Free Slip of the Knife by Denise Mina

cunts, disjointed pictures from magazines. It doesn’t take much. I was scared before the night, sometimes, but since the night I’ve never stopped being scared.
    I thought James was my friend but he wasn’t. I take full responsibility for what happened. The baby was crying and James held his throat to make him stop. We fiddled about with the body to make it look like someone else. I am sorry for the family, for the baby’s mother and family. I am sorry for what I have done. I will try to live a good life in the future. My dream is to work in a factory and live within a loving family structure.
    Everyone liked the last version best but ten years later all the different versions of the night had become as true as each other.
    When he remembered it, when he was alone, all he recalled were James’s black eyes smoldering as they stood over the tiny body crumpled in the wet grass, of the cold wind on his face as he stood on the verge looking back at the van, and behind him James making noises, sniggering, pulling things around to suit himself.
    When he remembered it now, Callum stood on the blustery verge and looked at the grass in front of him. It was trampled deep into the mud from the feet of all the people who had been there, the psychiatrists, the social workers, the guards who asked questions kindly and then sold the story to the newspapers, other prisoners who’d ask about it, sly, interested in details they shouldn’t be asking about.
    Cunt.
    Haversham was getting tired of Callum’s back. He tapped the door again, making his point, and shuffled off to taunt Hughie.
    Callum carried on his walk. From the door he stepped into the yard, straight across the yard to the guard block, around the concrete path at the side, staying off the grass. That would take thirty steps, maybe thirty-something. He had never been that way before. Along the grass to the door out. They would have to wait at the door until it buzzed open. The guards wouldn’t have keys for that door in case they were taken hostage. Security zones. Inside the door it would be warm, they’d have the heating on high for the guards. There would be a waiting room probably. Plastic chairs probably. Posters maybe. And beyond that an unknowable number of steps to the main doors. Through one. Locked behind him. Next door and out, out to the eye-aching brightness and the unbridled wind salting him. Out, out into a world full of Havershams.
    No one would come with him through the final door. He would be unsupervised for the first time since he was ten. He didn’t know what he would do.
    He looked back at the messages on the gray wall.
    Supergass.
    Callum’s own message was finished. Took him months. He curved all four s’s, gave curvy tails to the g’s and y, spelled it right. It was finished now. He could leave now. Callum’s own message:
    Everything smells the same when it’s burning.
    SIX
    BANG BANG
    I
    With his soft Dublin accent, fine, long face and green eyes, Father Andrew was an Irish mother’s dream. He was fresh from seminary when he came to St. Columbkille’s. Eager to make the Good News accessible to young people, he made everyone use his first name, introduced guitars to mass, made self-conscious teenagers mutter inaudible bidding prayers. The parish was elderly and didn’t like the unfamiliar. They revolted, complaining to the Monsignor, and soon Father Andrew’s radical reforms were curtailed to occasional mentions of already-out-of-date pop stars in his sermons and wearing a cassock with a rainbow embroidered on the back. Paddy saw defeat in him nowadays. She’d have felt for him more if he gave fewer sermons about the evils of unmarried, working mothers, homosexuality and sex before marriage.
    Opening his arms, he raised his eyes to the giant plaster Jesus dangling over the altar. “Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.”
    The organist launched into the opening bars of “How Great Thou Art” and Paddy found herself singing along in