The Last Breath

by Denise Mina

  ‘So McBree’s a good guy?’

  Aoife nodded that she thought so. Paddy thought back to Sunday night and McBree in her hallway. She could have had it all wrong, really. It was just a gut reaction to the guy: he was there with an agenda, she gathered that much, but it didn’t mean he was violent.

  She was pleased to have been so wrong.

  They had both done as much damage to the baguette as they could so they abandoned it on the wall and Paddy got out her cigarettes. Aoife took one from her.

  ‘He’s made a wild lot of enemies.’

  ‘McBree? Surely everyone wants peace?’

  ‘Ye’d think, wouldn’t ye? That’s the trouble with armed struggle. Even if it starts out very noble with good men putting their higher feelings aside it’s always going to be a magnet for thugs and sadists. There’s always going to be a faction who don’t want it to end, you know?’ Aoife stretched out her papery white legs, catching the sun. ‘Pathology is the sharp end. We see it all.’ She squinted at her cigarette. ‘My old boss at home, he dealt with the Shankill Butchers’ victims. You ever hear of them?’

  ‘No.’

  She took another draw and held it in. ‘They charged them with nineteen, but really there were about thirty murders. The Shankill Butchers were a gang of men, twelve or so of them, Protestant loyalists. They got hold of a black taxi cab, drove around at closing time. Whoever hailed them got killed. They wanted Catholics but sometimes got their own side. They weren’t that fussy. What does that tell ye about the depth of their political convictions?’

  Paddy tried to affect concern, but to her it was just a story about faceless men killing other faceless men. ‘It was an excuse?’

  Aoife looked over at groups of workmen sunbathing their lunch break away, stripped to the waist across the glimmering water. ‘One fella, Thomas Madden, wee quiet man, forty-eight, unmarried, a security guard. They hung him up by his feet for six hours. One hundred and forty-seven stab wounds. Chipping away at him for hours.’ She flicked her wrist. ‘All the work of the same hand, ye can tell that from the shape of the wounds. They put the time of death at about four a.m. Later, when they found him and saw where he’d been killed, they found a witness, a woman who’d been coming past around four. She was walking home after a party, she said, and heard a man’s voice. She thought someone was wild with the drink. He was shouting, “Kill me, kill me.”’ Aoife flattened her hand to her chest wearily. ‘I don’t know why that hurts me so much.’

  Paddy held her hand up. ‘That’s enough for me, actually.’

  ‘Aye well, there’s my point: in peacetime the Butchers would just be sadistic serial killers, but to some people they’re folk heroes. And they’re the people the peace-seekers have to go through. Both sides have their share of bastards. Any one of them can single-handedly break a ceasefire and keep the fight going. That’s who they need to weed out if there’s to be any hope.’

  ‘And McBree’s doing the weeding?’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  Paddy leaned back on her elbows, letting the sun warm her face. ‘When you said they don’t trust you, who were you talking about?’

  Aoife shrugged as if it was a silly question. ‘The bosses.’

  ‘Why would the bosses want to hide how Kevin died?’

  Aoife prodded Paddy in the shoulder. ‘That’s your job.’

  IV

  Helen, the chief librarian, was busy giving a junior member of staff a bollocking. She looked down her nose through her red plastic glasses.

  ‘Tell him that the reason we need one or two keywords is so that an idiot like you doesn’t end up with a truckload of envelopes to lose on the way up the stairs.’

  The copy boy was a teenager, his skinny legs hardly filling the smart trousers his mum had ironed for him. He was looking at the red beads on Helen’s glasses chain, trying to give the impression of looking at her without having the courage to actually do it.

  ‘The next time they give you a clippings request, take them this form.’ Helen held up a small yellow sheet with three questions on it. ‘Get them to fill it out. That way you won’t waste my time and yours.’

  Paddy leaned over the copy boy’s shoulder and pointed at Helen. ‘She used to give me grief all the time too.’

