Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

She shut the boot and walked over to the News building, pulling open the fire exit door and jogging purposefully up the stairs.

Her entrance to the newsroom elicited a small cheer from those who could remember back to the morning’s drama, but the look on Paddy’s face killed the joy stone dead. The lights were on in Bunty’s cubicle.

She knocked once and opened the door, to find Bunty and the Monkey relaxing at the far end of the table, eating poached salmon sandwiches and drinking half-pints of beer in Press Bar glasses. Bunty retracted his feet from the conference table when he saw it was her, rearranging his face to denote managerial fury.

She held a hand up and took a deep breath. “I lied. I wasn’t visiting Ogilvy, I didn’t even meet him. I was waiting in the car while Sean went in, keeping an eye out for journalists.”

She waited for a moment, steeling herself against a gale of shouting, but none came. She carried on:

“There’s a story, a much, much bigger story going on. It’s a keynote story and I’ve come to you with it because I haven’t got a fucking clue what to do.”

Intrigued, Bunty flicked his fingers, waving her forward, and nodded to the Monkey to leave them alone for a moment. Monkey took his sandwich and half-pint with him.

She sat down near him, feeling exhausted, her stomach aching. She told him about Kevin, about the bruises on his arm and chin and Aoife’s theory about the methods of cocaine ingestion. Ask anyone, she said, about Kevin’s drinking; he wasn’t a man who would take drugs quietly and have a mishap. She told him about Kevin’s disappearance in the ambulance, about the innocuous coffee-table book, about McBree and the portfolio, and her boot being broken into.

“Every single copy of that photograph has been taken. I’ve got some bad photocopies of it.” She pulled them out of her bag and unfolded them on the table.

Bunty glanced through them, chewing his sandwich, looking back at her to continue.

“Now,” she said nervously, “the really interesting thing about this is Knox.”

Bunty looked skeptical. She’d raised Knox with him before and he stymied her plan to do an investigation into him.

“This is real, though, listen: Knox pulled me in for questioning this morning. They made me wait and then in saunters Knox and tells me to stay off McBree: Kevin wasn’t killed by anybody, the IRA had nothing to do with this, I should go home and let the whole thing drop.”

Bunty swallowed his mouthful, took a sip of beer, and looked up at her. “Maybe you should.”

She was shocked. He was a good editor, a good journalist, and any idiot could tell there was a story here. “I cannot believe you’re saying that.”

Bunty took another bite of his sandwich, folding the crusts into his mouth. He leaned back in his chair, lifting his feet up onto the table, making her wait for him to finish his mouthful before he answered her. He swallowed, reached forward for his glass, and took a sip of beer. He rolled his tongue along the line of front teeth, top and bottom.

“Get a fucking move on,” she said.

“Don’t you ever wonder,” he said quietly, “why Knox is out of bounds?”

She didn’t answer. She hadn’t wondered that actually. She often wondered why she couldn’t catch him, wondered what he did to frighten so many people into keeping quiet about him, but she had never been aware that he was being kept from her.

“Is he out of bounds?”

Bunty cradled the back of his head with his hands, sucked a morsel from his front teeth, and nodded once.

“Says who? British Intelligence?”

Bunty raised an eyebrow.

Paddy shook her head at the table: it was so obvious now. Consecutive editors had turned the Knox story back; no one outside the police knew a thing about his activities and she couldn’t find a policeman with a bad word to say, and they had a bad word about everyone. It was a sure sign that he was being kept clean. And then Kevin’s admission to hospital being wiped off whichever record while they fixed the body just so, the deserted office and Knox’s arrogant assurances about what was and wasn’t the case.

She’d interviewed Patrick Meehan many times about his brushes with British Intelligence and what always struck her was how commonplace it all sounded. A room set aside in a police station. Stone-faced men with Oxbridge accents and just the right coat from the right tailor’s, unimaginative and protectionist, unashamed of their agenda. They called them spooks but they sounded like irritable bank managers. Knox had that commonplace look. She remembered him in Babbity’s, recalled him sliding around at a hundred press functions.

“If,” Bunty paused dramatically, “if you can get anything on him, which I doubt, I’ll go with it.”

“You’ll publish it?”

He sucked his teeth again, enjoying himself. “Yes.”

Any senior editor who OK’d a story that threatened national security could get sacked by the proprietor, or worse.

“Bunty, you could get the bullet for it.”

“I could get the bullet anyway. They could sack me tomorrow for not selling enough advertising.”

She leaned forward. “What do you think? Why are Intelligence protecting McBree?”

He thought for a moment, slowly brushing bread crumbs from his shirtfront. “It’s one of two things. Either McBree’s still loyal to his cause but is working with them. He could be a bridge, helping negotiations in Northern Ireland. Or else, and if this is the case you better buy a gun: they’ve got something on him and McBree’s a double agent.”

He looked her in the eye and they both drew breath.

“Fucking hell.”

Bunty nodded slowly. “Quite so: fucking hell.”

Traipsing downstairs to her car, she thought about McBree working for the British government. He wouldn’t just be spying for them, telling them what was going on inside the Republican movement in Northern Ireland. He’d be too valuable an asset to use so lightly. If McBree was working for the government they’d be getting him to mold and shape decisions in their favor. And if he was working for them he’d kill to stop anyone finding out. He’d have to. If his own side found out he’d be a dead man.

She walked over to the car and looked back at the bright door of the bar, saw McGrade smiling benignly as he poured a pint, heard the chat and a drunkard’s laugh. A man passed inside and she thought for a moment it was someone she knew a long time ago, a union official who got a kicking the night her first boss, Farquarson, was sacked. But that was a long time ago in another garden.

She knew before she reached the door that something bad had happened. The light was wrong; it was too bright in the close and warm air was filtering down from up above, from her house, her open door. The wood around the lock had been shattered from a rough kick and the door hung open into the hallway.

She ran up the final steps and found the hall in a mess. The boxes of Dub’s records had been tipped over, some of them stamped on maliciously, the broken bits kicked around the floor. Terry’s trunk had been opened and upended, the binbags of his papers emptied. In the living room the mess was even worse. The bookcases had been ransacked, cushions ripped off the settee and chair, and the screen of the telly was kicked in.

“Hey, you.” Dub came out of the kitchen. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day.”

Paddy threw her hands up, shocked into silence.

“I know. The police came and looked around, made some notes, but I can’t really tell what was taken. They didn’t nick anything, just broke stuff. Left the records, the radio, didn’t even take the telly-look, just kicked it in. My watch was in the bathroom, they didn’t even take that.”