The Dead Hour (4 page)

“Ye need to hand it in to the police though, Pad.”

“Aye,” she agreed quickly, as if that was what she had been going to do all along. “Aye, I know.”

“You’ll get it back, I’m sure.”

“Oh, aye.” She turned back to face the telly and nodded, a little too vigorously. “I’ll get it back.”

Kate had been awake for almost two days. Sitting behind the wheel of her smart new car she felt panicked and buzzed at the same time, giggly almost when she thought about the value of the thing in the boot, frightened when she thought about the consequences of what she had done. She turned a corner and saw a lorry lumbering along in front of her on the straight road. She stepped on the brake, touching it lightly, just curling her bare toes over the soft leather insole of her navy blue pump, and the sensitive car slowed on the wet road. Beautiful motion. Reflexively, her thumb stroked the enameled BMW badge at the center of the wheel. The blue matched her woolen Chanel suit, her earrings and watch. Lovely to be surrounded by lovely things.

The Loch Lomond Road was quiet this morning. It was too cold for tourists, too rainy even for Germans. The summer crowds were hardly even a memory now. As she drove through the little settlements dotted along the bare road all the bed-and-breakfast signs had NO VACANCIES notices attached at the bottom. Kate came here every summer when she was young and knew the rota of visitors to the Loch, from the pasty-faced city dwellers who came on the bus for a day in a tea shop during the drizzly, midge-infested summer to the other old established families who, like hers, came to their holiday homes for Christmas and Hogmanay, trooping from one house to another bringing season’s greetings and good bottles of malt with them.

He would probably suspect she’d come to the Balmaha cottage, and look for her there. She didn’t have keys for the front door but could easily break in around the back. She imagined herself in bra and stockings and garters, sitting on a chair in the hall, seductively smoking a cigarette as he opened the door. He’d love that, she smirked to herself, he’d go mad for that. She imagined the scene again, lowering the lights, making it at night, pulling her curly blond hair up but letting tendrils tumble about her shoulders and putting her glasses on. Sexy secretary. He loved that look. Unfortunately she didn’t have any of that sort of underwear with her.

She was overtaking the lorry, a third of the way up the side, flicking the wipers on to smear away the spray from the tall tires, when she saw the red car coming straight toward her, twenty feet away and closing.

“Shit!” Eyes wide, suddenly awake, she took her foot off the accelerator, slammed the brake, and managed to pull in behind the lorry so neatly that the red car narrowly missed clipping her near corner of the bonnet.

“Shit!” She shouldn’t be driving, suddenly doubted her perception of space and time and safety. The lorry pulled ahead of her and Kate let the car slow to a stop, pulling into the side, not even waiting to find a resting place, just letting the car roll to a stop, the bonnet dipping into the ditch, crunching into a bank of shingle.

Ahead of her the windscreen view was filled with sheer black rock, jagged and wet, covered in netting to stop loose boulders tumbling onto the road and making it any more treacherous than it already was.

She had been awake for two days, driving around for a lot of that, and now realized that it was a wonder that she hadn’t killed herself. She needed to sleep. She hadn’t eaten either, now she thought about it. She would get to the cottage and have a bath. There were always some tins of ham in the cupboard. Some dried milk too, she could make up a jug and have some tea. She took deep breaths, well practiced at bringing her heart rate down. She was trembling. Her fingers were actually trembling with fright.

Reaching over to the well of the passenger seat, she pulled up her navy blue handbag and sat it on the seat, feeling blind for the packet of cigarettes. She lit one. It wasn’t what she really wanted but she needed to slow down, calm down, keep steady. Get it together and drive to the cottage, have a bath. Eat some ham. Make milk from the powder in the cupboard. The police might pass her here and come to talk to her because the car was parked strangely. They’d recognize her, maybe, check the car, go into the boot.

Kate took a drag on her cigarette and reminded herself that those things hadn’t happened. She had just imagined that they had. They hadn’t happened. Realizing that she didn’t know if she had been parked for a second or an hour, she turned the radio on to give herself a measure of the passage of time. Duran Duran. She liked them. Lovely suits. Tans, nice suntans. Princess Diana liked them too. She took another draw on her cigarette and imagined herself at a smart party in Chelsea, Sloane Rangers in hairbands and guys in suits who worked in the City. Rich, rich people. Lot of money, champers, no one eating because they were all as coked up as she was. A room full of striped furniture and lovely things, well made. Italian things.

