Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

The hard sun glinted on the water as two businessmen walked past, giggling and swinging their briefcases.

“Will we whistle after them lads there?” said Aoife, her mood lifting suddenly when she changed the subject.

“Yeah, go on,” Paddy dared her.

Aoife turned back to them and shouted under her breath, “Hey, you fellas: wheet whoow!”

They laughed to themselves, watching the businessmen retreat down the river.

“God, it’s been a hell of a morning,” said Paddy, and told Aoife about Collins coming to her house and the man watching her son’s school.

“This guy’s Northern Irish, ye say?”

“I’ve got a photo of him.” She opened her bag and took out the photocopies. “You might know him.”

“Aye, he’s probably my cousin or something, ’cause you know, Ireland ’s only twelve foot across.” Aoife looked at the enlargement of Collins and smiled. “You’re having a laugh.”

Paddy was bewildered. “Am I?”

They looked at each other, both searching for a clue.

“You know him,” prompted Aoife.

“Do I?”

“Don’t ye?”

Paddy shook her head.

“He’s famous, like you.” She could see Paddy didn’t know what she was talking about. “Martin McBree. He’s a major highheadjan in the IRA. Don’t you work in the papers?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know who this guy is.”

“Martin McBree?” she said again, as if that would clear it up. “The photo holding the guy on Bloody Sunday?”

“Never heard of him, sorry.”

“He was over in New York last year, ambassadorial duties, restructuring the Noraid funding people. It was on the nine o’clock news at home. He shook them up pretty badly. Brought in a whole new management team and got rid of the old guard. Those old fellas’d send them nothing but guns and psychos. The Republicans are shifting their position, moving towards a negotiated settlement. What they want now is to put a raft of peace seekers into positions of power.”

“So McBree’s a good guy?”

Aoife nodded that she thought so. Paddy thought back to Sunday night and McBree in her hallway. She could have had it all wrong, really. It was just a gut reaction to the guy: he was there with an agenda, she gathered that much, but it didn’t mean he was violent.

She was pleased to have been so wrong.

They had both done as much damage to the baguette as they could so they abandoned it on the wall and Paddy got out her cigarettes. Aoife took one from her.

“He’s made a wild lot of enemies.”

“McBree? Surely everyone wants peace?”

“Ye’d think, wouldn’t ye? That’s the trouble with armed struggle. Even if it starts out very noble with good men putting their higher feelings aside it’s always going to be a magnet for thugs and sadists. There’s always going to be a faction who don’t want it to end, you know?” Aoife stretched out her papery white legs, catching the sun. “Pathology is the sharp end. We see it all.” She squinted at her cigarette. “My old boss at home, he dealt with the Shankill Butchers’ victims. You ever hear of them?”

“No.”

She took another draw and held it in. “They charged them with nineteen, but really there were about thirty murders. The Shankill Butchers were a gang of men, twelve or so of them, Protestant loyalists. They got hold of a black taxicab, drove around at closing time. Whoever hailed them got killed. They wanted Catholics but sometimes got their own side. They weren’t that fussy. What does that tell ye about the depth of their political convictions?”

Paddy tried to affect concern, but to her it was just a story about faceless men killing other faceless men. “It was an excuse?”

Aoife looked over at groups of workmen sunbathing their lunch break away, stripped to the waist across the glimmering water. “One fella, Thomas Madden, wee quiet man, forty-eight, unmarried, a security guard. They hung him up by his feet for six hours. One hundred and forty-seven stab wounds. Chipping away at him for hours.” She flicked her wrist. “All the work of the same hand, ye can tell that from the shape of the wounds. They put the time of death at about four a.m. Later, when they found him and saw where he’d been killed, they found a witness, a woman who’d been coming past around four. She was walking home after a party, she said, and heard a man’s voice. She thought someone was wild with the drink. He was shouting, ‘Kill me, kill me.’” Aoife flattened her hand to her chest wearily. “I don’t know why that hurts me so much.”

Paddy held her hand up. “That’s enough for me, actually.”

“Aye well, there’s my point: in peacetime the Butchers would just be sadistic serial killers, but to some people they’re folk heroes. And they’re the people the peace seekers have to go through. Both sides have their share of bastards. Any one of them can single-handedly break a ceasefire and keep the fight going. That’s who they need to weed out if there’s to be any hope.”

“And McBree’s doing the weeding?”

“So I’ve heard.”

Paddy leaned back on her elbows, letting the sun warm her face. “When you said they don’t trust you, who were you talking about?”

Aoife shrugged as if it was a silly question. “The bosses.”

“Why would the bosses want to hide how Kevin died?”

Aoife prodded Paddy in the shoulder. “That’s your job.”

Helen, the chief librarian, was busy giving a junior member of staff a bollocking. She looked down her nose through her red plastic glasses.

“Tell him that the reason we need one or two keywords is so that an idiot like you doesn’t end up with a truckload of envelopes to lose on the way up the stairs.”

The copyboy was a teenager, his skinny legs hardly filling the smart trousers his mum had ironed for him. He was looking at the red beads on Helen’s glasses chain, trying to give the impression of looking at her without having the courage to actually do it.

“The next time they give you a clippings request, take them this form.” Helen held up a small yellow sheet with three questions on it. “Get them to fill it out. That way you won’t waste my time and yours.”

Paddy leaned over the copyboy’s shoulder and pointed at Helen. “She used to give me grief all the time too.”

He turned, afraid at first and then grateful at her comradely tone. Helen wasn’t pleased. She scowled after the junior as he shuffled out of the office and gave Paddy a cold smile. They were friends sometimes, when Helen forgot about office politics and power games, which was about once a year, usually when her heart had been broken by yet another separated or divorced man. She was on an earnest hunt for love.

Paddy had met a few of Helen’s dates when she bumped into her in bistros around the West End. Red-faced businessmen in expensive suits, mostly. She wondered Helen could eat looking at some of them, much less sleep with them. But although Helen was handsome she was a nippy cow and Paddy supposed that brought her trade value down a lot.

She glared through her glasses at Paddy. “I don’t appreciate you speaking about me in that manner in front of a junior member of staff.”

“Yeah, OK.” Paddy was looking back into the library, at the big table where women with scissors used to cannibalize endless copies of each edition, cutting out stories and filing them in small brown envelopes under subject headings. Nowadays it was all done electronically: the copy was typed into computers to be set and sent to the print room downstairs, and a disk of the articles went to a company with expertise in these things. Helen was alone in the library, general of a dispersed army, and it had made her more unpleasant.