Slip of the Knife

I

Had it not been sunny, the lane would have looked like a film set for a Jack the Ripper movie: cobbled street, a high brick warehouse with tiny barred windows on one side, a huge black wooden shed and, plonked between industrial giants, a pretty Georgian merchant’s house with a hand-painted wooden sign outside: BABBITY BOWSTER.

A Babbity Bowster, Paddy had been informed, was always the last dance played at a ceilidh. It was a partners’ dance, designed specifically for courting couples to stake a claim in each other at the end of an evening. The name of the pub couldn’t have been more apt, given the manner in which the press used it.

Babbity’s was the favored hangout for most of the names and senior management in the Scottish press. It was close to the News offices and the Press Bar, a homeland for newspapermen all over the city, but Babbity’s was expensive, which stopped the grunts from coming in. The usual characters who hung around in journalists’ bars were filtered out by the prices too: petty thieves and city gossips were left behind in the old place. Here the familiars were all high-ranking city officials, politicians and businessmen, beguiled by the shabby glamour of the press. Upstairs in the restaurant deals were done, high-paying columns doled out, talent poached and arguments resolved over the scattered remains of the cheese board.

Designed by Robert Adam, the merchant’s house had three perfectly proportioned stories topped with a jaunty pediment and a doorway framed by flattened Doric columns. It had languished in the city center for two hundred years, served as a storehouse, a fishmonger’s, and finally lain empty for twenty years until an enterprising French hotelier renovated it. Inside, the decor was understated Scottish bothy, no tartan or glassy-eyed stag heads but whitewashed plaster, slate floors and black-framed photos of crofters and forgotten fishermen. The bar had a vast malt whiskey selection and took pride in its Scottish beer. The restaurant menu offered herring in oatmeal, old-fashioned cuts of ham and beef, and the sort of seafood that Scotland usually exported straight to France or Spain. A Scottish hotelier would have done it up as a French restaurant.

The early drinkers were in, stoically working their way through the late Sunday afternoon, alone or in twos, keeping company for the necessity of hiding their lonely look. The smell of warm ham and leeks hung softly in the smoky air.

Paddy felt their eyes on her as she clattered across the slate floor, her high heels announcing her arrival as effectively as gunfire. Merki waved to her from a corner, his black hair looking almost impossibly greasy today. She waved back and heard a voice from the bar:

“’S that bitch doing here?”

She turned back, found the voice coming from a long strip of bitterness hunched over a pint of stout. “Evening, Keck.”

Keck sat up and sipped his drink at her, not deigning to answer. Time had not been kind to him: his face looked like a coin purse that had been kicking around an octogenarian’s handbag since the end of the war. They stared at each other until he turned away. Keck was a sports writer, a good sports writer, and would have done better if he hadn’t been handicapped by his personality. Whenever anyone got the chance they made him redundant. He had a long, clear stretch of bar for four feet on either side.

Paddy looked at the back of his neck, hesitating, thinking she should have gone over and commiserated with him about Terry: they had all been young together and should have been friends. But Keck would know Terry was dead already; it had been in every paper and on the TV news.

It was then that she saw another pair of eyes, not looking directly at her but watching in the mirror behind the bar, angry, fearful eyes, narrowed and peering at her between the optics. Detective Chief Superintendent Alec Knox knew her and she knew him: a sallow-skinned man who took bribes from gangsters, initiated and pulled investigations to suit his own purposes. She’d been watching him for years, knew he was dangerous, but could never get a shred of evidence on him. The police officers below him were too cowed, he’d avoided crossing other journalists, and no editor would back her investigations. Knox never did anything headline worthy: no ostentatious displays of wealth or attending boxing matches with cigar-smoking hit men. In desperation she even tried disseminating rumors about him through Press Bar gossip, but for some reason it didn’t take.

She stepped around the corner to look him in the eye. Knox was sitting with a leader writer from the Scotsman, an ex-academic evangelist for devolution. Knox’s eyes widened as she looked back at him. He was glad she had seen him, knew he was connected to important people.

She nodded at him. “Knox.”

“Meehan,” he said but Paddy had turned away, climbing the stairs, hearing the leader writer quizzing Knox about where he knew Paddy Meehan from.

