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It was dark and smelled of damp chalk. A marble-patterned rubberized floor was stained with greasy puddles. As they climbed the wide circular stairs to the top floor, Paddy trailed her hand along the curved oak handrail. Cobwebs hung between the cast-iron banisters.
The front door to the flat was unpainted plywood with a single lock, the tang of newly seasoned wood still hanging off it. On the door frame, peeling Sellotape bordered a list of six names written in biro block capitals. The doormat was filthy. They could hear the squawk of a television inside.
Dub curled his lip. “It’s a bedsit. Why was he still living in bedsits?”
Paddy shrugged and put her arm around Pete’s shoulders. “He always did. I don’t know why. The lawyer said he had a house. Should we knock or just go in?”
Dub shrugged. “Knock, probably.”
“I’ll knock,” said Pete and gave the door a loud, rude thump with the base of his fist.
“Pete! You don’t knock on a door like that-”
Steps preceded the flinging open of the door. A man in a stripy T-shirt opened the door, wiping floured hands on a tea towel tucked into the waistband of his trousers. He looked expectantly at them.
“Sorry about the banging.” Paddy nodded at Pete. “A bit eager.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Um, well, you know about Terry? I’m here to get his things.”
The man wasn’t really listening though; he was smiling at Dub’s trousers. They were made out of ticking, blue and green with a white stripe, like the covering on an old-fashioned mattress.
“I recognize those kegs. You’re Dub McKenzie. I used to see you compèring at Blackfriars Comedy Club all the time.”
“Right? Do I know you?”
“Nah.” The man shook his head. “Nah, nah, nah, just a punter. I heard you were managing George Burns.”
“Was, yeah.”
“Did you fall out and tell him to do the Variety Show?”
Dub smirked. “I told him not to do it and then he sacked me.”
“God, it’s shit.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
They gri
“Pete, don’t,” said Paddy, wishing she could open her mouth without giving him into trouble.
“Ah, come in, wee man.”
The guy opened the door and let Pete in. Seven doors led off the hallway, all of them shut tight apart from the kitchen, which was straight ahead. A red tartan carpet had been laid over a number of other fitted carpets and stood two inches off the ground. A ripped paper shade hung from a flaking ceiling. The warm smell of bacon floated out to greet them.
“Bacon sarnie?” asked Dub.
“Just, eh”-the guy looked embarrassed-“knocking up a quiche.”
“Can ye do that? I thought they were sterile.”
The guy mouthed a drumroll/cymbal clash and the two men smiled.
“Which room’s Terry’s?”
He pointed to the door next to the kitchen. It was sealed with a padlock small enough to fit on a suitcase. The key to it was on the string Fitzpatrick had given her, flimsy as paper. She fitted it in the lock and opened the door into a large room.
Two long windows at one end looked straight across the street into facing flats. The sun was shining in through them, filtered and softened by the dirty filigree on the glass. The floorboards were painted black, chipped and dusty.
Terry had pulled the wallpaper off. Small scraps were still clustered by the skirting board and powdery residue covered the walls. The paint underneath had been a dark green but it was chipped and faded, a South American wall. She could imagine markets being held in front of it, executions taking place against it, children idling at its foot.
Terry had been camping more than living there. His bed was a bare mattress with dirty crumpled sheets, his duvet coverless and gray. The room was too big for his meager belongings: a silver trunk sat by the near wall, an old ghetto blaster nearby. Next to the mattress sat a large blue duffel bag, already packed with his clothes. Paddy recognized it: he’d had that bag when she saw him off on the train to London eight years ago. Lined up along the bottom of one wall were novels, Penguin Classics mostly, the paper yellowed and battered from being lovingly read.
“I’m really sorry about Terry,” said the quiche maker. “He was only here a month or two, I didn’t really know him. Nice guy though.”
In the empty expanse of dusty black floorboards she could see footsteps picked out in the dust, a cleared muddle in the middle of the room and steps leading away and back from it.
“People have been in here,” said Paddy, pointing at the disturbances in the dust.
“Police.” The quiche maker had followed them into the room. “They went through everything. They were fucking obnoxious too, made us all leave the house for the night while they did it. As far as I can see they took nothing but his passport. And a journalist. Cross-eyed and rude as fuck.”
“Merki.” Paddy nodded. “Did he take anything?”
“No. Brought a bottle of whiskey, put it on the table and asked us about Terry for an hour, then put the bottle back in his pocket and fucked off.”
Dub laughed but Paddy didn’t. “Why did he live like this?” she said aloud. “He owned a big house in Kilmarnock.”
“Oh, was that true then?” The quiche maker was surprised. “I kind of thought that was bullshit.”
“There isn’t really that much here, is there?”
“There might have been more but we were broken into last week. That’s why we’ve got the new door. The other one was made of paper. This one’s sturdy new cardboard.” He laughed at his joke, unperturbed that no one else was joining in.
Paddy traced the pattern of the dust, looking for disturbances. A flat empty space by the trunk looked cleaner than the rest. “Did they take something from there?”
The quiche maker looked from her to the space. “No, Terry moved it. He had a portfolio there. He moved it after we got broken into.”
“Where to?”
He gestured for her to follow him out to the hall and led the way into the kitchen.
The room was moist and smelled gorgeous. A table was scattered with flour, a dusted work strip where he had been kneading the pastry. On one of the two gas cookers sitting side by side was a frying pan, with strips of prosciutto cooling in it. The cookers were fed by a gas pipe that hung loose from the ceiling. Under the window a precariously sloped unit housed the sink. Odd cupboards and a red-and-white larder from the fifties were lined up along the near wall.
In Victorian times the kitchen was the servants’ arena. It was customary to build a small wall recess for the maid to sleep in, soaking up the heat from the ever-warm cast-iron range. In bad modernizations the recess was walled in and converted into a cupboard or sometimes a windowless kitchen if it was large, but here it was being used as a communal area. A grubby settee faced away from the kitchen towards a boxy old television twittering in the corner. Above the television, hovering seven feet in the air, was a giant cupboard with sliding plywood doors.
“It’s a good wee attic thingummy but you’ll need a ladder to get up there,” he said. “Terry put stuff in the back in case we were burgled again.”
Paddy looked around. “Is there a ladder?”
“Aye, aye, we’ve got one.” He disappeared off into one of the rooms and came back with a rickety paint-splattered wooden ladder. “Chris is painting his room.” He set it open and pushed it up against the door of the cupboard.
He expected Paddy to climb up but she pointed out that she didn’t know what they were looking for. Reluctantly, the quiche maker climbed the ladder himself. With great difficulty, he bumped the sliding door to the side. The cupboard was deep and black dark, at just the wrong angle to the strip light.
He reached into the black hole, pulling down a tent and poles, two sleeping bags tightly rolled in sleeves, and a cardboard box of dusty Christmas decorations, handing them down to Dub, who set them on the floor. Next came three black binbags of bedding, old duvets and pillows. The quiche maker then climbed off the top rung of the ladder, kneeling into the cupboard, his feet sticking out as he felt towards the back.