The empty lift arrived and they got in; Garrett pressed the button for the fifth floor and the door slid shut.
“Do you want to question me about Kevin? Is this whole thing about Kevin or are you factoring in Terry as well? I’ve got a photo of the guy I was telling you about.”
No one spoke.
“How is Kevin? Did you see his bruises?”
Garrett shifted her weight to her other foot.
“I was thinking, why would he have a line out to sniff if he was swallowing cocaine? And stuff was missing from his house, boxes of negatives. Did they tell you that?”
The doors opened out onto a long, quiet corridor of partitioned offices. At the far end a man in blue overalls was buffing the green lino floor with a humming machine. The corridor was very quiet.
As Garrett led them to the end, Paddy could see that all of the offices were empty. Windows onto the corridor looked into dark rooms, straight through to the outside windows. They passed the cleaner, stepped over the flex of his humming buffer, and went into a disused office. The shelves were empty, the desk clear. Someone had worked here once though: pale oblongs where posters and wall charts had hung marked the wall. It smelled of dust.
Garrett sat Paddy down and moved about behind her, pulling down the blinds onto the corridor, adding gloom to the office’s many other crimes. Then she sat down behind the desk, facing Paddy, blinking every ten seconds, leaving the two officers to stand by the door.
In the corridor outside, the floor buffer bumped gently off a skirting board, the hum missing a beat before continuing its journey.
Paddy had been interviewed by the police before, but this didn’t feel like a police interview. It felt like an ambush.
“Sorry”-the wooden chair creaked beneath her as she leaned forward-“who are you again?”
“DI Garrett.”
“You’re a policewoman?”
“Police officer.”
“Aren’t you a woman? Sorry. The skirt made me think, you know…” Garrett continued blinking to schedule. “You prefer ‘officer’?”
“It’s customary.”
“What do you prefer though?”
“Whatever is customary.” Garrett didn’t display a flicker of emotion. It was like talking to a fridge. No one at personnel would be tempted to strong-arm Garrett into Family Liaison.
“Hm.” Paddy sat back. “This empty office, away from everyone, waiting. We are waiting, aren’t we? For someone. Someone more senior than you.”
Garrett wasn’t unattractive but she had gone to a lot of trouble not to make the best of herself: shoulder pads emphasized her square body, the skirt didn’t fit her and her haircut was boxy, the blond streaks fooling no one. She didn’t have a smear of makeup on.
“Miss Meehan, why were you at Kevin Hatcher’s flat yesterday morning?”
Paddy told her the truth, aware that the stuffy office was isolated from the rest of the station: no one passed in the corridor outside, the lift didn’t ting as it reached their floor.
Garrett asked pointless questions, things she already knew the answer to, about Paddy’s claims regarding an Irishman who had come to her house, descriptions of the man who had been at her son’s school yesterday. She didn’t seem to be coaxing information out of Paddy but rather keeping her busy.
She made Paddy go over the details of finding Kevin, of going to his house on Sunday night, but cut her off whenever Paddy mentioned Liberia or the IRA. She didn’t even want her talking about the missing photograph from the portfolio so Paddy pushed it, starting to answer a question innocuously and then veering off to speak about the Irishman, naming him as McBree, mapping Garrett’s reaction when she said it. McBree. The name made her blink out of sequence.
“So you went there yesterday morning expecting Kevin Hatcher to-”
“Would a police officer ever wear a Celtic top?”
“Just answer the question-”
“McBree. He’s an important man in the IRA, very, very high up. International profile. Why does that not interest you?”
No one spoke.
“My family are Irish and my mum thinks the police’ll arrest you for being in possession of a potato. Why am I getting no interest in this guy? If I told you one of the Guildford Four had done it, would you pull them in? A big man in the IRA is in the city and that’s of no interest to you? What, because you already know?”
Before Garrett had the chance not to answer, the door behind the officers opened and Garrett sat up, her face warming. “Afternoon, sir.”
Knox was standing in the doorway, face pinched, shoulders square, ready to make his mark. He turned to the officers beside him. “Wait in the corridor.”
Suddenly sweating, Paddy stood up. “I’m leaving.”
He smiled calmly. “You can’t.”
“I’m not under arrest.”
“I want to talk to you.”
Knox shut the door slowly, listening for the secure click of the mechanism, and turned back to the room. As he sauntered over to Garrett’s seat she backed out of his space, standing subserviently at the side. He sat down, looked out of the window and back at her, overplaying his insouciance.
Paddy took out a cigarette, lit it, and blew the smoke at him.
“No one will believe you,” he said coldly.
“That you brought me to a deserted part of the building to menace me?”
His eyes flickered in Garrett’s direction. “About Hewitt,” he said casually.
Paddy uncrossed her legs. “Terry’s murder.”
“The officers told me what you said this morning. You’re wrong. The IRA have denied responsibility. The gun has been found and traced to a drugs murder in Easterhouse last year. We have evidence that it was nothing to do with the IRA.”
She took another draw on her cigarette, listening to the hum of the buffer slowing to a dying whine. She could hear the plug being snapped out of the wall. The lift tinged and she heard the doors slide shut after the cleaner. They were alone on the floor.
“Why am I here?”
What little color there was in Knox’s face drained away. He craned towards her, the skin so tight she could see the hammering of the pulse in his neck. “You’re here because you ran away yesterday morning. You should have come straight here as the officers requested. It makes police officers suspicious when someone they want to question runs away.”
“If it was such a big deal why didn’t they come to my house last night? Everyone knows where I live. The police found me easily enough on Saturday night. And by the way, where is Kevin? I spoke to all four casualty departments yesterday and couldn’t find him registered as a patient.”
“Kevin Hatcher is dead.”
He watched her face, taking a clinical interest in her reaction as the news sank in.
“When? When did he die?”
Knox cleared his throat, tipping his head back to Garrett. She stepped forward and spoke, her voice softer than before. “Kevin was dead on arrival at the hospital. They register a death differently, that may be why you missed him.”
“No, they don’t. I was on the calls-car shift for six months. I went around the hospitals every night, twice sometimes. They register a death on arrival in the same book as casualty admissions.”
Knox’s face didn’t move, but as he looked at her his eyes softened in amusement. This is how big we are, he was saying: we can make a man disappear. I could make you disappear.
He was expecting her to shout at him, to meet his play and issue impotent threats, but Knox was as hardened as Donaldson and her threats would be just as flaccid. Instead, she made the one move he wouldn’t have an answer to: she covered her face and pretended to cry, muttering about poor Kevin under her breath. She was only acting, and when her face was good and wet she looked up at Garrett, who blinked twice, for her the equivalent of an emotional flurry.
Knox had a stale smile stapled to his face. He rubbed the desktop with his fingertips, trying to worry off a small stain.