The Last Breath

by Denise Mina

  She turned to the wall. ‘Merki’s got a byline?’

  ‘Go and get tomorrow’s edition of the News. They’ve found the gun.’

  She hung up.

  Mary Ann had helped herself to another cigarette and held her head in her hands, the contaminating smoke curling up to the pulley of Pete’s clothes drying above her head.

  ‘Put that fag out,’ Paddy said firmly. ‘We’re going for a drive.’

  II

  It felt strange bringing Mary Ann to the News building. Just sitting in the car with her felt like a bizarre clash of the two distinct halves of her life. Paddy didn’t really know who to be: Mary Ann’s giggly wee sister or the braying harridan she was for work. It would have felt more odd if Mary Ann had been acting like Mary Ann but she was quiet, worried, fretting. She kept touching her hair, looking for a strand long enough to lose her fingers in. The cut was so bad it looked as if her hair had been singed off.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Paddy, opening the door. The absurd thought occurred to her that Mary Ann might slip out and disappear for ever in the dark of the car park. She swung her handbag on to her sister’s lap. ‘Get a cigarette out of there and smoke it. I’ll be two seconds.’

  The delivery men were working hard, swinging bales of papers along a line into the vans, their rhythm interrupted by the sight of Paddy Meehan walking out of the dark night to take a copy from a burst bale that had been discarded to the side.

  It was front page, with Merki’s name on it and a picture of the ditch Terry had been found in, strung along with police tape. A small inset photograph showed Terry as a young man, grinning cheesily at the photographer. She could see from the collar that he had his leather jacket on, the one with the red shoulder pads. She turned, walking back to the car, stroking the picture tenderly with her index finger, inadvertently smearing the damp ink and staining her hand.

  The burning red tip of the cigarette flared in the windscreen as Paddy walked towards the car. She hardly knew this Mary Ann. She hadn’t yet taken her final vows so leaving the convent would be slightly less of a wrench, if that was what she wanted. But Father Andrew had. Paddy could well imagine the courtship, the looks and Mary Ann’s blushes, the stolen moments in chilly convent corridors, a brush of the hand, a longing look, and Father Andrew’s pasty arse as he pumped his cock into her sister.

  She opened the door and fell into the driver’s seat, snatching the cigarette out of Mary Ann’s hand and throwing it on to the dirt floor of the car park. ‘Right, you. I need to know some things: how long has this been going on?’

  From the habit of complying with barked orders Mary Ann told her: nearly a year. They’d met when he came to say a special mass for the missions. They saw each other in secret. He didn’t want to leave the priesthood.

  ‘Do you want to leave the convent?’

  Mary Ann said she didn’t know.

  ‘You can come and stay with me.’

  Mary Ann didn’t answer and although Paddy would never say, she was a little offended. She flattened the newspaper out over the steering wheel and flicked on the cabin light.

  Mary Ann muttered by her side, ‘Got any more fags?’

  Paddy nodded at her bag.

  ‘Finished,’ said Mary Ann.

  ‘We’ll stop in a minute and get some.’

  Merki was back on form, no doubt about it. In perfect house style he reported that the police had found the gun used to shoot Terence Hewitt in the head, execution-style. Contrary to previous reports it wasn’t an IRA gun and they were now certain that the murder wasn’t anything to do with the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The gun had been found near the scene of the crime, and police ballistics had confirmed a match with the bullet used to kill Terence. They were now looking for a lone gunman and robbery was the suspected motive. The report was headlined as an exclusive.

  ‘What’s this?’ Mary Ann was trying to read it over her shoulder.

  ‘In a leap and a bound he was free,’ said Paddy. ‘The guy who wrote this hasn’t had his name on an article for ten months. He’s ambitious though. An unscrupulous source could get him to write that the Queen was a man if he thought it would get his career out of the toilet.’

  She folded the paper in half and threw it on to the back seat.

