The Dead Hour (38 page)

“Are you sure?”

“Aye. I remember that bend in the road back there.”

“Stop if you see a phone box.”

“What for?”

“I’m going to call the police.”

He drove on for a minute. “Paddy, who is this guy?”

She didn’t know what to say. “He’s a bad man. He’s got a woman in there and he’s going to kill her.”

Sean dropped speed rapidly until the car stopped dead.

Paddy slapped his shoulder. “Go. Go!”

He pointed out of the passenger window. “Phone,” he said simply.

A red phone box stood by the side of the road. The bordering hedge was trimmed carefully around it and the light in the ceiling glowed pale yellow in the dark.

Paddy scrambled out of the car, feeling in her pocket for a five-pence piece. The dial unfurled slowly after each nine and she held the five pence poised above the slot. She didn’t need it. The calm operator asked her whether she needed fire, police, or an ambulance.

“Police,” she said, watching the blind corner ahead of them, afraid they’d lose him completely. She told the police officer that a woman was being murdered in Huntly Lodge, Killearn.

“How do you know that, madam?”

“I’ve seen a man hitting her and now I can hear her screaming,” she lied.

“Uh huh.” He didn’t sound at all concerned. “You can hear her screaming now?”

“Yes.”

“I see, and your name is … ?”

Her own name might be flagged up to Knox. She didn’t know who she could trust. “Mary Ann Knox,” she said. “Please hurry.”

“Yes, Miss Knox, and you can hear her screaming?”

“Yes.”

“I see, uh huh, well, the phone box you’re calling from is three miles from Killearn, so how can you hear her screaming?”

They weren’t going to come. Paddy looked at Sean sitting in the car. “I heard her screaming. Please come.”

“How do we know this isn’t a hoax?”

“You don’t want this to be the Bearsden Bird all over again,” she said, and hung up. She was back in the car and Sean pulled off before she had the door shut.

“They coming?”

“Aye,” she said, not sure at all. “Aye, they’ll come.”

For three long minutes they drove into the dark, following the road, not knowing if he was ahead of them or behind them or already parked in a lay-by, strangling Kate in a field, burying her helpless body in a shallow grave.

“There!” shouted Sean so suddenly he made Paddy catch her breath. Red taillights glinted on a far hill, following the road around a corner.

The road was straightening out as they came into the dark village and Sean hung back, letting the slow BMW take Killearn Main Street alone, following it down through a dip in the road to Huntly Lodge.

They had passed the gate to Huntly Lodge before Paddy had realized where they were.

“Was that it?”

Sean was concentrating on the road. “Was what it?”

“Was that the gate we stopped at last night?”

“Aye, it was. He’s driven past it. Should I stop?”

“No.” She sat back in the seat, stunned at the enormity of her mistake. She had called the cavalry to the wrong place. “No, keep following.”

The taillights led them on and Sean followed at a cautious distance. Paddy hoped that they were following the wrong car, that Lafferty had stopped at Huntly Lodge and met the police there, that the car in front of them was an innocent midnight driver, someone pleasant going home after a long night out in the city, but they saw him as he hit the top of a hill and it was Lafferty; she could see him in the front seat, his round bald head and broad shoulders clear in the moonlight.

They were out of the green soft hills now, away from the relatively flat farming land, following the road down the side of Loch Lomond. Steep hillsides rose to their right; wind-gnarled trees clung dramatically to the sheer rock. To their left the flat land led down to the gleaming waterside. Sean had to let Lafferty get lost ahead of them and for a while they weren’t even sure they were on the same road.

They came to a turn in the road, passing a small cottage partially hidden behind a set of trees. They wouldn’t have noticed it if the BMW lights weren’t still on. The front door of the cottage swung wide into the dark inside. The car doors lay open. Lafferty was inside.

Paddy waited until they were around the corner. “Stop here.”

Sean brought the car slowly to the side of the road. He looked at her in the mirror. “The police aren’t coming here, are they?”

“No. They’re not coming.” She looked out at the flat silver expanse of the loch. “We’re on our own.”

Paddy opened the door, stepping out into a soft muddy bank that swallowed the sole of her boots.

“Fuck.”

