by Denise Mina
It was a scurrilous lie.
He scratched in another loop with his pencil as the Monkey watched her for a reaction. ‘I think, Bunty,’ she said carefully, ‘that you must have been a fucking good journalist.’
Bunty looked up and smiled wide at her. His yellow teeth were gappy, the gums receding. She suddenly, inexplicably, liked him enormously.
He straightened his face. ‘OK, we’ll give you the money but you’re not getting the story.’
‘But I’ve—’
‘NO!’ His hand was up and that was that. ‘If you want it you’ll have to do it in your own time. I’ll put someone else on it too. You beat them to it, all well and good.’
‘Who?’
‘Merki.’
She snorted. ‘Merki?’
‘Merki. Get out.’
Merki was good at finding leads. He could get into a house but people didn’t take to him, no one wanted to talk to him because he was funny-looking. It would be a walkover and she was getting the raise. She stood up quickly and put one knee on the table, clambering across the highly polished wood on all fours and, before the Monkey could intervene to stop her, she planted a wet, noisy kiss on Bunty’s bald head. The skin was smooth and papery.
He laughed, embarrassed, brushing the kiss off coyly as she climbed down off the table and pulled her skirt straight.
‘Long live the King,’ she said, making her way to the door.
The Monkey called after her. ‘We’ll have your copy today?’
‘I’ll phone it in to Larry tonight,’ she called back.
III
She used a phone on Features and called Terry Hewitt’s solicitors. First the receptionist had to put her through to his secretary, then his secretary wouldn’t put her through to the lawyer, then she tried to get Paddy to agree to an appointment two weeks hence.
Paddy said that was a real shame because she wrote for the Scottish Daily News and she’d been hoping to speak to him about doing a series profiling prominent lawyers.
The secretary hesitated. Paddy assumed she was a little awestruck. She was feeling smug and cosy, tricking a slippery lawyer into an early appointment with the promise of an ego rub, when the secretary said, ‘But he’s only twenty-three.’
‘Ah.’ Her feeling of superiority evaporated. ‘Well, you know, up-and-coming lawyers, the future and all that …’
Thirty seconds later she was talking to the squeaky-voiced boy and he agreed to see her in half an hour. She thought he sounded a little breathless.
IV
By day Blythswood Square was an elegant square of Georgian town houses, now offices, set around a private garden. The kerbs were high to the road, the step steep to accommodate descent from a carriage. At night the square became the working route of roving prostitutes, bare-legged girls with poor hair and prominent bosoms, faces dripping rank misery, ready to be peered at and pawed.
McBride’s Solicitors was in one of the older houses but the impression of elegance was lost at the door, where a cheap black punch-hole board was hanging with the names of the resident companies picked out in white plastic lettering. McBride, Solicitors and Notaries, were on the very top floor.
Paddy was panting and damp by the time she reached the sixth flight of stairs, leading to what had once been the servants’ quarters, shallow and sagging wooden steps worn in the middle, the banister sticky from trailing sweaty fingers. She caught her breath on the top step, embarrassed, as she always was when she lost her breath, to be a fat woman, sweating.
McBride’s office was a fading brown nod to the seventies. A motherly receptionist was dressed accordingly, in a brown skirt and matching jersey with a modest rope of pearls at her throat. The fittings in the reception area looked as old as she was: the phone was two-tone brown, the appointments book a battered black-leather puff of paper.
She was impressed when Paddy introduced herself, clutched her neck and said she was a big fan.
‘Thanks,’ said Paddy and looked for somewhere to sit.
‘No, no, go through. Mr Fitzpatrick’s waiting for you.’ She pointed to a flush dark-wood door.
Inside, a chubby teenager in a suit was standing stiffly by his desk. Mr Fitzpatrick was not only pleased to see her but seemed to have had a shave just before she got there. As she stepped forward to shake his hand she could smell soap and see that the skin on his cheeks was glossy smooth, a small nick at his ear still oozing white blood cells. He fussed her into a chair.
