Slip of the Knife

II

She was alone in the house. Dub was up in Perth with two of his acts and Pete was at Burns’s, leaving her with just the radio for company, sitting at her desk, trying to think of an opinion to beat to death with a thousand short words. She’d left the lights off in the rest of the house to help focus her attention, leaving just the Anglepoise shining on her blank sheet of paper, but the darkness was making her feel exhausted.

Out in the street she could hear a steady rumble of cars on the Great Western Road, the distant gurgle of the river, the chat of occasional passersby coming back from the pub.

The hard part of a Misty column was getting a start. Once she found her hook it was like skidding on oil. She loved it, and rarely got edited beyond her punctuation, which was poor. The difficult part was deciding what to rant about.

Whole areas of comment were closed to her because she was female: emotional first-person accounts about anything, stories about children, all things domestic. If she touched on those issues she wouldn’t be taken seriously and would end up right back in the Dab Sheet ghetto. And Callum Ogilvy. If she mentioned him, favorably or otherwise, she’d leave herself open to being outed as a friend of his family. She was amazed no one had mentioned the fact in print yet.

The Rats. Under Milk Wood. After just nine minutes at the desk she had already reached the point where she was testing her eyesight by reading the spines of books twenty feet away across the study.

Fat Is a Feminist Issue. Fifteen years of unsuccessful self-denial had made her no slimmer and bloody miserable. She read Fat Is a Feminist Issue and felt a wash of relief at the suggestion that she give up dieting. Actually, the book was far more complex, laying out a series of exercises for dealing with a fraught relationship with food, mirror work that involved standing naked and looking at yourself, sometimes jumping, but she didn’t do those things. She just let herself eat and it was a joy. She put on half a stone and plateaued there, the fattest she had ever been and the most content. She still felt flashes of disgust when her backside jiggled as she ran up steps or her stomach folded into a perfect round cushion when she sat down, still resented not being able to buy clothes she liked because she couldn’t get them over her head, but the pleasure of unbridled eating more than made up for it.

She looked at the box files high up on her shelves. The old yellowed clippings of all of Terry’s articles were stored up there. When she still had high hopes for their relationship she had meant to show them to him one day, to get them down and let him see how she had followed his every move, how much he’d always meant to her. She could get them down now and look through his articles from Liberia, see if there was anything in them, any tangles with the government that could explain his death. But Kevin was wrong. Liberia was an internal conflict. They were getting so much money from the CIA they’d never risk killing a journalist and alienating their American bankers.

The polite rap at the door was a welcome interruption. She stood up and walked lightly to the door, expecting a kindly neighbor or an evangelist or an Ogilvy-hunting journalist at worst.

He was short, sandy haired, wore a neat pale blue jumper over a white T-shirt, beige slacks and steel-rimmed square glasses. She immediately assumed he was a local with a petition about the parking.

She opened her mouth to say hello, but the look in his eyes stopped her. The eyes were cold, emotionally flat. The suburban neatness was a cover, the staypress crease down the front of his trousers suddenly a knife edge.

“Paddy Meehan?” He was Irish. He spoke quickly and quietly; she couldn’t tell whether the accent was North or South.

“Sorry?”

“Are you Paddy Meehan?”

The sensation began between her shoulder blades, a hot tremble, exacerbated by her tiredness no doubt, but spread to her arms, her neck, her throat. She cast her mind back into the flat, mapping Pete’s empty bed, the knives in the kitchen drawer, the dagger-shaped letter opener on the desk.

He smiled coldly, a cheerful snake. “Can ye not remember who ye are?” His breath was acid with the smell of stale cigarette smoke.

“Ah, she’s not in just now,” said Paddy. “I’m just trying to work out when she will be in.”

The smile widened but didn’t deepen. “It’s you. I recognize ye. Seen ye on telly.”

She smiled back, more convincingly than he had, she hoped. “Are you a fan?”

“No, no, no.” He dropped his head to his chest, thrusting his hands into his pockets, and didn’t seem to feel the need to elaborate.

“So…?”

He smirked at his shoes. The dim yellow light in the close glinted off the lenses of his spectacles. “You phoned about Terry? Said you were his family? Can I come in?” He shuffled towards the door without giving her the chance to answer, took the step and slid into the hallway, shutting the door after himself.

The lights were still off in the house. The Anglepoise in her study pooled light by the doorway, darkening the rest of the hall. They were standing close.

“What’s your name?”

He smiled again, cold eyed. His hands slithered out of his pockets and he raised them in a shrug. “You phoned about Terry. Said you were family.”

She thought of Pete and felt a flash of hot anger and reached over to the front door, swinging it open so that it banged loudly off the wall, denting the plaster behind it.

Steven Curren was stepping onto the landing. He stopped and looked at them, startled. “Oh,” he said, “Sorry. McVie made me come back again.”

Paddy grabbed his forearm and pulled him in. “Steven! Come in!”

Snake Eyes was looking from one to the other but put his hand out to Steven. “How are ye?” he said. “Nice to meet ye.”

“Hi.” Steven was young and well brought up. He shook the guy’s hand and introduced himself, said he was from the Mail on Sunday and didn’t really want to be here but his editor had sent him out again. He’d just started in the job.

“I’m sorry,” Paddy smiled at Snake Eyes, “I forget your name.”

His eyes flickered to the left, signaling a lie. “Michael Collins,” he said and let Steven’s hand fall.

Steven didn’t recognize the pseudonym but Paddy shuddered. The Republican hero was remembered for many things, for successfully conducting the war that threw the Brits out of Ireland, for signing a peace treaty that authorized partition, for dying in the brutal civil war that followed. What always stuck in Paddy’s mind was Collins’s time as director of intelligence for the IRA, when he formed the Twelve Apostles, an assassination squad who targeted British agents. On the first Bloody Sunday, in 1920, fourteen agents were either shot or had their throats slit in one night.

“How could I forget?” she said seriously, telling him she understood. “So you were just leaving?”

“No.” Michael Collins smiled. “You were just going to make me tea.”

They looked at each other. If he had a gun she would be no safer with him just outside the door than inside. There were knives in the kitchen drawer. “Of course.”

The kitchen was big enough to have a table with four chairs in it but not to move comfortably around. Steven and Michael sat down as she filled the kettle, shuffling sideways around the table, brushing their backs as she reached for tea bags and sugar. Into the taut silence Steven rambled about Glasgow and how he came to be here and how it was the greatest place for a journalist to begin his career because the competition was so fierce, you see? Best training ground in the world. They trained you to be really aggressive, really proactive, to really find your own stories. He left a pause but no one filled it. He missed his friends from uni, of course, it was a bit isolating, coming up here on his own, but still, lots of advantages.