Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

She nodded. “I’m back there again now.”

“Did we work together?”

“Yeah, for about four years,” she said, adding, “I was just a copyboy,” to excuse the fact that he didn’t recognize her.

He shifted uncomfortably on the settee’s arm, straddling it. “When I was there I was a bit… unconscious. Sorry. Sabbatical from reality.”

“I remember you getting redundancy and disappearing. We were running a book on how long it’d take for you to kill yourself.”

He smirked. He didn’t look bad for a dead man. “I’d have taken short odds on that myself.”

“Did you manage to spend the advance?”

Kevin looked up at a framed poster on the wall. An Edwardian portrait of a woman in a large red hat. Red and green, like Christmas. He sighed a no. “We came out four quid up. Just as well, wasn’t it? I’ll have to give it back now. Terry hadn’t nearly finished the writing.” He glanced at her shoes. “What happened between you two in Fort William?”

She wanted to get up and leave. Instead she said, “I got a note from him last month, came in the post to work. He said he was sorry.”

“What was he sorry for?”

They were looking at each other, less than a foot apart. If she was ever going to speak about Fort William it would be now. “People do change, Kevin. He changed. He wasn’t who he used to be. He was more soft before, you know?” She looked to Kevin to absolve her for not loving his dead friend.

They both watched as he turned his toe to her. He spoke softly. “He’d been about.”

“He’d seen things,” she added sadly.

“He had. I think Angola was pretty heavy.”

“Yeah?”

He shut his eyes and nodded once. “Yeah.”

They left it at that. She didn’t need to go into the details or explain that Terry frightened her so much she couldn’t bear to talk to him.

It was in the dark hotel room in Fort William. They’d been out for a meal: it was lovely, she hardly remembered where, just Terry’s eyes smiling and him taking her hand in the street as they walked back to the hotel. They started kissing in the lift, the first touch after eight years of thinking about each other. In the privacy of the room he was older, more considered and mature. Paddy didn’t get distracted by the wallpaper or noises in the hall or work worries. They spoke to each other, making requests, laughing when he couldn’t get his trousers off over his shoe. They ended up on the floor because the bed was covered in stupid little cushions.

But at the end, as he came, Terry forgot himself. He held on to her hair, digging his nails into her scalp, and banged her head hard off the floor five times, too many times to be a mistake. Far too many.

He apologized briefly and fell asleep while she lay beneath him, shocked and silent. His breathing became regular, the heat from his skin burning where it touched her. She disentangled herself, grabbed her clothes, and ran, speeding all the way back to Glasgow.

She couldn’t articulate why it bothered her so much. Perhaps it hinted at him secretly despising her. But really it was the casualness of his apology. He’d done that before, it had the feel of a habit. He’d done it many times to many women and not one of them was in a position to tell him to fuck off and never do that to her again.

She was ashamed and embarrassed for him. She didn’t want to tell anyone and Kevin was too graceful to press her for details. She wished she’d got to know him before now. Terry had so much not to talk about, and she could see now why he had liked Kevin so much.

“So what was your book going to be about?”

Kevin stretched his legs out in front of him. “Street portraits. Scots living in New York and London. It was just an excuse to go to New York together, really.”

“So he did the interviews?”

“No, he did the pictures and I did the text, that’s what was unusual about the book.” She looked at him and found him almost smiling at her. “Joke.”

“It was a very funny joke,” she said flatly, making him really smile this time. “Do you think the book had anything to do with him being murdered?”

“Nah,” he said with certainty. “Like the police said today, if it did I’d be dead too, wouldn’t I? I think it was something to do with somewhere he worked. Liberia, maybe. He saw some incriminating things, executions, money deals…” He ran out of vacuous ideas and shrugged an apology. “I’m a photographer,” he said, as if that explained his confusion about international affairs.

“How far did you get with the book?”

“Only a couple of mock-up pages for the project proposal.” He stood up and left the room, coming back with an A3 folder. He unfurled the elastic band around it and set two huge pages next to each other, a beautifully crisp photograph on one page and a small paragraph next to it. The picture was of an American street scene. It could have been anywhere: boxy clapboard houses with settees on porches, a big electric blue sky framing the scene. Stars and Stripes flags were hung in dirty windows or drooping on flagpoles, big cars parked in a broad patchwork concrete street, and in the foreground a woman of eighty, arms crossed, grinning, the folds in her skin deep enough to lose change in, her dentured teeth a wall of perfect white.

The caption read “Senga-Kilmarnock / New Jersey.” The facing paragraph of text told the woman’s history, how she came to be in the U.S. and why she stayed. Paddy smiled at the text. Terry was smart: it wasn’t what a reader would have expected. Senga drew no false comparisons between the two places, stated no preference. She came to visit her sister and married an Italian shopkeeper. She fell in love with his shoes and the way he mixed her drink. Her sister had cancer in her leg but still danced. It was very much Terry’s writing style. He always came at a story from a unique angle, edited out the obvious, and left the story to resolve itself in the reader’s mind. She stroked the picture of Senga with an open palm but Kevin pulled her hand away.

“Sorry,” he said, “it’s… the photographic paper doesn’t like that.”

“Sorry.”

Kevin looked tearful suddenly and turned the page for her. “Bob-Govan / Long Island.” Bob smiled on an unspoiled seashore, his shirtsleeves rolled up to show his forearm tattoo of a fey King Billy on a rearing horse.

Kevin pointed at the tattoo, a Loyalist commemoration of the defeat of the Irish Catholics by William of Orange. “That’s an invitation to fight in Glasgow. Over there people just think he likes horses. Reinvention. That’s what the whole book’s about really.”

“I’ll buy a copy when this comes out.”

“It won’t come out now.”

“Couldn’t someone just use Terry’s notes?”

“Nah. He was the reason it was getting published. He knew the woman who owns Scotia Press and all of the promotion was going to be on the back of his world travels.” Kevin nodded. “He bought your book.”

She was surprised. “The Patrick Meehan book?”

“Yeah, Shadow of Death. He got me to send it to him in Beirut.”

She hadn’t known then that Terry even remembered her. She stumbled across his articles about Lebanon while she was in hospital having Pete. Terry’d had a rare, bizarre dinner with a Hezbollah leader and wrote about the new constitution, about the hardship of the ordinary people and the raw beauty of the landscape. Until Pete, Terry’s world was everything she thought she wanted, brimful of glory and history, shining a light into shadowy corners. And then Pete was born-a happy, trouble-free baby, thriving from the moment he arrived, surrounded by family and friends and cousins. She felt detached when she read the series of articles but she was heading out into the quiet waters of motherhood, drifting off from the shore, alone in the boat. She was glad Terry was out there, protecting people by telling the truth, but her own life was more immediate and all-consuming.