Slip of the Knife (8 page)

Cunt.

Haversham was getting tired of Callum’s back. He tapped the door again, making his point, and shuffled off to taunt Hughie.

Callum carried on his walk. From the door he stepped into the yard, straight across the yard to the guard block, around the concrete path at the side, staying off the grass. That would take thirty steps, maybe thirty-something. He had never been that way before. Along the grass to the door out. They would have to wait at the door until it buzzed open. The guards wouldn’t have keys for that door in case they were taken hostage. Security zones. Inside the door it would be warm, they’d have the heating on high for the guards. There would be a waiting room probably. Plastic chairs probably. Posters maybe. And beyond that an unknowable number of steps to the main doors. Through one. Locked behind him. Next door and out, out to the eye-aching brightness and the unbridled wind salting him. Out, out into a world full of Havershams.

No one would come with him through the final door. He would be unsupervised for the first time since he was ten. He didn’t know what he would do.

He looked back at the messages on the gray wall.

Supergass.

Callum’s own message was finished. Took him months. He curved all four s’s, gave curvy tails to the g’s and y, spelled it right. It was finished now. He could leave now. Callum’s own message:

Everything smells the same when it’s burning.

SIX

BANG BANG

I

With his soft Dublin accent, fine, long face and green eyes, Father Andrew was an Irish mother’s dream. He was fresh from seminary when he came to St. Columbkille’s. Eager to make the Good News accessible to young people, he made everyone use his first name, introduced guitars to mass, made self-conscious teenagers mutter inaudible bidding prayers. The parish was elderly and didn’t like the unfamiliar. They revolted, complaining to the Monsignor, and soon Father Andrew’s radical reforms were curtailed to occasional mentions of already-out-of-date pop stars in his sermons and wearing a cassock with a rainbow embroidered on the back. Paddy saw defeat in him nowadays. She’d have felt for him more if he gave fewer sermons about the evils of unmarried, working mothers, homosexuality and sex before marriage.

Opening his arms, he raised his eyes to the giant plaster Jesus dangling over the altar. “Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.”

The organist launched into the opening bars of “How Great Thou Art” and Paddy found herself singing along in the strange, strangled falsetto she only ever used in chapel. Pete giggled at her side and she nudged his head with her elbow.

Before the altar, the priest and altar boys formed an orderly group, processing down the central aisle, gathering the congregation in their wake. Pete ducked out of the pew as the procession came past, desperate to be near the chubby, greasy-haired altar boy who was his hero: BC, named for his grandfather. None of the family could bear to say his name since Con senior died. Baby Con’s name had changed as suddenly as the family dynamic.

Because the boys stayed at Trisha’s on Saturday nights it would have been difficult for Paddy to insist Pete didn’t go to mass. As well as avoiding conflict with her mother she had a superstitious fear that organized religion might hold some romance for Pete in the future if she didn’t cram it halfway down his throat as a child. He wasn’t baptized and hated the dreary rigmarole of mass, but he still wanted to be an altar boy like his cousin. He wanted to be everything like his cousin. He shuffled ahead of her in the aisle, ducking between clustered families to get closer, keeping his adoring eyes on BC’s back.

Paddy held on to his shoulder, following him through the throng, afraid of losing him.

Ahead of them, standing between the doors, Father Andrew was holding an old woman’s hand, steering her by the wrist out of the door, dismissing her with a blessing. His eyes were on Paddy, willing her to him. He had already developed the faintly despising attitude to his parishioners that many older priests had. They were as cynical as strippers, some of them.

Beyond the doors and Father Andrew, Paddy could see Sean Ogilvy out in the warm sunshine. Sean Ogilvy, teetering on his tiptoes to look back in for her, dressed in his Sunday suit, his dark hair receding from his face.

Father Andrew reached across the throng and grabbed Paddy’s hand as she came past, reeling her in through the crowd. “My dear Lord, what’s this I’m reading about in your headline today?”

“Oh, well.” She broke eye contact and tried to move on to Sean.

“Please, God, it’s not true.”

But Father Andrew had a firm hold of her hand. “Please, God.” He looked imploringly at her. “Please, please, God.” Then added, as he always did, “I’ll pray for you, Patricia.” He ruffled Pete’s hair. “And you, son.”

If Pete hadn’t been with her she’d have kicked Father Andrew’s shin and passed it off as a mistake. Instead she dipped her eyes. “And I’ll pray for you, Father.”

