Slip of the Knife (6 page)

She sat up straight. Stranraer.

Meehan had no alibi for the night of Rachel Ross’s murder. He was casing a tax office in Stranraer, where the ferry terminal to Ireland was. Any IRA man in Scotland would be familiar with this road, with the small side roads, where the heavy traffic ran and where was quiet. This was exactly where they would dump a body if they wanted to.

The possibility startled her. There were so many exiles from the Troubles here, mostly Loyalists but a lot of IRA sympathizers among the Scots Irish. Arms were rumored to be shipped through Glasgow. If the IRA had killed Terry, if the conflict had moved here and Scotland wasn’t neutral anymore, it would be a bloodbath. And if any journalist of her generation was likely to have discovered the new development it would be Terry Hewitt. His work had that kind of scope.

A single bed back in the early eighties, dirty orange sheets and a blood spot on her knickers, Terry’s unpracticed hands moving over her body, her own tightness, taking deep breaths, waiting for it to be over.

When he left for South America she helped him take his bags to the London train, smiled and waved from the platform, crying all the way home on the bus. He left her behind to tend her mother and father, to work her way up slowly at the Daily News, the calls-car shift, the Women’s Page or “Dab Sheet,” to struggle with her book about Patrick Meehan. When she sat in her parents’ damp garage pretending to work on the Meehan book, she was secretly rereading his articles about Angola and Central America. She saw him crouched in jungles, sweating under slow fans in tropical hotels, meeting African dictators. When Shadow of Death was finally published, she got an address for Terry from his news agency and sent him an invite to the launch. He didn’t reply.

In her memory he became slim, tanned and tall, the epitome of a dignified search for truth—until he came back.

She wound the window down and threw the burnt-out fag stub onto the tarmac, not deliberately tormenting the gull bully, but glad when it pecked at the oily butt and spat it out.

“Fucker.” She lit another cigarette and watched the gull consider its next move. “Fat, greedy fucking fucker. Arsehole.”

The Bru was still cold.

Terry didn’t drink Bru anymore when he got home. Couldn’t get it abroad, he said. Lost the taste for it. He preferred Coke. He laughed when she bought him a Tunnock’s tea cake from the canteen.

“I remembered them as bigger,” he said pointedly.

That was unnecessary. Mean of him. She missed that clue. She should never, ever have gone back out with him.

She nodded at the gull. “I shouldn’t have gone to Fort William,” she told it. The fat scavenger blinked back at her.

FOUR

DAILY NEWS

I

It was five in the morning but, looking up from the car park, Paddy could see that the Daily News building was readying for the day. The long, black glass-and-chrome office building housed a print works downstairs with a glass wall looking into it. A stream of papers flew along the conveyor, print drying, the machine-gun clack-clack of the presses loud in the quiet of the morning. Van drivers gathered by the loading bay, waiting for the bales. Upstairs, on the second floor, the newsroom lights were off at the right-hand side of the room. The Doze Zone. When she worked the night shift they’d kept one part of the big room dark for those who wanted to sleep. Now the staff had been cut so much they only needed to use half the room.

The perpetual decline in Daily News sales meant a high turnover of senior editors, each of whom arrived in the job promising to reverse a global market trend and give the proprietors a better return. The easiest way to cut costs was by reducing wages. Paddy had left the News for a year. By the time she was poached back from the Herald a third of the staff were missing. To be fair, in the glory days of the sixties and seventies the staffing was breathtakingly flabby. Demarcation meant that a driver couldn’t load a van and a journalist wasn’t allowed to empty a bin. Ancillary jobs were so well paid that they were jealously passed from father to son.

When she started as a copyboy, defying the editors and skiving were considered art forms. Now everyone kept their heads down, aware that they were lucky to have survived each incoming editor’s cull, glad to be working in a shrinking market.

Checking her reflection in the rearview mirror, Paddy saw a face puffy from crying. She could pass it off as tiredness.

“I’ve just been woken up,” she told herself. “I was fast asleep and I’ve just woken up.”

