“The gun story: who’s your source, Merki?”
“A good journalist protects his sources at all costs.”
She folded her arms. “Strathclyde police just pulled me in to warn me off saying it was the IRA.”
Merki thought about it for a moment. “Doesn’t mean it is the IRA, does it? They could be worried. A story like that could spread fear and alarm.” It was Knox’s phrase, word for word.
“You’re an idiot. They’re playing you for an idiot. If you weren’t an idiot you’d have kept your name off it.”
He snapped, “What the hell would you know, Meehan? You’re a columnist. ‘I like TV,’ that’s the sort of shite you write. You wouldn’t know news if it punched you right on the nose, anyway.”
“It was Knox, wasn’t it?” But the name didn’t register. “Garrett?”
He flinched, stepped back and shook his head.
“What were you typing this morning, Merki?”
“Oh, that?” He smirked down the empty street. “A fan letter. To you. I think you’re brilliant.”
“And I think you’re handsome.”
His mouth dropped open with hurt and surprise. He was a wee cross-eyed guy, his head was a funny shape, his body thick and his legs stringy. It wasn’t a choice he’d made. She’d gone too far. She always went too far. She muttered, “Sorry,” and shook her head. “Been a heavy morning.”
He looked at her sideways. “You’re fat,” he said petulantly.
“I am. I’m fat, Merki, sorry.”
Still sullen, he nodded, as if her admission had redressed the balance. “It’s just your luck, innit?”
She could have pointed out that she was fat because she ate too much while he was born ugly, but didn’t think it would help any. “Going in to see the boy wonder up there?”
“Been. Went round the corner to get a sarnie for lunch but my car’s here.” He patted the notebook in his pocket. “Got great stuff.”
They were competing for the story. Whatever he told her about an interview with Fitzpatrick, the opposite would be true and they both knew it. If he’d had longer to prepare he would have come back to the office and said he’d got nothing, just to work a double bluff.
“Well done,” she said and they smiled at each other.
He turned to the curb and a small blue Nissan with a key scratch along the bonnet and a dent in the driver’s door, fitting the key in and opening it. “You seen the house he left ye yet?”
“Nut.”
“Want to come with me?”
She couldn’t go back to the office, Pete was in school, and if she spent time with Merki she might be able to work out what he had been writing this morning. “Can I smoke in your car?”
“Aye.”
She shrugged. “All right, then.”
TWENTY-THREE. COTTAGE
The drive didn’t take long but it was harrowing. Bunches of dead flowers were propped up at several turnings, marking the sites of fatal crashes. Merki took it slow, pootling along at forty, hitting fifty on straight stretches. A queue of cars lined up behind him, drivers who were familiar with the route forming an angry tailgated convoy, trying to embarrass him into hurrying along. He remained calm, checking them in the mirror, pulling over as much as he could to let them overtake, meeting their displays of aggression with a gentle hand raised and admonishments to “calm yourself down, pal.”
They turned a particularly sharp corner on the road and suddenly the soft hills of Ayrshire lay before them, carpeted in vibrant green grass, distant hills dotted with fat cows. The road broadened to two lanes and they were free to hang in the slow lane while a long line of irritable locals sped past, variously flicking their fingers at them or indicating that one of them had a cylindrical item attached to his head. Merki smiled calmly and waved back.
Merki wasn’t giving anything away about the Terry article. She asked him how he knew about Eriskay House and he said that the secretary had told him about that and the folder and Wendy Hewitt, but she knew he wouldn’t be telling her the truth; he was too professional. Fitzpatrick had probably told him. It might be a big fancy house, he said, hopeful for her. It sounded like it, didn’t it? Eriskay House sounded grand.
She let herself imagine for a moment that it was a gorgeous colonnaded country pile, but the only houses she could envisage like that were in Gone with the Wind and a white plantation villa seemed unlikely, even in rich rural Ayrshire. She reminded herself not to get too attached to the house, whatever it was like. She had no real right to a family home when there was a member of the family still living. Terry shouldn’t have left it to her. The folder was enough. Her hand crept into her bag and stroked a corner of it. Terry knew her better than almost anyone else. He had got to know her before she learned to lie, before she had defenses.
The double lanes of traffic merged again into single file and the road began to snake dangerously between two hills.
Suddenly Merki said, “There!” and swung the car to the left, leaving the fast road for a dirt track, overgrown with waist-high grass and wild bushes. Twenty feet on they came to a clearing and he stopped, switching the engine off. The grass was so deep he was afraid to go on, he said; they didn’t want to get stuck.
Scarlett O’Hara wouldn’t have asked a slave to live here. The house was a small Highland cottage, single story with deep small windows and a low front door with a heavy lintel. Brush and grass had grown so high along the walls that they looked as if they were shoring the building up. The roof was punched in on one side and a drainpipe hung down over the front. What really drew the eye, though, was the enormous crack running from the corner of the front door to the roof, edges mismatched, as if the entire building might snap in half like an Easter egg.
They got out. Paddy stood by the car, slightly stunned at the state of the place, while Merki stepped gingerly through the long grass and peered in the windows.
“There’s a piano in there,” he said, looking back at her. “Come and see.”
She wished she hadn’t come. It was so depressing. A family house rotted from a decade of neglect. It would have been lovely once, though, and it wasn’t that far from the city. Terry always had a car; he could have lived here as easily as anywhere else. It made no sense that he chose to live in grimy bed-sitters when he had this house fifteen minutes away.
“Come and see.”
Merki watched her reaction as she peered in the window, observing her so closely she wondered if he was going to write about it. “Fuck off,” she said and he turned away, urinal polite.
The windowsill was half a foot deep. She wiped the frosting of dust from the glass and looked inside. Storm shutters were propped open and beyond them the room was small and low. A piano was listing slightly against the back wall, the floor sinking into the dirt below. Old cottages didn’t have foundations-they were built straight into the soil, the weight of the walls keeping them upright-but it meant that damp took over if they weren’t kept warm, and this house hadn’t been warm for a long time. The fitted carpet on the floor looked warped and a tidal mark cantered across the back wall at head height. The wallpaper was faded and sliding down the wall at the corner. Pink with a pattern of disembodied baskets of flowers.
Merki was at her shoulder. “What do ye think?”
She stepped back and looked at him. “Are you going to write about this?”
“Mibbi.” He’d have denied it if he was.
She looked at him, wondering. “Merki, why are we here?”
He shrugged, looked away, shrugged again. “Dunno. Background?”
He was up to something. Definitely. He was doing innocent but he’d kept checking his watch all the way up here and now a smug smile was tugging at the corner of his mouth. He didn’t know about Kevin or he would have mentioned it. She remembered the McBree and Donaldson clippings in her bag, the dates on the front of them showing they had last been looked at months ago. Merki didn’t know anything about McBree either. But then she hardly knew anything about him herself.