She felt warm and comfortable. She drew on her cigarette again and smiled at the passenger window as though it were a fellow guest at the party. She nodded at a woman across the room. A titled woman. Someone who had house parties in her country place. People could stay all weekend because the house was so big they’d never run into each other. Never get sick of each other. She invited Kate away for the weekend. She’d invited half the party, but only half, and Kate was included. Kate smiled over at her again. Hi.

Duran Duran stopped and the news announcer came on the radio. Vhari Burnett. Kate heard the name and for a millisecond thought Vhari had done something lovely. Been proposed to by a royal, given an MBE, won a big case. Vhari Burnett had been murdered in her home. Her body was found by a colleague arriving to give her a lift to work. Her body. Murdered. Kate took three sharp, consecutive drags on her cigarette until she was almost certain there was no corner of either lung unfilled by smoke. She tried to see the titled woman from the party again but couldn’t.

She punched the radio off. It was impossible to imagine Vhari being dead. Vhari being away on holiday was possible, she could imagine that, but not dead. Not murdered.

Kate rolled her window down a fraction and felt the skirl of a bitter wind against her cheek as she pushed the cigarette out into the road. She wound it up again and restarted the car.

A hot bath and a tin of ham and a think about things. She watched the road behind her, turning, her right arm slipping over the seamed cream leather seat back. Lovely thing, the car. Lovely things.

Paddy put her key carefully in the front door and pushed it open. In front of her the stairs were still, the bathroom door on the landing lying open, the light off. Through the living room to her right, coming from the kitchen, she could hear the burble of the radio. Two plates crashed together, louder than was necessary. A cup hit a saucer.

Trisha was smashing around in the kitchen, washing and putting away, wiping and preparing breakfast ready for a family with nowhere to go. They didn’t know whether it was the change of life or the family’s circumstances but Trisha was as likely to shout over nothing as burst out crying and Paddy was worried about her. The news was full of stories about families breaking up under the strain of the recession, of mothers being found dead in spare bedrooms with bottles of pills next to them or fathers disappearing off to London. But no one else seemed to have noticed. Con was a shadow and everyone was distracted by their own worries.

Paddy took her leather off and hung it up in the cupboard under the stairs. She imagined she felt the crumple of dry paper from the pocket and blushed that the bloody note should be so near her mother. She walked through the living room, leaning in the kitchen door and hanging onto the door frame, trying to communicate the fact that she wouldn’t be coming in.

The table was set for two people to have breakfast together, Paddy and Trisha. Martin and Gerard were still in bed though it was ten thirty. Mary Ann would be out at mass. Her father, Con, was sitting at the table, flushed with the weather, having been out walking for a couple of hours.

“Been out already, Da?”

Con nodded, stroking his little David Niven mustache. He used to color it, she knew he did, some powdery concoction Trisha bought in a paper bag from the chemist’s, but he’d stopped recently. Now it was turning gray, disappearing against his gray skin apart from a little patch of red making itself known at the side, looking like a trace of ketchup from a distance. Con had been laid off two years ago and had lost faith that he would ever find work again. Force of habit made him rise at seven every day, take the breakfast Trisha set in front of him, and then, abruptly, find the whole hollow day staring him in the face. He took long walks across the industrial desert between Eastfield and Shettleston. Inside flimsy security fences ran miles of Armageddon fields, pitted with tangled metal and abandoned buildings, and Con picked his quiet way, carrying home scraps they might have a use for.

“Find any goodies?”

He shook his head, turning back to his tea. “Nothing.”

Beyond the kitchen window the sharp, low daylight sliced across the grass tips of the overgrown garden and cut through the kitchen. Trisha was at the empty sink, her face screwed up tight against bright morning, wiping down the metal until it sparkled. She looked up at Paddy.

“I’ve put your cereal out.” She pointed to a box of pressed high fiber that tasted like malted paper.

