She reached the end of the path before she was ready.
The Thillinglys’ front door was sheltered from the elements by a shallow trestle tunnel hung with vines, leafless at the moment, hanging like excised veins around the door. The brass doorbell rang out a soft two-tone.
Paddy stepped back, straightened her coat and scarf, and fluffed her hair up at the sides, hoping she looked like a credible journalist or at least an adult.
She heard shuffled steps approach across carpet and the door opened. A pretty but disheveled woman stood in the narrow crack, head bowed as if expecting a blow. Her dirty blond hair stood up on top and lay flat at one side where she had been sleeping on it.
“Are you the insurance company?” Her voice was as high and breathless as a child’s.
“No, I’m sorry to bother you at this difficult time-” Paddy stared at the small, heartbroken woman and wondered what the hell she was doing here and how frightened of Ramage could she pos-sibly be.
The woman leaned against the door frame, attempting to focus on Paddy’s face. “Who are you?”
“I’m from the Scottish Daily News. I wondered if I could talk to you about Mark?”
A slow tear rolled down the woman’s face and she stuck her tongue out to catch it. “They said you’d come.”
“They?”
“The police. They said you’d come. From the newspapers.”
No one else from the press had been yet. “Oh.” Paddy nodded, trying to jolt the words to the front of her mouth. “I wanted to ask about Mark’s relationship with Vhari Burnett.”
Suddenly awake, Mrs. Thillingly looked up, swayed, then slammed the door shut.
Paddy stood staring at the red paint. If she wasn’t so tired and had her wits about her she could have sidestepped this basic mistake. Of course it was a big deal; Thillingly was accused of killing Burnett. The woman behind the door hadn’t only been widowed, her husband had been slandered as well.
The rain pattered on her shoulders, dripping cold onto her scalp. What a wasted fucking afternoon, and she’d have to stay in the office on Monday morning to return the chitties favor to JT.
Paddy looked down the wet garden, wondering where she could find a phone box to call for the taxi home. Mount Florida was a long way from George Square and farther yet from Eastfield. She could have spent the afternoon at home, in the garage, with the fire on, reading a book or something, warm and alone. She was imagining herself in the big armchair drinking tea when she heard a gasp followed by another loud breath. Mrs. Thillingly was still on the other side of the door, her sobs escalating.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Paddy told the door. “I’m sorry about Mark. Everyone I’ve spoken to about Mark says he couldn’t have hurt her. Mrs. Thillingly?”
After a pause Paddy heard a soft voice. “Diana. Call me Diana. Who did you speak to?”
“The Amnesty people in George Square. Diana, are you all alone in there?”
There was a loud sniff. “Yeah.”
“Should you be alone?”
Diana sniffed again. “Dunno.”
“Please… can I come in and talk to you?”
The lock slid back and the door opened wide into a neat hall. A muggy warmth floated out to caress her face, contrasting with the cold of the day.
Diana turned and walked off down the hall, padding along the carpet in her bare feet. She had the build of a child, slim-hipped and thin-ankled, wearing capri pants and a man’s gray V-neck sweater that swamped her and hung over her fingertips. She flapped her hands behind her as she walked, hurrying away from the woman she had just let into her house.
Paddy pushed the door open with her fingertips and stepped inside, shutting the door behind her. The house was overheated, the air thick with fiber and dust motes from new carpets. The long hallway was papered in pink and gray, with two matching paper borders at hip and head level that made it seem even more narrow. At the far end a doorway led into a kitchen awash with gray outdoor light.
Paddy walked toward it, listening for sniffs and clues that Diana was in there. She heard the fizz of a match striking and her throat tightened with yearning for a harsh, scratchy cigarette.
The kitchen was a later addition to the little thirties house. It was a big room plonked on the back so that the kitchen cupboards ran underneath what was once the outside wall. At the end of the extension was a glass box with a sloping roof, overlooking a large back garden and concrete patio.
Diana was sitting at a dining table in the middle of the glass shed, puffing on a cigarette without inhaling. The tabletop debris suggested she had been sitting there for hours. A blue glass ashtray on the table had been emptied but not washed, and a recently crumpled cigarette, only half smoked and smoldering, lay facedown. A navy-and-gold packet of Rothmans sat next to a very dirty white coffee mug which Diana was clutching, the rim marred with dried brown drips.
Shedding her good coat and leaving it on the empty worktop, Paddy took a seat on the other side of the table. Diana exhaled and, even through the scent of cigarette smoke, Paddy could smell the sharp edge of the brandy in the coffee. Diana was as pissed as a tramp at a whisky tasting.
“I’ve kind of been here all day.” She took a fresh cigarette from the packet and lit it with a match. “Watching the garden. Mark’s parents owned this house. His mother left it to him a few years ago. That’s why the garden’s so well established. He didn’t want to change a thing.”
Paddy looked out at the small lawn bordered by bushes heavy with globe flowers in purple and red. She hardly knew enough about nature to differentiate an oak tree from a spider plant. “Those flowers are nice. The round ones on the bushes-they look like Christmas decorations.”
Diana looked back at her, incredulous. “The hydrangeas?”
“Is that what they are? They must take some looking after.”
“No.” She sounded belligerent. “They pretty much take care of themselves.”
Sensing she had the upper hand, and being a bit drunk, Diana was going to make her work for every snippet. She wasn’t, Paddy guessed, a woman you’d want to have any power over you at all.
Stopping herself from gibbering, Paddy took out her packet of ten Embassy Regals and flicked them open. Regals were a poor person’s cigarette, a brand women smoked at bingo nights and parish dances; cigarettes for women who didn’t know the names of flowers. She looked at the pretty, slight woman opposite her and a spark of sharp, unwarranted resentment flared in her throat. She took in Diana’s delicate features and good teeth and thought that she could go and fuck herself. Fuck herself and her fancy fucking house and her lawyer husband.
Holding the stubby cigarette between her teeth, Paddy took out her notebook and flicked to a clean page, drawing the tiny pencil out of the leatherette sheath on one side and writing “bollocking fuck” at the top of the page in indecipherable shorthand, underlining it twice to draw Diana’s attention to her world, a world of women making their own way, a world of jobs and special skills where only Paddy knew the language.
“So,” she said, pencil poised, “d’you have any kids?”
It was the perfect mark. Diana shook her head sadly. Her hand trembled as she lifted her cigarette to her mouth.
“And Mark worked at Easterhouse Law Center?”
“Yeah. We’re all right for money. He could choose to do that.”
“The law center isn’t a money spinner, then?”
Diana snorted, “God, no. Legal aid’s peanuts compared to what you can get for private work.” She raised her hands, as if coming to the tired conclusion of a well-worn argument. “But that’s what Mark wanted-to help people. See the sort of person he was? He used to come home at night and cry, I mean sometimes he’d actually cry when he told me about the people he had met that day. The poverty of the people. The poorness of their lives. Terrible.”