At the top of the steps Pete wriggled out from under her hand and ran over to Sean’s four kids. They were younger than him and therefore not as interesting as BC, but he could boss them and they loved him, especially now that he’d moved across the city and they didn’t see him all the time. Mary, the oldest, and Patrick hung on his arms, gurgling with delight at his presence.

Around the women a puddle of children gathered, dazed from the boredom of mass, holding on to their mothers’ legs, staring at each other or trying to eat stones from the ground.

Sean took Paddy’s elbow and pulled her aside. He looked grim.

“Tomorrow morning, OK?” he whispered.

“Tomorrow?”

He rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell me you can’t come.”

“No, no,” she said, shaking her head, “I can come, I can come. Just didn’t think it would be so soon. There was a journalist up at my door last night asking about his release. He asked if he was going to stay with you.”

“Shite.” Sean looked around to see if he’d been heard uttering a curse word in the chapel yard. “I need you there, you know everyone, you’ll be able to spot them in the car park. I don’t know all the faces, you know?”

Elaine was looking at them so Paddy gave her a wave. Elaine was holding baby Mona on her hip and had Cabrini strapped tightly into a stroller. She was standing with another mother, equally laden. Elaine had qualified as a hairdresser and always managed to keep herself looking good. She had a short brown bob at the moment, a break from her usual blond hair. Paddy envied her slim frame, especially after four pregnancies, but she was so decent and straightforward that no one who knew her could fail to like her. She waved back to Paddy, the tight muscle in her jaw cutting sharply across her cheek.

“Seany, you don’t have to do this.”

He looked at Paddy’s chin, his hand still clamped over his mouth. It was going to happen. He had volunteered to assuage his conscience, and now it was actually happening. Callum Ogilvy, the notorious child killer, was coming to live in his tiny house with himself, Elaine and their four children.

“I do need to,” he said, sharply. “That’s the thing, I do need to do this. He won’t get out otherwise. But we’ll both be in deep shit if the News management hear about it and we don’t give them the story. You don’t need to do it.”

“I do. It’ll be something selfless to tell my son one day. I pass up a chance.”

Sean smiled at her. He hadn’t driven her anywhere for a long time and they both missed it.

“Elaine knows it’s tomorrow, does she?”

“Of course she does.”

Together they looked over at Elaine, who bumped the baby up her hip and ground her teeth. She sensed their eyes on her and looked back at them, suddenly rocking the stroller back and forth. Cabrini’s arms shot up in surprise. Paddy sensed that Elaine was trying to comfort herself, not Cabrini.

“And she’s all right about it, is she?”

“She’s fine.” He didn’t sound very convincing.

“Fucking hell, Sean, you were lucky when you married that woman. I wouldn’t have done it.”

Sean looked at his wife and nodded. “I know that,” he said, “I know.” He didn’t sound very convincing.

“Terry Hewitt was murdered,” Paddy blurted, surprised again to find herself tearful. “I had to look at the body, they said it was the Provos.”

“Hewitt? That fat guy you chucked me for?”

“I didn’t—oh, for fucksake, let’s not get back into that.”

Her words choked her and Sean softened. “Sorry.” He pulled her out of the crowd to the side of the chapel and the shadows. “Was he investigating something in the Six Counties then? I thought he did Africa.”

“No, he was killed in Scotland. Out on the road to Stranraer.”

He stepped away from her. “The Provos’d never do that. Not a journalist. Not here.”

“Well, that’s what the police said.”

“Phff, what do they know? Our boys’d never do that.”

“Come on, Sean, don’t be naive, they’re kneecapping teenagers for selling hash.”

“They’re maintaining order.” Sean still believed the Easter Uprising was a week ago, that the Troubles were about goodies and baddies, and that an Irish Catholic with a gun could have nothing but God and the good of mankind on his mind. He was a season-ticket holder for Celtic and went to the Tower Bar on Sunday afternoons to sing rebel songs with all the other armchair revolutionaries. “The RUC can’t be trusted to police those areas . . .”

“Shut the fuck up. It’s just—it’s the last thing I need right now with Callum getting out. You wouldn’t believe the pressure I’m under.” She felt the note in her pocket. “The Times offered fifty thousand pounds for an exclusive. Maybe Callum should do one interview? Maybe that would get them off his back. Give him a bit of money to get going.”

