Slip of the Knife

by Denise Mina

  She knocked once and opened the door. When the children saw it was her they stood up.

  “Thank you, children,” said Miss McGlaughlin. “Good afternoon.”

  They chorused, “Good afternoon, Miss McGlaughlin,” at her and she spoke quietly to Miss MacDonald, telling her Paddy’s lie, that Pete’s granny was gravely ill and he was to leave with his mum right now. Miss MacDonald looked skeptical and whispered back, “Is that your mum or Mr. Burns’s mum?”

  Paddy could have slapped her. “My mum.”

  “I see.” Miss MacDonald turned to Miss McGlaughlin, who looked a little startled that she was quizzing a mother about a potential death in the family. “It’s just that Miss Meehan was telling me Pete’s dad might come to the school and try to take him out.” She looked back at Paddy, stopping short of calling her a liar. “Because if he does come now, what should I tell him?”

  Miss McGlaughlin watched her for an answer.

  Paddy motioned to Pete to come to her. He stood up and walked over, self-conscious, looking around the adults as if he’d done something wrong. “Pete’s daddy will bring him to school tomorrow, if it’s appropriate. Where’s your coat, son?”

  “Am I going to see my dad?”

  “Where’s your coat kept?”

  He could tell that she was defying the teachers and his eye took on a gleeful glint. “Cloakroom.”

  “’Mon.” She took his hand, remembered her manners and turned back to the teacher. “Thank you, Miss MacDonald.”

  She was in the corridor before the teachers could stop her, Pete giggly by her side.

  He shouted down the corridor to the open classroom door. “Bye ya!”

  II

  It was typical of his flamboyant style: the giant black Merc dwarfed the small, new-build house he lived in with Sandra, the second, but almost certainly not the last, Mrs. George H. Burns.

  The new estate was set on what had been a school sports ground. Making clever use of the small space, wavy roads led off around corners into shallow cul-de-sacs, calming traffic at the same time as giving the impression of not being absolutely tiny. None of the yellow-brick houses were exactly alike, but the differences were minimal and cosmetic, a garage to the left instead of the right, a small window on the stairwell, a window on a roof, just enough to give the impression of individuality without the architect having to go to the trouble of thinking of anything original. The cookie-cutter blandness made Paddy crave a ghetto.

  Pete was delighted to have been whipped out of school. He liked going well enough, but it was his nature to enjoy unexpected turns of events: surprise days out, holidays changed at the last minute, onerous trips canceled leaving empty hours to be filled with something else. He clutched his backpack and looked out of the taxi window as if he’d never been here before.

  “I’m staying here? For how long?”

  “I don’t know, son, but that’s only if it’s OK with your daddy and even then it’ll be a couple of days at most.”

  “My Ghost Train video’s here. Dad lets me watch it all the time. Will I still be going to Granny Trisha’s on Saturday though? Will I still get to play with BC on Saturday?”

  The taxi pulled up outside the house. “That’s a long way off.”

  “But, on Saturday, will I see BC?” He was excited, a little smile playing on his lips and his eyes wide and shining. “Will I, but?”

  “Aye, ye will.”

  His mouth sprang open in a grin and she threw her arms around him, kissing him all over his face until he got bored and pushed her away.

  They paid the driver and got out of the taxi, walking the length of the short lawn, following the yellow slabs making up the path to the front door. Coming from an old West End flat to here made everything seem slightly too small: the doors narrow, the ceilings low, even the windows like miniature impressions of the real thing.

  They rang the doorbell, and looked at the white plastic door. Pete traced his finger on the wood effect, finding the groove repeated note for note on the next panel.

  “Is it from the same tree?”

  “I think it’s plastic with a wood pattern on it.”

  He squinted at it. “Plastic should look like plastic.”

  “I think so too.”

  Following a scuffle of feet in the hallway, Burns opened the door to them, dropped his shoulders, and then remembered himself. He gave Pete a big showbiz smile.