  III

  Mary Ann cried in the car as they sat outside the convent, smoking in the dark. She tried to talk to Paddy but her feelings came out as a jumble of unconnected half-sentences, absent verbs and missing nouns making a nonsense of a painful but familiar story of thwarted love. Paddy didn’t want to question her or make her clarify what she was saying; she did want to know the details but flinched from prying. At the same time, she suddenly felt she had her sister back, a woman who was the same age as her, instead of a childbride of Christ who believed in miracles and fairy stories.

  Paddy watched as she walked off to the convent gate, pressing the illuminated doorbell and giving her a last longing look as she waited for the answer. Mary Ann looked so pretty suddenly, with the ivy on the convent walls curling up around the door to frame her, her short blonde hair lit from behind by the light on the buzzer; even the plain dress with its dowdy shirt collar and nasty buttons looked nice.

  The door opened and the convent swallowed her once again.

  Paddy drove away down the hill towards the West End. Stopped at a light, she imagined Mary Ann coming to stay with her, leaving the crushing grey conformity of the Church, and a flare of burning exultation exploded in her chest.

  She threw her head back and screamed her sister’s name.

  IV

  She left the radio off, the television off and the door to her study open so that she could hear any noise at all outside the front door. Michael Collins wouldn’t come back, she knew he wouldn’t, not tonight anyway, although her instinct to scan the horizon for tigers had been strong since Pete was born. Every sharp corner, every fast car was a potential assailant. It made her police him and nag and put anything dangerous up high, and now write an inflammatory column about the Troubles with one ear to the door.

  They’d left all of Terry’s things in the hall, keeping them separate in case the lawyer asked for them back. She’d moved the silver trunk behind the front door so that anyone breaking in would need to push it along the floor before they could get in. Even so, she’d sleep with her door open tonight.

  Having finished her column, she got it down to within five words of the word count so the editors didn’t have the scope to chew it up too much, and lifted the phone to call it in. The male copy taker took her column down for her, clarifying a couple of lines, correcting her punctuation once with a polite question. When she was finished she thanked him, pretended she did remember him from Father Richards’s leaving do years ago, and hung up.

  She should clean up the kitchen and get Pete’s gym kit ready so she didn’t have too much to do when she woke up in six hours’ time. She stopped for breath in the dark hallway, listening for the rhythm of Pete’s breathing but getting Dub’s narrow whistle instead. Terry’s portfolio was leaning against the wall with the yew box at its foot. She picked them up and took them into the kitchen.

  Putting them both on the table, she went to Dub’s food cupboard and took out the giant jar of peanut butter, scooping a spoonful out and sticking it in her mouth before she could think about it, rolling her tongue around the spoon, savouring the salty sweetness, promising herself that she wouldn’t have another. Except one. She rolled the spoon around the inside of the jar, getting a gravity-defying spoonful and eating the top off it so it didn’t spill while she was fitting the lid back on.

  She sat down. Terry’s box was lovely, well crafted and made from thick flawless wood. She opened the lid. It was lined with lilac velvet, faded over time to a crisp brown. Most of the photos were of Terry, as a baby, as a toddler in a garden, Terry at Pete’s age standing proud and stiff in a brand new school uniform, Terry as a chubby teen with his hair over his eyes, drinking Coke and laughing. The photos stopped
abruptly when he got to seventeen, when his parents died. There were photos of his parents and some older ones, black and white, of an old lady grinning by a large oak mantelpiece, of his parents’ wedding. His mother had a bob and a shy smile. At the bottom of the box were small nameless mementos: a newspaper cutting about a school play with Terry’s name underlined, a cat collar with a flattened tin bell on it, a tiny piece of green ribbon holding two matching wedding bands together, his and hers.

  His parents had died in a car crash. She kissed the dusty strip of ribbon and felt sad, whether for them or for him she didn’t know. If she’d been honest she might have admitted it was for him.

  These were his most important family memories, she realized, which meant that the worn brown folder Fitzpatrick had in his office had something altogether different in it.

  She dropped the pictures back in the box, shut it and wiped the lid with her hand, setting it gently on the chair next to her, and turned to the portfolio.