She shivered, still too vulnerable to go in without her work face, without her armor. In another time she had been so inconsequential she could have hanged herself at her desk without exciting comment, but those days were long past. She was a name now, drew a big wage and was female.

Her column had started as part of the Herald Dab Sheet, given to her by a sympathetic editor when Pete had double pneumonia. She was glad of it at the time. A column meant she didn’t have to leave the hospital ward and could call her copy in from the pay phone in the lobby. Her opinions on outside matters were exactly what could have been expected from a mother watching her son struggle to breathe every day. Terror made her angry, ill-considered and blunt. She was so controversial they gave her the whole of page five, a banner byline of her name and a front-page name check. The News poached her back to upset their readers.

The column was herself on a bad-tempered rant. She had denounced a perfectly sincere actor who spoke at a political rally in support of a cause he knew nothing about. She once did a whole column about footballers’ taste in casual clothes (“Pigs in Knickers”). She was sometimes embarrassed by the stuff she wrote, like a temper hangover, but the column attracted support from all quarters. She had stumbled on a talent for articulating nationwide annoyances. Her embarrassment was soothed by an exponential rise in her wages and the opportunities it opened up for her. It led to local, then national, radio and on to TV appearances. She did a three-month stint on a Sunday morning TV magazine show, where the lighting made her look extra-fat and mad. People set their alarm clocks to watch it.

She’d wanted to call the column “Land of Sophistry and Mist,” after Byron’s observations on the nastiness of the Scots, but the Herald editor at the time (from Bristol—lasted five months) said it was pretentious, smacked of a knowledge of literature, and cut it to “Land of Mist” without consulting her. “Giving it Misty,” to those in the know, meant ignorant tub-thumping.

Fear had been her inspiration but Pete soon recovered. He was prone to chest infections, but no worse than other kids. Although she was now calm and content, once a week she had to dip back into that black lake. The level was getting lower and lower, so she stole: she sought out angry people, milked them for comment, starting fights in the Press Bar to get an angle on any current issue.

She was successful and knew how that would make colleagues talk about her. They speculated unkindly about her sexual behavior, her income, her home life.

Lauded for her bad-tempered ranting, she feared that she would wake up one morning and find she had morphed into Misty, that she would buy into her public image and actually start to think like that. She had seen it happen to columnists before.

She looked back at the building. Terry Hewitt had stood outside that door waiting for her once, a hundred years ago, his left foot resting on the wall behind him. He had looked up as she came towards him, a warm smile on his face. He had worn a leather jacket; she was impressed by that.

She had left Fort William in the middle of the night, driving at eighty along back roads to get away from him. His articles told how he had witnessed corruption and brutality, women raped and murdered, children mutilated, whole villages put to the torch. She remembered his article about a fifteen-year-old Angolan boy, shot between the eyes right in front of him. She had been naive to expect him to remain unchanged. Ridiculous.

The work face wasn’t going to come. She’d just have to go in anyway or miss the deadline for the late edition. Taking a deep breath, she reached for the door handle and stepped out onto the buckled concrete floor of the car park, locking the car behind her.

Delivery men loitered in the loading bay, looking up as she came towards them. They stopped talking and watched her walk to the staff entrance, their heads following her, moving as one curious animal. She could say hello to one of them, curry for a champion, but she didn’t have it in her this morning. She pushed the staff door open and stepped in off the street to the cold stone lobby. As soon as the door shut, one of them would say something derogatory, make a comment about the size of her arse or who she’d gobbled.

She let the door fall shut and then yanked it open again, leaning out into the street, staring straight at them. One of them froze with his mouth open, a chest full of breath, ready to comment.

“Who the fuck are you wankers talking about?” she drawled.

They laughed at her for catching them out.

She slipped back into the lobby before they could retort and climbed the stairs heavily, pulling herself forward, pausing at the doors to the newsroom. Flattening her dress, she affected a frown. Most states of emotional turmoil could be covered with a growl, she’d found, especially after her father died, when the grief often ambushed her.

She organized her face into a scowl, pushed the double doors open, and walked in, keeping her chin high.

The night shift started into action like an automaton during a power surge. They saw it was her and toned it down a bit. Light from computer screens filled the gloomy room, uplighting those sitting at their desks.