  “Hiya, wee man,” he said as Pete clutched his leg, then lifted him up to give him a hug. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  Pete hung on to his dad’s neck, squeezing tight before letting go and sliding to the ground. “Mum came and brung me out.”

  “Brought you out,” corrected Paddy.

  He ran off down the hall to what looked like the kitchen.

  “Well.” Burns looked her up and down. “Now why would she do that?”

  She looked like shit, she knew she did. Her black skirt was crumpled, her black silk shirt was missing a button at the bottom and she had big stupid orange trainers on. Burns had lost weight in the past few years; he was TV-thin now, so thin his head looked disproportionately big. Dub said he looked like a tethered balloon. Today Sandra had chosen a white T-shirt and white jeans for him, ironed so well they might have come straight from the packet. He had a tan too; they owned a sunbed. Paddy could imagine the house in the dwindling light of an evening, dark but for a tiny bedroom window glowing fluorescent blue.

  In the kitchen Pete slid a video into a machine and she heard the opening strains of the Ghost Train theme.

  Unexpectedly, Paddy covered her mouth with her hand, pressing the fingers hard into her cheeks, digging into the skin with her fingernails as tears welled up in her eyes. She turned away to the street to hide her face.

  Burns watched her for a moment, hand idling on his hip. He leaned forward, took her wrist firmly, and pulled her into the house, out of sight of the neighbors.

  The front room had two white leather settees and a glass coffee table in it. In the small picture window Sandra had arranged yellow tulips in an ugly crystal vase. Burns put Paddy on one settee and sat himself down in the neighbor, calmly watching her cry, reaching forward once to pet her knee.

  She took the cigarettes out of her handbag and looked for permission. He nodded and she lit up, trembling, her lungs resistant to the deep breath.

  “What’s happening?” asked Burns.

  “Terry Hewitt was killed, you probably heard.”

  “I did, aye.”

  “I was named as next of kin. They made me ID the body on Saturday night.”

  Burns thought back to Sunday. “You never said.”

  She nodded out to Pete in the kitchen. “Well, anyway, I may be a bit freaked by that, and I know I’m overprotective, but Callum Ogilvy’s out of prison and he’s gone missing. I just don’t want Pete in the house or alone in school. It doesn’t feel safe.”

  “What happened to Terry?”

  “He was shot in the head.” She lifted her cigarette to her mouth but couldn’t face it and dropped her hand. “D’you remember Kevin Hatcher?”

  “No.”

  “A photographer. He was working with Terry on a book.” She shook her head, bewildered now she thought about it. “A bullshit book, a coffee-table thing. Nice pictures, nothing. Anyway, I was looking through his letter box—”

  “How like you.”

  She shut her burning eyes. “Please, George.”

  “I’m teasing. Just trying to get a rise out of you.” He touched her knee again, telling her to go on.

  “Kevin was lying on the ground. He’d had a stroke, swallowed a lot of cocaine, which he wouldn’t. Now he’s dead, there’s no trace of him arriving at any casualty department in the city, the police are warning me off and a bit of the book was missing.”

  He stopped her. “You’re not making any sense.”

  She tried to sort it out in her mind but gave up. “I used to be fearless about these things. ’Member Kate Burnett?
’Member Callum Ogilvy? Back then I was scared but not like this, not shaken and shitting it and crying all the fucking time.” She took a puff of the cigarette and looked at the floor. A white carpet. What sort of idiot would choose a white carpet in a house with a child? She looked around for an ashtray but there was nothing in the room but the empty coffee table. “Since Pete was born, it really matters if I die, you know?”

  “Is that why you’re smoking again?”

  She managed a shaky smile.

  He looked at her stubby cigarette. “Can you think of anything less regal than Regal?”

  They took three puffs to smoke, were favored by women who went to bingo and rebelling teenagers because they were cheap. Feeling in her handbag, she found an old paper hankie. Burns watched her make a bowl shape out of the crumpled tissue, spit into it, and touch it with the tip of her cigarette, letting it hiss itself to death.

