She leaned heavily on Burns’s chest to push herself up to sitting and turned away to pull her sweater on. “I won’t back off about Lafferty, no matter how often you do that to me.”
“I did it to you?” he said playfully. “You did it to me. I was just lying there.”
She lay back, resting her chin on his chest, breathing in the smell of him. A floor below they could hear the low hum of a vacuum cleaner. A car hooted its horn a mile away in the street.
“Okay.” Burns looked at her, his fingers in her hair. “Lafferty works for a guy called Paul Neilson. Neilson used to go out with Vhari Burnett’s sister. He’s squeaky clean, no record for anything.”
“Vhari had a sister?”
“Kate Burnett. She’s disappeared.”
“Is she dead?”
“No one knows. There’ve been a couple of sightings but nothing solid. Someone saw her at a restaurant a few nights ago but we’ve heard nothing since then.”
“What about the brother?”
He frowned down at her. “There isn’t a brother. The parents never mentioned a boy. Just the two girls.”
She was sure Evelyn at the Easterhouse Law Center had said Thillingly spent his last day with Vhari’s brother. She cast her mind back over the conversation: Bernie, Evelyn said his name was Bernie, and he had a garage. But if Vhari’s parents wouldn’t admit to him, there had to be a reason.
“What about Thillingly? Do they still suspect him?”
Burns took his fingers from her hair and sat up, hugging his knees with his arms and looking around at the mess of clothes on the floor.
“Well, do they?”
He found his underpants and stood up to pull them on, completely unabashed. “You have to understand, Paddy, the police’ll do anything to protect their own. But we get the job done. We do.”
“It’s not good enough.”
They looked at each other. Burns raised an angry eyebrow.
“You can’t frighten me when you’re standing there in nothing but your skanties, Burns.”
He ignored the comment and yanked his trousers on, pulling up the zipper like a final statement. His chest was broad with a T of black hair reaching down under his waistband. The scar on his stomach was pink and puckered. It looked like a bottle opener might well have pierced it and she wondered if he was lying about his wife at all.
“You’re giving evidence to the inquiry today, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.” She stood up and scrambled into her panties and skirt, anxious not to be the last one naked in the room, perching on the bed to fit her tights on over her feet. “Are they even looking for Kate Burnett?”
“Leave it, Paddy.”
“What if she turns up dead? What if I turn up dead?”
He slipped his feet into his toggle loafers and pulled his shirt over his head without undoing the buttons. “I was asking about the inquiry because I was going to take you there myself, make sure you’re safe.”
“Oh, that’ll be great for my reputation: pitching up in a flash sports car with the slag of the year.”
She meant the comment to be taken playfully but Burns misunderstood. He stared at her. “You’re a bit of a snide cow, actually, aren’t ye?”
She couldn’t think of an answer. Burns picked up his jacket and walked out of the room, leaving her sitting alone on the end of the mean little bed.
TWENTY-SEVEN. BERNIE’S IN
I
Bernie’s garage was not quite what she expected. Knowing what she did about Vhari Burnett’s family background Paddy had supposed her brother’s garage would be a dealership for smart new cars, but it was in a derelict area at the bottom of a sharp hill a long way from the main road.
She headed down toward the blackened Victorian railway arches. Beyond them lay the motorway and farther yet the river. Blocks of tenements had been knocked down on either side of the road, leaving just their footprint on the land. A couple of shanty workshops were still operating from what would have been the back court; she could hear radios blaring and see lights on inside, occasional drills and mechanical bits turning over. A square, single-story pub was set on the corner of a sea of dusty rubble.
The tall arches under the railway bridge had been converted into workspaces, not the ramshackle hodgepodge of organic economic development but uniform government-subsidized workshops that spoke of an economy in terminal decline. Yellow brick filled in the grand arches of blackened Victorian bricks, each with a double garage door in the middle, painted red with a unit number stenciled onto it.
Paddy walked toward them and felt the damp river air clinging to the bricks. Most of the units were dark and locked, some of them permanently. Only one or two had signs denoting a business operating out of them. Unit 7 was one of the few arches with the lights on and the red doors open. It was at the far end of the lane, across the road from a scrap merchant’s yard. A sign on the fence declared that the yard was PROTECTED BY DOG, and below the claim was a silhouette of a snarling wolf.
Wherever the Burnett family legacy was being used it certainly wasn’t being invested in Bernie’s business. He wasn’t leaving a smart Bearsden villa every morning to come here. A warm orange light spilled out from inside the door and the sound of a pop radio buzzed. The large hand-painted sign was propped up outside against the wall, BERNIE’S MOTORS, hardly visible behind a bank of engine parts. Two cars were parked outside, one with both back wheels off, the other apparently in good working order. Paddy didn’t know much about cars but she could see that it was a smart green Jaguar, an old one but with a perfectly preserved chrome trim and arched roof. The driver’s and passengers’ seats had been taken out, leaving jagged, uncomfortable axles pitted with bolts.
She was so engrossed in the handsome car that she didn’t see Bernie until she was almost standing on his toes.
“She’s a honey, isn’t she?”
He was looking lovingly at the Jaguar. She’d seen him before, in the photo of Grandfather Burnett’s funeral, holding Vhari’s arm. He had a James Dean haircut and wore a ripped navy blue boiler suit, smeared with black grease, going baggy at the knees. His red neckerchief served no purpose other than to make the oil-blackened boiler suit a fashion statement. His jaw was so square he looked as if he’d been drawn with a ruler. “I was trying to get oxblood leather seats for inside but they’re pretty hard to find.”
“Not a believer in the fashion maxim that ‘red and green should never be seen’?”
He laughed and looked at her for the first time, taking her in and pointing at her coat approvingly. “Nice.”
“A quid,” she said.
He nodded, impressed. “Top stuff.” He pointed at the Jag again. “Two hundred quid. She looked in such bad nick when I got her that no one else bid. If you know anything about these cars it’s the trim and the undercarriage that corrode. Even if she’s just for parts she was an absolute bargain.”
She could find no trace of Vhari Burnett in his face but Bernie’s accent seemed familiar, posh to the verge of sounding English, and she’d heard it before but couldn’t place it. At work maybe. Someone she’d interviewed for something. She could only imagine how self-possessed he’d need to be to carry the accent in such a working-class area. Talking like that in the Eastfield Star would have been an invitation to have all his car windows smashed.
Paddy stuck out her hand. “You Bernie?”
Suddenly suspicious, he looked at the hand and took it reluctantly, letting go as soon as he could. “Who are you?”
“Paddy Meehan. I’m a reporter with the Daily News.”
He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I don’t want to talk about her.”
“Neither do I.”
It was only half-true but it got his attention. “Why are you here then?”