The Dead Hour (7 page)

Gordon Sullivan wasn’t letting her tip the balance of power in her favor. “We know where you’re from.” He suppressed a smile. “We told you to come in.”

Paddy suppressed a smile back. “Just introducing myself, being polite. Having manners. You remember manners?”

He tilted his head. “That was a sixties thing, wasn’t it?”

“’S that the last time you were civil?”

Reid watched Sullivan and Paddy playing, inexperienced and sensing, but not quite understanding, what was going on.

“Well, then.” Sullivan took over the questioning and Paddy liked to think it was because he was going to enjoy it. “Miss Meehan. It is ‘Miss,’ is it?”

“No,” said Paddy. His eye flickered to her ring finger. “It’s ‘Ms.’”

Sullivan laughed in her face. “‘Ms.’?”

“Yeah. Are you married, Mr. Sullivan?”

Sullivan had a paunch and an ill-defined chin but his white hair was thick and carefully quaffed into a late Elvis bouff. He’d have been attractive in his day and she guessed that he was fond enough of the ladies to enjoy casting a veil over his status.

His mouth twitched a pout. “So,” he said, “your reputation goes before you. I know what you did on the Baby Brian case.”

She sighed and patted the table patiently.

Sullivan nodded heavily. “I know, I’m just saying, you’re not as daft as ye, um …” Uncomfortable and a little lost, he flicked his finger up at her. “Ye know. Anyway, so, you were at the Bearsden call? What did you see?”

She hesitated, knowing she should tell them about the fifty-quid note. “I spoke to the guy at the door. Did Tam and Dan give you a good description?”

“Yeah, don’t worry about that. Did you see the Burnett woman?”

“I saw her in the mirror. She had blood all over her neck, all down her shoulder. So she was found by someone who came to give her a lift to work? Was the door left open?”

Sullivan ignored the question. “What else?”

Paddy thought back to the Bearsden driveway and the dark, remembered the rain on her face and the terrible coldness of the night.

“Lights were on in the hall. And in the room on the left, as I was facing the door. The room on the right was in darkness. The man had suspenders on and an expensive shirt. He was talking to Dan at the door, and Tam Gourlay was guarding the car, which I thought was funny because of the area.” She looked at them. They didn’t find it funny at all. “The man kept his hands behind his back, keeping the door closed, like he didn’t want anyone to see in. I caught Vhari Burnett’s eye in the mirror and I sort of went—” she raised her eyebrows “—you know, like, ‘d’you want a hand?’ She shook her head and kind of—” Paddy slipped her chin to her chest and sat back in the chair, miming Vhari slipping out of view. Neither policeman seemed interested in the minutiae of their interaction. “I saw two BMWs parked around the back.”

Both men sat forward. Sullivan tapped the desk. “Where?”

“Round the back. I came up the drive, passed the squad car, and saw round the side. Tucked in behind the house. Where it’s dark.”

“Are you sure it was two cars?”

“Certain.”

Sullivan took a sheet of paper out of a drawer and pushed it across the desk to her with a pencil. “Could you draw them?”

She sketched the rough shape and the men asked her about the details, how high off the ground was that one, this one, any idea of the license-plate numbers? What made her notice them if they were tucked around the back?

“Aye, well, Tam was talking about them. He pointed to the cars and said how flash they were. That’s why I thought Burnett and the man at the door were married, because of the matching cars.”

The officers glanced at each other and Andy Reid, not versed at hiding his feelings, raised an eyebrow.

“Wasn’t it her car?” asked Paddy.

Reid shook his head. “She’d hardly need a lift to work if she’d a BMW round the back, would she?”

Sullivan cleared his throat and watched his hands folding a sheet of paper as he spoke. “There’s going to be an inquiry into what the officers did at the house and why they left. You’ll be called, so you better, you know, be available.”

“’Kay.” Paddy took a breath and looked around the desktop.

Now was the time to say it but telling them about the fifty quid would be more than a confession; they would guess that Dan and Tam had been given money as well. Policemen stuck together like cooked spaghetti. Threatening one of them meant threatening all of them and she was already regarded suspiciously because of the Baby Brian case.

