by Denise Mina
She tripped along the corridor, head down, so distracted that she almost walked straight past the entrance to 7H. It was easy to miss. Only a small sign sticking out of the wall highlighted the fact that the door was there. She turned, caught her breath, knowing Billy would be a harrowing sight, and opened the door.
She found herself in a short lobby, painted a calming pale lilac that made her feel faintly panicky. A kind, matronly woman smiled up at her from behind a desk, asking if she could help. Paddy gave Billy’s name and watched the nurse’s face for a reaction, revulsion or something, she didn’t quite know. The woman smiled and looked at a chart on her table,
“Are you family, pet?”
“No, I’m . . . I was with him.” Paddy thumbed out to where she imagined the car park was.
The nurse looked at her, reading her face. “What we don’t want is visitors who are going to get very upset,” she said in a careful voice. “I don’t want anyone to upset the patients. Do you feel able to do that? To stay calm?”
Paddy nodded, though she wasn’t sure it was true. “Are his family with him?”
The nurse nodded. “I’m sure they’ll be glad you came.” She stood up and opened the door for Paddy, pointing her down a shabbily constructed corridor of white emulsioned cubicle walls. Paddy had been in other wards in the hospital, she knew that only the burns ward had these walls and doors. Presumably they needed them to keep visitors from staring at the boiled and blistered men in the beds.
She crept along to the door the nurse had indicated, hearing the beep of the machines and the rustle of crisp sheets against moist skin. A strong medicinal stench came from the walls, mint over disinfectant.
She knocked gently on the door, half-hoping no one would answer. A smoker’s voice called to come in. Paddy turned the handle and pushed the door open.
A high, metal-framed single bed sat in the middle of a room. A tiny sink was against the back wall alongside a locker with a plastic jug of orange squash and a glass.
Billy was sitting bolt upright in the bed, flanked on one side by a standing woman and on the other by a young man in a plastic chair reading a tabloid newspaper. Billy looked astonished and mortified at the same time: his eyelashes and eyebrows had been seared off and his skin scorched into a permanent flustered blush. He was dressed in a blue paper nightie, his hands wrapped up into massive white bandage mittens like oversized Q-tips. He seemed small and then she realized: his hair was gone.
In all the time she knew him, Billy had sported the same shoulder-length wavy perm. She knew it was a perm because she watched it carefully from the backseat, night after night, the small hint of a straight root here or there and then the sudden two-week flush of distinct flatness just before he went to the hairdressers’ and had it redone. The hairdo was five years out of date when she first saw it four years ago, but she had developed a grudging respect for Billy’s persistence. It was a brave man who’d risk baldness out of loyalty to the age of disco. Sean and her brothers were terrified of losing their hair.
But Billy was going to have to find a new look: the perm had melted. Over his left ear—away, she imagined, from the source of the fire—a bush of hair remained as it was before, but the rest of his head was bald, furnished in small tufts or pink fleshy patches.
Relieved and surprised, Paddy barked an unkind, shrill laugh and pointed at him. The wife and son stared at her blankly.
“Bloody hell, Billy.” She sidled into the room. “I thought you were really hurt.”
Half-amused, Billy held his giant bandaged hands up to her. “This is pretty bad.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry, I thought it would be much worse.”
The wife was staring at her aggressively. She was stout, tanklike, her hands clasped together over an onerous chest and belly. The son was built like his mother, although young and footballer-fit; he looked as if he’d run to fat given a chance. He glanced at his mother, taking her cue about the stranger giggling at his burned father.
“I might never have the use of my hands again,” said Billy. “I might never be able to drive again. And it’s bloody sore.”
It was wrong of her but she was so relieved to see him looking like himself that she laughed again.
The wife widened her eyes, retracted her lips, and stepped up to meet her. “Who in the eff are you—” Her voice was the gravel growl of a heavy smoker and even as she stepped across the room to her Paddy smelled a whiff of smoke.
Billy called her off with a small, firm, “Agnes.”
His son huffed behind his hand. Billy asked them to go down to the canteen for a cup of tea and leave him alone with Paddy for ten minutes.
They gathered their things together, the wife giving Paddy a filthy look and banging shoulders with her on the way out. “She’s had a scare,” he explained when the door clicked shut behind her. “She reacts like that when she’s frightened.”
“You been married a long time, Billy?”
“Since we were seventeen.”
He was a long way from that now. Paddy took the seat next to him, still warm from his son, and realized that Billy was pretty old. In his late forties at least. They only ever met in the dark and she was generally staring at the back of his head, but she had imagined him younger.
They looked at each other and smiled. Paddy patted the bed in a symbolic contact. “Is this you from the front, then, Billy?”
Billy pointed his big white mittens at his face. “Is it bad?”
“You just look embarrassed.”
“They won’t let you see yourself. That’s scary.”
She looked around for a mirror but there wasn’t one, so she felt in her bag and pulled out a powder compact, opening it and handing it to him. Billy peered in at himself, turning the mirror to different angles. “Red, eh?”
Paddy nodded and grinned. “Is it sore?”
“Oh, my hands are murder.”