Sean leaned over from the driver’s seat and whispered loudly. “Should I come too?”

Paddy tutted. “Of course ye should bloody come. This guy’s an animal.” She found herself echoing Burns’s words.

Sean climbed out of the car and looked anxiously back down the road. “Sure ye don’t want me to wait with the car?”

“He’s going to kill her. He’s built like a brick shithouse. I could do with a wee hand.”

“But the police …” Sean shrugged nervously. “Can’t we drive until we find a phone and tell them to come here?”

“She could be dead by then.”

“We could be dead.” He felt immediately ashamed and slipped her eye. “I didn’t really sign up for this.”

“Okay.” She was furious. “You just keep watch then.”

“I’m not much of a fighter, Paddy—”

“Please your fucking self, Ogilvy.”

“Paddy—”

“I’m trying to save someone’s life, here, I haven’t got time to squabble.”

“Can’t I—”

But she’d moved off already, creeping down the lane heading back to the cottage, angry at Sean and sick with fright. Reluctantly Sean tripped after her.

It was a small Victorian cottage, a miniature mansion. A low slate roof hung over the whitewashed walls; picturesque windows had black wooden shutters open at either side. The front door was low, the heavy black lintel giving it a frown, flanked by cast-iron foot scrapers for horse riders to clean their boots on.

Across the road Paddy and Sean hung back behind the trees. Through the front windows they could see light seeping through doorways from the hall. Lafferty believed he was alone: he didn’t need to leave the lights off anymore.

Paddy looked back to the loch and saw the shape of a rickety wooden boathouse down by the water. She looked around the ground and picked up a thick branch. It was rotten and crumbled in her hand when she gripped it. There was nothing else by the roadside, no bits of metal or big round stones. She didn’t even have a plan.

Sean looked over at the house, fists firmly in his pockets, elbows locked tight. He saw her looking at his hands and smiled nervously. “Cold, isn’t it?”

“I’m going in,” she said angrily. “You do what ye like.” She crossed the road and headed around the side of the house alone.

Unlike at the Killearn house, the path here was overgrown with plants. She had to negotiate her way through the branches of an old tree that had snapped and fallen against one of the windows. A bush at her feet released the smell of spearmint as she brushed through it.

Around the back the lane opened up into a steep garden, shallow, with a sheer wall of black wet rock at the back. It was neatly set out but untended. The only part bare of vegetation was a big patch of turned earth at her feet.

The back wall of the house had two small windows on either side of a set of French doors leading from the kitchen. The far window was dark, a bathroom maybe. The window next to Paddy looked in over the sink.

She crept along the wall, the soft bare earth under her feet giving at every step. She stood flush to the wall and looked in. It was a pretty Edwardian kitchen, with beautifully crafted wooden shelves and pierced doors on the pantry, painted pale yellow and cornflower blue. An old-fashioned black cooking range sat in a large inglenook.

The kitchen had been beaten up: the wall cupboards lay open, doors had been yanked off hinges, the table overturned. Matching sets of plates and cups lay shattered on the black slate floor. Below the window the Belfast sink had loose tea and empty jars lying under a dripping tap, and a thick black crack snaked from one side to the other. A packet of flour had been emptied around the room, leaving a thin Christmas dusting on all the surfaces.

She didn’t see the legs at first. It was the drag mark from the doorway that led her eye to the filthy stocking feet near the window. Kate’s lower calf was horribly swollen, bent at an illogical angle, the pale sheer material of her tights holding the bloody mess together. Her feet were filthy, caked in mud, and a big toenail had come off, Paddy could see the coin-sized shape and the raw bloody mark underneath.

She tore her eyes from the figure on the floor and looked for a weapon. There were no knives visible in the kitchen; a couple of copper pots lay by the doorway but they didn’t look very heavy. She stepped back in the soft earth and looked around the garden. No tools. Big stones in the rockery but her hands were too small to pick them up.

Panicking, she stepped back to the window and peeped in. Something about the drag marks on the floor caught her eye. Paddy looked carefully at Lafferty’s footsteps next to the twin track marks from Kate’s feet. The footsteps were confused, as if Lafferty had turned around. Not around. He’d turned back. Lafferty’s footsteps doubled back, heading out of the kitchen.

