Slip of the Knife (27 page)

III

She was too old for sitting on stairs in buildings, but today she didn’t care about dignity or who she was supposed to be. The doors to the offices down- and upstairs were open into the stairwell for ventilation on a hot day. The muffled clack of electric typewriters and distant chat wafted up to her and the soft brown folder sat on her knees. Her name was written in his handwriting, carefully scrawled in capitals, big and clear enough to be read by any stranger.

She stroked it. A small grease spot had blossomed on the front, on a low corner. Fitzpatrick had said Terry gave it to him a year ago, to keep in the safe, when he had just come back to Glasgow, before he went to New York, before any of this had happened, probably before he had even become good friends with Kevin again.

She opened it.

The covering letter from Terry was written in his shorthand. She sighed. Everyone started out using the same textbook shorthand but over a lifetime it became a private language, virtually indecipherable to anyone else. Paddy could hardly read her own anymore. She peered at the sheet carefully. It was perfectly legible: Terry must have gone back to the book to write it.

P,

Notes here for you. Materials and stuff a friend gave me re your favorite person. Came to me through complex route, cost a lot of Marlboro and vodka.

Now you can do him justice.

She thought it was signed “Texan” but a second look told her he had slipped out of shorthand and marked the end T with a cross for a kiss.

Behind it, in a tidy pile of old papers, was a bill for two tickets on a commercial flight from Berlin Tempelhof in 1965. On a gray typewritten sheet behind that, a bill of lading acknowledging the receipt of prisoner 2108 by the British Embassy in West Berlin in the same year. In among yellowed press reports about the Patrick Meehan murder trial he had put a photocopy of the minutes of a meeting between the detective chief inspector in charge of Meehan’s investigation and a source called Hamish, whose name always appeared in inverted commas. It was vague, referring to actions commenced re PM and continued, threats to national security, details of Muscovite facilities where PM was held and reports written by PM. She understood every abbreviation, recognized each date and location. She knew what it all meant.

It must have taken Terry years to gather the evidence for her and God only knew which shadowy figures he’d bribed them from. For nearly three decades Patrick Meehan had been insisting that he was the victim of a conspiracy by the security services, that at their behest the Strathclyde police had fabricated evidence against him for the murder, but not a shred of supporting evidence ever came her way. Now she had it.

She had told Terry what the story meant to her, how she had followed Meehan’s progress through the courts since she was eight years old, from before she really knew what a court was, how she became a journalist because of him, because a journalist led the campaign to have him released and won. She had always thought him some small parallel of her own wicked self.

It was the most thoughtful thing anyone had ever done for her.

Paddy shut the folder, placed the flat of her hand on it, felt the grease from her palm being absorbed by the thick, porous paper.

Tearfully, she lifted it to her face and kissed it.

IV

As she stood on the top step, blinking hard at the bright day, a small figure materialized on the pavement in front of her. Merki.

“Oh,” he grinned cheekily, “I was just thinking about you.”

“What you doing here?”

He was wearing a brown shirt and matching tie, his top button undone to meet the heat of the day, the fat knot of tie squinted to one side. He looped his finger under it and yanked it to the other side. “Just, you know, going about. Polis let you out then?”

They nodded at each other.

“The gun story: who’s your source, Merki?”

“A good journalist protects his sources at all costs.”

She folded her arms. “Strathclyde police just pulled me in to warn me off saying it was the IRA.”

Merki thought about it for a moment. “Doesn’t mean it is the IRA, does it? They could be worried. A story like that could spread fear and alarm.” It was Knox’s phrase, word for word.

“You’re an idiot. They’re playing you for an idiot. If you weren’t an idiot you’d have kept your name off it.”

He snapped, “What the hell would you know, Meehan? You’re a columnist. ‘I like TV,’ that’s the sort of shite you write. You wouldn’t know news if it punched you right on the nose, anyway.”

“It was Knox, wasn’t it?” But the name didn’t register. “Garrett?”

He flinched, stepped back and shook his head.

“What were you typing this morning, Merki?”

