Slip of the Knife (29 page)

“Is that why you’re smoking again?”

She managed a shaky smile.

He looked at her stubby cigarette. “Can you think of anything less regal than Regal?”

They took three puffs to smoke, were favored by women who went to bingo and rebelling teenagers because they were cheap. Feeling in her handbag, she found an old paper hankie. Burns watched her make a bowl shape out of the crumpled tissue, spit into it, and touch it with the tip of her cigarette, letting it hiss itself to death.

“Seeing you spit into a dirty paper hankie makes me want you in the worst way.”

“Fuck you, Burns.”

He smiled. “There’s my brave girl. I’d get you an ashtray but then I’d be implicated. I’ll get battered when Sandy smells it.”

“I doubt you get battered for anything much, George.”

He shook his head slowly. “You don’t know what goes on, Pad. See this room, this white, empty room? You could do operations in here.” He did a stage sigh she’d heard many times before. “She has got . . . problems.”

She nodded, trying not to smile. George Burns had been confiding that his relationship was in trouble since she first met him, seven women ago. It was a sore lesson, she’d fallen for it often, but over the years she had finally realized that what George wanted wasn’t a big helpful chat to sort out his feelings; it often wasn’t even mindless sex with her, really. What George Burns craved was to win over disapproving women. Temporary was an essential precondition of what he wanted. No single woman in the universe was enough for him. Although they laughed about him and he was a philandering arsehole, his craven need to be well thought of was still kind of adorable. She just hoped it wasn’t genetic.

She crumpled the tissue into a ball and put it in her handbag, already smelling the rank stink and thinking of McBree’s awful breath.

“Can I leave Pete with you, George? Until they pick Callum up, I don’t want Pete staying where he could find him.”

“Well, I don’t know what Sandy’ll say but . . . I suppose I could take him to work with me.”

“Could you?”

“I’ll get one of the production girls to look after him.”

Sandra didn’t work and Paddy knew she had a cleaning lady who came in three days a week. She allowed herself the luxury of a snide aside, since she’d had a shock. “What does Sandra do all day?”

He looked out of the picture window. “Shops for clothes. Takes them back. Shops for more clothes.”

She already had a guilty aftertaste in her mouth. “Good,” she said, bringing the conversation to a close.

He slid towards her on the sofa and softened his voice, inclining his head towards hers. “D’you ever think about us?”

It should have made her feel special, but she knew him too well to mistake it for lingering affection. He would do some variation on the move to whichever woman he was left alone with. She looked up wearily.

“George, give me a fucking break. I don’t want to have a fight.”

He slid back in his seat, offended. “Are you and Dub together?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Burns was as suspicious as a faithless man could be. He could never accept that most people made friends and kept them, met lovers and stayed with them. His world was in a perpetual state of tectonic shift and he wouldn’t believe that it wasn’t so for everyone else.

“So much for the Three Musketeers,” he said caustically.

She didn’t have the energy to be angry. “No one ever called us the Three Musketeers but you, and you’re the one who let both of us down. You left me to move in with that bint Lorraine, and you got another manager when Dub told you to turn down the TV show. He was right, wasn’t he?”

He chewed his tongue for a moment and shrugged. “Suppose. Who’s he handling now?”

“Loads of people,” she lied. “Word got out that he advised you against it and the phone’s never stopped ringing.”

“This new guy—he wants me to cash in on the TV show, tour the workingmen’s clubs.”

“Don’t do that.”

“I’m not going to.” He looked sheepish. “But the money’s good.”

The clubs were a graveyard. He’d never get back on the circuit again and that was where the radio and television executives went looking for talent to pin shows on.

“Don’t do it,” Paddy told him. “It’s a dead end.”

“Would Dub talk to me, do you think?”

“You want him to manage you again?”

“Possibly.”

“I don’t know. He’s pretty hurt by what you did. If you’d left him and found a new manager that would have been one thing, but you did it behind his back.”

