The Last Breath Read online

  The woman officer stood up to meet her. ‘We need you to come and have a look at him, if you would.’

  ‘Just let me get changed.’

  As she passed Blane on her way out of the living room he looked down at her and blurted, ‘I love your column. I always agree with it. You write things before I’m even thinking them.’

  Paddy bared her teeth politely. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  3

  Regal and Bru

  I

  Paddy kept her window down. The warm breeze caressed her face, carrying the high-summer smell of dust and rotting vegetables as she followed the red tail-lights of the police car.

  Blane and Kilburnie were in the car ahead, sniggering about her purple hall no doubt, passing tasty morsels back and forth about her and George Burns. Everyone would know what Terry’s suicide note said by morning. They’d extrapolate every detail: Terry shot himself because of her, she loved Burns and that’s why she was watching his show, she’d painted her hall purple and yellow, Dub was a boyfriend or a beard. Rumours of her lesbianism increased in direct proportion to her success. It was intended to belittle her, but she quite liked the suggestion that she was impregnable, literally and metaphorically.

  A green traffic light switched to orange as the police car passed beneath it. Paddy slowed unnecessarily, stopping before it changed to red. Out of the empty street, a sudden rush of people crossed the road in front of her. She looked back. They were pouring out of the Ramshorn Kirk, a church she’d never even noticed before this year, converted into a theatre for Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture.

  For a century Glasgow had been a byword for deprivation and knife-wielding teenage gangs but in the past few years the thick coat of black soot had been sandblasted off the old buildings, revealing pale yellow sandstone that glittered in the sun, or blood-orange stone that clashed with blue skies. International theatre companies and artists had started coming to the city, colonizing unlikely venues, old churches, schools, markets and abandoned sheds, places the locals failed to notice every day. Glaswegians no longer felt as defensive of their home, began to look around with renewed interest, like a partner in a stale marriage finding out that their spouse was a heart-throb abroad.

  The lights changed to green but Paddy sat still, watching the pedestrians crossing in front of her. They were young for a theatre crowd, smoking now that they could, chatting animatedly about the piece they had just witnessed.

  Some of the men cast admiring glances at her car. It was a big white Volvo saloon, a vanity car, bought to show the world of men she moved among that she was doing well and had the readies to buy a big motor. She didn’t like it. It handled like a tank and was too big and boxy to park in the handy little spaces she used to manage in her Ford Fiesta. Parking it anywhere slightly rough was to invite a key along the paintwork.

  The crowd began to thin and she let the handbrake off, gently nudging forward. Ahead, the police car pulled out slowly, making sure she stayed with them, as if she couldn’t find the city morgue herself.

  They drove on, turning down the steep winding High Street, once the spine of the city, now a road through plots of dark wasteland. The seven-storey Tollbooth sat on its little traffic island, all that remained of a medieval prison where witches were hanged and the debtors voted in their own mayor.

  Glasgow City Mortuary was an unobtrusive single-storey building on the corner of the High Court. Built in red brick, it had windows on either side of a deep doorway like a punched-in nose. The business of the building was conducted below ground, in the white-tiled cellar.

  The squad car pulled up right in front, on a double yellow line, so Paddy followed their lead and drew up behind them. Kilburnie and Blane were waiting for her on the pavement, their mood lighter than it had been before, distant and observing. They had been talking about her, she could smell it on their breath.

  The mortuary faced Glasgow Green, an ill-lit expanse of grass cut through by the River Clyde, bordered on one side by the damp highrises in the Gorbals and on the other by the crumbling tenements of the Gallowgate. At night it was populated by roving prostitutes and the drunk men who came to fuck them, or rob them. Shadows routinely rose out of the moist night and tried the door of the mortuary. It was assumed they were attracted by the lights or looking for drugs but no one really knew why they came, banging on the oak or scratching at the windows.

  The narrow porch was a tight fit for the three of them. Blane’s looming bulk swallowed the light. They heard the entry buzzer fizz as he pressed it again.

  ‘You two do a lot of death knocks?’ Paddy used the police term to show them she wasn’t just a punter off the street.

