Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

Pete was delighted to have been whipped out of school. He liked going well enough, but it was his nature to enjoy unexpected turns of events: surprise days out, holidays changed at the last minute, onerous trips canceled leaving empty hours to be filled with something else. He clutched his backpack and looked out of the taxi window as if he’d never been here before.

“I’m staying here? For how long?”

“I don’t know, son, but that’s only if it’s OK with your daddy and even then it’ll be a couple of days at most.”

“My Ghost Train video’s here. Dad lets me watch it all the time. Will I still be going to Granny Trisha’s on Saturday though? Will I still get to play with BC on Saturday?”

The taxi pulled up outside the house. “That’s a long way off.”

“But, on Saturday, will I see BC?” He was excited, a little smile playing on his lips and his eyes wide and shining. “Will I, but?”

“Aye, ye will.”

His mouth sprang open in a grin and she threw her arms around him, kissing him all over his face until he got bored and pushed her away.

They paid the driver and got out of the taxi, walking the length of the short lawn, following the yellow slabs making up the path to the front door. Coming from an old West End flat to here made everything seem slightly too small: the doors narrow, the ceilings low, even the windows like miniature impressions of the real thing.

They rang the doorbell, and looked at the white plastic door. Pete traced his finger on the wood effect, finding the groove repeated note for note on the next panel.

“Is it from the same tree?”

“I think it’s plastic with a wood pattern on it.”

He squinted at it. “Plastic should look like plastic.”

“I think so too.”

Following a scuffle of feet in the hallway, Burns opened the door to them, dropped his shoulders, and then remembered himself. He gave Pete a big showbiz smile.

“Hiya, wee man,” he said as Pete clutched his leg, then lifted him up to give him a hug. “Why aren’t you in school?”

Pete hung on to his dad’s neck, squeezing tight before letting go and sliding to the ground. “Mum came and brung me out.”

“Brought you out,” corrected Paddy.

He ran off down the hall to what looked like the kitchen.

“Well.” Burns looked her up and down. “Now why would she do that?”

She looked like shit, she knew she did. Her black skirt was crumpled, her black silk shirt was missing a button at the bottom and she had big stupid orange trainers on. Burns had lost weight in the past few years; he was TV-thin now, so thin his head looked disproportionately big. Dub said he looked like a tethered balloon. Today Sandra had chosen a white T-shirt and white jeans for him, ironed so well they might have come straight from the packet. He had a tan too; they owned a sunbed. Paddy could imagine the house in the dwindling light of an evening, dark but for a tiny bedroom window glowing fluorescent blue.

In the kitchen Pete slid a video into a machine and she heard the opening strains of the Ghost Train theme.

Unexpectedly, Paddy covered her mouth with her hand, pressing the fingers hard into her cheeks, digging into the skin with her fingernails as tears welled up in her eyes. She turned away to the street to hide her face.

Burns watched her for a moment, hand idling on his hip. He leaned forward, took her wrist firmly, and pulled her into the house, out of sight of the neighbors.

The front room had two white leather settees and a glass coffee table in it. In the small picture window Sandra had arranged yellow tulips in an ugly crystal vase. Burns put Paddy on one settee and sat himself down in the neighbor, calmly watching her cry, reaching forward once to pet her knee.

She took the cigarettes out of her handbag and looked for permission. He nodded and she lit up, trembling, her lungs resistant to the deep breath.

“What’s happening?” asked Burns.

“Terry Hewitt was killed, you probably heard.”

“I did, aye.”

“I was named as next of kin. They made me ID the body on Saturday night.”

Burns thought back to Sunday. “You never said.”

She nodded out to Pete in the kitchen. “Well, anyway, I may be a bit freaked by that, and I know I’m overprotective, but Callum Ogilvy’s out of prison and he’s gone missing. I just don’t want Pete in the house or alone in school. It doesn’t feel safe.”

“What happened to Terry?”

“He was shot in the head.” She lifted her cigarette to her mouth but couldn’t face it and dropped her hand. “D’you remember Kevin Hatcher?”

“No.”

“A photographer. He was working with Terry on a book.” She shook her head, bewildered now she thought about it. “A bullshit book, a coffee-table thing. Nice pictures, nothing. Anyway, I was looking through his letter box-”

“How like you.”

She shut her burning eyes. “Please, George.”

“I’m teasing. Just trying to get a rise out of you.” He touched her knee again, telling her to go on.

“Kevin was lying on the ground. He’d had a stroke, swallowed a lot of cocaine, which he wouldn’t. Now he’s dead, there’s no trace of him arriving at any casualty department in the city, the police are warning me off and a bit of the book was missing.”

He stopped her. “You’re not making any sense.”

She tried to sort it out in her mind but gave up. “I used to be fearless about these things. ’Member Kate Burnett? ’Member Callum Ogilvy? Back then I was scared but not like this, not shaken and shitting it and crying all the fucking time.” She took a puff of the cigarette and looked at the floor. A white carpet. What sort of idiot would choose a white carpet in a house with a child? She looked around for an ashtray but there was nothing in the room but the empty coffee table. “Since Pete was born, it really matters if I die, you know?”

“Is that why you’re smoking again?”

She managed a shaky smile.

He looked at her stubby cigarette. “Can you think of anything less regal than Regal?”

They took three puffs to smoke, were favored by women who went to bingo and rebelling teenagers because they were cheap. Feeling in her handbag, she found an old paper hankie. Burns watched her make a bowl shape out of the crumpled tissue, spit into it, and touch it with the tip of her cigarette, letting it hiss itself to death.

“Seeing you spit into a dirty paper hankie makes me want you in the worst way.”

“Fuck you, Burns.”

He smiled. “There’s my brave girl. I’d get you an ashtray but then I’d be implicated. I’ll get battered when Sandy smells it.”

“I doubt you get battered for anything much, George.”

He shook his head slowly. “You don’t know what goes on, Pad. See this room, this white, empty room? You could do operations in here.” He did a stage sigh she’d heard many times before. “She has got… problems.”

She nodded, trying not to smile. George Burns had been confiding that his relationship was in trouble since she first met him, seven women ago. It was a sore lesson, she’d fallen for it often, but over the years she had finally realized that what George wanted wasn’t a big helpful chat to sort out his feelings; it often wasn’t even mindless sex with her, really. What George Burns craved was to win over disapproving women. Temporary was an essential precondition of what he wanted. No single woman in the universe was enough for him. Although they laughed about him and he was a philandering arsehole, his craven need to be well thought of was still kind of adorable. She just hoped it wasn’t genetic.

She crumpled the tissue into a ball and put it in her handbag, already smelling the rank stink and thinking of McBree’s awful breath.