The Last Breath

by Denise Mina

  ‘Wow,’ Paddy tried to prompt Sandra and Burns, ‘that is amazing.’

  Neither of them said anything. Sandra shifted her weight uncomfortably.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Paddy said to Burns, a vague threat in her expressi0n.

  Sandra looked at the floor again and Burns gave Paddy a furtive smile. ‘Great, yeah. A real breakthrough in toy-making.’

  Paddy could have hit him. ‘We watched your show the other night.’ From the corner of her eye she saw Sandra bridle. ‘That was breakthrough, too.’

  The effect was immediate. Burns snapped at Pete, ‘Where’s your coat?’ Pete ran back into his room and came out with his blue-and-white tracksuit top. ‘You can’t wear that, we’re going to lunch with a television producer. We’re going to a nice restaurant. You need to wear something smart.’

  It was too much for Pete. His mouth turned down at the corners and he started to bubble. ‘I don’t wanna …’

  Paddy rushed across the floor to him, glad of an excuse to hold him. ‘Aw, son.’

  Behind her Burns sighed, ‘For God’s sake, you shouldn’t baby him like that. He’s got to learn that he needs to dress smartly sometimes. It’s not a big deal.’

  But Paddy had her boy in her arms, her fingers in his hair and he was holding on to her tightly. ‘I’m just guessing here, but I don’t think Pete’s upset because you want him to wear a different coat. It’s the way you said it. Am I right, pal?’ She pulled Pete’s damp face away from her neck and made him look at her. ‘Am I right?’

  Pete nodded sadly.

  ‘You treat him like a baby.’

  ‘He’s only just nearly six.’ Paddy brushed his hair back from his face and kissed him. ‘He’s a big boy but even big boys are still babies to their mums.’ She held his chin and smiled as warmly as she could. ‘You can change your coat, can’t ye, darlin’? And have a nice night with your daddy. He’ll take ye to school tomorrow and I’ll pick ye up after.’

  Pete looked longingly over her shoulder to his bedroom as Burns muttered ‘fucksake’ to himself.

  Paddy stood with her nose touching the cold window, looking down to the big black Merc parked next to the private central garden. The perfectly waxed boot glinted yellow sunlight as Burns dropped the overnight bag in and shut it. Sandra folded herself into the front passenger seat and Burns opened a back door for Pete, watching as he clambered in on all fours. He slammed it shut with a great sweep of his arm, took a step towards the driver’s door and stopped. He checked across the roof of the car to see if the wife was out of sight, which she was, then he looked up to the window, at Paddy.

  He flashed her a flirtatious smile. She didn’t respond. He smiled again and, using his thumb and pinkie finger, made a telephone gesture to his ear. Paddy paused for effect and then made a slow, laborious wanking gesture back.

  Burns stood on the pavement and laughed his arse off.

  7

  Babbity Bowsters

  I

  Had it not been sunny, the lane would have looked like a film set for a Jack the Ripper movie: cobbled street, a high brick warehouse with tiny barred windows on one side, a huge black wooden shed and, plonked between industrial giants, a pretty Georgian merchant’s house with a handpainted wooden sign outside: ‘Babbity Bowster’.

  A Babbity Bowster, Paddy had been informed, was always the last dance played at a ceilidh. It was a partners’ dance, designed specifically for courting couples to stake a claim in each other at the end of an evening. The name of the pub couldn’t have been more apt, given the manner in which the press used it.

  Babbity’s was the favoured hangout for most of the names and senior management in the Scottish press. It was close to the News offices and the Press Bar, a homeland for newspaper men all over the city, but Babbity’s was expensive, which stopped the grunts from coming in. The usual characters who hung around in journalists’ bars were filtered out by the prices too: petty thieves and city gossips were left behind in the old place. Here the familiars were all high-ranking city officials, politicians and businessmen, beguiled by the shabby glamour of the press. Upstairs in the restaurant deals were done, high-paying columns doled out, talent poached and arguments resolved over the scattered remains of the cheese board.