  “Seeing you spit into a dirty paper hankie makes me want you in the worst way.”

  “Fuck you, Burns.”

  He smiled. “There’s my brave girl. I’d get you an ashtray but then I’d be implicated. I’ll get battered when Sandy smells it.”

  “I doubt you get battered for anything much, George.”

  He shook his head slowly. “You don’t know what goes on, Pad. See this room, this white, empty room? You could do operations in here.” He did a stage sigh she’d heard many times before. “She has got . . . problems.”

  She nodded, trying not to smile. George Burns had been confiding that his relationship was in trouble since she first met him, seven women ago. It was a sore lesson, she’d fallen for it often, but over the years she had finally realized that what George wanted wasn’t a big helpful chat to sort out his feelings; it often wasn’t even mindless sex with her, really. What George Burns craved was to win over disapproving women. Temporary was an essential precondition of what he wanted. No single woman in the universe was enough for him. Although they laughed about him and he was a philandering arsehole, his craven need to be well thought of was still kind of adorable. She just hoped it wasn’t genetic.

  She crumpled the tissue into a ball and put it in her handbag, already smelling the rank stink and thinking of McBree’s awful breath.

  “Can I leave Pete with you, George? Until they pick Callum up, I don’t want Pete staying where he could find him.”

  “Well, I don’t know what Sandy’ll say but . . . I suppose I could take him to work with me.”

  “Could you?”

  “I’ll get one of the production girls to look after him.”

  Sandra didn’t work and Paddy knew she had a cleaning lady who came in three days a week. She allowed herself the luxury of a snide aside, since she’d had a shock. “What does Sandra do all day?”

  He looked out of the picture window. “Shops for clothes. Takes them back. Shops for more clothes.”

  She already had a guilty aftertaste in her mouth. “Good,” she said, bringing the conversation to a close.

  He slid towards her on the sofa and softened his voice, inclining his head towards hers. “D’you ever think about us?”

  It should have made her feel special, but she knew him too well to mistake it for lingering affection. He would do some variation on the move to whichever woman he was left alone with. She looked up wearily.

  “George, give me a fucking break. I don’t want to have a fight.”

  He slid back in his seat, offended. “Are you and Dub together?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Burns was as suspicious as a faithless man could be. He could never accept that most people made friends and kept them, met lovers and stayed with them. His world was in a perpetual state of tectonic shift and he wouldn’t believe that it wasn’t so for everyone else.

  “So much for the Three Musketeers,” he said caustically.

  She didn’t have the energy to be angry. “No one ever called us the Three Musketeers but you, and you’re the one who let both of us down. You left me to move in with that bint Lorraine, and you got another manager when Dub told you to turn down the TV show. He was right, wasn’t he?”

  He chewed his tongue for a moment and shrugged. “Suppose. Who’s he handling now?”

  “Loads of people,” she lied. “Word got out that he advised you against it and the phone’s never stopped ringing.”

  “This new guy—he wants me to cash in on the TV show, tour the workingmen’s clubs.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “I’m not going to.” He looked sheepish. “But the money’s good.”

  The clubs were a graveyard. He’d never get back on the circuit again and that was where the radio and television executives went looking for talent to pin shows on.

  “Don’t do it,” Paddy told him. “It’s a dead end.”

  “Would Dub talk to me, do you think?”

  “You want him to manage you again?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I don’t know. He’s pretty hurt by what you did. If you’d left him and found a new manager that would have been one thing, but you did it behind his back.”

  George dipped his chin and looked up at her, puppy-dog penitent, asking her to fix it. Paddy knew that Dub was signing on and the dole paid next to nothing. He represented a number of comics but none of them had half of George’s talent. Onstage Burns was the man every woman wanted to be with and every man wanted to drink with, but offstage his persona was a bit more problematic. He was unpopular and not just because the TV show was crap: he kept sleeping with people’s wives just because he could and had a habit of launching into his act in the middle of a conversation, reducing the listeners to passive audience members, obliging them to laugh.

