The Last Breath

by Denise Mina

  She was ashamed and embarrassed for him. She didn’t want to tell anyone and Kevin was too graceful to press her for details. She wished she’d got to know him before now. Terry had so much not to talk about, and she could see now why he had liked Kevin so much.

  ‘So what was your book going to be about?’

  Kevin stretched his legs out in front of him. ‘Street portraits. Scots living in New York and London. It was just an excuse to go to New York together, really.’

  ‘So he did the interviews?’

  ‘No, he did the pictures and I did the text, that’s what was unusual about the book.’ She looked at him and found him almost smiling at her. ‘Joke.’

  ‘It was a very funny joke,’ she said flatly, making him really smile this time. ‘Do you think the book had anything to do with him being murdered?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said with certainty. ‘Like the police said today, if it did I’d be dead too, wouldn’t I? I think it was something to do with somewhere he worked. Maybe he saw some incriminating things, executions, money deals …’ He ran out of vacuous ideas and shrugged an apology. ‘I’m a photographer,’ he said, as if that explained his confusion about international affairs.

  ‘How far did you get with the book?’

  ‘Only a couple of mock-up pages for the project proposal.’ He stood up and left the room, coming back with an A3 folder. He unfurled the elastic band around it and sat two huge pages next to each other, a beautifully crisp photograph on one page and a small paragraph next to it. The picture was of an American street scene. It could have been anywhere: boxy clapboard houses with settees on porches, a big electric-blue sky framing the scene. Stars and Stripes flags were hung in dirty windows or drooping on flagpoles, big cars parked in a broad patchwork concrete street, and in the foreground a woman of eighty, arms crossed, grinning, the folds in her skin deep enough to lose change in, her dentured teeth a wall of perfect white.

  The caption read ‘Senga – Kilmarnock / New Jersey’. The facing paragraph of text told the woman’s history, how she came to be in the US and why she stayed. Paddy smiled at the text. Terry was smart: it wasn’t what a reader would have expected. Senga drew no false comparisons between the two places, stated no preference. She came to visit her sister and married an Italian shopkeeper. She fell in love with his shoes and the way he mixed her drink. Her sister had cancer in her leg but still danced. It was very much Terry’s writing style. He always came at a story from a unique angle, edited out the obvious and left the story to resolve itself in the reader’s mind. She stroked the picture of Senga with an open palm but Kevin pulled her hand away.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘it’s … the photographic paper doesn’t like that.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Kevin looked tearful suddenly and turned the page for her. ‘Bob – Govan / Long Island’. Bob smiled on an unspoiled seashore, his shirt sleeves rolled up to show his forearm tattoo of a fey King Billy on a rearing horse.

  Kevin pointed at the tattoo, a Loyalist commemoration of the defeat of the Irish Catholics by William of Orange. ‘That’s an invitation to fight in Glasgow. Over there people just think he likes horses. Reinvention. That’s what the whole book’s about really.’

  ‘I’ll buy a copy when this comes out.’

  ‘It won’t come out now.’

  ‘Couldn’t someone just use Terry’s notes?’

  ‘Nah. He was the reason it was getting published. He knew the woman who owns Scotia Press and all of the promotion was going to be on the back of his world travels.’ Kevin nodded. ‘He bought your book.’

  She was surprised. ‘The Patrick Meehan book?’

  ‘Yeah, Shadow of Death. He got me to send it to him in Beirut.’

  She hadn’t known then that Terry even remembered her. She stumbled across his articles about the Lebanon while she was in hospital having Pete. Terry’d had a rare, bizarre dinner with a Hezbollah leader and wrote about the new constitution, about the hardship of the ordinary people and the raw beauty of the landscape. Until Pete, Terry’s world was everything she thought she wanted, brim full of glory and history, shining a light into shadowy corners. And then Pete was born – a happy, trouble-free baby, thriving from the moment he arrived, surrounded by family and friends and cousins. She felt detached when she read the series of articles but she was heading out into the quiet waters of motherhood, drifting off from the shore, alone in the boat. She was glad Terry was out there, protecting people by telling the truth, but her own life was more immediate and all-consuming.

