The Last Breath

by Denise Mina

  ‘How’s Pete?’

  ‘I’ll put you on.’ Burns opened a door and called Pete.

  Her son’s tinny voice came on, distorted, sounding far away and electronic. ‘Mum? We got burgled! A man came in in the night and tried to steal Sandra’s jewellery.’ Paddy fought back choking tears, kicking at the ground, nodding. ‘Gosh. That’s mad. Are you OK?’

  ‘It’s exciting. He broke a window and climbed in.’

  ‘I need that back now.’ Damage was standing next to her, holding his hand out to the phone, deliberately ignoring the tears in her eyes and her evident panic.

  ‘Son, Dad’s going to take you to the police station, won’t that be something?’

  ‘I can see where he used to work. He knows everybody.’

  ‘Come on,’ shouted McVie, waving her over.

  Damage had circled her and was in her face. ‘The battery’ll run out. Give it to me.’

  ‘I’ll come and see you this afternoon, darlin’, OK?’

  ‘Mum, a man said he’s going to show me the cells.’

  ‘Meehan, give it.’ Damage lunged forward to grab the phone but she clung on.

  ‘I love you, son.’

  But Pete had hung up.

  Damage was saying something about the battery life. McVie came over and took her elbow, dragging her towards the church.

  McBree had come for Pete, with a knife. She felt very cold, her breathing deepened, every muscle in her body was loading itself with oxygen, ready to coil and spring. She felt as if she could outstare the sun.

  McVie dragged her into the cathedral. The internal walls were as black and forbidding as the facade of the church but it opened up to an arched oak ceiling and tall needled windows, jewelled with blue and red glass. McVie had gone to a lot of trouble. Big bouquets of lilies and white chrysanthemums, strung with red and blue ribbons, were hanging on both sides of the aisle with a giant wreath in white, red and blue sitting at the base of the altar. They were the colours of Ayr United, Terry’s football team.

  Feeling nothing but cold blind anger, Paddy followed McVie into the front pew. Ben, his precious, queeny boyfriend, was waiting for them. McVie would never admit to Ben, but here he was in plain sight, standing at the front of the massed mob of the Glasgow journalistic mafia. In a show of support, Paddy leaned over and kissed Ben’s proffered cheek, settling back in the pew and realizing that her lips were coated in face powder.

  A minister came in and everyone stood up. The organ struck up a short tune, drowning out the sound of the singing, which was very ragged and rambling. A minister talked for a bit about life and death and why it was a shame, but not really, because of Jesus, and then, without warning, he stepped aside and looked at McVie, who looked at Paddy. Ben looked at Paddy. Everyone in the church looked at Paddy.

  She wanted to drop her head back and scream but instead stepped out into the aisle, began to genuflect and then remembered it was a Protestant cathedral, getting a laugh when she bolted upright again.

  She didn’t even know where to stand, but the minister held his hand out and guided her up the winding staircase to the pulpit.

  The wooden platform groaned beneath her feet as she looked out at the expectant faces. Shug Grant, Keck, JT, Merki, McVie, a hundred and fifty men, some arseholes, some good souls, most both depending on the occasion.

  She leaned into the microphone.

  ‘Terry Hewitt was a friend of mine.’ The words echoed around the hollow church.

  It felt strange to say his name, to think of anything but Pete. He was safe at the moment and this was for Terry. Terry. Terry who wasn’t at all who she’d thought he was. He was an ordinary man who’d done his best with a lot of bad luck. But she’d made him into a paragon and then hated him for not living up to it. She couldn’t talk about that Terry, the real Terry, who came from a small home and belonged nowhere. She started again.

  ‘Terry Hewitt was my hero. I was a copy boy at the Daily News and he was a junior reporter. He had a leather jacket.’ That got another laugh. ‘He lived alone.’ If anyone didn’t already know she came from a big Catholic family the aborted genuflection had told them, and they laughed at that too. ‘I didn’t know then why he lived alone, just that his parents had died in a car crash. He told me but you don’t really hear those things when you’re young. They died thirty yards from the house and Terry was the first on the scene. He was seventeen.’ The pathos of the moment overwhelmed her. She paused, swallowing hard, getting a grip. ‘We spent a lot of time together when we were starting out. Well, most of you know,’ she looked up again, ‘we went out together. But all we talked about was our work, what we wanted to do in our work, and Terry was going to change the world.’

