“Bloody hell, Billy.” She sidled into the room. “I thought you were really hurt.”
Half-amused, Billy held his giant bandaged hands up to her. “This is pretty bad.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry, I thought it would be much worse.”
The wife was staring at her aggressively. She was stout, tanklike, her hands clasped together over an onerous chest and belly. The son was built like his mother, although young and footballer-fit; he looked as if he’d run to fat given a chance. He glanced at his mother, taking her cue about the stranger giggling at his burned father.
“I might never have the use of my hands again,” said Billy. “I might never be able to drive again. And it’s bloody sore.”
It was wrong of her but she was so relieved to see him looking like himself that she laughed again.
The wife widened her eyes, retracted her lips, and stepped up to meet her. “Who in the eff are you-” Her voice was the gravel growl of a heavy smoker and even as she stepped across the room to her Paddy smelled a whiff of smoke.
Billy called her off with a small, firm, “Agnes.”
His son huffed behind his hand. Billy asked them to go down to the canteen for a cup of tea and leave him alone with Paddy for ten minutes.
They gathered their things together, the wife giving Paddy a filthy look and banging shoulders with her on the way out. “She’s had a scare,” he explained when the door clicked shut behind her. “She reacts like that when she’s frightened.”
“You been married a long time, Billy?”
“Since we were seventeen.”
He was a long way from that now. Paddy took the seat next to him, still warm from his son, and realized that Billy was pretty old. In his late forties at least. They only ever met in the dark and she was generally staring at the back of his head, but she had imagined him younger.
They looked at each other and smiled. Paddy patted the bed in a symbolic contact. “Is this you from the front, then, Billy?”
Billy pointed his big white mittens at his face. “Is it bad?”
“You just look embarrassed.”
“They won’t let you see yourself. That’s scary.”
She looked around for a mirror but there wasn’t one, so she felt in her bag and pulled out a powder compact, opening it and handing it to him. Billy peered in at himself, turning the mirror to different angles. “Red, eh?”
Paddy nodded and grinned. “Is it sore?”
“Oh, my hands are murder.”
But she couldn’t stop smiling. “I thought you’d be in a big tent and have all cream on everywhere and no eyelids or something.”
“That’s next door.”
They nodded together for a while. She could almost hear the comforting crackle of a ghost police radio. “When we were at the Burnett house, did you see anyone come in or go out?”
He thought about it. “No.”
“Could you have seen anything I didn’t see?”
“Like what?”
“Like someone coming around the side of the house or a car outside or the police do something?”
He took himself back to the scene again. “No. I smoked a cigarette, saw you at the door, nothing happened.”
“Did you mention it to anyone?”
“Not a soul.”
“Right, well, I’m not as circumspect as you: I’ve been mouthing off all over town. I think they were after me and got you instead. Sorry about that.”
“I don’t look like you.”
“They don’t know what I look like. And from the back, your hair…” She didn’t want to press the point but swept her hand down the back of her head. “’Cause your hair’s long.”
“So they thought I was a woman?”
“Could be. Did you see anything before the fire? Anyone approaching the car?”
Billy thought about it. He looked down at his silly hands lying in his lap and she saw that his eyelids were completely unscathed. He looked straight ahead of himself, glancing up at the space where the rearview mirror would have been. “I’m smoking and waiting for you. You’ve not been long. I’m listening to the radio, listening for calls. Nothing’s coming. I was angry, thinking about you and the copper’s car.” He looked at her reproachfully and then at his hands. He raised his right elbow to where the windowsill would have been and pointed the Q-tip at his mouth, taking in a deep breath as he looked back at the mirror. “Smoking. I see a shadow behind me. Moving fast across the mirror. He was wearing black, whoever he was, next thing-whoosh. Flames everywhere.”
She asked him if the shadow he saw could have been of a big guy, a bald guy, but Billy said he’d only seen the guy’s torso from the neck down and no, he didn’t seem all that big, quite slim, actually. Had Billy seen a car behind him? But Billy laughed, opening his mouth and letting out a coughing sound so that he didn’t have to move his cheeks.
“He’s hardly going to park his car behind me and run up and throw a petrol bomb at me, is he? Anyway, there was only one car in the car park apart from us. Came in after you’d gone into the building and parked as if it had business there.”
“Was it a red Ford, by any chance?”
“No, did ye not see it? It was a BMW.”
TWENTY-FOUR. EASTERHOUSE
I
Paddy’s exhaustion was making her feel queasy and the top deck of the bus smelled like a smoker’s tonsils. She had a packet of crisps in her bag but was so nauseated she genuinely didn’t want them. She sat still, pains in her stomach, and watched the city pass by the window.
Lafferty would be out there somewhere, looking for her. He’d know by now that she hadn’t been in the car and he’d be angry, prowling the city like a hungry dog. Miserable and scared for her family, she leaned her head against the window. She’d told her mum to stay in the house, asked her to stop Mary Ann from going out too much, and told her to stay away from the windows. Paddy didn’t tell her about the firebomb or about Billy; she didn’t want to terrify her, she just said someone was after her and might come to the house and she should call the police if she saw a BMW or a red Ford. If Trisha had been herself she would have cried down the phone to Paddy and begged her to come home, but she was in her strange temper and sounded angry instead, huffy, as if Paddy was being self-important and making a lot of silly fuss.
The housing stock along the broad Edinburgh Road was a linear map of a century of social housing, from scrubby squares of muddy grass around garden city dreams, to high-rise machines for living. Occasionally they passed a wall of undemolished tenements, the old housing design that had worked in the city for centuries.
Easterhouse was barely twenty years old. In its short life the housing scheme had developed a reputation as one of the roughest ghettos in Europe. It was part of a social engineering project that carved the socialist city up into impassable islands surrounded by motorway. The most malcontent city center populations had been moved to the satellite estates, a long bus ride away from spontaneous social upheaval. Without the presence of a common enemy, frustration fermented among the people and they began to eat themselves. Gangs were rife. If Easterhouse had a heraldic shield it would need symbols for drunkenness, medication, and despair. A third of the estate was on disability benefit, occupying that gray area between extreme long-term poverty and illness.
It wasn’t a place to wander around. Gangs were territorial and known for attacking anyone who wandered through their patch. It was worse at night; Paddy knew from taking shortcuts in the calls car that the boys hung around in packs, watching the car pass, carrying sticks and swords, alert as hyenas. She was counting on its not being as bad during the day.
As soon as she stepped off the bus she felt unsafe. The stop was at the edge of a barren field, all the houses set well back from the traffic. The few houses that were within view were boarded up with fiberglass, the light coming through from the back of the house making it glow like the skin of a drum. Bottles lay smashed in the street or scattered on the grass. Paddy felt a long way from the small-town coziness of Rutherglen.