“Oh, that?” He smirked down the empty street. “A fan letter. To you. I think you’re brilliant.”

“And I think you’re handsome.”

His mouth dropped open with hurt and surprise. He was a wee cross-eyed guy, his head was a funny shape, his body thick and his legs stringy. It wasn’t a choice he’d made. She’d gone too far. She always went too far. She muttered, “Sorry,” and shook her head. “Been a heavy morning.”

He looked at her sideways. “You’re fat,” he said petulantly.

“I am. I’m fat, Merki, sorry.”

Still sullen, he nodded, as if her admission had redressed the balance. “It’s just your luck, innit?”

She could have pointed out that she was fat because she ate too much while he was born ugly, but didn’t think it would help any. “Going in to see the boy wonder up there?”

“Been. Went round the corner to get a sarnie for lunch but my car’s here.” He patted the notebook in his pocket. “Got great stuff.”

They were competing for the story. Whatever he told her about an interview with Fitzpatrick, the opposite would be true and they both knew it. If he’d had longer to prepare he would have come back to the office and said he’d got nothing, just to work a double bluff.

“Well done,” she said and they smiled at each other.

He turned to the curb and a small blue Nissan with a key scratch along the bonnet and a dent in the driver’s door, fitting the key in and opening it. “You seen the house he left ye yet?”

“Nut.”

“Want to come with me?”

She couldn’t go back to the office, Pete was in school, and if she spent time with Merki she might be able to work out what he had been writing this morning. “Can I smoke in your car?”

“Aye.”

She shrugged. “All right, then.”

TWENTY-THREE

COTTAGE

The drive didn’t take long but it was harrowing. Bunches of dead flowers were propped up at several turnings, marking the sites of fatal crashes. Merki took it slow, pootling along at forty, hitting fifty on straight stretches. A queue of cars lined up behind him, drivers who were familiar with the route forming an angry tailgated convoy, trying to embarrass him into hurrying along. He remained calm, checking them in the mirror, pulling over as much as he could to let them overtake, meeting their displays of aggression with a gentle hand raised and admonishments to “calm yourself down, pal.”

They turned a particularly sharp corner on the road and suddenly the soft hills of Ayrshire lay before them, carpeted in vibrant green grass, distant hills dotted with fat cows. The road broadened to two lanes and they were free to hang in the slow lane while a long line of irritable locals sped past, variously flicking their fingers at them or indicating that one of them had a cylindrical item attached to his head. Merki smiled calmly and waved back.

Merki wasn’t giving anything away about the Terry article. She asked him how he knew about Eriskay House and he said that the secretary had told him about that and the folder and Wendy Hewitt, but she knew he wouldn’t be telling her the truth; he was too professional. Fitzpatrick had probably told him. It might be a big fancy house, he said, hopeful for her. It sounded like it, didn’t it? Eriskay House sounded grand.

She let herself imagine for a moment that it was a gorgeous colonnaded country pile, but the only houses she could envisage like that were in Gone with the Wind and a white plantation villa seemed unlikely, even in rich rural Ayrshire. She reminded herself not to get too attached to the house, whatever it was like. She had no real right to a family home when there was a member of the family still living. Terry shouldn’t have left it to her. The folder was enough. Her hand crept into her bag and stroked a corner of it. Terry knew her better than almost anyone else. He had got to know her before she learned to lie, before she had defenses.

The double lanes of traffic merged again into single file and the road began to snake dangerously between two hills.

Suddenly Merki said, “There!” and swung the car to the left, leaving the fast road for a dirt track, overgrown with waist-high grass and wild bushes. Twenty feet on they came to a clearing and he stopped, switching the engine off. The grass was so deep he was afraid to go on, he said; they didn’t want to get stuck.

Scarlett O’Hara wouldn’t have asked a slave to live here. The house was a small Highland cottage, single story with deep small windows and a low front door with a heavy lintel. Brush and grass had grown so high along the walls that they looked as if they were shoring the building up. The roof was punched in on one side and a drainpipe hung down over the front. What really drew the eye, though, was the enormous crack running from the corner of the front door to the roof, edges mismatched, as if the entire building might snap in half like an Easter egg.