Merki Ferris, standing near the door, looked shifty and paranoid. He’d been exiled to the night shift for pissing off Bunty, their current editor. He was a cross-eyed trickster, had guile but no wit, could get into anywhere for an interview but then didn’t know what to ask. He was not an attractive man and it was hard to tell in the thin light whether he was smiling or grimacing.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, out of a habit of asking questions.

“Right, Merki?” She slipped past him.

The layout of the room had been changed to fill the gaps. In the old days the noise of typewriters and shouting filled the room, desks were positioned to fit with production needs, and everywhere had to be sidled to. Now the slimmed-down news, sports and features areas were farther away from each other, circular islands with flat electric typewriters and dirty-white plastic computers that pulsed cadaverous green light into the room. The editors had their own island now, away from the journalists.

Paddy walked across the room to a partitioned office for the senior editors. Outside the door she dipped at the knee to see in through the white venetian blinds behind the glass. Larry Gray-Lips, head of the night shift and king curmudgeon, was at his desk. She opened the door without knocking. Larry froze with a sandwich at his mouth, trying to remember whether Paddy Meehan had the clout to give them shit for not doing relay races from one end of the room to the other. He dropped his hand and looked worried.

“What?”

She picked up a schedule from his desk and pretended to read it. Larry put his sandwich down and leaned back in his chair, balancing carefully on two legs as he stared at her with the same languorous, faintly despising expression he always had. “Did you wake up and remember someone ye hated?”

“Nope.” She put the schedule down. “I’ve got a big news story.”

“You’re fucking joking.” He dropped his chair onto all fours. “For fucksake, we’re into feeding time here. Could ye not have come an hour ago?”

She shrugged, looking around the desk. “Just the way it happened.”

“Spit it out, woman.”

“Um . . .” She hesitated, poking around some papers on his desk. “Terry Hewitt.”

“What about Terry?”

“He’s been killed. Murdered.”

Larry didn’t speak or move. She stole a look at him. He was frowning at the desk, blinking quickly. He saw her looking at him and coughed for cover.

“Well.” His voice was lower. “Fuck me.”

Paddy nodded at the desk and bit her cheek. “I know.”

“No, I mean it.” Larry looked at her. “Fuck me.”

Each smiled weakly at the papers on Larry’s desk, glad of the respite. Quite suddenly the muscles on Paddy’s chin convulsed into a tight ball and she lost her breath.

“So.” She found her voice, higher and unsteady. “They found his body in a ditch. Word is—” she leaned down to whisper to him—“IRA hit.”

Larry opened his eyes wide. In nine years at the paper she’d never seen him do that. “You’re fucking joking. Here?”

“I know . . .”

“The Provos are killing people in Scotland?”

“Well, one anyway. ‘All the hallmarks of an IRA hit,’ said a source within the Strathclyde Police Force. The body was found out near Greenock.” He didn’t seem to realize the significance so she spelled it out. “Off the road to Stranraer, where the ferry runs to Belfast.”

“So was Terry just getting off the boat? Had he been in Ireland?”

“Dunno. He was found stripped naked in a ditch, single shot to the head.”

“Jesus Christ, this is huge.” Larry turned to his computer screen to see who was on. “Merki—”

“No.” Paddy put a firm hand on his desk. “I’ll write it. No byline, but I’ll do it.” Merki was a skilled hack and he’d want to know how Paddy had found out about Terry. If he caught a whiff of her personal involvement he’d tell Larry and they’d have her writing an emotive first-person account about identifying the body. They always wanted that, especially from female reporters.

Larry leaned back in his chair, picking bits of sandwich out of a molar and appraising her suspiciously. There was a time when no one in the press would volunteer to do a job without a byline. Even now it was still the custom to feign reluctance.

“What could you possibly have against Merki?”

“Nothing, just I know Terry. Knew Terry. By the time I’ve briefed him I could have written it.”

Larry hesitated.

“OK.” She threw her hands up. “Get Merki. Better than that: you do it. I’ll fuck off home to my bed.”