The Dead Hour

I

The house was full: Trisha was scrubbing the oven angrily, sweating and flushed but pretending she wasn’t. The boys were slumped in the living room, watching television.

Paddy made a plate of toast, took a mug of tea from the ever-full pot, and lifted the Daily News she had brought home with her. Out in the hallway she sat the plate and cup on the stairs as she pulled on her outdoor shoes, a pair of gloves, and a coat. She opened the front door and walked down the path. A lone car, parked at the end of the street, made her stop.

It was a red Ford Capri, quite new and very clean, the roof glinting from a recent wax. She couldn’t say why it caught her attention, other than she’d never seen it before. The Eastfield Star was a dead end; it wasn’t a place drivers passed through by mistake. She shivered lightly and stopped herself. She had been followed by a van during the Callum Ogilvy case and strange cars still frightened her sometimes, when she thought she’d seen them before or suspected the drivers of looking at her. It was the private space that scared her, the dark five feet square inside where passersby wouldn’t interrupt a man beating a woman to death.

As she looked she saw a shadow shifting in the Capri. The engine suddenly fired to life, headlights coming on as the car hurried backward, reversing left and then shooting forward, taking the roundabout the wrong way.

Paddy stood on the path and watched the car drive away. It left because she’d seen it, she knew it had. It wouldn’t be a burglar, there was no money here. It might be Sullivan, sitting in his own car; he’d insisted on dropping her home, after all, and knew where she stayed.

Worrying about it and wondering if she was right to, she crossed the garden and lifted the key out from under a brick, unlocking the garage side door and opening it, stirring up the musky smell of rotting paper. A damp fug hung in the air.

She knew before she flicked the light on that the neighbors hadn’t been to take their stuff out. Still, the pile of rotting cardboard boxes by the door made her feel a lethargic spark of annoyance.

She lifted the plate of buttery toast off her mug, sat it among the pencils and pens lying on the wooden box by the damp armchair, and fell in the chair, pulling the shelf of wood that fitted across the arms. She put her plate of toast and her mug of tea on it and began to eat, looking around the room.

She had set the garage as a study, to finally get down to writing her book about Patrick Meehan’s wrongful conviction. She kept every scene of his story in her head, after all, from the night the old lady was battered to death in Ayr to his release on a royal pardon. She even knew the details of his time in Communist East Germany as a young man, of his trip to Moscow, and about his family life and his background.

It should have been an easy book to write, but at first she couldn’t get going because the garage was too cold.

Her father found a wood burner on one of his long walks around the old industrial wastelands. He fitted it on a slab of concrete and fed a snake of aluminum tubing out of the window for a chimney.

Then she was uncomfortable at the wooden chair. Con found her an old armchair and made her a wooden shelf that sat over the arms for a table.

Having resolved the major impediments to writing the book she sat there afternoon after afternoon, winter light dying outside the small window, surrounded by research and fresh stationery lifted from work, still as a corpse, alone with her own resounding shortcomings. She spent a lot of time there, wishing she could write the book, but the pet project had turned into a monster. It felt like trying to swallow an elephant with a gulp.

Paddy chewed her toast and knew today would be no more productive than all the other days past. She tried to fire her interest by imagining Meehan in a scene from his life: his interview with MI5 in West Berlin, when he explained his brilliant method of springing spies from British prisons, the riot outside Ayr High Court when he was brought there to be charged with murder, the afternoon in gray Peterhead Prison when he broke the seal on the vellum letter that contained his royal pardon. Still, flat images all. All the characters in her mind struck cardboard poses, no one moved or spoke. If she couldn’t write this she couldn’t write anything.

Her dejected eyes strayed to the copy of the Daily News on the floor next to her. She lifted it onto the table. The Bearsden Bird was on the front page again; this time they were poring over her family history and a picture of her old school. She’d been engaged once, to Mark Thillingly, but was single now.

Paddy considered the engineering feat of pulling the teeth out of someone who was wide awake and not consenting. It would take two people: one to hold her and the other one to pull. That would explain the two cars parked around the back of the house. He must have already pulled one or two teeth out by the time Paddy spoke to him at the door. Vhari must have been in agony.

Paddy saw her face in the mirror again, sliding back into the living room. Vhari could have walked away. She could have pushed past the man at the door and climbed into a safe police car. Women stayed with men who hit them, she knew that. Leaving a husband was much more complicated than picking up a coat and walking, but the man wasn’t Vhari’s husband. His name didn’t seem to have come up in the police investigation yet, so he probably wasn’t even her boyfriend. She must have had a bloody good reason.

The police were useless. Most had set their heart on Thillingly and neither Dan nor Tam were admitting that Mark Thillingly wasn’t the man at the door, and they weren’t talking about the BMWs parked around the back, either. They had taken money and they knew the guy, she felt sure they did.

