as he pressed it.

“You two do a lot of death knocks?” Paddy used the police term to show them she wasn’t just a punter off the street.

“Not that often,” said Blane.

“Well, I’m afraid I’m Family Liaison.” Kilburnie smiled sadly and tipped her head to the side, putting Paddy in her place as the bereaved. “I have to come here quite often, I’m afraid.”

“You’re afraid of everything,” said Paddy quietly.

Blane smirked at his shoes. Tell your pals that, Paddy wanted to say: Meehan cracking jokes at the door of the mortuary, coming to view a corpse.

She’d been avoiding thoughts of Terry all the way into town, filling her head with Pete and decorating the new house and how soon she could get into the office to file the story. No amount of anticipating could make her ready for the sight of a dead body. She knew that from experience.

When her father, Con, died, the family held the nightly rosary around his open coffin. The gray simulacrum of Con Meehan became just that: not the man, but an impostor wearing her daddy’s best suit. She clung to her grief, knowing that it was the very last emotion her dad would ever provoke in her.

It was a terrible death. He was fifty-eight, riddled with tumors, but the physical pain was nothing compared to his anger in those last few ragged months. He died scratching at the clod walls of his grave, tearful, never accepting that his time was up. Everyone in the family made of Con’s uncharacteristic anger what they needed to. Trisha, his wife, thought it was because of the way things had gone with Paddy and Caroline, because the boys weren’t devout. Caroline put his fury down to his long-term unemployment and a lack of counseling. The boys said it was the medication, Mary Ann said pain. But when Paddy looked into his eyes she saw a great roar of regret. Con was a timid man. He had spent his life avoiding conflict, let everyone through the door before him, waiting in a holding position, and then, suddenly, his time was over.

She gave up trying to get her head around the fact of death. She developed the mental trick of pretending that Con had gone away on a long, happy trip, that she would see him again one day and everything would be better, he’d be tumor free, the regret and all the space between them gone. It was later that she realized her mother used exactly the same mental trick but called the destination heaven.

Blane glanced nervously out at the misty Green and cursed under his breath as he pressed the hissing intercom again. Kilburnie looked at Paddy, blank faced until her training kicked in: her face softened and she reached supportively for Paddy’s arm, retreating when she saw the snarl on her face.

Paddy thought she was coming over too hard. “Did he leave a note?”

Blane looked puzzled. “Who?”

“Terry. Did he leave a note saying why?”

Blane’s jaw dropped in realization. “No, no, sorry. He didn’t do it to himself.”

Kilburnie stole a pinch of Paddy’s elbow. “He was murdered.”

“You’re shitting me?”

“Oh yes, definitely. There were tire marks at the side of the road but no car around and we haven’t found the weapon. He was naked and we never found his clothes. He was murdered.”

“Terry was naked?”

Blane nodded. “Stark, bollock naked.”

She knew it had to be murder: even if the gun wasn’t missing, Terry wouldn’t want to be found naked. He was a bit pudgy, had some fat around his arse, and was ashamed. He wanted the lights off before he would undress in front of her. It was one of the things she’d liked about him. “But who’d want to kill Terry Hewitt?”

Blane leaned in confidentially. “They said it looks like an IRA assassination.”

Paddy reeled on her heels. “Get fucked!”

He nodded, excited, knowing the implications. “‘All the hallmarks.’ That’s what they said.”

“No one’d authorize that in Scotland. We’re neutral. And Terry had nothing to do with Ireland.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m sure they’ll tell us in the press statement. They usually do that, don’t they?”

Kilburnie leaned back, getting between them, pointedly clearing her throat, reminding Blane of the need for discretion. Chastened, he turned back to the door, his shoulder met by Kilburnie’s, forming a wall against Paddy. He pressed the buzzer a third time. “Well, that’s what they told us,” he said, defending himself to Kilburnie.

“It can’t be.” Paddy addressed their backs. “He was a journalist. Even the Americans wouldn’t stand for that.”