  It was black, greying because of the dust from the high-up cupboard in the flat, an exact copy of Kevin’s portfolio. Maybe they had bought them together. Terry always liked stationery. He used Moleskine notepads when he travelled – they’d found a box of the battered notebooks in the suitcase in the trunk.

  She unfurled the elastic strap and opened the portfolio, slipping the sheets of photographic paper out of the cupped side and setting them flat on the table. A small Moleskine pad was tucked in at the back. Flicking through it, she read Terry’s jittery shorthand and realized that these were notes of the interviews of all the photo subjects, numbered up to forty, dated variously over a month last year. She looked back at the pictures. Senga – New Jersey. Billy – Long Island. The others were without the accompanying text, just bare photos, but they each had Kevin’s touch. Brilliant crisp light, sharp colours and a person in the foreground, smiling or not, beautiful or not, all relaxed, all honest and open-faced.

  There was one black face, a woman with an aristocratic African profile, standing on the sunny side of a long narrow street of red-brick tenements in New York with fire escapes snaking up them. Quartz specks in the tarmac glittered in the sun. Her smile was crooked, as if she was trying to hide her teeth, and her hair was pulled up into waspish yellow and black braids that swirled around her head.

  Whoever the woman was, Paddy assumed she’d made a happy transition to the States. There were so few black people in Scotland that the two black Glaswegians she knew of were minor celebrities. One was an academic from the West Indies who taught at Glasgow University and had married a fellow linguist. Another, younger man worked as a sound engineer for Scottish Opera and drank in the Chip. Kevin’s woman looked African and Paddy assumed she had been adopted by a well-meaning Scottish couple and escaped as soon as possible. She looked very young to be an expatriate.

  Paddy was looking at the photo when her eye caught a detail in the background. If the picture had been smaller or the image less sharply defined by the slanted light in the street she wouldn’t have noticed it.

  Michael Collins had been thinner then. He was two hundred yards behind the woman, leaning over the roof of a big green car. He wore a thin peach summer shirt, his trousers sitting slack on his hips, the sunlight flashing off his glasses. Collins wasn’t looking at the camera. In fact, if Kevin had been quick, he wouldn’t even have been aware that a photographer was taking a picture down the street at all. As he leaned over the roof of the car his mouth was open in a laugh, hair cropped tight to his head. Across, at the roadside passenger door, was another man, a fat man in a dark suit, his face obscured as he twisted and reached for the door handle.

  Paddy sat back and downed the wine, elated. She had a photo of him. It was him in New York and some time ago, but it was a photo of him none the less, captured in a mundane moment, giving a friend a lift.

  She checked Terry’s notebook for names, looking for any with an African flavour: Morag, Alison, Barney, Tim, none of them fitted with the black woman. But if she had been adopted, her parents might have given her a Scottish name. The Scots had colonized half of Africa on behalf of the Empire. For all she knew, Morag could be a common Ethiopian name.

  She thought of Terry again, sitting in a bar, sweating, drunk, his arm around a hungry young girl, and shivered, shaking the thought away.

  Kevin Hatcher would know who the woman was, where the picture was taken, maybe even the name of the man in the background or some information Paddy could use to trace him and protect herself and Pete. But it was one o’clock in the morning and it would be rude to phone.

  Instead, she packed Pete’s gym kit and loaded the dishwasher. Instead, she washed her face, brushed her teeth. Instead, she went to bed feeling pleased that she had something to go on, a picture of Michael Collins.

  She should have grabbed Pete and run.

  13

  Yeah

  His neighbours were having a party. Back in his drinking days Kevin had been at many Monday night parties himself and knew how joyless they were. They were after-closing-time affairs, dragging through to the cold, damp morning, full of melancholy drinkers chasing a cheap carry-out, banding together solely to consume. He remembered ten-hour nights when conversation was an irksome incidental. Badly coordinated women, who had lost their looks to wine and late nights, doing sexy dancing together while dead-eyed men looked on. Music was mortar to plug the silences. He never wanted to go back there. But tonight the occasional howl and whoop through the wall, the guitar music and the grim hubbub sounded warm and friendly.