But she couldn’t stop smiling. “I thought you’d be in a big tent and have all cream on everywhere and no eyelids or something.”
“That’s next door.”
They nodded together for a while. She could almost hear the comforting crackle of a ghost police radio. “When we were at the Burnett house, did you see anyone come in or go out?”
He thought about it. “No.”
“Could you have seen anything I didn’t see?”
“Like what?”
“Like someone coming around the side of the house or a car outside or the police do something?”
He took himself back to the scene again. “No. I smoked a cigarette, saw you at the door, nothing happened.”
“Did you mention it to anyone?”
“Not a soul.”
“Right, well, I’m not as circumspect as you: I’ve been mouthing off all over town. I think they were after me and got you instead. Sorry about that.”
“I don’t look like you.”
“They don’t know what I look like. And from the back, your hair . . .” She didn’t want to press the point but swept her hand down the back of her head. “’Cause your hair’s long.”
“So they thought I was a woman?”
“Could be. Did you see anything before the fire? Anyone approaching the car?”
Billy thought about it. He looked down at his silly hands lying in his lap and she saw that his eyelids were completely unscathed. He looked straight ahead of himself, glancing up at the space where the rearview mirror would have been. “I’m smoking and waiting for you. You’ve not been long. I’m listening to the radio, listening for calls. Nothing’s coming. I was angry, thinking about you and the copper’s car.” He looked at her reproachfully and then at his hands. He raised his right elbow to where the windowsill would have been and pointed the Q-tip at his mouth, taking in a deep breath as he looked back at the mirror. “Smoking. I see a shadow behind me. Moving fast across the mirror. He was wearing black, whoever he was, next thing—whoosh. Flames everywhere.”
She asked him if
the shadow he saw could have been of a big guy, a bald guy, but Billy said he’d only seen the guy’s torso from the neck down and no, he didn’t seem all that big, quite slim, actually. Had Billy seen a car behind him? But Billy laughed, opening his mouth and letting out a coughing sound so that he didn’t have to move his cheeks.
“He’s hardly going to park his car behind me and run up and throw a petrol bomb at me, is he? Anyway, there was only one car in the car park apart from us. Came in after you’d gone into the building and parked as if it had business there.”
“Was it a red Ford, by any chance?”
“No, did ye not see it? It was a BMW.”
TWENTY-FOUR
EASTERHOUSE
I
Paddy’s exhaustion was making her feel queasy and the top deck of the bus smelled like a smoker’s tonsils. She had a packet of crisps in her bag but was so nauseated she genuinely didn’t want them. She sat still, pains in her stomach, and watched the city pass by the window.
Lafferty would be out there somewhere, looking for her. He’d know by now that she hadn’t been in the car and he’d be angry, prowling the city like a hungry dog. Miserable and scared for her family, she leaned her head against the window. She’d told her mum to stay in the house, asked her to stop Mary Ann from going out too much, and told her to stay away from the windows. Paddy didn’t tell her about the firebomb or about Billy; she didn’t want to terrify her, she just said someone was after her and might come to the house and she should call the police if she saw a BMW or a red Ford. If Trisha had been herself she would have cried down the phone to Paddy and begged her to come home, but she was in her strange temper and sounded angry instead, huffy, as if Paddy was being self-important and making a lot of silly fuss.
The housing stock along the broad Edinburgh Road was a linear map of a century of social housing, from scrubby squares of muddy grass around garden city dreams, to high-rise machines for living. Occasionally they passed a wall of undemolished tenements, the old housing design that had worked in the city for centuries.
Easterhouse was barely twenty years old. In its short life the housing scheme had developed a reputation as one of the roughest ghettos in Europe. It was part of a social engineering project that carved the socialist city up into impassable islands surrounded by motorway. The most malcontent city center populations had been moved to the satellite estates, a long bus ride away from spontaneous social upheaval. Without the presence of a common enemy, frustration fermented among the people and they began to eat themselves. Gangs were rife. If Easterhouse had a heraldic shield it would need symbols for drunkenness, medication, and despair. A third of the estate was on disability benefit, occupying that gray area between extreme long-term poverty and illness.
It wasn’t a place to wander around. Gangs were territorial and known for attacking anyone who wandered through their patch. It was worse at night; Paddy knew from taking shortcuts in the calls car that the boys hung around in packs, watching the car pass, carrying sticks and swords, alert as hyenas. She was counting on its not being as bad during the day.
As soon as she stepped off the bus she felt unsafe. The stop was at the edge of a barren field, all the houses set well back from the traffic. The few houses that were within view were boarded up with fiberglass, the light coming through from the back of the house making it glow like the skin of a drum. Bottles lay smashed in the street or scattered on the grass. Paddy felt a long way from the small-town coziness of Rutherglen.
A woman pushing a pram scuttled along the mud track toward her, her anorak hood pulled up against imaginary rain, her head down. On the distant horizon, just before the houses, unsupervised children chased each other around a playground where the baby swings had been maliciously wound around the top bar and the merry-go-round was burned out, the wooden base nothing but a sooty stump. Paddy walked along to the corner and followed the sign for the shopping center.
