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THIRTY-THREE. FROM A MILE UNDER WATER
I
She called Pitt Street and asked for Knox. The receptionist put her through to a secretary. DCS Knox wasn’t in right now but she wondered if she could take a message?
“It’s really him I need to speak to,” Paddy told her. “It’s quite urgent.”
“Well, I’m very sorry but he won’t be back in again tonight.”
Paddy couldn’t go and wait in the cottage on her own all night if McBree didn’t know where she was. He’d come after Pete and find him in the house with her mother and brothers. It would be a massacre.
“It’s about Martin McBree, I have some-”
“Just a moment.”
She heard two soft-tone beeps and Knox picked up.
“This is Paddy Meehan. I’ve got McBree’s pictures, the last few copies. I want to hand them over.”
He thought for a moment. “That’s nothing to do with me,” he said.
“Tonight. Eriskay House, off the Ayr road. There’s a small sign for the house, shortly before the Troon petrol station on the roundabout.”
“Why are you telling me?” He sounded so casual and self-assured it made her furious.
“Knox, I will get around to you.”
“Will you?” He was smiling.
“I know about you.” She had nothing on him, but the more threatened he felt the more likely he was to call McBree immediately.
“Miss Meehan-”
She hung up on him. Knox moved in that murky area between criminality and government-licensed corruption. He would have his finger in a hundred scams and couldn’t know which of them she was alluding to.
She stood in the hall, felt the familiar breeze at her ankles from the gap under the front door, heard the murmur of the television in the living room, looked at the tread on the stair carpet, unchanged throughout her entire life. She began to tremble.
II
The twenty-four-hour shop was a five-minute detour from the motorway, on the lip of the West End. It sold munchie food, catering to hungry drunks on their way home from clubs in the town and hash-smoking students who ventured out in the night in search of nourishment. As a backup source of income it had diversified, offering a hundred other services: handwritten adverts for rooms to let, a bulky photocopier near the back, magazine subscriptions and, behind the counter, under the cigarettes, a fax machine.
“Nah, ye can’t send it yourself. Give me the number and I’ll send it for ye.”
The sleepy young woman had bleached hair that seemed to be melting at the tips. Paddy wondered at the wisdom of entrusting her with her revenge. “It’s quite important. Can I come round and make sure you do it right?”
The shop assistant sighed as if she’d been asked to clean her room. “I can’t let people around the counter. Yes or no. Hurry up.”
The machine was small but looked new.
“OK.”
The girl pulled out a cover sheet from under the counter. “Fill it out.”
Paddy used a pencil:
Number of pages including this one: two.
From: blank.
To: blank.
Subject: Martin McBree’s meeting with British security agent in New York, 1989.
She stacked the photocopy of McBree under the cover sheet and handed it over with the list of Irish phone numbers she had got from directory inquiries that afternoon. “These three numbers.”
The girl took them, turned her back, and fitted the picture facedown into the feeder. She looked at the numbers. “Which one first?”
“Si
“All in Northern Ireland?”
“Yeah. The area codes are all there.”
The blonde punched the numbers in lazily, sensing that Paddy was anxious and in a hurry, so taking her time. Eventually the machine swallowed the sheet and spat it back out, gave off a whirring-beeped burp, and a short slip of paper slid out of the underside.
“And I’ll take a couple of Snickers bars as well.”
Paddy checked the transmission report as she waited for her change. It was number perfect. It would take some time, she felt sure, for the word to get out, be checked and double-checked, and finally for someone to believe Martin McBree was working with the security services. But one day he’d get a knife in his neck and he’d know it was because of her.
He was coming to get her and, she realized, she didn’t even have a pocket knife.
The shop assistant held out the change to her, looking at her hand and noting the tremble in her fingers.
“Sorry,” said Paddy, “do you sell kitchen scissors?”
III
She stood by her Volvo, cramming the second Snickers bar into her dry mouth, hardly tasting it on the way down but aware of the stringy caramel sticking in her throat. She looked at her hands, at her chocolate-coated fingertips. She was too full even to lick them clean and they were still shaking.
She rapped on the window and Dub rolled it down. “Could you drive, Dub? I wouldn’t mind just looking out of the window.”
They got back onto the motorway, took the bridge across the river, and followed the signs for Ayr. Before long the lanes narrowed, then converged, and they were in a drag race with the late commuters who had missed the rush hour and were desperate to get home.
Dub wasn’t used to driving. The dark, the sweeps and turns through the hills and the aggressive locals made him lean forward in his seat, hanging over the steering wheel, neck craned, cursing under his breath every time a car or a van shot past him. When they reached a broad stretch to the south of the city he relaxed a fraction and sat back.
“Now,” he said, “this meeting: you’re just going to hand over the photos to the McBree guy? Are you sure you’ll be all right out here on your own?”
“Yeah.” She drew on her cigarette, keeping her hand close to her face so he couldn’t see her shaking. “He won’t approach if there’s anyone there.”
An articulated lorry overtook them at an alarming speed, clearing the side of the car by less than a foot, the canvas straps whip-cracking at Dub’s window. He panicked and hit the brakes hard, slowing down to thirty, panting and leaning over the wheel again until he’d calmed himself down. His eyes kept flickering to the darkness in the rearview mirror as if he expected another assault. “The crying at the house, what was all of that about?”
“Mum called the boys up to come and batter Mary A
“Quite right, neither he would.”
Outside the window the gentle hills of Ayrshire rolled softly away to a darkening sky. I may not come back this way, she thought. I may never come back.
She looked at Dub, memorizing his face. She could think about him when the time came. Not Pete, because she’d sob and struggle and lose it, but if it came to it, if McBree got her, in her final moments she could think about Dub and smile. She’d remember walking home with him late at night, eating sticky pasta in the flat, the warm toasting smell of him ironing behind her while she watched TV and his hand finding hers under the duvet in the dark night. They should have gone on holidays. They should have dated each other.
Like bubbles rising from a mile under water, the words found her lips: “I love you.”
Dub slowed down to thirty again and looked sternly out at the road. “I don’t think this is the time or the place…”
She smiled at his discomfort. “Yeah, yeah.”
“We talked about this before.”
“Yeah, your fat arse, Dub McKenzie.”
He turned his head but was afraid to take his eyes off the road. “Meehan, it was you who said we shouldn’t try to pin it down, not me.”
“Shut up and drive. You wanker.” She gri