  As she felt the weight of the pages on her knees and looked into Kevin’s shocked eyes, she realized that she had been furious with Terry because, in the dark of Fort William, he had killed her most fondly held delusion: that someone somewhere was making a difference.

  II

  She was alone in the house. Dub was up in Perth with two of his acts and Pete was at Burns’s, leaving her with just the radio for company, sitting at her desk, trying to think of an opinion to beat to death with a thousand short words. She’d left the lights off in the rest of the house to help focus her attention, leaving just the anglepoise shining on her blank sheet of paper, but the darkness was making her feel exhausted.

  Out in the street she could hear a steady rumble of cars on the Great Western Road, the distant gurgle of the river, the chat of occasional passers-by coming back from the pub.

  The hard part of a Misty column was getting a start. Once she found her hook it was like skidding on oil. She loved it, and rarely got edited beyond her punctuation, which was poor. The difficult part was deciding what to rant about.

  Whole areas of comment were closed to her because she was female: emotional first-person accounts about anything, stories about children, all things domestic. If she touched on those issues she wouldn’t be taken seriously and would end up right back in the Dab Sheet ghetto. And Callum Ogilvy. If she mentioned him, favourably or otherwise, she’d leave herself open to being outed as a friend of his family. She was amazed no one had mentioned the fact in print yet.

  The Rats. Under Milk Wood. After just nine minutes at the desk she had already reached the point where she was testing her eyesight by reading the spines of books twenty feet away across the study.

  Fat is a Feminist Issue. Fifteen years of unsuccessful self-denial had made her no slimmer and bloody miserable. She read Fat is a Feminist Issue and felt a wash of relief at the suggestion that she give up dieting. Actually, the book was far more complex, laying out a series of exercises for dealing with a fraught relationship with food, mirror work that involved standing naked and looking at yourself, sometimes jumping, but she didn’t do those things. She just let herself eat and it was a joy. She put on half a stone and plateau’d there, the fattest she had ever been and the most content. She still felt flashes of disgust when her backside jiggled as she ran up steps or her stomach folded into a perfect round cushion when she sat down, still resented not being able to buy clothes she liked because she couldn’t get them over her head, but the pleasure of unbridled eating more than made up for it.

  She looked at the box files high up on her shelves. The old yellowed clippings of all of Terry’s articles were stored up there. When she still had high hopes for their relationship she had meant to show them to him one day, to get them down and let him see how she had followed his every move, how much he’d always meant to her. She could get them down now and look through his articles from Liberia, see if there was anything in them, any tangles with the government that could explain his death. But Kevin was wrong. Liberia was an internal conflict. They were getting so much money from the CIA they’d never risk killing a journalist and alienating their American bankers.

  The polite rap at the door was a welcome interruption. She stood up and walked lightly to the door, expecting a kindly neighbour or an evangelist or an Ogilvy-hunting journalist at worst.

  He was short, sandy-haired, wore a neat pale blue jumper over a white T-shirt, beige slacks and steel-rimmed square
glasses. She immediately assumed he was a local with a petition about the parking.

  She opened her mouth to say hello, but the look in his eyes stopped her. The eyes were cold, emotionally flat. The suburban neatness was a cover, the staypress crease down the front of his trousers suddenly a knife edge.

  ‘Paddy Meehan?’ He was Irish. He spoke quickly and quietly; she couldn’t tell whether the accent was North or South.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Are you Paddy Meehan?’

  The sensation began between her shoulder blades, a hot tremble, exacerbated by her tiredness no doubt, but spread to her arms, her neck, her throat. She cast her mind back into the flat, mapping Pete’s empty bed, the knives in the kitchen drawer, the dagger-shaped letter opener on the desk.

  He smiled coldly, a cheerful snake. ‘Can ye not remember who ye are?’ His breath was acid with the smell of stale cigarette smoke.

  ‘Ah, she’s not in just now,’ said Paddy. ‘I’m just trying to work out when she will be in.’

  The smile widened but didn’t deepen. ‘It’s you. I recognize ye. Seen ye on telly.’

  She smiled back, more convincingly than him, she hoped. ‘Are you a fan?’

