Slip of the Knife (33 page)

Paddy smiled at him. “If you can’t handle it we can sleep in the car.”

“Nope. I’m fine. It’s fine.”

She wanted to touch him again. Callum was in the other room so she slid over to him. “There’s only two sleeping bags. We’ll have to share. Is that OK?”

He looked around the floor. “But where?”

No part of the floor was any cleaner than anywhere else. She suggested seeing if they could find a broom and he liked that.

They found Callum in the front room, lifting the lid on the sloping piano. He tried a key but found it dead, tried the next and the next and the next until a faint twang came from inside the piano’s belly.

Seen from the inside, the room was a good size. There was no fireplace but a fat potbellied stove sat at an angle in the corner. One of its thin legs had sunk into the carpet, ripping a hole and pulling the chimney pipe from its shoring in the wall behind.

Dub held back at the door to the kitchen. “Smells revolting in here.”

Paddy wanted to point out that it was pretty though, the windows were nice, and then she wondered why she was trying to sell it to him. It didn’t matter if he liked it or not. They were only staying a night.

The other rooms were in no better state. A rudimentary bathroom had a blue plastic toilet with a horribly stained dry bowl. The window was broken and leaves had gathered on the floor and in the bath, mulching through the years. Ragged spiderwebs coated the break in the window.

Two bedrooms, both small, one with a fireplace and a dead bird in the grate. There was no broom.

It was a relief to get back to the civilized kitchen, where the smell of damp was tempered by the warmth of the barbecue fire.

Dub said he didn’t think he would be able to sleep at all in here because it was so dirty. Callum took the cardboard box down from the dresser, shook it to make sure nothing was hiding in there, flattened it, and used the edge to brush part of the floor clean for Dub’s head.

Paddy watched him, bent double in the flickering light, scratching at the floor to clear a space for someone he barely knew, enjoying the roughness of everything, adapting to his new life and not at all bitter, and she found herself thinking that if Pete had lived through what Callum had and was like this on the other side, she’d be quite proud of him.

Dub thanked him.

Callum unfurled the sleeping bags and sat down in his, zipping it up to his neck, expertly rolling his jumper into a small cylinder to make a pillow. He lay down with his hands behind his head, shut his eyes, and became still almost immediately.

Dub and Paddy sat up, drinking a can of juice in silence to let Callum sleep, passing it back and forth. Paddy lit a cigarette and Dub gave her a look that suggested she was adding to the smell in the kitchen.

“I like them,” she whispered.

Callum’s leg stirred in the dark. He wasn’t asleep at all. She looked over and saw that he was smiling in the dark. He’d misheard her. He thought she’d said, “I like him.” And she was glad.

Fully clothed, they stood up and tried to negotiate two people in one sleeping bag. They unzipped it and laid it out on the floor, putting the opening in the space Callum had cleared for them. Paddy lay down, Dub lay next to her, and they had to cling to each other to do the zip up.

She looked up at the warm orange light rippling across the ceiling, felt Dub’s heart racing beneath her hand, and fell asleep smiling.

TWENTY-EIGHT

THE DARKNESS IN SUBURBIA

Martin McBree looked back up to the dark windows of Paddy’s flat in Lansdowne Crescent. It hadn’t been hard to get the door open; it was only propped shut and when he got in he realized why: ransacked, the beds pissed on. No one was coming back here tonight. She was lost to him.

Back in the car, he lit a cigarette and started the engine. There was nothing for it but to go to option two. The nasty option. He had a grandson that age.

He pulled out of the crescent and made his way to the broad Great Western Road. It was three in the morning and very quiet. Taxis and the odd night bus sped along the straight road, making use of the clear stretch ahead of them.

He parked carefully in the street, reversing neatly into a space between two cars, nudging tentatively backwards and forwards until he was equidistant between the two. The first rule of a lightning strike: attract no attention.

He opened the car door and threw his cigarette end into the street, stepping out after it, the toe of his shoe crushing the scarlet tip against the tarmac. A double-decker night bus sailed past him, speeding down the incline of the hill. In the cold white cabin light the lone passenger’s pasty face looked drained and ill, staring blindly out into the dark, seeing nothing but his own reflection in the glass.

McBree hated Glasgow. He hated the plump women with their rasping accents, the aggressive undertone of the men in bars, the chatty shopkeepers who asked personal questions. New York wasn’t like that. In New York they told you about themselves, the women were handsome, the accent exotic and mellifluous. He smiled at the thought of New York, recalled the warm evenings and the smell of car fumes mingling with street food, being able to drink in bars without a soul raising the subject of politics.

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 onto 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 hounds-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 nonetheless. 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 streetlights 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 onto 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 seen the show. 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, around 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 neighbors’ 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 backyard, 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 onto 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 savoring 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.

He stepped forward, aware of the brush of his sole on the fibers 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.