The restaurant was even emptier than the bar but smokier. A non-press couple were in for a nice meal, their eyes locked on each other. Nearby, in front of the curtained wall leading to the offices upstairs, was a table of four Rottweilers in suits. Known as the SS, they were reporters for the Scottish Standard. By the back wall, three pals from the Daily Mail were smoking, drooping over their dinners after a day-long binge. It was quiet but there were enough people to see her there and put the word out. As soon as Keck heard she was meeting George McVie, the story was as good as delivered back to the Daily News.

A lithe young waitress saw her standing at the empty reception desk and walked over, stepping on her tiptoes like a dancer. The Standard reporters laughed loudly behind her and she flinched. New girl, Paddy guessed, first shift. She was in for a night of it. She led Paddy to a table for two over by a window and brought her a glass of water.

The Standard table was warming up, looking around at the other tables for someone to fight with. They were a new gang; the Standard’s London management had noticed that the Scots had a ravenous appetite for newspapers and revamped the Scottish edition of the paper, putting in more local stories and adding “Scottish” to the title. They recruited the two biggest arseholes in the Scottish trade to run it: Jinksie and Macintosh had worked at the News and Express respectively. Neither had shone and no one quite understood why they’d been given the top jobs. The Standard managers had seen something in both men that everyone else had missed: they were petty to the verge of obsession. No personal foible was too unimportant to be printed, no story too distasteful, no individual too tragic to be exploited. Sales soared.

Paddy had been sitting at the table just long enough to read the menu twice and think up a couple of good retorts to Keck’s snub when George McVie made a dramatic entrance, bouncing the outside door off the wall.

He paused, drawing all eyes to him, scowling back at the faces in the room. Nature, time and his temperament had conspired to perfect McVie’s glower. His face and posture fitted around misery as neatly as cellophane over a cup. The drunken Mail journalists gave him a whoop and a couple of handclaps, really just to wind up the Standard table. McVie willfully misinterpreted the greeting as congratulations for a great issue: that morning’s Mail on Sunday had exposed a High Court judge for being gay and cruising for rent boys in Edinburgh. They had been investigating the story for months, a rare occurrence now, and McVie could rightfully take a bit of credit for lending the resources to it. The applause died while his hand was raised in modest triumph, leaving him to right himself to the hisses and boos of the Standard table. One of the Standard reporters cupped his mouth and shouted, “Poof.”

McVie stood by the door looking as if he’d walked in with no trousers on. Paddy stood up and called him over. The wit shouted “Poof” at her as well and got a round of applause from the table even though the comment was neither apposite nor particularly insulting.

“You lot are wanted back at the office,” she said quietly and, she thought, with great dignity. “Someone somewhere’s just taken their underpants off.”

The Mail boys erupted into forced laughter and bread throwing at the Standard table. The romantic couple broke off looking at each other, glancing around, realizing suddenly that they were not on a pleasure cruise but on a pirate ship. The waitress stood at the side of the room, nervously chewing the cuff of her shirtsleeve.

McVie sloped across the room to Paddy. He kissed her hand in a way that made the meet look staged, which it was.

“That’ll do,” she muttered. “Sit down, for fucksake.”

He dropped his shoulders and his perfectly tailored suit jacket slid down his arms and into his hands. He draped it carefully over the back of the chair, flashing the electric blue silk lining as he whispered, “Can I go home now?”

“Probably. Thanks for this.”

He settled in the seat in front of her. Meeting the editor of a rival paper would suggest to anyone who heard about it that Paddy was about to be poached to do a column for them. Having dinner with him would suggest he was offering more money than the Daily News. The News editor, Bunty, had only been in the job for a year but his sales were steadily falling. He wasn’t giving anyone a raise but might if he thought his beloved Misty was about to move.

“You’re paying though, right?” he said.

McVie was as rich as God now, could have paid the bill for everyone in the place and not even noticed the dent in his bank account, but he had to pretend he was getting something out of the meeting. Otherwise he’d just be doing Paddy a favor and that was tantamount to an admission of friendship. “Where’s that wee bastard of yours tonight, then?”

“Off with his dad.”

“Talentless prick. That show of his is an affront to humanity.”

The waitress skipped over to them but her smile died when she saw McVie’s face. “Get me a big gin ’n’ tonic. Just tickle it with the tonic.” He jabbed her in the stomach with the menu. “Haggis and neeps and hurry up.”