Paddy yearned for bed. “I had something at Sean’s, Mum.”

Trisha looked at her, barely suppressing a pang of fury. “Okay then, but you’ll have tea.” She turned to the worktop and pulled off the knitted tea cozy, pouring two mugs of strong tea from the steel pot. “And how was last night?”

“Oh, quiet,” said Paddy, watching the tea pour and hanging firmly onto the outside of the door frame, as if her mother’s need for company would be strong enough to suck her into the kitchen. “Missed the big stories again.”

“Did ye hear about this girl killed up in Bearsden? A lawyer, nice girl. A Protestant but a nice girl. It was on the radio.”

Paddy smiled at her mother trying to show she wasn’t a bigot. “How do you know she was a Protestant, Mum? They hardly announced that, did they?”

Trisha poured milk into both cups of tea. “Yes, Miss Smarty-Pants: they always mention it when someone’s Catholic. Anyway, she lives in Bearsden and her name’s Burnett.” She held out the mug to Paddy, just far enough beyond the reach of her fingertips so that she would have to step into the kitchen to take it. “The news’ll be on again in a minute.”

Paddy was being sucker-punched and she knew it. Trisha lifted the mug of strong hot tea a fraction, releasing a puff of comfort. Paddy could smell it at the door. She reached for it and no sooner had her fingers curled around the handle than Trisha pulled a chair out.

“Isn’t Caroline down today?” Paddy only asked the question to upset her mother and they both knew it.

Usually Caroline would be in when Paddy arrived home late, and it was ominous that her seat was empty. Baby Con had started school and Caroline came home most days. When she didn’t get the two buses down to Eastfield it was always because of her husband: John’d either given her a sore face or raised hell about the housework and she had to stay home and scrub.

“She called from the phone box. She’s got too much to do today.” Trisha raised her mug to her mouth. “Sit. Just give us your chat for a wee minute.”

Feeling small and unkind, Paddy sat down. “Well, first we went to this car crash but no one was hurt, and then we went over to the police station in Anderston.” She monologued as she knew her mother wanted, giving her the highlights of the night shift but skipping the visit to Bearsden.

Same as all her women friends, Trisha’s life was vicarious. Paddy heard them in the Cross Café and outside the chapel: they passed on secondhand stories about their kids’ friends, got angry about fights their husbands had at work, boasted about their families’ achievements while they themselves stayed in the kitchen. With an unemployed husband and three of her kids sitting at home waiting for the recession to abate, Trisha had very little material. She couldn’t talk honestly about Caroline’s home life and Mary Ann spent her life in the chapel. Marty and Gerard were monosyllabic at the best of times. If Paddy didn’t take the time Trisha wouldn’t have anything to offer.

She was gibbering about last week’s newspaper awards and JT’s prize, when the news came on. The Bearsden murder was the first item. The police had attended a call at the house earlier in the evening. An inquiry was being called to investigate why the officers left Vhari Burnett in the house. Trisha was right: Vhari was from an aristocratic family; the villa had recently been left to her by a grandfather and she had only just moved in. She was an active member of Amnesty International and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

“There,” said Trisha, “you should go and ask about her, get a story. Then they wouldn’t be able to keep you back.”

In a paranoid morning of exaggerated despair, Paddy had confided in her mother her conviction that the editors hated her and wouldn’t print any story she phoned in anyway so it was all pointless. It was really just the tiredness talking but Trisha took it literally. Paddy suspected that Trisha had told some of her lady friends about it: she often asked about the conspiracy and suggested reporting them to the union. Paddy didn’t know how to take back the allegation without making herself look foolish.

“It’s political.” Trisha pointed at the radio. “You wait and see. She knew something important and they killed her. You should question the folk she was in the CND with.”

“CND don’t meet that often. Amnesty do but everyone else’ll think of it first. They’ll be out this morning.”

“Well, go earlier then. Go today. Go just now.”

“I need to sleep, mum.”

“Fine.” Trisha stood up and began to wash her mug without pouring the last bit of tea out.

Con smiled quietly into his mug. Paddy knew she was cheating her mother of a triumph. She finished her tea quickly and sloped upstairs to sleep.