by Denise Mina
What followed felt like a very long evening to Paddy. The priestly band split up, and one of them came back on to do poor stand-up comedy with rotten material. He told a slightly off-color joke about a baby born on the wrong side of the blankets, but the audience laughed because he was a priest so it must be all right, then. Whenever Ireland or Irishness was mentioned a spontaneous round of applause would erupt and roll around the auditorium, as if the homeland were a thousand desert miles distant instead of forty-five minutes away on a ferry. A skinny young priest who hadn’t been in the band came on and did a poor Elvis impersonation, leaving the stage to a gale of appreciation.
It was warm in the auditorium, the heat from the crowd below rising up to the balcony, and Paddy found herself getting sleepy and half thinking about Thillingly being dragged out of the water, the black river running out of him and down the cliff as he lay in the cold grass, graceless; married Burns and the other policeman making jokes about him minutes after his soul left his body; and the jagged bank ripping his face open.
Paddy nodded off in the dark warmth, enjoying the close press of women around her and Trisha, content for once, at her side. She woke up as the lights rose for the interval, with Trisha rustling in her handbag for bonbons, and Paddy knew that Thillingly hadn’t hurt Burnett or even been at her house the night she died. He had committed suicide because of what had happened in the car park, because of some humiliation, some small scuffle that related to Vhari. To an uncluttered mind it was an obvious conclusion, and if it was obvious to her it was probably obvious to everyone else. That’s why Sullivan was going behind his bosses. That’s why he was asking her to meet him in dark alleys outside the morgue. Someone was working hard to steer the Burnett murder inquiry away from the good-looking man in suspenders at Vhari’s door. This was the story that would get her off the night shift, the story she was going to write up for Ramage.
The lights went up in the hall, a flock of desperate women with weak bladders bolted for the loos. Most people stayed in their seats, saving their tired legs the worry of getting back up the stairs again. The consensus from the seats in front and behind them seemed to be that it was a very, very good show. Very good. Even better than last year.
Trisha chewed the last bonbon and looked despondently into the empty paper bag. “I don’t suppose ye brought another quarter of bonbons for the interval?”
Paddy acted indignant. “Is nothing enough for ye, woman?”
They giggled about it until the lights went back down and the second half of the show began with a priest in sunglasses singing a Roy Orbison medley.
On the way back to the train station afterward, as they walked down the dark streets, staying close to the others all heading home to Rutherglen, Paddy found herself feeling for the Burnett funeral photograph in her pocket, stroking it with her finger, yearning to break away from the cautious crowd. In the Eastfield Star Caroline would be sulkily watching television in the living room, the boys would be out, and Mary Ann would be praying upstairs or reading an improving book: she didn’t watch telly anymore. No one would have done the dishes after tea and Trisha would don her pinny and start cleaning as soon as they got in.
Paddy felt the pull of the town and wanted to go to work, wondering what her city was throwing up tonight.
TWENTY
SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY
I
Paddy had wasted thirty minutes looking for the address of the Easterhouse Law Center in the Glasgow A-Z. She shut the book, let it drop down the side of the armchair, and put both her hands on the table in front of her, like a psychic trying to conjure a spirit.
She should have been thinking about Patrick Meehan and the book, scribbling page after page of true crime doggerel, but nothing came to her.
Meehan was from a poor family of Irish immigrants and grew up in the Gorbals during the days of the Razor Kings, when squads of young men fought pitched battles in the high, narrow streets with straight razors sharpened to a tip. He was sent to reform school for breaking the branch of a tree in the park and learned his trade there. Petermen were safecrackers, skilled professionals, gentlemen who knew how to cook gelignite in a frying pan and stay calm enough during a break-in to listen for the lone, distant click of a safe lock. They were respected. He’d escaped from Nottingham jail during a stint for burglary and traveled to East Germany, crossing the border on a stolen bicycle to sell ground plans of British prisons to the Communists—prompted, he claimed, by an MI5 agent provocateur. The Communists questioned him for eighteen months and then handed him back to British intelligence to serve out his sentence. Resentful and broke, he sold his story to a national paper and claimed that he’d drawn up the plan to spring the spy George Blake. He said he’d told MI5 before it happened and they did nothing, which proved they were all counteragents. Six short months after the article was published, he was charged with the brutal murder of an elderly woman in Ayr. Everyone in Glasgow knew he was innocent: the real murderer tried to sell his story to the Sunday Express days after Meehan’s conviction. Meehan was a technician. A criminal but a craftsman, not a thug.
