Paddy stood in the bitter field, her hair flattened against her head, listening to the brutal February wind and all the callous cars rushing home to warmth and kindness. The story suited everyone and wouldn’t be questioned until the evidence was overwhelming. It was Paddy fucking Meehan all over again. No matter how much evidence he had produced or how many people saw him on the night of Rachel Ross’s murder, the police were determined it was him.
EIGHTEEN . KILLY GIRLS AND COUNTRY BOYS
I
Meehan would spend the remaining twenty-five years of his life poring over the details of the night he didn’t kill Rachel Ross. He told the story so often that it changed meaning: the names of the girls became pleas for understanding; the timing, where the cars were parked, when the lights went on and off at the hotel, all became a hollow mantra to be chanted when a new journalist or lawyer took a passing interest in his case.
At the time, the night seemed like nothing but another disappointing recce, like a thousand other nights in the life of a professional criminal.
They had been sitting in the hotel car park for three hours, watching people arrive and leave the bar, slumping down when a man came past walking his dog, watching and waiting for the lights to go off so they could scan the office next door, which issued automobile tax decals. James Griffiths was slumped in his stiff car coat and kept coming back to the same thing.
“I’ll steal one for ya,” he said, his thick Rochdale accent putting the inflection at the end of the sentence, turning it into a question. “Happilee, happilee, happilee.” He stubbed his Senior Service out in the ashtray. Until James helped himself to the turquoise Triumph 2000 from outside the Royal Stewart Hotel in Gretna, the four-year-old car’s ashtray had never been used. Now it was overflowing with snapped stubs and flaky ash.
Meehan sighed. “I’m not taking them on holiday to East Germany in a nicked motor, for Godsake. We wouldn’t get far. The Secret Service are watching me all the time.”
“You won’t get done,” said Griffiths casually. “I never get done. Been getting away with it for years.”
“You never get done?” Meehan stared at him.
“Never,” said Griffiths, only faintly uncomfortable at the blatant lie.
“What were you doing in my cell on the Isle of Wight, then? Visiting?”
“Yeah.” Griffiths grinned, but Meehan didn’t reciprocate.
The first time they met was on the Isle of Wight, when Griffiths was doing a three-year stretch for car theft. Griffiths was a halfwit sometimes. He did and said whatever came into his mind at the time; that’s why he got the strap so often inside. Paddy had seen him without his shirt on often enough: his back looked like Euston station.
Meehan needed the car to get the family to a holiday in East Germany. He didn’t really want a holiday. What he really wanted was to show his kids that he could speak German and Russian, that he was receiving a payment from a foreign government, that he wasn’t just another Glasgow thug. Before they got much older he was going to give them good memories of their father. He had spent the previous winter sitting next to his own father’s hospital bed while he was eaten away by cancer, and during the long nights he couldn’t recall a single happy time with him. Not one. There wasn’t a moment spent together as a family that wouldn’t have been better had his father been out. Meehan wanted to be more than that to his kids, and he couldn’t take them away in a stolen car. They’d be picked up before Carlisle, he was sure, stopped at the side of the motorway and sent home fatherless. He could already see their hurt and humiliated eyes looking up at him from the backseat of a panda car.
“I dunno what you’re worried about,” said Griffiths. “I’ve been picking so many cars up here I’ve been rolling them over a cliff up into the water ’cause I got nowhere to sell ’em. And good ones, too, Jags and that. Not rubbish. I’ll steal one for ya.”
He was apologizing, Meehan knew that. They’d spent a lot of time together over the years, and he knew Griffiths’s shorthand for sorry. He was apologizing because the tax decal job he’d brought Meehan to scope in Stranraer wasn’t going to happen. As the hotel lights gradually went out and the patrons left in ones and twos, followed by the staff, it became clear that the spotlight on the roof of the tax building would stay on. Even if it went off, the hotel kept dogs, big bastards by the sound of them. So they sat at the dark edge of the car park, smoking and watching, Meehan going quiet to hide his dejection, Griffiths getting chatty to cover his embarrassment.
Between the tax office and the hotel they could see Loch Ryan, and beyond the hills, to the molten black sea. Big red ferryboats for Belfast and the Isle of Man bobbed on the gentle lift and sway of the water. A few lorries were already parked there, drivers sleeping in the cabs, waiting for the first crossing.
“Fuck it,” said Meehan, stubbing out his fag in the ashtray. “This is pointless. Let’s get back to Glasgow and get a breakfast at the meat market.”
The meat dealers’ café opened at four in the morning. Their fry-ups had rashers as thick as gammon steaks, and they sold mugs of cheap whisky. Griffiths took a puff on his cigarette, shaking his head as he exhaled a string of smoke. They had shared a cell for two months and could read each other’s breathing. Griffiths was vexed. He shook his head at Paddy, smiling a little, and relented.
“Okay, okay.” He turned the key in the ignition, leaving the lights off as he reversed out of the dark corner. “Let’s get some brekkie.”
II
Fifty miles north of Stranraer, in the small, wealthy suburb of Ayr, Rachel and Abraham Ross were in the bedroom of their bungalow, getting ready for bed. Rachel, in a sky-blue nightie and pink chenille dressing gown, sat on the side of her twin bed and watched her husband winding his watch. A single, convulsive cough shook her. She fought it off and waved a dismissive hand.
“It’s nothing.”
“Sure?” said Abraham, putting his watch on the bedside table.
Rachel patted his bed. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said. “Dr. Eardly said it would come and go for a little while after the operation, didn’t he? I’m fine.”
She smiled reassuringly for her husband, showing a little of her bare pink gums. They had spent the past month lying in their respective beds, listening to the texture of Rachel’s bronchial cough. It had left them both exhausted. The cough was so violent that it had cracked one of her ribs and caused her to have an operation. Abraham had fallen asleep in his office in the Alhambra Bingo Hall yesterday and seen Rachel cough up a river into their bedroom. She had always been the stronger, five years older than him and barren too, but in both their minds the stronger.
She pulled back the covers on her bed and took off her dressing gown, folding it carefully in half, laying it along the bottom of her bed.
“Good night, dear.” She kissed her own hand and touched his cheek with her fingertips to save her bending down.
“Good night, my dear.”
He waited until she was well tucked in, then pulled the string above his head to turn off the light. A cozy blue settled on the room, broken only by the puddle of yellow light from the hall. In unison they took off their spectacles, folded them and set them, side by side, on the nightstand. Rachel was propped up on pillows, having been told to sleep sitting up as much as possible to let the fluid settle at the bottom of her lungs, where it would take up less surface area. She folded her hands in front of her over the coverlet.