“It was me invited him in. You make the tea.”
Lara was looking at my coat, and I could tell she liked it. I was expecting her to leave the room to make tea, but she clopped across to the sideboard and turned on a kettle that was sitting there. Stevie saw me staring open-mouthed at the arrangement.
“I’m doing up the kitchen as well,” he explained, inviting me to sit on the sofa.
How extraordinary. I didn’t want to sit on anything in my nice new coat, so I used the excuse of there being only two places on the settee and, lifting my coat at the back, balanced myself on the arm.
“I don’t like living like this,” snapped Lara at me.
“Neither of us likes it,” retorted Stevie.
“Wasn’t me that done it,” said Lara.
Stevie shrugged. “It’s just temporary,” he said.
“It’s been temporary for nearly two years.”
He swiveled around. “Lara,” he implored. “You’re nipping my fucking head. Give us peace.”
She raised her voice. “You give me peace,” she shouted.
Stevie laughed softly and turned back to me, spreading his hands in an appeal for reason. “She could start a fight in an empty house,” he said. If anyone had done that to my house, I’d have slapped them from sunup to sundown.
Lara busied herself at the sideboard, making us each a mug of tea. She asked me if I wanted sugar, and when I said yes, she shook some into the cup from a paper packet, stirring it with a suspiciously dun teaspoon. I think it was filthy but couldn’t see it across the room. Lara saw me looking concerned and used her body to block my view. She gave us both disgusting, cloudy-looking tea in stained cups, and Stevie fell on his, sipping it with great relish as though it were a delicate soup. I wasn’t about to drink mine. For an amuse-gueule, Lara opened a green bag of crisps and took out a handful for herself before handing them to me. She was still eating when she lit up a Rothmans from a packet in her dressing-gown pocket. I took out my Marlboros and offered them around. Stevie took one and put it behind his ear (for later, he explained). I sat the tea on the floor and pretended to be concerned with picking bits out of my handful of crisps and smoking. I found Lara a bit frightening. I didn’t want her having a go at me.
“I hear they found Donna’s body,” she said, smoking through a mouthful of cheese and onion. She opened her mouth to masticate, and smoke clung to the crisps, a wet landscape of smoldering rubble.
I nodded. “Yeah. Sad. Sorry, do you hate her?”
“No,” said Lara genuinely. “We weren’t friends. I never met her, but I was pleased that she took him off my hands.”
“I knew her,” smiled Stevie, sitting to attention. “I’ve got nice pictures of her.”
I looked at Lara. “But I thought you were divorced from Gow long before she came on the scene?”
“Oh, aye. I divorced him, so he was going to kill me. He used to phone me and write letters. He was always talking to Stevie about what he’d do if he caught me.” Stevie nodded helpfully. “I didn’t get any peace until she came along.”
“That’s why we’ve never told anyone we were together,” said Stevie. “He’d have killed her if he got out.”
“Do you really believe he was capable of killing anyone?”
“Listen,” said Lara with conviction. “Never you mind what the courts say. He killed those women.”
“So you’re not sad that he’s dead?”
“No. I’m pleased,” said Lara Orr. “When he was out, I had to go and stay in my sister’s trailer in Prestwick to get a sleep. I didn’t feel safe.”
Stevie patted her knee. “That’s why I saw him before he left for up north,” he said. “I wanted to make sure he went away.”
“I knew he’d kill Donna.” She sat back smugly, shaking her head. “Didn’t I, Stevie? I said, didn’t I?”
Stevie nodded, first at her and then at me.
“But he didn’t kill Donna,” I said tentatively. “The court says that my wife killed her.”
“Naw.” Lara was certain. “ Not Dr. Susie.” She was talking about it as if it were a soap opera. “If you ask me, he killed Donna and someone else killed him. He was a killer through and through.”
We sat on the settee and finished the bag of crisps, passing it among us. A freezing mist hung in the room, leeching the heat from the gas fire. I glanced at my watch. It was twelve-thirty-three. If I had been at home, I’d have been up here getting miserable.
“Do you want to see my pictures of her?”
Stevie got out a pile of photos from the sideboard and came and stood next to me, handing them to me one at a time, making sure I looked at them before he gave me the next one. They were big publicity shots he’d taken of Donna to sell to magazines. They weren’t good photos, she didn’t look relaxed or pretty, but there were a lot of them, and I realized that Stevie was looking to sell them to me. The way he went about it was clever too: he took out the pile of photos and started flicking through them saying I might like this one better, what about this one, isn’t that nice? Of course this one’s only two quid because it’s a bit blurry. He stood too close to me, his soft womanly thigh tightly against mine so that I’d have agreed to almost anything to get away from the itchy heat gathering between our skins. There were a lot of photos.
“Where did you get these?” I said, showing I wasn’t being shaken down.
“I took them,” he said quite proudly. “Donna didn’t agree to using these. She didn’t like herself in these ones.”
Stevie carried on flipping through: Donna smiling with red eyes; Dragon Donna (little trails of smoke trickling out of her nostrils); Donna outside, her back to a strong wind (the skirt of her coat blown up); Donna at a bus stop with one eye shut and the other rolled back. You could see her teeth in that one, which was unusual.
“Stevie, why do you think I would want to buy publicity shots of the woman my wife is accused of killing?”
“For your book,” said Stevie simply.
I looked at Lara. She shook her head. Stevie nodded and carried on going through the photos.
“I’m not going to write a book, Stevie. And I’m not going to buy any photos from you, either. If I did you’d only go to the papers with the story.”
He thought about it for a moment, then came around the other side, sat down on the settee, and looked up at me. “But,” he said, “that’s not much of a story, is it? Man buys photograph?”
I didn’t want to fight with them, so we sat looking at the photos until we had all finished our cigarettes. Stevie turned to an indoors one of Donna leaning toward the camera across the top of a wooden surface. She was wearing a purple and white tie-dye top that swept down to her cleavage and a gold crucifix dangling between her boobs. She was smiling, pressing her lips tight together the way she always did in photos. It was quite a good picture.
“What’s that scar there from?” I said, pointing to a pink mark that had caught the light.
“That’s where she broke her collarbone when she was wee,” said Stevie. “It was a bad break. She was in a cast for months.”
I laughed but they didn’t. Of course they didn’t. They never went to medical school. They couldn’t know that you can’t use plaster to set a fractured clavicle. Old MacDonald used the same joke every year: it’s like using an envelope to try to set jelly, he’d say, and the second-years would titter. Nor would Stevie know that a bone breaking through skin wouldn’t leave a perfectly straight, small scar at ninety degrees to the bone. Donna’s scar looked like a deep paper cut, it was so straight. And he wouldn’t know that pink scar tissue is relatively recent.
He could see how intrigued I was by it. “You take that picture,” said Stevie as I stood to leave.
“I don’t want it,” I said. He shoved it toward me.
“Take it, take it,” he insisted, pushing it into my hands.