Paddy had been haunted by Patrick Meehan’s story since she was a young girl. The accident of having the same name made her listen every time he was mentioned on the radio news, try to read the newspapers from long before she should have, assume his mantle of guilt every time a fresh appeal was knocked back. A journalist wrote a book about the flaws in the case and the appeal was reopened. Finally, after seven years in prison, Meehan was given a royal pardon for a crime he didn’t commit and set free. For Paddy, Meehan became a symbol of attacks on Catholics, of the blindsiding hypocrisy of the British judiciary, of the triumphant value of journalism.
She knew the story inside out and it had everything: exotic locations, secret-service machinations, a shoot-out across Glasgow, a faithful wife, and a beleaguered hero who won in the end.
As she chewed the end of her pen, looked hard at the blank page in front of her, she felt the will to ever write anything about Patrick Meehan slipping away from her. The only reason she’d started was that she thought it would be easy.
She reached down to the other side and picked up her notepad and the cuttings she had kept about Vhari.
The green woodburner gave off a warm glow as she settled back in her chair, doodling in the margin of the pad, listening to the graphite scratch of her pencil. Vhari Burnett had retreated into the house after they had pulled her teeth out. She would have known by then that they were vicious enough to kill her and yet she had slipped out of view and had gone back inside. Paddy couldn’t imagine anything that would induce her to martyr herself. It couldn’t have been money, Vhari didn’t care about that. It didn’t seem to be a case she was working on, either. But whatever it was, she cared enough about it to give up her only chance of escape.
Paddy looked at the blank page again and tried to imagine Patrick Meehan doing anything, meeting Betty, being questioned, standing trial. All she could see was a pockmarked man sitting at a table, looking at her expectantly, waiting impatiently for her opening gambit. But she didn’t have one.
If she was ever going to write any of it she’d need to do something. McVie was the only man who could help her.
II
For reasons as deep as a volcanic plug, Scotland mourned Sundays. Churches and pubs and newsagents were the only things open. Even the telly was rubbish. By teatime most areas were shuttered and fly-blown. Cars in the streets moved slowly, as though afraid to stir up the leaden air.
The address McVie had given her was in the back lane of the old warehouse buildings that were being renovated and sold to yuppies. His building was down a narrow street, the high buildings on either side swallowing what light there was. On the corner of his building was a pub: a grubby, tired working-man’s bar, a remainder from a time when the area had a workforce and a purpose.
Paddy passed the pool of light outside the pub and made a mental note that she could run back here if anyone jumped out at her
from the shadows.
The doorway to McVie’s building was a grand double door set in an arched frame of pale green glazed bricks, its splendor lost in the narrow alley. A pristine panel of buzzers with names next to them hummed. Paddy pressed the button marked MCVIE and waited.
“Yes?”
It was a man’s voice, but he was English and sounded young.
“H-hello?” she stuttered. “I was looking for George McVie?”
He paused for a moment. “Who are you?”
“I’m Paddy Meehan, from his work.”
The voice asked someone something and came back to the intercom. “Come in. Two flights up.”
Intrigued, she pressed one of the big doors with her fingertips and it clicked open in her hand, letting her into a wood-paneled lobby with a modern staircase on the right. Above her, somewhere along the ribbon handrail, she heard a door open and the soft sound of a piano concerto playing on a radio station.
