The Dead Hour (36 page)

Reluctantly, Trisha lifted her arms around her daughter and whispered into her hair to hush. A bus rumbled past and the cold wind sweeping across the square skirled around them.

“I’m sorry, Mum. I’m sorry I’m not what ye want me to be.”

Trisha was crying too, fighting it but crying, sobs racking her chest as she stroked Paddy’s hair and patted her back. “Oh, now. Come on now, it’s not so bad as all that, surely?”

She hid her face in her mother’s soft neck. “I’m not you, Mum. I can’t be as good as you.”

Trisha stroked and patted her, holding her tight as if she had been hungry for contact for ten years.

Finally, Trisha broke off. “Eat that soup, it’ll do you good.” She smiled bravely and unzipped her handbag, rummaging for her change purse and her house keys, reassuring herself that she would be home soon.

Paddy wiped her nose on the back of her hand and sniffed. Trisha pulled the keys out, and Paddy saw the clear laminated plaque on her key ring and remembered the slogan. Trisha had bought it in a holy shop, an orange sunset behind a silhouette of a tiny boat and the inscription:

Lord help me,

The sea is so wide

And my boat is so small.

The renewed vigor of the newsroom had disappeared now that everyone had worked out when Random would be in and out of the room. The fact that he was generally stationed downstairs holding meetings about money meant that long hours could easily be spent carelessly doing nothing or scanning job vacancies in the News or other papers.

McVie sloped in through the door to the tea room and stood close to her, watching the kettle come to the boil.

“How are you?” he asked, uncharacteristically needy. He was too close, looming over her.

“I’m fine,” she said, scowling up at him, hoping he’d do it back.

“So, what did you …” He rolled his head to the side. “You know, think the other night?”

She realized that he wasn’t standing close to her so much as pinning her into the wall, penning her in. “He’s a nice chap.”

McVie raised his eyebrows and leaned across her, picking at a bit of dried jam on the fridge top. He seemed offended.

“I mean, he’s nice enough. I wouldn’t spend a lot of time with him. Not that you shouldn’t. He’s nice. Pleasant.”

“Hmm, pleasant … Yeah.”

McVie and Paddy had known each other for four years and had a bitchy, easy rapport, but now the conversation felt as clumsy as grade one Arabic. They cringed in unison, watching the kettle come to a boil. She had overfilled it. Scalding water bubbled out from under the lid, spilling down the sides and over the cord. They grinned together as the steaming water spilled down the door of the fridge.

“That’s not very safe, is it?”

“Naw.” Paddy grinned and moved her feet away. Her suede boots were ruined already but she didn’t want to make them any worse. “I don’t care if you’re a poof.”

McVie blinked hard at the word and rubbed his long gothic face with his hand. “I heard you shagged George Burns in his car.”

Paddy felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end in alarm. A week before she would have been frightened of him knowing—she’d never really trusted him sexually—but now he was the only safe man in the newsroom. Suddenly it seemed funny that McVie knew. She started to giggle into the wall. McVie watched her, disconcerted for a moment, and then snorted through his nose, shaking his shoulders, actually looking more miserable than before but laughing, she was quite sure he was laughing.

“What did your wife say when she found out about you?”

McVie rolled his head back at the mention of his wife and barked up at the ceiling. “Surprised.”

“Are you two having an affair?” It was Shug Grant, standing at the door, talking loud to draw the newsroom’s attention to them.

“Grant.” McVie spoke without a hint of aggression. “You’re about a half as interesting as ye think ye are. Fuck off and shut up.” He turned back to Paddy. “Tomorrow night we’re going for a drink with Paddy Meehan. Press Bar, seven o’clock. Okay?”

She nodded.

Scolded, Shug backed out of the room and McVie followed him, pointing a warning finger back at her. “Seven, right?”

“I’ll be there.”

As soon as Bernie pulled the comfort pillow out from under a pile of bricks in the garage, Kate knew she would be able to come here. Now, she sat in the Mini, cold condensation forming a mist on the inside of the windscreen, blocking out the view of the pub and Knox’s house across the road. The tip of her right index finger was withered from rubbing high-grade cocaine into her gums.