George dipped his chin and looked up at her, puppy-dog penitent, asking her to fix it. Paddy knew that Dub was signing on and the dole paid next to nothing. He represented a number of comics but none of them had half of George’s talent. Onstage Burns was the man every woman wanted to be with and every man wanted to drink with, but offstage his persona was a bit more problematic. He was unpopular and not just because the TV show was crap: he kept sleeping with people’s wives just because he could and had a habit of launching into his act in the middle of a conversation, reducing the listeners to passive audience members, obliging them to laugh.

“You should talk to Dub, see what he says.”

“I never see him.”

“Phone him.”

“He’s never in.”

It was a power play: Dub was in all the time but Burns wanted Dub to come to him.

“Are you troubled at all by the fact that your son and I came here in mortal danger and now we’re discussing your career?”

He laughed at himself, the kindest side to him, and she sat forward. “I’ll say good-bye to Pete.”

But Burns could see she was still shaken. “Sit for a minute, Pad.” He put his hand on her knee, leaving it there, and she was glad of the warmth.

Paddy could well imagine how much Pete would see of his father, building up to the recording of the show tomorrow night, just as she could imagine the fury of some woman working her way up in TV who was expected to give up her proper job and be an impromptu nanny for George H. fucking Burns’s spoiled kid. She didn’t give a shit.

He squeezed her hand kindly. “I’m proud of the wee man. You’re doing a great job.”

In a moment of weakness she pecked a kiss at his fingers, the white leather sofa squeaking unattractively under her arse.

TWENTY-FIVE

BETTER BUY A GUN

I

The taxi dropped her in the street, at the opposite end of the car park from the News building so she could get back to her car without being seen.

The car park was a dirty stretch of ground, not even flattened for the cars. It was concreted over near the building but here, on the far fringes, the ground was potholed and dusty. A city tenement had been pulled down here, a long time ago, whether because of a German bomb or general decay she didn’t know. The pavement was the only part still standing, a ring fence around the empty space. Cars were clustered up near the front of the building, more now than there used to be. A cab rank had been set up at one end, near the road into town, because the paper’s budget had been cut back dramatically and the first thing to go was the pool of cars with staff drivers idling by the front door.

She walked carefully along the pavement, moving at a normal pace, hoping not to be seen. Upstairs the early shift would still be on, the final few pages being set and finished. All it would take was for Bunty or the Monkey to glance out of the window and spot her and she’d be dragged upstairs again, made to write an article about a fictitious visit to Callum. They’d be desperate for any copy about him now. His shoe size would command a front-page lead.

Level with her car, she left the pavement and crossed the dusty ground towards it. She had parked in the same spot this morning as she had been in the other night, when she left Mary Ann smoking fluently in the car. Mary Ann smoking, upset about a boyfriend. It jarred, not just because she was a nun, but because she was a child to them all. Not just a child of the Church but of all the Meehans, and it wasn’t to her benefit but to theirs. She was a token of their childhood, a nostalgic reminder of how they were.

Both the Press Bar doors were open to the summer night and a warble of chat and the chink of glasses sounded warm and friendly. Paddy would have loved to be in there, trouble free, gossiping and having a laugh among her own.

She smiled at the thought as she drew level with the car and stopped, her toes kicking up brown dust from the dry ground. The boot had been broken into, the entire lock drilled out, leaving a gaping black hole thick as a man’s thumb in the carcass of the car.

Reaching forward, she put her finger into the hole and lifted the boot. It opened lightly, the spring mechanism taking the weight after her initial pull. A plastic bag with dry cleaning she had yet to hand in was there, one of Pete’s footballs and a pair of his trainers were there, and a squashed box for apples that she had used to take some frozen shopping to her mother’s was there too, but Terry’s portfolio was gone. His photographs were gone; his notebook full of shorthand that he had tucked protectively into the spine was gone too.

A breeze picked up, swirling grainy dust around her bare ankles. She stared into the messy boot. It was the photographs they wanted, and she knew completely, whatever Knox or Aoife said, that it was McBree. She rummaged in her handbag. The photocopies were in there. They weren’t very good, she didn’t have a proper picture of the woman anymore, but she did have a photo of McBree standing at the door of the car facing a fat man in a dark suit. This story could be huge.

