“How long could that take?”
He blew his lips out. “Months? A year? Longer?”
Paddy glanced at her watch. It was five past three and Pete got out of school at half past. She had to get a parking space near the gates or he’d try to cross the road himself. The lollipop lady sometimes hid behind a tree for a cigarette and the road was busy.
“OK.” She stood up. “Fuck it. Let me know what happens.”
“There are these papers…” He waved his hand towards a folder on the table. It was brown, made of soft cardboard, fraying all around the edges. She could see that it was stuffed with well-thumbed sheets of notes, yellowed newspaper clippings folded over on themselves, a bit of a magazine. Her name was written on the outside cover, “Paddy,” in a blue felt pen, the pigment faded into a yellowed green. If Fitzpatrick had been trying to lure her into a cave full of tigers, he could have done worse than leave the folder at the mouth. Paddy could feel herself salivating. “Where did it come from?”
“He left it with me, in the safe.”
“When?”
“A year ago.”
It might be nothing to do with his murder. Her interest blunted, she looked at him, but Fitzpatrick was working a move. He licked his bottom lip, looking back at her with a steady, distracted eye.
“What’s in it?”
“I couldn’t say.” He almost smiled.
She pressed him further. “Can I look at what’s in it?”
“No. I could give it to you now, to take away, but you’d need to sign off the claim to the house.”
He waited. She waited. His eyes slid to the side. With every second thudding past, the realization dawned on Fitzpatrick that she wasn’t that hungry for the folder.
She cleared her throat. “You know Wendy Hewitt then, do you?”
His eyelids contracted momentarily, eyes widening. “Not personally, no.”
“Do you represent her professionally?”
“No,” he said, too quickly.
She suddenly didn’t give a shit anymore. She stood up. “Fuck this, I’m off.”
Fitzpatrick stood up to meet her. “But his effects, you need to clear out his flat.”
“What?”
“His effects. The landlord wants the flat emptied or he’ll have the house cleared…”
“Well, that’s your responsibility, surely?”
“It’s a tiny amount of stuff. Rubbish. You could bin it.”
Paddy had the impression that he’d had a first scan of the belongings and thought it was all worthless. But he wouldn’t know, and whatever it was, it was stuff Merki wasn’t being offered.
She thought of sitting in the house tonight with Pete playing in his bedroom, listening always for Michael Collins’s soft knock at the door. “OK,” she said. “Where is it?”
“Partick.” He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a set of keys on a round of dirty string with a paper tag. “ Forty Lawrence Street. Here are the keys.”
Paddy snatched them from his hand. “This is your job, Fitzpatrick. I know it is. Don’t think I don’t know.”
ELEVEN. TERRY’S EFFECTS
The gardens set the street apart. Old trees flourished in the small front gardens, high as the blocks themselves, roots escaping the gardens and bursting up through the pavements like fingers through warm butter. Some of the front gardens were chaotically overgrown, one was graveled, but the one in front of Terry’s close door was a picture book of giant flowers, bushes heavy with vibrant red and blue and yellow. A sun-bleached deck chair sat under a gnarled old tree, a book lying facedown by its side. The gardens were fenced in with functional black railings, replacements for the wrought-iron rails melted down as part of the war effort.
Pete looked out of the car window at the deck chair. “Why do we need to come here?”
“I need to sort through a friend’s things,” said Paddy, reluctant to get out of the car. She was afraid of what she might find in Terry’s flat, afraid he might have photos of her, have written her one last desperate lovelorn missive and not had time to post it.
“Why?”
Dub raised an eyebrow at her from the passenger seat.
“Just promised I would, that’s all.”
Pete looked out of the window again. “Has the friend gone away?”
“Yeah.”
Whatever questions Terry’s flat threw up, they couldn’t be more complicated than the ones in the car. Paddy opened the door and stepped out into the warm street. The high summer sun lifted the soft smell of cut grass and blossom into the air. Beyond the block, cars hurried by on the busy road, but Lawrence Street was sleepy, the warm air trapped in the shallow valley of flats.
Terry’s flat was in a classically proportioned, pedimented block of low blond sandstone. Golden summer sun picked out the dirt on the windows and the shabbiness of the cheap curtains. One of the windows on the second floor had a big dangerous crack across a pane, mended on the inside with masking tape.
The car door next to Paddy opened but she stopped it with a firm hand. “What have I told ye? Always get out on the pavement side.”
Pete mumbled an apology and bumped his bottom along the seat to the other door.
Dub was standing next to her. “Do you get to keep all this stuff?”
“I don’t really know. I think so. I get to keep it until the will’s overturned anyway.”
“Might be worth a few quid. Might be jewelry.”
“Yeah, Terry was always mad for his big gold chains, wasn’t he?”
“Well,” said Dub, reluctant to be wrong, “I saw him wearing a ruby tiara and matching sandshoes once.”
“Oh, yeah.” She smiled away from him. “I remember them. High heels?”
“High heels and a sketch of the Last Supper picked out on the toe. Judas was cross-eyed.”
“A lovely shoe.”
“Two lovely shoes.” Dub nudged her supportively. She turned to look at him and found him smiling at his feet. He was a full foot taller than her, handsome in an odd way. They had been friends for years, since before she ever spoke to Terry Hewitt, and sometimes, like today, she felt so fond of him she wanted to grab him and kiss him. She looked away. “Right, let’s do this.”
Pete waited dutifully on the pavement until Paddy walked over and took his hand, leading him along the street and up the path between the two sets of railings to Terry’s front door. She fitted the key and let them into the close.
It was dark and smelled of damp chalk. A marble-patterned rubberized floor was stained with greasy puddles. As they climbed the wide circular stairs to the top floor, Paddy trailed her hand along the curved oak handrail. Cobwebs hung between the cast-iron banisters.
The front door to the flat was unpainted plywood with a single lock, the tang of newly seasoned wood still hanging off it. On the door frame, peeling Sellotape bordered a list of six names written in biro block capitals. The doormat was filthy. They could hear the squawk of a television inside.
Dub curled his lip. “It’s a bedsit. Why was he still living in bedsits?”
Paddy shrugged and put her arm around Pete’s shoulders. “He always did. I don’t know why. The lawyer said he had a house. Should we knock or just go in?”
Dub shrugged. “Knock, probably.”
“I’ll knock,” said Pete and gave the door a loud, rude thump with the base of his fist.
“Pete! You don’t knock on a door like that-”
Steps preceded the flinging open of the door. A man in a stripy T-shirt opened the door, wiping floured hands on a tea towel tucked into the waistband of his trousers. He looked expectantly at them.
“Sorry about the banging.” Paddy nodded at Pete. “A bit eager.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Um, well, you know about Terry? I’m here to get his things.”
The man wasn’t really listening though; he was smiling at Dub’s trousers. They were made out of ticking, blue and green with a white stripe, like the covering on an old-fashioned mattress.