The intercom crackled: “Yeah?”

Blane leaned in. “PCs Blane and Kilburnie from Pitt Street. Expected here for an ID.”

The door buzzed and fell open an inch, letting out a jab of sharp lemon. Paddy had visited the city mortuary several times and the smell didn’t get any less alarming. She took a deep breath before stepping into the dark hall.

Blane made sure the door was shut tight behind them.

Inside, the lobby was softly lit. A bleary-eyed security guard sat stiffly at the desk, the appointments book in front of him suspiciously flattened. As Blane and Kilburnie showed him their warrant cards and signed in, Paddy moved to the side and spotted the edge of a pillow on his lap.

Blane smiled at the guard, saying his name twice in the course of a bland hello. Police officers liked to say people’s names. Made them feel connected. He introduced Paddy but the security guard didn’t react to her name. Not a Daily News reader.

Blane gave up trying to chat and nodded Kilburnie and Paddy down the corridor to a set of doors with ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY painted on them. Through the doors, after a long landing, narrow stone steps led down into the bowels of the building and a warren of white-tiled corridors.

Kilburnie turned back to Paddy at the bottom of the stairs. “About the IRA-that’s just a canteen rumor.”

Paddy nodded. “Understood.”

“It shouldn’t go in the paper or anything. Could scare people. Cause friction.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said Paddy vaguely, itching to get to the office now.

“Now, this…” Kilburnie pointed down the corridor. “I’m here to support you. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Fine,” said Paddy sharply.

She saw Kilburnie flinch at her coldness. Paddy could have faked a bit of trauma, but that wasn’t supposed to be the point. The incessant attempts to prompt her emotions were getting on her tits.

Ahead of them, sheet-plastic abattoir doors glowed yellow from the light behind them and a radio hummed, muffled by the scratched, leathery material. Kilburnie reached out with both hands and pushed them open. The smell hit Paddy’s nose like a spiteful slap. Rancid meat and the afterburn of alcohol. She forced herself to take breaths in and out. She’d made herself dizzy in the mortuary once before by not breathing in enough.

The bizarre tableau they walked in on stopped them dead. Kilburnie gasped, afraid again no doubt.

Standing alone against a wall of glinting stainless steel was an elf dressed in green scrubs, face mask hinged off one ear. Her hands hung by her sides, turned towards them, like Jesus welcoming sinners in a painting. The wild brown hair was blunt cut above her shoulders. She smiled stiffly, eyes open a little too wide. She’d heard them coming down the stairs, probably heard the buzzer and the doors. Her welcoming stance had gone stale.

“Hello.” The odd little woman refreshed her smile. She was young, her skin perfect, her figure unformed, as if she was still waiting for puberty to hit.

Blane frowned. “John about?”

The mortuary elf looked Paddy over, smart in a black wraparound work dress and platform orange-suede trainers. “He’s having a kip in the back.”

All three of them considered the possibility that this tiny woman had risen from the Green, broken in for some sick reason, and beaten John to death.

She touched a hand to her chest. “Aoife McGaffry,” she said, her Northern Irish accent thick and warm. “I’m the new pathologist.”

Blane smiled. “Oh, I thought you were a nutter. What are you doing here at this time on a Saturday night?”

Aoife stepped back, welcoming them into the big room. “We’re backed up.”

“Old Graham Wilson had a heart attack a week ago,” Blane explained to Paddy. “They’ve been storing everyone they can until the new Path started.”

Paddy had never met Graham Wilson but she’d seen him giving evidence at the High Court a couple of times. He was disheveled, looked as if he’d just been woken up, wore a crumpled three-piece suit and pince-nez.

“Died on the job,” said Aoife. “Not ‘on the job’ as in mid- coitus,” she corrected herself, “but ‘on the job’ here.” She pointed at the floor in front of her. “Again, not in midcoitus.”

It was supposed to be a joke but Blane flinched.

