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She looked back at him. His left arm was beneath him, the soft inside of his forearm facing upwards. It was blue. A huge blue-and-green bruise covered the skin, deep, a memory of trauma. He hadn’t had it when she saw him on Sunday.
She stepped forward. “That bruise on his arm.” She pointed it out to the ambulance men. “Could he have done that when he fell?”
One of them shrugged, irritated that she had drawn their attention away from their work. “Suppose.”
She tried to imagine a fall that would occasion a bad blow on the i
“Excuse me.” She reached forward and touched the ambulance man’s shoulder. “Are you sure it’s a stroke?”
He shook her hand off, angry at being distracted. “Aye, it is. It just is, look at his hand.”
She stepped around Kevin’s feet to get a better look and the ambulance man sighed and glanced back at the police officers. “Can ye…?”
A noise came from deep inside Kevin, a gurgle that seemed to emanate from his stomach. A small bubble of wet formed at his lips and burst.
He was dying. She knew he was dying. One of the officers saw Paddy reel backwards and grabbed her under the arm, turning her away. He took her out to the cold, dark close and encouraged her to catch her breath.
“Is he dead?”
“He’s going to be fine. The paramedics say he’s going to be fine.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“No, he’s fine.”
“He’s dead.”
He sat Paddy on the neighbor’s front step and told her to bend over and put her head between her legs. She couldn’t quite hear him so he held her head down, cupping it as if she was being guided into a police car. She had a pencil skirt on and her cheeks were pressed tight against her knees. Staring at her orange suede trainers, the cold stone numbing her bum, she didn’t want to see any more, couldn’t bear the thought of looking up. She thought of Terry, how sad he would be, and thinking about that reminded her of Kevin showing her the photos on Sunday night. He said no one was after him. He said it was nothing to do with the book.
She watched as they lifted him carefully onto the stretcher, one side limp, the other tight as a traction band. His left knee was almost up to his chin, his clawed hand in the way. The walls slid sideways and she dropped her head to her knees again.
Paddy had been to the site of a hundred car crashes and fatal accidents but the bodies in the bags weren’t people she knew, the blood was a faceless stranger’s blood, the weight of sorrow someone else’s.
She eased herself upright. The young police officer was in front of her, looking into the house, stepping from foot to foot, his hands fiddling with his belt. He was excited to have a job that didn’t involve hassling truants in the park or chasing junkies out of Woolworths.
Kevin looked smaller on his side. Paddy watched as the paramedics lifted the stretcher slowly, carried it through the door, and negotiated the turn of the stairs. She saw Kevin’s blond hair darkened and crusty, a white residue over it.
The older officer was standing in front of her, nodding as his walkie-talkie crackled instructions at him. He signed off and hung it on his belt, turning formally to Paddy.
“We’d like to ask you about how you came to be here and what you know about-” He thumbed back to the hallway.
“Kevin.”
He nodded gravely. “About Kevin.”
She looked back into the hallway. The sun had moved, the tip of it touching the crusty saliva mess.
Kevin wouldn’t take cocaine. If he’d been taking it she would have known. She’d seen him drinking when he worked at the News and he was a compulsive, mental drunk. Men had gone to their graves swearing they’d chuck it if they got as bad as Kevin. She had once seen him have an alcoholic seizure in the office, then sit for a while with a cup of tea before going out drinking again in the afternoon. Men like that didn’t take an occasional line, not like Dub did sometimes. Someone had made him take it.
Collins. She could see him stand by while Kevin vomited on the floor, watching calmly as a stroke curled him up like a dead leaf.
“Look, I need to go but take it from me, Kevin didn’t do drugs,” she told the older officer. “The bruises on his arm and chin-didn’t you see them?”
He looked at her. “Not really.”
“I think Kevin was killed by the same guy who murdered Terry Hewitt.”
“Terry…?”
“Hewitt. The guy found shot dead on the Greenock road? The journalist?”
Terry’s death had been blanketed over the papers, over the television and radio news, but neither of the officers seemed to know what she was talking about. Not the sharpest pencils in the box.
The younger officer sensed her disapproval. “Oh, I think I heard something about that,” he said, nodding at his colleague.
“How do you know it’s to do with that?” The older officer leaned in, as if half expecting Paddy to confess to the killings herself.
“Oh, for Christ sake,” she said impatiently, “just call it in. Ask for the team investigating Terry Hewitt’s murder. They’ll know what I’m talking about.”
The older man pulled himself up to his full height, nostrils aflare, and she realized that her sniping tone had been a bad mistake. He might be an idiot but, in common with all police officers, he didn’t want to be spoken to with anything but fawning respect.
“I will decide what we do and don’t call in, and I’ll thank you to watch your language when you speak to me.”
She apologized, said it was the shock, and tried to explain how she needed to look through the portfolio of photographs Kevin had taken for the book.
The younger officer glanced at his mentor, nodding so much she guessed he wasn’t listening. The older officer seemed to understand this time but didn’t take notes or react. When she had finished he told her to wait here and went downstairs, presumably to call it in and ask a senior officer who the hell Terry Hewitt was and what the fuck he should do now.
The younger man stayed with her in the close. Paddy knew they were keeping her with them, intending to take her in for questioning, which would mean a two-hour wait, a short conversation and then another two-hour wait before someone decided she could go. She could leg it but the squad car would probably be just outside the close. Even if she ran, both officers looked fit enough to outrun her. Actually, her mother could probably outrun her. She wasn’t very fit.
“So you knew this guy?”
“We worked together.”
“In papers?”
“Yeah.”
“You a secretary then?”
“No, I’m a journalist.”
He gri
“Kind of.”
He smirked a little and looked away, leaned over the banister, looking for signs of his partner. When he found none he stepped into Kevin’s flat, shrugging and smiling like a naughty schoolboy. He beckoned Paddy to come too.
“Let’s look for the photos,” he said, showing he had been listening after all.
She stood in the hall watching him in the bedroom, stepping over a tidal wave of dirty clothes stacked against a chest of drawers. She turned away, looking back into the living room. The line of cocaine on the coffee table was wrong. She tipped her head at it: if Kevin had cleared a space to chop a line he would have put the boxes of negatives on the floor under the table, which was the only empty space that was big enough. She glanced around at the settee, under the television, by the chair. The boxes were gone.
“There should be boxes of negatives somewhere near the table, they were on the table…”
The nosy officer was smiling out at her, standing beyond the rumpled bed, triumphantly holding a big black portfolio that Paddy recognized from her last visit. He put it on the bed.