He’d gone back out to the car, to the front of the house where Sean was waiting. Paddy froze in horror. Sean was alone with him. She listened hard, every sense heightened, listening for a cry or a call or a noise.

Wind rasped through the trees on the high hill behind her, dead leaves hissed around her ankles. So rigid with indecision that she could hardly blink, she stood there, a woman dying in front of her, her own breath frosting and clearing the small panel on the window, listening for Sean’s death.

A shift in the light at the kitchen doorway made her jump back into the dark and her heel sank into the soil.

Lafferty sauntered back in through the kitchen door, calmly stepping over the table to Kate, holding a large knife. He took the hem of his sweatshirt and wiped the blade with it, a faint smile on his lips.

Paddy could hear her heartbeat drumming in her ears. As Lafferty dropped to his knees in front of Kate his free hand brushed the broken leg and she saw Kate’s leg twitch, heard a desperate groan through the window.

She couldn’t move. She had walked away from Vhari, had stood silently in a rockery while Lafferty killed Sean, and now she was going to watch him cut Kate’s throat. Suddenly, she saw a shadow in the kitchen doorway.

Having come in from the dark, Sean was blinded by the overhead light and blinked hard. Lafferty was on his feet, standing straight, twisting from the waist toward the doorway, holding the big knife in front of him.

Tearing her eyes from the window, Paddy grabbed a huge stone at her feet and stood up, surprised by the weight. She swung it at the French doors. The loud shattering of glass panels and aged wood splitting into kindling hit the back wall of the garden, reverberating through the doors. The French doors swung languidly inward. They were unlocked.

Clueless as to what she’d do when she landed, Paddy jumped into the kitchen, feet skidding on the shards of glass. Lafferty spun toward her, his neck a solid flex of muscle, his teeth bared. Sean swung a wild punch at the back of Lafferty’s head.

Paddy watched Lafferty’s face as he received the blow. His jaw slackened and the anger left his eyes for a moment. Behind him Sean retracted his arm and watched.

Lafferty blinked, hunched his shoulders, and spun on his heel to Sean, lifting the knife as he turned.

The base of the copper pan was actually very heavy. The dusting of flour on the handle strengthened her grip as Paddy used two hands to lift it over her head and bring it down on his.

Lafferty paused again as the knife slipped from his fingers; the tip stuck into the wooden floor, the handle vibrating from the force.

The great bull of a man slid to his knees and toppled sideways against the leg of the table, snapping it as his chest fell against it. He reached out a big hand to steady himself and found nothing but air. He landed on his face.

Sean looked down at Lafferty’s still back and over at Kate curled into a small ball by the sink. “Fucking hell, Paddy, I’m due more than two twenty an hour for this.”

Kate’s broken leg twitched, making them both startle. She was trying to speak.

Paddy rushed over to her side. “It’s all right. You’re safe now, Kate.”

Her curly blond hair was stuck to her face. She was just like Vhari apart from her nose. It looked as if it had been crushed with a flatiron. She was mumbling, desperate to be heard. Paddy put her ear to Kate’s mouth but it was hard to make out the words because her voice was so faint and nasal.

“Darling,” she said, “lovely.”

“Lovely?” repeated Paddy, puzzled and wondering if she had heard right.

“To see you, darling. Lovely. I can hear you, darling.”

Kate’s lips slid back; her front teeth were missing, her mouth hinged with sticky blood. Her breath smelled foul.

Her lips parted and Paddy heard what she thought was a death rattle, a gurgle at the back of the throat. Kate was laughing.

The hall stand had a shallow seat on it for Edwardian ladies and gentlemen to sit on while they pulled galoshes and riding boots on and off. It was wide enough for any single bottom, however prosperous, but Paddy and Sean were squashed in side by side, thigh pressing hard against thigh. Paddy was glad of the heat. The police insisted on keeping the front door wide open to the cold night, and frost was settling on the rug.

Ambulance men worked on Kate in the kitchen. Paddy could hear her gurgling and laughing and groaning as the paramedics expressed concern and then bewilderment. They didn’t know what she was laughing about, either. There was nothing for her to laugh about, that leg was a hell of a mess, hell of a mess.