Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

It felt strange bringing Mary Ann to the News building. Just sitting in the car with her felt like a bizarre clash of the two distinct halves of her life. Paddy didn’t really know who to be: Mary Ann’s giggly wee sister or the braying harridan she was for work. It would have felt more odd if Mary Ann had been acting like Mary Ann but she was quiet, worried, fretting. She kept touching her hair, looking for a strand long enough to lose her fingers in. The cut was so bad it looked as if her hair had been singed off.

“Wait here,” said Paddy, opening the door. The absurd thought occurred to her that Mary Ann might slip out and disappear forever in the dark of the car park. She swung her handbag onto her sister’s lap. “Get a cigarette out of there and smoke it. I’ll be two seconds.”

The delivery men were working hard, swinging bales of papers along a line into the vans, their rhythm interrupted by the sight of Paddy Meehan walking out of the dark night to take a copy from a burst bale that had been discarded to the side.

It was front page, with Merki’s name on it and a picture of the ditch Terry had been found in, strung along with police tape. A small inset photograph showed Terry as a young man, grinning cheesily at the photographer. She could see from the collar that he had his leather jacket on, the one with the red shoulder pads. She turned, walking back to the car, stroking the picture tenderly with her index finger, inadvertently smearing the damp ink and staining her hand.

The burning red tip of the cigarette flared in the windscreen as Paddy walked towards the car. She hardly knew this Mary Ann. She hadn’t yet taken her final vows so leaving the convent would be slightly less of a wrench, if that was what she wanted. But Father Andrew had. Paddy could well imagine the courtship, the looks and Mary Ann’s blushes, the stolen moments in chilly convent corridors, a brush of the hand, a longing look, and Father Andrew’s pasty arse as he pumped his cock into her sister.

She opened the door and fell into the driver’s seat, snatching the cigarette out of Mary Ann’s hand and throwing it onto the dirt floor of the car park. “Right, you. I need to know some things. How long has this been going on?”

From the habit of complying with barked orders, Mary Ann told her: nearly a year. They’d met when he came to say a special mass for the missions. They saw each other in secret. He didn’t want to leave the priesthood.

“Do you want to leave the convent?”

Mary Ann said she didn’t know.

“You can come and stay with me.”

Mary Ann didn’t answer and although Paddy would never say, she was a little offended. She flattened the newspaper out over the steering wheel and flicked on the cabin light.

Mary Ann muttered by her side, “Got any more fags?”

Paddy nodded at her bag.

“Finished,” said Mary Ann.

“We’ll stop in a minute and get some.”

Merki was back on form, no doubt about it. In perfect house style he reported that the police had found the gun used to shoot Terence Hewitt in the head, execution-style. Contrary to previous reports it wasn’t an IRA gun and they were now certain that the murder wasn’t anything to do with the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The gun had been found near the scene of the crime, and police ballistics had confirmed a match with the bullet used to kill Terence. They were now looking for a lone gunman and robbery was the suspected motive. The report was headlined as an exclusive.

“What’s this?” Mary Ann was trying to read it over her shoulder.

“In a leap and a bound he was free,” said Paddy. “The guy who wrote this hasn’t had his name on an article for ten months. He’s ambitious though. An unscrupulous source could get him to write that the Queen was a man if he thought it would get his career out of the toilet.”

She folded the paper in half and threw it onto the backseat.

Mary Ann cried in the car as they sat outside the convent, smoking in the dark. She tried to talk to Paddy but her feelings came out as a jumble of unconnected half sentences, absent verbs and missing nouns making a nonsense of a painful but familiar story of thwarted love. Paddy didn’t want to question her or make her clarify what she was saying; she did want to know the details but flinched from prying. At the same time, she suddenly felt she had her sister back, a woman who was the same age as her, instead of a child Bride of Christ who believed in miracles and fairy stories.

Paddy watched as she walked off to the convent gate, pressing the illuminated doorbell and giving her a last longing look as she waited for the answer. Mary Ann looked so pretty suddenly, with the ivy on the convent walls curling up around the door to frame her, her short blond hair lit from behind by the light on the buzzer; even the plain dress with its dowdy shirt collar and nasty buttons looked nice.

The door opened and the convent swallowed her once again.

Paddy drove away down the hill towards the West End. Stopped at a light, she imagined Mary Ann coming to stay with her, leaving the crushing gray conformity of the Church, and a flare of burning exultation exploded in her chest.

She threw her head back and screamed her sister’s name.

She left the radio off, the television off and the door to her study open so that she could hear any noise at all outside the front door. Michael Collins wouldn’t come back, she knew he wouldn’t, not tonight anyway, although her instinct to scan the horizon for tigers had been strong since Pete was born. Every sharp corner, every fast car was a potential assailant. It made her police him and nag and put anything dangerous up high, and now write an inflammatory column about the Troubles with one ear to the door.

They’d left all of Terry’s things in the hall, keeping them separate in case the lawyer asked for them back. She’d moved the silver trunk behind the front door so that anyone breaking in would need to push it along the floor before they could get in. Even so, she’d sleep with her door open tonight.

Having finished her column, she got it down to within five words of the word count so the editors didn’t have the scope to chew it up too much, and lifted the phone to call it in. The male copy taker took her column down for her, clarifying a couple of lines, correcting her punctuation once with a polite question. When she was finished she thanked him, pretended she did remember him from Father Richards’s leaving do years ago, and hung up.

She should clean up the kitchen and get Pete’s gym kit ready so she didn’t have too much to do when she woke up in six hours’ time. She stopped for breath in the dark hallway, listening for the rhythm of Pete’s breathing but getting Dub’s narrow whistle instead. Terry’s portfolio was leaning against the wall with the yew box at its foot. She picked them up and took them into the kitchen.

Putting them both on the table, she went to Dub’s food cupboard and took out the giant jar of peanut butter, scooping a spoonful out and sticking it in her mouth before she could think about it, rolling her tongue around the spoon, savoring the salty sweetness, promising herself that she wouldn’t have another. Except one. She rolled the spoon around the inside of the jar, getting a gravity-defying spoonful and eating the top off it so it didn’t spill while she was fitting the lid back on.

She sat down. Terry’s box was lovely, well crafted and made from thick, flawless wood. She opened the lid. It was lined with lilac velvet, faded over time to a crisp brown. Most of the photos were of Terry, as a baby, as a toddler in a garden, Terry at Pete’s age standing proud and stiff in a brand-new school uniform, Terry as a chubby teen with his hair over his eyes, drinking Coke and laughing. The photos stopped abruptly when he got to seventeen, when his parents died. There were photos of his parents and some older ones, black-and-white, of an old lady grinning by a large oak mantelpiece, of his parents’ wedding. His mother had a bob and a shy smile. At the bottom of the box were small nameless mementos: a newspaper cutting about a school play with Terry’s name underlined, a cat collar with a flattened tin bell on it, a tiny piece of green ribbon holding two matching wedding bands together, his and hers.