  He turned, afraid at first and then grateful at her comradely tone. Helen wasn’t pleased. She scowled after the junior as he shuffled out of the office and gave Paddy a cold smile. They were friends sometimes, when Helen forgot about office politics and power games, which was about once a year, usually when her heart had been broken by yet another separated or divorced man. She was on an earnest hunt for love.

  Paddy had met a few of Helen’s dates when she bumped into her in bistros around the West End. Red-faced businessmen in expensive suits, mostly. She wondered Helen could eat looking at some of them, much less sleep with them. But although Helen was handsome she was a nippy cow and Paddy supposed that brought her trade value down a lot.

  She glared through her glasses at Paddy. ‘I don’t appreciate you speaking to me in that manner in front of a junior member of staff.’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’ Paddy was looking back into the library, at the big table where women with scissors used to cannibalize endless copies of each edition, cutting out stories and filing them in small brown envelopes under subject headings. Nowadays it was all done electronically: the copy was typed into computers to be set and sent to the print room downstairs, and a disk of the articles went to a company with expertise in these things. Helen was alone in the library, general of a dispersed army, and it had made her more unpleasant.

  ‘OK: Brian Donaldson.’ Paddy smacked her lips and leaned across the desk. ‘Martin McBree. Independent and joint.’

  Helen sucked her teeth at Paddy to show that she wasn’t happy, turned and went down to the clippings drum to call up the search. She punched in the names to the panel, the metal drum churned and clanked and slits opened up along its body. She lifted the envelopes out and slapped her hand with them, thinking for a moment. She looked at Paddy, a smug thought shimmering across her face, came back to the desk and stamped them.

  ‘These cross-ref for IRA and Northern Ireland.’ Helen handed her the envelopes, trying not to smile. ‘Did you see Merki’s copy last night? Contradicts your IRA theory a bit, doesn’t it?’

  Paddy nodded politely. ‘Yes. I’m a fool, Helen,’ and she walked out of the room.

  In the corridor she looked at the dates stamped on the front of the clippings envelopes. No one had had either of them out for over eight months. Merki wasn’t following the same trail because he was convinced the IRA weren’t involved.

  She ran upstairs to the newsroom, clutching the envelopes and pulling her narrow skirt up to her thighs so she could move faster.

  V

  She found a space on a desk in a quiet corner and opened the first envelope that came to hand.

  Martin McBree was IRA royalty. His career was outlined in two separate full-page profiles. He joined the organization when he was little more than a boy, pledging his loyalty three years before the Troubles began in the North, in the balmy days when IRA was said to stand for ‘I Ran Away’. He came through as part of the generation of Northern Irish Republicans who ousted the old guard when the Troubles began, turning the IRA into a significant paramilitary force.

  On the second Bloody Sunday, British soldiers, unprovoked, had fired upon a peaceful civil rights march and killed thirteen unarmed civilians. McBree had been in the crowd that day and a photographer captured him in a moment of such tender glory that the image was published in newspapers all over the world. He was carrying another man, one arm under his shoulders, the other under his knees, leaning backwards to counter the weight. He was small, only five foot seven or so, but he must have been all muscle and sinew. The man had an open chest wound, was probably dead already. He had a black coat on and the photo was in black and white, but there was no mistaking the thick black blood on his chest, running down his arm and dr
ipping from his limp hand. McBree’s pale shoes were splattered with blood. It was a good picture but what made it famous was the wild-eyed priest standing in front of them, holding up a white hankie in surrender, begging safe passage through the government snipers.

  Paddy read down: the dead man was a plumber. He had four sons and a daughter. He was thirty-one.

  She looked at the picture more closely. McBree didn’t look frightened. His jaw was clenched tight at the strain of the weight he was carrying. Here was a man used to blood. Here was a man who could face a hard task without flinching.

