The Last Breath

by Denise Mina

  She had her hands on the top end of the sheet. Paddy stared hard at Aoife’s face and nodded.

  ‘Right, here we are now.’

  Against orders, Paddy watched as Aoife rolled the sheet back, folding it under Terry’s chin as if he was a sleeping child. ‘You try to have a wee look now.’

  At first all Paddy could see was the mess of it. A black hole the size of a fist was at his temple. A tongue, was that a tongue? Purple, swollen, poking out between the bloody lips. He must have been lying on his side after he was shot because tendrils of blood had dried across his face, a black octopus climbing out of the hole above his ear. She couldn’t see Terry in all of that. She stole a look at Aoife’s shoulder, braced herself, looked at him again through a puff of white breath.

  The first thing she recognized was the BCG scar on his upper arm. She had kissed that, stared at it in the gloomy room in Fort William while Terry talked about San Salvador, knew every fold of the smooth penny, every overlapping freckle. Then she saw that the nose was Terry’s nose. It was his double chin. She saw the hair on the back of his neck: black, coarse, gelled, sticky to the touch. She had run her fingertips around that neck, savoured the softness, scratched and kissed it, run the tip of her tongue through the soft precursor hairs, tasted him. Her mouth filled suddenly with salt water.

  ‘Him. It’s him.’

  Lightness flooded into the top of her head, making her unsteady. Ordering herself to be brave, she raised her eyes to Aoife but her gaze rolled up past the thick brown hair, rushed up the wall and skidded up to the ceiling into a burning strip light.

  She hit the floor before realizing she was going down.

  II

  The light above her was so harsh that Paddy threw her arm over her face and rolled on to her side to get away from it. Aoife was talking a mile away. ‘She’s fine. No worries. Yez can go about your business now.’

  Paddy heard Blane say something. Or was it Kilburnie? Aoife replied and a door clicked shut somewhere.

  Keeping her hands over her face, Paddy sat up. She was on a low bed, a leather daybed, covered in a long strip of paper like a gynaecologist’s examination couch. She had passed out right in front of policemen while she was wearing a dress. Blane and Kilburnie would have a story to tell now: Burns on the telly, purple hall and herself on the floor, legs akimbo, washday-grey knickers on full show. She cursed to herself and swung her legs over the side of the bed, forcing her eyes open.

  They must have carried her in here. It was a small office, cut off from the rest of the mortuary by wood and glass partitions. Grey box files and papers were stacked on every surface. The cheap chipboard desk had a big white computer sitting on it, the screen blinking a green prompt.

  Aoife was watching her from a swivel chair, smoking a cigarette she didn’t look old enough to buy.

  ‘Oh, sorry, I’m sorry,’ Paddy apologized over and over, trying to think of something else to say. ‘I’ll go, I’m sorry.’ She stood up uncertainly and looked around. ‘Where’s my coat?’

  ‘Ye haven’t a coat.’

  ‘Haven’t I?’

  ‘Are ye pregnant or anything?’

  Paddy stroked the round of her stomach defensively.

  ‘I didn’t mean … Ye don’t look it or anything.’ Aoife waved her cigarette up and down Paddy’s body. ‘Just in case there’s something more than shock going on. I’m a doctor, I’m supposed to ask stuff like that.’

  Paddy remembered the harrowing moments before she fainted. She covered her face with her hands and groaned Terry’s name.

  ‘Your friend,’ said Aoife simply.

  Paddy looked up. ‘Friend.’ The word seemed infinitely tender. She felt like crying. ‘Who’d shoot him in the head? He was a good guy.’ She remembered the hotel room in Fort William. ‘Good-ish. A good enough guy.’

  Aoife considered her cigarette. ‘While you were out of it the police said he’d been shot by the Provos.’

  ‘Terry was nothing to do with the Troubles. He wasn’t even interested in that.’

  Aoife snorted bitterly and crossed her legs. ‘Doesn’t take much to cross them bastards. I trained in Belfast. Seen some right messes. Most of them’re just thugs with a political justification. Both sides. Wankers.’

  She sounded like the child she resembled: small, scatological, odd. Her ponytail had come undone at the side, probably from yanking Paddy’s body off the floor. Her hair was so wiry each strand looked thick and coarse as a horse’s tail.