  The pain in his arm and chin were seeping away and, held still as he was, he could feel the certainty that everything was going to be fine pulse through his body.

  His stomach disagreed. It convulsed, once, twice, and the grip on his chin tightened.

  ‘Don’t fucking spew. You spew you swallow, understand?’

  He was holding Kevin’s mouth shut, a hard hand pressed tightly under his chin.

  It was dark in the room. He’d left the lights off when he dragged Kevin in here and threw him into the armchair. The curtains were open. They were always open: Kevin didn’t mind people across the road looking in if they could be bothered. He could see out now, a couple with their backs to him watching telly in a soft light. A dark room. A man washing his hands at a kitchen sink.

  The man had been kneeling on Kevin’s forearm for what felt like hours. He had lost the feeling in his fingers, in his wrist, and his elbow was pressed tight against the leather but it didn’t seem to hurt now. Nothing seemed to hurt now. Even his teeth, even his jaw which the man had levered open with a chisel before he put the little paper packages into the back of his throat and forced the water in, making him swallow.

  Kevin looked up at the steel-rimmed glasses, the orange street lights from below reflected on the square lenses, and sensed that, of the two of them, his assailant was feeling worse than he was. The man was desperate and afraid. Sweating.

  ‘Spew and you swallow.’

  Kevin’s mood had turned as quickly as a loose feather in a high wind. He knew everything would be OK, whereas a moment ago he had felt helpless and trapped.

  The heat came first, a burning heat to his face and chest. A veil of sweat slid across his eyes and the music next door was matched and overtaken by his own heartbeat thudding, faster and faster, pushing through his face. He couldn’t see.

  Suddenly, his every muscle tightened to its fullest extent and he stood up, the small man sliding off his lap like a napkin. The man grabbed Kevin’s ankles but was powerless against the buzz of strength flooding through Kevin’s every sinew.

  Smiling, a ray of all-powerful light himself, Kevin lifted his foot and stamped on his assailant’s hand. He heard the man cry out, curl into a ball at his feet, half under the coffee table, but Kevin didn’t care. It was wonderful not to care. He stamped again, missing him this time but it didn’t matter. He turned to the room. Light was bursting from every surface. The door. He should go to the door and get out.


  He took three steps, a colossus striding forth, the cool night air caressing his hot skin, his chest leading the way, his heart bursting forward, pushing him out to the close where it would be even colder, even better. He imagined his face pressed tight against the cold of the bare stone, absorbing the delicious tingling chill. One of the drunken neighbours shouted ‘yeah’ and Kevin turned back at the living-room doorway, shouting back, his voice touching theirs through the wall.

  Yeah.

  An absolute communion of voices. Perfect. Something small was scrabbling at his feet, something grabbing, scratching, pulling at his legs, tugging him.

  White light, cool light, flooded spontaneously out of the wall at him, glorious, thrilling. He shut his eyes for one second but forgot to open them again.

  He was on the floor, on his side, his arm curled into a tight ball under his chin, his whole left side throbbing to the music. His face was wet.

  In the sky above him a foot stepped over his head, a body moved and a sole hovered above his face. Two orange squares of vicious brightness glinted down at him.

  Kevin shut his eyes again.

  A voice through a wall called to him, tugging him back to grimy rooms, to sticky settees and black Monday night parties full of the dead.

  Yeah.

  14

  Sleek Rats

  Callum was exhausted. His room was small and dark and warm, warmer than any room he’d been in for a long time. Although it was summer they had the heating on and he couldn’t have the sheet over him without getting clammy. But the tiredness was partly because he hadn’t been alone for over nine hours. He didn’t think he would miss being alone so much.

  It was a tiny room, half the size of the smallest cell he’d lived in. The single bed took up most of the floor and faced a bookshelf and a white plastic wardrobe with one door missing. He had to walk sideways to get round to the window.