THIRTY-ONE. THE KAFFIR ON THE FENCE

I

As soon as Bernie pulled the comfort pillow out from under a pile of bricks in the garage, Kate knew she would be able to come here. Now, she sat in the Mini, cold condensation forming a mist on the inside of the windscreen, blocking out the view of the pub and Knox’s house across the road. The tip of her right index finger was withered from rubbing high-grade cocaine into her gums.

She needed to watch the house and make sure he was in before she went across, pressed the doorbell, and told him that she would go to the papers if he didn’t call Paul off. He could do that. He could tell Paul to let her go. He wasn’t Paul’s boss or anything, no one was Paul’s boss, but she knew enough to damage all of them and Knox was the cautious one. They had laughed at how careful he was, always meeting at night, in the wine cellar at Archie’s basement, never wanting Paul to come to his house and refusing to come to theirs.

Knox was the cautious one.

She had said it out loud, she realized. Sitting alone in a cheap car, in the damp dark, outside a nasty brewery pub with a red PUB GRUB neon light blinking in the window.

She said it again just to be sure-“Knox was the cautious one”-and smiled, incredulous, at the sound of her own voice. She hadn’t realized she was talking and not just thinking. She decided to practice her speech.

“Hello, Knox. I need your help.”

That was no good. It sounded subservient.

When he opened the door she’d bluntly say, “Knox-” He’d pull her into the hall, check outside to make sure she hadn’t been seen in the street. “I want you to help me. Paul Neilson and I are in dispute and you have to tell him to leave me alone.”

Better. It sounded forceful, as if she was in charge.

“If you don’t want me to go to the papers with what I know, you’ll tell him to back off.”

That was it. Pitch perfect. And then shut up, don’t start twittering or say anything about Vhari or anything. Perfect. She licked her fingertip and reached across to the passenger seat, running the numb skin over a fold in the plastic before lifting it to her mouth. A little engine rev and she’d open the door and go over there. But the little dab did nothing so she tried again and again. She was rubbing and dabbing and rubbing, waiting for the perfect chemical equation to occur and give her the courage and clarity to do what she needed to.

The balance eluded her. All she could do was sit and sweat and listen to her tired old heart thumping like a galley drum while her blood raced through her brain bringing thought after thought, conclusion after conclusion, details and meaning indistinguishable, red streaks of taillight in a time-lag photograph. She knew what the thoughts were about but couldn’t capture any of the detail: reminiscences of childhood, holidays, dull days off school with colds, meals she’d eaten somewhere.

She dabbed again. Her tongue was terribly dry, she didn’t know if she would be able to move her mouth to talk. She could go into the pub and get a drink. A spritzer. She had money. A tenner appeared in her hand.

It took her a week to pull the clammy metal door handle toward her and step out onto the soft black tarmac. Suddenly she was in the pub, by the bar, blinking hard at the unflattering light. The decor was a crime: horseshoes, brass bedpans, horrible pretend England. It was almost empty but everyone who was there was looking at her. She wouldn’t have walked into a pub this brightly lit on her best day and, she remembered dimly, she looked bad, really bad.

White wine and soda, please, and Marlboro. The sweet drink washed the salty numbness from her gums, sloshing across her tongue to hit the parched spot on the back of her throat. Another one. She smoked a cigarette, looking away from everyone, trying not to be seen. Struck by a sudden pang of longing for the pillow, she put the half-drunk glass down and reeled her shoulders, heading out through the doors to the car park and back to the side of the Mini.

She looked up and found herself standing outside Knox’s house. Evidently she’d had another rub and dab; her tongue kept finding its way up past her teeth to her grainy gums and running the length of them.

Knox’s front garden had been paved over to make parking spaces and the front of the house seemed very close to the road. It was a small house, Kate thought, with a cheap-looking glass porch stuck on the front of it, jammed full of ugly little plants and Wellingtons and so on. Outdoor accoutrements. Perhaps he had a dog. Was he married? She couldn’t remember. There was only one car parked in front of the house. Next to the glass porch, on the far side, was a window into a front room but the curtains were shut.

Kate’s heart ached, not with fear but with the simple strain of keeping going. She pressed the buzzer and stepped back, watching as the light snapped on in the hall, rosy behind the cheap orange glass in the window of the front door. The door opened, spilling light into the porchway. He was wearing slippers. And a cardigan. His angry voice crackled at her.

She answered, barking the only words she could remember. “Knox. Help.”

II

Down at the Salt Market a Volvo station wagon was underneath a bus. The car driver was dead, flattened inside his car. The safety windscreen had come off whole and lay on the road by the pavement, smeared with his blood. The car was such a mess that it took the ambulance men a while to work out if they were looking at one very big car or two wee cars.

The blameless bus driver was sitting on the wet curb, his mouth hanging open, tears streaming down his face, blankly watching the fire brigade cutting the car up with torches, trying to establish whether there had been a passenger as well.

Paddy was jotting down the statement of an eyewitness, a tipsy old man who saw the car going fast down this road, the bus coming down that one and then, kaboom, he wasn’t watching, but what a bloody bang, excuse his French. She’d already written his name and address down for the story and couldn’t be arsed to try and find another witness.

“Would you say you were terrified?” she said, being unprofessional and putting words in his mouth.

He looked a little skeptical. “I suppose…”

“Have you ever seen anything like it before in your life?”

He looked even more unconvinced. “Well, I fought in the war, at Monte Cassino, and it wasn’t anything like as bad as that.”

Paddy sighed, exhausted. “Was it like something you might have seen in the war? Could you say that?”

“Aye.” He could go along with that. “Maybe. A bit like that.”

She wrote it down. “Alistair Sloane of Dennistoun said, ‘It was like something out of the Battle of Monte Cassino and I should know because I was there.’ Is that any good?”

He looked at her shorthand, excited that he might be in the paper. “Aye. Is that going in tomorrow?”

“It’s not up to me, really, but that’s how I’ll put it in.”

She left the old man, who was grinning gleefully, looking like a ghoul, and walked back toward the car, working hard at keeping her gaze away from the undercarriage of the bus. Even in the dark road she could see splatters of blood on the bus wheels, pooling on the road. Her half-informed eye kept trying to reconstruct a person out of the shapes she wasn’t looking at, a round object turned into a head. There was black stuff all over the road and she wasn’t certain that it was oil. She was glad Sean was waiting in the car. If she wasn’t being brave for him she might have followed one of the police officer’s examples and thrown up.

“I heard you were here.”

At the sound of Burns’s voice her already delicate stomach spiked acid. He let his pal walk on and sauntered over solo, standing between her and the bus. She had no option but to follow the line of his body from waist to face to avoid seeing an image that might haunt her.