Aoife McGaffry winced. Police officers might snigger at the nightie someone was wearing when they were told of a loved one’s death, they might make jokes about Head and Shoulders at the scene of car crashes, but, apparently, there were bounds of decency and the suggestion that a colleague had died in the course of a necrophiliac orgy wasn’t funny. Paddy liked Aoife immediately.

“I’m Paddy Meehan.” She stepped forward and put out her hand.

Aoife smiled at the outstretched hand. “You wouldn’t thank me for shaking it. It’d take ye a week to get the smell out.” She twisted around to look behind her. “Tend to go a bit ripe if they’re left for a week.”

“I’m here to identify someone…”

Behind her Blane barked, “SMR Ref 2372/90,” reading from his notebook.

Aoife listened, dismissed him with a blink, and looked at Paddy again, shedding all her awkwardness now she was in her professional role. “And is this someone close to you?”

“Not really. A friend. He hadn’t anyone else.”

“OK.” She nodded. “Well, I’ve been here for two days and haven’t had the time to dress anyone up. I don’t know what kind of state your friend is in but we can do this two ways: I can tidy him up but that’ll take time, or I can just bring you to him. How’s your constitution?”

Paddy shrugged. It was shite, actually, but she wanted to get to the office and file the story before the final edition went to press. “Fair to middling.”

Aoife smiled. “Beckett,” she said, catching the reference. “Right, come on now you with me and we’ll find your friend.”

The police trailed after them as Aoife led Paddy through a small passageway to a big steel door. A gauge on the wall next to it showed the temperature. Paddy had looked at a body here before, a long time ago, as a favor to an old friend.

“Don’t you use the drawers anymore?”

“Bloody thing conked out ages ago. Heads need banging together in this place.” Using all her slight weight, Aoife yanked the big door open. A gust of frost and alcohol burst into the corridor. Brutal white strip lights flickered awake in the walk-in fridge, casting inky shadows under the sheeted trolley beds. Inside, the fridge was crowded. Aoife had to wiggle sideways between the beds to make her way to the back of the room.

“What number did ye say?” Her voice echoed back to them.

Blane looked at his notebook again and repeated it.

She checked a couple of toe tags, muttering “Here we go” to herself when she found Terry. She looked back across the full fridge and sighed a white cloud. “Hell. We might need to empty the whole place to get him out.”

There were fifteen, eighteen bodies in the place. It would take ten minutes to wheel all the beds out and then they couldn’t very well piss off and leave her with the bodies in the corridor.

“Tell you what, I’ll come in,” said Paddy, bracing herself and stepping into the cold. She slid between the shrouded shapes, holding her hands high, trying not to touch anything.

“Me too,” said Kilburnie. Family Liaison. Elbow holder. Empathy in uniform. She followed Paddy’s path through the trolleys, keeping close, until they were gathered on the other side of the bed from Aoife, exhaling smog over the cold white sheet.

Paddy looked down. Terry was under there. A Terry-shaped piece of meat. Naked. Rotting. Suddenly, death wasn’t a long holiday. It was real.

Aoife McGaffry sensed her tension. “Was he a relative of yours?”

“No.” Paddy couldn’t stop her eyes from mapping the mountains and valleys of the sheet in front of her. “No, no. We’ve just known each other for a long time, that’s all.”

It wasn’t all. They had known each other for nine years and she thought about him all the time he was away, wondered after him, imagined his absent opinion of her actions. Terry Hewitt had been her touchstone for nearly a decade. He was a marker of how she was doing, a spur to action, a call for decency. She wished he’d never come back to Glasgow.

Aoife was talking. “… pull the sheet back slowly. You’re better just looking at him once the sheet’s away and not while it comes off. It’s easier to look then. And stand back a wee bit, there.”

Dumbly, Paddy took a step away, her bum banging into the trolley behind her. She started, imagined a dead hand grabbing her arse.

“Don’t get freaked out, just step back. It’s good to have more in your line of vision than just the deceased. Keeps perspective. If it gets too much, look up at me. Ready?”