  ‘No, no, no.’ He dropped his head to his chest, thrusting his hands into his pockets, and didn’t seem to feel the need to elaborate.

  ‘So …?’

  He smirked at his shoes. The dim yellow light in the close glinted off the lenses of his spectacles. ‘You phoned about Terry? Said you were his family? Can I come in?’ He shuffled towards the door without giving her the chance to answer, took the step and slid into the hallway, shutting the door after himself.

  The lights were still off in the house. The anglepoise in her study pooled light by the doorway, darkening the rest of the hall. They were standing close.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  He smiled again, cold-eyed. His hands slithered out of his pockets and he raised them in a shrug. ‘You phoned about Terry. Said you were family.’

  She thought of Pete and felt a flash of hot anger and reached over to the front door, swinging it open so that it banged loudly off the wall, denting the plaster behind it.

  Steven Curren was stepping on to the landing. He stopped and looked at them, startled. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Sorry. McVie made me come back again.’

  Paddy grabbed his forearm and pulled him in. ‘Steven! Come in!’

  Snake Eyes was looking from one to the other but put his hand out to Steven. ‘How are ye?’ he said. ‘Nice to meet ye.’

  ‘Hi.’ Steven was young and well brought up. He shook the guy’s hand and introduced himself, said he was from the Mail on Sunday and didn’t really want to be here but his editor had sent him out again. He’d just started in the job.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Paddy smiled at Snake Eyes, ‘I forget your name.’

  His eyes flickered to the left, signalling a lie. ‘Michael Collins,’ he said and let Steven’s hand fall.

  Steven didn’t recognize the pseudonym but Paddy shuddered. The Republican hero was remembered for many things, for successfully conducting the war that threw the Brits out of Ireland, for signing a peace treaty that authorized partition, for dying in the brutal civil war that followed. What always stuck in Paddy’s mind was Collins’s time as director of intelligence for the IRA, when he formed the Twelve Apostles, an assassination squad who targeted British agents. On the first Bloody Sunday, in 1920, fourteen agents were either shot or had their throats slit in one night.

  ‘How could I forget?’ she said seriously, telling him she understood. ‘So you were just leaving?’

  ‘No,’ smiled Michael Collins, ‘you were just going to make me tea.’

  They looked at each other. If he had a gun she would be no safer with him just outside the door than inside. There were knives in the kitchen drawer. ‘Of course.’

  The kitchen was big enough to have a table with four chairs in it but not to move comfortably around. Steven and Michael sat down as she filled the kettle, shuffling sideways around the table, brushing their backs as she reached for teabags and sugar. Into the taut silence Steven rambled about Glasgow and how he came to be here and how it was the greatest place for a journalist to begin his career because the competition was so fierce, you see? Best training ground in the world. They trained you to be really aggressive, really proactive, to really find your own stories. He left a pause but no one filled it. He missed his friends from uni, of course, it was a bit isolating, coming up here on his own, but still, lots of advantages.

  Collins gave nothing away. He listened to answers politely, and all the while his hands sat flattened on the table top, unnaturally still.

  He wasn’t flustered by Steven’s presence; it was a complication, not a bar. He might kill both of them, she realized suddenly as she picked the cups out of the cupboard. She needed to get to the phone. She flicked the kettle on, sat the cups on the table and got the milk out of the fridge.

  ‘Biscuits?’

  Steven said yes, he’d love a biscuit, he hadn’t had his tea yet and Paddy slipped out of the room.

  She stepped into the study, the calm site of work. The debris of her uneventful Misty night lay on the table, the letter from Johnny Mac propped on the typewriter, the empty packet of crisps she’d had from Dub’s food cupboard. The time felt like a treat in hindsight. Steven was still rambling behind her but, she realized too late, his voice was carrying out to the hall, coming towards her, following the back of the man who was creeping after her. She lunged for the phone.

  ‘I only want to talk to you.’

  She clutched the receiver to her chest and spun to look at him. The dagger-shaped letter opener was on the right side of the desk, she could see the tip of it in the shadow of the typewriter.

  ‘Honestly.’ He stepped towards her, a creep, a liar, a true Apostle. ‘Just a talk.’