‘I don’t know how you could even have heard of me. Did someone give you my name?’
She bit the bullet and admitted the ruse: she needed to find out about Terry and couldn’t get an appointment for two weeks so she’d fibbed. His disappointment was palpable.
‘But I phoned my mum.’
Paddy cringed in sympathy. ‘I thought you were older,’ she said. ‘I thought I was playing a trick on a smug big lawyer who couldn’t be arsed seeing me. I’m really sorry.’
‘What’ll I tell my mum?’
‘Can’t you tell her it didn’t come off ? That’s what I always tell mine.’
‘She’ll call the paper.’
‘You could say the article is about left-wing lawyers so we had to leave you out?’
He considered it for a moment. ‘Yes, that might work.’
‘Tell her it was for the Star or some paper she won’t see. Or the Daily Mail.’ She didn’t want to be pre-sumptuous, but guessed his mother wouldn’t take the Daily Star.
Having resolved his angst over his mother’s disappointment Mr Fitzpatrick turned to the matter of Terry, far more kindly than she would have done in the circumstances.
He took out a file and opened it. Terry had left her everything: there was a car, an old model, worth a couple of hundred pounds, all his papers and books, some clothes and the house.
‘Which house?’
‘Eriskay House.’ He peered at his notes. ‘A two-bedroomed house with three acres of land in Kilmarnock. It’s an old house of the family’s. I don’t know what sort of condition it’s in but it must be pretty good: we’ve already had an objection lodged by Mr Hewitt’s cousin, a Miss Wendy Hewitt.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that she’s challenging the validity of the will. In short, we can’t execute.’
Paddy shifted uncomfortably. A house. She didn’t want anything to do with Terry, didn’t think she could stay in a house he’d lived in or owned, but it was, after all, a house. Not one that Burns paid for either. And it had land around it for Pete to play in.
‘Could I sell it to her?’
‘No. You need to own it before you can sell it. You don’t own it at the moment.’
‘Well, who does own it?’
‘Mr Hewitt’s estate owns it.’
‘So …?’
‘Mm.’ Fitzpatrick looked at his notes again. ‘So we’ll have to wait to see what happens.’
‘How long could that take?’
He blew his lips out. ‘Months? A year? Longer?’
Paddy glanced at her watch. It was five past three and Pete got out of school at half past. She had to get a parking space near the gates or he’d try to cross the road himself. The lollipop lady sometimes hid behind a tree for a cigarette and the road was busy.
‘OK.’ She stood up. ‘Fuck it. Let me know what happens.’
‘There are these papers …’ He waved his hand towards a folder on the table. It was brown, made of soft cardboard, fraying all round the edges. She could see that it was stuffed with well-thumbed sheets of notes, yellowed newspaper clippings folded over on themselves, a bit of a magazine. Her name was written on the outside cover, ‘Paddy’, in a blue felt pen, the pigment faded into a yellowed green. If Fitzpatrick had been trying to lure her into a cave full of tigers, he could have done worse than leave the folder at the mouth. Paddy could feel herself salivating. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘He left it with me, in the safe.’
‘When?’
> ‘A year ago.’
It might be nothing to do with his murder. Her interest blunted, she looked at him, but Fitzpatrick was working a move. He licked his bottom lip, looking back at her with a steady, distracted eye.
‘What’s in it?’
‘I couldn’t say.’ He almost smiled.
She pressed him further. ‘Can I look at what’s in it?’
‘No. I could give it to you now, to take away, but you’d need to sign off the claim to the house.’
He waited. She waited. His eyes slid to the side. With every second thudding past, the realization dawned on Fitzpatrick that she wasn’t that hungry for the folder.
She cleared her throat. ‘You know Wendy Hewitt then, do you?’
His eyelids contracted momentarily, widening. ‘Not personally, no.’
‘Do you represent her professionally?’
‘No,’ he said, too quickly.
She suddenly didn’t give a shit any more. She stood up. ‘Fuck this, I’m off.’
Fitzpatrick stood up to meet her. ‘But his effects, you need to clear out his flat.’