She had her hands on the top end of the sheet. Paddy stared hard at Aoife’s face and nodded.

“Right, here we are now.”

Against orders, Paddy watched as Aoife rolled the sheet back, folding it under Terry’s chin as if he was a sleeping child. “You try to have a wee look now.”

At first all Paddy could see was the mess of it. A black hole the size of a fist was at his temple. A tongue, was that a tongue? Purple, swollen, poking out between the bloody lips. He must have been lying on his side after he was shot because tendrils of blood had dried across his face, a black octopus climbing out of the hole above his ear. She couldn’t see Terry in all of that. She stole a look at Aoife’s shoulder, braced herself, looked at him again through a puff of white breath.

The first thing she recognized was the BCG scar on his upper arm. She had kissed that, stared at it in the gloomy room in Fort William while Terry talked about San Salvador, knew every fold of the smooth penny, every overlapping freckle. Then she saw that the nose was Terry’s nose. It was his double chin. She saw the hair on the back of his neck: black, coarse, gelled, sticky to the touch. She had run her fingertips around that neck, savored the softness, scratched and kissed it, run the tip of her tongue through the soft precursor hairs, tasted him. Her mouth filled suddenly with salt water.

“Him. It’s him.”

Lightness flooded into the top of her head, making her unsteady. Ordering herself to be brave, she raised her eyes to Aoife but her gaze rolled up past the thick brown hair, rushed up the wall, and skidded up to the ceiling into a burning strip light.

She hit the floor before realizing she was going down.

II

The light above her was so harsh that Paddy threw her arm over her face and rolled onto her side to get away from it. Aoife was talking a mile away. “She’s fine. No worries. Yez can go about your business now.”

Paddy heard Blane say something. Or was it Kilburnie? Aoife replied and a door clicked shut somewhere.

Keeping her hands over her face, Paddy sat up. She was on a low bed, a leather daybed, covered in a long strip of paper like a gynecologist’s examination couch. She had passed out right in front of policemen while she was wearing a dress. Blane and Kilburnie would have a story to tell now: Burns on the telly, purple hall, and herself on the floor, legs splayed, washday-gray knickers on full show. She cursed to herself and swung her legs over the side of the bed, forcing her eyes open.

They must have carried her in here. It was a small office, cut off from the rest of the mortuary by wood and glass partitions. Gray box files and papers were stacked on every surface. The cheap particleboard desk had a big white computer sitting on it, the screen blinking a green prompt.

Aoife was watching her from a swivel chair, smoking a cigarette she didn’t look old enough to buy.

“Oh, sorry, I’m sorry,” Paddy apologized over and over, trying to think of something else to say. “I’ll go, I’m sorry.” She stood up uncertainly and looked around. “Where’s my coat?”

“Ye haven’t a coat.”

“Haven’t I?”

“Are ye pregnant or anything?”

Paddy stroked the round of her stomach defensively.

“I didn’t mean… Ye don’t look it or anything.” Aoife waved her cigarette up and down Paddy’s body. “Just in case there’s something more than shock going on. I’m a doctor, I’m supposed to ask stuff like that.”

Paddy remembered the harrowing moments before she fainted. She covered her face with her hands and groaned Terry’s name.

“Your friend,” said Aoife simply.

Paddy looked up. “Friend.” The word seemed infinitely tender. She felt like crying. “Who’d shoot him in the head? He was a good guy.” She remembered the hotel room in Fort William. “Good-ish. A good enough guy.”

Aoife considered her cigarette. “While you were out of it the police said he’d been shot by the Provos.”

“Terry was nothing to do with the Troubles. He wasn’t even interested in that.”

Aoife snorted bitterly and crossed her legs. “Doesn’t take much to cross them bastards. I trained in Belfast. Seen some right messes. Most of them’re just thugs with a political justification. Both sides. Wankers.”

She sounded like the child she resembled: small, scatological, odd. Her ponytail had come undone at the side, probably from yanking Paddy’s body off the floor. Her hair was so wiry each strand looked thick and coarse as a horse’s tail.

