Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

Merki grinned. “You’re jealous of me and my success.”

They stood together and laughed. Merki was pretty funny: he had a face like a bag of spanners, worked nights, and she made four times his salary for eight hundred words a week.

Paddy looked over his left shoulder and the Monkey appeared, scowling when he spotted her. She stepped away as he waved her over to Bunty’s door. She held up a finger to the Monkey and picked up a phone, dialed 9 for an outside line, and rang directory inquiries, covering her mouth so Merki wouldn’t hear her asking for the number of Scotia Press. The exchange was deep in the heart of the West End.

The woman answered as if she’d been expecting her call. “Yah?”

“Ah, hello, this is Paddy Meehan from the Scottish Daily News here. I wondered if I might come over later and talk to you about Terry Hewitt?”

Reluctantly, the woman gave her the address, told her not to come in the next three hours and to ring the bell firmly. Paddy thanked her and hung up.

The Monkey wasn’t smiling as she approached. He held the already open door to Bunty’s office and bowed as she passed on the way in.

Bunty was sitting with his elbows on the table, his index fingers steepled against his mouth. He looked up at her. She had never seen him quite as white before.

“Sit.”

Paddy shut the door behind her, leaving the Monkey outside, and took the nearest chair. The table was ten feet long; they were sitting at either end and it still felt too close.

Bunty sat forward. “Callum Ogilvy. Is he out?”

He left the name hanging in the air between them. It wasn’t clear whether it was an accusation, a story suggestion or a reproach. She could bluff it, tell him an outright lie, but big lies rarely went well for her. The porous paper on the clippings envelopes was suddenly damp from her damp hands. She put them on the table.

“Bunty-”

He had her column copy on the table in front of him. “And this flimsy crap is all you bring me.” His voice rose suddenly, his words tumbling over each other in their hurry to get out. “Where’s the bite in this? Say it was the Provos or say it wasn’t. And Misty doesn’t use semicolons. What the fucking bloody hell am I paying you for?” He wasn’t a habitual user of bad language, didn’t understand the rhythm of it, and it sounded desperate. “At the prison: you were seen.”

“Look, there’s been another attack.” She was matching his speed, talking louder than she normally would. “Kevin Hatcher, our old pictures editor. I saw Merki’s article but just because they found a gun doesn’t mean it’s confirmed either way. Someone threatened me at my house. My son-” God, she was personalizing it, making it emotional. She hadn’t meant to. “They threatened me, at my house.”

But Bunty had barely heard her. “You were outside the prison. It’s all over Glasgow. Everyone knows. I look like a bloody fool.”

“But this other story, it’s going to be huge, boss. When Terry and Kevin were in New York – There’s an IRA guy, McBree.”

“I could lose my job.”

His voice was so loud she felt the glass walls on the cubicle shudder and a silence fell in the newsroom outside. A red flush rose up his cheeks and his eyes seemed to deepen in their sockets.

Paddy’s mouth opened, her brain disengaged, and to her astonishment she said, “I visited Ogilvy. I’m working him.”

“For me or for McVie?”

“For you, boss, of course for you.”

Bunty’s red fog ebbed and subsided. His lips reappeared at his mouth. He blinked at the desk. Outside, the noise of the newsroom resumed.

“He’s not out?”

“Ah.” The second she said Callum was no longer in custody a scrum of journalists would form outside Sean’s house. She hoped they hadn’t asked the prison service about Callum’s whereabouts. “Not to my knowledge.”

“Bring me six hundred words on your visit to Ogilvy in the next two hours or I’ll sack you and tell every single person in this business why. Out.”

“OK.” She stood up, wondering what the fuck she had said that for. She’d even called him boss. She hadn’t called an editor boss in five years.

The Monkey must have been listening to the entire conversation because he opened the door from outside for her to leave. Paddy picked up her envelopes and walked out.

The Monkey pointed her over to a small space at a computer on the features island. “You can use that desk there.”

People wandering around the room watched her, as she walked uncertainly over to the desk and sat down, setting her clippings envelopes in a tidy pile.

The Monkey was watching her too so she reached forward and switched on the computer. The monitor gave a green yawn and flickered to a DOS prompt.

She couldn’t write up a fictitious visit to Callum. It was checkable; other journalists would look at the prison visitors’ book and see her name wasn’t in it. If she wrote the truth about the release, Sean would never forgive her-she had accompanied him as a friend, not a reporter. I have a life, she reminded herself, beyond my job: I have a life. Callum was volatile, living in Sean’s house with his children and his wife, and he didn’t want to be written about. If he saw her name on an article he’d be sure to blame Sean.

The Monkey was watching so she directed the DOS prompt to take her into a word-processing package.

The feet were back again. Callum had watched them for two hours yesterday and now they were back. He could see them as he stepped into the street, watched them from the corner of his eye, and turned to the right, heading in the opposite direction from the way he had gone yesterday morning. He resisted the urge to look back at the man, to see where he was watching. He’d find out soon enough.

He walked on, head up, staying calm, not drawing the man’s eye, until he had passed a garage forecourt and an old kirk and come to a bend in the road. Only then did he cross the street to the right side, the side the man was on.

Callum didn’t know this area but he took an educated guess and skirted around the block, looking for ways into the back court and the flooded midden. It was a red-sandstone quadrangle of tenements, old-style, not cleaned up like a lot of the buildings he had seen on the drive in. Black soot still coated the stone, thickest against the top floors. The glittering red stone showed on the ground floor, where the rain had run it off. It was tenements as he remembered them, Glasgow as he knew it as a child: black and forbidding.

He found an open close mouth and looked through. There was the bin shed, there was the puddle where the children had been playing yesterday. The man would be around the corner, standing in a close that ran at a ninety-degree angle to this one, looking out into the street. And he’d be bored now, thinking about other things, his guard down.

Callum’s mouth felt dry as he flattened himself against the inside wall and looked out into the back court. Bright sunlight sliced the yard in half, glinting off the puddle and the upended skeleton of a pram. Swarms of midges hung in the air. It was a school day, but the children would be coming home soon. Elaine had taken the babies off in the pram, setting off early, she said, to pick up messages before she went to get the kids from school. She wouldn’t even know he’d slipped out of the house but he had only fifteen minutes until the back court was overrun with children.

He looked up. Windows were open all around the square, kitchen windows. He could see taps in front of one window, a clothes pulley on a ceiling. Somewhere a radio crackled an old show tune.

He stepped out onto the dirt floor, tiptoeing, keeping against the wall and in the shadows, and crept around to the close door.