White wine and soda, please, and Marlboro. The sweet drink washed the salty numbness from her gums, sloshing across her tongue to hit the parched spot on the back of her throat. Another one. She smoked a cigarette, looking away from everyone, trying not to be seen. Struck by a sudden pang of longing for the pillow, she put the half-drunk glass down and reeled her shoulders, heading out through the doors to the car park and back to the side of the Mini.
She looked up and found herself standing outside Knox’s house. Evidently she’d had another rub and dab; her tongue kept finding its way up past her teeth to her grainy gums and running the length of them.
Knox’s front garden had been paved over to make parking spaces and the front of the house seemed very close to the road. It was a small house, Kate thought, with a cheap-looking glass porch stuck on the front of it, jammed full of ugly little plants and Wellingtons and so on. Outdoor accoutrements. Perhaps he had a dog. Was he married? She couldn’t remember. There was only one car parked in front of the house. Next to the glass porch, on the far side, was a window into a front room but the curtains were shut.
Kate’s heart ached, not with fear but with the simple strain of keeping going. She pressed the buzzer and stepped back, watching as the light snapped on in the hall, rosy behind the cheap orange glass in the window of the front door. The door opened, spilling light into the porchway. He was wearing slippers. And a cardigan. His angry voice crackled at her.
She answered, barking the only words she could remember. “Knox. Help.”
II
Down at the Salt Market a Volvo station wagon was underneath a bus. The car driver was dead, flattened inside his car. The safety windscreen had come off whole and lay on the road by the pavement, smeared with his blood. The car was such a mess that it took the ambulance men a while to work out if they were looking at one very big car or two wee cars.
The blameless bus driver was sitting on the wet curb, his mouth hanging open, tears streaming down his face, blankly watching the fire brigade cutting the car up with torches, trying to establish whether there had been a passenger as well.
Paddy was jotting down the statement of an eyewitness, a tipsy old man who saw the car going fast down this road, the bus coming down that one and then, kaboom, he wasn’t watching, but what a bloody bang, excuse his French. She’d already written his name and address down for the story and couldn’t be arsed to try and find another witness.
“Would you say you were terrified?” she said, being unprofessional and putting words in his mouth.
He looked a little skeptical. “I suppose…”
“Have you ever seen anything like it before in your life?”
He looked even more unconvinced. “Well, I fought in the war, at Monte Cassino, and it wasn’t anything like as bad as that.”
Paddy sighed, exhausted. “Was it like something you might have seen in the war? Could you say that?”
“Aye.” He could go along with that. “Maybe. A bit like that.”
She wrote it down. “Alistair Sloane of Dennistoun said, ‘It was like something out of the Battle of Monte Cassino and I should know because I was there.’ Is that any good?”
He looked at her shorthand, excited that he might be in the paper. “Aye. Is that going in tomorrow?”
“It’s not up to me, really, but that’s how I’ll put it in.”
She left the old man, who was grinning gleefully, looking like a ghoul, and walked back toward the car, working hard at keeping her gaze away from the undercarriage of the bus. Even in the dark road she could see splatters of blood on the bus wheels, pooling on the road. Her half-informed eye kept trying to reconstruct a person out of the shapes she wasn’t looking at, a round object turned into a head. There was black stuff all over the road and she wasn’t certain that it was oil. She was glad Sean was waiting in the car. If she wasn’t being brave for him she might have followed one of the police officer’s examples and thrown up.
“I heard you were here.”
At the sound of Burns’s voice her already delicate stomach spiked acid. He let his pal walk on and sauntered over solo, standing between her and the bus. She had no option but to follow the line of his body from waist to face to avoid seeing an image that might haunt her.
“Burns.”
“Meehan?” He returned the bald greeting but looked disappointed.
“Sorry.” She tipped her head to the mess under the bus. “I’m trying not to look.”
Burns glanced back at it, unflinching. “Yeah, messy. We’ve been sent over to redirect the traffic. Exciting. I love nights. Standing in the bollock-freezing cold telling nosy bastards to go left. I got that address you were after.”
“Brilliant.” He recited it for her and she jotted it down. “Does Knox have a reputation? A flashy car or too much money?”
“Not so much that anyone’s talking about it, no.” Burns shifted nearer, looking down at her mouth as if he was going to kiss her. Paddy noticed that she was salivating. His breath hit her face in warm puffs. “You still at the hotel?”
“Did they arrest Lafferty for the firebomb yet?”
His gaze slid down her neck. “No. He’s gone abroad.”
“Abroad to where?”
“ Ireland, the wife says. No proof, just her say-so.”
She shut her notebook. “Looks like I’m still in the hotel, then.”
“That’s safest, yeah.” He looked over at the calls car. “Is that Billy’s replacement? You found him awful quick. Is he a boyfriend of yours?”
She stumbled over the answer, hoping he wouldn’t want an introduction. “No, he’s not my boyfriend. He’s my… well, it’s complicated.”
“Is it?”
She hesitated again. If she’d had her wits about her she could have made up a salving lie. “We’ve just… known each other a long time.”
Burns tipped his chin at her, looking down his nose and sucking air in between his teeth in a sour hiss. “I see. That’s nice and cozy. I’m doing an open spot at Blackfriar’s tomorrow night. Can you come?”
Dub generally booked an open-mike night once a month so it wasn’t the free-for-all. Burns must have arranged an open spot with Dub, which meant he had spoken to him, independent of her. He was muscling in on her meager social life.
“I’ll try.”
A spine-chilling creak of ripping metal filled the street as the fire brigade cleaved part of the bloody hood away from the bus’s axle. Paddy suddenly saw herself and Burns standing too close to each other, too keen to exclude others from their conversation. It was obvious there was something between them.
“I’d better go and call this in.” She backed off toward the car.
Burns watched her mouth as she moved away and she watched his. His pink tongue glistened behind the rim of his white teeth.
III
It was the middle of the night or so. Or day. Or night. Kate was lying down on something soft. A sofa. A sofa draped in a sheet. Her fingertips ran over the sheet and it felt marvelously comforting, familiar and kind and warm to the touch. Like skin. Soft like skin and smelling comforting, like the comfort pillow. Paul was talking to her, reminding her how much they liked each other, how it was important to be kind to each other and help each other. She felt wonderful.
Suddenly the cold realization made her eyes spring open. The comfort pillow was plastic. She was lying on a plastic sheet.
Paul was sitting on a chair next to her, his legs crossed, talking softly to her. He was dressed nicely, a tailored blue shirt and slate gray slacks with a pleated front. He liked to dress like a businessman. He could see that she was alarmed but said she didn’t need to be afraid. Everything was going to be fine. Not to worry.