The Last Breath

by Denise Mina

  ‘Come on, Miss Meehan, you must know when he’s getting released. Where’s he staying when he gets out? Is Driver Sean going to pick him up? Is he staying with him?’

  He had a grasp of the basic facts but nothing he couldn’t have found in old clippings or picked up from office gossip. She waited for him to hit her with something else but he didn’t.

  ‘Is that it?’

  He shrugged. ‘Um, yeah.’

  ‘This is a bullshit door stop,’ she said. ‘You’ve got nothing to go on. Do the Mail even know you’re here?’

  ‘McVie,’ he explained, eyes dipping in shame. ‘He said I have to try.’

  ‘McVie sent you to my door on a Saturday night?’

  ‘He said to follow up the leads.’

  She felt for him. A more practised journalist could have challenged her or made up some fact to goad her into talking. Her own door-stop method had always been to wait until a few journalists had rung the bell and been thrown off the step. Then she’d open her eyes wide and pretend to be a rookie, forced to come here by an evil editor. She’d ask the householder permission to wait on the step for a little while, just so that her editor couldn’t sack her. Often they’d side with her against the paper and invite her in. Curren, by contrast, had started combative and then had nothing to back it up. He’d get his face kicked in doing that in Glasgow.

  ‘You’re new at this, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He looked excited.

  ‘New to Glasgow?’

  He brightened. ‘Been here a week. Just finished my training. “Greatest newspaper city in the world”.’

  Combative and then suddenly soft; it was the worst possible combination to use when prying into the affairs of very upset people.

  ‘Maybe you should try being more aggressive,’ she said, imagining him nursing a black eye in the Mail newsroom while explaining where he got the idea from to guffawing colleagues. ‘When you get to a door try to push it open, swear at them, do something that’ll make them think you’re in charge. No one’s going to buckle under gentle quizzing.’

  Curren nodded earnestly. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, Glaswegians really respond to that kind of firm hand.’

  Curren hummed at his feet ‘OK.’ He took a deep breath, steeled himself and demanded, ‘When’s Ogilvy getting out?’

  ‘Better. Definitely better.’

  Confusion flickered on his face and Paddy felt a little bit guilty. In the yellow light of the close he looked young and embarrassed and fed up, while she, content and pyjamaed, still had the taste of oaty biscuits bright in her mouth.

  She gave him permission to do what he’d do anyway. ‘Listen, just go back and tell your editor I’m a total bitch and you tried really hard.’

  Resentment flashed behind his glasses. ‘I’ll tell McVie he’s a fat poof.’

  She tutted. Brutal insults were the custom of their profession, but she didn’t like McVie’s homosexuality used as a slur. ‘Nah, don’t say that to him, he might get a bit, you know …’ she searched for the word, ‘… stabby.’

  He grinned. Nice teeth. ‘Stabby? Is that an intransitive verb? Only in Glasgow …’

  ‘Adjective.’ She’d never heard of that kind of verb. Even tea boys had degrees these days. ‘Well, fuck off anyway.’ She shut the door, felt a pang of guilt at her mis-advice and called through the wood, ‘Safe home.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he answered, his voice muffled. ‘By the way, I saw your Misty column about dope. Brilliant.’

  Paddy felt vaguely ashamed. She had stolen the argument that no one started a fight in a bar because they’d smoked pot, but that alcohol provided so much tax revenue it couldn’t be outlawed.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said to the door. ‘It was Bill Hicks’s line actually. I took it and didn’t give him an acknowledgement.’

  ‘Good for you,’ replied the door. The kid would go far.

  She listened as his foot dropped to the first step, followed the echo of his trail as he walked down two flights and left the close. The outside door slammed behind him.

  Lucky her. The biggest crime story in the last twenty years hadn’t so much landed in her lap as grown up under her feet. Callum Ogilvy and another small boy had been found guilty of the brutal murder of a toddler nine years ago. At the same time Paddy, a hungry young reporter, was engaged to Callum’s cousin, Sean. It was because of Paddy’s investigation that the men who goaded the boys to do it were found and charged. Callum and James were done for conspiracy instead of murder and it carried a shorter sentence. Even she didn’t know if it was a good idea to release them, but there was no legal basis on which to hold them any longer.

