by Denise Mina
‘No,’ she said. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘Ye said “sir”.You’re not the police?’
‘No. I’m Heather Allen, Daily News. I’m here about Thomas Dempsie?’
‘Oh, aye, the wee fella that was murdered years ago?’
‘Yeah. Do you know which house was his?’
‘There.’ He pointed to the house with the tyres in the garden. ‘The family moved away after. The mother lives in the high flats down at Drygate. It was his dad that killed him, ye know.’
Paddy nodded. ‘So they say.’
‘Then he hanged himself in Barlinnie.’
‘Aye, I heard that too.’
Together they looked at the house. Beyond the tyres and the muddy grass, limp white nets formed an arch in the window.
The man nodded. ‘Ye don’t know what goes on indoors, sure ye don’t. At least he was sorry enough to kill himself.’
‘Aye. Didn’t they think he was taken from the garden?’
‘At the start they did. He just went missing, but of course then it turns out that the daddy had him all along.’
‘I see.’
The man shifted his weight uncertainly. ‘Is that it? Can I go?’
‘Oh.’ Paddy realized suddenly that the man, ages with her father, had been waiting to be dismissed. ‘Thank you, that’s all I wanted to know.’
He nodded, backing off before turning and carrying on his way. She watched him go, amazed at the power gleaned from introducing herself as a journalist.
Kennedy Street should have had an open vista over the new motorway to Edinburgh but the view was blocked by a makeshift barrier. Bits of plyboard had been pulled off and Paddy crossed over to look through it. The ground was muddy and uneven. A stubborn ground-floor tenement wall stood alone with melancholy cherry wallpaper around the impression of a fireplace.
She had never met anyone like Tracy Dempsie before. Everyone she knew who had suffered terrible tragedy in their lives offered it up to Jesus. She thought of Mrs Lafferty, a woman in their parish whose only child had been run over and killed, whose husband had died agonizingly of lung cancer and who had herself developed Parkinson’s so that she had to have communion brought to her seat during mass. But Mrs Lafferty was all high kicks and yahoo. She flirted with the young priests and sold raffle tickets. The possibility that suffering could defeat people disturbed Paddy. The only other person she had ever heard of like Tracy was old Paddy Meehan. The unfortunate were supposed to rise above adversity. They shouldn’t become fat, bitter men in cheap coats boring people in dirty East End pubs.
It took her a moment to register the sound. Coming around the corner towards her was a hurried, scuffed run. For no real reason she thought of the boys in the lift and felt a stab of fright in her stomach, thinking she’d be pushed through the hole in the wall. Without looking to the source, she scurried across the road towards the nearest working street light and calmed herself. There was nothing to be afraid of. Tracy had creeped her out, that was all.
She slowed her pace to a walk and turned to see the person behind. He smiled at her with disarming warmth. He was tall, taller than Sean, with thick brown hair and a creamy complexion. He stood six feet away, hands in his pockets.
‘Sorry, did I frighten you? I was running because I saw ye and I thought you were my pal.’ Paddy smiled back. ‘No.’
‘It’s a girl I’m trying to meet. By accident.’ He nodded and looked sheepishly back up the street. ‘You live here?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m working.’
‘What d’ye work at?’
‘Journalist. For the Daily News.’
‘Ye a journalist?’
‘Aye.’
Impressed, he looked her up and down, his eyes lingering on her monkey boots and gelled hair. ‘Don’t they pay ye?’ ‘Listen, these are Gloria Vanderbilt monkey boots.’ He smiled at that and looked at her with renewed interest. He held his hand out. ‘Kevin McConnell.’ He leaned forward to take her hand.
It could be a Catholic name, she wasn’t sure. ‘Heather Allen.’
His hand enveloped hers, the skin powder-soft. As he stepped forwards the light caught a gold stud in his ear. Paddy had only ever seen male pop stars with earrings and Glasgow was not a city that calmly accepted blurred gender boundaries: she’d once heard of a guy being beaten up for using an umbrella. Looking at him with renewed admiration, she noticed that his eyes were small and neat, and his lips were glistening.
