Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

“Someone tried to kill Pete last night. A man, an Irish Republican I’ve been writing about, broke into Burns’s house and tried to stab Pete because he couldn’t find me. It was a warning. It’s me he wants.”

Marty dropped back down to sit on the bed, staring at her. It was the traces of fear in his eyes that made her see it: he looked so much like Con it was all she could do to stop herself from crying again. “I need you to watch over Pete.”

He took her hands in his, easing her thumbs out and baring his wee sister’s palms.

“Why? Where are you going?”

She took another deep breath. “I have to go and meet him.”

The words hung heavily in the air between them as Paddy looked out of the window at the tree nodding in the summer breeze at the end of the garden.

“Can’t I come with you?”

“I need you to watch over Pete.”

When they first moved in, her father thought the tree was a bush and left it. She’d found out recently that it was a sycamore. Every summer it grew taller and more lush until now it dominated the whole garden, the only feature that rose above a rusting washing machine peeking like a commando over the tips of the tall grass. No one had ever liked that tree but Paddy. She loved it for daring to be beautiful in an ugly place.

Marty pressed her palms together, warming them in the circle of his own hands.

“Can’t you call the police?”

“The police are protecting him. He’s killed two people already and they warned me off investigating him.”

“Call the papers?”

“The two guys he killed were the papers.”

Marty looked terrified. “Me and Gerry could hide in the van and-”

“No.”

“We could get a gun-”

“No. We’re not that kind of people. He’s after me and whoever is with me, Marty. He’s been doing this for twenty years… Please trust me. I could spend an hour explaining and I’ll still have to go by myself.”

He was holding her hands tight now, his head almost in her lap. He whispered, “Will you leave Pete here?”

She nodded at the window.

“Will he come for Pete tonight?”

“Not if I go to meet him.”

She looked back at her brother. He was stroking her hands and crying, face red, chin quivering, and now he really looked like her daddy. Con cried a lot at the end. Spontaneous outbursts of limitless sadness.

“We, um…” Marty broke off to sniff. “We’ll take turns staying up. We’ve got baseball bats in the van and we’ll keep knives by the settee. If you do meet him-” He shut his eyes and curled over his knees, tensing his back into a tight curve. “We’ll move home and mind Pete.”

She pulled her thumbs free and cupped Marty’s hands in hers, lifted them, holding them to her cheek.

Slowly, he rocked forward until their heads were pressed tight together.

He pressed so hard he numbed her scalp.

She called Pitt Street and asked for Knox. The receptionist put her through to a secretary. DCS Knox wasn’t in right now but she wondered if she could take a message?

“It’s really him I need to speak to,” Paddy told her. “It’s quite urgent.”

“Well, I’m very sorry but he won’t be back in again tonight.”

Paddy couldn’t go and wait in the cottage on her own all night if McBree didn’t know where she was. He’d come after Pete and find him in the house with her mother and brothers. It would be a massacre.

“It’s about Martin McBree, I have some-”

“Just a moment.”

She heard two soft-tone beeps and Knox picked up.

“This is Paddy Meehan. I’ve got McBree’s pictures, the last few copies. I want to hand them over.”

He thought for a moment. “That’s nothing to do with me,” he said.

“Tonight. Eriskay House, off the Ayr road. There’s a small sign for the house, shortly before the Troon petrol station on the roundabout.”

“Why are you telling me?” He sounded so casual and self-assured it made her furious.

“Knox, I will get around to you.”

“Will you?” He was smiling.

“I know about you.” She had nothing on him, but the more threatened he felt the more likely he was to call McBree immediately.

“Miss Meehan-”

She hung up on him. Knox moved in that murky area between criminality and government-licensed corruption. He would have his finger in a hundred scams and couldn’t know which of them she was alluding to.

She stood in the hall, felt the familiar breeze at her ankles from the gap under the front door, heard the murmur of the television in the living room, looked at the tread on the stair carpet, unchanged throughout her entire life. She began to tremble.

The twenty-four-hour shop was a five-minute detour from the motorway, on the lip of the West End. It sold munchie food, catering to hungry drunks on their way home from clubs in the town and hash-smoking students who ventured out in the night in search of nourishment. As a backup source of income it had diversified, offering a hundred other services: handwritten adverts for rooms to let, a bulky photocopier near the back, magazine subscriptions and, behind the counter, under the cigarettes, a fax machine.

“Nah, ye can’t send it yourself. Give me the number and I’ll send it for ye.”

The sleepy young woman had bleached hair that seemed to be melting at the tips. Paddy wondered at the wisdom of entrusting her with her revenge. “It’s quite important. Can I come round and make sure you do it right?”

The shop assistant sighed as if she’d been asked to clean her room. “I can’t let people around the counter. Yes or no. Hurry up.”

The machine was small but looked new.

“OK.”

The girl pulled out a cover sheet from under the counter. “Fill it out.”

Paddy used a pencil:

Number of pages including this one: two.

From: blank.

To: blank.

Subject: Martin McBree’s meeting with British security agent in New York, 1989.

She stacked the photocopy of McBree under the cover sheet and handed it over with the list of Irish phone numbers she had got from directory inquiries that afternoon. “These three numbers.”

The girl took them, turned her back, and fitted the picture facedown into the feeder. She looked at the numbers. “Which one first?”

“Sinn Fein Offices. Then the Irish Republican News. Then the Sweetie Bottle Bar.”

“All in Northern Ireland?”

“Yeah. The area codes are all there.”

The blonde punched the numbers in lazily, sensing that Paddy was anxious and in a hurry, so taking her time. Eventually the machine swallowed the sheet and spat it back out, gave off a whirring-beeped burp, and a short slip of paper slid out of the underside.

“And I’ll take a couple of Snickers bars as well.”

Paddy checked the transmission report as she waited for her change. It was number perfect. It would take some time, she felt sure, for the word to get out, be checked and double-checked, and finally for someone to believe Martin McBree was working with the security services. But one day he’d get a knife in his neck and he’d know it was because of her.

He was coming to get her and, she realized, she didn’t even have a pocket knife.

The shop assistant held out the change to her, looking at her hand and noting the tremble in her fingers.

“Sorry,” said Paddy, “do you sell kitchen scissors?”

She stood by her Volvo, cramming the second Snickers bar into her dry mouth, hardly tasting it on the way down but aware of the stringy caramel sticking in her throat. She looked at her hands, at her chocolate-coated fingertips. She was too full even to lick them clean and they were still shaking.