“Seriously. Watch.” He pointed at the block of high-rises looming over them. A lot of the windows were open, she noticed. An unusual number for February. She’d heard the heating was sometimes controlled centrally in the older council blocks and they could easily overheat if the system went berserk. But not all the windows were open.
At first she thought it was something falling slowly from a window on the third floor, but it was a bit of paper being lowered softly on a string. When it reached five feet off the ground, a tiny shadow figure materialized from behind one of the stilts, tugged the paper free, and melted away again. The string hung there, billowing gently until another young man ducked out and tied a note to the end, watching as it rose above his head. Farther down the block another weighted string was lowered from a first-floor window and someone else stepped out of the shadows, caught it, and tied a paper to it.
“What’s going on?” whispered Paddy.
“That’s money going up, heroin coming down. It’s the reason the town’s so quiet. The people used to be in the town on Friday nights having knife fights. Now they’re around one another’s houses, jagging up and watching telly.”
She thought about the traces of cocaine Sullivan had found on her note, currently sitting in PC McDaid’s cupboard. “What about cocaine? Do they sell that here?”
“No, that’s the other end of the scale. Rich people. They never really catch those ones; they’re too well connected. See, we can’t search the flats without a warrant and the tenants won’t open the door unless they know who it is. This way they can deal without opening their front doors.” Burns paused. “I asked around about Lafferty, by the way. He’s up to his elbows in all of this.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He pointed to the shadows and the strings. “He’s a known face but no one knows which outfit he’s working for and there aren’t any charges outstanding against him.”
“Did Vhari Burnett ever prosecute him?”
“The Bearsden Bird?”
She didn’t want to give Sullivan’s lead away and half-wished she hadn’t mentioned it but nodded softly.
“Not that I know of.” Burns stroked the leather steering wheel. “Someone else was asking about that. Have you heard something we should know about?”
“No, name just keeps coming up, that’s all.” Paddy looked and found his eyes drinking in her bare neck and her mouth. He didn’t stop when he saw the coldness on her face, either, but smiled ruefully, as if he knew he’d never touch her and regretted it.
He turned the key, starting the engine and startling the buyers so that, black on black, they scattered like a flock of bats under the black belly of the building.
SIXTEEN. BETTER TO BURN
I
Kate sat at the table in the small green kitchen, frozen with terror, repeating Knox’s name under her breath in a mantra, trying to feel safe. She couldn’t bring herself to turn around and look back at the man peering curiously in through the window. She could hear his hand brushing dirt from the small pane above the sink, feet crunching on the dead plants below the window as he swayed from foot to foot. He must have been as cold as she was.
And it was cold in the house. She had found logs under the back porch and coal in the cellar but didn’t dare build a fire. She didn’t know who was watching. Luckily she had found a wardrobe full of woolen sweaters and trousers in the back bedroom and now wore three layers, none of which suited her. She didn’t care. She had turned all the mirrors to the wall. She couldn’t bear to look at herself.
The light hit the table at an angle and she could see long, tongue-shaped trails through the dust. She licked it last night, trying to be frugal and not waste a spilled drop because the envelopes seemed to be emptying by themselves. She had mixed the contents of one of them with the milk powder but it just meant she had to get more into herself to achieve the same sense of comfort and it was hard because her nose was so sore and raw. She had to hold the tip of it out from her face to sniff. The second envelope wasn’t mixed with milk but the contents were still evaporating. It seemed inconceivable that she was taking it all. There was no one else in the house, even though she had been convinced for a period last night that there was, so it had to be her.
Kate imagined the face at the window had blurred features because of the soil stuck to his pale skin. There would be a deep, bloody, black hole where his eye should have been. His fingernail scratched slowly down the window, a high-pitched shriek, running down her spine vertebra by vertebra.
Kate covered her eyes and tried to breathe. It didn’t matter which room she went into, where she sat in the house, the man from down the hill would be behind her somewhere, singing sometimes, a vague tune in a low growl, trying to get her attention. Every spare corner of her head was filled with him; every time she shut her eyes she recalled the sight of him, her fingers tingling with sensation of a pencil through paper.
Since last night he was becoming confused in her mind with Vhari. She saw them as a couple, happy together, malevolent only to her, the cause of their troubles, cause of their deaths. Vhari hadn’t had a boyfriend since fat Mark Thillingly dumped her, but now she was drawn to the one-eyed man by their shared hatred of Kate. The couple lingered in the shadows, became more confident at night, tiptoed across landings, laughing behind doors, playing whispering tricks on wide-awake ugly Kate.
To be ugly. She was now ugly. It never seemed possible. Maybe at sixty or fifty but not at twenty-two. She caught her reflection in the windows during the day and saw a stranger, so thin she might have been a boy, her nose flattened, widening her face, making her look more freakish than plain. She grew up knowing she was beautiful. Her looks invited privilege and she took it wherever she went. She left school at sixteen and never worked, never wanted, never even had to ask for favors, just got given everything. People liked having her around. Not anymore.
She looked at the almost empty second envelope. There was no one at the window despite what she could hear. She still knew that much anyway. She had to get the fuck out of here. She had to get back to the city and visit Bernie’s garage.
If she didn’t get up from this chair soon and move she’d be found next May, swinging from the stairwell.
II
Paddy smarted at Burns’s parking a little bit down from her house and turning off the engine. It wasn’t for him to decide they’d stay and talk for a while. And yet they lingered, a combative silence hanging between them. They were both in the middle of a stretch of night shifts and neither of them were anywhere near tired.
The Meehan house squatted like a fat frog in the overgrown garden. Only the living-room light was on. Marty and Gerard would be watching late-night TV. They’d have to share a room tonight, as they did before Caroline got married and moved out. They would have spent their evening being directed by Con as they moved Gerard’s bed back into what was now Marty’s room and brought Caroline’s dusty single bed down the narrow ladders from the attic. The camp bed, a deathtrap for anyone over four stone, would have been unfurled and set at the foot of the room for Baby Con to sleep in near his mum. Paddy thought about the bus journey here from Caroline’s house and the shame of everyone seeing what her husband had done to her. Trisha would insist that Caroline go back to John. She’d make her go back again and again until she complied enough and demeaned herself enough and supplicated herself enough to make it work. Marriages couldn’t fail in their family. Divorce was for other people, Protestants, movie stars.
Paddy looked at the house. Better to marry than burn, they said. She’d rather burn.
A gentle wind nudged the branches of a tree in the street behind them, shifting the dim lights on the road and houses around them into a moving landscape of black and gray.