  She looked down and saw Shug Grant whispering to the man next to him. They both sniggered and avoided looking at her. A sexual slur about her, not thinking about Terry or who he was or what he meant his life to be, just there because everyone else was, and there would be drink afterwards.

  ‘Some of us are here because we loved Terry. Some of us are here because our editors said we could get the morning off.’ A nervous titter rolled around the church. They could see she was looking stern, staring down at Shug. She was famous for losing her temper and going beyond what was appropriate, and they could see that she was angry. ‘But I’m here because of what Terry represented to me. He worked on a bigger scale than most of us here. He went to war zones, conflict zones, did hard reporting on a world stage.’

  Paddy could sense the atmosphere plummeting. She knew she should tell a funny story, make herself popular by lightening the mood, but all she could see was Terry as a young man standing at the end of his parents’ driveway, looking into the fireball engulfing their car. And Pete, asleep in a bed she had never seen, with a bad man outside the door and herself miles away.

  The security forces would blanket the whole episode with rumours and dripfeeds to hungry journos like Merki. McBree would come for Pete again and next time he’d hurt her son, to hurt her. The best she could do, what Terry would have done, was draw the fire to herself. She began to weep but her voice remained steady.

  ‘Terry was killed over a book he was writing, executed on a dark road late at night, shot in the back of the head. The official word is he was mugged. If you believe that, if this audience believes that, then journalism is dead. He was killed by a man called Martin McBree, a high-ranking Republican. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.’ A ripple of consternation feathered the crowd awake. Merki sat up and attempted a casual laugh but no one looked at him.

  Paddy’s voice weakened. She leaned into the microphone to be heard. ‘Terry would have stood here and said that. He made me proud to be a hack. He was the best of us.’

  She stepped away from the lectern, crying, ashamed that it wasn’t really for Terry, and walked back to her seat to a hesitant round of applause.

  A guy in a khaki jacket got up from the pew behind, carrying copious notes, and took her place.

  McVie leaned over to her, talking out of the side of his mouth. ‘What the fuck was all that about? Cheer us all up, why don’t you.’

  She elbowed him gently in the ribs.

  ‘No,’ he whispered, handing her his handkerchief. ‘It was good. Really good. Very Terry.’

  The khaki man had come from London to speak. His accent was posh and public school, which immediately made everyone hate him. He claimed to be a great friend of Terry’s. Referring back to Paddy’s speech, he implicated himself on a grander world stage, which compounded the audience’s prejudices. Then he told a couple of stories about Terry and himself at significant world events, in Gaza, then in Lebanon, the point of which seemed to be that he was there, and filed his copy before Terry, who had trouble getting things down on paper. He made a horrible allusion to Terry having sex with a fat woman whose children were waiting in the next room. He slunk off to a silence an audience at the Glasgow Empire would have thought harsh.

  Two or three other local journalists tried
their hand, one to talk about Terry’s capacity for drink, another to tell a story about them investigating corruption at a greyhound track and trying to get a urine sample from a dog, which went down well.

  Last up was McVie. He slid past Paddy and took his time getting up there, pausing to rest a hand on either side of the lectern and look down his nose at the crowd, letting them know he was in charge.

  It was an after-dinner speech but no worse for that. He made some sweeping statements about the nature of journalism, told three perfect stories about quips Terry had made, none of them hugely funny, but they were well delivered and stormed with the audience, who were ripe for a laugh.

  He finished on a rousing note: sales were dropping across the board, Terry Hewitt might well be remembered as the last of a dying breed. No one had funding for foreign journalists now and papers were in danger of turning into nothing but daily bingo games and holiday giveaways. It was up to them to make sure that didn’t happen through their dedication and commitment. Then he invited everyone back to McGrade’s for a toast.

