by Denise Mina
‘What in the name of fuck does“pig ignorant” mean?’
‘You,’ Paddy shouted back, sticking her finger in his face. ‘Don’t know how to behave around people.’
Billy muttered amen to that and turned the key, starting the engine. The radio crackled into life, drowning out all hope of a continued dialogue, even a bawled one. They sat for a few minutes listening to long pauses and requests for police cars to go back to the station. Livid at being ganged up on, McVie kicked the back of the seat and Billy pulled the car out into the street.
Paddy sat back and watched the dark city slip past the window, enjoying the rare sensation of being in a car. They passed by a rough pub in the Salt Market. Two drunk men were wrestling outside, one in a grey leather bomber jacket squeezing the throat of a man in a crombie, holding him tight in the crook of his elbow, his opponent frantically reaching back, grabbing air, feeling for his attacker’s face. Both men were too old for a dignified street fight, their bellies and stiff legs restricting their movements, turning it into a jerky, adamant dance. Behind them three other men leaned against the pub’s outside wall, watching the fight, detached, as if it was an audition. If Paddy had been standing at a bus stop the sight would have scared the life out of her, but she felt secure in the smart car and able to observe it, imagining herself as a journalist. She had dreamed of this since she was at school, ever since Paddy Meehan got his royal pardon because of the work of a campaigning journalist.
II
It was the first of their nightly rounds. Billy stopped the car in a broad street on the north side lined by industrial warehouses and McVie got out, slamming the door behind him. His hand was on the door to the police station before he realized that Paddy was at his back. ‘Bint, stay in the car.’
‘Farquarson told me to go with you, so that’s what I’m doing.’
McVie sighed, shutting his eyes and pausing dramatically, as if being pleasant to Paddy was the hardest call of his life. He reached up and pulled open one of the double doors, leaving it to close in her face.
Inside she found herself in a waiting room with dirty plastic chairs arranged around the walls, some slightly sootstained where a visitor had used a cigarette lighter on the underside and backs. Cheerful posters on the walls carried warnings about pickpockets and burglaries and gas leaks. Two tired young men were slumped disconsolately on the chairs, waiting and waiting and waiting.
Seated behind a high desk was a middle-aged policeman, his pink skin blistered with acne. He dabbed at his neck with a tissue, touching a weeping spot just below his ear, while he wrote in a large black book tilted towards him on the desk.
‘God,’ Paddy said to McVie when she caught up with him at the desk,‘you’re an awful curmudgeon.’
‘Who’s a curmudgeon?’ The duty officer looked up from his ledger.
‘Him,’ said Paddy, thumbing at McVie. ‘He’s a torn-faced misery.’
The officer smiled pleasantly and dabbed again, flinching slightly as the tissue touched open skin.
‘What’s going on?’ McVie nodded at the big black book on the high desk.
‘Nothing. A couple of suicides. One, a schoolgirl found in her school uniform in the Clyde. She’d failed her mock “O” Grades. The other …’ He looked down the ledger, guiding his eye with his finger. ‘A guy hanged himself at Townhead.’
Paddy expected McVie to go for the suicidal schoolgirl. It was the obvious choice: an emotive and tragic story with spin-off articles about the pressure of exams, a grieving family who would almost certainly give a quote about how it was someone else’s fault and a good excuse to print a picture of a girl in school uniform. McVie flipped open his pad. ‘Whereabouts in Townhead?’
The desk sergeant was surprised too and had to find the entry in the ledger with his finger again. ‘Kennedy Street, just an hour ago. Street suicide, hung himself off a lamppost.’
‘What’s the name?’
The officer looked at the ledger again. ‘Eddie McIntyre, but he doesn’t live there. He did it outside a girlfriend’s house.’ He ran his finger along the entry. ‘Her name’s Patsy Taylor.’
McVie wrote down the names and addresses. ‘Right, Donny, give me it straight. Are they here?’
The officer flinched, checking behind McVie, reassuring himself that the waiting men couldn’t hear. ‘I’m not answering on the record.’ He hardly moved his lips. ‘What we don’t want is a repeat of last night.’ McVie nodded. ‘They going to charge them?’ Donny shrugged and nodded at the same time, dabbing the clear yellow liquid pooling on his neck. ‘What’s the charge?’