“By God, ye’ve some head of hair on ye,” said Paddy, letting her Irish phrasing show now they were alone.

Aoife looked at her, sternly at first. Her face broke into a laugh. Paddy laughed along with her.

Aoife pointed to the door. “Hey, that fat fella says you’re a famous person.”

“Aye.” Paddy rubbed her face roughly. “Couldn’t tell ye which one at the minute.”

“Maybe you’re Sean Connery.”

“That’d be a turn-up, wouldn’t it?” Paddy smiled. “And me a mother.”

They laughed together again, softly this time. Aoife pointed at her with the tip of her cigarette. “I’ll tell ye this: the Provos never done for your pal.”

“How do you know?”

“Not how they do it. They shoot through the mouth or the back of the head, usually behind the ear, not through the temple. Doing that ye might just shoot someone’s eyes off and leave them alive to make a statement.”

“Why do they think it was the Provos then?”

“I suppose assassination by a single shot is pretty rare outside Northern Ireland.”

One of Aoife’s lids gave a telltale twitch. She’d given herself away as a Protestant. A Catholic would call the province “the North of Ireland.” And she’d know where Paddy’s own sympathies lay because of her name.

Paddy leaned over and touched her knee. “Hey, I don’t care what you call it.” Aoife smiled weakly. “You’ve a strange name though, for an orange bastard.”

“Aye. Intermarriage. My da chose the name. I think he did it to upset her-they weren’t getting on by then anyway.”

“Quick turnaround?”

“Aye, but they stayed together for the sake of the wee one, bless ’em.” She smiled sarcastically.

“I’m sorry.”

“Aye, well.” Aoife took a deep draw on her cigarette. “D’you and your husband get on?”

“I’m not married.” Paddy stood up and straightened her skirt.

Aoife blinked. “But ye were married?”

Paddy shook her head and looked for her bag. She’d already said she had a child; there was no going back.

When men realized she was a single mother they could be sympathetic, or assume she was a desperate slapper and take it as an invitation to chance their arm. Only women were pitying. Paddy was afraid to look at Aoife. She liked her but knew her background, understood the press of convention in an Irish household and how single mothers were talked about.

“How old’s your baby?” Aoife’s tiny face was a mask of calm but her mouth curled up at one side.

“Five. He’ll be six in a few months.” Paddy picked up her handbag from the floor and made for the door. “He’s called Pete.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Aoife, trying to make up for her disapproving twitch. “That’s a lovely name.”

“Named after an old friend,” said Paddy, letting herself out and shutting the door behind her.

III

The Daily News office wasn’t far from the mortuary. A committed journalist would have run the three blocks to file her exclusive. Whatever the truth of it, Terry’s assassination would make a great, fat, scaremongering story. The press would embrace it because it suggested they were involved in a noble, life-threatening venture, and the Scottish public would follow it to find out if they were really about to be plunged into a war. She could break the story as an anonymous news item, then quash the rumor furiously in her column on Wednesday and still turn out to be right.

But instead of hurrying to the office, Paddy drove numbly around, taking corners that led her away from the office, slowly circling the city center and heading down towards the river.

The light above the basement door was sharp and hurt her eyes. It was a dark part of town, a warren of warehouses on the south bank of the slow, cold river, in an area that had once been a bustling commercial center by the docks. A moist cold seemed to hang over it. When Paddy got out of the car the wet chill hit her face and she huddled in her thin dress as she hurried across the road to the door.

Saturdays were always quiet at the soup kitchen. Everyone who worked there had a different theory as to why: on weekends even the homeless were invited to drinking parties; they got too drunk to make it over on Saturdays; takeaway shops gave out free food when they were closing up and you didn’t need to stay sober or mouth prayers to get that handout.

