Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

Forsyth was still stunned about Kevin’s death. She waved a hand vaguely over the phone on the desk but Paddy stood up. “I’ll use the one out in the hall, on my way out. I don’t want to interrupt your work.”

“Sure, sure.” Joan stood up to shake Paddy’s hand again. “If you ever have an idea for a book come to me.” She looked her up and down. “You’re very marketable.”

Paddy wasn’t altogether sure it was a compliment. “Tell your friend I’m sorry for insulting her hair.”

“No.” She waved the offense away. “She had it cut because of you, no bad thing.”

“And I’m sorry the book won’t come out.”

“Are you joking?” Forsyth managed a weak smile. “With a story like this attached to it, it bloody well will come out.”

Paddy remembered Kevin sitting in his living room on a quiet Sunday night, proudly showing her the portfolio, saying Terry had offended someone in Liberia and nothing would happen to him.

“Joan, I’d keep that really quiet for a while if I were you.”

Tippy was playing music upstairs somewhere, and Paddy was alone in the hall. She rang Burns.

Sandra picked up, putting on a breathy telephone voice and answering as “the Burnses’ residence.” Paddy kept her voice down and asked for Pete. Sandra leaned away from the phone and called, “Peter, Peter,” into the kitchen. Paddy could hear the theme to Ghost Train playing on the video in the background.

“All right, son? What are you doing?”

The sound of his voice made her relax, resting her forehead on the cool wall above the telephone table. He was monosyllabic, probably looking into the kitchen where the video was, but he sounded happy and said he’d been to a neighbor’s kid’s party and had a lot of Coke and crisps. His dad said Pete didn’t need to have a bath tonight and he’d had toast for dinner.

“No veg?”

“Crisps are made from potatoes,” he said, quoting BC, who compounded his fatness by being a smart-arse.

“Are you quite happy staying there tonight? Have you got a clean shirt for school?”

“Yes and yes,” he said, succinct because he wanted to get off the phone. “The video…”

She made him promise to phone her at home and say good night before she let him go. She hung up and let herself out into the cool of the evening.

It was dark outside. Paddy and Dub had been everywhere they could think of, up to Springburn, where Callum came from, on the off chance he’d managed to get a train and bus up there, back down the road for a scour of Rutherglen and the fields around it, following the bus routes from the main road nearby, to a local supermarket that opened late, into a couple of cafés that were brightly lit and a pub that stood out cheerily against the dark because of the red neon FOOD sign in the window. As Dub pointed out, Callum wasn’t off looking for a good time, he was hiding. He would be hiding in a dark ditch somewhere, not going into the obvious places. Paddy knew one thing for sure: she didn’t want to be the one to find him. He was scary enough with the lights on.

She told Dub about her conversation with Burns and how he wasn’t feeding Pete properly.

“It’s only one night, you’d think he could cook him something once .”

“Yeah,” said Dub. “Maybe I’ll phone him.”

“Let him phone you.”

They drove past Sean’s street, stopping and peering down the road to see the hordes parked up outside the house. Photographers stood in groups, their bags at their feet, fingering their cameras and looking bored. Journalists stood separately. She knew the scatter pattern well enough: clusters of the genial ones, gathering around to swap lies about their wages and expense accounts and all the coups they nearly had, the loners hanging about on the fringes, telling themselves lies and coming up with schemes to trounce the others and get the story. A large television van was parked up on Sean’s side of the road, a massively tall transmission aerial sticking out of the top. She could already imagine the complaints from the press journalists: the van would be in their view, spoil the pictures. But that was why it was there, to get the logo in any of the pictures that got published and show that STV were on the scene too.

Dub suggested they get fish suppers and park to eat them and she realized how hungry she was. She hadn’t had any lunch, just the biscuit at the publisher’s house. No wonder she felt so ropy.

Rutherglen was her old stamping ground. When she dated Sean they often went to the Burnside café to pick up fish suppers for his mum and brothers. It faced onto a dark, hilly park full of old trees and they used to hand in the order and then go across and snog behind a tree for ten minutes while the man cooked their food.

She parked across the road and Dub said he’d get them if she waited in the car, so she asked for a battered haggis supper with lots of vinegar and a can of juice. He mugged a sad face at her. “No veg?”

“Batter is made from veg.”

The café was empty. Paddy watched through the car window as the bored proprietor chucked chips into plastic trays, wrapping them expertly in white-and-brown paper, picking the haggis from a display shelf sitting above the fryers. That meant the haggis had been fried earlier in the evening. That meant it would be dried out. She was cursing to herself, imagining the rubbery casing around the meat, when she looked over to the park and saw something move behind a tree. A head, a big head, the right height for Callum as well.

Paddy looked at Dub, a long strip of cool buying her nice chips to share after a hard day of misery and grim. She chewed her tongue hard and looked back out into the park. It would be getting cold soon: the heat from the day was leaving the earth and there wasn’t any cloud cover. Fuck him, she thought, fuck him. He’s a creep and I’ve had a hard day, but her hand found the door handle and she got out into the street, hoping he’d see her and run for it. She stepped out of the street light into the shadow of the trees and cleared her throat.

“Is that you?”

Whoever it was slipped back behind the tree.

“’Cause if it is you, Sean’s very worried and we’re out looking for you.” She looked back at Dub handing a fiver over the counter, the parcels tucked neatly into a flimsy blue plastic bag hanging from his hand.

“We’re getting chips.”

Her heart sank as Callum peered skittishly around the trunk of the tree. He must be hungry. For the sake of Sean she waved him over to her. “Come on.”

“I can’t go back. They’re all over the place.”

“OK, get in the car and we’ll eat the chips and think of something.”

Dub was surprised to find Paddy getting into the car with a bulky young stranger but he managed to defer his curiosity until they were inside. They could tell Callum had been crying. He had managed to get dirt on his face and there were clean tracks where the tears had fallen, smeared where he had wiped them away. She looked at him in the dark and remembered the terrified wee boy in a hospital bed nine years ago.

She introduced Dub to him, him to Dub, and they opened the chips. The haggis supper was too big for her anyway so she halved it with him and Dub donated a third of his fish, giving Callum his can of Irn-Bru. Callum thanked them through a mouthful of sausage, cramming chips into his mouth, explaining that he’d only had a cheese sandwich and he was starving. The chips were sweet and salted to perfection and they sank into the easy camaraderie of hungry people enjoying a good meal.

Dub finished first, gave a satisfied sigh, wiped the grease from his mouth with a paper napkin, and looked at Callum, still eating on the backseat.