‘What?’
‘His effects. The landlord wants the flat emptied or he’ll have the house cleared …’
‘Well, that’s your responsibility, surely?’
‘It’s a tiny amount of stuff. Rubbish. You could bin it.’
Paddy had the impression that he’d had a first scan of the belongings and thought it was all worthless. But he wouldn’t know, and whatever it was, it was stuff Merki wasn’t being offered.
She thought of sitting in the house tonight with Pete playing in his bedroom, listening always for Michael Collins’s soft knock at the door. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Where is it?’
‘Partick.’ He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a set of keys on a round of dirty string with a paper tag. ‘40 Lawrence Street. Here are the keys.’
Paddy snatched them from his hand. ‘This is your job, Fitzpatrick. I know it is. Don’t think I don’t know.’
II
Terry’s Effects
The gardens set the street apart. Old trees flourished in the small front gardens, high as the blocks themselves, roots escaping the gardens and bursting up through the pavements like fingers through warm butter. Some of the front gardens were chaotically overgrown, one was gravelled, but the one in front of Terry’s close door was a picture book of giant flowers, bushes heavy with vibrant red and blue and yellow. A sun-bleached deckchair sat under a gnarled old tree, a book lying face down by its side. The gardens were fenced in with functional black railings, replacements for the wrought-iron rails melted down as part of the war effort.
Pete looked out of the car window at the deckchair. ‘Why do we need to come here?’
‘I need to sort through a friend’s things,’ said Paddy, reluctant to get out of the car. She was afraid of what she might find in Terry’s flat, afraid he might have photos of her, have written her one last desperate lovelorn missive and not had time to post it.
‘Why?’
Dub raised an eyebrow at her from the passenger seat.
‘Just promised I would, that’s all.’
Pete looked out of the window again. ‘Has the friend gone away?’
‘Yeah.’
Whatever questions Terry’s flat threw up, they couldn’t be more complicated than the ones in the car. Paddy opened the door and stepped out into the warm street. The high summer sun lifted the soft smell of cut grass and blossom into the air. Beyond the block, cars hurried by on the busy road, but Lawrence Street was sleepy, the warm air trapped in the shallow valley of flats.
Terry’s flat was in a classically proportioned, pedimented block of low blond sandstone. Golden summer sun picked out the dirt on the windows and the shabbiness of the cheap curtains. One of the windows on the second floor had a big dangerous crack across a pane, mended on the inside with masking tape.
The car door next to Paddy opened but she stopped it with a firm hand. ‘What have I told ye? Always get out on the pavement side.’
Pete mumbled an apology and bumped his bottom along the seat to the other door.
Dub was standing next to her. ‘Do you get to keep all this stuff ?’
‘I don’t really know. I think so. I get to keep it until the will’s overturned anyway.’
‘Might be worth a few quid. Might be jewellery.’ ‘Yeah, Terry was always mad for his big gold chains, wasn’t he?’
‘Well,’ said Dub, reluctant to be wrong, ‘I saw him wearing a ruby tiara and matching sandshoes once.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ She smiled away from him. ‘I remember them. High heels?’
‘High heels and a sketch of the Last Supper picked out on the toe. Judas was cross-eyed.’
‘A lovely shoe.’
‘Two lovely shoes.’ Dub nudged her supportively. She turned to look at him and found him smiling at his feet. He was a full foot taller than her, handsome in an odd way. They had been friends for years, since before she ever spoke to Terry Hewitt, and sometimes, like today, she felt so fond of him she wanted to grab him and kiss him. She looked away. ‘Right, let’s do this.’
Pete waited dutifully on the pavement until Paddy walked over and took his hand, leading him along the street and up the path between the two sets of railings to Terry’s front door. She fitted the key and let them into the close.
It was dark and smelled of damp chalk. A marble-patterned rubberized floor was stained with greasy puddles. As they climbed the wide circular stairs to the top floor, Paddy trailed her hand along the curved oak handrail. Cobwebs hung between the cast-iron banisters.