Two men in double coats were sitting at a table near the door, the crumbs from jam rolls and empty bowls of soup lying in front of them. One was asleep, the other blinking hard and looking around, bewildered and innocent as an abandoned child. Nearer the counter a few more men sat at tables, eating. Some of them were respectably dressed in old suits, or clean pressed denims. The Talbot Centre must have been giving away clean clothes.

The steel counter was ablaze with strip lights. Behind it, on scrubbed steel tables out of grab range, sat trays of buttered rolls with clear red jam dribbling out of them. A large tureen of soup, a plastic slow cooker that plugged into the wall, stood on the counter next to a stack of bowls.

Sister Tansy was alone behind the counter, her mouth perpetually a tightly drawn string bag, eyes despising whatever hove into her line of vision. Sister Tansy wore the long white coat the nuns always wore at the kitchen, a cross between a dinner lady and a doctor. She saw Paddy approaching and her shoulders rose in a silent ripple of fury, eyes glued suddenly to the lentil-crusted soup tureen.

When Paddy had said that Sister Tansy was one dry sherry away from committing a massacre, Mary Ann laughed with a self-censoring hand over her mouth.

“Hi, Sister, is Mary Ann about?”

“No.” She took the lid off the soup and stirred, bringing a cloud of floury green to the surface.

“Hm.” Paddy looked at her insistently. “I need to see her.”

“Ahe, well, ahe, ahe,” she tittered angrily, “I really don’t think that this is the place for-”

“Paddy.”

Mary Ann was standing behind Sister Tansy, side on to Paddy, smiling over her shoulder at her sister. She wore the white dinner-lady coat, her blond hair pulled back in a hairnet, her cheeks touched fairy pink from the heat in the kitchen.

“Hiya.” Paddy stared across at her sister, calmed by the sight of her.

“OK?”

“Fine.” She managed a weak smile. “Just wanted to see ye.”

Sister Tansy stepped between them and did her phony laugh. “Ahe, ahe, we are quite busy, actually.”

Paddy tipped to the side to give Mary Ann one more look. She didn’t smile or giggle or give her any prompt, but Mary Ann knew exactly what Paddy would be thinking and her face convulsed into a taut mask of sadness, then panic and then nausea, until she covered it with two hands and scuttled away to have a laugh in the toilets.

“You mustn’t come here.” Sister Tansy gave the soup a vicious skirl. “You’ve been asked before.”

“Sister, the police came to my door tonight and told me that someone close to me had died. I thought it was Mary Ann at first and got a terrible fright. I just wanted to look at her.”

“That is neither here nor there,” she said, her customary response to any appeal for mercy. Sister Tansy would have said that on hearing about Hiroshima. “You cannot come in-”

“It was a boyfriend. My ex. He was naked.” Badness made her say it and it felt good. She gave in to the urge and went for triple points. “They think he was murdered by the IRA.”

Sister Tansy was stunned dumb. Paddy turned and walked away, knowing she was being rude and Mary Ann would pay the price.

Outside, she thought how lucky she was to be able to come and see her sister. Nuns, like priests, rarely got to work near their home parish. More usually they were moved away from their family of origin. The Church said it was so that they could concentrate on their vocation but Paddy saw it as a move to depersonalize them, break the bonds with their own people so that their only loyalty would be to the Church. The Brides of Christ had no family but the Church, which also happened to be their employer. Manager and boyfriend. An actress could have sued.

She got back in the car, and before she had time to reflect on what she was doing, she was driving down the empty gray motorway, heading towards where Terry’s body had been found.

She pulled out of the middle lane when she saw the slip road for Glasgow airport.

The lobby was empty, all the check-in desks shut and unmanned. A blue-uniformed security guard idled, smoking a cigarette. He nodded guiltily as Paddy came through the automatic doors.

“Havin’ a smoke,” he said.

Paddy excused him with a smile.

Behind the counter at the empty newsagent’s shop a sleepy middle-aged woman in a blue tabard watched, heavy eyed and accusing, as Paddy wandered between the chocolate bars and displays of crisps.

