“No.” He spoke slowly. “From on high. Not us. No way, in no capacity, under no circumstances.”
She sat back and looked at him. Donaldson was scruffy, fat, and smelled of Guinness, but he did have the assured demeanor of a man with power. She might need to speak to him again.
“I’m sorry for threatening ye, Mr. Donaldson.” She put her papers in her bag and noticed that his eyes followed them. “But I’m desperate.”
“It’s OK.” He nodded softly at the table in front of him. “I understand. A mother’s love’s a blessing.”
“No matter where you roam,” she said, filling in the next line of the hokey old Irish song she’d been hearing all her life.
He gave her the end of the chorus. “You’ll never miss a mother’s love ’til she’s buried beneath the clay.”
They smiled, each seeing the frightened Catholic child in the other.
“An anthem for emotional blackmail. Have ye kids yourself, Mr. Donaldson?”
“A son,” he said, and something seemed to snap shut in his eyes. “He died. On remand in Long Kesh.”
“Oh. God. I’m so sorry.”
Donaldson sighed down at the dirty tabletop in front of him. “Aye,” he said. “Me too.”
II
The summer street was blinding compared to the dark bar. Paddy walked along the busy pavement, stepping out onto the road to skirt around a lorry making a delivery of carpet rolls to a shop. She chewed her tongue to clear away the nasty taste of the cigarettes, thought about Kevin lying on the stretcher, wondering whether his parents were alive and whether she should phone them and let them know he was in hospital.
She didn’t look back along the street. She didn’t see the young man in the black tracksuit who had followed her from the bar, watching her as she stopped at her car, memorizing her number plate.
She drove aimlessly around the busy city center, thinking about Collins and Donaldson, hardly paying attention to the pedestrians dodging out in front of her. After a close shave with a small woman carrying heavy shopping bags, Paddy had a future flash of herself explaining to a policeman that she had run away from two officers at a serious assault, mowed down an innocent shopper, but didn’t mean any harm.
She pulled into a car park at the foot of the huge glass-tent shopping mall, found a space, and stopped.
Women in thin summer clothes flitted past, dragging reluctant children after them. A bigger car park sat between her and the flea market next to the river, the sharp sun glinting brutally off the bonnets and roofs. She took a breath, thought about lighting a cigarette but couldn’t face it.
She could be completely wrong about Collins. She didn’t have any evidence that the man watching the school was anything to do with him, or that he had hurt Terry. He had come to her door and asked about Terry, but that was all she knew for certain. Other than that, it was just a gut suspicion and she was off form anyway. Terry and Kevin might have known him, he could have been a strange pal of theirs; journalists often had contacts who appeared unlikely as friends, people they were working for stories. She’d had contacts herself when she was doing news, creeps and weirdos who’d scare you out of an alley if you met them on a dark night. Half the Press Bar was like that.
A skinny man brushed past her car, his plastic bag sweeping noisily over the bonnet, bringing her back into the bright day.
Kevin was in a hospital somewhere and she had no idea if he was alive or dead.
III
Standing outside the Albert Hospital, she smoked a cigarette she didn’t want and puzzled it over. It was unusual, to say the very least. The best she could come up with to explain the fact that Kevin Hatcher wasn’t registered in any of the four major hospitals with a casualty department in Glasgow was that they had misspelled his name on the registration form. But she had spent half a year doing the hospital rounds every night in the calls car and knew that they were meticulous when anyone came in. She had clearly told the officers who Kevin was and his name was on all the mail on the hall table.
She had called in to all four hospitals, flashed her NUJ card, told them she was from the News. No Hatcher, Catcher or Thatcher was registered anywhere.
EIGHTEEN. MAKING HEROES OF BUTCHERS
I
Noise moved strangely in the busy morgue. The tiled walls shattered and amplified sound so that drills, metallic clangs and strange muted calls ricocheted down corridors, distorting and warping, masking everyday sources and turning them into growls from monsters, saws through skulls.
Through the effort of not ingesting the smell, Paddy found herself breathless by the time she reached Aoife’s office.
The door was open but the chair was empty. A lone cigarette smoldered in an ashtray, the sour tang a welcome interruption to the vivid yowl of disinfectant.
The office was a mess. Storage boxes of papers and files took up most of the floor space. A stack of brown files on the desk threatened to spill on the floor.
“I was surprised when the desk said you were here.” Aoife McGaffry was standing behind her. “Kind of thought I’d offended ye, to be honest.”
She was smiling, genuinely pleased to see her, and Paddy felt a pang of guilt. She had been offended. Now everyone was a potential source of information.
“Auch, it takes a lot more than that to offend me.”
Aoife bought it and looked relieved. “Well, come on in anyway.”
She gestured into the office with a roll of address labels in her hand and they shuffled in and shut the door after themselves. A saw started up some distance away, a high whine, and Aoife saw Paddy wince. She hid a smile and held up the roll. “I need to go through all the files and change the serial numbers. They’ve been put in out of sequence.”
“Does that matter?”
“Does if it comes to court.”
“What are you doing this for? Shouldn’t you have an assistant?”
“I have got one, somewhere, but she never comes in to work and the managers don’t seem to care. I was wondering if she’s the Provost’s daughter or something.”
“Oh yeah, the City Council is a lazy bastard’s dream employer. Both my brothers worked for the Parks Department. Spent their days hiding behind trees.”
“Aye, well, it’s weird moving somewhere new. All the unofficial regulations and rules. I think I’ve offended half of Glasgow and I’ve barely been here a week. It’s a personal best, even for me.”
Aoife took the desk chair and offered Paddy the examination bed to sit on. Box files were propped all along it and rather than move them and get comfortable she perched her bum on the edge.
“So…” Aoife looked at the files on her desk, patting her work space with both hands, remembering where everything was. “What can I do for ye?”
Paddy nodded at the files. “Sorry for interrupting.”
“No, you’re fine.” Aoife turned to give her her full attention. “I never really said it the other night: I’m awful sorry about your friend. It was a rotten thing to happen.”
“Brutal,” said Paddy. She took a breath. “I came to see you because you did your training in Belfast.”
Aoife gave her a wary look. “You’re not thinking of writing an article, are ye? I don’t know what it’s like here, but back home we’re not allowed to be interviewed.”
“No, not an interview.” She didn’t quite know how to phrase it. “A friend of Terry’s had a stroke this morning. He was only thirty or so. I found him.” She looked away, her mind back in the messy hall, seeing the dried chalky saliva. “They said he’d taken coke and given himself a stroke, but I don’t honestly believe he’d use drugs.”
“A lot of users are secretive, you wouldn’t necessarily know if he was using drugs.”
“No, it looked staged.” Paddy felt certain now when she thought about it. “There was a line of cocaine out on the table, I think it was cocaine-”