Slip of the Knife

Bunty made a pyramid of his fingers. He looked like a man with the shadow of professional death hanging over his shoulder, which he was. Sales of the Daily News were in a steady decline, and advertising was plummeting as more and more of the big spenders were going over to the Standard. The Daily News wasn’t making a loss but they weren’t turning a great profit either and the board of directors had been through four of the five stages of economic grief already: hope, disappointment, blame and fury. The next stage, Paddy knew, was good-bye Bunty.

“You’ll be pleased to hear that Terry Hewitt’s obituary is going in tomorrow. It’s a full half-page.”

As usual, Bunty had misheard all the office gossip and thought she was Terry’s girlfriend. Paddy thanked him anyway. “That’s good of you. He started here, same time as me.”

“So I read. Shocking business.” Bunty looked over at the Monkey. “It could bring the Irish Troubles over here.”

Everyone knew that twenty hours ago but Monkey took his henchman’s duties seriously and nodded as if he was just finding out.

“So. Yes. Oui, as it were.” Bunty chewed the inside of his mouth and scribbled hard on the sheet, a vicious doodle. “Alors. I heard a rumor about you.”

“There are a lot of rumors about me. I started many of them myself.”

He smiled courteously at her attempted joke. “I heard you were in Babbity’s last night with McVie and you haven’t handed in this week’s Misty. Anything I should know?”

She tried to look noncommittal.

“We’d hate for there to be any misunderstanding.” He looked to Monkey, who nodded and smiled, and Bunty turned back to her. “We value you tremendously.” He strained over the word, closing his eyes. “Just tremendously.” They looked at her expectantly.

“Good,” she said.

“Are you happy here?” Bunty waved across his desk, leaving his fingers wide as an opener for her to say something. Monkey copied his facial expression, as if he’d posed the question himself.

“I asked you for more money two months ago and I’m still waiting for an answer.”

Bunty leaned over the desk, narrowing his eyes at her. “Have you been offered more money elsewhere?”

She stared back at him. She could lie. “I want more money and to investigate Terry’s death.”

Bunty smiled and shook his head. “It’s a long time since you did a news story. We can’t assign stories to placate people. It might be too big.”

“But I want it.” Paddy thought she sounded like Pete.

Bunty sighed at his doodle: a lot of regal looping lines angrily shaded in with pencil. A potentate foiled. “You know,” he sighed, “McVie takes people on and buries them, d’you know that? Gets everyone on short-term contracts and dumps them.”

It was a scurrilous lie.

He scratched in another loop with his pencil as the Monkey watched her for a reaction. “I think, Bunty,” she said carefully, “that you must have been a fucking good journalist.”

Bunty looked up and smiled wide at her. His yellow teeth were gappy, the gums receding. She suddenly, inexplicably, liked him enormously.

He straightened his face. “OK, we’ll give you the money but you’re not getting the story.”

“But I’ve-”

“NO!” His hand was up and that was that. “If you want it you’ll have to do it in your own time. I’ll put someone else on it too. You beat them to it, all well and good.”

“Who?”

“Merki.”

She snorted. “Merki?”

“Merki. Get out.”

Merki was good at finding leads. He could get into a house but people didn’t take to him, no one wanted to talk to him because he was fu

He laughed, embarrassed, brushing the kiss off coyly as she climbed down off the table and pulled her skirt straight.

“Long live the King,” she said, making her way to the door.

The Monkey called after her. “We’ll have your copy today?”

“I’ll phone it in to Larry tonight,” she called back.

III

She used a phone on Features and called Terry Hewitt’s solicitors. First the receptionist had to put her through to his secretary, then his secretary wouldn’t put her through to the lawyer, then she tried to get Paddy to agree to an appointment two weeks hence.

Paddy said that was a real shame because she wrote for the Scottish Daily News and she’d been hoping to speak to him about doing a series profiling prominent lawyers.

The secretary hesitated. Paddy assumed she was a little awestruck. She was feeling smug and cozy, tricking a slippery lawyer into an early appointment with the promise of an ego rub, when the secretary said, “But he’s only twenty-three.”

“Ah.” Her feeling of superiority evaporated. “Well, you know, up-and-coming lawyers, the future and all that…”

Thirty seconds later she was talking to the squeaky-voiced boy and he agreed to see her in half an hour. She thought he sounded a little breathless.

IV

By day Blythswood Square was an elegant square of Georgian town houses, now offices, set around a private garden. The curbs were high to the road, the step steep to accommodate descent from a carriage. At night the square became the working route of roving prostitutes, bare-legged girls with poor hair and prominent bosoms, faces dripping rank misery, ready to be peered at and pawed.

McBride’s Solicitors was in one of the older houses but the impression of elegance was lost at the door, where a cheap black punch-hole board was hanging with the names of the resident companies picked out in white plastic lettering. McBride’s Solicitors and Notaries were on the very top floor.

Paddy was panting and damp by the time she reached the sixth flight of stairs, leading to what had once been the servants’ quarters, shallow and sagging wooden steps worn in the middle, the banister sticky from trailing, sweaty fingers. She caught her breath on the top step, embarrassed, as she always was when she lost her breath, to be a fat woman, sweating.

McBride’s office was a fading brown nod to the seventies. A motherly receptionist was dressed accordingly, in a brown skirt and matching jumper with a modest rope of pearls at her throat. The fittings in the reception area looked as old as she was: the phone was two-tone brown, the appointments book a battered black-leather puff of paper.

She was impressed when Paddy introduced herself, clutched her neck and said she was a big fan.

“Thanks,” said Paddy and looked for somewhere to sit.

“No, no, go through. Mr. Fitzpatrick’s waiting for you.” She pointed to a flush dark-wood door.

Inside, a chubby teenager in a suit was standing stiffly by his desk. Mr. Fitzpatrick was not only pleased to see her but seemed to have had a shave just before she got there. As she stepped forward to shake his hand she could smell soap and see that the skin on his cheeks was glossy smooth, a small nick at his ear still oozing white blood cells. He fussed her into a chair.

“I don’t know how you could even have heard of me. Did someone give you my name?”

She bit the bullet and admitted the ruse: she needed to find out about Terry and couldn’t get an appointment for two weeks so she’d fibbed. His disappointment was palpable.

“But I phoned my mum.”

Paddy cringed in sympathy. “I thought you were older,” she said. “I thought I was playing a trick on a smug big lawyer who couldn’t be arsed seeing me. I’m really sorry.”

“What’ll I tell my mum?”

“Can’t you tell her it didn’t come off? That’s what I always tell mine.”

“She’ll call the paper.”

“You could say the article is about left-wing lawyers so we had to leave you out?”