Stepping out to the street she saw the car parked right in front of the close, Billy watching the entrance hopefully. He saw her and gave a nervous smile and raised his hand. She opened the dented passenger door and fell in.
“’Kay?” he asked, turning in his seat to look at her.
“Nothing happened. ’S dead anyway. Let’s do the hospitals and go back to the office,” she said, dredging up the stock phrases they used each night.
“Okay then,” agreed Billy carefully, seeing how upset she was. “That’s what we’ll do, then.”
He wasn’t just worried about his job. She could tell that he was sorry for losing his temper and sad to see her crying in the street on her own. He tried to look at her a couple of times but she didn’t look back.
Burns’d told everyone. It was only two days ago and everyone in Glasgow knew. He looked her in the eye and lied about it. She would never, ever forgive him. And she would get him back. If she had to wait for years and years and years she’d humiliate him as much as he had her.
TWENTY-TWO. FIRE
I
They were parked in the darkness outside the Royal Hospital. Apart from a couple of consultants’ discreetly posh cars the car park was empty. Yellow lights blazed in most of the windows of the huge soot-blackened Victorian hospital, and a brittle silver frost hung in the air. Inside the warm car it was snuggle-up bedtime dark. Paddy’s heart rate had slowed so much that she was having trouble remembering why it would be wrong to sleep.
Billy cracked the window and lit his cigarette but Paddy stayed in the backseat. Sundays were always quiet, but the Royal’s emergency room was a good place to pick up stories that missed the police’s attention. Gangsters often traveled across the city if they were stabbed or slashed, sometimes coming as far as ten miles in a taxi, clutching tea towels to their wounds, because the Royal surgeons were reputedly the best in the city.
For the first time Paddy wished peace on the city. She wanted a quick return to the twilight office, to get away from Billy, licking her wounds until home time.
Billy watched her in the mirror. “Ye not going in?”
“Yeah.” She looked across the car park to the hospital door. A man in a thin brown shirt stood outside the door, smoking and hugging himself against the cold air. He had a large white bandage over one ear. Paddy didn’t stir. “Can I have a cigarette, Billy?”
“You don’t smoke.”
“Just to gee me along a bit.”
He gave her a disapproving look but reached across his shoulder and handed her one. She lit it and took a deep breath, filling her lungs until her fingers tingled. She felt better, a little elated, and took another little drag for good luck before giving the cigarette back to him.
“Nip that for me, will ye? I’ll not be long.”
“Did it wake ye?”
She opened the door and stepped out into the car park. “Wee bit, aye.”
She stepped carefully across the slippery frosted asphalt and passed the man with the sore ear at the main entrance. Down a drafty beige corridor, she passed through automatic double doors and into the searing white light of the emergency department’s waiting room.
A motley crowd of people were scattered around the seats inside. Some looked miserable and worn, some excited and bright. From a cursory look Paddy couldn’t tell who was sick and who was a chaperone. The woman behind the Plexiglas was a pretty brunette with a Western Isles accent and a taste for gory stories.
“Hi, Marcelli, anything big tonight?”
Marcelli shook her head. “Nothing very much at all, I’m afraid.”
“No gangster action tonight? No stabbings or swordplay or anything?”
“Nope. Sorry. The German’s left.”
Paddy smiled. “The German doing the thesis?”
“Aye. I’m in mourning.” If the German doctor didn’t know that Marcelli fancied him he was either blind or gay or both, Paddy thought. He had been writing a thesis about the sword injuries he witnessed during his time at the Royal, arguing that the blunt heavy swords created injuries that would match those from a medieval battleground.
“How’s work? Keeping busy?”
“Aye, busy enough.”
Marcelli looked at the wipe-clean board behind her head. The morning shift cleaning women washed the board with soapy water so the buildup of blue smudges generally expressed how busy the department had been. The board was almost pristine tonight.
“It’s all colds and falls tonight, I’m afraid.”
The two women smiled at each other politely, inquired after one another’s families. Marcelli’s husband worked the oil rigs and spent two weeks offshore and two weeks on. She had the content, rested look she always had when he was away. Paddy guessed that they fought a lot when he was home.
She patted the counter and told Marcelli she’d see her tomorrow.
“I’ll see if I can rustle up a gang brawl for ye.”
“Cheers, Marcelli.”
She walked out of the department, through the lobby, and out to the cusp of the dark, dark night.
The sore-eared man was smoking a fresh cigarette at the doorway. Hunched against the cold, he caught her eye and smiled, a little hopefully, mistaking her frank stare for a come-on instead of rudeness born of exhaustion. Paddy glanced away, toward the calls car, and saw the red winking eye of Billy’s cigarette rise in the driver’s window. On the far side of the car a black shadow darted toward the road.
A scorching ball of orange light seared the delicate membrane of her eyes before she had time to blink. Paddy fell backward, tripping on a step, a hand over her eyes as she heard the back of her head crack on the stone step. Lafferty might be coming for her across the car park, he could have the hammer in his hand, the one he used to batter Vhari to death, but Paddy still couldn’t make her eyes open or get up to run away. Blind as a newborn puppy, she curled into a ball and waited for him. She heard the fire in the calls car whoosh and crackle, felt the wet of the frost on the step biting her cheek.
Someone was running toward her, urgent footsteps slapping on linoleum, and a sudden wordless cry. The feet were coming from inside the hospital, and were joined by others, a lot of people, flooding into the car park. Nurses and ambulance crews were running past her to the car. Billy was in the car.
Paddy sat up, holding the wall as she pulled herself onto her feet and stood up on unsteady legs. She could still feel the heat from the fire on her face as she forced her eyes open. Every window in the car was cracked and broken, angry orange flames lapping the roof. The driver’s door lay open and Billy was on the ground, his body obscured by a gathering of medics. Protruding between two sets of legs lay a charred arm, the fingers skinned red, curled into a tight claw.
A shoulder bumped hers and startled her into spinning around. It was the sore-eared man standing inside the door, flattened against one of the cold marble pillars, the bandage on his ear hanging crazily at the side of his head, hinged by white tape.
She grabbed his arm and shook him. “Did you see him? Did you see who it was?”
He shook his head at her, pointing at her lips, asking her to slow down because he couldn’t hear. She pointed out to the blackness and commotion and the burning car, being tackled by porters throwing buckets of sand over it.