Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

His parents had died in a car crash. She kissed the dusty strip of ribbon and felt sad, whether for them or for him she didn’t know. If she’d been honest she might have admitted it was for him.

These were his most important family memories, she realized, which meant that the worn brown folder Fitzpatrick had in his office had something altogether different in it.

She dropped the pictures back in the box, shut it, and wiped the lid with her hand, setting it gently on the chair next to her, and turned to the portfolio.

It was black, graying because of the dust from the high-up cupboard in the flat, an exact copy of Kevin’s portfolio. Maybe they had bought them together. Terry always liked stationery. He used Moleskine notepads when he traveled-they’d found a box of the battered notebooks in the trunk.

She unfurled the elastic strap and opened the portfolio, slipping the sheets of photographic paper out of the cupped side and setting them flat on the table. A small Moleskine pad was tucked in at the back. Flicking through it, she read Terry’s jittery shorthand and realized that these were notes of the interviews of all the photo subjects, numbered up to forty, dated variously over a month last year. She looked back at the pictures. Senga- New Jersey. Billy- Long Island. The others were without the accompanying text, just bare photos, but they each had Kevin’s touch. Brilliant crisp light, sharp colors and a person in the foreground, smiling or not, beautiful or not, all relaxed, all honest and open faced.

There was one black face, a woman with an aristocratic African profile, standing on the sunny side of a long, narrow street of red-brick tenements in New York with fire escapes snaking up them. Quartz specks in the tarmac glittered in the sun. Her smile was crooked, as if she was trying to hide her teeth, and her hair was pulled up into waspish yellow and black braids that swirled around her head.

Whoever the woman was, Paddy assumed she’d made a happy transition to the States. There were so few black people in Scotland that the two black Glaswegians she knew of were minor celebrities. One was an academic from the West Indies who taught at Glasgow University and had married a fellow linguist. Another, younger man worked as a sound engineer for Scottish Opera and drank in the Chip. Kevin’s woman looked African and Paddy assumed she had been adopted by a well-meaning Scottish couple and escaped as soon as possible. She looked very young to be an expatriate.

Paddy was looking at the photo when her eye caught a detail in the background. If the picture had been smaller or the image less sharply defined by the slanted light in the street she wouldn’t have noticed it.

Michael Collins had been thinner then. He was two hundred yards behind the woman, leaning over the roof of a big green car. He wore a thin peach summer shirt, his trousers sitting slack on his hips, the sunlight flashing off his glasses. Collins wasn’t looking at the camera. In fact, if Kevin had been quick, he wouldn’t even have been aware that a photographer was taking a picture down the street at all. As he leaned over the roof of the car his mouth was open in a laugh, hair cropped tight to his head. Across, at the roadside passenger door, was another man, a fat man in a dark suit, his face obscured as he twisted and reached for the door handle.

Paddy sat back, elated. She had a photo of him. It was him in New York and some time ago, but it was a photo of him nonetheless, captured in a mundane moment, giving a friend a lift.

She checked Terry’s notebook for names, looking for any with an African flavor: Morag, Alison, Barney, Tim, none of them fitted with the black woman. But if she had been adopted, her parents might have given her a Scottish name. The Scots had colonized half of Africa on behalf of the Empire. For all she knew, Morag could be a common Ethiopian name.

She thought of Terry again, sitting in a bar, sweating, drunk, his arm around a hungry young girl, and shivered, shaking the thought away.

Kevin Hatcher would know who the woman was, where the picture was taken, maybe even the name of the man in the background or some information Paddy could use to trace him and protect herself and Pete. But it was one o’clock in the morning and it would be rude to phone.

Instead, she packed Pete’s gym kit and loaded the dishwasher. Instead, she washed her face, brushed her teeth. Instead, she went to bed feeling pleased that she had something to go on, a picture of Michael Collins.

She should have grabbed Pete and run.

His neighbors were having a party. Back in his drinking days Kevin had been at many Monday night parties himself and knew how joyless they were. They were after-closing-time affairs, dragging through to the cold, damp morning, full of melancholy drinkers chasing a cheap carryout, banding together solely to consume. He remembered ten-hour nights when conversation was an irksome incidental. Badly coordinated women, who had lost their looks to wine and late nights, doing sexy dancing together while dead-eyed men looked on. Music was mortar to plug the silences. He never wanted to go back there. But tonight the occasional howl and whoop through the wall, the guitar music and the grim hubbub sounded warm and friendly.

The pain in his arm and chin were seeping away and, held still as he was, he could feel the certainty that everything was going to be fine pulse through his body.

His stomach disagreed. It convulsed, once, twice, and the grip on his chin tightened.

“Don’t fucking spew. You spew, you swallow, understand?”

He was holding Kevin’s mouth shut, a hard hand pressed tightly under his chin.

It was dark in the room. He’d left the lights off when he dragged Kevin in here and threw him into the armchair. The curtains were open. They were always open: Kevin didn’t mind people across the road looking in if they could be bothered. He could see out now, a couple with their backs to him watching telly in a soft light. A dark room. A man washing his hands at a kitchen sink.

The man had been kneeling on Kevin’s forearm for what felt like hours. He had lost the feeling in his fingers, in his wrist, and his elbow was pressed tight against the leather but it didn’t seem to hurt now. Nothing seemed to hurt now. Even his teeth, even his jaw, which the man had levered open with a chisel before he put the little paper packages into the back of his throat and forced the water in, making him swallow.

Kevin looked up at the steel-rimmed glasses, the orange streetlights from below reflected on the square lenses, and sensed that, of the two of them, his assailant was feeling worse than he was. The man was desperate and afraid. Sweating.

“Spew and you swallow.”

Kevin’s mood had turned as quickly as a loose feather in a high wind. He knew everything would be OK, whereas a moment ago he had felt helpless and trapped.

The heat came first, a burning heat to his face and chest. A veil of sweat slid across his eyes and the music next door was matched and overtaken by his own heartbeat thudding, faster and faster, pushing through his face. He couldn’t see.

Suddenly, his every muscle tightened to its fullest extent and he stood up, the small man sliding off his lap like a napkin. The man grabbed Kevin’s ankles but was powerless against the buzz of strength flooding through Kevin’s every sinew.

Smiling, a ray of all-powerful light himself, Kevin lifted his foot and stamped on his assailant’s hand. He heard the man cry out, curl into a ball at his feet, half under the coffee table, but Kevin didn’t care. It was wonderful not to care. He stamped again, missing him this time but it didn’t matter. He turned to the room. Light was bursting from every surface. The door. He should go to the door and get out.