“Would you have?”
“Aye, yeah, usually. No press release, nothing. Here, hang on.” He covered the phone again but she could hear talking in the background this time. “Right? ’K. No, right ye are.” He came back on. “Getting it in now. Not them.”
“They’re denying it?”
“Official,” he said. “Any jobs over there?”
“Some. What’s your name?”
“Poraig Seaniag.”
She wrote it on an invisible bit of paper with an invisible pen, just to get the right effect to her voice. “Poraig, you’re a doll.”
“If you need anything done on the story I could do with a byline.”
She’d never heard of anything so pushy: an informant asking for a name check as the author of an article. “It’s not necessarily an article, to be honest. We were close. I just want to know what happened to him.”
“Oh. Was he family?”
“Kind of.” She let the conversation trail away, adding in a sniff for flavor.
“OK, sorry. Well, keep an eye out for my name.”
“Will do.”
She tutted indignantly at the receiver after she’d hung up.
Merki was still hiding behind the door to the coffee room; she could see his feet shuffling. He’d come running over the moment she left, look for notes jotted on a pad, try to find the page she’d been checking out in the phone book. Spitefully, she opened the phone book at the P’s, running her hand down the spine to flatten it before she shut it and put it back on the shelf.
EIGHT. THE DARKNESS IN FORTWILLIAM
I
Kevin Hatcher moved like an old man, his actions stiff and slow. He wasn’t old though. He actually looked younger than Paddy remembered him being six years ago when she last saw him up close, but he was a drinker then. His hair was blond, lighter now that his life didn’t consist of staggering from bar to bar, and he had a tan. Through the thin denim of his worn shirt she could tell that he exercised and had developed broad shoulders and solid arms.
When she called ahead he didn’t ask her why she wanted to come over, even though it was eight o’clock on a Sunday night. He opened the door to her, mumbled hello as he took her coat, dropped it carelessly onto a chair in the hall, and pointed her into the living room. He was still shocked, she could see that.
The flat was on the top floor of a red sandstone tenement, nice but fantastically messy and cavelike, definitely a bachelor’s house. They passed the kitchen door and she caught a whiff of sour mop. She suspected that a woman had lived here at one point: framed pictures were hung with care and there was a degree of order under the blanket of mess. Two settees faced each other in the living room; there was a carpet under there somewhere but the flat was layered with dust and clutter, dirty mugs, prints of photographs, mysterious bits of kit and wrappers from motorway cuisine. Tripods of various sizes were propped in the doorway. A lone chair had been placed right in the middle of the living-room floor, directly in front of the television.
As he followed her in he told her that he’d gone out to buy milk at noon and seen the Daily News headline several times before he recognized the photo of Terry.
“That was an old picture,” he said, pushing a clutter of magazines to one side of the settee so that Paddy could sit down.
“Yeah,” she said, “from before he went away.”
He stood in front of Paddy, looking at the floor, clasping and unclasping his hands as if trying to cast his memory back and recall where these interactions went next. At last he remembered. “Tea?”
“I’m fine. Are you OK?”
Kevin shook his head.
“Sit down.” She patted the settee next to her. “What have you been doing all day?”
He shuffled over to the settee, waved a hand helplessly over the jacket and cup sitting on it, trying to magic them away. Finally he picked them up, put them on the floor, sat down, and wrapped his arms around his waist. He’d called the police and spent a few hours with them, reiterating the events of the night in the casino.
Kevin’s work was everywhere. The coffee table held several open boxes of slide negatives and large black portfolios sat against the wall or lay open on the floor. The photographs were wonderfully crisp street portraits, each of them brimming with narrative: a fishmonger with blood on his overalls smoking a cigarette, three jolly men in leather aprons outside a Brutalist abattoir, a fat man in sports gear on a bleak winter hillside, his reflective sunglasses showing the hordes of tourists trailing up a steep path. She wanted to compliment Kevin on them but thought it would sound frivolous.
Kevin was nodding rhythmically at his feet and looked at her suddenly. “He really loved you.”
She shivered.
“I don’t mean that you should have loved him back, just-you know-he did.”
“Kevin, Terry hadn’t spent any time with me for years. I don’t know who he was in love with but he didn’t know me anymore.”
“Do people change?” he said, as if it was news to him. “Bigger houses, kids and money, it’s all just garnish, isn’t it?”
She liked his phrasing. “You’re pretty smart for a snapper.”
He flashed a polite smile. “Did you see his body?”
Paddy nodded. “They came to my house and took me to ID him.” She could see that he wanted to ask about it but couldn’t bring himself to. “They said it would have been fast. They shot him from behind so he wouldn’t even have seen them coming, might not have known it was about to happen.”
He knew she was lying, she could tell. He nodded for a bit, his eyes skittering around the floor as he gnawed a cuticle.
“I heard you were with him earlier that night.”
“Yeah, we went to the casino. We’re writing a book together. Were. It was a short text to accompany the pictures. They gave us a shit advance to finish it so we went out to spend it all in one night. Casino’s the only place you could do that really.”
“What, on drink?”
“No, gambling. I don’t drink anymore.”
She’d heard that Kevin had got sober. He had disappeared for a while back in the mideighties; everyone had assumed he was dead but then he had reappeared, working for himself. She had only seen him across dark banqueting halls, jogging up to various stages to accept prizes for his work.
He was looking at her out of the corner of his eye. “I recognize you from telly but did you used to work at the Daily News?”
She nodded. “I’m back there again now.”
“Did we work together?”
“Yeah, for about four years,” she said, adding, “I was just a copyboy,” to excuse the fact that he didn’t recognize her.
He shifted uncomfortably on the settee’s arm, straddling it. “When I was there I was a bit… unconscious. Sorry. Sabbatical from reality.”
“I remember you getting redundancy and disappearing. We were running a book on how long it’d take for you to kill yourself.”
He smirked. He didn’t look bad for a dead man. “I’d have taken short odds on that myself.”
“Did you manage to spend the advance?”
Kevin looked up at a framed poster on the wall. An Edwardian portrait of a woman in a large red hat. Red and green, like Christmas. He sighed a no. “We came out four quid up. Just as well, wasn’t it? I’ll have to give it back now. Terry hadn’t nearly finished the writing.” He glanced at her shoes. “What happened between you two in Fort William?”
She wanted to get up and leave. Instead she said, “I got a note from him last month, came in the post to work. He said he was sorry.”
“What was he sorry for?”
They were looking at each other, less than a foot apart. If she was ever going to speak about Fort William it would be now. “People do change, Kevin. He changed. He wasn’t who he used to be. He was more soft before, you know?” She looked to Kevin to absolve her for not loving his dead friend.