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“It’s your kid?” she said softly. “They’ve got something on one of your kids?”
McBree held his breath, exhaled thick smoke, and looked back at her. “Ye’ve got the pictures?”
“I read about Donaldson’s boy being murdered in prison. Did they have something on your kid? Were they going to send him to prison?”
Eyes downcast, he held his hand towards her. “Just give us the fucking pictures.”
“And you such a big man, they’d try to kill him for sure. You’re doing all this for him. You’d kill Terry and Kevin and my five-year-old son to protect him?”
He dropped his hand, looked at the ceiling, composed himself. When he looked back at her he was smiling. “Will I come over there and get them from ye?”
She put the scissors in her pocket carefully, took the photocopies out, balled them in her fists, and threw them over to his feet.
He smiled wryly. “Is that your wee hidey-hole over there, wee mousey?” He bent down, scooped up the balled photocopies, and stood up again in a flash. He was more agile than he looked. He watched her as he pulled the paper straight, glanced at it, and took his lighter out.
“Now…” He touched his lighter to the edge of the sheet, holding on to the top corner while the flames took hold and then letting go, watching the flickering paper float to the floor. “Well, I for one feel much better.”
She didn’t see him coming. Didn’t see him drop his cigarette or take a step-just, very suddenly, he was across the room with one hand on her neck and the other on her wrist, pi
Paddy swung her foot at his balls but missed, waved her free hand at his face and managed to knock his glasses off, but he didn’t flinch. He just pressed tighter and tighter until her eyes felt too big for her head, until her ears began to scream a high-pitched tone, and then he let her go.
Too stu
McBree dropped to his knees, bending forward, pressing his face into her groin like a man pleading for mercy. She raised her hands away from him, remembered her scissors, and fumbled to get them out of her coat pocket as McBree swayed first one way, then the next, and fell onto his side.
Callum Ogilvy was standing behind him, panting, holding a brick.
Behind him, framed in the kitchen doorway, furious and carrying a red petrol can, stood Dub. “I told you to wait in the fucking car!” he shouted.
III
Paddy, Dub and Callum sat close together along the wall, numbed, watching the man die. McBree’s right hand had landed on his chest but the left hand was thrown out to the side, palm open to the ceiling, like a singer reaching the crescendo. On the top of his head, facing the three of them, was a gash of bloody skin, a ragged split. Warm blood was still oozing lazily out of it, the puddle black in the dark of the kitchen, a slow-moving slick of ink that glistened silver as it split into tributaries on the uneven floor, making lakes of dips, looking for the sea.
The left hand was near to them, sitting in a diamond of the morning light coming through the window. Paddy could see a strip of soft white skin under his heavy wedding ring. His face looked strange without his glasses, naked, vulnerable. His eyes were smaller than she’d supposed, his lashes short and curled.
“We bury him in the garden,” said Callum.
Paddy was perturbed by his attitude. “He’s not dead.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” said Dub.
They sat in silence for a moment. Callum took a breath and spoke again. “We burn the place down with him in it. They come here and find the food and one sleeping bag. We leave a lighter near him and a packet of fags and they’ll think he was a jakey who was living rough and set fire to himself with a fag. The problem is the car out the front… We could drive it back, lose it in the city.”
Paddy and Dub looked at him. He was very calm, as if he had been born for this moment.
“Callum,” said Paddy, “the man is not yet dead. What part of that don’t you get? He’s not dead, he’s alive.”
Callum sighed. “OK, call an ambulance then.”
She tutted, cutting him off, but Callum persisted. “If he lives will he kill you? Will he come back and get you and hurt Peter?”
“Maybe.” She thought about it. “Probably.”
“Grow up, then.”
“You should be in the fucking car,” said Dub, as if that helped anything.
Paddy covered her face with her hands. “God, I’m fucking starving. How could anybody get hungry at a time like this?”
“Adrenaline,” said Callum, calmly watching a bloody rivulet creep across the floor towards him. “You get a big whoosh of it and then it passes and makes you hungry.” He saw them looking at him curiously. “Anger management course. Prison.”
Paddy looked down at the crumpled heap on the floor. “Maybe he’ll bleed to death?”
Callum wrinkled his nose at her. “What if he doesn’t?”
Dub stood up and looked down at Callum. “The thing that really bothers me about this, I mean really fucking does my head in, is that you shouldn’t be here. Whatever happens, you shouldn’t be here, seeing this.”
“He’s right,” said Paddy, standing up, keeping her eyes on McBree’s wound, repulsed but afraid to take her eyes off him in case he leaped suddenly to his feet and came at her. “You should go back to the car.”
Callum got up, wiped the dust from his bum. “You’re trying to protect me but you’re too late.” He gestured down at the half-dead man. “This is what I understand. You two, you don’t understand this. You’re sitting watching him, hoping he’ll die, but we need to do something.”
He had a point but Paddy stepped between him and McBree’s body. “I need to do something.”
His eyes were imploring. “Let me do it. I know what I’m doing. You don’t.”
Paddy hesitated. “I want you to go back to the car with Dub. Most people, Callum, most of us come from a comfortable home, we grow up and then we see things like this. It’s going to be harder for you. You’ll have to do it backwards.”
“I’m not leaving you here, you don’t have a clue-”
“You WILL go to the car with Dub.” It was her warning-mother voice again. It had worked on the sports guys, it worked on Pete, but Callum had spent his whole life being shouted at. She could see him smiling a little, swithering. He suppressed a grin and dipped his eyes, glanced at Dub’s feet.
“I’ll go back to the car.”
IV
She lit a cigarette and looked down at McBree’s head. The wound had stopped bleeding, the pool of blood no longer slithering across the floor but still. She kept her eyes on his face as she skirted his feet, stepping towards his left arm. She should have felt for a pulse, seen if he was alive or dead, but she didn’t want to touch him, couldn’t bring herself to bend over him, afraid he’d sit up suddenly and grab her, pull her down, throttle her again.
She stood over him and thought about Callum’s u
Playing for time, she thought again of checking for a pulse but it didn’t matter whether he was still alive. She couldn’t exactly call an ambulance. She was waiting, she realized, for the decision to be made for her.