by Denise Mina
Donaldson looked down at where she had prodded him and slowly raised his eyebrows in amusement, as if a threat from her was a joke.
Paddy could feel herself getting hot and angry; never a safe combination.
‘Donaldson, for all I care you may be the King of the fucking Maze, you may have cut your own ear off in a bet – you might just be that fucking hard – but if there’s a whisper of a threat to my wean, I will find you and I will ruin you.’
She sat back and caught her breath, hoping she frightened him a little bit.
Donaldson smiled. ‘Miss Meehan, d’ye not think every wumman who’s ever lost a child thinks that? We’re all fighting for our children, they’re why we’re fighting.’
She stood up and leaned across the table, her nose an inch from his. ‘I’m not talking about the struggle. I’m talking about you. I’ll ruin you.’
He laughed a puff of grainy Guinness at her. ‘Are ye trying to threaten me?’
She sat back down and looked at him. A total miscalculation. He hadn’t flinched, hadn’t even bothered to keep his poker face on. In fact, he looked a little bored, as if he’d heard a hundred threats of bloody violence and ruin.
She sighed and looked out of the booth. ‘I was trying to, but it doesn’t seem to be taking.’
Donaldson chuckled to himself, shaking his tits at her, his neck folding over into two round rolls.
She held the sheets up. ‘I will find out who this guy is.’
He swatted her adamance away with a flick of his wrist. ‘Aye, ye maybe will. Ye maybe will.’
‘Have you thought about the effect these killings are going to have on your organization? Killing teenagers in Ulster is one thing—’
‘We don’t kill Ulster teenagers.’ For a flash his nose wrinkled, mouth turning up at the corner, shoulder rising as if he couldn’t bear the accusation.
‘Charles Love,’ she said, referring to a sixteen-year-old Catholic boy accidentally killed earlier in the year by a remote control IRA bomb intended for soldiers.
‘Love was an accident.’ Donaldson narrowed his eyes. ‘Seamus Duffy wasn’t: the RUC shot him dead last year. He was fifteen.’ He shrugged. ‘We could go on and on.’
‘Killing journalists on neutral soil is going to undermine everything you’ve worked for. Even your Americans won’t fund this sort of thing.’
‘We are not killing journalists on neutral soil.’
‘Does that mean Scotland’s part of the civil war now?’
‘No.’
‘So you don’t count Kevin and Terry as journalists? Why? They weren’t anything else. I’ve known Terry since he was a teenager and he would never work for British Intelligence.’
‘You’d be surprised who’s working for British Intelligence.’ It was an aside, a sad note to self more than a statement. Looking for a consolation drink, Donaldson tipped his pint glass a fraction, remembered it was empty and set it straight.
‘You’re wrong,’ Paddy told him. ‘Two nights ago Kevin said there was no one after him. He thought Terry had been killed by someone he met in Liberia, for Christsake. If you’re justifying this by saying they were part of some big espionage plot, you’re wrong.’
Donaldson leaned over the table at her and spoke slowly. ‘We are not involved in this, officially, unofficially or in any of the grey areas in between. We didn’t do it. We wouldn’t do it. It wasn’t us.’
‘As far as you know,’ she said flatly, implying that he was nothing but a foot soldier.
‘No.’ He spoke slowly. ‘From on high. Not us. No way, in no capacity, under no circumstances.’
She sat back and looked at him. Donaldson was scruffy, fat and smelled of Guinness, but he did have the assured demeanour of a man with power. She might need to speak to him again.
‘I’m sorry for threatening ye, Mr Donaldson.’ She put her papers in her bag and noticed that his eyes followed them. ‘But I’m desperate.’
‘It’s OK.’ He nodded softly at the table in front of him. ‘I understand. A mother’s love’s a blessing.’
‘No matter where you roam,’ she said, filling in the next line of the hokey old Irish song she’d been hearing all her life.
He gave her the end of the chorus. ‘You’ll never miss a mother’s love ’til she’s buried beneath the clay.’
They smiled, each seeing the frightened Catholic child in the other.
‘An anthem for emotional blackmail. Have ye kids yourself, Mr Donaldson?’
