They waded through the damp grass in single file. At the back the land opened up into a long garden, now choked with a decade of neglect. Large trees hid the road but they could hear it, the cars and lorries speeding past. At the far end was the orchard where his parents had stood under a tree for a photograph. Green baby apples the size of cherries were just appearing on the trees but the trunks and some branches had been colonized by thick, waxy ivy. She couldn’t see the exact tree they had stood under but she was sure it was here. It must have been a lonely place for an only child to grow up.
The kitchen was bare and basic, the table covered in dust and mouse droppings. A cardboard box sat on a dresser, rotting in the damp, ripped by mice making a home. There didn’t seem to be a cooker. It was in the country and it wasn’t council but it was modest. She had always assumed Terry came from money, but she suspected everyone of that because she didn’t herself.
She stood back and saw that Merki was looking at another crack in the wall, this one beginning above the kitchen window.
“Let’s go home.”
But Merki was reluctant. He stepped over to the back door and wiped the dirt from the keyhole. “I can jimmy this. Want to go inside?”
“Nah.”
“No bother,” he said and got a ring of L-shaped metal sticks from his pocket.
“Merki, I can’t be bothered, there’s nothing to see in there but mice.”
He stopped, checked his watch, did some mental calculations and nodded. “Aye, all right.”
Head down, he led the way back to the car.
She lit a cigarette when they were inside and offered him one but he declined. “What are you checking your watch for all the time?”
He shrugged, flinging an arm over the back of the seat to reverse out to the mouth of the driveway, keeping to the tracks in the flattened grass they had made on the way in.
“Are you waiting for something to happen? Was someone supposed to meet us here?”
He stopped the car, looking out at the traffic speeding past on the road.
Just three feet away cars were going past so fast she couldn’t make out the drivers’ faces. Behind them, coming from Glasgow, a lorry took the blind turn in the road and hurtled towards them, correcting his trajectory at the last minute and narrowly avoiding clipping Merki’s boot.
“I want to go back that way but they won’t…” He pulled the car forward to the edge of the tarmac. “Just… go, I suppose.”
It was terrifying: Merki shot forward just as a Range Rover belted around the corner at sixty. His Nissan had no power and he couldn’t speed up to get clear. The Range Rover was on top of them, brakes screeching, lights flashing in the rearview.
It was at that moment that Paddy realized in a wash of horror why Terry Hewitt didn’t live here: when he was seventeen years old his parents had died in a car crash and they had died on this road, somewhere, on a corner with dead flowers. He had told her about it when she was young, when she told him about Patrick Meehan and all her secret shame about the case. He heard her but she didn’t take in what he was saying: her family didn’t own a car and the crash seemed glamorous to her then, Jayne Mansfield-esque. She’d envied his freedom.
Merki raised his hand to the Range Rover and carried on, building his speed up to thirty-five. She’d dropped her cigarette on the floor but was too afraid to let go of the door handle and reach down to get it. They hit a straight stretch of road and the lumbering four-by-four pulled into a break in the oncoming traffic, honking furiously as it overtook them. Merki waved back. “Thank you,” he said. “Shit, we’re going the wrong way, though.”
“Don’t you dare turn around in this road.”
“I’ll just go on to the next roundabout then,” he said happily.
She picked up the cigarette from the dusty floor and took a long, welcome draw. The traffic was building up behind them again, cars passing them in a blur, only to slow abruptly at a roundabout up ahead. A petrol station on the far side of the roundabout was full of haulage trucks.
“This is a nightmare road,” she said.
Merki glanced at his watch.
“What’s with the watch, Merki?” He smiled so she gave his arm a light slap. “And what do you keep smiling about?”
“My cousin’s due a baby,” he shouted, annoyed for no real reason. He rubbed his arm where she’d touched him. “Heard you got a bollocking from Bunty this morning anyway.”
“Oh, aye, he set the police on me. Did ye hear that too?”
He smiled. “Did he get you arrested, did he? For visiting Callum Ogilvy, was it? He had me arrested the other day, drunk in charge of a stapler.”
They were journalists, they could lie to each other for hours at a time, but she really wanted to know. “Come on, why are we here? Why the watch?”
He checked it again and smiled out of the windscreen, slowing for the roundabout up ahead. “OK.” He sighed through his nostrils. “Ogilvy’s out.”
“Out of prison?”
“Aye. Released. Everyone and his auntie’s going to get sent to Driver Sean’s house to sit it out and I figured, you know, don’t be there. They’ll send someone else. If there’s a story you’re never going to get it sitting between the Standard and the Record, are ye? You were visiting him the other day, weren’t ye? That’s why Bunty was shouting at ye, eh? Eh?” He smiled, glancing at her, taking his eyes off the road.
“Pull into that petrol station. I need to make a call.”
“If you’re phoning the office don’t tell them I’m with ye, eh?”
“I’m not phoning the office,” she said, winding her window down and throwing the cigarette out, watching in the side mirror as it bounced behind them on the road and disappeared into the dark under the chassis of a coach.
Despite being next door to the toilets the phone box still smelled of fresh urine. She punch-dialed the Ogilvys’ number quickly, as if she could beat bacterial infection with speed.
They weren’t answering the phone and she wasn’t surprised. When the answer machine clicked on she spoke loudly, knowing kids would be screaming in the background. They were noisy at the best of times.
“Sean, it’s Paddy, pick up the phone, I need to talk-”
The phone clicked and Elaine sighed into the receiver, turning away to tell one of the kids to be quiet.
“Elaine, the papers know Callum’s out.”
Elaine sighed again, heavier this time, in a way that suggested she already knew that, thank you very much, and handed the receiver over to Sean.
“I guess you know then?”
“There’s a bank of them outside the door. They’ve been taking pictures of the kids and the windows and the street and everything.”
“Can he stay indoors for a while? I’ll bring ye in groceries if ye need them.”
“He’s not here, Paddy, he’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“No idea. The STV van was the first to pull up, he saw it and slipped out the door, went round the back and we’ve never seen him since. That was half an hour ago. Could you drive around and have a look for him? He can’t be far.”
It was the last thing she wanted to do. “My car’s in the lot at work, Bunty’s looking for me, I’ve just been picked up by the police and-fuck-Hatcher’s dead…” But Sean Ogilvy had been a father to Pete when he was a baby. He and Elaine had babysat to let Paddy go to work sometimes, minded him when he was teething and let her sleep. The only valid excuse now would be if she herself was dead. Sean said nothing but she heard it all.
“OK. OK, OK.”
When she opened the car door Merki had turned on the radio and was happily singing along to “Daydream Believer.”
“Get me the fuck back to Glasgow, Merki.”
