The Dead Hour

by Denise Mina

  “Sean,” she said with forced patience, “there’s no new evidence—”

  “The old evidence could be made up.”

  “Mrs. Thatcher could be an evil robot but she isn’t. Just because something’s plausible doesn’t make it possible.”

  They looked at each other again. All it would take, she thought, was for one of the animals at work to see a career boost in the story and Sean would be eaten alive.

  “You’d be better off dropping it. No one wants to keep this story going but you.”

  “Pad,” he used the fond diminutive of her nickname but sounded serious, “it’s not just a story to me. I won’t side with the world against that wee guy. I’m all he’s got.”

  “Couldn’t you be all he’s got and still accept that he did it? Does he have to be innocent for you to like him? He was ten years old when he did it, who knows anything at ten?”

  “Don’t start that.”

  Resigned, Paddy nodded. “Come on anyway, get up.”

  Sean stretched back. “Put the kettle on, eh? And a couple of slices.”

  “Playschool’s on in a minute.” She backed out of the room and hesitated at the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. She had come here straight from a night shift but she drew the line at cooking his breakfast. She chose the living room door, fell onto the settee, and looked around the room.

  The Ogilvys were good little soldiers of the church, just like her own family. Their furniture was nice enough, built to be hard wearing but not to look good or feel modern. All the pictures on the walls were either religious or sacrament-related triumphs of the various family members: Sean’s parents at their silver wedding anniversary, the ordination of a distant cousin, one brother’s small wedding to a pretty girl from Hamilton and the subsequent christenings of their four children, all outside the same ugly little chapel during different seasons. Paddy and Sean had been engaged for two of the children’s christenings and she was pictured in the family group, although, in her only expression of annoyance at Paddy for breaking it off, Mimi had framed one of them so that she was sliced in half by the edge of the frame.

  Paddy took a copy of the Daily News out of her pale leather backpack, frowning heavily to stop herself grinning at the second page. Her insert was printed there: police were called to a party at 173 Drymen Road, Bearsden, after neighbors complained of the noise. A woman was found to be injured but police made no arrests. It was her first piece of copy in four night shifts.

  Putting down the paper, she listened for noises from the hall. Nothing.

  “Sean,” she shouted, irritated, “they won’t let you off with it anymore.”

  “I’m eating a fry-up in the shower.”

  She could tell by his voice that he was still lying down. If he was late again they wouldn’t process his giro check until later in the afternoon, which meant the check would arrive in three days instead of two. They did it to punish latecomers and Mimi needed the money.

  “Your mum’s behind on all her catalogs. Mr. McKay’ll come and repo all your underpants.”

  She heard the clip-clop of high heels in the close and a key rasping into the front door. She hoped it was Mimi but knew it wasn’t. Guilty, as if she had been caught skiving school, she tucked her hands between her knees and sat up straight on the settee.

  Elaine McCarron stepped into the hallway, mac on over her blue work pinny, smiling to herself. Elaine had been two years below them at school, slim, slight, and fine featured. She hated Paddy but was too dainty to ask Sean to stop hanging about with his ex the whole time. A junior hairdresser, she worked hard on her feet all during the long afternoons that Paddy and Sean spent watching telly or wandering around Woolworth’s eating pick and mix and playing with the toys.

  Paddy let herself be known by a stage cough. Elaine spun, infuriated, and Paddy tried a smile.

  “I wouldn’t have come,” she whispered, “only Mimi asked me.”

  Elaine pursed her lips hard, draining the blood from them, and looked away to Sean’s bedroom door. She pulled her pinny straight, composing herself before knocking prettily.

  Paddy sat sheepishly back on the settee. She couldn’t leave immediately. It would look as if she had done something wrong. She felt a familiar hollow sense of guilt, as if she had eaten the flake out of Elaine’s ice cream and no one knew it but the two of them. She could blame Mimi all she liked, she could deny it to everyone, but Paddy knew that she was clinging to Sean because he was the only person she felt completely comfortable with. She needed him even more now because she missed her sister Mary Ann so much.

  From across the hall she heard Elaine give a sexy giggle, louder than she needed to, for Paddy’s benefit she was sure. She stood up suddenly and turned the telly on to the news. Unemployment was running at one in ten. The Scott Lithgow shipyard was threatening to close with six and a half thousand layoffs. Boy George was pictured arriving in Paris, at Charles de Gaulle with his Japanese girlfriend. Then the local news.

  Mist rose from a lawn in a sharp morning. In the distance a Victorian villa with serious policemen in front of it, their frosted breath silver in the brittle morning air. It was the house she had stopped last night. The homeowner, Vhari Burnett, had been found this morning by a colleague who had come to give her a lift to work. They showed a grainy photo of the woman Paddy had seen in the mirror. Her hair was shorter in the picture and she was outside, her blond hair wind-ruffled, smiling crescent eyes.

  Paddy sat upright: the good-looking man had killed her. She remembered the flurry of light at the Bearsden window and it seemed to her now an arm swung in a punch, a machete strike, a death blow. She recalled the night cold on her cheeks, the wind brushing her hair back, and saw again the fingers clench the door handle, holding the door closed, keeping the woman inside.

  Burnett had been a prominent member of the prosecutor’s office, unmarried and a political activist. In the wide shot Paddy noticed that both BMWs were gone from the back of the house.

  As Paddy sat on the settee, slack and horrified, vaguely aware of the sound of voices out in the hall, she shifted and felt the fifty quid crumple in her pocket. She should phone the police and tell them about it. It could be important—not many people had the odd fifty-quid note sitting about in their hall. But the police would gossip. Her first and only bribe would become public knowledge.

  The front door clicked shut and Sean said something. She’d be known as corrupt and the note would end up in some policeman’s pocket. Evidence was misplaced all the time, generally money or other valuables, but it never seemed to happen to moldy jam sandwiches or hats with holes in them.

  “Did ye not make tea?” asked Sean, repeating himself. He was standing at the door of the living room.

  Paddy pointed at the telly. “He killed her.”

  “Who?”

  “I was at the door of that house last night and they’ve just said a woman was murdered after we left. I spoke to the guy who did it.”

  Sean glanced at the television. “Creepy.”

  Paddy drew a long breath, balancing the news of the fifty-quid note on the tip of her tongue, unsure if she wanted to commit herself to doing the right thing. She looked at Sean’s face and gave in. “He gave me money, a fifty-pound note, to go away.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  Paddy cringed. “Shitloads, isn’t it? Mum’d have a field day with a note that big.”

  Sean’s eyes widened thinking of all the things he could do with fifty quid. It was five weeks’ worth of benefit for him. He could send his mum to Rome on pilgrimage. Buy shoes that fitted him. Get new carpet for the threadbare hall.

  “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.”

 
; THREE

  HOME

  I

  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.

  II

  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?”