The Dead Hour

I

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.