The front door to the flat was unpainted plywood with a single lock, the tang of newly seasoned wood still hanging off it. On the door frame, peeling Sellotape bordered a list of six names written in biro block capitals. The doormat was filthy. They could hear the squawk of a television inside.
Dub curled his lip. ‘It’s a bedsit. Why was he still living in bedsits?’
Paddy shrugged and put her arm around Pete’s shoulders. ‘He always did. I don’t know why. The lawyer said he had a house. Should we knock or just go in?’
Dub shrugged. ‘Knock, probably.’
‘I’ll knock,’ said Pete and gave the door a loud, rude thump with the base of his fist.
‘Pete! You don’t knock on a door like that—’
Steps preceded the flinging open of the door. A man in a stripy T-shirt opened the door, wiping floured hands on a tea towel tucked into the waistband of his trousers. He looked expectantly at them.
‘Sorry about the banging.’ Paddy nodded at Pete. ‘A bit eager.’
‘What can I do for you?’
‘Um, well, you know about Terry? I’m here to get his things.’
The man wasn’t really listening though; he was smiling at Dub’s trousers. They were made out of ticking, blue and green with a white stripe, like the covering on an old-fashioned mattress.
‘I recognize those kegs. You’re Dub McKenzie. I used to see you compering at Blackfriars Comedy Club all the time.’
‘Right? Do I know you?’
‘Nah.’ The man shook his head. ‘Nah, nah, nah, just a punter. I heard you were managing George Burns.’
‘Was, yeah.’
‘Did you fall out and tell him to do the Variety Show?’
Dub smirked. ‘I told him not to do it and then he sacked me.’
‘God, it’s shit.’
‘Isn’t it, though?’
They grinned at each other for a moment until Pete’s patience ran out and he pushed at the door.
‘Pete, don’t,’ said Paddy, wishing she could open her mouth without getting him into trouble.
‘Ah, come in, wee man.’
The guy opened the door and let Pete in. Seven doors led off the hallway, all of them shut tight apart from the kitchen, which was straight ahead. A red tartan carpet had been laid over a number of other fitted carpets and stood two inches off the ground. A ripped paper s
hade hung from a flaking ceiling. The warm smell of bacon floated out to greet them.
‘Bacon sarnie?’ asked Dub.
‘Just, eh’ – the guy looked embarrassed – ‘knocking up a quiche.’
‘Can ye do that? I thought they were sterile.’
The guy mouthed a drum roll/cymbal clash and the two men smiled.
‘Which room’s Terry’s?’
He pointed to the door next to the kitchen. It was sealed with a padlock small enough to fit on a suitcase. The key to it was on the string Fitzpatrick had given her, flimsy as paper. She fitted it in the lock and opened the door into a large room.
Two long windows at one end looked straight across the street into facing flats. The sun was shining in through them, filtered and softened by the dirty filigree on the glass. The floorboards were painted black, chipped and dusty.
Terry had pulled the wallpaper off. Small scraps were still clustered by the skirting board and powdery residue covered the walls. The paint underneath had been a dark green but it was chipped and faded, a South American wall. She could imagine markets being held in front of it, executions taking place against it, children idling at its foot.
Terry had been camping more than living there. His bed was a bare mattress with dirty crumpled sheets, his duvet coverless and grey. The room was too big for his meagre belongings: a silver trunk sat by the near wall, an old ghetto blaster nearby. Next to the mattress sat a large blue duffle bag, already packed with his clothes. Paddy recognized it: he’d had that bag when she saw him off on the train to London eight years ago. Lined up along the bottom of one wall were novels, Penguin Classics mostly, the paper yellowed and battered from being lovingly read.
‘I’m really sorry about Terry,’ said the quiche-maker. ‘He was only here a month or two, I didn’t really know him. Nice guy though.’
In the empty expanse of dusty black floorboards she could see footsteps picked out in the dust, a cleared muddle in the middle of the room and steps leading away and back from it.
‘People have been in here,’ said Paddy, pointing at the disturbances in the dust.