  She hadn’t met Callum since he went to prison. She knew very little about him, other than the sanitized snippets Sean passed on from his prison visits and the occasional articles about his life there. Sean wanted her to write Callum’s big interview when he got out. Working in newspapers for the past six years, he was savvy enough to know that Callum would be hunted down and eventually caught, probably by an unsympathetic journalist who’d print a picture and ruin what little anonymity he had. Most journalists would have bitten Sean’s hand off for the opportunity but Paddy had her doubts about writing it: she couldn’t guarantee a sympathetic story, and anyway, Callum didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  She loitered in the hall, looking down at the boxes of Dub’s records and a cardboard rack of her work clothes. Unpacking had ground to a halt a month ago and now they only noticed the boxes when they saw them from an unusual angle.

  The ceilings were high in the flat. The early Victorians took tenements seriously, built them on a grand scale with servants’ quarters and drawing rooms that could accommodate dance parties, and Lansdowne Crescent was one of the oldest tenements in the West End of Glasgow.

  It was a student flat before Paddy bought it: the hall was still purple with canary-yellow trim, the detailing on the magnificent cornicing obscured under a century and a half of pasty emulsion. The three bedrooms were painted in colours that would exacerbate a hangover and the kitchen ceiling was so nicotine-stained that it was hard to tell whether it had been painted white or kipper-yellow.

  At twenty-seven, this was her first home away from her family and she was still gliding around it like a triumphant child in a longed-for Wendy house.

  Back in the living room Dub smirked up at her. Paddy could tell by the crumbs on his T-shirt front that he’d stolen some of her biscuits.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘A wee journalist from the Mail. Asking about Callum Ogilvy. How’s the show this week?’

  ‘Oh, bliss, it’s even worse.’

  ‘Can’t be.’

  They watched as George H. Burns demanded a welcoming round of applause from the audience, his eyes flashing angry as he backed offstage to the wings. The curtain rose on a sweating ventriloquist with a cow-puppet sitting upright on his knee, its impertinent pink udders quivering in the spotlight.

  The Saturday Night Old Time Variety Show was arseclenchingly poor. George H. Burns’s compèring style revolved around insulting the audience. He guessed where they were from, told jokes about skinflints from Aberdeen and halfwits from Dundee. His material was obvious, the intervening acts mediocre, the musicians plodding.

  ‘Even the curtains look tired,’ said Dub.

  The viewing figures were spectacular: every single week the numbers halved. But it wasn’t really funny. If Burns’s career took a nosedive he’d stop giving Paddy money, even sporadically, and she was stretched tight enough as it was.

  Dub had been George’s manager when the TV company approached them and offered the show. He advised Burns not to host it on the grounds that it would be absolutely fucking shit. Burns, greedy and headstrong, sacked the guy who’d brought him to the brink of stardom and replaced him with a manager who wore shiny suits and couldn’t talk to a woman without staring at her tits. Now even he knew the show was crap. He was angry, blaming the producer, the writers, the quality of the
acts, but the flaw was in the concept: variety theatre needed revival because it was dying, and it was dying because it was patchy and dull. Worse for George, going mainstream had alienated all his comrades on the alternative comedy circuit. Far from being alternative, the circuit was suddenly all there was, apart from guest spots and working men’s clubs.

  ‘Mother of God,’ muttered Paddy, dropping into her chair. ‘Where are they finding these people? Backstage must be like the bus to Lourdes.’

  ‘They’re all actual performers. Dinosaurs. Actually, minisaurs. Babysaurs.’ He lay there, grinning, his chin folded into his neck, the sole pocket of fat on his entire six-foot-two frame. She’d been flat-sharing with him for two months and saw how much he ate. She’d always hoped that thin people were lying, that they didn’t eat giant meals and keep their figures just the same, but Dub ate peanut butter sandwiches before his dinner, snacked on entire packets of biscuits and was still rake-thin. Paddy felt the hefty roll of fat on her middle bulge as she sat down. It was just unfair.

  A slow knock echoed out from the deep hall. Paddy sighed as she stood up again. ‘Tell him to get lost,’ Dub said.