She needed to watch the house and make sure he was in before she went across, pressed the doorbell, and told him that she would go to the papers if he didn’t call Paul off. He could do that. He could tell Paul to let her go. He wasn’t Paul’s boss or anything, no one was Paul’s boss, but she knew enough to damage all of them and Knox was the cautious one. They had laughed at how careful he was, always meeting at night, in the wine cellar at Archie’s basement, never wanting Paul to come to his house and refusing to come to theirs.

Knox was the cautious one.

She had said it out loud, she realized. Sitting alone in a cheap car, in the damp dark, outside a nasty brewery pub with a red PUB GRUB neon light blinking in the window.

She said it again just to be sure—“Knox was the cautious one”—and smiled, incredulous, at the sound of her own voice. She hadn’t realized she was talking and not just thinking. She decided to practice her speech.

“Hello, Knox. I need your help.”

That was no good. It sounded subservient.

When he opened the door she’d bluntly say, “Knox—” He’d pull her into the hall, check outside to make sure she hadn’t been seen in the street. “I want you to help me. Paul Neilson and I are in dispute and you have to tell him to leave me alone.”

Better. It sounded forceful, as if she was in charge.

“If you don’t want me to go to the papers with what I know, you’ll tell him to back off.”

That was it. Pitch perfect. And then shut up, don’t start twittering or say anything about Vhari or anything. Perfect. She licked her fingertip and reached across to the passenger seat, running the numb skin over a fold in the plastic before lifting it to her mouth. A little engine rev and she’d open the door and go over there. But the little dab did nothing so she tried again and again. She was rubbing and dabbing and rubbing, waiting for the perfect chemical equation to occur and give her the courage and clarity to do what she needed to.

The balance eluded her. All she could do was sit and sweat and listen to her tired old heart thumping like a galley drum while her blood raced through her brain bringing thought after thought, conclusion after conclusion, details and meaning indistinguishable, red streaks of taillight in a time-lag photograph. She knew what the thoughts were about but couldn’t capture any of the detail: reminiscences of childhood, holidays, dull days off school with colds, meals she’d eaten somewhere.

She dabbed again. Her tongue was terribly dry, she didn’t know if she would be able to move her mouth to talk. She could go into the pub and get a drink. A spritzer. She had money. A tenner appeared in her hand.

It took her a week to pull the clammy metal door handle toward her and step out onto the soft black tarmac. Suddenly she was in the pub, by the bar, blinking hard at the unflattering light. The decor was a crime: horseshoes, brass bedpans, horrible pretend England. It was almost empty but everyone who was there was looking at her. She wouldn’t have walked into a pub this brightly lit on her best day and, she remembered dimly, she looked bad, really bad.

White wine and soda, please, and Marlboro. The sweet drink washed the salty numbness from her gums, sloshing across her tongue to hit the parched spot on the back of her throat. Another one. She smoked a cigarette, looking away from everyone, trying not to be seen. Struck by a sudden pang of longing for the pillow, she put the half-drunk glass down and reeled her shoulders, heading out through the doors to the car park and back to the side of the Mini.

She looked up and found herself standing outside Knox’s house. Evidently she’d had another rub and dab; her tongue kept finding its way up past her teeth to her grainy gums and running the length of them.

Knox’s front garden had been paved over to make parking spaces and the front of the house seemed very close to the road. It was a small house, Kate thought, with a cheap-looking glass porch stuck on the front of it, jammed full of ugly little plants and Wellingtons and so on. Outdoor accoutrements. Perhaps he had a dog. Was he married? She couldn’t remember. There was only one car parked in front of the house. Next to the glass porch, on the far side, was a window into a front room but the curtains were shut.

Kate’s heart ached, not with fear but with the simple strain of keeping going. She pressed the buzzer and stepped back, watching as the light snapped on in the hall, rosy behind the cheap orange glass in the window of the front door. The door opened, spilling light into the porchway. He was wearing slippers. And a cardigan. His angry voice crackled at her.

She answered, barking the only words she could remember. “Knox. Help.”

Down at the Salt Market a Volvo station wagon was underneath a bus. The car driver was dead, flattened inside his car. The safety windscreen had come off whole and lay on the road by the pavement, smeared with his blood. The car was such a mess that it took the ambulance men a while to work out if they were looking at one very big car or two wee cars.