Paddy looked around the desk: two packets of cigarettes, a lighter, a form, two sheets of carbon paper, and a small bald circle on the wood to the right of the form where a previous occupant had placed a hot cup and burned through the varnish. She could just blurt it out.

“You can go now.”

They waited for her to get up but she sat there, trying to think of a way to tell them.

“I said you can go.”

She took a breath and stood up. “Okay,” she said finally. “See you later.”

Gordon Sullivan waited until she was at the door before calling good-bye.

Paddy Meehan stepped down from the front desk rostrum into the mess of the waiting room, knowing she had done a cowardly thing.

Mark Thillingly stood in the dark shadows of the bridge watching the thick gray river slide past. He had never been in the river but had watched it from here so often that now, sitting here on the grass with the smell of damp soil in his nose, it felt like the times in his life when he had stayed away were silly, pointless interludes. His father brought him here when he was a boy—their family firm of solicitors had offices in the building just behind him now—and they came out here in the summer for picnic lunches. He’d brought Diana here just before they married but she didn’t really get it and he should have known then that it was a mistake to marry her. Poor Diana. She thought she was marrying the next leader of the Labour Party and instead she got fat Mark who killed his friends.

He was too tired to cry anymore, bored by his own inadequacy and misery, too bored by grief to even allow that it mattered or could be remedied. He was not the man he had hoped he could be. He wasn’t brave or selfless or strong. At the very last he had let Vhari down.

Up on the bridge a car sped past, trying to beat the lights and failing but running through just the same. It reminded him of himself in the car park outside work. When he realized they were going to hit him, when it became clear that they were definitely going to use violence, he had run for it in a mad panic, running for his car, stupidly running toward the thugs who had come to frighten him.

Mark flinched at the memory. He’d never been a brave man, not physically. At school he banded together with thick bully boys so they wouldn’t pick on him, and he despised himself for it. He avoided sports because he was afraid of physical pain and even chose to follow his father into law when he wanted to teach because he’d heard that some of the schoolkids were handy. It was a weakness he had tried to organize out of his life, that he was ashamed of, and now it had cost Vhari her life.

The admission horrified him afresh and he covered his mouth with his hand and sobbed. She was dead. Because of him. He heard what they had done to her, he’d called a contact in the police. There was blood all over one side of an armchair where the guy had held her down and pulled her teeth out with pliers. Then they hit her hand with a hammer, broke two fingers so that they were swollen to twice their normal size. She hadn’t told them what they wanted so they hammered her head and left her to drag herself through the living room to the hall, blond hair smeared scarlet, leaving a long, bloody red smear through the familiar drawing room, past the dark wood archway to the Victorian hall and out toward the phone. Bit of bone in her brain. They couldn’t have saved her even if she’d managed to make the 999 call. The detective remembered then that Thillingly knew her. Didn’t you work with Burnett or something? Years ago, said Thillingly, trying to keep it light.

He fumbled to pull a cigarette out of his packet, his cold hands clumsy and trembling. He lit it and dropped the lighter in the grass. He didn’t need it anymore. There would be no more cigarettes, no more large dinners or football matches on TV, no more fights with Diana, no more smiling through the disappointment he found himself, and God it was a relief.

Holding the cigarette between his teeth, he stood up and walked toward the river. A small muddy incline led to the waterside. He imagined himself stepping delicately toe first, like a nymph going for a midnight dip, into the great gray slug of water. He’d chicken out if he tried to do it that way. Try and flap his way to the bank or call for help. He was a fucking coward. That’s why he was here in the middle of the night.

Shutting his eyes to squeeze out a final tear, he backed off from the water and walked up to the bridge, checking to make sure he wasn’t looking down at land. He was too close still: his body might spin as it fell and he’d land on the bank. He took five sideways steps, climbed up onto the railing, thought of Vhari wearing a summer dress and touching her hair, and toppled off the bridge.

He wasn’t frightened as he fell. He knew the water would be piercingly cold, that he was falling from high enough for the landing contact to break bones, but he convinced himself that he would land on a bed of cushions and his body relaxed into the fall, expecting softness. He fell happily.