‘You need to be careful coming up here, visiting people in a scheme ye don’t know.’
‘I was only here for a minute.’ She started strolling slowly down the road, hoping he’d follow.
‘A minute’s long enough,’ he said, falling into step. ‘There’s gangs up here, ye have to be careful.’
‘Are you in a gang?’
‘Nut. Are you writing about the gangs? Is that what you’re doing up here?’
He veered towards her slightly, narrowing the space between them as if he could feel the frisson between them too. ‘I’ll see ye out safely, hen.’
She kept him talking, asking if he was working (he wasn’t), where he went dancing (he didn’t), and what sort of music he liked. The Floyd, Joe Jackson and the Exploited sometimes, but only sometimes. Ye have to be in the right mood, eh? Paddy knew what he meant: she never happened to be in the right mood for the Exploited.
By the time they reached Cathedral Street she was reluctant to leave his company. He was a big, handsome man, like Sean, but not annoyed at her or talking about his family or angry about her job. He walked her down to the bus station, waving her off across the dual carriageway, giving her a coy look and saying that maybe he’d see her again.
As Paddy walked down through the town to the train station it occurred to her that maybe the world was full of men she might choose; that maybe Sean was just one of the nice men instead of the one nice man.
Reluctant to go home to her family, she took her time wandering down through the town. The closer she got to the station the smaller she felt. She wasn’t Heather Allen. She wasn’t a journalist at all. She was just a fat lassie who was afraid to go home.
IV
Trisha was alone in the house when Paddy got in and the atmosphere was worse. She dished up a bowl of broth and a plate of mince with peas and spuds and left Paddy alone to eat it, going off to sit in the living room to watch the news. Paddy could see her through the serving hatch sitting in the armchair, her neat brown hair shot through with wild grey. She was pretending to listen to a news report about the Maze Prison hunger strikers, as if the world outside Rutherglen Main Street didn’t terrify her.
Paddy would have gone to the movies but she didn’t have any money. She considered using her Transcard and taking the two-hour circular route around the city on the 89 just to worry Trisha but knew it would be a petty revenge. And the bus might be cold.
She finished eating and got up, putting her plates in the sink, meaning to wash them later as a penance, but her mother got out of the chair and silently came into the kitchen, slipping between Paddy and the sink, running the hot water and beginning to wash the plates and cutlery briskly. Paddy skulked away into the living room.
She couldn’t be bothered watching the news. She twisted the channel dial to ITV and sat down before the picture had resolved itself. It was a quiz show. A saccharine host was asking a portly woman from Southampton questions about her tiny bespectacled husband, trapped in a soundproof booth and smiling like a baby sitting in warm shit.
Sean would be eating his tea right now. His mum would be smiling and chatting away to him, telling him the news of the day and who had died in the parish and whose grandchild had said a clever thing. Paddy could phone and tell him she missed him. She could try to say sorry again. She waited until her mum had walked through the living room and climbed the stairs to the toilet,
then nipped out and dialled Sean’s number.
Mimi Ogilvy could hardly speak when she asked for him. ‘Please, Mrs Ogilvy, I’ve got something important to tell him.’
She hadn’t finished the sentence before Mimi hung up.
V
Mary Ann came up to bed earlier than she normally would and silently went about her business, going to the bathroom with her wash bag and coming back dressed for bed, sorting out her clothes for the morning and putting her dirty pants and vest in the laundry bag at the side of the wardrobe, all the time letting off incontinent little laughs as she pottered around the room.
