She thought of Knox. “Do very senior officers know about the key?”
“No, just me.”
“And you know for certain that the note was here yesterday morning?”
“Definitely.”
“So, who came in yesterday?”
He pulled a blue notebook out of his top drawer and reluctantly pushed it across the desk to her with his fingertips. “I’m one year short of my full term.” He whispered, “I won’t even get my pension now. Mrs. McDaid’ll… I don’t know how we’ll manage.”
Paddy read down the list of three and there, first off, at nine ten in the morning, was Tam Gourlay’s signature. He must have gone in just before he was suspended, before Burns found him in the car park and beat him up. She showed McDaid the page and tapped the name.
“Him. Did he go into the safe?”
“Sure, he put a production in there. First thing.” He checked the seven-digit number next to Gourlay. “A shoplifting production. Straightforward case. But I know for certain it wasn’t him because he came in in his shirtsleeves and I watched him the whole time.”
“How did he stand?”
McDaid got up and leaned toward the safe with his bum in the air. “Summary charge productions go on the bottom shelf.” He adjusted his stance and they both realized that Gourlay’s hands would have been obscured from McDaid’s vantage point at the desk.
McDaid stood up, looking broken. “But he was in his shirtsleeves and I would have heard him fold it if he took it. A fifty’s a very big note. It was new. I’d have heard it.” His eyebrows furrowed with self-doubt. “I’m old, I know I am, but I’m alert. I’d have heard it.”
II
Paddy stepped back out into the cold morning street, feeling sick as she remembered Neilson’s wide crocodile smile. The missing note was good for her, though, her bribe would never come to light or be mentioned and she could still run her story with Lafferty as the sole villain. Without the note it was actually a better story, there would be no codicils or information held back until the court case. But Paul Neilson had walked, gone back to his vulgar villa in Killearn to take leisurely swims in his outdoor pool. It was all wrong.
Crossing the supermarket car park to the train station, her stomach spasmed and she doubled over, throwing up the cup of tea McDaid had made her at the station. She leaned over the brown puddle to see if more would come, waiting for her head to stop spinning, and deep inside she realized.
She stood up slowly, glinting at the light, and spoke aloud without meaning to. “Oh, shit.”
III
It was because she had so much to avoid thinking about that the words came so easily, flowing through her fingers and straight onto the page, perfect paragraphs in the new, punchy Daily News house style.
It was an exciting story to tell, the lawyer who had died to protect her sister from a crazy ex-boyfriend, beautiful Kate in terrible danger, the view from the garden window in Loch Lomond. She had to throw in a few comments from “sources,” facts framed as speculation so that the lawyers would pass it for publication, but she knew the police wouldn’t object. They came out of it looking good too.
Paddy stopped at the end of her seven hundred and fifty words and wondered why it had never been this easy before. Maybe exhaustion brought her down to the right level for this style of writing; she was usually too considered to bang out reams of short sentences, one fact in each, top and tailing the article with what she was going to say and a summary of what she had just said. Sullivan had given her a couple of on-the-record, ascribable statements to hang the whole thing on. It read perfectly well but she thought of everything she had to leave out: Neilson, Knox being the most important. She knew that although it satisfied as a News article and Ramage would be pleased, it didn’t satisfy her.
She looked up from her desk. Three copyboys were perched on the bench, scanning the room for the faintest signal. The newsroom was packed with men going about their business but everyone seemed altered. The energy of the room seemed to move around her and the scoop she was writing up. No one came near her desk. Shug Grant and Tweedle-Dum and – Dee were over at the sports desk, keeping their backs to her. A photographer looked away as she glanced over at him. The news desk editor caught her eye and smiled. A copyboy leaped to his feet and jogged over to her, gesturing with a phantom mug, asking if she wanted tea.
This was the respect of her peers. She ran her tongue over her teeth. It tasted metallic, like faintly sour milk.
THIRTY-SIX. PATRICK MEEHAN
I
The smell of tired men on a Friday night hit her nose, a mingling of sweat and disappointment. The Press Bar was no longer a nice place to drink. Most of the powerful movers wanted to get away from the politics of the News on a Friday and drank in the Press Club a mile away, where the drink was union subsidized and the staff from other papers gathered as well.
A thin smattering of drinkers were hanging around the bar or sitting at the tables, reading or staring. No one was talking much. Behind the bar, McGrade was cleaning glasses and greeted her with a welcoming nod.
McVie was alone at a small table and Paddy was relieved that Patrick Meehan hadn’t turned up. She stood up straighter and walked over to the table. “Did you get a dizzy?”
“Eh?”
“A disappointment. Did Meehan not show?”
McVie nodded behind her and she turned to see him walking back from the toilet, checking his fly as an afterthought. He was small and dressed in a heavy black overcoat. His skin was acne scarred and yellow and he looked pissed off. He arrived at the table, looking down his nose at Paddy.
“Hiya,” she said.
“You’re just a girl.”
She couldn’t really argue with that. “I am, aye.”
McVie intervened. “This girl’s one of the brightest young journalists in Scotland.”
Patrick Meehan stuck his tongue in his cheek. He looked Paddy over again and put his hand out to her.
Given that he had just come from the lavatory, she didn’t really want to take his hand but she forced herself. He squeezed it a little too hard, letting her know he was strong. His shortness and arrogant demeanor, the russet hair and short legs, suggested that he had never been very attractive to women and she suspected he had the resentment she met all the time from men like that, as if she was responsible for every knockback and slight every woman had ever given him.
“I’m Paddy Meehan too,” she said.
He nodded at McVie. “He said that. You’ve got the same name as me,” he said, picking a stubby cigarette from the packet on the table and lighting it.
“Aye.”
He looked her over. “Meehans from Eastfield? Where are your people from?”
“Donegal, I believe, around Letterkenny.”
“We’re from Derry.”
“Most of the Meehans are, eh?”
“Aye.”
He seemed to trust her more, now that they had established which Irish county their great-grandparents had fled from. “Will we sit?”
“Aye.” She shook herself awake. “Let me get you a drink, Mr. Meehan.”
Appreciative of the courtesy, Meehan pulled a chair out and sat on it. “I’ll have a half and a half.”
Paddy looked at McVie but he frowned, indicating that he’d like to make the meeting as short as possible, or duck out before it finished.
The barman, benign McGrade, smiled as she came toward him. “See you’re interviewing a local notary over there?”
Paddy smiled and ordered. “I think I’ve been pipped at the post by just about everyone else in the paper business.”
He put the large whisky and half of beer down next to each other. “Ah, there’s always something new to say, isn’t there?” he said, letting her know that even he knew the Meehan story was dead in the water.