"Slip of the Knife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mina Denise)

III

The Daily News office wasn’t far from the mortuary. A committed journalist would have run the three blocks to file her exclusive. Whatever the truth of it, Terry’s assassination would make a great, fat, scaremongering story. The press would embrace it because it suggested they were involved in a noble, life-threatening venture, and the Scottish public would follow it to find out if they were really about to be plunged into a war. She could break the story as an anonymous news item, then quash the rumor furiously in her column on Wednesday and still turn out to be right.

But instead of hurrying to the office, Paddy drove numbly around, taking corners that led her away from the office, slowly circling the city center and heading down towards the river.

The light above the basement door was sharp and hurt her eyes. It was a dark part of town, a warren of warehouses on the south bank of the slow, cold river, in an area that had once been a bustling commercial center by the docks. A moist cold seemed to hang over it. When Paddy got out of the car the wet chill hit her face and she huddled in her thin dress as she hurried across the road to the door.

Saturdays were always quiet at the soup kitchen. Everyone who worked there had a different theory as to why: on weekends even the homeless were invited to drinking parties; they got too drunk to make it over on Saturdays; takeaway shops gave out free food when they were closing up and you didn’t need to stay sober or mouth prayers to get that handout.

Two men in double coats were sitting at a table near the door, the crumbs from jam rolls and empty bowls of soup lying in front of them. One was asleep, the other blinking hard and looking around, bewildered and innocent as an abandoned child. Nearer the counter a few more men sat at tables, eating. Some of them were respectably dressed in old suits, or clean pressed denims. The Talbot Centre must have been giving away clean clothes.

The steel counter was ablaze with strip lights. Behind it, on scrubbed steel tables out of grab range, sat trays of buttered rolls with clear red jam dribbling out of them. A large tureen of soup, a plastic slow cooker that plugged into the wall, stood on the counter next to a stack of bowls.

Sister Tansy was alone behind the counter, her mouth perpetually a tightly drawn string bag, eyes despising whatever hove into her line of vision. Sister Tansy wore the long white coat the nuns always wore at the kitchen, a cross between a dinner lady and a doctor. She saw Paddy approaching and her shoulders rose in a silent ripple of fury, eyes glued suddenly to the lentil-crusted soup tureen.

When Paddy had said that Sister Tansy was one dry sherry away from committing a massacre, Mary Ann laughed with a self-censoring hand over her mouth.

“Hi, Sister, is Mary Ann about?”

“No.” She took the lid off the soup and stirred, bringing a cloud of floury green to the surface.

“Hm.” Paddy looked at her insistently. “I need to see her.”

“Ahe, well, ahe, ahe,” she tittered angrily, “I really don’t think that this is the place for-”

“Paddy.”

Mary Ann was standing behind Sister Tansy, side on to Paddy, smiling over her shoulder at her sister. She wore the white dinner-lady coat, her blond hair pulled back in a hairnet, her cheeks touched fairy pink from the heat in the kitchen.

“Hiya.” Paddy stared across at her sister, calmed by the sight of her.

“OK?”

“Fine.” She managed a weak smile. “Just wanted to see ye.”

Sister Tansy stepped between them and did her phony laugh. “Ahe, ahe, we are quite busy, actually.”

Paddy tipped to the side to give Mary Ann one more look. She didn’t smile or giggle or give her any prompt, but Mary Ann knew exactly what Paddy would be thinking and her face convulsed into a taut mask of sadness, then panic and then nausea, until she covered it with two hands and scuttled away to have a laugh in the toilets.

“You mustn’t come here.” Sister Tansy gave the soup a vicious skirl. “You’ve been asked before.”

“Sister, the police came to my door tonight and told me that someone close to me had died. I thought it was Mary Ann at first and got a terrible fright. I just wanted to look at her.”

“That is neither here nor there,” she said, her customary response to any appeal for mercy. Sister Tansy would have said that on hearing about Hiroshima. “You cannot come in-”

“It was a boyfriend. My ex. He was naked.” Badness made her say it and it felt good. She gave in to the urge and went for triple points. “They think he was murdered by the IRA.”

Sister Tansy was stunned dumb. Paddy turned and walked away, knowing she was being rude and Mary Ann would pay the price.

Outside, she thought how lucky she was to be able to come and see her sister. Nuns, like priests, rarely got to work near their home parish. More usually they were moved away from their family of origin. The Church said it was so that they could concentrate on their vocation but Paddy saw it as a move to depersonalize them, break the bonds with their own people so that their only loyalty would be to the Church. The Brides of Christ had no family but the Church, which also happened to be their employer. Manager and boyfriend. An actress could have sued.

She got back in the car, and before she had time to reflect on what she was doing, she was driving down the empty gray motorway, heading towards where Terry’s body had been found.

She pulled out of the middle lane when she saw the slip road for Glasgow airport.

The lobby was empty, all the check-in desks shut and unmanned. A blue-uniformed security guard idled, smoking a cigarette. He nodded guiltily as Paddy came through the automatic doors.

“Havin’ a smoke,” he said.

Paddy excused him with a smile.

Behind the counter at the empty newsagent’s shop a sleepy middle-aged woman in a blue tabard watched, heavy eyed and accusing, as Paddy wandered between the chocolate bars and displays of crisps.

She didn’t want anything to eat, even though she felt hungry. She kept thinking about the ragged hole in Terry Hewitt’s head, of the black spider crawling across his face. A jagged breath caught in her throat and she stood staring into the searing white light of the drinks cooler, blinking back urgent tears, wondering what the hell was wrong with her. She’d identified bodies before, seen horrific injuries, facial injuries, and she had been frightened of Terry; she should be glad he wasn’t about to hassle her anymore. Aware that she was being watched, she picked up a cold can of Irn-Bru and took it to the counter.

The attendant looked expectantly as Paddy glanced behind her at the cigarettes, asked for a packet of Embassy Regal, dropped three quid on the counter, and walked away with her cigarettes and drink, the cold metal of the can burning the skin on her hand.

Back in the car park, Paddy locked the doors and sat, holding the cold can of juice tight, focusing on the chilblain pains in her fingertips. Then she started the car and pulled out, reaching a hundred by the time she hit the motorway.