She came to a row of meager shops. Three of them were shut and shuttered against the populace. A licensed grocer and the law center were still open. The bookies’ was operating with its windows boarded over with wood and a sign declaring cheerfully WE’RE STILL OPEN! inviting the vandals to have another go.
The Easterhouse Law Center was in an unprepossessing shop unit with nothing more than a poster in the window to explain what it was. The glass on the door was covered in notices: yellow posters for an ex-offenders’ support group, a change of venue for a tenants’ rights meeting, notices about expenses available for prison visits.
When Paddy opened the door, notices fell off and fluttered to the floor as a shop bell tinkled happily. She bent down and picked up the papers, turning back to the door and trying to find the space they had come from.
“Leave it,” said a harsh voice. “Give them to me.”
A woman held her hand out. Her hair was cut in a wedge with dyed blond streaks, yellow on black, like a wasp. She was young, about the same age as Paddy, but her mouth was pinched bitterly and her eyes wrinkled where they were habitually narrowed. She looked Paddy over, head tilted to one side, as if she couldn’t quite believe what life was forcing her to look at now.
Paddy put the notices in her hand, expecting a cursory thank-you from the woman. When it didn’t come, Paddy got confused and thanked her instead. She frowned as if Paddy had just shat in her pocket. Paddy apologized reflexively, prompting another look of disgust.
The woman retreated to a desk, dropping the leaflets in the bin as though she couldn’t bear to hold them anymore. She sat down at a paper-strewn desk with a typewriter on it. A purple can of Tab was sitting on a stack of used carbon paper next to a full ashtray.
Paddy glanced around the office to see if there was anyone else she could speak to. There was another desk, bare of effects, but the rude woman was alone. Pulling a cigarette out of a packet of Marlboros and lighting it with a disposable lighter, the nippy woman sat back and looked Paddy over, guessing she wasn’t in for legal representation. She blew an impertinent stream of smoke at her.
“Selling something?”
“No.” Paddy stepped toward her. “I wanted to ask about Mark Thillingly?”
The nippy woman narrowed her eyes. “Yeah, well, Mark’s dead. They say he killed himself.” She shut her eyes for a moment and took a draw on her cigarette.
Paddy guessed that being brutal might pass for integrity. “I know. I was there when they pulled him out of the water.”
The woman flinched but looked at her with renewed interest. “Who are you?”
“I’m Paddy Meehan, Scottish Daily News.” Paddy held her hand out but the nippy woman declined to take it. Paddy dragged a chair over from the other desk and sat down. “So, Mark Thillingly,” she said as she pulled her notebook out. “He worked here, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. He worked here.” The woman hesitated again. “He worked here . . .”
“Did he ever mention a woman called Vhari Burnett?”
“Aye, she worked here too. Mark gave her summer work when she was at uni.”
“And were you here then too?”
“Aye. It was when Vhari and Mark were going out together. Went together until Diana came along and poached him.” She sucked her cigarette hard, breathing in deep, making Paddy’s throat close at the memory of her smoking binge with Diana in the conservatory two nights ago.
“I like Vhari better. She’d meet scum through this center and then help them do stuff like fill out forms for the social security, stuff she wasn’t getting paid for and didn’t need to do. Do anything, she would.”
“Was Mark involved like that?”
“Only when she was here. They made each other nice.” The woman blushed at the silly, pink word. “Know what I mean?”
“I know exactly what you mean,” said Paddy.
They were in danger of being pleasant to one another. The woman sucked her cigarette again and narrowed her eyes at Paddy, angry that she had unilaterally overstepped the bounds of brisk rudeness.
Paddy examined her notebook to stop herself smiling. “Do you know of any particular cases Mark and Vhari worked on together?”
“They didn’t work on the same cases. They did their own cases.”
“Is there anyone you can think of who came in looking for representation who’d link them?”
She shrugged. “Anyone who was about the office then, I suppose. Everyone knew them as a couple.”
“Who was about the office then?”
“I dunno.” She wasn’t even considering the question. “People.”
“No special cases coming through the center then? Gangster cases?”
“No. We don’t do criminal cases in here. We just help with social security claims and expenses claims for prison visitation. Small stuff, civil cases.”
“Look.” Paddy leaned forward and put her hands on the desk. “What’s your name?”
The woman pursed her lips. “Evelyn McGarrochy.”
“Evelyn, I take it you don’t read the papers?”
“Load of lies.”
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this: the police think Mark killed Vhari.”
Evelyn McGarrochy melted: her shoulders dropped, her face slackened, and her mouth fell open.
Suddenly Paddy understood the rounded backs of the policemen as they took the path up to Mark Thillingly’s house in the middle of Wednesday night. It was a terrible thing to see.
Finally Evelyn spoke. “Why?”
“Because he killed himself the next night.”
Evelyn looked down to her hand and saw that her cigarette had burned down to an oily stub. She dropped it into the ashtray and slowly pulled another from the packet, lethargically dropping it into her mouth like a diabetic in danger reaching for a boiled sweet. Paddy lit a match for her and held it to the end. Evelyn’s forehead twitched as she smoked, and Paddy could see her disbelieving the news.