Climbing the stairs toward the sound she wondered if George might have a son from England, or a cousin perhaps. She didn’t know what his domestic situation was. Before the recent change in his behavior she’d assumed he lived somewhere middle-class with grown-up children who sided with their mother, that they all lived together in a house in the suburbs that looked nicer from the outside than it did on the inside, that they were unhappy and too cowardly or unimaginative to leave each other.
A barefoot man was standing on the landing above her. He smiled as she turned the corner. He shifted his weight, resting his hip against the railing as he dried his hands on a tea towel, standing to attention as she approached, holding his hand out to her. He had a flattop haircut, and he wore a white T-shirt worn soft with a hundred washings and a pair of stonewashed denims with a pleated front.
Paddy took his hand and shook it.
“I’m Ben,” he said, an excited throb in his voice.
Paddy was so distracted by Ben’s face she almost forgot to introduce herself: she could have sworn he was wearing mascara and lip gloss. Either that or he had just been swimming, climbed out of the pool, and ate a greasy chicken portion without licking his lips.
She took his hand. “Paddy.”
“Hello.” Ben shook her hand and held onto it, pulling her through a small door, into a low corridor, and out into a large room with a strip of kitchen against the back wall. Facing the kitchen, magnificent windows ran the full length of the room. Unfortunately, the view was of a brick wall twenty feet away, the monotony of it broken only by a few small, dirty office windows, dark now.
Below the big windows, as far from the door as was possible in the room, sat McVie. He was in a chintzy armchair, chosen for a different sort of house, stagily holding a book as if he were reading it. Every muscle on his face was taut, creating deep inverted commas above his eyebrows.
“Georgie.” Ben spoke his name as if he was giving him a warning.
McVie looked up and pretended to be surprised. “Oh, hello. Paddy.”
Something was going on, something homosexual, but Paddy wasn’t worldly enough to know what it was. Her mother said homos were men so debauched that they had tried everything else, the implication being that nothing was dirtier than a man with a man. She’d laughed at Trisha’s naïveté, but the fraught atmosphere was making her wonder. The only homosexual she had seen in the movies was the lonely guy in Fame who had a psychiatrist and a ginger Afro. Would there be nudity? Would she be expected to dance? Would she be expected to dance nude? She made a panicked face at McVie.
“What?” He stood up from his chair, rattled and frightened.
Paddy waved her open palms at him.
“What’s wrong with her?” said Ben tartly.
She wanted to leave but Ben was between her and the door. She looked around the flat for an alternative exit. Everything in it was brand new but the furniture was old-fashioned. The walls were new, the kitchen looked immaculate. She doubted the cooker had ever been used.
“Nice flat,” she said, as a filler.
Ben pulled his T-shirt up at the waist to scratch his stomach. “We just moved in.”
“Where were you before?”
“He lived in Mount Vernon. I was in a bedsit in Govanhill.” He looked accusingly at McVie. “It was shit. I was there for months.”
McVie looked at Ben, a staggered look that started on his bared stomach and rose, softening, until it reached Ben’s eyes. She suddenly understood that McVie loved him. There would be no naked dancing, no untoward touching. Ben was the reason McVie had bought flowers, the reason he looked younger and dressed himself nicely.
“Am I the first person you’ve had up from work?”
Ben answered for him. “Yes. Georgie’s met all my friends from college and I’ve not met any of his friends.”
“Because I haven’t got any friends,” explained McVie, dropping his book.
“So.” Paddy didn’t want to get in the middle of a fight. “Which college are you at?”
“Royal Academy of Music.”
“Brilliant. What do you play?”
Ben smiled arrogantly. “Most things,” he said.
McVie frowned and looked out of the window at the brick wall. Her invitation was a test. Paddy knew he had given her his address and asked her up because she didn’t matter. If the visit went badly it would be a containable disaster because no one at work listened to her anyway. To be a sexually active woman in the newsroom was hard, she realized, but to be a poof in love would be very hell.
“McVie, I’m on my way to work but I stopped by to ask a favor. I need to meet Patrick Meehan, can you set it up?”