  She found his name in an article about the first round of hunger strikes: he had been imprisoned many times for arms offences and was the prisoner representative at the Maze for a year. Talks broke down when he left.

  More recently he had been arrested and released for travelling on a false passport. He was on his way back from the Lebanon. She checked the dates, counting back to Pete’s spell in hospital. Terry had been reporting from Beirut at the same time.

  Later clippings reported that McBree admitted to attending a training camp in the Lebanon, and they cited off-the-record speculation that he had been training both PLO and ETA guerrillas in hand-to-hand combat.

  McBree was pictured in New York, a stolen snapshot of him at an airport. Just as Aoife had said, he was sent there with a mandate to restructure Noraid, ostensibly to make it more efficient but actually to shift power to a new raft of soldiers. He was ruthless in taking power away from the factions supporting the armed struggle and giving it to those who wanted a negotiated settlement. McBree’s hand-to-hand combat training must have come in useful, Paddy thought. His wife and two children had stayed home in Ireland while he was gone and a bomb had gone off near his house. Police suspected infighting in the Republican movement.

  He had been in her house. She thought back to the blunt letter opener, imagined herself trying to stab him and realized how lucky she had been. Sweating lightly, she sat back and saw Bunty’s Monkey watching her, his arms crossed, looking smug.

  The Donaldson clippings told her little of interest: he was pictured at a couple of press conferences, looking slimmer, less debauched. His son had died in the Maze and Donaldson himself was forced out of Northern Ireland after a turf war.

  The joint clippings filled out his story: his son, David Donaldson, had been stabbed to death aged nineteen by a junior member of a Loyalist paramilitary group just two days after he was brought in on remand. The assassin had been given an amnesty under Martin McBree’s orders, only to be found with his throat cut the day after his release. Rumour had it that McBree averted a gang war to give his group leverage with the prison authorities, and to afford the Donaldson family the courtesy of killing the assassin themselves.

  Donaldson owed McBree. He would have phoned him the minute she left the Shammy, reiterating every detail of what she had said, telling him that her son’s safety was her only concern.

  She sat back and thought about what Aoife had said: McBree was a good guy but only compared to the likes of the Shankill Butchers.

  19

  Callum in the Street

  I

  Maggie, the social worker assigned to his case, came in the morning and sat with Callum in the living room. She asked him questions about how he felt and he guessed the right answers: scared about the press, ashamed of his offences, happy to be free. She waited long after they had run out of things to say to each other, drank a cup of tea Elaine gave her and then said she’d come back next week, same time.

  Elaine avoided him. She spent most of her time in the kitchen. It was two in the afternoon and she was no longer strained but nippy now, sniping at the two babies, waking them when they fell asleep, trying to make them sleep when they were awake.

  Callum hadn’t moved from the sofa since watching Count Duckula with the kids before school, because no one had told him to and he didn’t want to just wander around the place. He went to the toilet a couple of times, accepted a cheese sandwich from Elaine and a cup of tea when Maggie came, and watched the television all day while the toddler came in and out. Sometimes she approached him, curious, pawing at his trouser leg, but she always went away. He didn’t know how to play with her.

  Finally Elaine came back into the living room.

  ‘Right.’ She had her purse open and was looking through it. ‘Here’s two quid. Could you go three doors up and get me four pints of milk and a loaf ?’

  Callum looked around. She couldn’t mean the toddler. ‘Me?’

  ‘Aye. Save me going.’ She held the notes out to him and he took them. They looked at each other. She went into the hall and came back with his coat. ‘Just out the door and to the left, three doors down.’

  He stood in the close and looked across the road to the door where he had seen the rat-feet hiding. He could see straight through to the dirt in the back yard, to the bin shed and next to it a big puddle with two small children crouched on its shore, playing. Women bustled past the close mouth, hurrying down the street, summer tops and jeans. Old women wore overcoats.

