by Denise Mina
In New York he changed how he dressed. Val asked him about it when he came home, said he looked cheap in his print shirts and loafers. She hated change. If she had her way they’d take the kids and go and live in the parish house with the gnarly old priests, but Martin had seen another life out there, a life devoid of the Church or the struggle, where a man could just be.
He smiled as he stepped on to the pavement. New York. Everything was brighter then and it wasn’t even very long ago. Over the cusp of the hill came an old man in a deerstalker hat and overcoat, dragging an elderly King Charles spaniel out for a stroll in the middle of the night. Incontinent dog or insomniac owner. Martin sank his hands into his pockets, keeping his head down, pretending to feel for house keys as he walked past the old man.
‘Come on,’ the old man muttered, attentive to his charge. He looked up to McBree, keen to engage with the only other soul in the street at that hour, but McBree kept his head down, frowning, preoccupied, a man on his way home. He strode on to the entrance to the estate.
In keeping with his training, he kept his eyes on the road in front of him, not glancing around. People who belong in a place don’t swivel their heads like lost tourists. In a familiar environment no one looks around. People walk blindly, thinking; most let their faces drop into a half-scowl.
The road surface changed at the mouth of the estate, from the patched tarmac on the old main road to yellow brick, set in a hound’s-tooth pattern, with matching slab pavements and an orange lip of bricks separating them. It was a new estate. The bricks had not yet had the time to settle into the ground and become irregular, no corners jagging upwards to trip the toe or wobbly slabs with secret puddles underneath to splash the shin. It was pristine.
He allowed himself an orientating glance upward. The map of the shallow streets was pretty clear but it was always possible to follow a pavement to the wrong corner, especially when it all looked the same. The houses were small and regular, expensive still because they were in a posh area but unremarkable none the less. The cars parked in the driveway showed the real income: big foreign cars, a sports car, all sitting next to freshly laid lawns living out their first summer. By next year the care of the owners would tell. The lawns wouldn’t be uniform then; some would flourish, others would die back to dandelions and alopecia patches.
The roads were ablaze. Yellow street lights were dotted along the yellow pavement, their bulbs new, placed so that each pool of brightness formed a Venn-diagram overlap with the next. The houses had porch lights that remained on even when all the lights in the house were off. It was three in the morning and the place was bright as day.
A problem with new estates, and he had come across this before in Poleglass, was that they had no dark back alleys to skirt through and wait in. Here the houses had small rear gardens backing on to other small gardens, and nothing between them but a wooden fence. The back wasn’t an option.
He came up to the house and saw a shiny black Merc sitting in the driveway, glinting under the porch light. All the windows were dark.
Without looking up or slowing his stride, McBree scanned the house. No alarm box blinking a warning. Front door, plastic, big window into front room, curtains open, garage on the other side. Second floor, small window, bathroom or bedroom, big window master bedroom. New developers liked to squeeze en suites into cupboards in these things, just for the spec in the estate agent’s window, so a good bit of the second floor would be taken up with that room. There was a second bedroom though, he knew that. The guy wouldn’t have a Merc in the driveway and make his kid sleep on the floor when he came for a visit.
A TV comedian. McBree had watched the show last week, to see the face, weigh the guy in. Not funny but the guy seemed angry and looked tall, six foot one or so, unless everyone else in the show was very small. It was hard to guess. Ex-policeman. It would be a pleasure.
Without a dip in his stride he walked down the driveway and cut off to the side of the house, round the corner where the empty bins were. He stopped. A deep velvet blackness enveloped him. He let his face relax and pulled his latex gloves on. He looked up at the side wall of the house next door. No lights on, and only one small window on each house, high up, the neighbours’ netted, the target clear but dark. He stepped back against the dividing fence and looked more carefully. Clear but even in the darkness he could see the outline of bottles neatly regimented, shoulders to the glass. Main bathroom. The small window at the front was the second bedroom.
