“No!” Joan thought hard and her eyes opened wide in surprise. “No! Kevin’s dead?”
“Did you know Kevin?”
Forsyth looked wildly around the walls of her office. “God, how awful. What a dreadful- God!”
“Who got to see the pictures from your side?”
“Well, I didn’t show them to anyone, but everyone in the book got their own picture. Kevin was a news journalist, so he didn’t know that much about the portraiture business. We had to send them all a copy with a release form to get consent to use their images.”
“Everyone in the book got a copy of their own photograph?”
“Sure.”
“But they only got their own photograph?”
“Yeah. God-”
“Who sent the photographs out to people?”
“Me.”
Joan didn’t seem able to make the next logical leap so Paddy had to spell it out for her. “Maybe we can trace the person who got that photograph. Do you have all the names and addresses somewhere?”
“Um-yes, but I don’t know who got what. We put a release form in each envelope, addressed them, then Terry came in with a small six-by-four of each portrait and put the right one in each before we sent them off.”
She still had the list of addresses though, a messy sheet of lined foolscap with Terry’s handwritten list on it, thirty-four names and addresses. Over half of them were men’s names. It shouldn’t be too hard to find the black woman.
Paddy smiled at the jagged, childish scrawl. Like herself, Terry was spoiled by the speed of shorthand and his letters tumbled messily over each other. She remembered a note she left on the notice board at work once, when she wanted to sell her old car. Someone drew a speech bubble, attaching it to the last letter on the page: “Stop pushing at the back!” Journos doing interviews often wrote notes without looking at the page, keeping eye contact with an interviewee. Terry had forgotten to look at the page sometimes while he was copying the addresses and his writing escaped the lines, soaring upwards.
She folded the sheet and put it in her bag. “Look, can I be a terrible bother and borrow your phone to make a quick call?”
Forsyth was still stunned about Kevin’s death. She waved a hand vaguely over the phone on the desk but Paddy stood up. “I’ll use the one out in the hall, on my way out. I don’t want to interrupt your work.”
“Sure, sure.” Joan stood up to shake Paddy’s hand again. “If you ever have an idea for a book come to me.” She looked her up and down. “You’re very marketable.”
Paddy wasn’t altogether sure it was a compliment. “Tell your friend I’m sorry for insulting her hair.”
“No.” She waved the offense away. “She had it cut because of you, no bad thing.”
“And I’m sorry the book won’t come out.”
“Are you joking?” Forsyth managed a weak smile. “With a story like this attached to it, it bloody well will come out.”
Paddy remembered Kevin sitting in his living room on a quiet Sunday night, proudly showing her the portfolio, saying Terry had offended someone in Liberia and nothing would happen to him.
“Joan, I’d keep that really quiet for a while if I were you.”
II
Tippy was playing music upstairs somewhere, and Paddy was alone in the hall. She rang Burns.
Sandra picked up, putting on a breathy telephone voice and answering as “the Burnses’ residence.” Paddy kept her voice down and asked for Pete. Sandra leaned away from the phone and called, “Peter, Peter,” into the kitchen. Paddy could hear the theme to Ghost Train playing on the video in the background.
“All right, son? What are you doing?”
The sound of his voice made her relax, resting her forehead on the cool wall above the telephone table. He was monosyllabic, probably looking into the kitchen where the video was, but he sounded happy and said he’d been to a neighbor’s kid’s party and had a lot of Coke and crisps. His dad said Pete didn’t need to have a bath tonight and he’d had toast for dinner.
“No veg?”
“Crisps are made from potatoes,” he said, quoting BC, who compounded his fatness by being a smart-arse.
“Are you quite happy staying there tonight? Have you got a clean shirt for school?”
“Yes and yes,” he said, succinct because he wanted to get off the phone. “The video…”
She made him promise to phone her at home and say good night before she let him go. She hung up and let herself out into the cool of the evening.
TWENTY-SEVEN. ENJOYING THE SLIDE
I
It was dark outside. Paddy and Dub had been everywhere they could think of, up to Springburn, where Callum came from, on the off chance he’d managed to get a train and bus up there, back down the road for a scour of Rutherglen and the fields around it, following the bus routes from the main road nearby, to a local supermarket that opened late, into a couple of cafés that were brightly lit and a pub that stood out cheerily against the dark because of the red neon FOOD sign in the window. As Dub pointed out, Callum wasn’t off looking for a good time, he was hiding. He would be hiding in a dark ditch somewhere, not going into the obvious places. Paddy knew one thing for sure: she didn’t want to be the one to find him. He was scary enough with the lights on.
She told Dub about her conversation with Burns and how he wasn’t feeding Pete properly.
“It’s only one night, you’d think he could cook him something once.”
“Yeah,” said Dub. “Maybe I’ll phone him.”
“Let him phone you.”
They drove past Sean’s street, stopping and peering down the road to see the hordes parked up outside the house. Photographers stood in groups, their bags at their feet, fingering their cameras and looking bored. Journalists stood separately. She knew the scatter pattern well enough: clusters of the genial ones, gathering around to swap lies about their wages and expense accounts and all the coups they nearly had, the loners hanging about on the fringes, telling themselves lies and coming up with schemes to trounce the others and get the story. A large television van was parked up on Sean’s side of the road, a massively tall transmission aerial sticking out of the top. She could already imagine the complaints from the press journalists: the van would be in their view, spoil the pictures. But that was why it was there, to get the logo in any of the pictures that got published and show that STV were on the scene too.
Dub suggested they get fish suppers and park to eat them and she realized how hungry she was. She hadn’t had any lunch, just the biscuit at the publisher’s house. No wonder she felt so ropy.
Rutherglen was her old stamping ground. When she dated Sean they often went to the Burnside café to pick up fish suppers for his mum and brothers. It faced onto a dark, hilly park full of old trees and they used to hand in the order and then go across and snog behind a tree for ten minutes while the man cooked their food.
She parked across the road and Dub said he’d get them if she waited in the car, so she asked for a battered haggis supper with lots of vinegar and a can of juice. He mugged a sad face at her. “No veg?”
“Batter is made from veg.”
The café was empty. Paddy watched through the car window as the bored proprietor chucked chips into plastic trays, wrapping them expertly in white-and-brown paper, picking the haggis from a display shelf sitting above the fryers. That meant the haggis had been fried earlier in the evening. That meant it would be dried out. She was cursing to herself, imagining the rubbery casing around the meat, when she looked over to the park and saw something move behind a tree. A head, a big head, the right height for Callum as well.