  ‘By God, ye’ve some head of hair on ye,’ said Paddy, letting her Irish phrasing show now they were alone.

  Aoife looked at her, sternly at first. Her face broke into a laugh. Paddy laughed along with her.

  Aoife pointed to the door. ‘Hey, that fat fella says you’re a famous person.’

  ‘Aye.’ Paddy rubbed her face roughly. ‘Couldn’t tell ye which one at the minute.’

  ‘Maybe you’re Sean Connery.’

  ‘That’d be a turn-up, wouldn’t it?’ smiled Paddy. ‘And me a mother.’

  They laughed together again, softly this time. Aoife pointed at her with the tip of her cigarette. ‘I’ll tell ye this: the Provos never done for your pal.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Not how they do it. They shoot through the mouth or the back of the head, usually behind the ear, not through the temple. Doing that ye might just shoot someone’s eyes off and leave them alive to make a statement.’

  ‘Why do they think it was the Provos then?’

  ‘I suppose assassination by a single shot is pretty rare outside Northern Ireland.’

  One of Aoife’s lids gave a telltale twitch. She’d given herself away as a Protestant. A Catholic would call the province ‘the North of Ireland’. And she’d know where Paddy’s own sympathies lay because of her name.

  Paddy leaned over and touched her knee. ‘Hey, I don’t care what you call it.’ Aoife smiled weakly. ‘You’ve a strange name though, for an orange bastard.’

  ‘Aye. Intermarriage. My da chose the name, I think he did it to upset her – they weren’t getting on by then anyway.’

  ‘Quick turnaround?’

  ‘Aye, but they stayed together for the sake of the wee one, bless ’em.’ She smiled sarcastically.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Aye, well.’ Aoife took a deep draw on her cigarette. ‘D’you and your husband get on?’

  ‘I’m not married.’ Paddy stood up and straightened her skirt.

  Aoife blinked. ‘But ye were married?’

  Paddy shook her head and looked for her bag. She’d already said she had a child; there was no going back.

  When men realized she was a single mother they could be sympathetic, or assume she was a desperate slapper and take it as an invitation to chance their arm. Only women were pitying. Paddy was afraid to look at Aoife. She liked her but knew her background, understood the press of convention in an Irish household and how single mothers were talked about.

  ‘How old’s your baby?’ Aoife’s tiny face was a mask of calm but her mouth curled up at one side.

  ‘Five. He’ll be six in a few months.’ Paddy picked up her handbag from the floor and made for the door. ‘He’s called Pete.’

  ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Aoife, trying to make up for her disapproving twitch. ‘That’s a lovely name.’

  ‘Named after an old friend,’ said Paddy, letting herself out and shutting the door behind her.

  III

  The Daily News office wasn’t far from the mortuary. A committed journalist would have run the three blocks to file her exclusive. Whatever the truth of it, Terry’s assassination would make a great, fat, scare-mongering story. The press would embrace it because it suggested they were involved in a noble, life-threatening venture, and the Scottish public would follow it to find out if they were really about to be plunged into a war. She could break the story as an anonymous news item, then quash the rumour furiously in her column on Wednesday and still turn out to be right.

&n
bsp; But instead of hurrying to the office, Paddy drove numbly around, taking corners that led her away from the office, slowly circling the city centre and heading down towards the river.

  The light above the basement door was sharp and hurt her eyes. It was a dark part of town, a warren of warehouses on the south bank of the slow, cold river, in an area that had once been a bustling commercial centre by the docks. A moist cold seemed to hang over it. When Paddy got out of the car the wet chill hit her face and she huddled in her thin dress as she hurried across the road to the door.

  Saturdays were always quiet at the soup kitchen. Everyone who worked there had a different theory as to why: on weekends even the homeless were invited to drinking parties; they got too drunk to make it over on Saturdays; takeaway shops gave out free food when they were closing up and you didn’t need to stay sober or mouth prayers to get that handout.