She was sitting back, wondering, when her eye fell on a page-two story. It was a picture of Patrick Meehan in a small living room, grinning bitterly and holding up a letter. His skin had a heavy smoker’s yellow tinge, dying from the outside in. The criminal injuries board had paid him a lump sum of compensation for his wrongful conviction. Meehan said he was accepting the money because he owed a lot of people and wanted to do the right thing by them, but fifty thousand pounds wasn’t enough.

He didn’t look anything like the one-dimensional Meehan in her weak imagination. She looked at his watery eyes and saw traces of bitterness, impotent anger, a tinge of self-disgust. She had heard gossip about the damage the case had done to his children. He was holding the letter too tightly: his fingernails were white at the tips. He must have been holding it for a while, the photographer probably had trouble with his lights.

Meehan had always been part of her life but he never seemed like a real person before.

II

Paddy hesitated at the mouth of the dark cobbled alleyway. Brigate lanes could be used for a lot of things, and being mugged for her monthly Transcard, the only thing of value she owned, was the least of her worries. A few of the lanes had mattresses in them, put there by forward-thinking prostitutes who still had the sense to attend to their own comfort.

She took a step into the lane and felt herself swallowed by the darkness. She could smell a wet mattress on the cobbles and imagined the sickly scent of formaldehyde. Cardboard melted slowly into the stone. It smelled like the neighbors’ debris in her garage.

She was ten yards into the inky dark when she saw his shadow. Sullivan was waiting for her at the side door to the morgue, just as he said he would be. He had asked her to come about six thirty or quarter to seven. He couldn’t say it but she understood the implication: police shifts changed at that time and most officers would be getting briefed for their shift; they wouldn’t be coming past the morgue on routine business.

Sullivan nodded at her and kicked his heel back, pushing the usually locked door open into the bright white tiled corridor. Paddy shut the door behind her.

Wordlessly he led the way along the corridor. Glassy Victorian tiles covered the walls and floor. The overhead strip lights glinted yellow off the glaze. She could smell bleach.

“Thanks for coming,” he said. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention this wee visit.”

“You’re sticking your neck out here, aren’t you?”

Sullivan shrugged, reluctant to voice his suspicions. Paddy touched his back, telling him to lead on, that she would follow. He was a brave man.

They came through a reception area with a vacant desk, a gray school cardigan slung over the back of the office chair. Behind stood a stack of oak boxes of index drawers, each fronted by a letter of the alphabet written in gothic script. Sullivan stopped at a set of double oak doors and looked back at Paddy.

“You been in here before?”

“No.”

He didn’t offer her words of comfort or warning and she appreciated it. He took a deep breath, rolling his finger to warn her to do the same, and then pushed the door open.

The sharp compost smell was tempered by the cold, but not enough. Across the tiled floor, a steel wall of big drawers splintered the overhead light and standing in front of it was a man in a white coat, facing the door expectantly. He was young but bearded, his mustache grown down over his top lip, wet at the tips. He smiled shyly, trying to be welcoming, but his teeth were stained and broken. Sullivan looked away and Paddy saw the sadness in the man’s eyes.

“All right, Keano? Here’s the wee lady I was telling ye about.”

Shamed, Keano pressed his lips together and nodded at Paddy. “Don’t get many birds in here.” He tapped a fingernail against the metal drawer behind him. “Don’t mean in here. Birds die just the same as us, eh?” He looked to Sullivan for confirmation that women couldn’t cheat death.

“Oh, aye, they die just the same.”

Keano cringed, aware that he sounded stupid. “Die just the same.”

They were looking at Paddy, expecting a response. She gave Keano an unthreatening smile. “Good,” she said, wanting it to be all right for him.

Sullivan leaned in confidentially. “Is our guy handy then?”

Keano took two steps across the steel wall and took hold of the handle. The drawer slid open easily, a narrow seven-foot-long tray. Mark Thillingly’s corpse was wrapped tight in a crisp white linen sheet, patches of the material translucent where water had dampened it. The earthy smell of river water rose as soft as mist.

Keano flipped the sheets open left and right. Thillingly was naked, his skin waxy and luminous. Paddy tried not to look further down than the nipples but she could see Keano’s hand reach out and pull the sheet back over the genitals.

A raw Y-incision across the chest and stomach had been sewn back up with big stitches and thick thread. The rip on his cheek had been sewn more carefully but still puckered around the heavy thread. Thillingly was fat. Paddy looked at his sagging stomach and slight breasts and felt for him, imagined all the times he had avoided taking his top off in front of others, how, like her, he dreaded hot weather and never went swimming.