  He stepped out of the close, one, head down, keeping close to the wall, two three four five steps, slipping along to the left until he came to a shop door with stickers advertising cigarettes and bananas. Nineteen steps outside, alone, and nothing bad had happened.

  The door jingled as he opened it. A small Asian man looked up from the counter and then looked away again. Callum hurried over to hide behind the shelves, struggling to catch his breath. Twenty-six steps outside and nothing had happened. No one had looked at him twice. No one had recognized him. Maybe he wasn’t as famous as Mr Stritcher said he was.

  The radio was on in the shop, a jagged song with an insistent fast beat that the cheery DJ announced was by somebody Hammer. Callum liked it. He played another one, a slower song with long notes and a sad way about it.

  Callum stood still, staring at the bread and the boxes of cakes, and listened to the end. Wonderful. A mind can only hold one thought at a time and his mind now was full of beautiful music. He could feel the beat on his face, the stirring, sweeping notes through his chest. He wanted to dance, to sway and move his feet.

  ‘Ay, you there, are ye going to buy something?’

  The shopkeeper was talking to him. Callum stepped around the stand and looked at the man. He was tiny really, wore a turban and that made him look bigger, but he was less than five foot four and skinny, comical. ‘Eh?’

  ‘Are you going to buy something or just stand there?’ The man was so small and so angry. He wouldn’t have lasted a minute in prison. Men that slight couldn’t get that angry in prison unless they had a knife or a minder, and then, Callum realized, even if they had a really big argument it wouldn’t come to blows. That was why he was so angry, because it was safe to be angry. He poked his finger at Callum rudely. ‘Yeah, son, I can see the top of your head over those shelves there. What you doing standing so long? You’re not stealing from me, eh?’

  Callum held his jacket open to show he had nothing, hadn’t hidden a loaf in there. ‘I was listening to the radio. Forgot what I was doing.’

  ‘Aye, yeah, you like those tunes nowadays, bang bang bang? You like them, you young ones, at your discos. Load of old rubbish, man, garbage.’

  The tiny old man and Callum smiled at each other. You young ones. I am young.

  ‘What you come in for anyway, eh?’

  ‘Milk.’

  ‘Over there at the back.’ He waved Callum towards a fridge with a glass door. Cartons of green and blue were stacked up on top of each other.

  ‘I don’t know which one to get.’

  ‘Who is it for? For you?’

  ‘No, a baby.’

  ‘Blue.’

  Callum put it on the counter and held out the two pound notes. ‘And a loaf, please.’

  ‘You get that off the shelf. White, brown?’

  They gave you a choice of white or brown in prison but they tasted the same. He thought he remembered the cheese sandwic
h being white.

  ‘White, I think.’

  The old man punched the price into the till and charged him one twenty. He gave him his change. ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Just moved near here.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, still sounding angry, but half smiling as well. ‘You be a good customer to me, yes? Don’t give your money to those bastards in supermarket.’

  ‘OK,’ smiled Callum, taking the change from him. ‘OK.’

  Outside he smiled all the way along the road, swinging the loaf by the neck, thinking about the music he had heard and the funny man. He was at the close mouth before he realized he hadn’t been counting.

  Smiling, he turned back to the street and saw the leather shoes. They were parked in the close, same as they had been the night before. Brown, sleek, a pattern punched out on the toe. The bloke looked up. A young one, like himself. Long blond hair pulled back from his face, glasses, wearing a red-checked coat, watching down the road the way Callum had just come.

  The children who had been playing in the puddle in the back court pushed past the shoes. He let them through, smiling, touching the top of a head, and looked down the street again. He must have watched Callum coming out of the shop. Must have watched him swinging the loaf, off guard, smiling about the funny shopkeeper.

  Callum leaned his back against the close wall.

  They were coming for him.

  II

  Pete had finally settled in bed after only six trips back into the living room to ask for water, a bit of bread because he was hungry, a cuddle after a particularly badly feigned nightmare, the horror of which dissipated as soon as Dub smiled at him.