  Paddy wondered how commitment could trump a lack of funding but no one else seemed to. The crowd rose for him, applauding him for organizing the event and bringing his boyfriend as much as for his call to arms.

  McVie got back to his seat. The organ struck a note and the cathedral emptied as suddenly as a toilet flushing.

  But Paddy, McVie and Ben lingered, looking at the Ayr United wreath at the base of the altar.

  When the clatter of feet behind them died down Paddy whispered to McVie, ‘How can dedication stop the decline?’

  McVie sighed and looked down at his legs as they stretched out in front of him, flexing his ankles. ‘It can’t,’ he said. ‘Nothing can.’

  II

  Paddy knew that if she went roaring over to Pitt Street and demanded to see Pete before his tour of the cells he’d know something scary was happening, that the man in his father’s house had been there for him, not for Sandra’s jewellery. So she and Dub went to the Press Bar.

  McVie had put three hundred quid behind the bar and ordered McGrade to line up whisky shots all along it, just to start the drinking off on a nice, mental note. Most of the attendees were Protestant and had never been to a wake. They didn’t understand that the idea was to drink until the misery evaporated and tell stories about the dead person, remember them as a companion, celebrate their life. All they knew was the tradition was Irish so they’d better get hammered and fight each other. And so they did.

  By the time Paddy nudged the car into a far corner of the full Daily News car park the noise from the bar was deafening and the crowd had spilled out into the street. She stood next to Dub, looking at the shabby brown-tiled exterior, at the men smoking on the step outside and the general hubbub and decided, fuck it, they’d go and wait in the lobby at Pitt Street until a decent amount of time had passed. At least they’d be near Pete then. Paddy was pulling out of the dusty car park when she saw the khaki man crossing the road in front of her, heading towards the bar.

  She wound down her window and shouted over to him but he didn’t hear her, just kept his head down and sidled through the crowd at the door.

  Dub nudged her. ‘Go on after him. I’ll park.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Go on. I’ll park the car and wait.’

  The khaki man was at the bar when she got in, the only person there with no one to talk to, standing uncertainly with a whisky shot in his hand as the choppy crowd drank their way to gale force. She kept her head down and made for him.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, refusing a whisky from McGrade.

  ‘Oh, hello.’ He gave her a look as if she’d interrupted something terribly important. ‘You were the first speaker, weren’t you? Very good. Moving. Great speakers, the Scots.’

  ‘Thanks. So you knew Terry in Lebanon?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ He saw that she wanted him to elaborate but misunderstood and gave her a potted history of his own career, sipping at his whisky shot as if it was sherry. He was terribly clever, seemed to be the gist of it, cleverer than other people. He named a couple of other Middle Eastern correspondents, big national names, and told her why they were wrong and foolish.

  ‘But to get back to Terry. What was he doing there?’ Terry had been sent to Lebanon by the national editor when the usual guy’s wife was having a baby. But he hated it, said it was impossible to write up a Lebanese bus timetable without having a first in history. Khaki Man paused there, nodding a heavy prompt that suggested he did have a first in history, if only she would ask.

  She pulled a sheet of paper out of her pocket and unfolded it carefully on the bar. The toner was crumbling at the folds but McBree’s face was still recognizable. ‘Did you ever meet this guy?’

  ‘Martin McBree? Yes, he was in the Lebanon, everyone knows that.’

  ‘Did Terry ever meet him?’

  ‘Sure. Everyone did. We all did. He was at a dinner organized by a Reuters agency man from Hong Kong. Samkeh harrah. Very good.’

  ‘Sammy Hurrah, is that the guy’s name?’

  He smirked. ‘No. It’s a Lebanese dish.’

  ‘Was Terry at the dinner too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he and McBree have a fight or anything?’

  ‘No.’