They got out. Paddy stood by the car, slightly stunned at the state of the place, while Merki stepped gingerly through the long grass and peered in the windows.

“There’s a piano in there,” he said, looking back at her. “Come and see.”

She wished she hadn’t come. It was so depressing. A family house rotted from a decade of neglect. It would have been lovely once, though, and it wasn’t that far from the city. Terry always had a car; he could have lived here as easily as anywhere else. It made no sense that he chose to live in grimy bed-sitters when he had this house fifteen minutes away.

“Come and see.”

Merki watched her reaction as she peered in the window, observing her so closely she wondered if he was going to write about it. “Fuck off,” she said and he turned away, urinal polite.

The windowsill was half a foot deep. She wiped the frosting of dust from the glass and looked inside. Storm shutters were propped open and beyond them the room was small and low. A piano was listing slightly against the back wall, the floor sinking into the dirt below. Old cottages didn’t have foundations—they were built straight into the soil, the weight of the walls keeping them upright—but it meant that damp took over if they weren’t kept warm, and this house hadn’t been warm for a long time. The fitted carpet on the floor looked warped and a tidal mark cantered across the back wall at head height. The wallpaper was faded and sliding down the wall at the corner. Pink with a pattern of disembodied baskets of flowers.

Merki was at her shoulder. “What do ye think?”

She stepped back and looked at him. “Are you going to write about this?”

“Mibbi.” He’d have denied it if he was.

She looked at him, wondering. “Merki, why are we here?”

He shrugged, looked away, shrugged again. “Dunno. Background?”

He was up to something. Definitely. He was doing innocent but he’d kept checking his watch all the way up here and now a smug smile was tugging at the corner of his mouth. He didn’t know about Kevin or he would have mentioned it. She remembered the McBree and Donaldson clippings in her bag, the dates on the front of them showing they had last been looked at months ago. Merki didn’t know anything about McBree either. But then she hardly knew anything about him herself.

“Let’s look round the side,” she said.

They waded through the damp grass in single file. At the back the land opened up into a long garden, now choked with a decade of neglect. Large trees hid the road but they could hear it, the cars and lorries speeding past. At the far end was the orchard where his parents had stood under a tree for a photograph. Green baby apples the size of cherries were just appearing on the trees but the trunks and some branches had been colonized by thick, waxy ivy. She couldn’t see the exact tree they had stood under but she was sure it was here. It must have been a lonely place for an only child to grow up.

The kitchen was bare and basic, the table covered in dust and mouse droppings. A cardboard box sat on a dresser, rotting in the damp, ripped by mice making a home. There didn’t seem to be a cooker. It was in the country and it wasn’t council but it was modest. She had always assumed Terry came from money, but she suspected everyone of that because she didn’t herself.

She stood back and saw that Merki was looking at another crack in the wall, this one beginning above the kitchen window.

“Let’s go home.”

But Merki was reluctant. He stepped over to the back door and wiped the dirt from the keyhole. “I can jimmy this. Want to go inside?”

“Nah.”

“No bother,” he said and got a ring of L-shaped metal sticks from his pocket.

“Merki, I can’t be bothered, there’s nothing to see in there but mice.”

He stopped, checked his watch, did some mental calculations and nodded. “Aye, all right.”

Head down, he led the way back to the car.

She lit a cigarette when they were inside and offered him one but he declined. “What are you checking your watch for all the time?”

He shrugged, flinging an arm over the back of the seat to reverse out to the mouth of the driveway, keeping to the tracks in the flattened grass they had made on the way in.

“Are you waiting for something to happen? Was someone supposed to meet us here?”

He stopped the car, looking out at the traffic speeding past on the road.

Just three feet away cars were going past so fast she couldn’t make out the drivers’ faces. Behind them, coming from Glasgow, a lorry took the blind turn in the road and hurtled towards them, correcting his trajectory at the last minute and narrowly avoiding clipping Merki’s boot.