Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

The officer started the car and pulled away, easing down the busy street to another smattering of applause. As they turned the corner she looked back and saw the man in the black tracksuit slip away in the opposite direction.

Paddy cleared her throat and sat forward. “Did you get into trouble because I ran away?”

“Sit back and put your belt on.”

Every single car on the road gave way to them, let them cut in, slowed down when they noticed the squad car. She watched the driver, saw the expectation of deference and how angry he got when a driver didn’t let them in, noticed how he muttered under his breath that they must be blind.

“You’re not arresting me, are you?”

They didn’t answer.

“How’s Kevin? Is he OK? Where is he? I went looking for him yesterday and couldn’t find a trace of him.”

She looked at the back of their heads, at their shoulders. Neither of them cringed or twitched, they weren’t withholding anything: they didn’t know how Kevin was.

“They haven’t told you, have they?”

Seen in the rearview mirror, the driver’s eyes were heavy. “Shut the fuck up,” he said.

So she did.

Squad cars lined the street in front of a modest red-brick office block, built in the thirties, all long lines and big windows. The cantilevered slab over the door had been updated, clad in raw steel and extended so that it covered the entire pavement. Picked out in confident blue letters, the building declared itself to be Strathclyde Police Headquarters. The overall effect wasn’t friendly. It was a public space annexed by the big boys.

They found a parking place in the street, and straightened their uniforms as they got out and came around to her door. They glanced up at the building and Paddy thought they looked intimidated, two constables from the South Side bringing her to their unseen masters. They grabbed her as she got out, holding her elbows too tight, pinching the bones, nasty little bullies as they huckled her towards the glass doors on behalf of their bosses.

“You really don’t need to hold me this tight,” she said, as they pushed the doors open and brought her into reception.

They weren’t in a police station, Paddy could see that straightaway. Reception looked like a corporation’s. There were no holding cells here and the public had little reason to drop in, so leather seats lined the wood-paneled hall, a pretty receptionist looked up attentively, and the phones on her desk weren’t nailed down the way they were in other cop shops.

“I’m not going to run again,” Paddy told the older officer.

He shot her a dirty look. “Be quiet.”

The younger officer came over, settled on her other side, and they waited. She’d have to speak to Sean and tell him they’d been seen picking Callum up. It wouldn’t be as bad for him as it was for her, she thought. He was only a driver for the News and was Callum’s cousin. Sacking someone for not reporting a member of their own family was too Maoist, even for panicky Bunty.

She looked up the slatted wooden stairs. Whoever had sent them to get her was up there, reading about Terry, or Kevin, or her. She’d come back from this with a story about Kevin Hatcher, squeeze something out of the person questioning her and feed it to Bunty to appease him. Whatever Merki was writing, he was still a hundred miles behind her.

“I think I’m being followed,” she said to the officer next to her, “by a wee guy in a tracksuit. I’d suspect the police, but he’s wearing a Celtic shirt and I know you’re all Prods.”

He wasn’t listening though; he was looking past her to the stairs. He stood up, raising an eyebrow.

Paddy turned to see a frumpy woman in a cheap business suit coming down towards them, nodding once at the officer. She spoke as she took Paddy by the upper arm, urged her to her feet, and marched her to the lift. “Miss Meehan, I’m DI Sharon Garrett. Can you come with me, please.”

It wasn’t a question.

Paddy looked at their watered reflection in the steel elevator doors. She was flanked by Garrett and the young officer, the older guy standing behind them, allowing himself a smile. She looked very small in among them, her clothes crumpled. She could smell the smoke off herself.

The empty lift arrived and they got in; Garrett pressed the button for the fifth floor and the door slid shut.

“Do you want to question me about Kevin? Is this whole thing about Kevin or are you factoring in Terry as well? I’ve got a photo of the guy I was telling you about.”

No one spoke.

“How is Kevin? Did you see his bruises?”

Garrett shifted her weight to her other foot.

“I was thinking, why would he have a line out to sniff if he was swallowing cocaine? And stuff was missing from his house, boxes of negatives. Did they tell you that?”

The doors opened out onto a long, quiet corridor of partitioned offices. At the far end a man in blue overalls was buffing the green lino floor with a humming machine. The corridor was very quiet.

As Garrett led them to the end, Paddy could see that all of the offices were empty. Windows onto the corridor looked into dark rooms, straight through to the outside windows. They passed the cleaner, stepped over the flex of his humming buffer, and went into a disused office. The shelves were empty, the desk clear. Someone had worked here once though: pale oblongs where posters and wall charts had hung marked the wall. It smelled of dust.

Garrett sat Paddy down and moved about behind her, pulling down the blinds onto the corridor, adding gloom to the office’s many other crimes. Then she sat down behind the desk, facing Paddy, blinking every ten seconds, leaving the two officers to stand by the door.

In the corridor outside, the floor buffer bumped gently off a skirting board, the hum missing a beat before continuing its journey.

Paddy had been interviewed by the police before, but this didn’t feel like a police interview. It felt like an ambush.

“Sorry”-the wooden chair creaked beneath her as she leaned forward-“who are you again?”

“DI Garrett.”

“You’re a policewoman?”

“Police officer.”

“Aren’t you a woman? Sorry. The skirt made me think, you know…” Garrett continued blinking to schedule. “You prefer ‘officer’?”

“It’s customary.”

“What do you prefer though?”

“Whatever is customary.” Garrett didn’t display a flicker of emotion. It was like talking to a fridge. No one at personnel would be tempted to strong-arm Garrett into Family Liaison.

“Hm.” Paddy sat back. “This empty office, away from everyone, waiting. We are waiting, aren’t we? For someone. Someone more senior than you.”

Garrett wasn’t unattractive but she had gone to a lot of trouble not to make the best of herself: shoulder pads emphasized her square body, the skirt didn’t fit her and her haircut was boxy, the blond streaks fooling no one. She didn’t have a smear of makeup on.

“Miss Meehan, why were you at Kevin Hatcher’s flat yesterday morning?”

Paddy told her the truth, aware that the stuffy office was isolated from the rest of the station: no one passed in the corridor outside, the lift didn’t ting as it reached their floor.

Garrett asked pointless questions, things she already knew the answer to, about Paddy’s claims regarding an Irishman who had come to her house, descriptions of the man who had been at her son’s school yesterday. She didn’t seem to be coaxing information out of Paddy but rather keeping her busy.

She made Paddy go over the details of finding Kevin, of going to his house on Sunday night, but cut her off whenever Paddy mentioned Liberia or the IRA. She didn’t even want her talking about the missing photograph from the portfolio so Paddy pushed it, starting to answer a question innocuously and then veering off to speak about the Irishman, naming him as McBree, mapping Garrett’s reaction when she said it. McBree. The name made her blink out of sequence.