She knew one thing for sure: he wasn’t the man at Vhari Burnett’s front door on the night of the murder. She looked up to speak but Sullivan was shaking his head softly.

“Keano, my man,” he said cheerfully, stepping away from the tray. “Thanks, pal.”

“You owe me a drink then, eh?” Keano forgot himself and grinned again.

“Sure do.” Sullivan backed off out of the room, taking Paddy with him. “Sure do, my man.”

“Aye.” Keano watched them leave. “We don’t get many women visiting, is what I mean.”

“Right enough,” called Paddy, as the door swung shut behind them. “Sullivan, that’s not him.”

“Okay.” It wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

She tried not to sound excited. “This is a big story. This is going to be massive.”

“Okay.” He led her farther down the corridor and when he turned back she could see how troubled he was. No policeman wanted to take a stand against another. “The board of inquiry into the Burnett call are meeting next week. They’re calling witnesses. You’ll get a letter but they’ve got you penciled in for Tuesday afternoon. You’ll have to tell them about the fifty quid then. I can’t guarantee word won’t get out after that.”

He was reminding her that she had a lot to lose too. “Fair enough. I’m going to need this story, then. I’ll wait for it but I really need it.”

Sullivan nodded. “Pet, if the story is what I think it is, I’m going to need you. Do you know what I mean?”

They looked at each other, neither of them favored by colleagues, both in need of a boost and someone at their back.

“Hundred percent.”

II

It was still dark outside the car but Kate had been awake for ten minutes. She smoked a breakfast cigarette and looked out of the window at the car park. She had slept in the driver’s seat, arms folded, her chin on her chest, secure in the bad area as long as the doors were locked. She’d taken a small sniff too, just to give the cigarette a nice morning edge.

She shook her right hand again, irritated, banging her fingertips off the steering wheel. A sharpened pencil through a drum of paper; she could feel it in her fingers, the sensation of resistance followed by a snap and give. She blinked hard when she saw the man on the floor with the shoe heel in his eye. Her coke-widened eyes shut tight and opened again, hoping the image burned onto the back of her retinas would change. She couldn’t take the image in, it felt like two distinct pictures overlapping. A shoe and a man. Not a shoe in a man. A shoe and a man. Even through a fog of drugs and tiredness she sensed the world moving beyond her capacity to grasp it. She had killed a man.

Kate did know not to park the car outside the restaurant. She wasn’t a complete idiot. She drove the car three streets away and pulled up in the dark far corner of an office car park, turning off the engine. She drummed her fingers on the leather-clad wheel. If she left it here, in the dark, all alone, it would certainly attract attention. It was a new BMW, for God’s sake. Most of the people around here had never seen a new pair of shoes. She wouldn’t mind them taking the actual car itself but the parcel in the boot was another matter.

It came to her very suddenly: if she was to stay alive she had to get the pillow out of the car and plant it somewhere safe. That way if they came for her, and she knew they would eventually, she would have a negotiating tool. She felt like an ex-wife trying to negotiate a deal, driving around with a car stuffed with collateral, art or bonds or share certificates or something. Alone in the dark car park, with nowhere to go and brain tissue from a stranger on her heel, she smiled at the thought.

But where to leave it. She rolled through possibilities: a safe-deposit box. She’d be too easy to trap because she’d have to go back and back to fill up her snuffbox. Who did she know that could keep it safe without knowing what it was? Her parents, but she dismissed the idea immediately. She hadn’t seen them for three years and it would take too much explaining. Alison, her best friend at school. She had two kids, though, and might not be sympathetic to a party girl. She thought about people Vhari knew, old old friends from back when they were so close most of their friends were sort of mutual. The Thillinglys. But he had a dreadful wife and Mark was too straightlaced. Bernie. She loved Bernie even if he wasn’t nice to her. His garage/shed thingy was down by the motorway and would be empty at night.

Kate looked around the car park, realizing that it was overshadowed by the office buildings above. She could have a little snifter quite safely here, she thought, but she was super thirsty and definitely needed a drink first. Or after. After would do too.

She felt naughty as she took the snuffbox out of her handbag and detached the little spoon, dipping it into the powder as her other hand flicked the lid open.

It hurt. For the first time in a long time the inside of her nose burned white hot. She had the presence of mind not to drop the snuff box, even though she had the pillow in the boot. Eyes shut, she snapped the box shut and put it in her handbag, keeping her other hand on the bridge of her nose as she doubled over her knees.

She rubbed the bone vigorously as if that would make it go away. Her eyes were streaming, her nose running. It must have been a big crystal. A big solid coke crystal had landed in her nose and it was tickling like a complete bugger. She gasped a smile, squeezing a tear out of one of her eyes. Complete bugger.