A high slatted fence ran between the properties and there was a gate into the back yard, locked with an old-fashioned black bolt lock. He fingered it and smiled. It wouldn’t have kept a chicken out.
Reaching into his pocket, he felt for his old skeleton key, the cold, firm shank sitting comfortably in his hand. It was a while since he’d used it. Most locks were more complex now. He spat on the bit, rubbing the saliva over the teeth to silence the entry into the lock, and tried it. The lock sprang back with a loud, unaccustomed crunch. McBree stood perfectly still for a moment, listening for movement. Nothing. He spat silently on to his fingertips and rubbed the exposed hinges on the gate, trying it tentatively at first until he was sure it made nothing louder than a mild creak. Pausing only to pull his balaclava on, he adjusted the eye holes and slid through the gate into the garden.
A patch of grass surrounded by the high fence, a glass conservatory, shallow, leading into a kitchen. A television on standby sat on a table, the lone red eye lighting the floor in front of it. The place looked tidy, no clothes or newspapers left on the floor or counter tops, which was good: it was unlikely there would be any debris lying around to trip over. Not like the photographer’s house. Shit everywhere. Val would have had a fit if she’d seen that. She liked the house perfect. It was her one sphere of control. Her mother had been the same.
The back door was plastic like the front but windowed, a long mottled strip of glass in a PVC frame. He looked at the lock, standing close in so that his shadow would blend in with the line of the house if anyone looked. It was complicated, a bolt and a Yale, a lot of work.
He turned back to the conservatory. A ground-level glass panel could be cut and slipped out of the frame easily enough and he would fit in sideways. He paused, half listening for noise inside and out, but really savouring the moment. These quiet times, when his mind was fully occupied with an immediate problem, when his hot breath gathered as droplets of moisture inside his mask, he was content.
He wanted a cigarette. He always wanted a cigarette. Sometimes while he was actually smoking he craved a cigarette.
He took the penknife from his pocket, checked carefully with his finger that the blade was exposed and spat a long line of saliva down the glass. He’d left saliva at a scene before but he was the most common blood group and the police would be steered away from him even if they spotted it. The blade scratched quietly down then across, and he pushed with his fingertips, starting when one edge of the glass snapped and the muffled crack echoed across the lawn. No movement.
Taking hold of the edge, he pulled first one section out, then the next and the last. Just wide enough. He squared his shoulders to the hole and wriggled in easily, landing on the cold floor like a snake shedding its skin.
He stood up, looked around, padded silently through the kitchen to the hallway – carpeted, better. He turned the locks on the front door, snibbing them so that both would be ready for a quick exit, and watched the door in case it fell open. Fine.
Upstairs, padding the steep carpeted steps, moss green, to the landing. Stop. Breathing behind one door, the master bedroom, a man snoring in a light regular whistle. The bathroom to the side, where the window looked over the alley. The door to the second bedroom straight ahead.
Stop.
Nausea. Confused images. His own grandson sleeping over on New Year’s Eve, nuzzled up to Val on the settee, his cheek resting on her thigh, and McBree creeping through the dark of a house to harm him.
Bullshit.
H
e stepped forward, aware of the brush of his sole on the fibres of the carpet, the rubber of his gloves catching on the landing banister as he trailed his fingers. He was facing the boy’s bedroom door, could sense the living presence on the other side. He did a quick mental rehearsal: open the door, step in, find the torso, knife into left side, straight for the heart. He had a point to make. Every drop of blood, every gut-churning task – they were all necessary. But McBree’s heart weighed like a stone in his chest. The justifications weren’t working tonight. A child. A healthy child. Asleep, trusting the world to mind him.
He remembered his O level Shakespeare. Macbeth. Losing it. ‘I am in blood stepped in so far that returning were as tedious as going over.’ Something like that. Go. Just go.
His fight hand circled the handle of the blade. His left took hold of the door handle, his wrist moving awkwardly, pressed it down, releasing the catch.
‘What are you doing here?’