  Designed by Robert Adams, the merchant’s house had three perfectly proportioned storeys topped with a jaunty pediment and a doorway framed by flattened Doric columns. It had languished in the city centre for two hundred years, served as a storehouse, a fishmonger’s and finally lain empty for twenty years until an enterprising French hotelier renovated it. Inside, the decor was understated Scottish bothy, no tartan or glassy-eyed stag heads but whitewashed plaster, slate floors and black-framed photos of crofters and forgotten fishermen. The bar had a vast malt whisky selection and took pride in its Scottish beer. The restaurant menu offered herring in oatmeal, old-fashioned cuts of ham and beef, and the sort of seafood that Scotland usually exported straight to France or Spain. A Scottish hotelier would have done it up as a French restaurant.

  The early drinkers were in, stoically working their way through the late Sunday afternoon, alone or in twos, keeping company for the necessity of hiding their lonely look. The smell of warm ham and leeks hung softly in the smoky air.

  Paddy felt their eyes on her as she clattered across the slate floor, her high heels announcing her arrival as effectively as gunfire. Merki waved to her from a corner, his black hair looking almost impossibly greasy today. She waved back and heard a voice from the bar:

  ‘’S that bitch doing here?’

  She turned back, found the voice coming from a long strip of bitterness hunched over a pint of stout. ‘Evening, Keck.’

  Keck sat up and sipped his drink at her, not deigning to answer. Time had not been kind to him: his face looked like a coin purse that had been kicking around an octogenarian’s handbag since the end of the war. They stared at each other until he turned away. Keck was a sports writer, a good sports writer, and would have done better if he hadn’t been handicapped by his personality. Whenever anyone got the chance they made him redundant. He had a long, clear stretch of bar for four feet on either side.

  Paddy looked at the back of his neck, hesitating, thinking she should have gone over and commiserated with him about Terry: they had all been young together and should have been friends. But Keck would know Terry was dead already; it had been in every paper and on the TV news.

  It was then that she saw another pair of eyes, not looking directly at her but watching in the mirror behind the bar, angry fearful eyes, narrowed and peering at her between the optics. Detective Chief Inspector Alec Knox knew her and she knew him: a sallow-skinned man who took bribes from gangsters, initiated and pulled investigations to suit his own purposes. She’d been watching him for years, knew he was dangerous, but could never get a shred of evidence on him. The police officers below him were too cowed, he’d avoided crossing other journalists and no editor would back her investigations. Knox never did anything headline-worthy: no ostentatious displays of wealth or attending boxing matches with cigar-smoking hitmen. In desperation she even tried disseminating rumours about him through Press Bar gossip, but for some reason it didn’t take.

  She stepped around the corner to look him in the eye. Knox was sitting with a leader writer from the Scotsman, an ex-academic evangelist for devolution. Knox’s eyes widened as she looked back at him. He was glad she had seen him, knew he was connected to important people.

  She nodded at him. ‘Knox.’

  ‘Meehan,’ he said but Paddy had turned away, climbing the stairs, hearing the leader writer quizzing Knox about where he knew Paddy Meehan from.

  The restaurant was even emptier than the bar but smokier. A non-press couple were in for a nice meal, their eyes locked on each other. Nearby, in front of the curtained wall leading to the offices upstairs, was a table of four Rottweilers in suits. Known as the SS, they were reporters for the Scottish Standard. By the back wall, three pals from the Daily Mail were smok
ing, drooping over their dinners after a day-long binge. It was quiet but there were enough people to see her there and put the word out. As soon as Keck heard she was meeting George McVie, the story was as good as delivered back to the Daily News.

  A lithe young waitress saw her standing at the empty reception desk and walked over, stepping on her tiptoes like a dancer. The Standard reporters laughed loudly behind her and she flinched. New girl, Paddy guessed, first shift. She was in for a night of it. She led Paddy to a table for two over by a window and brought her a glass of water.