‘A son,’ he said, and something seemed to snap shut in his eyes. ‘He died. On remand in Long Kesh.’
‘Oh. God. I’m so sorry.’
Donaldson sighed down at the dirty table top in front of him. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Me too.’
II
The summer street was blinding compared to the dark bar. Paddy walked along the busy pavement, stepping out on to the road to skirt around a lorry making a delivery of carpet rolls to a shop. She chewed her tongue to clear away the nasty taste of the cigarettes, thought about Kevin lying on the stretcher, wondering whether his parents were alive and whether she should phone them and let them know he was in hospital.
She didn’t look back along the street. She didn’t see the young man in the black tracksuit who had followed her from the bar, watching her as she stopped at her car, memorizing her number plate.
She drove aimlessly around the busy city centre, thinking about Collins and Donaldson, hardly paying attention to the pedestrians dodging out in front of her. After a close shave with a small woman carrying heavy shopping bags, Paddy had a future flash of herself explaining to a policeman that she had run away from two officers at a serious assault, mowed down an innocent shopper, but didn’t mean any harm.
She pulled into a car park at the foot of the huge glass-tent shopping mall, found a space and stopped.
Women in thin summer clothes flitted past, dragging reluctant children after them. A bigger car park sat between her and the flea market next to the river, the sharp sun glinting brutally off the bonnets and roofs. She took a breath, thought about lighting a cigarette but couldn’t face it.
She could be completely wrong about Collins. She didn’t have any evidence that the man watching the school was anything to do with him, or that he had hurt Terry. He had come to her door and asked about Terry, but that was all she knew for certain. Other than that, it was just a gut suspicion and she was off form anyway. Terry and Kevin might have known him, he could have been a strange pal of theirs, journalists often had contacts who appeared unlikely as friends, people they were working for stories. She’d had contacts herself when she was doing news, creeps and weirdos who’d scare you out of an alley if you met them on a dark night. Half the Press Bar was like that.
A skinny man brushed past her car, his plastic bag sweeping noisily over the bonnet, bringing her back into the bright day.
Kevin was in a hospital somewhere and she had no idea if he was alive or dead.
III
Standing outside the Albert Hospital, she smoked a cigarette she didn’t want and puzzled it over. It was unusual, to say the very least. The best she could come up with to explain the fact that Kevin Hatcher wasn’t registered in any of the four major hospitals with a casualty department in Glasgow was that they had misspelled his name on the registration form. But she had spent half a year doing the hospital rounds every night in the calls car and knew that they were meticulous when anyone came in. She had clearly told the officers who Kevin was and his name was on all the mail on the hall table.
She had called in to all four hospitals, flashed her NUJ card, told them she was from the News. No Hatcher, Catcher or Thatcher was registered anywhere.
18
Making Heroes of Butchers
I
Noise moved strangely in the busy morgue. The tiled walls shattered and amplified sound so that drills, metallic clangs and strange muted calls ricocheted down corridors, distorting and warping, masking everyday sources and turning them into gro
wls from monsters, saws through skulls.
Through the effort of not ingesting the smell, Paddy found herself breathless by the time she reached Aoife’s office.
The door was open but the chair was empty. A lone cigarette smouldered in an ashtray, the sour tang a welcome interruption to the vivid yowl of disinfectant.
The office was a mess. Storage boxes of papers and files took up most of the floor space. A stack of brown files on the desk threatened to spill on the floor.
‘I was surprised when the desk said you were here.’ Aoife McGaffry was standing behind her. ‘Kind of thought I’d offended ye, to be honest.’
She was smiling, genuinely pleased to see her, and Paddy felt a pang of guilt. She had been offended. Now everyone was a potential source of information.
‘Auch, it takes a lot more than that to offend me.’
Aoife bought it and looked relieved. ‘Well, come on in anyway.’
She gestured into the office with a roll of address labels in her hand and they shuffled in and shut the door after themselves. A saw started up some distance away, a high whine, and Aoife saw Paddy wince. She hid a smile and held up the roll. ‘I need to go through all the files and change the serial numbers. They’ve been put in out of sequence.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘Does if it comes to court.’