McBree spun on his heel. He hadn’t even heard footsteps, hadn’t heard a door open, no padding feet or steadying hand brush a wall. A woman, good-looking, blonde hair pillow-blustered, eyes heavy with sleep, standing in the doorway to the master bedroom in a long white nightie, the ties at the neck lying open, exposing the curve of her breasts. He lunged with the knife but she fell back into the room and he only nicked her skin, carving a wide crescent on her left breast. She fell to the floor, scrambling backwards on all fours like a spider, blood gushing, panting and whimpering at the same time.
The man snoring in the bed sat up very suddenly, threw the duvet off and got to his feet, staggering sideways, facing the wrong way. He was six foot two, three maybe, and broad, much bigger than McBree.
McBree’s combat-hardened mind gave him two options: kill them all, stage-lit like a break-in, or run.
The man stumbled to where he had begun as the woman rolled her head back to let out a ripe, ear-splitting scream.
McBree bolted down the stairs, threw open the door, and was gone.
29
Very Terry
I
It felt like the first day of school. Everyone was wearing black and looking neat and scrubbed. Men she hadn’t seen looking clean in years were standing around in groups, hair smeared flat, dressed in whatever formal clothing they could find, chatting on the forecourt of the cathedral.
There was Merki and Keck and Bunty and his Monkey. All of the Standard guys were there, none of whom could possibly have known Terry more than in passing. McGrade, the manager from the Press Bar, was there, together with his tiny, bearded sidekick, which meant the bar was shut for the first time in living memory. Sean was standing with the drivers and gave her a wink and turned away.
McVie had called everyone in the business and they had all come because it was about more than Terry Hewitt: it was a celebration of who they were. Terry would have loved it.
Paddy’s eyes prickled. Tipping her head back to stop her mascara running, she looked up at the Gothic spires of the cathedral and the green Necropolis hill beyond, Victorian death monuments choked with ivy. She was getting Pete withdrawals, a tightening in her stomach because she hadn’t spoken to him before he went to school, didn’t know what he’d eaten or if he’d slept at all. She’d call Burns after the ceremony and ask Sandra what he’d had. At least she knew how to make toast.
Glasgow Cathedral dated largely from the end of the thirteenth century. It was saved from destruction during the Reformation when a gang of the city’s tradesmen armed themselves and fought off a mob of treasure-seekers in a pitched battle. The squat building was blackened during the Industrial Revolution and sat at the top of the High Street like a fat toad draped in a mourning mantilla.
McVie was greeting mourners like a maitre d’, working the crowd, certain that the Mail on Sunday would be mentioned in all the coverage. He spotted Paddy and Dub coming towards him, did a spot check of her clothes and saw she was dressed smartly.
‘You’re up first then,’ he said. ‘Set the right tone.’
‘But I haven’t got anything prepared.’
He saw the panic in her eyes. ‘Just do it off the cuff. Since when could you not talk? Did you see Merki’s exclusive?’
‘Where did he get that from?’
It was a rhetorical question but McVie looked irritated. ‘The fuck should I know?’ He slipped away to talk to someone else.
A hand landed hard on her shoulder and she turned to see Billy, her first-ever driver, standing behind her, grinning. Billy had beefed up in the intervening years. He had left the News after a firebomb attack on her car, using the payout to buy a burger van so he could continue working nights. His hands were badly scarred, the skin smooth and watered; the little finger of one hand had been removed after a graft didn’t take. He’d had long hair then but it was shaved now, tight into the wood, like Terry’s when she first knew him. His wife, Agnes, was at his side, as warm as a tank. She looked away as they greeted each other with kisses and slaps to the arm.
‘And is this your young man?’ asked Billy of Dub.
‘Oh no, this is Dub McKenzie. D’ye not remember Dub?’
Billy said he didn’t, so they told him about Dub’s time as a copy boy at the News, gave dates and outlined a couple of stories: Dub getting caught hiding in a café when he was supposed to be death-knocking a widow, Dub stapling prawns to the underside of an editor’s desk before he left. Billy still didn’t remember but pretended to and that did well enough.