  ‘Not that often,’ said Blane.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I’m Family Liaison.’ Kilburnie smiled sadly and tipped her head to the side, putting Paddy in her place as the bereaved. ‘I have to come here quite often, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You’re afraid of everything,’ said Paddy quietly.

  Blane smirked at his shoes. Tell your pals that, Paddy wanted to say: Meehan cracking jokes at the door of the mortuary, coming to view a corpse.

  She’d been avoiding thoughts of Terry all the way into town, filling her head with Pete and decorating the new house and how soon she could get into the office to file the story. No amount of anticipating could make her ready for the sight of a dead body. She knew that from experience.

  When her father Con died, the family held the nightly rosary around his open coffin. The grey simulacrum of Con Meehan became just that: not the man, but an impostor wearing her daddy’s best suit. She clung to her grief, knowing that it was the very last emotion her dad would ever provoke in her.

  It was a terrible death: he was fifty-eight, riddled with tumours, but the physical pain was nothing compared to his anger in those last few ragged months. He died scratching at the clod walls of his grave, tearful, never accepting that his time was up. Everyone in the family made of Con’s uncharacteristic anger what they needed to: Trisha, his wife, thought it was because of the way things had gone with Paddy and Caroline, because the boys weren’t devout. Caroline put his fury down to his long-term unemployment and a lack of counselling. The boys said it was the medication, Mary Ann said pain. But when Paddy looked into his eyes she saw a great roar of regret. Con was a timid man. He had spent his life avoiding conflict, let everyone through the door before him, waiting in a holding position, and then, suddenly, his time was over.

  She gave up trying to get her head around the fact of death. She developed the mental trick of pretending that Con had gone away on a long happy trip, that she would see him again one day and everything would be better, he’d be tumour-free, the regret and all the space between them gone. It was later that she realized her mother used exactly the same mental trick but called the destination heaven.

  Blane glanced nervously out at the misty Green and cursed under his breath as he pressed the hissing intercom again. Kilburnie looked at Paddy, blank-faced until her training kicked in: her face softened and she reached supportively for Paddy’s arm, retreating when she saw the snarl on her face.

  Paddy thought she was coming over too hard. ‘Did he leave a note?’

  Blane looked puzzled. ‘Who?’

  ‘Terry. Did he leave a note saying why?’

  Blane’s jaw dropped in realization. ‘No, no, sorry. He didn’t do it to himself.’

  Kilburnie stole a pinch of Paddy’s elbow. ‘He was murdered.’

  ‘You’re shitting me?’

  ‘Oh yes, definitely. There were tyre marks at the side of the road but no car around and we haven’t found the weapon. He was naked and we never found his clothes. He was murdered.’

  ‘Terry was naked ?’

  Blane nodded. ‘Stark, bollock naked.’

  She knew it had to be murder: even if the gun wasn’t missing, Terry wouldn’t want to be found naked. He was a bit pudgy, had some fat around his arse, and was ashamed. He wanted the lights off before he wo
uld undress in front of her. It was one of the things she’d liked about him. ‘But who’d want to kill Terry Hewitt?’

  Blane leaned in confidentially. ‘They said it looks like an IRA assassination.’

  Paddy reeled on her heels. ‘Get fucked!’

  He nodded, excited, knowing the implications. ‘“All the hallmarks”. That’s what they said.’

  ‘No one’d authorize that in Scotland. We’re neutral. And Terry had nothing to do with Ireland.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m sure they’ll tell us in the press statement. They usually do that, don’t they?’

  Kilburnie leaned back, getting between them, pointedly clearing her throat, reminding Blane of the need for discretion. Chastened, he turned back to the door, his shoulder met by Kilburnie’s, forming a wall against Paddy. He pressed the buzzer a third time. ‘Well, that’s what they told us,’ he said, defending himself to Kilburnie.

  ‘It can’t be.’ Paddy addressed their backs. ‘He was a journalist. Even the Americans wouldn’t stand for that.’

  The intercom crackled: ‘Yeah?’

  Blane leaned in. ‘PCs Blane and Kilburnie from Pitt Street. Expected here for an ID.’