He glared at Paddy, prompting her to order. She chose the ham hock in sherry sauce and the waitress withdrew, glad to get away.

Paddy tutted at him. “You’re laying it on a bit thick, aren’t ye?”

“Am I?” He took out his cigarettes and lit one, flicking the packet across the table at her as an offering. It always took McVie a while to calm down after he left his work. He wasn’t a natural leader, was a loner by inclination, but maintained control of his staff with displays of temper a two-year-old would have thought vulgar. He tried to give her a friendly smile. “Better?”

“No. Ye look as if a rival just had an anal prolapse.”

He sucked a hiss between his front teeth, as close to a genuine laugh as he did these days. McVie had a better side: away from work he was a very slightly different man. He gave Pete age-inappropriate presents, but presents nonetheless. He loaned Paddy his cottage on Skye for a holiday after Pete got out of hospital because he was still on oxygen and they couldn’t go far. It was full of dodgy wiring and gay pornography.

“Come on,” said Paddy, “I’ve had a bit of a grim weekend. I could do without this.”

“Terry?”

She nodded. “Terry.”

“Sad,” he said and meant it.

Paddy frowned at her plate. “Yeah. Sad.”

In a little cheering display of bonhomie, McVie shook his napkin jauntily at his side, pulled it across his lap, took the end of his cream silk tie, tucked it loosely into his shirt pocket, and touched the cutlery on his place setting with his fingertips, a concert pianist greeting the keys. He sighed and looked up at her.

“God, I’m hungry.”

“You sent a child to my door last night,” she said.

“That young man said you’re a bitch.”

“Did he?”

“Yes.”

“He grilled me pretty hard.”

McVie hissed at his place mat. “What can I say? When the boy gets the scent there’s no stopping him.”

The Mail journalists shouted at the waitress for more wine. One of them was humming, drumming his fingers on the table edge, trying to remember a song from his youth. They were on the jagged verge of singing.

“Tell me about Terry,” said McVie.

“God. It was awful. I had to go and look at the body, say it was him for sure. He was shot in the fucking head. His face was all over the place.”

The waitress brought his gin and tonic over and he took it from her hand, acknowledging her only by waving his free hand to dismiss her. She hesitated in surprise and Paddy smiled a weak apology. She backed off.

McVie sipped his drink. “He was working for me, freelance.”

“Who? Terry?”

“Yeah, on nothing stories, local bullshit. Waiting for a war commission from London. We’ll organize the memorial service. Will you speak?”

“God, no.” She couldn’t speak about him. Everyone there would know she’d chucked him. “The police said it was the Provos.”

McVie sipped. “My source in the police said it wasn’t.”

“Bit of a coincidence though, his body being found out on the Stranraer road.”

“Why’s that significant?”

“The ferry for Belfast leaves from Stranraer. Anyone who travels to Ireland regularly would be familiar with it, know the cutoffs, where’s busy, where’s quiet. It suggests it was an Irishman who killed him.”

“Well, I heard it was a mugging or something.”

“A robbery?”

“Aye.”

“Was he missing anything?”

“They never found his clothes and his wallet.”

She looked at him. “Bit elaborate for a mugging, isn’t it? The guy could afford a gun and a car; he’s hardly going to kill someone for their trousers.”

She knew that McVie was just playing her for clues: the other newspapers would want the Daily News to be wrong about the Provos because they had blown the other papers off the stands.

“Your contact wouldn’t happen to be Knox, would it?” she asked McVie.

“Christ, don’t start that shit again.”

“He is bent.”

“I don’t give a fuck. No one gives a fuck except you and him.” He stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette messily, chasing the scarlet tip around the ashtray. “Terry was involved in a lot of things. When he started out he didn’t mind the danger, but I think he got to like it.”

“I suppose. Who wants to be a war reporter?”

“Yeah, exactly. Ambitious young men who don’t know any better and old men with a death wish.”

The Mail journalist had remembered his song and was giving it his all. His head was tipped back, eyes shut tight as he murdered Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” It probably sounded better in his head.

“Right, Meehan, come on: Callum Ogilvy. When’s he getting out?”

“No one knows, do they?”

He was looking at her, a smile somewhere in his eyes. “You do,” he said quietly.