‘What are you doing this for? Shouldn’t you have an assistant?’
‘I have got one, somewhere, but she never comes in to work and the managers don’t seem to care. I was wondering if she’s the Provost’s daughter or something.’
‘Oh yeah, the City Council is a lazy bastard’s dream employer. Both my brothers worked for the Parks Department. Spent their days hiding behind trees.’
‘Aye, well, it’s weird moving somewhere new. All the unofficial regulations and rules. I think I’ve offended half of Glasgow and I’ve barely been here a week. It’s a personal best, even for me.’
Aoife took the desk chair and offered Paddy the examination bed to sit on. Box files were propped all along it and rather than move them and get comfortable she perched her bum on the edge.
‘So …’ Aoife looked at the files on her desk, patting her work space with both hands, remembering where everything was. ‘What can I do for ye?’
Paddy nodded at the files. ‘Sorry for interrupting.’
‘No, you’re fine.’ Aoife turned to give her her full attention. ‘I never really said it the other night: I’m awful sorry about your friend. It was a rotten thing to happen.’
‘Brutal,’ said Paddy. She took a breath. ‘I came to see you because you did your training in Belfast.’
Aoife gave her a wary look. ‘You’re not thinking of writing an article, are ye? I don’t know what it’s like here, but back home we’re not allowed to be interviewed.’
‘No, not an interview.’ She didn’t quite know how to phrase it. ‘A friend of Terry’s had a stroke this morning. He was only thirty or so. I found him.’ She looked away, her mind back in the messy hall, seeing the dried chalky saliva. ‘They said he’d taken coke and given himself a stroke, but I don’t honestly believe he’d use drugs.’
‘A lot of users are secretive, you wouldn’t necessarily know if he was using drugs.’
‘No, it looked staged.’ Paddy felt certain now when she thought about it. ‘There was a line of cocaine out on the table, I think it was cocaine—’
‘If it was a line and it was white it probably was. Speed’s the only other thing people snort and that’s kind of yellow.’
‘Thing is, Kevin drank for years. He was a wild man in the drink, famously wild. He drank everywhere, from first light to home time. And then he stopped a few years ago. If he was taking drugs everyone would know. He wouldn’t hide it. He’d be mad with it.’
Aoife nodded. ‘Right? But there was a line out on the table?’
‘Yeah,’ Paddy conceded, ‘and he’d vomited chalky powder in his saliva. I know it looks as if he’d—’
‘Wait.’ Aoife had a hand up. ‘He’d vomited white powder and there was a line for snorting on the table?’
Paddy hesitated. ‘Aye, I know it looks as if he was using but an ambulance took him away and he wasn’t admitted to any of the casualty departments—’
Aoife stopped her dead. ‘Who knows we’ve met?’
Paddy shrugged. ‘Anyone could know. The officers would have gossiped about Saturday night. Believe me about Kevin, it looks obvious but he—’
Aoife interrupted her again. ‘It doesn’t look obvious. It looks odd.’ She stood up, suddenly, inexplicably angry. ‘Odd. Come you now with me.’
She grabbed a brown leather handbag off the floor by the strap, swinging it over her head and shouting out of the door into the corridor. ‘I’m going out for lunch. Don’t yous be tickling them in there.’
Paddy followed her out into the corridor and saw a man’s head looking back at her from the walk-in fridge. He shot her a smile and a thumbs-up.
‘Follow me,’ said Aoife, marching off down the corridor.
II
He stood in Lansdowne Crescent, hands tucked tightly into the pockets on his tracksuit trousers, taking in the general feel of the place. It was right next to a busy road but the houses were wrapped around a private garden, which seemed to absorb the noise. The old buildings faced each other with a quiet dignity. He had been up west loads of times, to Clatty Pat’s nightclub, choking with fanny on a Monday, but you wouldn’t really notice this place, not unless you were looking, not unless you’d got someone’s address from the phone book and come here deliberately.
The fat bird was two up, top flat. No security on the close door.
