Smiling, he turned back to the street and saw the leather shoes. They were parked in the close, same as they had been the night before. Brown, sleek, a pattern punched out on the toe. The bloke looked up. A young one, like himself. Long blond hair pulled back from his face, glasses, wearing a red-checked coat, watching down the road the way Callum had just come.
The children who had been playing in the puddle in the back court pushed past the shoes. He let them through, smiling, touching the top of a head, and looked down the street again. He must have watched Callum coming out of the shop. Must have watched him swinging the loaf, off guard, smiling about the funny shopkeeper.
Callum leaned his back against the close wall.
They were coming for him.
II
Pete had finally settled in bed after only six trips back into the living room to ask for water, a bit of bread because he was hungry, a cuddle after a particularly badly feigned nightmare, the horror of which dissipated as soon as Dub smiled at him.
Paddy and Dub were alone in the living room, sloped at either end of the settee, and Paddy told him about Kevin and the police. He agreed with her: there was no way Kevin Hatcher had been quietly taking drugs while living a relatively normal life. Could it have been his first time, though? Dub’d heard of people dying the first time they took an E and maybe it could happen with cocaine. They both considered it and decided that Aoife was right: no one swallowed and snorted at the same time.
Paddy was tired, worried about Mary Ann and frightened for Kevin. She’d phoned the casualty wards again in the early evening, when the night-shift receptionists who knew her would be on. There was still no trace of him.
Dub knew what would cheer her up: he put on an old tape of Evil Dead II. They already knew it by heart. They’d watched it a hundred times and knew all the jokes already but it was still comforting.
Bruce Campbell had sawn halfway through his own wrist when she suddenly thought about Fitzpatrick and the folder.
“I’ve been left a house,” she said, and told Dub about the folder with her name on it. He laughed at her.
“That’s ridiculous, he can’t make you choose between a folder and a house. It’s a will, not a quiz show. Go back and ask him what the fuck he’s on about. Better yet, get another lawyer to look into it.”
Paddy nodded, watching the tape. A woman in a bad mask was menacing the hero. Dub stretched out on the settee, his foot making contact with her leg. He flinched, withdrew from the electric touch until she smiled at him and wrapped her hand around his toes, pulling his foot onto her lap and holding it.
They watched the TV, both smiling, as the Deadites came to claim the world of men.
TWENTY. RAT SHOES
I
Paddy stood by the doors for a moment, clutching the envelopes from the clippings library. The morning newsroom was empty. Everyone was packed into Bunty’s cubicle for the editorial conference. Admin staff and the dregs and strays were rattling around and, although it was almost two hours after his shift had finished, Merki was still there, strutting, pleased with himself, offering cigarettes and prompting people to acknowledge his article the day before.
Just then Bunty’s door opened and the conference emptied out into the newsroom, eds and subs spilling out to the desks, journalists heading purposefully for the doors or phones to follow up the stories they had been assigned.
Merki trotted over to a desk and claimed his place at the keyboard, notebook propped up against the monitor, fag packet and lighter at his elbow, ready to bang out a story. She made her way over to him, standing shoulder to shoulder with him. She was a full head taller, and she wasn’t tall.
“Merki, where did you get that story, about the gun?”
Without turning to her, he scratched his neck. “That would be telling, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, because none of the other papers ran it or picked up on it, which made me think, you know, single source, known only to you. If anyone was confirming it they would have run it too. Did you cross-check it with anyone?”
Merki grinned. “You’re jealous of me and my success.”
They stood together and laughed. Merki was pretty funny: he had a face like a bag of spanners, worked nights, and she made four times his salary for eight hundred words a week.
Paddy looked over his left shoulder and the Monkey appeared, scowling when he spotted her. She stepped away as he waved her over to Bunty’s door. She held up a finger to the Monkey and picked up a phone, dialed 9 for an outside line, and rang directory inquiries, covering her mouth so Merki wouldn’t hear her asking for the number of Scotia Press. The exchange was deep in the heart of the West End.
The woman answered as if she’d been expecting her call. “Yah?”
“Ah, hello, this is Paddy Meehan from the Scottish Daily News here. I wondered if I might come over later and talk to you about Terry Hewitt?”
Reluctantly, the woman gave her the address, told her not to come in the next three hours and to ring the bell firmly. Paddy thanked her and hung up.
The Monkey wasn’t smiling as she approached. He held the already open door to Bunty’s office and bowed as she passed on the way in.
Bunty was sitting with his elbows on the table, his index fingers steepled against his mouth. He looked up at her. She had never seen him quite as white before.
“Sit.”
Paddy shut the door behind her, leaving the Monkey outside, and took the nearest chair. The table was ten feet long; they were sitting at either end and it still felt too close.
Bunty sat forward. “Callum Ogilvy. Is he out?”
He left the name hanging in the air between them. It wasn’t clear whether it was an accusation, a story suggestion or a reproach. She could bluff it, tell him an outright lie, but big lies rarely went well for her. The porous paper on the clippings envelopes was suddenly damp from her damp hands. She put them on the table.
“Bunty-”
He had her column copy on the table in front of him. “And this flimsy crap is all you bring me.” His voice rose suddenly, his words tumbling over each other in their hurry to get out. “Where’s the bite in this? Say it was the Provos or say it wasn’t. And Misty doesn’t use semicolons. What the fucking bloody hell am I paying you for?” He wasn’t a habitual user of bad language, didn’t understand the rhythm of it, and it sounded desperate. “At the prison: you were seen.”
“Look, there’s been another attack.” She was matching his speed, talking louder than she normally would. “Kevin Hatcher, our old pictures editor. I saw Merki’s article but just because they found a gun doesn’t mean it’s confirmed either way. Someone threatened me at my house. My son-” God, she was personalizing it, making it emotional. She hadn’t meant to. “They threatened me, at my house.”
But Bunty had barely heard her. “You were outside the prison. It’s all over Glasgow. Everyone knows. I look like a bloody fool.”
“But this other story, it’s going to be huge, boss. When Terry and Kevin were in New York – There’s an IRA guy, McBree.”
“I could lose my job.”
His voice was so loud she felt the glass walls on the cubicle shudder and a silence fell in the newsroom outside. A red flush rose up his cheeks and his eyes seemed to deepen in their sockets.
Paddy’s mouth opened, her brain disengaged, and to her astonishment she said, “I visited Ogilvy. I’m working him.”
“For me or for McVie?”
“For you, boss, of course for you.”
Bunty’s red fog ebbed and subsided. His lips reappeared at his mouth. He blinked at the desk. Outside, the noise of the newsroom resumed.
“He’s not out?”
“Ah.” The second she said Callum was no longer in custody a scrum of journalists would form outside Sean’s house. She hoped they hadn’t asked the prison service about Callum’s whereabouts. “Not to my knowledge.”