  The door buzzed and fell open an inch, letting out a jab of sharp lemon. Paddy had visited the city mortuary several times and the smell didn’t get any less alarming. She took a deep breath before stepping into the dark hall.

  Blane made sure the door was shut tight behind them.

  Inside, the lobby was softly lit. A bleary-eyed security guard sat stiffly at the desk, the appointments book in front of him suspiciously flattened. As Blane and Kilburnie showed him their warrant cards and signed in, Paddy moved to the side and spotted the edge of a pillow on his lap.

  Blane smiled at the guard, saying his name twice in the course of a bland hello. Police officers liked to say people’s names. Made them feel connected. He introduced Paddy but the security guard didn’t react to her name. Not a Daily News reader.

  Blane gave up trying to chat and nodded Kilburnie and Paddy down the corridor to a set of doors with ‘Absolutely No Entry’ painted on them. Through the doors, after a long landing, narrow stone steps led down into the bowels of the building and a warren of white-tiled corridors.

  Kilburnie turned back to Paddy at the bottom of the stairs. ‘About the IRA – that’s just a canteen rumour.’

  Paddy nodded. ‘Understood.’

  ‘It shouldn’t go in the paper or anything. Could scare people. Cause friction.’

  ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ said Paddy vaguely, itching to get to the office now.

  ‘Now, this …’ Kilburnie pointed down the corridor. ‘I’m here to support you. Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Paddy sharply.

  She saw Kilburnie flinch at her coldness. Paddy could have faked a bit of trauma, but that wasn’t supposed to be the point. The incessant attempts to prompt her emotions were getting on her tits.

  Ahead of them, sheet-plastic abattoir doors glowed yellow from the light behind them and a radio hummed, muffled by the scratched, leathery material. Kilburnie reached out with both hands and pushed them open. The smell hit Paddy’s nose like a spiteful slap. Rancid meat and the afterburn of alcohol. She forced herself to take breaths in and out. She’d made herself dizzy in the mortuary once before by not breathing in enough.

  The bizarre tableau they walked in on stopped them dead. Kilburnie gasped, afraid again no doubt.

  Standing alone against a wall of glinting stainless steel was an elf dressed in green scrubs, face mask hinged off one ear. Her hands hung by her side, turned towards them, like Jesus welcoming sinners in a painting. The wild brown hair was blunt-cut above her shoulders. She smiled stiffly, eyes open a little too wide. She’d heard them coming down the stairs, probably heard the buzzer and the doors. Her welcoming stance had gone stale.

  ‘Hello.’ The odd little woman refreshed her smile. She was young, her skin perfect, her figure unformed, as if she was still waiting for puberty to hit.

  Blane frowned. ‘John about?’

  The Mortuary Elf looked Paddy over, smart in a black wraparound work dress and platform orange-suede trainers. ‘He’s having a kip in the back.’

  All three of them considered the possibility that this tiny woman had risen from the Green, broken in for some sick reason and beaten John to death.

  She touched a hand to her chest. ‘Aoife McGaffry,’ she said, her Northern Irish accent thick and warm. ‘I’m the new pathologist.’

  Blane smiled. ‘Oh, I thought you were a nutter. What are you doing here at this time on a Saturday night?’

  Aoife stepped back, welcoming them into the big room. ‘We’re backed up.’

  ‘Old Graham Wilson had a heart attack a week ago,’ Blane explained to Paddy. ‘They’ve been storing everyone they can until the new Path started.’

  Paddy had never met Graham Wilson but she’d seen him giving evidence at the High Court a couple of times. He was dishevelled, looked as if he’d just been woken up, wore a crumpled three-piece suit and pince-nez.

  ‘Died on the job,’ said Aoife. ‘Not “on the job” as in mid-coitus,’ she corrected herself, ‘but “on the job” here.’ She pointed at the floor in front of her. ‘Again, not in mid-coitus.’

  It was supposed to be a joke but Blane flinched.

