Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

Sister Tansy was stunned dumb. Paddy turned and walked away, knowing she was being rude and Mary Ann would pay the price.

Outside, she thought how lucky she was to be able to come and see her sister. Nuns, like priests, rarely got to work near their home parish. More usually they were moved away from their family of origin. The Church said it was so that they could concentrate on their vocation but Paddy saw it as a move to depersonalize them, break the bonds with their own people so that their only loyalty would be to the Church. The Brides of Christ had no family but the Church, which also happened to be their employer. Manager and boyfriend. An actress could have sued.

She got back in the car, and before she had time to reflect on what she was doing, she was driving down the empty gray motorway, heading towards where Terry’s body had been found.

She pulled out of the middle lane when she saw the slip road for Glasgow airport.

The lobby was empty, all the check-in desks shut and unmanned. A blue-uniformed security guard idled, smoking a cigarette. He nodded guiltily as Paddy came through the automatic doors.

“Havin’ a smoke,” he said.

Paddy excused him with a smile.

Behind the counter at the empty newsagent’s shop a sleepy middle-aged woman in a blue tabard watched, heavy eyed and accusing, as Paddy wandered between the chocolate bars and displays of crisps.

She didn’t want anything to eat, even though she felt hungry. She kept thinking about the ragged hole in Terry Hewitt’s head, of the black spider crawling across his face. A jagged breath caught in her throat and she stood staring into the searing white light of the drinks cooler, blinking back urgent tears, wondering what the hell was wrong with her. She’d identified bodies before, seen horrific injuries, facial injuries, and she had been frightened of Terry; she should be glad he wasn’t about to hassle her anymore. Aware that she was being watched, she picked up a cold can of Irn-Bru and took it to the counter.

The attendant looked expectantly as Paddy glanced behind her at the cigarettes, asked for a packet of Embassy Regal, dropped three quid on the counter, and walked away with her cigarettes and drink, the cold metal of the can burning the skin on her hand.

Back in the car park, Paddy locked the doors and sat, holding the cold can of juice tight, focusing on the chilblain pains in her fingertips. Then she started the car and pulled out, reaching a hundred by the time she hit the motorway.

Scottish summer mornings arrive in the middle of the night. Just after three a.m. the big sky began to lighten, the sun lurking below the horizon like a mugger.

The motorway took a turn on the shoulder of a high hill and Paddy found herself looking out over the wide plain of the Clyde Estuary. The tide was out, baring gray, demiwaved sand with strips of mercury winking in the first rays. Small boats keeled sidelong in the soft mud. Two giant granite hills stuck out of the sand, massive and round as marbles, tiny buildings clinging to them.

The first town she hit was Port Glasgow. A concrete council estate was perched on the hill overlooking the water, panda-eyed windows peering out to sea. On the coast side of the road abandoned warehouses were being colonized by dark, quivering bushes bursting out between the bricks. It was a shipbuilding area and had been hit so badly by the eighties recession that instant coffee had become a form of currency: there was no money to be stolen in the area and the jars, which could be shoplifted with ease, had a set value.

Paddy was crying. She didn’t know why, she didn’t mean to, but her eyes ached and stung, her face burned, tears were dripping off her chin. It was getting so bad she couldn’t see properly.

She pulled into an empty car park, turned the headlights off, and sat, staring blindly at the steering wheel, crying still, puzzled and angry at herself. She wound the window down and held her head out, hoping the brisk sea wind would blow the sadness off her. The sun was creeping up behind her, yellow and mockingly cheerful.

A fat, mean-eyed gull swooped threateningly over the car roof and landed next to the car. It stared up at her from the side of its nasty head, snapping its beak hungrily. It was fucking enormous. Paddy dipped her head back in the car and wound the window up. Outside, the gull snapped again, disappointed, and turned its back, spread its broad wings, and flew away.

She looked at the passenger seat. Regal and Bru.

Paddy and Terry used to have Embassy Regal cigarettes and Irn-Bru for breakfast when they were young and together. They’d sit on his dirty orange bedsheet and sip their cans, passing one of the stubby fags back and forth and giggling about people in the office. Everyone seemed stupid to them then. The editors and senior journalists were leftovers from an ice age, Helen the librarian was a status-obsessed idiot. They gloried in the belief of their own infallibility and importance. Actually, Paddy didn’t believe anything of the kind but she borrowed Terry’s certainty. He was handsome in those days, solid, not fat, with dark eyes. He sat with his knees together and played with his ear when he was thinking.

She began to cry again. He was so young and she’d never noticed how lonely he must have been, living in his cheap bedsitter, sharing a bathroom with people he didn’t know. To her, trapped by her family, by their history and all their needs, he seemed gloriously free, not alone, not adrift. She thought about how alone he would need to be to have put her down as next of kin when she wouldn’t even answer the phone to him.

The car’s cigarette lighter glowed red, warming the tip of her nose when she touched the cigarette to it. A nicotine tingle rolled down to her toes and she exhaled at the windscreen, the smoke flattening into a patty against the glass.

She blinked and saw Terry’s head again, his hair, his dear black hair.

She should have spoken to him in Babbity’s when she saw him in the press for the bar. She shouldn’t have run away in case he made a scene. She should have gone over to him, apologized for leaving him in Fort William, folded her arms around his perfect head and kissed his face, his eyelids, his mouth and told him he was loved and she loved him. She loved him. Somebody loved him.

An inch of gray ash dropped into her lap and exploded. She brushed it away with a damp hand.

The gull was back, looking at the car as if thinking about taking it on.

“Fuck off,” she muttered, wiping her wet face dry.

It didn’t, so she hooted the horn twice, giving it a start but exciting its curiosity as well. It twitched its head at her.

There was something about this area that made her think of Shadow of Death , the book she had written about a miscarriage-of-justice case from the sixties. She’d followed the case all her life because the villain had her name. She became a journalist because the campaign to free him was headed by a hack, and eventually got to know the man she’d followed in the papers and in the press. Patrick Meehan was bitter about his murder conviction. He claimed that the security services framed him for the vicious murder of a pensioner to pay him back for scrabbling under the Iron Curtain to sell secrets about the British prisons where spies were being held. But there was no evidence of a grander conspiracy and she was too well trained to do more than hint at it in the book. Something about Greenock reminded her of him but she couldn’t think what it was. Somehow the sea air seemed to relate to him, the screaming gulls, cigarette smoke in a car with the windows wound up. She could see his red skin and the yellowed whites of his eyes, his defensive rounded shoulders. She’d never been down the coast with Meehan; all of their interviews were done in a pub and once in a restaurant but something about this area reminded her of him. She looked inland and then she saw it: a sign for Stranraer.