Slip of the Knife Read Free

step for a little while, just so that her editor couldn’t sack her. Often they’d side with her against the paper and invite her in. Curren, by contrast, had started combative and then had nothing to back it up. He’d get his face kicked in doing that in Glasgow.
    “You’re new at this, aren’t you?”
    “Yeah.” He looked excited.
    “New to Glasgow?”
    He brightened. “Been here a week. Just finished my training. ‘Greatest newspaper city in the world.’”
    Combative and then suddenly soft; it was the worst possible combination to use when prying into the affairs of very upset people.
    “Maybe you should try being more aggressive,” she said, imagining him nursing a black eye in the Mail newsroom while explaining where he got the idea from to guffawing colleagues. “When you get to a door try to push it open, swear at them, do something that’ll make them think you’re in charge. No one’s going to buckle under gentle quizzing.”
    Curren nodded earnestly. “Really?”
    “Yeah, Glaswegians really respond to that kind of firm hand.”
    Curren hummed at his feet. “OK.” He took a deep breath, steeled himself, and demanded, “When’s Ogilvy getting out?”
    “Better. Definitely better.”
    Confusion flickered on his face and Paddy felt a little bit guilty. In the yellow light of the close he looked young and embarrassed and fed up, while she, content and pajamaed, still had the taste of oaty biscuits bright in her mouth.
    She gave him permission to do what he’d do anyway. “Listen, just go back and tell your editor I’m a total bitch and you tried really hard.”
    Resentment flashed behind his glasses. “I’ll tell McVie he’s a fat poof.”
    She tutted. Brutal insults were the custom of their profession, but she didn’t like McVie’s homosexuality used as a slur. “Nah, don’t say that to him, he might get a bit, you know . . .” she searched for the word, “. . . stabby.”
    He grinned. Nice teeth. “Stabby? Is that an intransitive verb? Only in Glasgow . . .”
    “Adjective.” She’d never heard of that kind of verb. Even tea boys had degrees these days. “Well, fuck off anyway.” She shut the door, felt a pang of guilt at her mis-advice, and called through the wood, “Safe home.”
    “Thanks,” he answered, his voice muffled. “By the way, I saw your Misty column about dope. Brilliant.”
    Paddy felt vaguely ashamed. She had stolen the argument that no one started a fight in a bar because they’d smoked pot, but that alcohol provided so much tax revenue it couldn’t be outlawed.
    “Thanks,” she said to the door. “It was Bill Hicks’s line actually. I took it and didn’t give him an acknowledgment.”
    “Good for you,” replied the door. The kid would go far.
    She listened as his foot dropped to the first step, followed the echo of his trail as he walked down two flights and left the close. The outside door slammed behind him.
    Lucky her. The biggest crime story in the last twenty years hadn’t so much landed in her lap as grown up under her feet. Callum Ogilvy and another small boy had been found guilty of the brutal murder of a toddler nine years ago. At the same time Paddy, a hungry young reporter, was engaged to Callum’s cousin Sean. It was because of Paddy’s investigation that the men who goaded the boys to do it were found and charged. Callum and James were done for conspiracy instead of murder and it carried a shorter sentence. Even she didn’t know if it was a good idea to release them, but there was no legal basis on which to hold them any longer.
    She hadn’t met Callum since he went to prison. She knew very little about him, other than the sanitized snippets Sean passed on from his prison visits and the occasional articles about his life there. Sean wanted her to write Callum’s big interview when he got out. Working in newspapers for the past six years, he was savvy enough to know that Callum would be hunted down and eventually caught, probably