The blameless bus driver was sitting on the wet curb, his mouth hanging open, tears streaming down his face, blankly watching the fire brigade cutting the car up with torches, trying to establish whether there had been a passenger as well.

Paddy was jotting down the statement of an eyewitness, a tipsy old man who saw the car going fast down this road, the bus coming down that one and then, kaboom, he wasn’t watching, but what a bloody bang, excuse his French. She’d already written his name and address down for the story and couldn’t be arsed to try and find another witness.

“Would you say you were terrified?” she said, being unprofessional and putting words in his mouth.

He looked a little skeptical. “I suppose …”

“Have you ever seen anything like it before in your life?”

He looked even more unconvinced. “Well, I fought in the war, at Monte Cassino, and it wasn’t anything like as bad as that.”

Paddy sighed, exhausted. “Was it like something you might have seen in the war? Could you say that?”

“Aye.” He could go along with that. “Maybe. A bit like that.”

She wrote it down. “Alistair Sloane of Dennistoun said, ‘It was like something out of the Battle of Monte Cassino and I should know because I was there.’ Is that any good?”

He looked at her shorthand, excited that he might be in the paper. “Aye. Is that going in tomorrow?”

“It’s not up to me, really, but that’s how I’ll put it in.”

She left the old man, who was grinning gleefully, looking like a ghoul, and walked back toward the car, working hard at keeping her gaze away from the undercarriage of the bus. Even in the dark road she could see splatters of blood on the bus wheels, pooling on the road. Her half-informed eye kept trying to reconstruct a person out of the shapes she wasn’t looking at, a round object turned into a head. There was black stuff all over the road and she wasn’t certain that it was oil. She was glad Sean was waiting in the car. If she wasn’t being brave for him she might have followed one of the police officer’s examples and thrown up.

“I heard you were here.”

At the sound of Burns’s voice her already delicate stomach spiked acid. He let his pal walk on and sauntered over solo, standing between her and the bus. She had no option but to follow the line of his body from waist to face to avoid seeing an image that might haunt her.

“Burns.”

“Meehan?” He returned the bald greeting but looked disappointed.

“Sorry.” She tipped her head to the mess under the bus. “I’m trying not to look.”

Burns glanced back at it, unflinching. “Yeah, messy. We’ve been sent over to redirect the traffic. Exciting. I love nights. Standing in the bollock-freezing cold telling nosy bastards to go left. I got that address you were after.”

“Brilliant.” He recited it for her and she jotted it down. “Does Knox have a reputation? A flashy car or too much money?”

“Not so much that anyone’s talking about it, no.” Burns shifted nearer, looking down at her mouth as if he was going to kiss her. Paddy noticed that she was salivating. His breath hit her face in warm puffs. “You still at the hotel?”

“Did they arrest Lafferty for the firebomb yet?”

His gaze slid down her neck. “No. He’s gone abroad.”

“Abroad to where?”

“Ireland, the wife says. No proof, just her say-so.”

She shut her notebook. “Looks like I’m still in the hotel, then.”

“That’s safest, yeah.” He looked over at the calls car. “Is that Billy’s replacement? You found him awful quick. Is he a boyfriend of yours?”

She stumbled over the answer, hoping he wouldn’t want an introduction. “No, he’s not my boyfriend. He’s my … well, it’s complicated.”

“Is it?”

She hesitated again. If she’d had her wits about her she could have made up a salving lie. “We’ve just … known each other a long time.”

Burns tipped his chin at her, looking down his nose and sucking air in between his teeth in a sour hiss. “I see. That’s nice and cozy. I’m doing an open spot at Blackfriar’s tomorrow night. Can you come?”

Dub generally booked an open-mike night once a month so it wasn’t the free-for-all. Burns must have arranged an open spot with Dub, which meant he had spoken to him, independent of her. He was muscling in on her meager social life.

“I’ll try.”

A spine-chilling creak of ripping metal filled the street as the fire brigade cleaved part of the bloody hood away from the bus’s axle. Paddy suddenly saw herself and Burns standing too close to each other, too keen to exclude others from their conversation. It was obvious there was something between them.