“He doesn’t want to,” said Sean. “I think he should but he doesn’t want to.”

Elaine was waving Sean over to her. He dropped his foot down one of the steps and turned back. “I’ll pick you up at six.”

“Six a.m.?”

He wrinkled his nose. “I know. Sorry about Terry. I know you liked him.”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that, but thanks.”

II

Condensation streaked the window onto the messy back garden. The grass was two feet tall, almost obscuring a rusting twin tub, gathering around the trunk of the tree at the far end.

The babble from the radio and the crackle of the frying pan drowned out the noise of the two boys at the table. BC was breaking his fast and Pete was having a second bowl of cornflakes so that he didn’t feel left out. Caroline sat across from them, ignoring everyone, reading a magazine about hairdos. Five places were set at the table that used to hold seven. She couldn’t remember how all of them used to fit in here.

Trisha broke three eggs into the frying pan. “And was this the boy who used to phone here all the time?”

“Aye. Terry. You met him once. ’Member he came here with his pal’s van to take my old desk out of the garage? Dark hair, a wee bit fat.”

Trisha kept her voice low so the boys wouldn’t hear. “And what was that boy to you?”

“Just a friend.”

“Why did he call all the time?”

“Dunno. Well, he’d been abroad and didn’t really have any pals when he came back. He was lonely, maybe.”

Trisha gave the frying pan an angry little shake.

“Why did they ask you to go and see his body then?”

Paddy shrugged, trying to be casual about it, but one of her shoulders got stuck up around her ears and betrayed her. “I just knew him from way back. We started at the paper at the same time.”

Behind them the boys were squabbling over the free toy from the cereal packet. Without looking, Trisha called over her shoulder, “It’s BC’s shot, son. You got it the last time.”

“But that’s the one I want.” Pete crossed his arms tight and scowled, a tiny despot planning a coup. “I’m the one that likes dinosaurs.”

BC waggled the cheap toy at Pete, taunting him. Paddy and Trisha smiled at the frying pan, keeping their faces from the boys.

“Give it to him,” Caroline ordered her son, always quick to take a side against him.

“Shots each,” said Trisha, “or I’ll keep the toy for myself.”

Using the wooden spatula, Trisha splashed hot fat over the top of the eggs and dropped her voice again. “I mean, the boy surely had some family.”

“Terry had no one,” said Paddy, adding, by way of explanation, “He was a Protestant.”

Trisha smirked: it was an old country joke about non-Catholics, designed to appeal to Trisha’s prejudices, about how Protestants neglected to breed like rats and didn’t all live on top of each other. “You’ve got me down as a right old greenhorn, don’t ye?”

“Ma, I’ve got you down as class on a stick. ’Member the time you dressed the pig up in a tuxedo?”

Trisha smiled into the pan, corrected herself, and gave Paddy a reproachful look. She had taken to widowhood with a wizened vigor and was prone to tutting at anything resembling good fun or high jinks. Without the timidly tempering cynicism of her husband she was more devout now, and since Mary Ann had taken her vows she wouldn’t hear a word against the Church. It left a chasm between them.

The eggs were done, the potato scones and bacon browned, so Paddy picked up the plates and poured the hot water warming them into the sink, dried them with a tea towel, and held them out to her mother.

“Terry put me down on his passport as his next of kin. That’s why they came to me.”

“And the police said the Provos killed him?”

“Yeah. ‘All the hallmarks,’ they said.”

“God help us,” muttered’ Trisha, her voice little more than a breath now, shielding it from the boys. “God help us if that’s true.”

She glanced fearfully at the table and fixed on Pete. “Maybe you should think about giving him his daddy’s name,” she said, still believing that young Catholic men could be arrested for having a name that sounded Irish.

“I don’t think even the Met are rounding up five-year-olds, Ma. Terry was just a friend.”

Trisha didn’t look at her as she dished the breakfast onto the plates and put the pan back on the cooker, clenching her jaw to silence herself.

“Honest.”

They stood, stiff, Trisha looking at the plates in Paddy’s hand and Paddy looking down at her mother. Not long ago Paddy would have been looking her straight in the eye but Trisha was shrinking. Now she could see the top of her head, the gray roots under the gravy brown, loose hairs creeping out from the Elizabeth Taylor set she had done every Monday at Mrs. Tolliver’s house.