She didn’t want anything to eat, even though she felt hungry. She kept thinking about the ragged hole in Terry Hewitt’s head, of the black spider crawling across his face. A jagged breath caught in her throat and she stood staring into the searing white light of the drinks cooler, blinking back urgent tears, wondering what the hell was wrong with her. She’d identified bodies before, seen horrific injuries, facial injuries, and she had been frightened of Terry; she should be glad he wasn’t about to hassle her anymore. Aware that she was being watched, she picked up a cold can of Irn-Bru and took it to the counter.

The attendant looked expectantly as Paddy glanced behind her at the cigarettes, asked for a packet of Embassy Regal, dropped three quid on the counter, and walked away with her cigarettes and drink, the cold metal of the can burning the skin on her hand.

Back in the car park, Paddy locked the doors and sat, holding the cold can of juice tight, focusing on the chilblain pains in her fingertips. Then she started the car and pulled out, reaching a hundred by the time she hit the motorway.

IV

Scottish summer mornings arrive in the middle of the night. Just after three a.m. the big sky began to lighten, the sun lurking below the horizon like a mugger.

The motorway took a turn on the shoulder of a high hill and Paddy found herself looking out over the wide plain of the Clyde Estuary. The tide was out, baring gray, demiwaved sand with strips of mercury winking in the first rays. Small boats keeled sidelong in the soft mud. Two giant granite hills stuck out of the sand, massive and round as marbles, tiny buildings clinging to them.

The first town she hit was Port Glasgow. A concrete council estate was perched on the hill overlooking the water, panda-eyed windows peering out to sea. On the coast side of the road abandoned warehouses were being colonized by dark, quivering bushes bursting out between the bricks. It was a shipbuilding area and had been hit so badly by the eighties recession that instant coffee had become a form of currency: there was no money to be stolen in the area and the jars, which could be shoplifted with ease, had a set value.

Paddy was crying. She didn’t know why, she didn’t mean to, but her eyes ached and stung, her face burned, tears were dripping off her chin. It was getting so bad she couldn’t see properly.

She pulled into an empty car park, turned the headlights off, and sat, staring blindly at the steering wheel, crying still, puzzled and angry at herself. She wound the window down and held her head out, hoping the brisk sea wind would blow the sadness off her. The sun was creeping up behind her, yellow and mockingly cheerful.

A fat, mean-eyed gull swooped threateningly over the car roof and landed next to the car. It stared up at her from the side of its nasty head, snapping its beak hungrily. It was fucking enormous. Paddy dipped her head back in the car and wound the window up. Outside, the gull snapped again, disappointed, and turned its back, spread its broad wings, and flew away.

She looked at the passenger seat. Regal and Bru.

Paddy and Terry used to have Embassy Regal cigarettes and Irn-Bru for breakfast when they were young and together. They’d sit on his dirty orange bedsheet and sip their cans, passing one of the stubby fags back and forth and giggling about people in the office. Everyone seemed stupid to them then. The editors and senior journalists were leftovers from an ice age, Helen the librarian was a status-obsessed idiot. They gloried in the belief of their own infallibility and importance. Actually, Paddy didn’t believe anything of the kind but she borrowed Terry’s certainty. He was handsome in those days, solid, not fat, with dark eyes. He sat with his knees together and played with his ear when he was thinking.

She began to cry again. He was so young and she’d never noticed how lonely he must have been, living in his cheap bedsitter, sharing a bathroom with people he didn’t know. To her, trapped by her family, by their history and all their needs, he seemed gloriously free, not alone, not adrift. She thought about how alone he would need to be to have put her down as next of kin when she wouldn’t even answer the phone to him.

The car’s cigarette lighter glowed red, warming the tip of her nose when she touched the cigarette to it. A nicotine tingle rolled down to her toes and she exhaled at the windscreen, the smoke flattening into a patty against the glass.

She blinked and saw Terry’s head again, his hair, his dear black hair.