  The Standard table was warming up, looking around at the other tables for someone to fight with. They were a new gang; the Standard’s London management had noticed that the Scots had a ravenous appetite for newspapers and revamped the Scottish edition of the paper, putting in more local stories and adding ‘Scottish’ to the title. They recruited the two biggest arseholes in the Scottish trade to run it: Jinksie and Macintosh had worked at the News and Express respectively. Neither had shone and no one quite understood why they’d been given the top jobs. The Standard managers had seen something in both men that everyone else had missed: they were petty to the verge of obsession. No personal foible was too unimportant to be printed, no story too distasteful, no individual too tragic to be exploited. Sales soared.

  Paddy had been sitting at the table just long enough to read the menu twice and think up a couple of good retorts to Keck’s snub when George McVie made a dramatic entrance, bouncing the outside door off the wall.

  He paused, drawing all eyes to him, scowling back at the faces in the room. Nature, time and his temperament had conspired to perfect McVie’s glower. His face and posture fitted around misery as neatly as cellophane over a cup. The drunken Mail journalists gave him a whoop and a couple of handclaps, really just to wind up the Standard table. McVie wilfully misinterpreted the greeting as congratulations for a great issue: that morning’s Mail on Sunday had exposed a High Court judge for being gay and cruising for rent boys in Edinburgh. They had been investigating the story for months, a rare occurrence now, and McVie could rightfully take a bit of credit for lending the resources to it. The applause died while his hand was raised in modest triumph, leaving him to right himself to the hisses and boos of the Standard table. One of the Standard reporters cupped his mouth and shouted, ‘Poof.’

  McVie stood by the door looking as if he’d walked in with no trousers on. Paddy stood up and called him over. The wit shouted ‘Poof’ at her as well and got a round of applause from the table even though the comment was neither apposite nor particularly insulting.

  ‘You lot are wanted back at the office,’ she said, quietly and, she thought, with great dignity. ‘Someone somewhere’s just taken their underpants off.’

  The Mail boys erupted into forced laughter and bread-throwing at the Standard table. The romantic couple broke off looking at each other, glancing around, realizing suddenly that they were not on a pleasure cruise but on a pirate ship. The waitress stood at the side of the room, nervously chewing the cuff of her shirt sleeve.

  McVie sloped across the room to Paddy. He kissed her hand in a way that made the meet look staged, which it was.

  ‘That’ll do,’ she muttered. ‘Sit down, for fucksake.’

  He dropped his shoulders and his perfectly tailored suit jacket slid down his arms and into his hands. He draped it carefully over the back of the chair, flashing the electric-blue silk lining as he whispered, ‘Can I go home now?’

  ‘Probably. Thanks for this.’

  He settled in the seat in front of her. Meeting the editor of a rival paper would suggest to anyone who heard about it that Paddy was about to be poached to do a column for them. Having dinner with him would suggest he was offering more money than the Daily News. The News editor, Bunty, had only been in the job for a year but his sales were steadily falling. He wasn’t giving anyone a raise but might if he thought his beloved Misty was about to move.

  ‘You’re paying though, right?’ he said.

  McVie was as rich as God now, could have paid the bill for everyone in the place and not even noticed the dent in his bank account, but he had to pretend he was getting something out of the meeting. Otherwise he’d just be doing Paddy a favour and that was tantamount to an admission of friendship. ‘Where’s that wee bastard of yours tonight, then?’

  ‘Off with his dad.’

  ‘Talentless prick. That show of his is an affront to humanity.’

  The waitress skipped over to them but her smile died when she saw McVie’s face. ‘Get me a big gin ‘n’ tonic. Just tickle it with the tonic.’ He jabbed her in the stomach with the menu. ‘Haggis and neeps and hurry up.’

  He glared at Paddy, prompting her to order. She chose the ham haugh in sherry sauce and the waitress withdrew, glad to get away.

  Paddy tutted at him. ‘You’re laying it on a bit thick, aren’t ye?’

  ‘Am I?’ He took out his cigarettes and lit one, flicking the packet across the table at her as an offering. It always took McVie a while to calm down after he left his work. He wasn’t a natural leader, was a loner by inclination but maintained control of his staff with displays of temper a two-year-old would have thought vulgar. He tried to give her a friendly smile. ‘Better?’

  ‘No. Ye look as if a rival just had an anal prolapse.’