Paddy and Dub moved away.
‘Why are we a secret?’ asked Paddy under her breath.
‘I can’t remember,’ said Dub, pretending he hadn’t seen Keck waving to him. ‘Let’s body-swerve that tit for a start. Will Callum be all right out there on his own, do you think?’
They had left him back at the cottage with three cans of juice and a loaf of bread, promising to come back later or send Sean. He was happy to stay there, said he had never been to the countryside and wanted to know what all the trees were.
‘Not gossiping, dears? Naughty, naughty.’ It was Farquarson, Paddy’s first-ever boss, the last editor any of them had known who stood up to the board for them. Paddy had hero-worshipped Farquarson, who’d taken an interest in her, given her writing assignments when she wasn’t due them. He had aged badly since she last saw him. He was wearing a trilby hat but she could still see that his hair had thinned. His ears were long, drooping, the skin loose where they were attached to his skull, and his face was livered and jowly.
He pointed at Paddy, couldn’t locate her name and then it occurred to him. ‘Monihan!’
Paddy grinned at him. ‘Meehan, you mad old bastard.’
McVie was persuading everyone inside and nipped her elbow, muttering, ‘You’re next to me at the front.’ Then he turned to greet Farquarson. ‘You look a hundred years old.’
McVie didn’t like Farquarson. He had languished on night shift under him and only got out of it by convincing a grieving mother to let him document her son’s death from a heroin overdose.
She was worried that McVie was picking on a faded old man but Farquarson answered, ‘And I hear you’re a nancy now.’
Insults met and meted, everyone settled into the company and headed towards the chapel doors.
A big chauffeur-driven car pulled up suddenly at the kerb. They watched as the driver leaped out and ran round the car to open the door. Out stepped Random Damage, the short, overbearing editor who had turned the News from a dull-as-dust broadsheet into a tabloid success. He was dressed in a beautifully cut grey suit and was carrying a small black box. Paddy realized it was a portable telephone. Why Damage would need a telephone at a memorial service was obvious to anyone who knew him: he was obsessed with image and wanted the world to know he had a portable telephone. Second out of the car was his slim, six-foot-tall wife, who straightened her black velvet overcoat and stood, willowy, at his side. Paddy heard that he had left the press to run his wife’s chain of luxury hotels.
‘Is that a walkie-tal
kie?’ asked Farquarson.
Damage held it up. ‘Portable telephone.’
McVie looked sullen. ‘Not that portable, though, is it?’
‘Can you only phone other portable telephones with it?’ asked Paddy.
Damage laughed at her. ‘No. You can telephone any other phone. Soon they’ll have faxes on them as well. That’s the new thing.’
‘And you’ll have to lug tons of paper around,’ said McVie, jealous and not making a good job of hiding it.
Paddy reached out. ‘Can I have a go? I need to make a two-minute call.’
‘Be my guest.’
‘Fucking hurry up,’ said McVie.
Paddy dialled Burns’s number.
‘Hello?’ Burns sounded a long way away. The line crackled and spat.
‘Oh, hi, George.’ She was shouting, her voice lost in the big open space, so she turned away from the crowd of people and shouted into the street. ‘Just wondered if Pete got away to school OK?’
Burns was quiet.
A fist tightened around Paddy’s heart. ‘What?’
‘Paddy, Pete—’
‘What? Is he ill? Is he there?’
‘He’s here, he’s fine but the house is full of policemen. We got broken into last night. Sandra went to the loo at three in the morning and found a guy on the landing heading into Pete’s bedroom with a knife.’
‘Fuck!’
‘Wearing a balaclava. He cut Sandra’s tit open and ran away but he was definitely headed for Pete.’
‘I’m coming now.’
‘No, look, the house is full of CID and they’re taking us to the station so they can tape our interviews. Come later. Come and get us at Pitt Street.’