“No, I don’t.”

The waitress brought them some bread and individually wrapped butter portions, fresh from the freezer.

“But you do.”

“George, I don’t know when he’s getting out, I promise.”

“Swear on the life of your child.”

She grinned at him. He knew she was lying, everyone knew she was lying about Callum Ogilvy, but McVie could read her better than most.

“How are ye, George?”

He hissed at the feeble detour, and took out another cigarette. She tried again. “How’s that nice young man of yours?”

He sucked his teeth, lit the cigarette, and blew thick smoke across the table. It hit her place mat, lifting off it like a morning mist rising from a lake.

“Meehan, we’ve got guys camped outside the prison. We can wait forever. You tell Callum Ogilvy this: we’ll pay top whack for an exclusive. With pictures. Someone’s getting it and he might as well make a few quid off it. Set him up in his new life.”

“Johnny Mac from the Times offered him fifty K and he doesn’t want it.”

“Unless you’re keeping it for yourself, exclusive on the cheap, family connections and all that.” He gave her a sly look. Callum and Sean Ogilvy weren’t members of her family. People forgot that she had been engaged to Sean and that he wasn’t her cousin. She herself forgot sometimes.

“George, what does your man think about you outing gay men in your paper?”

McVie’s face tightened. “The judge was picking up teenage junkie prostitutes and fucking them in his car.”

“Still,” she sipped her mineral water, “it was a bit of a gay bash.”

He excused himself with a wave of his cigarette. “Sells papers. That’s the business we’re in.”

The Standard guys were sniggering at the waitress, who was trying to lift the plates from their table. “Aren’t you frightened those bastards’ll out you?”

“No,” said McVie, but he looked worried.

McVie had left his wife seven years ago and had gradually come out to the industry. Under the unspoken rules of engagement his sexuality had never been mentioned in the press, even when he took over the Scottish Mail on Sunday and became a name, but the Standard’s spite knew no bounds.

“If they decide to out you it’ll be ugly.”

McVie wriggled as if he had a cockroach between his shoulder blades. “Shut up about that.” He took a slice of bread from the basket and then a butter portion, cracking it back and forth in the paper to thaw it. “What did Hatcher say about Terry?”

As luck would have it, the butter was frozen solid and McVie didn’t notice the moment’s pause before she spoke. “Kevin Hatcher?” she said as if she was correcting him.

“Mmm.”

“Nothing much.”

“He must have said something. He left Terry outside the casino.”

Paddy took a slice of bread too, pulled the soft guts out of it and chewed. “Just, you know…” She took a guess. “They lost money.”

McVie unwrapped the butter portion and put it on his bread, trying to spread it with his knife. The frozen butter gathered the soft bread to it, pulling the slice into lumps.

“So,” said Paddy casually, “Kevin was the last person to see Terry? Where is he now, the Express?”

McVie looked angrily at the mauled slice of bread. “Freelance. Got his own agency.” He picked the bread up, used both hands to form it roughly into a ball, and threw it towards the startled waitress, who was taking a pudding order from the romantic couple. The ball of bread hit the curtains and dropped to the floor. He didn’t need to raise his voice: everyone was looking at him already. “I want butter that isn’t frozen fucking solid.”

The couple looked appalled. The Standard boys cheered, because they always cheered bullies, and the Mail clapped halfheartedly because he was their boss.

“You’re an arsehole.”

He sat back and sucked his cigarette. “When’s Ogilvy getting out?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

The waitress brought the plates of haggis and ham over, apologizing for the butter and explaining that the chef had forgotten to take it out earlier but as soon as it was softened she’d bring it right over. McVie grunted an answer. She backed off as soon as she dared, hurrying away to hide in the kitchen.

“Meehan, this is my one night off,” he said when she’d left. “I’m doing you a favor.”

Paddy made him look at her. “George, you know you’ve barely looked me in the eye since you got here. Ye were never very nice to start with, but for Christsake, are ye in there?”

Resting his elbow on the table, McVie poked his fork at her, his scowl lifting. “I’m in here, aye.”

“Good. Remember, you don’t have to be an arsehole to be an editor. It helps, but you don’t need to be. Remember Farquarson? He was decent.”

“Yeah, and where’s he now?”

