She watched as they lifted him carefully onto the stretcher, one side limp, the other tight as a traction band. His left knee was almost up to his chin, his clawed hand in the way. The walls slid sideways and she dropped her head to her knees again.
Paddy had been to the site of a hundred car crashes and fatal accidents but the bodies in the bags weren’t people she knew, the blood was a faceless stranger’s blood, the weight of sorrow someone else’s.
She eased herself upright. The young police officer was in front of her, looking into the house, stepping from foot to foot, his hands fiddling with his belt. He was excited to have a job that didn’t involve hassling truants in the park or chasing junkies out of Woolworths.
Kevin looked smaller on his side. Paddy watched as the paramedics lifted the stretcher slowly, carried it through the door, and negotiated the turn of the stairs. She saw Kevin’s blond hair darkened and crusty, a white residue over it.
The older officer was standing in front of her, nodding as his walkie-talkie crackled instructions at him. He signed off and hung it on his belt, turning formally to Paddy.
“We’d like to ask you about how you came to be here and what you know about-” He thumbed back to the hallway.
“Kevin.”
He nodded gravely. “About Kevin.”
She looked back into the hallway. The sun had moved, the tip of it touching the crusty saliva mess.
Kevin wouldn’t take cocaine. If he’d been taking it she would have known. She’d seen him drinking when he worked at the News and he was a compulsive, mental drunk. Men had gone to their graves swearing they’d chuck it if they got as bad as Kevin. She had once seen him have an alcoholic seizure in the office, then sit for a while with a cup of tea before going out drinking again in the afternoon. Men like that didn’t take an occasional line, not like Dub did sometimes. Someone had made him take it.
Collins. She could see him stand by while Kevin vomited on the floor, watching calmly as a stroke curled him up like a dead leaf.
“Look, I need to go but take it from me, Kevin didn’t do drugs,” she told the older officer. “The bruises on his arm and chin-didn’t you see them?”
He looked at her. “Not really.”
“I think Kevin was killed by the same guy who murdered Terry Hewitt.”
“Terry…?”
“Hewitt. The guy found shot dead on the Greenock road? The journalist?”
Terry’s death had been blanketed over the papers, over the television and radio news, but neither of the officers seemed to know what she was talking about. Not the sharpest pencils in the box.
The younger officer sensed her disapproval. “Oh, I think I heard something about that,” he said, nodding at his colleague.
“How do you know it’s to do with that?” The older officer leaned in, as if half expecting Paddy to confess to the killings herself.
“Oh, for Christ sake,” she said impatiently, “just call it in. Ask for the team investigating Terry Hewitt’s murder. They’ll know what I’m talking about.”
The older man pulled himself up to his full height, nostrils aflare, and she realized that her sniping tone had been a bad mistake. He might be an idiot but, in common with all police officers, he didn’t want to be spoken to with anything but fawning respect.
“I will decide what we do and don’t call in, and I’ll thank you to watch your language when you speak to me.”
She apologized, said it was the shock, and tried to explain how she needed to look through the portfolio of photographs Kevin had taken for the book.
The younger officer glanced at his mentor, nodding so much she guessed he wasn’t listening. The older officer seemed to understand this time but didn’t take notes or react. When she had finished he told her to wait here and went downstairs, presumably to call it in and ask a senior officer who the hell Terry Hewitt was and what the fuck he should do now.
The younger man stayed with her in the close. Paddy knew they were keeping her with them, intending to take her in for questioning, which would mean a two-hour wait, a short conversation and then another two-hour wait before someone decided she could go. She could leg it but the squad car would probably be just outside the close. Even if she ran, both officers looked fit enough to outrun her. Actually, her mother could probably outrun her. She wasn’t very fit.
“So you knew this guy?”
“We worked together.”
“In papers?”
“Yeah.”
“You a secretary then?”
“No, I’m a journalist.”
He grinned, not maliciously. “So you make things up for a living?”
“Kind of.”
He smirked a little and looked away, leaned over the banister, looking for signs of his partner. When he found none he stepped into Kevin’s flat, shrugging and smiling like a naughty schoolboy. He beckoned Paddy to come too.
“Let’s look for the photos,” he said, showing he had been listening after all.
She stood in the hall watching him in the bedroom, stepping over a tidal wave of dirty clothes stacked against a chest of drawers. She turned away, looking back into the living room. The line of cocaine on the coffee table was wrong. She tipped her head at it: if Kevin had cleared a space to chop a line he would have put the boxes of negatives on the floor under the table, which was the only empty space that was big enough. She glanced around at the settee, under the television, by the chair. The boxes were gone.
“There should be boxes of negatives somewhere near the table, they were on the table…”
The nosy officer was smiling out at her, standing beyond the rumpled bed, triumphantly holding a big black portfolio that Paddy recognized from her last visit. He put it on the bed.
“Wait, wait,” she said. “If Kevin’s attacker picked it up his prints’ll be on it.”
He shrugged, slipped the elastic band off its shoulder, flipped it open, dragging his greasy fingertips down the cover with a recklessness that Paddy couldn’t quite believe. She realized that he wasn’t a considered liberal or a genius working undercover. He was an idiot who didn’t believe her fantastical story that Kevin and Terry had been killed by someone Kevin had photographed. Quiet people always fooled her.
He lifted the photos, one after the other, looking at them and at her, waiting for her to say stop, there he is, but the black woman’s picture wasn’t in the portfolio.
“Well, it was there,” she said, “and the negatives have gone.”
He replied with his customary smirk.
Echoing footsteps heralded the return of the older officer. Panting lightly, he rolled his eyes at the stairs and caught his breath enough to order the other officer to secure the flat. They shut the door, fixing the lock to stop it blowing open in a draft but not much more.
“Listen,” Paddy told their backs, “I really have to go. I’ll give you my number if you need to call me.”
“You’re coming with us, Miss Meehan,” the older officer said with relish. “DI Garrett wants to talk to you in Pitt Street.”
Outside, Paddy could see that they hadn’t had any trouble finding a parking space for their squad car. They had stopped it in the middle of the two lines of cars and got out, and now it was jammed between the other cars in the street. The officer who had pawed the portfolio could only open the back door halfway for her.
“But I’ve got my own car,” she protested.