  But it didn’t sound the same, didn’t sound like a journalist’s jaunty, faux-friendly beat. ‘I’ve told him to fuck off.’ She brushed her hands clean on her pyjama trousers. ‘I’m just after telling him that.’

  As she stepped back over the boxes the knock was still going, a rhythmic, steady tap on wood, slow and grave. Paddy’s heart jolted a warning.

  Her hand hesitated on the handle. It could be a lost drunk who’d wandered up the close, or a journalist from a serious paper looking for news of Callum Ogilvy’s release date. Or George Burns on a downer. Or Terry fucking Hewitt. God, not Terry, please.

  She slipped the safety chain on noisily, hoping it sounded more substantial than it was, and opened the door an inch.

  Two unfamiliar police officers, a man and a woman, stood shoulder to shoulder, wearing full uniform and looking grimly back at her.

  Paddy slammed the door shut in their faces.

  Alone in the hall, her knee buckled. She had shadowed the police often enough to know what a death knock looked like: two uniformed officers, stony-faced, one of them a woman, turning up at an unexpected hour.

  When Paddy was on night shift she’d arrived at the door with them, faked sympathy along with them, never once thinking they would come to her. With them, she kept her face straight during the interview and sniggered at the jokes in the car afterwards, laughing at the clothes and the decor, at the family set-up and undercurrents, dead wives found in a boyfriend’s bed, car crashes caused by drink, once a husband found dead in a ladies’ changing room at a department store, trying on girdles. They laughed, not because any of it was funny, but because it was sad.

  Someone close to her had died. They had died violently, or she would have been called by a hospital, and they had died alone, or a family member would have phoned her. It had to be Mary Ann.

  ‘Dub?’ Her voice was high and wavering. ‘Could ye come out here a minute?’

  Dub took his time. When he appeared he stood in the doorway; he was still looking back at the TV. ‘What?’

  ‘Two police. Outside. I think something’s happened.’

  They looked anxiously at the door, trying to read an answer in the lumpy yellow paint.

  Dub came over, standing too close, even jumpier than she was. ‘Couldn’t be a noise complaint? A mistake? The journalist, the wee guy, was he noisy on the way out?’

  Paddy pressed her hand to her mouth.

  ‘It could be Mary Ann.’

  ‘Let them in then.’ Dub reached over swiftly, slipped the chain off and pulled the door wide.

  The male officer was a big shed of a man, fat and broad, blue shadow on both his chins, his chest still heaving from the effort of lumbering up the stairs. The woman was blonde, hair scraped back so tight it looked as if it had been painted on. She was birdlike: a pointy nose, beady eyes, thin lips. Family Liaison. They always sent out a woman from Family to hold the person’s hand when they sobbed.

  The policewoman attempted a smile but it withered on her lips and she slipped Paddy’s eye. She hadn’t done many death knocks, hadn’t yet developed the cold skill of looking heartbreak in the face.

  ‘Hello.’ The portly officer took charge. ‘I’m PC Blane and this is WPC Kilburnie. Are you Paddy Meehan?’

  They waited for an answer but Paddy was stiff with fright. She couldn’t seem to get the air to the bottom of her lungs.

  ‘I know it’s you actually.’ He half smiled at Paddy. ‘I recognize your face from the newspapers.’

  Paddy did what she always did when a fan approached her. She bared her teeth politely and mumbled an irrelevant ‘thank you’.

  Dub moved in front of her. ‘Is it Mary Ann?’

  Blane blanked his question, stepping over the threshold and looking exclusively at Paddy. ‘Can we come in?’

  She backed away, letting the officers shuffle in, trespassing death into her Wendy house.

  Neither of them looked at Dub. Usually he was great at taking charge of a situation. He’d done stand-up for many years and was more than capable of demanding the attention of a nightclub full of drunk people but now, strangely, neither officer would acknowledge him.

  ‘He’s my friend,’ said Paddy, pointing at him.

  Blane and Kilburnie glanced warily at each other. Blane cleared his throat. ‘Shall we go through?’

  Paddy’s footsteps felt spongy and unsteady as she stepped across the boxes and walked the length of the hall. She slowed as she reached the living room, stalling, as if she could prolong the unknowing moment indefinitely, but Blane took her elbow, hurrying and supporting her at the same time.