As far as she knew, their old editor was enjoying a leisurely retirement in Devon, but that wasn’t what George meant. “Every editor gets the bump sometime. It wasn’t because he retained a sliver of humanity.”

“Come on. Give me something. I’ll look like a tit if I come away with nothing.”

She pretended to think about it. “Ogilvy is getting out, you’re right about that.”

“When?”

“In a while.”

McVie tried to read her face. “Two weeks, that’s what everyone thinks.”

“They’re wrong.”

“Three weeks?”

Paddy wobbled her head from side to side and sliced into the soft pink ham.

“Three weeks?”

She tipped her head encouragingly.

“Three weeks then.”

She looked up at him. “I didn’t say that.”

“No, that’s right.” McVie nodded and smiled at his plate. “You didn’t. Thanks.”

II

The night shift were absent from the newsroom, most of them out on assignments or hiding in different secret places around the building. Larry was in his office listening to the radio. She kept her coat on and lifted the phone book from the secretaries’ desk, flicking through the residential numbers for H.

“What are you doing?”

She started and looked up to find Merki standing at the side of the desk, peering at the listings. “Christ, what are you sidling about after?”

Merki stared hungrily at the phone book. “Looking for something?”

Paddy pursed her lips at him.

Merki licked the side of his mouth, trying to think of another move. “The Provos say it wasn’t them.”

“They told you that, did they?”

“Naw.” He craned his neck, trying to read the page upside down. “They didn’t claim responsibility. They have a code word they use to admit responsibility and they haven’t done it yet.”

“Well, maybe they’re all away on training this weekend.”

His eyes were fixed on the phone book listings. “‘H’?”

“How soon do they make the phone call?”

“Usually before the body’s even found. It’s been twenty-four hours now and nothing.”

She stared at him, blank and still, until he sloped off towards the coffee cupboard, glancing backwards at the phone book, wondering.

Paddy found Kevin Hatcher’s name. His address was listed as Battlefield on the South Side.

She looked up to the coffee room and saw Merki’s shoulder. He was waiting in there, ready to come out and check the phone book after her. She could phone Sinn Fein and ask if they’d heard anything about Terry but they’d have to deny all knowledge of IRA activities: the only reason they were legally allowed to exist was that they claimed to be separate from the IRA. She looked up the contacts book on the secretaries’ table and called the Irish Republican News.

The call was eventually answered by a bored copy taker.

“Sorry, not copy, I want to talk to a reporter.”

“Is it a story?”

“Yeah,” she said. Well, it kind of was. She’d be lucky to get a journalist who could be bothered to help her.

A news reporter caught the call and asked her what the fuck she wanted in a thick brogue. She lowered her voice and tried to sound terribly senior.

“Paddy Meehan here, from the Scottish Daily News. Big story over here: suspected execution of a journalist by a soldier of the IRA. Any word on it?”

He covered the phone with his hand. She couldn’t hear any talking at the other end. He might have put the receiver down and walked away, for all she knew. Suddenly he came back on and surprised her. “We’ve heard nothing.”

“Would you have?”

“Aye, yeah, usually. No press release, nothing. Here, hang on.” He covered the phone again but she could hear talking in the background this time. “Right? ’K. No, right ye are.” He came back on. “Getting it in now. Not them.”

“They’re denying it?”

“Official,” he said. “Any jobs over there?”

“Some. What’s your name?”

“Poraig Seaniag.”

She wrote it on an invisible bit of paper with an invisible pen, just to get the right effect to her voice. “Poraig, you’re a doll.”

“If you need anything done on the story I could do with a byline.”

She’d never heard of anything so pushy: an informant asking for a name check as the author of an article. “It’s not necessarily an article, to be honest. We were close. I just want to know what happened to him.”

“Oh. Was he family?”

“Kind of.” She let the conversation trail away, adding in a sniff for flavor.

“OK, sorry. Well, keep an eye out for my name.”

“Will do.”

She tutted indignantly at the receiver after she’d hung up.

Merki was still hiding behind the door to the coffee room; she could see his feet shuffling. He’d come running over the moment she left, look for notes jotted on a pad, try to find the page she’d been checking out in the phone book. Spitefully, she opened the phone book at the P’s, running her hand down the spine to flatten it before she shut it and put it back on the shelf.