She turned off the light by the door but instead of getting into bed she climbed over her own bed and sat on Paddy’s, pulling out a pack of cards from behind her back and a packet of cheese and onion crisps. She tugged Paddy out of bed and over to the window, made her sit down and pulled the curtain over their heads. Lit by moonlight, Mary Ann opened the packet of crisps for them to share and dealt them a rummy hand of seven cards each. Down at the bottom of the garden the lone tree waved softly in the breeze, silver moonlight glinting off the few leaves.
They played for almost an hour, laughing silently when the crisps made a crunchy noise in their mouths, keeping score in Paddy’s notepad. Mary Ann mimed out the additions every time they moved on to a new hand, scratching her head and making a puzzled face, writing down ridiculously wrong numbers in her favour. Paddy let her go through her play each time, enjoying it more and more. They kept the real score on the back page.
They stayed there long after their eyes had begun to sting with sleep, playing together, their faces next to the window pane, damp and cold, their overheated feet in the bedroom, smothering comradely giggles. The silent games would become a ritual, a nightly statement of loyalty that bound them to each other for decades ahead.
17
The Callous Cars
I
The features writer was struggling to whip up a credible moral panic piece about Joe Dolce’s novelty single signalling the final demise of the English language when the phone rang, giving him an excuse to turn away from the page.
‘Nope,’ he said, running his eye over the sheet in the typewriter, ‘Heather Allen doesn’t work here any more.’
The man on the phone seemed surprised. He had met her yesterday, he said, in Townhead, and she told him she worked at the Daily News. ‘Yeah, well, she’s left now, pal.’
‘Would you have another number I can reach her on?’
‘Nope.’
The man sighed into the phone, sending a ruffle of wind into the journalist’s ear. ‘It’s just … it’s really important.’
The features writer’s attention span was broken anyway and the guy sounded genuinely desperate. ‘Well, I know she works at the polytechnic newspaper. Ye could phone them.’
‘Thank you,’ said the man. ‘That’s brilliant.’
II
He phoned the polytechnic several times, always refusing to leave a message, always asking just for Heather Allen, when would she be in, is she still not there? I’ll ring back, he said. It’s her I want.
It was late afternoon before Heather came into the Poly Times office. She was in a furious mood. She hadn’t told anyone about her dismissal from the News. Even her parents didn’t know. A latent sense of decency had stopped her from telling them about the syndicated piece. She’d known at the time that she would feel rotten for doing it, had weighed up the pros and cons and decided that in the long term the benefits would outweigh the guilt. But she’d been wrong. She hated herself for betraying Paddy and she’d lost her job. She felt enough of a shit without having to deal with her father’s disapproval.
The Poly Times was a two-bit operation. Their office was a small room on the first floor of the students union block, furnished with a single table, three chairs and a phone. Two walls of shelving held four years of back copies and all the financial records and minutes of all the committee meetings there had ever been. Lots of people applied to work on the paper but they only printed twice a year and there just wasn’t that much to do. They managed to freeze out most of the interested parties by being cliquey, intimidating and unfriendly, which left them with a core staff of about six. As the editor, one of Heather’s duties was trawling through the unsolicited articles students submitted to see if any of them were printable.
Despite posters up all over campus declaring the upcoming deadline there weren’t very many submissions in the red wire basket. The office wasn’t empty, though: a couple of committee members, both greasy headbangers, both super naturally ugly, were standing by the telex machine trying unsuccessfully to send something off. Heather ignored them, hoping they’d feel uncomfortable and leave.
She claimed the entire work table by putting her bag on one side and the red wire basket on the other, using one chair to drape her coat on and another to sit in. One of the metal boys called over to her that a guy had been phoning for her all morning.
‘Someone from the Daily News?’ she said hopefully. The boy shrugged. ‘He didn’t say where he was from.’ On reflection, Heather realized that the call couldn’t have been from the News. If they had wanted her back someone would have phoned her at home last night. Anyway, they wouldn’t reverse the decision. No-one went against the union. She settled back into her black mood and began pulling submissions out of envelopes and folders, piling them up.