Donny kept his lips tight. ‘Murder.’
McVie leaned into him. ‘What are the families like?’ ‘Hmm, aye, well, one– OK. Other one– Wild West,’ he said, as if the sin of breaching a professional confidence could be tempered by using broken language.
McVie stepped back from the desk and smiled warmly at the sergeant. ‘Donny, you’re a pal.’ He turned, heading for the car and forgetting to hate Paddy for the moment. ‘Let’s go.’
Paddy had her suspicions but waited until they were sitting in the back seat again. ‘Who is in there?’ McVie looked out of the window. ‘Never mind.’
She caught Billy’s eye in the mirror.
‘The Baby Brian Boys,’ Billy said, starting the engine. It made them sound like a sinister jazz band. She knew immediately that the name would stick for ever.
The street was dark, filled with deep, sharp shadows. As they pulled away Paddy looked up at the tiny cell windows, imagining a child up there in a cell alone with no-one to stand up for him. It would have been a terrifying prospect for an adult.
She tried to make it sound casual. ‘Are they looking for the men behind it?’
‘No.’ McVie seemed sure. ‘If they were looking for a grown-up they’d be charging them with conspiracy to commit murder, not murder.’
‘How’s that different?’
‘Conspiracy would mean they weren’t the brains behind it, not as culpable. In sentencing terms it’s a difference of about ten years.’
Paddy looked out of the window and thought of Paddy Meehan being mobbed outside Ayr High Court. Someone had run out of the crowd and kicked him so hard on the shin that they drew blood. She wondered if the person who did that had felt ashamed when they heard that he was innocent.
They passed the brightly lit bus station. Billy was driving along a broad back road to Townhead, around the back of the bus station, skirting the shut and empty town.
‘Why’re we going to this story anyway?’ Paddy asked.
‘The schoolgirl was a better story.’ Neither of them answered her.
Billy crossed at the lights and pulled into the scheme. Townhead was on a subtle hill between the city centre and the motorway. They were good houses, built with quality materials on a small scale after the city planners had learned the lessons of the slum clearances. Its housing stock ran from individual houses with tiny gardens and low blocks of flats to four giant high-rises. The surrounding area was carefully landscaped into steep little green hills with trees on them, giving a false perspective, like a grand estate on a mini-golf scale. Respectful residents looked after the area jealously: houses could go empty for weeks without having the windows smashed.
Billy stopped outside the entrance to Patsy Taylor’s block of flats. The stairs were open to the elements. Each flat had a front-room window that curled around the corner of the building, a veranda at the side and a port-hole window next to the front door.
‘D’you want to see what this shitty city’s about?’ asked McVie vindictively. ‘Then come with me.’
The walls of the close were a green and cream but the steps were cold grey concrete. The flat they were looking for was one flight up, the door flanked by tripod plant-pot holders holding withered somethings. A fake mother-of-pearl nameplate was fastened to the door frame.
McVie looked disappointed.
‘Well, at least it’s not Sawney Bean again,’ he muttered, referring to a famous Scottish cannibal who had lived in a cave, eaten travellers from England and interbred with all fifty of his daughters. Bean was fictional, a clumsy piece of anti-Scottish propaganda from the eighteenth century that back fired: the Scots loved Sawney from the moment he was launched on to the international bogeyman scene, taking him to their hearts and private kinky nightmares, extrapolating from his wild and lawless life to develop a national personality.
McVie took a deep breath and knocked on the door, an authoritative, firm three times. A stocky balding man with a ring of cropped white hair opened the door. He was sucking a freshly emptied pipe and wearing an itchy woollen dressing gown over his day clothes. ‘What can I do for you, my friend?’
‘Good evening, Mr Taylor. My name is George McVie and I’m the chief reporter for the Scottish Daily News. I understand there has been an incident here this evening. I wonder if I could have ten minutes of your time to ask you about it?’