McVie looked surprised. “I thought you didn’t want to meet him.”
“I’m trying to write a book about him.” Admitting a personal ambition was almost as dangerous as admitting to be gay. “But it’s not happening.”
“Take your coat off,” said Ben, tugging at her sleeve. “This isn’t a station.”
“No.” Paddy brushed his fingers from her as kindly as she could. “I need to go to work.”
“Your friend is rude,” said Ben, spinning on his heel and walking off to the bedroom.
Paddy smiled down at McVie. “Georgie?”
McVie grinned back and stood up, dropping his book and pushing her toward the front door.
It was cold on the landing and he was wearing his slippers without socks. He tried to talk to her but she pulled his sweater sleeve until they were two flights of freezing steps down, standing close together behind the drafty front door.
They stood close, she noticed, closer than they ever had before and McVie looked down at her, shivering but giddy with relief. “You don’t like Ben, do you?”
“No.”
They giggled together for a moment, neither quite sure why, and looked at the rows of brass mailboxes on the wall behind the door. Paddy didn’t like Ben but McVie did. He liked him so much he was dressing well and buying flowers and smiling without witnessing an accident. When they first met he was the most unhappy, bitter person she had ever sat next to. He was a homosexual but she was having mad sex with married men in cars and it was making her pretty happy.
“I’ve known you for four years and you’ve been nothing but miserable and hateful. But now . . .” She looked at him; a compliment would embarrass them both. “You’re . . . not.”
McVie nodded at the brass postboxes, eyes flicking across the handwritten scraps of paper shoved into the windows. “Aye. That’s a nice thing to say.”
“It is. I’m nice.” They giggled together again. “I’ll not say anything. It’s not my business.”
McVie closed one eye and looked at her again. “You really don’t like him?”
“What’s the difference whether I like him or not? I’m not shagging him.”
He blanched, shocked at her frankness. “What are you talking about? You’re supposed to be a good Catholic girl.”
She didn’t want to talk about her own sexual behavior. “I’m just saying. Not being
depressed has to be a good thing, doesn’t it? Those instincts are there for a reason.”
“I suppose . . .” He scratched the gummy residue of a sticker off the face of one of the postboxes. “It was either kill myself or give into it.”
They bridled at the sudden honesty, looking away from each other.
“Maybe you should have considered the first option more closely,” said Paddy quietly and made him smile. “Right, I’m off. Will you set up the Meehan meet for me?”
“Sure.”
She reached for the door.
“By the way, you were asking about Bobby Lafferty? He’s in Govan police station. Been there since this morning. They’re questioning him about the Bearsden Bird, apparently.” He looked at his watch. “You want to get yourself over there. They’ve only got another four hours with him.”
III
The street was quiet outside Bernie’s garage. Kate leaned into the backseat and lifted the blue-handled wire cutters over to the front, finding them incredibly heavy, so heavy that her wrists could hardly manage the weight of them. She sat with them in her lap, weighing down her skinny legs. She was so thin now that she could fit her fist sideways between her thighs. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door and stepped out into the street, cradling the bolt cutters on her arms as she walked along the railway arches.
Bernie had put a new padlock on the doors and she cut through the loop of metal on it, finding it harder to get through than the last one. She was getting weak. She hadn’t eaten anything for days, couldn’t remember what it was like to want food. The tinned, jellied ham she’d brought from the cottage stuck in her throat like a fist of dried leaves.
Unhooking the padlock, she slipped inside, feeling along the wall for the light switch, smiling to herself when she thought about the prize waiting there for her. She realized to her surprise that she was salivating, thinking about holding her pillow again, feeling the warm, skinlike texture under her fingers, smelling the clean, sweet plastic. The light flickered on, a sharp brutal whiteness that hurt, and she blinked several times to adjust her eyes. Each time she opened them again she thought she was mistaken but the image resolved itself in her eye and she managed to squint and keep her eyes open. The table had been pulled out, the red toolbox yanked away from the wall at one side. She hurried over to look behind it.