  “You should talk to Dub, see what he says.”

  “I never see him.”

  “Phone him.”

  “He’s never in.”

  It was a power play: Dub was in all the time but Burns wanted Dub to come to him.

  “Are you troubled at all by the fact that your son and I came here in mortal danger and now we’re discussing your career?”

  He laughed at himself, the kindest side to him, and she sat forward. “I’ll say good-bye to Pete.”

  But Burns could see she was still shaken. “Sit for a minute, Pad.” He put his hand on her knee, leaving it there, and she was glad of the warmth.

  Paddy could well imagine how much Pete would see of his father, building up to the recording of the show tomorrow night, just as she could imagine the fury of some woman working her way up in TV who was expected to give up her proper job and be an impromptu nanny for George H. fucking Burns’s spoiled kid. She didn’t give a shit.

  He squeezed her hand kindly. “I’m proud of the wee man. You’re doing a great job.”

  In a moment of weakness she pecked a kiss at his fingers, the white leather sofa squeaking unattractively under her arse.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  BETTER BUY A GUN

  I

  The taxi dropped her in the street, at the opposite end of the car park from the News building so she could get back to her car without being seen.

  The car park was a dirty stretch of ground, not even flattened for the cars. It was concreted over near the building but here, on the far fringes, the ground was potholed and dusty. A city tenement had been pulled down here, a long time ago, whether because of a German bomb or general decay she didn’t know. The pavement was the only part still standing, a ring fence around the empty space. Cars were clustered up near the front of the building, more now than there used to be. A cab rank had been set up at one end, near the road into town, because the paper’s budget had been cut back dramatically and the first thing to go was the pool of cars with staff drivers idling by the front door.

  She walked carefully along the pavement, moving at a normal pace, hoping not to be seen. Upstairs the early shift would still be on, the final few pages being set and finished. All it would take was for Bunty or the Monkey to glance out of the window an
d spot her and she’d be dragged upstairs again, made to write an article about a fictitious visit to Callum. They’d be desperate for any copy about him now. His shoe size would command a front-page lead.

  Level with her car, she left the pavement and crossed the dusty ground towards it. She had parked in the same spot this morning as she had been in the other night, when she left Mary Ann smoking fluently in the car. Mary Ann smoking, upset about a boyfriend. It jarred, not just because she was a nun, but because she was a child to them all. Not just a child of the Church but of all the Meehans, and it wasn’t to her benefit but to theirs. She was a token of their childhood, a nostalgic reminder of how they were.

  Both the Press Bar doors were open to the summer night and a warble of chat and the chink of glasses sounded warm and friendly. Paddy would have loved to be in there, trouble free, gossiping and having a laugh among her own.

  She smiled at the thought as she drew level with the car and stopped, her toes kicking up brown dust from the dry ground. The boot had been broken into, the entire lock drilled out, leaving a gaping black hole thick as a man’s thumb in the carcass of the car.

  Reaching forward, she put her finger into the hole and lifted the boot. It opened lightly, the spring mechanism taking the weight after her initial pull. A plastic bag with dry cleaning she had yet to hand in was there, one of Pete’s footballs and a pair of his trainers were there, and a squashed box for apples that she had used to take some frozen shopping to her mother’s was there too, but Terry’s portfolio was gone. His photographs were gone; his notebook full of shorthand that he had tucked protectively into the spine was gone too.

  A breeze picked up, swirling grainy dust around her bare ankles. She stared into the messy boot. It was the photographs they wanted, and she knew completely, whatever Knox or Aoife said, that it was McBree. She rummaged in her handbag. The photocopies were in there. They weren’t very good, she didn’t have a proper picture of the woman anymore, but she did have a photo of McBree standing at the door of the car facing a fat man in a dark suit. This story could be huge.