A second before he hit the rush of greedy black water, Mark Thillingly realized that he had learned the trick of being brave.

THE SAD FATE OF THE LATE AND THE LOST

Kate awoke with a start. She had been dreaming that a giant insect was sitting on her throat, its hollow proboscis burrowing into the soft skin on her forehead, sucking out a blackhead that turned into a reservoir of pus. She woke up slapping at herself, her elbows rattling noisily against the wooden floor of the boathouse, frightened and bewildered as to where she was and who had put her there. She sat up against the orange box, looking around in the near dark and realizing how cold it was. She was lucky not to have frozen to death in the damp. She could see her breath and had nothing on but a linen suit and a blouse. She was missing a shoe.

Her eyes adjusted to the light and she realized she was in her grandfather’s boathouse. Loch Lomond, for God’s sake. She reached blindly up over her head, feeling on top of the box, and smiled as her hand felt the cold of the snuffbox kissing her fingertips. But then she heard the engines and froze.

Two cars, quiet, good engines, good motion. Driving slowly along the road, looking, definitely looking, for something. One set of wheels coming off the smooth black tarmac and crunching over the dirt drive in front of the cottage. Only one set, though. If it was them they’d both want to be off the road in case she was there, so that they would be less visible to a passerby. The second set of wheels crunched slowly in a turn. She stood up unsteadily, shedding her one shoe, and looked out of the crack again.

Two BMWs parked side by side. It was getting dark outside but she knew him from the shape of his head. She could have recognized him from part of an ear, a shoulder, a toe because she’d spent so long watching him sleep and eat and make love. She remembered every corner of him. From the second car came two men, neds, one wearing a sheepskin. Cheap gangster look. He was letting himself down being seen with men like that. He didn’t need to employ cheap-looking men. There had to be well-dressed gophers, surely.

He’d have laughed if he heard her say that. Once upon a time he’d have laughed, but maybe not now.

She had left the cottage door unlocked and they didn’t knock, just pushed it open and walked in. She watched as the light went on in the hall, a bright yellow light radiating out into the cold night. She should be sitting inside the door in her underwear, waiting to greet him.

She thought of the two men coming in through the door and giggled, imagining them embarrassed, overwhelmed by her sexiness. God, he’d say, you are stunning, and look at her with the shining-eyed, hungry admiration he had that night in Venice.

She looked fondly toward the house, thinking of him in there, looking for her. She almost went to him but a small window of insight opened up in her coke-scrambled head, and she remembered that Vhari was dead, murdered.

Kate watched the house through the boathouse window and wondered what she had done wrong. She stumbled noiselessly over to the orange box and opened her snuffbox again, finding the spoon sitting inside, covered in powder where it shouldn’t have been. She helped herself to a half portion, a maintenance sniff. She was rubbing her nose when she started crying, cried for herself again because her nose stung so much and now she couldn’t think straight or sort anything out.

Her luck had changed. Paddy could feel it as a vibration coming off the city, buzzing off the gray concrete and the wet tarmac. She sat in the back of the car, bright-eyed as each dramatic call came in; a fight between neighbors that ended with a stabbing, a motorway pileup with two dead, and now a drowning. None of the stories were big or significant enough to be taken away and given to a better journalist. Her copy would be all over the paper.

They were cruising along empty roads to the south bank of the Clyde where a body had been seen floating in the fast-moving water. A cold mist began to descend on the midnight city, a stagnant exhalation that clung to the tops of passing cars. Yellow streetlights jostled hard against the thickening dark.

Billy pulled up under an iron railway bridge and yanked on the hand brake, switching off the engine, anticipating a long wait. Paddy sat forward and together they looked across the road, to beyond the marble handrail of Glasgow Bridge. They could see the tops of black police hats, all facing the river.

“Dead, then,” said Billy, seeing no ambulance had rushed to the scene.

“Aye, another poor soul,” said Paddy, hoping it was an interesting story. “God help us.”

Billy was watching her in the mirror, skeptical at her pretense of emotional engagement. He could see how excited she was by the course of the night. Paddy dropped her eyes, opened the car door, and got out.