Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

“Not really. A friend. He hadn’t anyone else.”

“OK.” She nodded. “Well, I’ve been here for two days and haven’t had the time to dress anyone up. I don’t know what kind of state your friend is in but we can do this two ways: I can tidy him up but that’ll take time, or I can just bring you to him. How’s your constitution?”

Paddy shrugged. It was shite, actually, but she wanted to get to the office and file the story before the final edition went to press. “Fair to middling.”

Aoife smiled. “Beckett,” she said, catching the reference. “Right, come on now you with me and we’ll find your friend.”

The police trailed after them as Aoife led Paddy through a small passageway to a big steel door. A gauge on the wall next to it showed the temperature. Paddy had looked at a body here before, a long time ago, as a favor to an old friend.

“Don’t you use the drawers anymore?”

“Bloody thing conked out ages ago. Heads need banging together in this place.” Using all her slight weight, Aoife yanked the big door open. A gust of frost and alcohol burst into the corridor. Brutal white strip lights flickered awake in the walk-in fridge, casting inky shadows under the sheeted trolley beds. Inside, the fridge was crowded. Aoife had to wiggle sideways between the beds to make her way to the back of the room.

“What number did ye say?” Her voice echoed back to them.

Blane looked at his notebook again and repeated it.

She checked a couple of toe tags, muttering “Here we go” to herself when she found Terry. She looked back across the full fridge and sighed a white cloud. “Hell. We might need to empty the whole place to get him out.”

There were fifteen, eighteen bodies in the place. It would take ten minutes to wheel all the beds out and then they couldn’t very well piss off and leave her with the bodies in the corridor.

“Tell you what, I’ll come in,” said Paddy, bracing herself and stepping into the cold. She slid between the shrouded shapes, holding her hands high, trying not to touch anything.

“Me too,” said Kilburnie. Family Liaison. Elbow holder. Empathy in uniform. She followed Paddy’s path through the trolleys, keeping close, until they were gathered on the other side of the bed from Aoife, exhaling smog over the cold white sheet.

Paddy looked down. Terry was under there. A Terry-shaped piece of meat. Naked. Rotting. Suddenly, death wasn’t a long holiday. It was real.

Aoife McGaffry sensed her tension. “Was he a relative of yours?”

“No.” Paddy couldn’t stop her eyes from mapping the mountains and valleys of the sheet in front of her. “No, no. We’ve just known each other for a long time, that’s all.”

It wasn’t all. They had known each other for nine years and she thought about him all the time he was away, wondered after him, imagined his absent opinion of her actions. Terry Hewitt had been her touchstone for nearly a decade. He was a marker of how she was doing, a spur to action, a call for decency. She wished he’d never come back to Glasgow.

Aoife was talking. “… pull the sheet back slowly. You’re better just looking at him once the sheet’s away and not while it comes off. It’s easier to look then. And stand back a wee bit, there.”

Dumbly, Paddy took a step away, her bum banging into the trolley behind her. She started, imagined a dead hand grabbing her arse.

“Don’t get freaked out, just step back. It’s good to have more in your line of vision than just the deceased. Keeps perspective. If it gets too much, look up at me. Ready?”

She had her hands on the top end of the sheet. Paddy stared hard at Aoife’s face and nodded.

“Right, here we are now.”

Against orders, Paddy watched as Aoife rolled the sheet back, folding it under Terry’s chin as if he was a sleeping child. “You try to have a wee look now.”

At first all Paddy could see was the mess of it. A black hole the size of a fist was at his temple. A tongue, was that a tongue? Purple, swollen, poking out between the bloody lips. He must have been lying on his side after he was shot because tendrils of blood had dried across his face, a black octopus climbing out of the hole above his ear. She couldn’t see Terry in all of that. She stole a look at Aoife’s shoulder, braced herself, looked at him again through a puff of white breath.

The first thing she recognized was the BCG scar on his upper arm. She had kissed that, stared at it in the gloomy room in Fort William while Terry talked about San Salvador, knew every fold of the smooth penny, every overlapping freckle. Then she saw that the nose was Terry’s nose. It was his double chin. She saw the hair on the back of his neck: black, coarse, gelled, sticky to the touch. She had run her fingertips around that neck, savored the softness, scratched and kissed it, run the tip of her tongue through the soft precursor hairs, tasted him. Her mouth filled suddenly with salt water.

“Him. It’s him.”

Lightness flooded into the top of her head, making her unsteady. Ordering herself to be brave, she raised her eyes to Aoife but her gaze rolled up past the thick brown hair, rushed up the wall, and skidded up to the ceiling into a burning strip light.

She hit the floor before realizing she was going down.

The light above her was so harsh that Paddy threw her arm over her face and rolled onto her side to get away from it. Aoife was talking a mile away. “She’s fine. No worries. Yez can go about your business now.”

Paddy heard Blane say something. Or was it Kilburnie? Aoife replied and a door clicked shut somewhere.

Keeping her hands over her face, Paddy sat up. She was on a low bed, a leather daybed, covered in a long strip of paper like a gynecologist’s examination couch. She had passed out right in front of policemen while she was wearing a dress. Blane and Kilburnie would have a story to tell now: Burns on the telly, purple hall, and herself on the floor, legs splayed, washday-gray knickers on full show. She cursed to herself and swung her legs over the side of the bed, forcing her eyes open.

They must have carried her in here. It was a small office, cut off from the rest of the mortuary by wood and glass partitions. Gray box files and papers were stacked on every surface. The cheap particleboard desk had a big white computer sitting on it, the screen blinking a green prompt.

Aoife was watching her from a swivel chair, smoking a cigarette she didn’t look old enough to buy.

“Oh, sorry, I’m sorry,” Paddy apologized over and over, trying to think of something else to say. “I’ll go, I’m sorry.” She stood up uncertainly and looked around. “Where’s my coat?”

“Ye haven’t a coat.”

“Haven’t I?”

“Are ye pregnant or anything?”

Paddy stroked the round of her stomach defensively.

“I didn’t mean… Ye don’t look it or anything.” Aoife waved her cigarette up and down Paddy’s body. “Just in case there’s something more than shock going on. I’m a doctor, I’m supposed to ask stuff like that.”

Paddy remembered the harrowing moments before she fainted. She covered her face with her hands and groaned Terry’s name.

“Your friend,” said Aoife simply.

Paddy looked up. “Friend.” The word seemed infinitely tender. She felt like crying. “Who’d shoot him in the head? He was a good guy.” She remembered the hotel room in Fort William. “Good-ish. A good enough guy.”

Aoife considered her cigarette. “While you were out of it the police said he’d been shot by the Provos.”

“Terry was nothing to do with the Troubles. He wasn’t even interested in that.”

Aoife snorted bitterly and crossed her legs. “Doesn’t take much to cross them bastards. I trained in Belfast. Seen some right messes. Most of them’re just thugs with a political justification. Both sides. Wankers.”