III
Two deep, vibrant orange bars glowed across the dark room. The electric fire sported little empty ash zeros where they had lit cigarettes against the bars. The curtains didn’t shut properly, and even lying in the bed Paddy could see into the flats opposite, watching as a man readied himself for a Saturday night on the town and a woman made dinner for a thin man.
Terry slept for twenty minutes like a dead man, and when he woke up he told her a lot of gossip about the people at work. Kevin Hatcher, the drunken pictures editor, was only twenty-eight and had once won an international photography award for a photo essay about nomadic tribes of the Gobi Desert. Richards had stood for election as a Communist Party member. Tony Benn spoke on a platform with him and everything. Paddy was amazed. Then they had a long, pleasant argument about the relative value of Tiswas and Swap Shop, killing time before they had to be grown up again. He stroked her shoulder, looking at it with half-shut eyes, then leaned down to let his lips rest against the skin.
“I’m very fat at the moment,” she said softly, as if the weight was an occasional condition that afflicted her.
“You’re gorgeous. Womanly.” He touched her breast and she blushed.
“I got a real fright today,” she said quickly, “with that guy.”
“We’ll go to the police tomorrow, when things are calmer. They’ll have let most of the marchers out by noon, it’ll be quiet. There’s good material in this, you know. There’s at least one article in it.”
She’d never told anyone before, and her worries spilled across her lips before she could stop them. “I don’t think I can write. I don’t know why, but I can’t think straight when I sit down at a desk. I can see bits of it but I can’t fit them together.”
“That’s just craft,” he said. “No one knows that stuff straightaway. You need to learn all that stuff.”
“Really?”
“You’ll learn. Don’t worry.” He stroked his hand up and down her soft belly. “It’s just practice.”
She could feel him pressing his cock against her leg and knew he was ready to go again.
“Shall we have another smoke?”
“Okay.” Terry helped himself to one of her Embassy Regal cigarettes and climbed out of the bed, shamelessly walking naked across the room to the heater, crouching down to light it on the bars. “Heather Allen used to smoke these.”
“God rest poor Heather.” Paddy imagined her lying on the floor of the grocery van, among the bread dust. “What was she doing up in Townhead that night?”
“It turns out she wasn’t in Townhead at all. When they checked it out, she was at an uncle’s house having dinner with her parents. The witness who came forward must have confused her with someone else. Weird that they got her name right, though.”
A sudden drop of pressure made one of Paddy’s ears pop. There was only one of them in the Townhead scheme that night. She’d called herself Heather Allen when she spoke to the shy man in the navy overcoat, and it wasn’t the first time. She’d introduced herself as Heather Allen to Naismith when she first met him, the day the syndicated article was published in the paper. That’s how he knew where she worked.
He’d killed the wrong girl.
TWENTY-NINE . LIFE IN A SCOTCH SITTING ROOM
I
Terry dropped her on the main road and tried to kiss her, but she ducked out of the car quickly. It would be bad enough that she was seen getting out of a man’s car, much less kissing him. She leaned back.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”
He mugged hurt at her. “You’ll shag me but not kiss me? That’s a bit Mary Magdalene.”
“Shut up.”
She smiled and slammed the door shut, watching as he drove away. When he turned the distant corner her grin dissolved. She pulled the neck of her coat up around her and headed into the Star. Every house was full tonight; every front room was filled with the blue-and-white shifting flash of the Saturday night television. Paddy’s feet were cold and wet inside her boots. Her bare toes curled against the paper sole, peeling the top layer off, gathering it between her toes. She walked straight past her house, past the Beatties’, taking an overgrown lane out of the scheme and into the next door field. She climbed up to a wild bit of cliff overlooking an industrial valley that stretched for two miles over to the East End. The brae was considered a wild, slightly dangerous place, but Paddy needed to be alone.
It was dark and wet underfoot. She took the less-worn parallel path a couple of feet uphill from the muddy main track, trying to keep out of the mud and puddles. Within twenty feet she had cleared the bushes and trees and was on the bare hillside. The sounds of buses and cars and a lone whining motorbike wafted up the hill. She followed the hill around until she was no longer facing the city. White stars shone from the inky sky.
She looked out over the dying industrial valley. There was an ironworks down there that had given off the sulfurous smell of bad eggs night and day for as long as she had been alive, but now the lights were dark and all the men had been laid off. Smaller factories around it in the valley were closing down, farther down the river the shipyards were laying off, and every morning brought news of brand-new endings. The proud city was dying. Paddy lit her fifth cigarette of the day and blinked back tears as she thought of Sean and Naismith and what might have happened had he managed to grab her.
She was responsible for Heather’s death. She’d wished her harm when she gave her name to Naismith. And what was a wish but a vulgar prayer to whoever else happened to be listening.
II
It was half past ten when Paddy slipped her key in the front door. As she opened it the first thing she noticed was the television was off and the living room was empty. An ominous light spilled into the hall from the kitchen. She didn’t have time to hang up her coat before she heard her father’s voice calling her through, trying to sound calm.
She saw a snapshot as she passed the serving hatch to the living room. Her family were gathered around the kitchen table, her mother and father grim-faced, the boys and Mary Ann huddled close together in a little row. Mary Ann was smirking at the tabletop, pressing her lips first to one side and then the other, trying not to scream with laughter. The boys stared at the table, dying with discomfort at the confrontation, the very men their father had made them. She noted sadly that Sean wasn’t there and the only unoccupied place at the table was untouched, a clean glass sitting by it, clearly intended for her.
The kitchen table was scattered with the remains of a stillborn party: triangular sandwiches curling into sarcastic grins, a jug of weak orange squash, and an unopened bottle of sweet, viscous Liebfraumilch. As a centerpiece to the table sat a small white cake. The decorative silver balls on Marty’s side of the table had been pulled out, leaving bullet holes in the icing.
Paddy held her coat over her arm, standing in the kitchen doorway like a visitor who didn’t plan to stay long. She saw herself through their eyes: in at ten thirty without her engagement ring on, with mud on her shoes and tear-swollen eyes.
Con was so tense that he had to turn his entire body to look at her, twitching his little moustache side to side like a comedy humbug.
“It’s late, I know,” she said.
Her dad couldn’t cope. It was enough that a child had defied him, but for her not to be penitent and for it to be his youngest daughter was too much.
“How dare you,” he spluttered, the whites of his eyes turning red. “I will not be spoken to… I will not be spoken to-”
Trisha pressed her hand over Con’s. “Where have you been all day?”