  She was sweating, wanted to step back from the smell of his sour breath but hardly dared move. ‘What about?’

  He looked around the dark room, at the pine bookcases, at her old desk, the leatherette top scarred along the edge with fag burns from before it was hers, at the letter from Johnny Mac propped on the typewriter. ‘Terry Hewitt, he wasn’t one of ours.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  ‘That was a separate thing,’ he said and corrected himself. ‘Nothing to do with us.’

  ‘Separate thing?’

  He blinked slowly, thinking his way through the implications before he spoke. ‘Someone else’s thing. Not ours.’

  Still shielding her breastbone with the phone, she chanced a step towards the desk, her hand resting by the typewriter, inches from the dagger. ‘Do you know what that thing was?’

  ‘So, are you Terry’s family? A cousin?’

  ‘Ex-girlfriend. Terry had no family.’

  He tipped his head back, showing her his throat, and laughed joylessly.

  Behind him she could see Steven Curren at the kitchen table, bending sideways out of his chair to see them. Collins composed himself. ‘Lovely cornicing. My father was a plasterer. Later he ran a chip shop.’

  ‘Who killed Terry?’

  A smile slithered across his face. ‘Goodbye.’ He stepped backwards out of the room. She didn’t hear him walk across the hall but the door opened and shut quietly. Steven smiled at her from the kitchen. ‘Is he off then?’

  Paddy dropped the phone and looked out into the dark hallway. Gone. She looked in the hall cupboard, checked Dub’s room. He lived a curiously spartan life. His books and precious collection of rare comedy albums were kept in cardboard boxes that he used variously as a bedside table, a desk and a lamp stand. She looked under the bed, and then skipped into Pete’s room. He was gone.

  Steven was calling to her from the kitchen. ‘The kettle’s boiled. Shall I make the tea? D’you want one?’

  Paddy stood in the dark bedroom. The room door had been open when Collins passed it. A pile of fresh boy’s clothes was folded neatly and sitting on the end
of the little bed, a box of plastic trucks visible under the bed.

  Collins knew she had a child. He knew where she lived, what she looked like and he knew she had a child.

  III

  She heard his footsteps in the hall at two forty in the morning, rolled on to her back, an arm over her burning eyes, listening carefully to the rhythm and the distance, unable to shake her body awake enough to sit up.

  Tiptoeing across the wooden floorboards, trying not to make a noise, he went to the kitchen, then to the bathroom, and finally into his own room. He hadn’t seen Pete’s door lying open or he would have come in to her.

  She summoned the energy to throw the duvet off with a hand, paused and sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, keeping her raw eyes shut.

  She felt for her dressing gown at the end of the bed, pulled it on and stood up unsteadily, staggering over to the door and out into the hall.

  Dub had only just climbed into bed. He looked up at her, standing by the door, her hair a tangled mess, her head tipped back so that she didn’t have to open her eyes properly.

  A sensual, sleepy smile bloomed on his face. ‘Hello, gorgeous.’

  She staggered over to the bed, dropped her dressing gown on the floor and found her way under the covers, wrapping herself around his warm naked body.

  ‘Pete …’ he said.

  ‘Still at Burns’s.’

  Dub kissed her hair, pushing it back from her face, the tender smell of sweat and cigarette smoke from his night engulfing her.

  His hand slid down her bare hip, the backs of his fingers nestling in the warm soft comma at the top of her thigh. He pressed his forehead to hers, their eyelashes touching at the tips.

  ‘You’re the nicest landlady I’ve ever had.’

  ‘Wake me up when you’ve had your fun,’ she said and met his smile.

  9

  Family Unit

  I

  Paddy put her hand on the bonnet of a silver estate car that looked vaguely familiar, feeling for warmth. She’d been halfway round the car park, had felt so much cold metal that her fingers were numb and she couldn’t really tell if the engine had been running recently. She didn’t care if other journalists were here, hiding and waiting for Callum. She didn’t care about Callum at all or whether Bunty found out she was up here at the gates of the prison, planning to come home with no story, just doing her duty as the only person Sean knew who would be any kind of support.