She shut the boot and walked over to the News building, pulling open the fire exit door and jogging purposefully up the stairs.

II

Her entrance to the newsroom elicited a small cheer from those who could remember back to the morning’s drama, but the look on Paddy’s face killed the joy stone dead. The lights were on in Bunty’s cubicle.

She knocked once and opened the door, to find Bunty and the Monkey relaxing at the far end of the table, eating poached salmon sandwiches and drinking half-pints of beer in Press Bar glasses. Bunty retracted his feet from the conference table when he saw it was her, rearranging his face to denote managerial fury.

She held a hand up and took a deep breath. “I lied. I wasn’t visiting Ogilvy, I didn’t even meet him. I was waiting in the car while Sean went in, keeping an eye out for journalists.”

She waited for a moment, steeling herself against a gale of shouting, but none came. She carried on:

“There’s a story, a much, much bigger story going on. It’s a keynote story and I’ve come to you with it because I haven’t got a fucking clue what to do.”

Intrigued, Bunty flicked his fingers, waving her forward, and nodded to the Monkey to leave them alone for a moment. Monkey took his sandwich and half-pint with him.

She sat down near him, feeling exhausted, her stomach aching. She told him about Kevin, about the bruises on his arm and chin and Aoife’s theory about the methods of cocaine ingestion. Ask anyone, she said, about Kevin’s drinking; he wasn’t a man who would take drugs quietly and have a mishap. She told him about Kevin’s disappearance in the ambulance, about the innocuous coffee-table book, about McBree and the portfolio, and her boot being broken into.

“Every single copy of that photograph has been taken. I’ve got some bad photocopies of it.” She pulled them out of her bag and unfolded them on the table.

Bunty glanced through them, chewing his sandwich, looking back at her to continue.

“Now,” she said nervously, “the really interesting thing about this is Knox.”

Bunty looked skeptical. She’d raised Knox with him before and he stymied her plan to do an investigation into him.

“This is real, though, listen: Knox pulled me in for questioning this morning. They made me wait and then in saunters Knox and tells me to stay off McBree: Kevin wasn’t killed by anybody, the IRA had nothing to do with this, I should go home and let the whole thing drop.”

Bunty swallowed his mouthful, took a sip of beer, and looked up at her. “Maybe you should.”

She was shocked. He was a good editor, a good journalist, and any idiot could tell there was a story here. “I cannot believe you’re saying that.”

Bunty took another bite of his sandwich, folding the crusts into his mouth. He leaned back in his chair, lifting his feet up onto the table, making her wait for him to finish his mouthful before he answered her. He swallowed, reached forward for his glass, and took a sip of beer. He rolled his tongue along the line of front teeth, top and bottom.

“Get a fucking move on,” she said.

“Don’t you ever wonder,” he said quietly, “why Knox is out of bounds?”

She didn’t answer. She hadn’t wondered that actually. She often wondered why she couldn’t catch him, wondered what he did to frighten so many people into keeping quiet about him, but she had never been aware that he was being kept from her.

“Is he out of bounds?”

Bunty cradled the back of his head with his hands, sucked a morsel from his front teeth, and nodded once.

“Says who? British Intelligence?”

Bunty raised an eyebrow.

Paddy shook her head at the table: it was so obvious now. Consecutive editors had turned the Knox story back; no one outside the police knew a thing about his activities and she couldn’t find a policeman with a bad word to say, and they had a bad word about everyone. It was a sure sign that he was being kept clean. And then Kevin’s admission to hospital being wiped off whichever record while they fixed the body just so, the deserted office and Knox’s arrogant assurances about what was and wasn’t the case.

She’d interviewed Patrick Meehan many times about his brushes with British Intelligence and what always struck her was how commonplace it all sounded. A room set aside in a police station. Stone-faced men with Oxbridge accents and just the right coat from the right tailor’s, unimaginative and protectionist, unashamed of their agenda. They called them spooks but they sounded like irritable bank managers. Knox had that commonplace look. She remembered him in Babbity’s, recalled him sliding around at a hundred press functions.

“If,” Bunty paused dramatically, “if you can get anything on him, which I doubt, I’ll go with it.”