Paddy was astonished at McVie’s skill and grace. Mr Taylor was charmed too, and flattered that the Daily News would send out its chief reporter for his story, a fact that McVie had anticipated when he told the lie.
Mr Taylor invited them into his formal front room and packed his pipe from a yellowing rubber pouch while his silent wife made tea and grandly offered around custard cream biscuits. The electric fire wasn’t on but the red light spun slowly under a dusty coal mountain range, regular as a siren.
Mr Taylor had taken the large armchair for himself and put McVie next to him on the settee. Paddy was relegated to the far end by the door, furthest away from the core of the conversation. Listening over the ticking of the clock, Paddy thought she heard someone down the hall sobbing low and regular, like a boiler ticking down to cool.
Under McVie’s surprisingly gentle prompting Mr Taylor told how his wife was washing the dishes at the back of eight when she heard a commotion in the street. They both looked out of the window and saw a body hanging from the street light opposite their house. Mrs Taylor called the police and ambulance services from the neighbour’s telephone but the man was dead. They found a letter pinned to his chest, addressed to Patsy, Mr Taylor’s daughter. When the police came to the door Patsy admitted that she had received another letter at work that morning. The hanging boy was Eddie, a lad from her work who was angry because she didn’t want to go out with him. Mr Taylor kept his eyes on his cup of tea as he explained the background, and Paddy felt strongly that he was lying.
‘Could I see the letter, please?’ she asked suddenly. ‘To check the spelling of Eddie’s name. I’ll get into terrible trouble with the lawyers if we spell it wrong.’
Both men had forgotten she was there. They sat up and looked at her in surprise.
‘That’s your bit of the job, is it?’ said Mr Taylor. Paddy nodded and pulled a notebook out of her bag. It was pristine, a navy-blue hardboard cover with a matching elastic band around the middle. She’d only stolen it from the stationery cupboard that afternoon.
Mr Taylor hesitated for a moment. ‘There’s a lot of language in it.’
‘That doesn’t bother me.’ Paddy smiled bravely. ‘I’ve heard it all in this job. I just ignore it.’
He reached under his cushion to pull out a pale yellow envelope, handing it to Paddy. ‘You’re surely not a journalist?’
She glanced at McVie. If he was the chief news reporter she could be a journalist. ‘Aye,’ she said,‘I am.’
McVie drew his attention away, asking him to repeat the story again because it was vital that they get the times right.
Paddy slid the folded sheet out of the envelope and opened it. She moved her pencil across her pad as if she was copying out the name while she read the letter quickly. The sheet of paper was from a small girl’s writing set, a little sister’s maybe. It had a faint picture of a black horse on the face of it, galloping through a misty field. It was obvious that Eddie and Patsy had been more than passing acquaintances. He referred to previous outings, and to her father, calling him a bigot. But Eddie was an angry man. He told Patsy she was a bitch and he’d kill himself if she didn’t meet him tonight. Paddy folded the letter carefully and slipped it between the pages of her notebook, putting the empty envelope on the table in full view.
McVie noticed and stood up, gesturing to Paddy to get up too. ‘Thank you for your time. It’s very much appreciated.’ Mr Taylor glanced at the envelope and saw that it was empty. He knew he had made a stupid mistake. He lurched forward in front of McVie, grabbing the notebook with one hand and Paddy’s wrist with the other, trying to yank them apart.
‘Mr Taylor, let go of her at once,’ said McVie, as indignant as the Pope in a go-go bar. ‘She’s just a girl.’
‘Ye devils!’ Mr Taylor pulled it away from her and found the letter inside. ‘Dirty, lying devils. Out!’
He chased them into the hall, pushing them out of the front door and slamming it behind them. McVie looked at Paddy, panting and exhilarated.
‘It was the father who split them up then?’ She nodded.
‘Thought so.’ He nearly smiled but caught himself. ‘You didn’t fuck that up too much at all, bint.’
‘Thank you,’ said Paddy, accepting the compliment in the spirit in which it was intended. ‘You ignorant shit.’
As they left the mouth of the close and headed down the path, Billy reversed slowly back, letting the car roll to the end of the path. Paddy didn’t want to get back into the car with Billy and all the animosity and unpleasantness.