She should have spoken to him in Babbity’s when she saw him in the press for the bar. She shouldn’t have run away in case he made a scene. She should have gone over to him, apologized for leaving him in Fort William, folded her arms around his perfect head and kissed his face, his eyelids, his mouth and told him he was loved and she loved him. She loved him. Somebody loved him.

An inch of gray ash dropped into her lap and exploded. She brushed it away with a damp hand.

The gull was back, looking at the car as if thinking about taking it on.

“Fuck off,” she muttered, wiping her wet face dry.

It didn’t, so she hooted the horn twice, giving it a start but exciting its curiosity as well. It twitched its head at her.

There was something about this area that made her think of Shadow of Death, the book she had written about a miscarriage-of-justice case from the sixties. She’d followed the case all her life because the villain had her name. She became a journalist because the campaign to free him was headed by a hack, and eventually got to know the man she’d followed in the papers and in the press. Patrick Meehan was bitter about his murder conviction. He claimed that the security services framed him for the vicious murder of a pensioner to pay him back for scrabbling under the Iron Curtain to sell secrets about the British prisons where spies were being held. But there was no evidence of a grander conspiracy and she was too well trained to do more than hint at it in the book. Something about Greenock reminded her of him but she couldn’t think what it was. Somehow the sea air seemed to relate to him, the screaming gulls, cigarette smoke in a car with the windows wound up. She could see his red skin and the yellowed whites of his eyes, his defensive rounded shoulders. She’d never been down the coast with Meehan; all of their interviews were done in a pub and once in a restaurant but something about this area reminded her of him. She looked inland and then she saw it: a sign for Stranraer.

She sat up straight. Stranraer.

Meehan had no alibi for the night of Rachel Ross’s murder. He was casing a tax office in Stranraer, where the ferry terminal to Ireland was. Any IRA man in Scotland would be familiar with this road, with the small side roads, where the heavy traffic ran and where was quiet. This was exactly where they would dump a body if they wanted to.

The possibility startled her. There were so many exiles from the Troubles here, mostly Loyalists but a lot of IRA sympathizers among the Scots Irish. Arms were rumored to be shipped through Glasgow. If the IRA had killed Terry, if the conflict had moved here and Scotland wasn’t neutral anymore, it would be a bloodbath. And if any journalist of her generation was likely to have discovered the new development it would be Terry Hewitt. His work had that kind of scope.

A single bed back in the early eighties, dirty orange sheets and a blood spot on her knickers, Terry’s unpracticed hands moving over her body, her own tightness, taking deep breaths, waiting for it to be over.

When he left for South America she helped him take his bags to the London train, smiled and waved from the platform, crying all the way home on the bus. He left her behind to tend her mother and father, to work her way up slowly at the Daily News, the calls-car shift, the Women’s Page or “Dab Sheet,” to struggle with her book about Patrick Meehan. When she sat in her parents’ damp garage pretending to work on the Meehan book, she was secretly rereading his articles about Angola and Central America. She saw him crouched in jungles, sweating under slow fans in tropical hotels, meeting African dictators. When Shadow of Death was finally published, she got an address for Terry from his news agency and sent him an invite to the launch. He didn’t reply.

In her memory he became slim, tanned and tall, the epitome of a dignified search for truth-until he came back.

She wound the window down and threw the burnt-out fag stub onto the tarmac, not deliberately tormenting the gull bully, but glad when it pecked at the oily butt and spat it out.

“Fucker.” She lit another cigarette and watched the gull consider its next move. “Fat, greedy fucking fucker. Arsehole.”

The Bru was still cold.

Terry didn’t drink Bru anymore when he got home. Couldn’t get it abroad, he said. Lost the taste for it. He preferred Coke. He laughed when she bought him a Tunnock’s tea cake from the canteen.

“I remembered them as bigger,” he said pointedly.

That was unnecessary. Mean of him. She missed that clue. She should never, ever have gone back out with him.

She nodded at the gull. “I shouldn’t have gone to Fort William,” she told it. The fat scavenger blinked back at her.