“McVie, I’m on my way to work but I stopped by to ask a favor. I need to meet Patrick Meehan, can you set it up?”
McVie looked surprised. “I thought you didn’t want to meet him.”
“I’m trying to write a book about him.” Admitting a personal ambition was almost as dangerous as admitting to be gay. “But it’s not happening.”
“Take your coat off,” said Ben, tugging at her sleeve. “This isn’t a station.”
“No.” Paddy brushed his fingers from her as kindly as she could. “I need to go to work.”
“Your friend is rude,” said Ben, spinning on his heel and walking off to the bedroom.
Paddy smiled down at McVie. “Georgie?”
McVie grinned back and stood up, dropping his book and pushing her toward the front door.
It was cold on the landing and he was wearing his slippers without socks. He tried to talk to her but she pulled his sweater sleeve until they were two flights of freezing steps down, standing close together behind the drafty front door.
They stood close, she noticed, closer than they ever had before and McVie looked down at her, shivering but giddy with relief. “You don’t like Ben, do you?”
“No.”
They giggled together for a moment, neither quite sure why, and looked at the rows of brass mailboxes on the wall behind the door. Paddy didn’t like Ben but McVie did. He liked him so much he was dressing well and buying flowers and smiling without witnessing an accident. When they first met he was the most unhappy, bitter person she had ever sat next to. He was a homosexual but she was having mad sex with married men in cars and it was making her pretty happy.
“I’ve known you for four years and you’ve been nothing but miserable and hateful. But now…” She looked at him; a compliment would embarrass them both. “You’re… not.”
McVie nodded at the brass postboxes, eyes flicking across the handwritten scraps of paper shoved into the windows. “Aye. That’s a nice thing to say.”
“It is. I’m nice.” They giggled together again. “I’ll not say anything. It’s not my business.”
McVie closed one eye and looked at her again. “You really don’t like him?”
“What’s the difference whether I like him or not? I’m not shagging him.”
He blanched, shocked at her frankness. “What are you talking about? You’re supposed to be a good Catholic girl.”
She didn’t want to talk about her own sexual behavior. “I’m just saying. Not being depressed has to be a good thing, doesn’t it? Those instincts are there for a reason.”
“I suppose…” He scratched the gummy residue of a sticker off the face of one of the postboxes. “It was either kill myself or give into it.”
They bridled at the sudden honesty, looking away from each other.
“Maybe you should have considered the first option more closely,” said Paddy quietly and made him smile. “Right, I’m off. Will you set up the Meehan meet for me?”
“Sure.”
She reached for the door.
“By the way, you were asking about Bobby Lafferty? He’s in Govan police station. Been there since this morning. They’re questioning him about the Bearsden Bird, apparently.” He looked at his watch. “You want to get yourself over there. They’ve only got another four hours with him.”
III
The street was quiet outside Bernie’s garage. Kate leaned into the backseat and lifted the blue-handled wire cutters over to the front, finding them incredibly heavy, so heavy that her wrists could hardly manage the weight of them. She sat with them in her lap, weighing down her skinny legs. She was so thin now that she could fit her fist sideways between her thighs. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door and stepped out into the street, cradling the bolt cutters on her arms as she walked along the railway arches.
Bernie had put a new padlock on the doors and she cut through the loop of metal on it, finding it harder to get through than the last one. She was getting weak. She hadn’t eaten anything for days, couldn’t remember what it was like to want food. The tinned, jellied ham she’d brought from the cottage stuck in her throat like a fist of dried leaves.
Unhooking the padlock, she slipped inside, feeling along the wall for the light switch, smiling to herself when she thought about the prize waiting there for her. She realized to her surprise that she was salivating, thinking about holding her pillow again, feeling the warm, skinlike texture under her fingers, smelling the clean, sweet plastic. The light flickered on, a sharp brutal whiteness that hurt, and she blinked several times to adjust her eyes. Each time she opened them again she thought she was mistaken but the image resolved itself in her eye and she managed to squint and keep her eyes open. The table had been pulled out, the red toolbox yanked away from the wall at one side. She hurried over to look behind it.
The pillow was gone.
Sobbing, she sank to her knees. She could stand Vhari being murdered, she could handle losing her looks, she could even, she realized now, cope with being told to get out of the Killearn mansion she had lived in for four years, but this was too much.
It had to be here. Blinded by tears, she stood up and pulled some things off the table, toppling a stack of receipt pads onto the floor before stopping, exhausted. If Lafferty had been here he would have made the same sort of mess as he had in the cottage. Everything would be broken. It was Bernie. He had stolen her pillow.
Kate walked out of the garage, leaving the doors lying open and the light on, and climbed back into the Mini. On second thought she realized that she would need to keep Bernie sweet if she was to get her pillow back from him. She climbed out of the car, flicking the garage lights off and pulling the doors to.
She started the engine, patting the wheel encouragingly when it started, and headed off to Bernie’s flat.
TWENTY-ONE. LAFFERTY THE DOG
I
Sullivan let Paddy lead the way into the black corridor and shut the door softly behind him. The tiny narrow room smelled of dust and sweat, the black walls around her thick to keep the noise out. She could just make out Sullivan’s face in the silver gloom coming through the two-way mirror. He turned away from her, craning his neck as he peered though the mottled glass into the cream room. His belly had been pulled in as they climbed the stairs and walked to the door but now, fascinated by the scene in front of him, he relaxed, his back slouching and his belly hanging out in a way that made her think of her dad and smile.
Sullivan had warned her not to speak, that the room wasn’t soundproof, but Paddy found herself inadvertently sighing an exclamation. His head was shaved and his shoulders broad, as if he worked out in a gym. His neck was thick, a bushel of tendons stood out on either side, the skin on it wrinkled, hard, knife-slash criss-crosses over thin skin where the muscles had been tensed for thirty years. He looked like a thick-necked dog. If Lafferty went for you, he’d be making contact with his teeth.
His eyes roved around the room as one of the two officers sitting in front of him asked questions. Where was he on the night of Tuesday the fifteenth? Had he been in Bearsden that night? Lafferty’s angry animal eyes flickered back and forth across the wall and the mirror, gliding over Paddy’s face and Sullivan’s chest. They were dead eyes, unkind and cold, vicious.
Opening his mouth to speak, Lafferty displayed a mouth of broken and dead teeth. He stared straight at the mirror and demanded in a hard man’s drawl to know who was asking “theze quesjinz.” The officer ignored him and repeated himself, sounding bored, as if he’d been saying the same thing over and over for quite a long time.
“Aye.” Lafferty stood up slowly, knuckles on the table, and craned his neck toward the mirror. “Sullivan. Cunt.”