She sounded like the child she resembled: small, scatological, odd. Her ponytail had come undone at the side, probably from yanking Paddy’s body off the floor. Her hair was so wiry each strand looked thick and coarse as a horse’s tail.
“By God, ye’ve some head of hair on ye,” said Paddy, letting her Irish phrasing show now they were alone.
Aoife looked at her, sternly at first. Her face broke into a laugh. Paddy laughed along with her.
Aoife pointed to the door. “Hey, that fat fella says you’re a famous person.”
“Aye.” Paddy rubbed her face roughly. “Couldn’t tell ye which one at the minute.”
“Maybe you’re Sean Connery.”
“That’d be a turn-up, wouldn’t it?” Paddy smiled. “And me a mother.”
They laughed together again, softly this time. Aoife pointed at her with the tip of her cigarette. “I’ll tell ye this: the Provos never done for your pal.”
“How do you know?”
“Not how they do it. They shoot through the mouth or the back of the head, usually behind the ear, not through the temple. Doing that ye might just shoot someone’s eyes off and leave them alive to make a statement.”
“Why do they think it was the Provos then?”
“I suppose assassination by a single shot is pretty rare outside Northern Ireland.”
One of Aoife’s lids gave a telltale twitch. She’d given herself away as a Protestant. A Catholic would call the province “the North of Ireland.” And she’d know where Paddy’s own sympathies lay because of her name.
Paddy leaned over and touched her knee. “Hey, I don’t care what you call it.” Aoife smiled weakly. “You’ve a strange name though, for an orange bastard.”
“Aye. Intermarriage. My da chose the name. I think he did it to upset her-they weren’t getting on by then anyway.”
“Quick turnaround?”
“Aye, but they stayed together for the sake of the wee one, bless ’em.” She smiled sarcastically.
“I’m sorry.”
“Aye, well.” Aoife took a deep draw on her cigarette. “D’you and your husband get on?”
“I’m not married.” Paddy stood up and straightened her skirt.
Aoife blinked. “But ye were married?”
Paddy shook her head and looked for her bag. She’d already said she had a child; there was no going back.
When men realized she was a single mother they could be sympathetic, or assume she was a desperate slapper and take it as an invitation to chance their arm. Only women were pitying. Paddy was afraid to look at Aoife. She liked her but knew her background, understood the press of convention in an Irish household and how single mothers were talked about.
“How old’s your baby?” Aoife’s tiny face was a mask of calm but her mouth curled up at one side.
“Five. He’ll be six in a few months.” Paddy picked up her handbag from the floor and made for the door. “He’s called Pete.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Aoife, trying to make up for her disapproving twitch. “That’s a lovely name.”
“Named after an old friend,” said Paddy, letting herself out and shutting the door behind her.
III
The Daily News office wasn’t far from the mortuary. A committed journalist would have run the three blocks to file her exclusive. Whatever the truth of it, Terry’s assassination would make a great, fat, scaremongering story. The press would embrace it because it suggested they were involved in a noble, life-threatening venture, and the Scottish public would follow it to find out if they were really about to be plunged into a war. She could break the story as an anonymous news item, then quash the rumor furiously in her column on Wednesday and still turn out to be right.
But instead of hurrying to the office, Paddy drove numbly around, taking corners that led her away from the office, slowly circling the city center and heading down towards the river.
The light above the basement door was sharp and hurt her eyes. It was a dark part of town, a warren of warehouses on the south bank of the slow, cold river, in an area that had once been a bustling commercial center by the docks. A moist cold seemed to hang over it. When Paddy got out of the car the wet chill hit her face and she huddled in her thin dress as she hurried across the road to the door.
Saturdays were always quiet at the soup kitchen. Everyone who worked there had a different theory as to why: on weekends even the homeless were invited to drinking parties; they got too drunk to make it over on Saturdays; takeaway shops gave out free food when they were closing up and you didn’t need to stay sober or mouth prayers to get that handout.
Two men in double coats were sitting at a table near the door, the crumbs from jam rolls and empty bowls of soup lying in front of them. One was asleep, the other blinking hard and looking around, bewildered and innocent as an abandoned child. Nearer the counter a few more men sat at tables, eating. Some of them were respectably dressed in old suits, or clean pressed denims. The Talbot Centre must have been giving away clean clothes.
The steel counter was ablaze with strip lights. Behind it, on scrubbed steel tables out of grab range, sat trays of buttered rolls with clear red jam dribbling out of them. A large tureen of soup, a plastic slow cooker that plugged into the wall, stood on the counter next to a stack of bowls.
Sister Tansy was alone behind the counter, her mouth perpetually a tightly drawn string bag, eyes despising whatever hove into her line of vision. Sister Tansy wore the long white coat the nuns always wore at the kitchen, a cross between a dinner lady and a doctor. She saw Paddy approaching and her shoulders rose in a silent ripple of fury, eyes glued suddenly to the lentil-crusted soup tureen.
When Paddy had said that Sister Tansy was one dry sherry away from committing a massacre, Mary Ann laughed with a self-censoring hand over her mouth.
“Hi, Sister, is Mary Ann about?”
“No.” She took the lid off the soup and stirred, bringing a cloud of floury green to the surface.
“Hm.” Paddy looked at her insistently. “I need to see her.”
“Ahe, well, ahe, ahe,” she tittered angrily, “I really don’t think that this is the place for-”
“Paddy.”
Mary Ann was standing behind Sister Tansy, side on to Paddy, smiling over her shoulder at her sister. She wore the white dinner-lady coat, her blond hair pulled back in a hairnet, her cheeks touched fairy pink from the heat in the kitchen.
“Hiya.” Paddy stared across at her sister, calmed by the sight of her.
“OK?”
“Fine.” She managed a weak smile. “Just wanted to see ye.”
Sister Tansy stepped between them and did her phony laugh. “Ahe, ahe, we are quite busy, actually.”
Paddy tipped to the side to give Mary Ann one more look. She didn’t smile or giggle or give her any prompt, but Mary Ann knew exactly what Paddy would be thinking and her face convulsed into a taut mask of sadness, then panic and then nausea, until she covered it with two hands and scuttled away to have a laugh in the toilets.
“You mustn’t come here.” Sister Tansy gave the soup a vicious skirl. “You’ve been asked before.”
“Sister, the police came to my door tonight and told me that someone close to me had died. I thought it was Mary Ann at first and got a terrible fright. I just wanted to look at her.”
“That is neither here nor there,” she said, her customary response to any appeal for mercy. Sister Tansy would have said that on hearing about Hiroshima. “You cannot come in-”
“It was a boyfriend. My ex. He was naked.” Badness made her say it and it felt good. She gave in to the urge and went for triple points. “They think he was murdered by the IRA.”
Sister Tansy was stunned dumb. Paddy turned and walked away, knowing she was being rude and Mary Ann would pay the price.