‘It’s a pretty poor thing to do.’ She slowed her step to a stroll. ‘Kill yourself to upset someone.’
‘Aye, well.’ McVie slowed down alongside her. ‘That won’t make the page. We won’t publish an article saying “moody wee bastard kills himself”.It’s the details that tell the real story. The truth is a slippery bastard, that’s what you learn in this game. That, and never trust the management.’ He looked up at the street light where Eddie had hanged himself, carefully considering whether he had any more important information to pass on to the next generation. ‘And that people are arseholes.’
McVie’s mood had mellowed, even to the extent of talking to Billy. ‘Well,’ he said as he got back into the car, ‘there actually was a story in it.’ Billy shrugged. ‘D’you want to go anyway?’ ‘Aye, why not.’
‘Go where?’ asked Paddy. Neither of them answered her.
Billy didn’t get faster than five miles an hour, crawling along slowly for a couple of streets. At the heart of the scheme they cruised past a dark swing park with mini-chutes and barred baby swings glistening with frost. Billy took a sharp corner a little too fast and drove along for a hundred yards before parking.
It took Paddy a minute to work out where they were. Following McVie’s gaze she looked up the gentle incline of the road and recognized the green ribbon fencing before anything else.
There was no-one outside the Wilcoxes’ house but the lights were on in the living room. The only thing that picked it out from the other houses on the modest terrace were the yellow ribbons tied randomly to the railings, the dirty bows soggy from exposure to the elements. One of them was a big perky bow from a bouquet of flowers and remained obscenely cheerful, hanging at an angle near the gate.
‘Gina Wilcox’s house,’ said Paddy.
Billy smiled in the mirror. ‘We’re here looking for a story to save his career.’ He glanced at McVie. ‘He wants to get off night shift but he’s annoyed too many people. Careers’ll be made over those boys. Could be bigger than the Ripper.’
‘Aye, you’d know,’ said McVie. ‘’Cause you’re a fucking taxi driver. Right, bint, you want to be a reporter. What do you see in there?’
Paddy looked at him half amused, expecting him to laugh at the paper-thin ruse, but McVie didn’t laugh back. He genuinely expect
ed her to tell him everything she could glean from the scene without questioning his right to use it. Flustered, she looked back at the house.
‘Um … I dunno.’ Maybe there was some unspoken rule about giving up information and no-one had told her about it. Paddy could see into the empty living room. The curtains in the window were unlined, the ornaments small and cheap. ‘Nothing much.’
The settee and armchair were brown and old, antimacassars pinned over balding arms and backs. It was an elderly person’s suite, perhaps donated to a poor new house by a kind relative or bought second hand. At the centre of the wall above the gas-fire mantel was a wooden clock in the shape of Africa with two red dots on the lower coastline. Someone in the Wilcox family had emigrated to South Africa. A lot of working-class families went, drawn by tales of ex-bus drivers with swimming pools, of plumbers with private airplanes.
‘I can’t see anything at all. Are the two boys from this scheme?’
‘No, Barnhill,’ said McVie.
Paddy knew the area. She had been to a funeral there once. ‘That’s a couple of miles north. So they came here, got the baby, went to Steps, left him there and went all the way home alone? What ages are they?’ ‘Ten? Eleven?’
Paddy shook her head. ‘Why were they here in the first place if they live in Barnhill? Do they know someone here?’ McVie shook his head. ‘No. The police think they came to use the swing park after seeing it from the road, maybe from a bus into town; came to have a go, saw Baby Brian and … well, you know. Pop.’
They had passed the swing park and Paddy noticed that it was for babies and under fives. The chutes had a gradient as gentle as the horizon. There was even a sandpit and rubber matting around the ridey horses for tiny tots to take tumbles on. Paddy looked around. Across the road, over a grass verge and broad dual carriageway, was the high back wall of the bus station. The swing park wasn’t even visible from the road: it was tucked in tight into the centre of the estate. She was sure the boys had been brought here by someone who knew the area. An adult had brought them here.