She was halfway through reading a second year’s travelogue about interrailing around Italy when the phone rang.
‘Heather Allen?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I met you last night, do you remember?’ She didn’t. ‘I meet a lot of people.’
‘I know I can trust you.’ The caller paused, wanting a reaction.
‘Really?’ She was still only half listening, balancing the receiver on her shoulder and flicking through the submissions, looking to see if there were any other travel pieces in case she needed to choose between the two. ‘Do you want to know about Baby Brian?’ Heather dropped the travelogue and took the receiver in her hand. He must have heard she was the source of the syndicated piece. She covered her mouth with one hand to stop the sound carrying to the headbangers in the corner.
‘Can you tell me something about that?’
‘Not on the phone. Can you meet me?’
‘Name the place and I’ll be there.’
The man explained that he was very nervous and made her promise to come alone to the Pancake Place at one a.m. He asked her not to tell anyone where they were meeting and said she shouldn’t even write it down in case she was followed without knowing it.
Heather tore the scribbled address off the corner of the foolscap sheet and dropped it in the bin. ‘I’ll see you tonight,’ she said, and waited for him to confirm before she hung up. The boys were watching her without looking; she could feel them. She left her things on the table and went out to the lobby to buy a gritty coffee from the machine. She dropped the coins in and looked out of the window, over the rooftops of low buildings towards the city chambers, smiling to herself as the machine spluttered and whirred her coffee into the plastic cup. She would skip the Daily News and take her story straight to a national paper. With a good story about Baby Brian and the syndicated piece about the family on her CV she would be able to walk into any job she wanted after graduation. She could go straight to London.
III
Paddy hung around the news room and canteen, killing time until McVie came in. The night shift gradually filtered into the news room, replacing the manic fussiness of the day. The skeleton staff took up their positions at their desks, setting up for the night, laying out their magazines and books for reading, one guy on the features desk tuning in a small tranny to a Radio Four programme about the silent age of cinema.
McVie saw her when he came in to check the board for messages. He nodded an acknowledgement but looked annoyed whe
n she came over to speak to him.
‘Not again,’ he said. ‘I got in enough fucking trouble last time. That wee bastard phoned in and complained about us. I didn’t know you weren’t a journalist.’
‘I’m a copyboy.’
‘Well, just stay away from me,’ he said.
‘I just want to ask you something about Baby Brian.’
‘Yeah.’ He pointed at her nose accusingly. And that’s another fucking thing. You’re related to that bastarding child and you never told me.’
Paddy raised a finger and did it back. ‘I didn’t know it then, did I, ye big arse.’
The use of a bad word seemed to placate McVie somehow, as though he suddenly, completely understood the degree of her vehemence.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Have you got anything ye can tell me about it?’
‘Nut. I don’t know anything about him.’
‘How can you not know anything about him? He’s a relative.’
‘Are you close to your family?’ It was a lucky guess. ‘D’you know what, though?’ she added. ‘That guy JT, he tried to question me about it and he wasn’t a patch on your technique.’
McVie nodded. ‘Yeah, but he’d swap his balls for a story. Gives him the edge. I heard he once went to collect the picture of a rape and murder victim from her mother. On his way out of the door he said her daughter had been asking for it.’ He nodded in sympathy with the shock on Paddy’s face. ‘That way the woman wouldn’t talk to anyone else from the press. Made it an exclusive. He’s an arsehole. What do you want anyway?’
‘I wanted to ask you something about Baby Brian. What time did the boys catch the train to Steps?’
‘They said it was between nine and half ten at night. Why?’
‘Where were they from lunchtime until then?’ She lowered her voice. ‘And JT said no-one saw them on the train. I don’t think wee guys with nothing would catch a commuter train to Steps.’
McVie looked unconvinced. ‘They found their tickets on them.’
‘But Barnhill’s full of waste ground and abandoned factories and these are poor kids. Why would they spend money on a train? Could the police get it that wrong?’