Two long windows at one end looked straight across the street into facing flats. The sun was shining in through them, filtered and softened by the dirty filigree on the glass. The floorboards were painted black, chipped and dusty.
Terry had pulled the wallpaper off. Small scraps were still clustered by the skirting board and powdery residue covered the walls. The paint underneath had been a dark green but it was chipped and faded, a South American wall. She could imagine markets being held in front of it, executions taking place against it, children idling at its foot.
Terry had been camping more than living there. His bed was a bare mattress with dirty crumpled sheets, his duvet coverless and gray. The room was too big for his meager belongings: a silver trunk sat by the near wall, an old ghetto blaster nearby. Next to the mattress sat a large blue duffel bag, already packed with his clothes. Paddy recognized it: he’d had that bag when she saw him off on the train to London eight years ago. Lined up along the bottom of one wall were novels, Penguin Classics mostly, the paper yellowed and battered from being lovingly read.
“I’m really sorry about Terry,” said the quiche maker. “He was only here a month or two, I didn’t really know him. Nice guy though.”
In the empty expanse of dusty black floorboards she could see footsteps picked out in the dust, a cleared muddle in the middle of the room and steps leading away and back from it.
“People have been in here,” said Paddy, pointing at the disturbances in the dust.
“Police.” The quiche maker had followed them into the room. “They went through everything. They were fucking obnoxious too, made us all leave the house for the night while they did it. As far as I can see they took nothing but his passport. And a journalist. Cross-eyed and rude as fuck.”
“Merki.” Paddy nodded. “Did he take anything?”
“No. Brought a bottle of whiskey, put it on the table and asked us about Terry for an hour, then put the bottle back in his pocket and fucked off.”
Dub laughed but Paddy didn’t. “Why did he live like this?” she said aloud. “He owned a big house in Kilmarnock.”
“Oh, was that true then?” The quiche maker was surprised. “I kind of thought that was bullshit.”
“There isn’t really that much here, is there?”
“There might have been more but we were broken into last week. That’s why we’ve got the new door. The other one was made of paper. This one’s sturdy new cardboard.” He laughed at his joke, unperturbed that no one else was joining in.
Paddy traced the pattern of the dust, looking for disturbances. A flat empty space by the trunk looked cleaner than the rest. “Did they take something from there?”
The quiche maker looked from her to the space. “No, Terry moved it. He had a portfolio there. He moved it after we got broken into.”
“Where to?”
He gestured for her to follow him out to the hall and led the way into the kitchen.
The room was moist and smelled gorgeous. A table was scattered with flour, a dusted work strip where he had been kneading the pastry. On one of the two gas cookers sitting side by side was a frying pan, with strips of prosciutto cooling in it. The cookers were fed by a gas pipe that hung loose from the ceiling. Under the window a precariously sloped unit housed the sink. Odd cupboards and a red-and-white larder from the fifties were lined up along the near wall.
In Victorian times the kitchen was the servants’ arena. It was customary to build a small wall recess for the maid to sleep in, soaking up the heat from the ever-warm cast-iron range. In bad modernizations the recess was walled in and converted into a cupboard or sometimes a windowless kitchen if it was large, but here it was being used as a communal area. A grubby settee faced away from the kitchen towards a boxy old television twittering in the corner. Above the television, hovering seven feet in the air, was a giant cupboard with sliding plywood doors.
“It’s a good wee attic thingummy but you’ll need a ladder to get up there,” he said. “Terry put stuff in the back in case we were burgled again.”
Paddy looked around. “Is there a ladder?”
“Aye, aye, we’ve got one.” He disappeared off into one of the rooms and came back with a rickety paint- splattered wooden ladder. “Chris is painting his room.” He set it open and pushed it up against the door of the cupboard.
He expected Paddy to climb up but she pointed out that she didn’t know what they were looking for. Reluctantly, the quiche maker climbed the ladder himself. With great difficulty, he bumped the sliding door to the side. The cupboard was deep and black dark, at just the wrong angle to the strip light.
He reached into the black hole, pulling down a tent and poles, two sleeping bags tightly rolled in sleeves, and a cardboard box of dusty Christmas decorations, handing them down to Dub, who set them on the floor. Next came three black binbags of bedding, old duvets and pillows. The quiche maker then climbed off the top rung of the ladder, kneeling into the cupboard, his feet sticking out as he felt towards the back.
They heard a long sliding noise and he stepped carefully back onto the ladder, his knees gray with dust, screwing up his face as if he might sneeze. He was holding a large, square yew box. Although it was dusty the wood was still gorgeously yellow and leopard spotted, the edges perfectly dovetailed. A flat brass hook on the front held it shut. He handed it down to Paddy, who flicked the hook from the eye and opened it.
Inside were photographs, mostly old, of family members. One near the top looked like it might be Terry’s parents, a couple with their arms around each other standing under an apple tree in high summer. The colors had faded to orange and yellow, the white-framed edges worn from being held. Scratched in thin biro on the back it said “Sheila and Donald ’76.” Creepily, the mother looked a bit like her.
Dub looked over her shoulder, sighed onto her neck. “I’m not saying it.”
“Me neither.”
“Hang on.” The quiche maker reached farther in. “There’s this.”
He climbed out again, dragging a large black portfolio, A3 size, just like the one Kevin had shown Paddy on Sunday night. The quiche maker looked puzzled. “Didn’t want to lose it, I suppose.”
“It’s a book Terry was writing,” said Paddy. “He’d already been paid for it.” She reached up and took it off him. “Thanks so much. It’s really kind of ye.”
“No bother,” he said, taking the camping equipment back from Dub and chucking it into the black hole. “My pastry needs to rest anyway.”
He dragged the reluctant door back across the hole and climbed down the ladder, brushing his hands clean.
“We’ll empty Terry’s room and get out of your way.”
“If you could leave the keys for the next person.” He wrestled the ladder shut and put it over his shoulder. “There’s binbags in that cupboard on the wall there if you want something to put the stuff in.”
Back in the room Pete set up a little play camp by the window, taking marbles out of his pocket and chipping at them, chatting to himself, playing the audience to his own moves. “Wow, good one. Close, very close, wee man. Superb.”
Dub grinned at Paddy as he shook a black binbag open and dropped the Penguin Classics into it. “What’s in the portfolio? Why did he hide it so carefully?”
“Dunno,” she said quietly. “Could be just because it’s work. Could be he knew whoever’d broken in was after it.”
Dub put the binbag down, said hang on, and left her to it. She found a suitcase full of papers hidden in the trunk, Terry’s own clippings mostly.
“The guy out there says Terry’s room wasn’t the focus of the break-in. They nicked a bike and a penny collection, so it doesn’t look like a master burglar.
“Maybe Terry was just paranoid about it because it was his work. He’d never had a book published, had he?”
“No.”
“You know how different that feels. It might have really mattered to him.”
“Maybe.”