  He sucked a hiss between his front teeth, as close to a genuine laugh as he did these days. McVie had a better side: away from work he was a very slightly different man. He gave Pete age-inappropriate presents, but presents none the less. He loaned Paddy his cottage on Skye for a holiday after Pete got out of hospital because he was still on oxygen and they couldn’t go far. It was full of dodgy wiring and gay pornography.

  ‘Come on,’ said Paddy, ‘I’ve had a bit of a grim weekend. I could do without this.’

  ‘Terry?’

  She nodded. ‘Terry.’

  ‘Sad,’ he said and meant it.

  Paddy frowned at her plate. ‘Yeah. Sad.’

  In a little cheering display of bonhomie, McVie shook his napkin jauntily at his side, pulled it across his lap, took the end of his cream silk tie, tucked it loosely into his shirt pocket and touched the cutlery on his place setting with his fingertips, a concert pianist greeting the keys. He sighed and looked up at her.

  ‘God, I’m hungry.’

  ‘You sent a child to my door last night,’ she said.

  ‘That young man said you’re a bitch.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He grilled me pretty hard.’

  McVie hissed at his place mat. ‘What can I say? When the boy gets the scent there’s no stopping him.’

  The Mail journalists shouted at the waitress for more wine. One of them was humming, drumming his fingers on the table edge, trying to remember a song from his youth. They were on the jagged verge of singing.

  ‘Tell me about Terry,’ said McVie.

  ‘God. It was awful. I had to go and look at the body, say it was him for sure. He was shot in the fucking head. His face was all over the place.’

  The waitress brought his gin and tonic over and he took it from her hand, acknowledging her only by waving his free hand to dismiss her. She hesitated in surprise and Paddy smiled a weak apology. She backed off.

  McVie sipped his drink. ‘He was working for me, freelance.’

  ‘Who? Terry?’

  ‘Yeah, on nothing stories, local bullshit. Waiting for a war commission from London. We’ll organize the memorial service. Will you speak?’

  ‘God, no.’ She couldn’t speak about him. Everyone there would know she’d chucked him. ‘The police said it was the Provos.’

  McVie sipped. ‘My source in the police said it wasn’t.’

  ‘Bit of a coincidence though, his body being found out on the Stranraer road.’

  ‘Why’s that significant?’

  ‘The ferry for Belfast leaves from Stranraer. Anyone who travels to Ireland regularly would be familiar with it, kno
w the cut-offs, where’s busy, where’s quiet. It suggests it was an Irishman who killed him.’

  ‘Well, I heard it was a mugging or something.’

  ‘A robbery?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Was he missing anything?’

  ‘They never found his clothes and his wallet.’

  She looked at him. ‘Bit elaborate for a mugging, isn’t it? The guy could afford a gun and a car; he’s hardly going to kill someone for their trousers.’

  She knew that McVie was just playing her for clues: the other newspapers would want the Daily News to be wrong about the Provos because they had blown the other papers off the stands.

  ‘Your contact wouldn’t happen to be Knox, would it?’ she asked McVie.

  ‘Christ, don’t start that shit again.’

  ‘He is bent.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck. No one gives a fuck except you and him.’ He stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette messily, chasing the scarlet tip around the ashtray. ‘Terry was involved in a lot of things. When he started out he didn’t mind the danger, but I think he got to like it.’

  ‘I suppose. Who wants to be a war reporter?’

  ‘Yeah, exactly. Ambitious young men who don’t know any better and old men with a death wish.’

  The Mail journalist had remembered his song and was giving it his all. His head was tipped back, eyes shut tight as he murdered Neil Young’s ‘Heart of Gold’. It probably sounded better in his head.

  ‘Right, Meehan, come on: Callum Ogilvy. When’s he getting out?’

  ‘No one knows, do they?’

  He was looking at her, a smile somewhere in his eyes.

  ‘You do,’ he said quietly.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  The waitress brought them some bread and individually wrapped butter portions, fresh from the freezer.

  ‘But you do.’

  ‘George, I don’t know when he’s getting out, I promise.’

  ‘Swear on the life of your child.’