  Khaki’s absolute certainty that there was never once a jostle at a urinal or an argument over a bowl of peanuts on a bar was getting on Paddy’s nerves. ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘McBree was much more interested in established Middle Eastern correspondents. He talked to me for over half an hour. Was very interested in my analysis of the Camp Wars. Terry really struggled to understand the interests of the different factions out there, he couldn’t—’

  ‘For fucksake, I’m not asking whether Terry was more important than you, I’m asking if he ever fought with McBree.’

  Khaki sipped at his whisky again, an insult to a host in Scotland. He rolled the microscopic portion around the back of his throat before swallowing and his mouth stayed puckered when he spoke. ‘Young lady, you’ll find politeness and a pleasant manner will get you further—’

  She was spluttering angry, ‘Oh, shut up, you utter cock.’

  McGrade grinned at her from behind the bar. He reached over, handing her a brimming whisky shot and she downed it in one, slammed the glass on the bar and gave Khaki Man a parting piece of advice.

  ‘You keep talking like an arsehole and you’ll leave this bar with a sore face.’

  She heard later that he flew back to London with a splint on his nose and an arm in plaster.

  30

  Slip of the Knife

  I

  The Pitt Street reception area was busy. Police officers, uniformed and plain-clothed, bustled by, all with the same military-precision haircut and shoulders-back bearing. They greeted each other, waited for the lift, disappeared through doors behind reception or took the stairs, never pausing to consider Paddy and Dub, both in funeral clothes, both scruffy and frightened, waiting anxiously on the black leatherette chairs, sweating with the desire to see their boy.

  The receptionist was a young man this time, officious and cold, anticipating their annoyance by deadening his eye every time they asked when the questioning would be over, when would they be able to see Pete. Burns was still being questioned. Pete and Sandra had been taken for a tour of one of the stations nearby but Paddy and Dub needed Burns’s say-so before the police could let them see him.

  Paddy sat back, twitchy and sickened, thinking that it was a good thing really: she might have been an agent for McBree, they were keeping her boy safe.

  Resting her head on the back of the chair, staring up at the stained polystyrene ceiling tiles, she tried to clear her mind. It had been a declaration of war. She had named McBree at the memorial service and some of the journalists who had been there would pick up on it. She’d given them his name, they’d make calls, he’d hear about it. He had the prints and the negatives but Knox would have told
him that she had been brandishing photocopies. He had to come for her now. If he didn’t get the last few copies the IRA would kill him for his betrayal.

  What she couldn’t understand was why McBree had turned. He was a lifelong Republican, it was his devotion and his career. He was a hero. It must have been his whole identity. The clippings said a bomb had gone off near his family home while he was in New York, she remembered. He’d left his wife and family to deal with the consequences of his commitment to a cause, while at the same time he took money and protection from the enemy. She didn’t know what the security services had over him but it must have been compelling. Blackmail was usually about sex or money.

  McBree and Paddy came from the same background. She knew that with rigid moral laws all it took was a stumble on the path, a slip of the knife, unrepented, to put a person on the outside for ever, looking in on their families and friends. Paddy herself had stumbled and slipped, scrabbling back but never quite making it. She’d spent most of her childhood on the outside looking in on that warm place. Eventually, when she was older, she had let herself career down the mountainside. It was a lonely journey, but when she came to the bottom she had found her own people in the newsroom, among friends like Dub.

  She looked up at him. Dub was leaning on his knees, his back tense, head dropped forward and a big bony hand on his neck. She nudged him with her knee and he sat up and looked at her.

  ‘This is taking fucking ages,’ he said.

  ‘He’s safe.’

  Not comforted, he shrugged a little and looked round at three policemen waiting at the lift doors. They were all out of uniform but tall and clipped. One wore a green wax coat, the other two suit jackets over slacks. Dub leaned back to mutter to her, ‘Ye wonder how they ever manage to go undercover, don’t ye? They look so polis-y you could cash them in.’

  A bad suit stopped at the corner of her eye, pale blue, slightly crumpled skirt. Paddy turned to find the policewoman who’d interviewed her for Knox standing just inside the doors, looking at her, wary. Paddy nodded. ‘Garrett.’