  ‘Please sit down.’ He guided Paddy through the door and over to the sofa. She saw Blane clock George Burns on TV, crouching down at the edge of the stage to talk to a busty woman in the audience.

  ‘Burns,’ he muttered dismissively, letting the comment write itself.

  Burns had been a policeman before he became a comedian. Every copper in Glasgow had a story about him, usually derogatory – how there were ten guys on every squad funnier than him, how they’d done their training with him and he was a prick then too, anecdotes always delivered with a slightly thrilled smile that they knew someone on telly.

  Determined to be spoken to, Dub dropped on to the settee right next to Paddy, reaching for her hand, but Kilburnie managed to squeeze her pointy little self into the space between them.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Paddy, taking a deep breath and holding it, bracing herself for the blow.

  Kilburnie nodded her head to Dub and widened her eyes. ‘Maybe it would be better if we spoke to you on your own.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Well …’ She looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m afraid we have some rather bad news, Miss Meehan.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Kilburnie continued with the standard speech she had practised in the car, ‘we found a body yesterday, in the countryside, near Port Glasgow …’

  Two fat tears raced down Paddy’s cheeks. ‘Just say it.’

  Kilburnie looked down at her lap, patting her knees with both hands, steeling herself. ‘Terry Hewitt is dead. A shot to the head, I’m afraid. We would have come sooner only he didn’t have any identification on him and we’ve only just found his flat and been through his effects …’

  Paddy sat up. ‘Terry Hewitt ?’

  Disconcerted, Kilburnie glanced at Blane. ‘I’m afraid he’s dead. I’m very sorry.’

  Dub sat forward. ‘Terry Hewitt?’

  ‘Single shot to the head.’ Kilburnie gave Blane a worried look. ‘He’s dead, I’m afraid.’

  Dub reached across Kilburnie’s lap. ‘Paddy? Were you seeing him again?’

  ‘No,’ she muttered, ‘not since … before. I haven’t seen him since Fort William.’

  ‘Why are you telling her this?’


  Kilburnie turned to Dub. ‘I’m very sorry.’

  ‘What are you saying sorry to me for?’

  Kilburnie looked from Dub to Paddy. ‘I’m sorry for talking about this in front of your hubby.’

  ‘Oh.’ Dub looked at them both, smiling at the suburban phrasing. ‘Oh, no. We’re just flatmates. We’re friends.’

  ‘I’m not married,’ said Paddy. ‘Is Mary Ann OK?’

  ‘Who is Mary Ann?’ asked Kilburnie.

  ‘My sister. She works in a soup kitchen. She’s a nun. When you said it was out in the country I thought she’d been abducted. I thought she’d been raped …’ Paddy clamped her hand over her mouth to stop herself talking.

  She knew they’d repeat every word of the interview back at the station. A minor provincial celebrity caught off guard wearing ripped pyjamas. There were a lot of pauses in police work, opportunities for gossip. They’d describe the purple and yellow hall, her non-hubby flatmate, how they were watching Burns’s show and Paddy was eating biscuits instead of having dinner. They’d tell people about the rip in her pyjama bottoms.

  ‘The thing is …’ Kilburnie tailed off. ‘I’m afraid we need you to identify his body.’

  ‘Why me? There must be someone who’s seen him more recently than me. I haven’t seen Terry for six months.’

  ‘But you were the next of kin on his passport. We found it in his house. That’s how we got this address.’

  ‘He had me down at this address?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Dub watched the back and forth, interested now that he knew Mary Ann was safe.

  ‘But we just moved in two months ago.’ She looked around the living room, at the orange walls, the sparse furniture, carefully chosen from junk shops and auctions. Terry had never been here; she hadn’t thought he knew the address.

  ‘So you’re not related?’

  ‘No. Terry’s parents died years ago. I don’t know if he had anyone else. He was a foreign correspondent, travelled, didn’t make many friends. I suppose that’s why. I’m not completely surprised, to be honest. He wasn’t happy.’

  Paddy stood up. It occurred to her that she should get to the Daily News and file the story of Terry’s suicide. It wasn’t a great story but the thought of work calmed her. She felt the steel nib pierce her heart, felt her muscles relax, her blood slow. With a notebook in her hand she could walk through fire and feel nothing.