  Aoife McGaffry winced. Police officers might snigger at the nightie someone was wearing when they were told of a loved one’s death, they might make jokes about Head and Shoulders at the scene of car crashes, but, apparently, there were bounds of decency and the suggestion that a colleague had died in the course of a necrophiliac orgy wasn’t funny. Paddy liked Aoife immediately.

  ‘I’m Paddy Meehan.’ She stepped forward and put out her hand.

  Aoife smiled at the outstretched hand. ‘You wouldn’t thank me for shaking it. It’d take ye a week to get the smell out.’ She twisted around to look behind her. ‘Tend to go a bit ripe if they’re left for a week.’

  ‘I’m here to identify someone …’

  Behind her Blane barked, ‘SMR Ref 2372/90,’ reading from his notebook.

  Aoife listened, dismissed him with a blink and looked at Paddy again, shedding all her awkwardness now she was in her professional role. ‘And is this someone close to you?’

  ‘Not really. A friend. He hadn’t anyone else.’

  ‘OK.’ She nodded. ‘Well, I’ve been here for two days and haven’t had the time to dress anyone up. I don’t know what kind of state your friend is in but we can do this two ways: I can tidy him up but that’ll take time, or I can just bring you to him. How’s your constitution?’

  Paddy shrugged. It was shite, actually, but she wanted to get to the office and file the story before the final edition went to press. ‘Fair to middling.’

  Aoife smiled. ‘Beckett,’ she said, catching the reference. ‘Right, come on now you with me and we’ll find your friend.’

  The police trailed after them as Aoife led Paddy through a small passageway to a big steel door. A gauge on the wall next to it showed the temperature. Paddy had looked at a body here before, a long time ago, as a favour to an old friend.

  ‘Don’t you use the drawers any more?’

  ‘Bloody thing conked out ages ago. Heads need banging together in this place.’ Using all her slight weight, Aoife yanked the big door open. A gust of frost and alcohol burst into the corridor. Brutal white strip lights flickered awake in the walk-in fridge, casting inky shadows under the sheeted trolley beds. Inside, the fridge was crowded. Aoife had to wiggle sideways between the beds to make her way to the back of the room.

  ‘What number did ye say?’ she called back to them.

  Blane looked at his notebook again and repeated it.

  She checked a couple of toe tags, muttering ‘Here we go’ to herself when she found Terry. She looked back across the full fridge and sighed a white cloud. ‘Hell. We might need to empty the whole place to get him out.’
/>   There were fifteen, eighteen bodies in the place. It would take ten minutes to wheel all the beds out and then they couldn’t very well piss off and leave her with the bodies in the corridor.

  ‘Tell you what, I’ll come in,’ said Paddy, bracing herself and stepping into the cold. She slid between the shrouded shapes, holding her hands high, trying not to touch anything.

  ‘Me too,’ said Kilburnie. Family Liaison. Elbow-holder. Empathy in uniform. She followed Paddy’s path through the trolleys, keeping close, until they were gathered on the other side of the bed from Aoife, exhaling smog over the cold white sheet.

  Paddy looked down. Terry was under there. A Terry-shaped piece of meat. Naked. Rotting. Suddenly, death wasn’t a long holiday. It was real.

  Aoife McGaffry sensed her tension. ‘Was he a relative of yours?’

  ‘No.’ Paddy couldn’t stop her eyes from mapping the mountains and valleys of the sheet in front of her. ‘No, no. We’ve just known each other for a long time, that’s all.’

  It wasn’t all. They had known each other for eleven years and she thought about him all the time he was away, wondered after him, imagined his absent opinion of her actions. Terry Hewitt had been her touchstone for nearly a decade. He was a marker of how she was doing, a spur to action, a call for decency. She wished he’d never come back to Glasgow.

  Aoife was talking. ‘… pull the sheet back slowly. You’re better just looking at him once the sheet’s away and not while it comes off. It’s easier to look then. And stand back a wee bit, there.’

  Dumbly, Paddy took a step away, her bum banging into the trolley behind her. She started, imagined a dead hand grabbing her arse.

  ‘Don’t get freaked out, just step back. It’s good to have more in your line of vision than just the deceased. Keep perspective. If it gets too much, look up at me. Ready?’