She knew the story inside out and it had everything: exotic locations, secret-service machinations, a shoot-out across Glasgow, a faithful wife, and a beleaguered hero who won in the end.
As she chewed the end of her pen, looked hard at the blank page in front of her, she felt the will to ever write anything about Patrick Meehan slipping away from her. The only reason she’d started was that she thought it would be easy.
She reached down to the other side and picked up her notepad and the cuttings she had kept about Vhari.
The green woodburner gave off a warm glow as she settled back in her chair, doodling in the margin of the pad, listening to the graphite scratch of her pencil. Vhari Burnett had retreated into the house after they had pulled her teeth out. She would have known by then that they were vicious enough to kill her and yet she had slipped out of view and had gone back inside. Paddy couldn’t imagine anything that would induce her to martyr herself. It couldn’t have been money, Vhari didn’t care about that. It didn’t seem to be a case she was working on, either. But whatever it was, she cared enough about it to give up her only chance of escape.
Paddy looked at the blank page again and tried to imagine Patrick Meehan doing anything, meeting Betty, being questioned, standing trial. All she could see was a pockmarked man sitting at a table, looking at her expectantly, waiting impatiently for her opening gambit. But she didn’t have one.
If she was ever going to write any of it she’d need to do something. McVie was the only man who could help her.
II
For reasons as deep as a volcanic plug, Scotland mourned Sundays. Churches and pubs and newsagents were the only things open. Even the telly was rubbish. By teatime most areas were shuttered and fly-blown. Cars in the streets moved slowly, as though afraid to stir up the leaden air.
The address McVie had given her was in the back lane of the old warehouse buildings that were being renovated and sold to yuppies. His building was down a narrow street, the high buildings on either side swallowing what light there was. On the corner of his building was a pub: a grubby, tired working-man’s bar, a remainder from a time when the area had a workforce and a purpose.
Paddy passed the pool of light outside the pub and made a mental note that she could run back here if anyone jumped out at her from the shadows.
The doorway to McVie’s building was a grand double door set in an arched frame of pale green glazed bricks, its splendor lost in the narrow alley. A pristine panel of buzzers with names next to them hummed. Paddy pressed the button marked MCVIE and waited.
“Yes?”
It was a man’s voice, but he was English and sounded young.
“H-hello?” she stuttered. “I was looking for George McVie?”
He paused for a moment. “Who are you?”
“I’m Paddy Meehan, from his work.”
The voice asked someone something and came back to the intercom. “Come in. Two flights up.”
Intrigued, she pressed one of the big doors with her fingertips and it clicked open in her hand, letting her into a wood-paneled lobby with a modern staircase on the right. Above her, somewhere along the ribbon handrail, she heard a door open and the soft sound of a piano concerto playing on a radio station.
Climbing the stairs toward the sound she wondered if George might have a son from England, or a cousin perhaps. She didn’t know what his domestic situation was. Before the recent change in his behavior she’d assumed he lived somewhere middle-class with grown-up children who sided with their mother, that they all lived together in a house in the suburbs that looked nicer from the outside than it did on the inside, that they were unhappy and too cowardly or unimaginative to leave each other.
A barefoot man was standing on the landing above her. He smiled as she turned the corner. He shifted his weight, resting his hip against the railing as he dried his hands on a tea towel, standing to attention as she approached, holding his hand out to her. He had a flattop haircut, and he wore a white T-shirt worn soft with a hundred washings and a pair of stonewashed denims with a pleated front.
Paddy took his hand and shook it.
“I’m Ben,” he said, an excited throb in his voice.
Paddy was so distracted by Ben’s face she almost forgot to introduce herself: she could have sworn he was wearing mascara and lip gloss. Either that or he had just been swimming, climbed out of the pool, and ate a greasy chicken portion without licking his lips.
She took his hand. “Paddy.”
“Hello.” Ben shook her hand and held onto it, pulling her through a small door, into a low corridor, and out into a large room with a strip of kitchen against the back wall. Facing the kitchen, magnificent windows ran the full length of the room. Unfortunately, the view was of a brick wall twenty feet away, the monotony of it broken only by a few small, dirty office windows, dark now.
Below the big windows, as far from the door as was possible in the room, sat McVie. He was in a chintzy armchair, chosen for a different sort of house, stagily holding a book as if he were reading it. Every muscle on his face was taut, creating deep inverted commas above his eyebrows.
“Georgie.” Ben spoke his name as if he was giving him a warning.
McVie looked up and pretended to be surprised. “Oh, hello. Paddy.”
Something was going on, something homosexual, but Paddy wasn’t worldly enough to know what it was. Her mother said homos were men so debauched that they had tried everything else, the implication being that nothing was dirtier than a man with a man. She’d laughed at Trisha’s naïveté, but the fraught atmosphere was making her wonder. The only homosexual she had seen in the movies was the lonely guy in Fame who had a psychiatrist and a ginger Afro. Would there be nudity? Would she be expected to dance? Would she be expected to dance nude? She made a panicked face at McVie.
“What?” He stood up from his chair, rattled and frightened.
Paddy waved her open palms at him.
“What’s wrong with her?” said Ben tartly.
She wanted to leave but Ben was between her and the door. She looked around the flat for an alternative exit. Everything in it was brand new but the furniture was old-fashioned. The walls were new, the kitchen looked immaculate. She doubted the cooker had ever been used.
“Nice flat,” she said, as a filler.
Ben pulled his T-shirt up at the waist to scratch his stomach. “We just moved in.”
“Where were you before?”
“He lived in Mount Vernon. I was in a bedsit in Govanhill.” He looked accusingly at McVie. “It was shit. I was there for months.”
McVie looked at Ben, a staggered look that started on his bared stomach and rose, softening, until it reached Ben’s eyes. She suddenly understood that McVie loved him. There would be no naked dancing, no untoward touching. Ben was the reason McVie had bought flowers, the reason he looked younger and dressed himself nicely.
“Am I the first person you’ve had up from work?”
Ben answered for him. “Yes. Georgie’s met all my friends from college and I’ve not met any of his friends.”
“Because I haven’t got any friends,” explained McVie, dropping his book.
“So.” Paddy didn’t want to get in the middle of a fight. “Which college are you at?”
“ Royal Academy of Music.”
“Brilliant. What do you play?”
Ben smiled arrogantly. “Most things,” he said.
McVie frowned and looked out of the window at the brick wall. Her invitation was a test. Paddy knew he had given her his address and asked her up because she didn’t matter. If the visit went badly it would be a containable disaster because no one at work listened to her anyway. To be a sexually active woman in the newsroom was hard, she realized, but to be a poof in love would be very hell.