  Two men in double coats were sitting at a table near the door, the crumbs from jam rolls and empty bowls of soup lying in front of them. One was asleep, the other blinking hard and looking around, bewildered and innocent as an abandoned child. Nearer the counter a few more men sat at tables, eating. Some of them were respectably dressed in old suits, or clean pressed denims. The Talbot Centre must have been giving away clean clothes.

  The steel counter was ablaze with strip lights. Behind it, on scrubbed steel tables out of grab-range, sat trays of buttered rolls with clear red jam dribbling out of them. A large tureen of soup, a plastic slow cooker that plugged into the wall, stood on the counter next to a stack of bowls.

  Sister Tansy was alone behind the counter, her mouth perpetually a tightly drawn string bag, eyes despising whatever hove into her line of vision. Sister Tansy wore the long white coat the nuns always wore at the kitchen, a cross between a dinner lady and a doctor. She saw Paddy approaching and her shoulders rose in a silent ripple of fury, eyes glued suddenly to the lentil-crusted soup tureen.

  When Paddy had said that Sister Tansy was one dry sherry away from committing a massacre, Mary Ann laughed with a self-censoring hand over her mouth.

  ‘Hi, Sister, is Mary Ann about?’

  ‘No.’ She took the lid off the soup and stirred, bringing a cloud of floury green to the surface.

  ‘Hm.’ Paddy looked at her insistently. ‘I need to see her.’

  ‘Ahe, well, ahe, ahe,’ she tittered angrily, ‘I really don’t think that this is the place for—’

  ‘Paddy.’

  Mary Ann was standing behind Sister Tansy, side on to Paddy, smiling over her shoulder at her sister. She wore the white dinner-lady coat, her blonde hair pulled back in a hairnet, her cheeks touched fairy pink from the heat in the kitchen.

  ‘Hiya,’ Paddy stared across at her sister, calmed by the sight of her.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘Fine.’ She managed a weak smile. ‘Just wanted to see ye.’

  Sister Tansy stepped between them and did her phoney laugh. ‘Ahe, ahe, we are quite busy, actually.’

  Paddy tipped to the side to give Mary Ann one more look. She didn’t smile or giggle or give her any prompt, but Mary Ann knew exactly what Paddy would be thinking and her face convulsed into a taut mask of sadness, then panic and then nausea, until she covered it with two hands and scuttled away to have a laugh in the toilets.

  ‘You mustn’t come here.’ Sister Tansy gave the soup a vicious skirl. ‘You’ve been asked before.’

  ‘Sister, the police came to my door tonight and told me that someone close to me had died. I thought it was Mary Ann at first and got a terrible fright. I just wanted to look at her.’

  ‘That is neither here nor there,’ she said, her customary response to any appeal for mercy. Sister Tansy would have said that on hearing about Hiroshima. ‘You cannot come in—’

  ‘It was a boyfriend. My ex. He was naked.’ Badness made her say it and it felt good. She gave in to the urge and went for triple points. ‘They think he was murdered by the IRA.’

  Sister Tansy was stunned dumb. Paddy turned and walked away, knowing she was being rude and Mary Ann would pay the price.

  Outside, she thought how lucky she was to be able to come and see her sister. Nuns, like priests, rarely got to work near their home parish. More usually they were moved away from their family of origin. The Church said it was so that they could concentrate on their vocation but Paddy saw it as a move to depersonalize them, break the bonds with their own people so that their only loyalty would be to the Church. The Brides of Christ had no family but the Church, who also happened to be their employer. Manager and boyfriend. An actress could have sued.

  She got back in the car and, before she had time to reflect on what she was doing, she was driving down the empty grey motorway, heading towards where Terry’s body had been found.

  She pulled out of the middle lane when she saw the slip road for Glasgow airport.

  The lobby was empty, all the check-in desks shut and unmanned. A blue-uniformed security guard idled, smoking a cigarette. He nodded guiltily as Paddy came through the automatic doors.

  ‘Havin’ a smoke,’ he said.

  Paddy excused him with a smile.

  Behind the counter at the empty newsagent’s shop a sleepy middle-aged woman in a blue tabard watched, heavy-eyed and accusing, as Paddy wandered between the chocolate bars and displays of crisps.

