“How d’ye know for sure?”
“It’s one of the young officers. He’s just been transferred here.”
“Would I know him?”
“Dunno. Young fella, just moved to this station, transferred. Name of Tam Gourlay.”
Gourlay. He must have thought she’d know his car when she saw it outside her house but she didn’t know cars at all. She considered telling Sean but he wouldn’t understand why Gourlay’s parking outside her house was so bad. He was trying to intimidate her before the police inquiry, frighten her into being circumspect about what she said. And now someone had transferred him to Partick Marine, the very station that Sullivan was conducting the Bearsden Bird investigation out of.
“God, of course, it’s Tam,” she said, trying to smile happily.
“Ah, ye know him?”
“I know Tam well. And his wife. And the baby. We’re about the same age.”
Murdo was old and hadn’t noticed. He screwed his eyes up at her. “Aye, well, so I suppose.”
“Where is Tam just now, d’ye know?”
He looked wary. “He’s on night shift.”
“I know he’s on night shift. We’ve been bumping into each other most nights for the past two months.” She leaned in confidentially. “We were both at the Bearsden Bird’s door on the night she was killed.”
Murdo rocked uncomfortably from foot to foot. He didn’t want to talk about that with a journalist now, no policeman did, not until the inquiry was over and no one was found at fault.
“Naw, naw,” she said. “I’m not interested in that; that’s too big a story for someone like me. I just wanted to hook up with him later, but if you don’t want to tell me where he is, I’m sure we’ll bump into each other anyway.”
She patted the desk and waited but Murdo was an old lag and had seen every ruse there was. His blank expression didn’t flicker.
“Is it weird that he was transferred here?” She muttered, “Given that the inquiry into the Bearsden call’s coming up and the investigation’s happening out of here? Isn’t that a bit unusual?”
Murdo looked her straight in the eye until she got tired of waiting and turned and walked away, feeling foolish and awkward, Sean following in her wake.
“I’m looking to meet up with one of the officers working out of this station tonight,” she told Sean outside. “Let’s follow the calls for the west as closely as possible.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but okay.”
She went over to the red Ford and looked at it carefully, skirting around to the front of it so that she was seeing it from the same angle as she had in Eastfield. It was definitely the same car. She hadn’t even consciously remembered it but there was a car deodorizer hanging from the mirror and it was still there, a small rectangle hanging from a chain.
When she got back to the calls car and fell into the backseat Sean asked whether Whiteinch would count as the West End?
“Absolutely. Why?”
“Just heard a call for there. A shop window got broken.”
“Right, let’s go.”
Sean swung the car in a clumsy arch across the road and headed west.
They chased calls all night, attending every smashed streetlight and shadow on a shop window but Tam Gourlay stayed ahead of them. She didn’t want to ask after him; if she did he’d know she was coming and she’d lose the edge. But she was glad in a way. Sean made her see herself from the outside, imagine herself being watched instead of ignored and invisible the way she usually did. She was glad that they were hanging tight to the west tonight and couldn’t meet Burns together. She was afraid Sean would guess if he saw them speaking.
But Gourlay stayed beyond them. A few hours later they were called to a polite student party in university halls that had gone bad when some street boys had crashed and smashed their way through the cooking facilities. Pictures had been ripped off the walls and wallpaper scratched all the way along the hall to the front door. When Paddy got outside she saw Sean standing on the pavement watching boys not much younger than himself being rounded up by the attending policemen. He was smoking, listening for the radio through the open window, his eyes red and heavy, smiling at the show.
“Anything come over?” she asked, nodding in at the radio.
“Naw.” He grinned at her. “Nothing came over.”
She could see that he was loving this. She nearly told him that it wouldn’t always be this much fun, he’d get as jaded as she had when the tiredness and the sameness became oppressive but she stopped herself. She’d had that spark when she first started, and it was fun taking these small glimpses into unfamiliar lives.
“’Mon, we’ll go.”
She got back into the car, watching the policemen for signs of Gourlay, and it occurred to her that Gourlay had parked outside her house on Friday night. If he had been there earlier and she hadn’t noticed him he could have seen her pull up with Burns. A rush of hot blood up the back of her neck made her think suddenly that possibly, just possibly, Gourlay had followed them to the waste ground and watched them fucking in the car. And he had told everyone in the Strathclyde region. It all made sense now. He was trying to discredit her before the inquiry.
“Sean,” she shouted over the noise of the radio, sounding so alarmed that he turned it down suddenly. “Sean, give us a cigarette, would ye?”
He was a more committed smoker than she was. He pulled the car over to the pavement and handed his packet back to her, watching in the mirror as she took one out and lit it with his lighter.
Paddy drew heavily on the cigarette. It was an unfamiliar brand and the taste raked hard at her throat, making her heart race and her hands shake. Burns was innocent after all. Well, innocent-ish.
“Is there any point in us driving around?”
“Eh?”
Sean took a cigarette himself and lit it. “Is there any point in us driving around if we’re going nowhere? Shouldn’t I just pull over and we can listen from the curbside?”
“Aye, yeah, whatever you think.”
He parked in a street and they sat with the radio blaring between them, smoking, not speaking. Sean didn’t look at her once and didn’t notice how flustered she was at the thoughts rolling around her head. Sitting with him was actually more comfortable than it had been with Billy, and she was surprised by that. She kept looking in the mirror and expecting to see Billy’s eyes.
They followed a call to a high-rise dive suicide and stopped at the burger van where Paddy bought Sean a Nick Special, a deep-fried burger on a bun with a fish stick and extra onions. They ate in the car listening to the radio for West End calls. Neither of them really believed they were ever going to find Gourlay.
She was looking out of the window, looking forward to the hotel room she could never seem to get to, raking through her troubles and feeling sorry for herself, when she remembered that Lafferty was still out there and that if he found her, and she lived, she might look back on this as a high point in her life.
TWENTY-SIX. BURNS
I
Her hotel room was small, built into the attic space, furnished with a single bed so narrow that turning over in her sleep would be tricky, and a window set deep into the roof, showing nothing but sky. The sheets were nylon and the blankets scratchy but it was quiet and Paddy was alone. She had shared a room with Mary Ann since she was born and had never slept in a room by herself. She could sleep naked if she wanted. She took off all her clothes and climbed into the bed, looking at the sagging wallpaper on the sloping ceiling, luxuriating in the quiet.
As she fell asleep, in her last conscious moment, she listened, as she always did, for her sister’s soft breathing.
She had to tell the board of inquiry about her fifty-quid bribe this afternoon; that, coupled with the knowledge that Lafferty was out there somewhere, prowling for her, made her sleep fitful and tense. Syrupy dreams bled through her mind of Billy burning in sudden bright lights and Ramage scowling and blaming her.