Usually Paddy’d get the burgers for herself and Billy, no F-plan option here, and climb back in the car. They’d sit with the radio turned down a notch, sometimes in a cozy silence, sometimes sharing speculative gossip about people at work that they didn’t know very well. Tonight Billy was out of the car by the time she turned back, chatting to a cabbie he knew, passing on the news of the layoffs, no doubt, glad of a fresh audience to vent his indignation to. Pleased she wouldn’t have to deal with him, Paddy took his burger over to him and went back to the car alone, relishing the prospect of a quiet half hour.
She was licking the burger grease from her fingers, wishing she could have another one, when the police car drew up. For a moment her throat tightened until a door opened and the cab light went on, showing that the two uniformed officers inside were no one that she knew and certainly not George Burns.
She watched them swaggering over to the death burger van, looking around at the parked cabs, claiming the territory like cowboys entering a saloon. They accepted free rolls from Nick, toasting him before wandering over to join Billy and the cabbie. A couple of other cabbies gravitated over to them to find out what was happening in the city tonight, where the accidents were and which routes to avoid. She noticed them glancing over to her, sitting alone in the car.
Sullivan had seemed certain that Lafferty wouldn’t connect her to the fingerprints but she wasn’t sure. The thought of his thick neck and mean eyes turned her stomach.
The group of men around the burger van broke up with a bit of shoulder slapping and a final joke, and Billy walked slowly over to the car. A cabbie sounded his horn and pulled his cab a full circle, driving off, and Billy raised his hand in a slow wave.
She had never heard a door slam quite as loudly. The sudden change in air pressure made her eardrums smart. Billy stopped for a moment, sighed at his hands on his knees before turning the key to start the engine and yanking the car in a fast, tight turn, throwing Paddy against the side of the cab, knocking her forehead on the cold window.
She shouted at him over the noise of the radio but Billy sped up, taking the junction with hardly a glance either way. Paddy peeled herself off the backseat and sat forward, slapping his shoulder. “Fucking calm down!”
Billy sped the car up and ran a red light, racing through a junction to the motorway. It would have been busy during the day and Paddy could imagine cars plowing into her side. She reached forward through the seats and grabbed the hand brake, her thumb hovering over the button.
“Stop this car or I will.”
Abruptly, Billy stepped on the brakes. Good driver that he was, he tapped the pedal three times. Paddy was thrown forward, her shoulder jammed between the two front seats. The engine spluttered to a stop. Behind them in the deserted road, the cab who had been at the death burger van hooted irritably and drove around them.
Paddy touched Billy’s hair at the back. “What happened there?”
He shook his head and looked at her in the mirror, a deep hurt vivid in his eyes.
“Billy?”
“You stupid cow.” He pressed his lips together and for a moment she thought he was going to cry. “You fucked a cop. In his own car.” He reached forward and restarted the stalled engine. “You stupid cow.”
He drove off at ten miles an hour through the bleak, dead city.
III
An hour later Paddy was still chilled and silent, sitting in the back of the car, pressed tight up against the backseat as if Billy was doing ninety. She nodded dumbly when Billy asked her if she wanted to follow up the only radio call they’d had so far, a minor domestic in Govanhill. They drew up behind two panda cars, badly parked at angles from the pavement as if something enormously important was going on.
When Paddy got out and shut the door, she paused by the side of the car to pull her scarf up around her neck. Billy didn’t lift his packet of smokes off the dashboard like he usually did. He sat looking at her, straight at her, hurt and angry and disgusted. Paddy bent her knees and looked in at him, gesturing for him to unwind his window. He carried on staring at her, watching as the bitter wind blew her hair hard against her head and pinched her cheeks.
She took a step back down the body of the car, opened the passenger door, and shouted in at him, “You mind your own fucking business, you ugly prick.”
Billy started the car before she’d pulled back, driving along the road for fifty yards with the passenger door swinging wildly. He stopped, threw one foot into the street, shut the passenger door, and reversed toward her, slowing as he came past her, to show that he was in control. Paddy lifted her leg and kicked the passing car with the heel of her foot as hard as she could, pulling herself off balance and staggering over to the side. She left a heel-shaped dent in the door. Billy sped off.
They’d sack him for leaving her there. They hadn’t even done the city center hospital calls round yet. She’d have to cover for him by getting a taxi back to the office and she wouldn’t be able to claim the money back or Ramage would find out what had happened.
Furious, she entered the damp of the green close. It was dark inside; the lights were out on the lower landings and only deflected light from higher up in the echoing stairs tempered the shadows. Following the sound of voices, she climbed up to the second landing. A drunk woman was protesting, drawling, “Nah, nah, nah,” over everyone who tried to speak to her. Two policemen were trying to calm a man who was saying that she had said this and he’d said that and then she went like this and he was like that: what would you do, pal? Eh? With a woman like that. What would you do?
His bottom lip was bloody and made her think of Vhari Burnett. Next to him, hanging on the door frame and keeping them all out of the flat, was a skinny woman in stonewashed jeans and a lemon sweater that had been stretched by a yank to her neck and hung off one bony shoulder.
The policemen looked up as Paddy climbed the stairs. It was George Burns and his partner. His eyes smiled spontaneously, a warm, loving grin, but he looked away immediately. He was wearing his wedding ring.
Paddy struggled to remember what an innocent would do in this situation. She took out her notebook, conscious of her hands, her neck, the way she was moving. The other policeman continued to question the woman and Paddy made a big deal of glancing around the doorway to get the right number and the names on the doorplate. She wrote everything in her notebook, working briskly as if it were a worthwhile story.
George’s pal managed to convince the woman to let them go inside to talk about it and give the neighbors a chance to go to sleep. As he stepped into the house, following the arguing couple, he turned and looked at her, smirking disparagingly. Burns hung back, waiting until the policeman and the couple were out of earshot. He didn’t get the chance to speak.
“You cunt,” Paddy said. She’d never used the word before and felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up at the sound of it.
He coughed a laugh and looked astonished. “Wha?”
“Everyone in Glasgow knows. Billy was told at the same time as a bunch of cabbies outside the death burger van.”
Burns looked flummoxed. “I’ve not said anything.”
She was so angry every muscle in her body was tense and her strangled voice barely audible. “Do you have any idea what this’ll do to me? For the rest of my fucking life I’ll be the stupid bitch who fucked a copper in his car.”
He was insistent and quite calm. “Paddy, I didn’t tell anyone.”
Weeping with rage, she turned and took the stairs on faith, holding onto the sticky banister and slowing down as soon as she was out of sight around the turn. She stopped in the dark close, rubbing her face dry and struggling to breathe in against her contracting ribcage. She could walk back to the office. It would only take an hour and it had been a quiet night anyway; she probably wouldn’t miss any major events so no one need know. She’d take a back road so that Burns wouldn’t pass in his squad car. If he stopped and tried to give her a lift she might punch him. But it wouldn’t be safe if Lafferty had been released and came looking for her. It wouldn’t be hard to find her on the only call of the night.