Paddy took a shaky draw on her cigarette. “McBree. He killed them both.”
Knox shook his head. “No.”
“How can you possibly know he didn’t?”
“Nothing links the two deaths. One’s a shooting, one’s a stroke, one’s indoors, one’s outdoors, neither man was involved in politics.”
“Why would Kevin leave out a line of cocaine to inhale when he’d swallowed enough to make him have a stroke and vomit? It’s like finding a glass of whiskey next to someone who died from drinking vodka, for fucksake.”
Knox stood up calmly and made for the door. The interview was over, though she couldn’t see what he’d got out of it. She stood up too. “You’re refusing point-blank to look at McBree?”
He stood, rolled his head back, and turned to face her.
“They spent the night before Hewitt’s death at the casino. A lot of strange people visit casinos. We’re interviewing several of the people who were there that night.”
“But not McBree?”
“You will get the wrong end of the stick and keep chewing, won’t you?”
She meant to give a cavalier laugh but it sounded like a hysterical sob. “You’re concerned that I may be slandering the IRA?”
“We’re concerned that you may be spreading fear and alarm, Meehan.”
Paddy stubbed her cigarette out on the desk, picked up her bag, and brushed past Knox at the door. Outside, the two officers turned as she opened it, looking back into the room for guidance. Someone gave them a nod to let her go and she pushed through them.
She didn’t want to wait for the lift and found the door to the stairs, jogging down three flights without drawing a breath. She stopped when she felt sure they weren’t coming after her, leaned her back against the wall, and let herself cry properly.
Her feelings for Terry were complicated. He’d frightened her and chased her and she knew deep down that her life would be easier now that he wasn’t around. But Kevin Hatcher-Kevin was just a nice man.
TWENTY-TWO. NOTES FROM A TEXAN
I
Blythswood Square was a short, steep street away from the police headquarters and Paddy found herself heading up that way, trying to think of a justification for going into Fitzpatrick’s office and orchestrating a fight with him. She steamed up the hill, her face still puffed and red from crying. At the top she caught her breath, realized she was looking for someone timid to have a fight with. She couldn’t go back to the News offices or Bunty would banjax her into writing about Callum. She found a seat on the square, looking back down the hill to a line of squad cars.
She could write a news piece about Kevin dying and phone it in. Writing things up always made her feel detached and calm. But the editors wouldn’t take it without certain bald facts: she didn’t know which hospital to name-check or even what he died of.
Kevin was dead, Terry was dead and the Strathclyde Police Force weren’t showing a flicker of interest in the fact that McBree had to be involved.
She took out a cigarette and lit it, her throat closing over in disgust as she tried to breathe in. She persevered. The nicotine made her feel more detached, calmer, fed. She sat back on the wooden bench, the heat from the slats soaking into her back, thinking about Father Andrew making a big point of shaking her hand after mass every Sunday and Mary Ann crying at the kitchen table.
Sickened, she threw the cigarette to the curb.
II
The mousy receptionist rolled her necklace around her finger, half strangling herself with her pearls, as Paddy leaned on her desk, messing up the tidily sorted pencils laid out in a neat row by the phone.
“He’s just very, very busy, you see.” She glanced at the door to Fitzpatrick’s office.
“Listen to me,” said Paddy. “I want you to go in there and tell him if he doesn’t see me now I’m going to report him to the Law Society.”
III
She was too old for sitting on stairs in buildings, but today she didn’t care about dignity or who she was supposed to be. The doors to the offices down- and upstairs were open into the stairwell for ventilation on a hot day. The muffled clack of electric typewriters and distant chat wafted up to her and the soft brown folder sat on her knees. Her name was written in his handwriting, carefully scrawled in capitals, big and clear enough to be read by any stranger.
She stroked it. A small grease spot had blossomed on the front, on a low corner. Fitzpatrick had said Terry gave it to him a year ago, to keep in the safe, when he had just come back to Glasgow, before he went to New York, before any of this had happened, probably before he had even become good friends with Kevin again.
She opened it.
The covering letter from Terry was written in his shorthand. She sighed. Everyone started out using the same textbook shorthand but over a lifetime it became a private language, virtually indecipherable to anyone else. Paddy could hardly read her own anymore. She peered at the sheet carefully. It was perfectly legible: Terry must have gone back to the book to write it.
P,
Notes here for you. Materials and stuff a friend gave me re your favorite person. Came to me through complex route, cost a lot of Marlboro and vodka.
Now you can do him justice.
She thought it was signed “Texan” but a second look told her he had slipped out of shorthand and marked the end T with a cross for a kiss.
Behind it, in a tidy pile of old papers, was a bill for two tickets on a commercial flight from Berlin Tempelhof in 1965. On a gray typewritten sheet behind that, a bill of lading acknowledging the receipt of prisoner 2108 by the British Embassy in West Berlin in the same year. In among yellowed press reports about the Patrick Meehan murder trial he had put a photocopy of the minutes of a meeting between the detective chief inspector in charge of Meehan’s investigation and a source called Hamish, whose name always appeared in inverted commas. It was vague, referring to actions commenced re PM and continued, threats to national security, details of Muscovite facilities where PM was held and reports written by PM. She understood every abbreviation, recognized each date and location. She knew what it all meant.
It must have taken Terry years to gather the evidence for her and God only knew which shadowy figures he’d bribed them from. For nearly three decades Patrick Meehan had been insisting that he was the victim of a conspiracy by the security services, that at their behest the Strathclyde police had fabricated evidence against him for the murder, but not a shred of supporting evidence ever came her way. Now she had it.
She had told Terry what the story meant to her, how she had followed Meehan’s progress through the courts since she was eight years old, from before she really knew what a court was, how she became a journalist because of him, because a journalist led the campaign to have him released and won. She had always thought him some small parallel of her own wicked self.
It was the most thoughtful thing anyone had ever done for her.
Paddy shut the folder, placed the flat of her hand on it, felt the grease from her palm being absorbed by the thick, porous paper.
Tearfully, she lifted it to her face and kissed it.
IV
As she stood on the top step, blinking hard at the bright day, a small figure materialized on the pavement in front of her. Merki.
“Oh,” he grinned cheekily, “I was just thinking about you.”
“What you doing here?”
He was wearing a brown shirt and matching tie, his top button undone to meet the heat of the day, the fat knot of tie squinted to one side. He looped his finger under it and yanked it to the other side. “Just, you know, going about. Polis let you out then?”
They nodded at each other.