authorized partition, for dying in the brutal civil war that followed. What always stuck in Paddy’s mind was Collins’s time as director of intelligence for the IRA, when he formed the Twelve Apostles, an assassination squad who targeted British agents. On the first Bloody Sunday, in 1920, fourteen agents were either shot or had their throats slit in one night.
“How could I forget?” she said seriously, telling him she understood. “So you were just leaving?”
“No.” Michael Collins smiled. “You were just going to make me tea.”
They looked at each other. If he had a gun she would be no safer with him just outside the door than inside. There were knives in the kitchen drawer. “Of course.”
The kitchen was big enough to have a table with four chairs in it but not to move comfortably around. Steven and Michael sat down as she filled the kettle, shuffling sideways around the table, brushing their backs as she reached for tea bags and sugar. Into the taut silence Steven rambled about Glasgow and how he came to be here and how it was the greatest place for a journalist to begin his career because the competition was so fierce, you see? Best training ground in the world. They trained you to be really aggressive, really proactive, to really find your own stories. He left a pause but no one filled it. He missed his friends from uni, of course, it was a bit isolating, coming up here on his own, but still, lots of advantages.
Collins gave nothing away. He listened to answers politely, and all the while his hands sat flattened on the tabletop, unnaturally still.
He wasn’t flustered by Steven’s presence; it was a complication, not a bar. He might kill both of them, she realized suddenly as she picked the cups out of the cupboard. She needed to get to the phone. She flicked the kettle on, sat the cups on the table, and got the milk out of the fridge.
“Biscuits?”
Steven said yes, he’d love a biscuit, he hadn’t had his tea yet, and Paddy slipped out of the room.
She stepped into the study, the calm site of work. The debris of her uneventful Misty night lay on the table, the letter from Johnny Mac propped on the typewriter, the empty packet of crisps she’d had from Dub’s food cupboard. The time felt like a treat in hindsight. Steven was still rambling behind her but, she realized too late, his voice was carrying out to the hall, coming towards her, following the back of the man who was creeping after her. She lunged for the phone.
“I only want to talk to you.”
She clutched the receiver to her chest and spun to look at him. The dagger-shaped letter opener was on the right side of the desk; she could see the tip of it in the shadow of the typewriter.
“Honestly.” He stepped towards her, a creep, a liar, a true Apostle. “Just a talk.”
She was sweating, wanted to step back from the smell of his sour breath but hardly dared move. “What about?”
He looked around the dark room, at the pine bookcases, at her old desk, the leatherette top scarred along the edge with fag burns from before it was hers, at the discarded wrapper from a packet of wine gums lying under her chair. “Terry Hewitt, he wasn’t one of ours.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“That was a separate thing,” he said and corrected himself. “Nothing to do with us.”
“Separate thing?”
He blinked slowly, thinking his way through the implications before he spoke. “Someone else’s thing. Not ours.”
Still shielding her breastbone with the phone, she chanced a step towards the desk, her hand resting by the typewriter, inches from the dagger. “Do you know what that thing was?”
“So, are you Terry’s family? A cousin?”
“Ex-girlfriend. Terry had no family.”
He tipped his head back, showing her his throat, and laughed joylessly.
Behind him she could see Steven Curren at the kitchen table, bending sideways out of his chair to see them. Collins composed himself. “Lovely cornicing. My father was a plasterer. Later he ran a chip shop.”
“Who killed Terry?”
A smile slithered across his face. “Good-bye.” He stepped backwards out of the room. She didn’t hear him walk across the hall but the door opened and shut quietly. Steven smiled at her from the kitchen. “Is he off then?”
Paddy dropped the phone and looked out into the dark hallway. Gone. She looked in the hall cupboard, checked Dub’s room. He lived a curiously Spartan life. His books and precious collection of rare comedy albums were kept in cardboard boxes that he used variously as a bedside table, a desk and a lamp stand. She looked under the bed, and then skipped into Pete’s room. He was gone.
Steven was calling to her from the kitchen. “The kettle’s boiled. Shall I make the tea? D’you want one?”
Paddy stood in the dark bedroom. The room door had been open when Collins passed it. A pile of fresh boy’s clothes was folded neatly and sitting on the end of the little bed, a box of plastic trucks visible under the bed.
Collins knew she had a child. He knew where she lived, what she looked like, and he knew she had a child.
III
She heard his footsteps in the hall at two forty in the morning, rolled onto her back, an arm over her burning eyes, listening carefully to the rhythm and the distance, unable to shake her body awake enough to sit up.
Tiptoeing across the wooden floorboards, trying not to make a noise, he went to the kitchen, then to the bathroom, and finally into his own room. He hadn’t seen Pete’s door lying open or he would have come in to her.
She summoned the energy to throw the duvet off with a hand, paused, and sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, keeping her raw eyes shut.
She felt for her dressing gown at the end of the bed, pulled it on, and stood up unsteadily, staggering over to the door and out into the hall.
Dub had only just climbed into bed. He looked up at her, standing by the door, her hair a tangled mess, her head tipped back so that she didn’t have to open her eyes properly.
A sensual, sleepy smile bloomed on his face. “Hello, gorgeous.”
She staggered over to the bed, dropped her dressing gown on the floor, and found her way under the covers, wrapping herself around his warm naked body.
“Pete…,” he said.
“Still at Burns’s.”
Dub kissed her hair, pushing it back from her face, the tender smell of sweat and cigarette smoke from his night engulfing her.
His hand slid down her bare hip, the backs of his fingers nestling in the warm, soft comma at the top of her thigh. He pressed his forehead to hers, their eyelashes touching at the tips.
“You’re the nicest landlady I’ve ever had.”
“Wake me up when you’ve had your fun,” she said and met his smile.
NINE. FAMILY UNIT
I
Paddy put her hand on the bonnet of a silver estate car that looked vaguely familiar, feeling for warmth. She’d