A big arch ran under the building, for carriages in the olden days, leading to a deserted back yard of overgrown gardens with tumbledown walls separating it from the lane. It would be dark at night.
III
The north bank of the Clyde was a godforsaken place. Paddy had gravitated here during smoky moments of self-pity and despondency. It was fly-blown, paved over with cracked and stained concrete, and there was a sheer drop to the grey swirl of the water. There weren’t even very many seats.
Thin bushes separated it from the busy road, empty gold cans of super-lager strewn at their feet. The sun though, the warm days and softness of the air, attracted a smattering of office workers there for their lunch.
They sat on the edge of a concrete box of bushes and Aoife offered her half her sandwich, a large baguette stuffed with enough egg mayonnaise to fill a skip. Someone in the office ran out with the lunchtime orders, she explained; it was all they’d had left with egg in it.
‘Why would they even sell food this big?’ She looked at it, puzzled. ‘It would do a coach party.’
‘Yeah.’ Paddy had eaten one of them herself once, and then had some biscuits. ‘So why did you say the thing with Kevin looked odd?’
Aoife took a bite and munched it into one corner of her mouth. ‘You see, a line is for snorting, inhaling. Vomiting cocaine means you’ve swallowed it. No one does both.’
‘Do people swallow it?’
‘Sometimes. Wrap it in a Rizla and swallow, just as effective but takes longer and it’s harder to pace yourself. But doing both is playing Russian roulette. It’s a hard enough balance to achieve through one method of ingestion.’
Paddy chewed a mouthful of creamy egg filling, enjoying Aoife’s accent, the hard nasal ‘r’s and short vowels. ‘How could he disappear? Does that mean he wasn’t admitted to hospital at all? His hand was all curled up at the side.’ She mimicked Kevin’s claw hand. ‘Could he have recovered before they got to hospital and gone to his parents or something?’
Aoife looked shifty. ‘Don’t think so. He may not have made it to hospital. He may have … you know … passed on.’ When Aoife spoke again her voice was low. ‘They don’t trust me.’
Paddy looked at her, ‘Who?’
‘Them. Upstairs. Graham Wilson was in with the bricks, one of the boys, th
ey could trust him. That’ll be why your friend has disappeared: they knew I’d find traces in his nostrils and stomach and blurt it.’
‘Who though?’
The hard sun glinted on the water as two businessmen walked past, giggling and swinging their briefcases.
‘Will we whistle after them lads there?’ said Aoife, her mood lifting suddenly when she changed the subject.
‘Yeah, go on,’ Paddy dared her.
Aoife turned back to them and shouted under her breath, ‘Hey, you fellas: wheet whoow!’
They laughed to themselves, watching the businessmen retreat down the river.
‘God, it’s been a hell of a morning,’ said Paddy, and told Aoife about Collins coming to her house and the man watching her son’s school.
‘This guy’s Northern Irish, ye say?’
‘I’ve got a photo of him.’ She opened her bag and took out the photocopies. ‘You might know him.’
‘Aye, he’s probably my cousin or something, ’cause you know, Ireland’s only twelve foot across.’ Aoife looked at the enlargement of Collins and smiled. ‘You’re having a laugh.’
Paddy was bewildered. ‘Am I?’
They looked at each other, both searching for a clue.
‘You know him,’ prompted Aoife.
‘Do I?’
‘Don’t ye?’
Paddy shook her head.
‘He’s famous, like you.’ She could see Paddy didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘Martin McBree. He’s a major highheadjan in the IRA. Don’t you work in the papers?’
‘Yeah, but I don’t know who this guy is.’
‘Martin McBree?’ she said again, as if that would clear it up. ‘The photo holding the guy on Bloody Sunday?’
‘Never heard of him, sorry.’
‘He was over in New York last year, ambassadorial duties, restructuring the Noraid funding people. It was on the nine o’clock news at home. He shook them up pretty badly. Brought in a whole new management team and got rid of the old guard. Those old fellas’d send them nothing but guns and psychos. The Republicans are shifting their position, moving towards a negotiated settlement. What they want now is to put a raft of peace-seekers into positions of power.’