  She didn’t want anything to eat, even though she felt hungry. She kept thinking about the ragged hole in Terry Hewitt’s head, at the black spider crawling across his face. A jagged breath caught in her throat and she stood staring into the searing white light of the drinks cooler, blinking back urgent tears, wondering what the hell was wrong with her. She’d identified bodies before, seen horrific injuries, facial injuries, and she had been frightened of Terry; she should be glad he wasn’t about to hassle her any more. Aware that she was being watched, she picked up a cold can of Irn-Bru and took it to the counter.

  The attendant looked expectantly as Paddy glanced behind her at the cigarettes, asked for a packet of Embassy Regal, dropped three quid on the counter and walked away with her cigarettes and drink, the cold metal of the can burning the skin on her hand.

  Back in the car park, Paddy locked the doors and sat, holding the cold can of juice tight, focusing on the chilblain pains in her fingertips. Then she started the car and pulled out, reaching a hundred by the time she hit the motorway.

  IV

  Scottish summer mornings arrive in the middle of the night. Just after three a.m. the big sky began to lighten, the sun lurking below the horizon like a mugger.

  The motorway took a turn on the shoulder of a high hill and Paddy found herself looking out over the wide plain of the Clyde Estuary. The tide was out, baring grey, demi-waved sand with strips of mercury winking in the first rays. Small boats keeled sidelong in the soft mud. Two giant granite hills stuck out of the sand, massive and round as marbles, tiny buildings clinging to them.

  The first town she hit was Port Glasgow. A concrete council estate was perched on the hill overlooking the water, panda-eyed windows peering out to sea. On the coast side of the road abandoned warehouses were being colonized by dark, quivering bushes bursting out between the bricks. It was a shipbuilding area and had been hit so badly by the ’80s recession that instant coffee had become a form of currency: there was no money to be stolen in the area and the jars, which could be shoplifted with ease, had a set value.

  Paddy was crying. She didn’t know why, she didn’t mean to, but her eyes ached and stung, her face burned, tears were dripping off her chin. It was getting so bad she couldn’t see properly.

  She pulled into an empty car park, turned the headlights off and sat, staring blindly at the steering wheel, crying still, puzzled and angry at herself. She wound the window down and held her head out, hoping the brisk sea wind would blow the sadness off her. The sun was creeping up behind her, yellow and mockingly cheerful.

  A fat, mean-eyed gull swooped threateningly over the car roof and landed next to the car. It stared
up at her from the side of its nasty head, snapping its beak hungrily. It was fucking enormous. Paddy dipped her head back in the car and wound the window up. Outside, the gull snapped again, disappointed, and turned his back, spread his broad wings and flew away.

  She looked at the passenger seat. Regal and Bru.

  Paddy and Terry used to have Embassy Regal cigarettes and Irn-Bru for breakfast when they were young and together. They’d sit on his dirty orange bedsheet and sip their cans, passing one of the stubby fags back and forth and giggling about people in the office. Everyone seemed stupid to them then. The editors and senior journalists were leftovers from an ice age, Helen the librarian was a status-obsessed idiot. They gloried in the belief of their own infallibility and importance. Actually, Paddy didn’t believe anything of the kind but she borrowed Terry’s certainty. He was handsome in those days, solid, not fat, with dark eyes. He sat with his knees together and played with his ear when he was thinking.

  She began to cry again. He was so young and she’d never noticed how lonely he must have been, living in his cheap bedsitter, sharing a bathroom with people he didn’t know. To her, trapped by her family, by their history and all their needs, he seemed gloriously free, not alone, not adrift. She thought about how alone he would need to be to have put her down as next of kin when she wouldn’t even answer the phone to him.

  The car’s cigarette lighter glowed red, warming the tip of her nose when she touched the cigarette to it. A nicotine tingle rolled down to her toes and she exhaled at the windscreen, the smoke flattening into a patty against the glass.

  She blinked and saw Terry’s head again, his hair, his dear black hair.

  She should have spoken to him in Babbity’s when she saw him in the press for the bar. She shouldn’t have run away in case he made a scene. She should have gone over to him, apologized for leaving him in Fort William, folded her arms around his perfect head and kissed his face, his eyelids, his mouth and told him he was loved and she loved him. She loved him. Somebody loved him.