The Dead Hour

I

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.

II

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.

As she crossed the empty road droplets of cold mist burst on her warm skin, catching on her black woolly tights and shining the toes of her shoes. The swirling river threw up the smell of decay as she crossed the empty bridge to the high fence.

The riverbank was cut off from the street by a high Victorian railing, painted black and glistening wet. Through the fence she could see a crowd of black-coated policemen standing on the grass, looking down a gentle grassy slope, watching someone in the water.

A tall fence was necessary because, beyond the inviting slope of green lawn, the ground suddenly fell away into a black cliff. A little wooden stepladder was leaning against the railings and a wooden box had been placed on the far side. The railings would have been a steep climb, even for a superfit policeman. Happily, not all the policemen were superfit, so they kept the stepladder hidden nearby; Paddy never found out where they stowed it. She climbed up the five steps now, swinging her legs over the spikes at the top and dropping down awkwardly on the box on the other side, toppling on an ankle as she stepped off but righting herself before anyone noticed.

The dank fog was thick on the water, so close to the swilling surface that the far bank was hidden, backlit and glowing yellow. At the foot of the cliff a life-jacketed man in a wooden rowboat was prodding at something on the surface with a long pole. It looked like a submerged black balloon, bobbing in the fast-moving gray water, tugging the hook on the end of the pole, trying to free itself.

The boatman poked and prodded the object, moving it toward the riverbank. Employed by the Glasgow Benevolent Society to dredge the river for bodies, he patrolled every morning looking for unlucky drunks and suicides from the night before. It was a rare occasion when he was called out beyond his hours.

Paddy walked over and stood behind the policemen, watching the show on the river. The pack of policemen glanced back, noting that she was there but so used to her appearing at their back that the storyteller holding their attention didn’t bother to temper his chat.

“She’d her shirt over her head and he’s standing there giving it ho-ho,” he said, and the others chuckled.

Paddy had seen the guy before. Every time she met him he seemed to be giving a command performance to a group, usually telling a long story that involved a woman taking her top off. He was funny; she’d laughed at a couple of his stories before and she’d meant to tell him about Dub and the comedy club.

She felt she should announce her arrival. “What’s the story here, then?”

“Ah, some guy dead in the water,” said the joker.

Paddy looked around at the empty street and heavy fog.

“How did anyone know?”

“A couple coming from a nightclub stopped at a phone box. They saw him splashing about.” He nodded over. “Saw him from the bridge.”

“Take it to the bridge,” called a stocky policeman, trying to mimic James Brown and failing. There was a small bleak pause.

“Aye, right enough,” said the funny one, smiling but not laughing.

The boatman had pinned the bobbing body to the bank and shouted up to them to come and get it out of the water.

“Ah, Christ,” said the joker, “we’ll be stinking of the fucking river for the rest of the shift.”

The river was swollen by the heavy rains and the steep cliff was only three feet deep. As they edged gingerly down to the water’s edge Paddy stepped to the side to get a better view. She had never seen a drowning victim before. They were usually found during the day when her shift was finished. Teenagers and disoriented people favored the river-jumping from a bridge was an impulsive act-but this body looked too big to be a young person. The black balloon bumped between the boat’s side and the riverbank.

The joker and the not-funny one grabbed the wet material with both hands, lifting on a count of three. They rose for a moment and then fell back as the weight of the body came out of the water. One more surge of effort and they pulled him onto the muddy bank.

The body rolled over onto its back and everyone recoiled at the sight. It was a man in his thirties, clean shaven, eyes open, the bridge of his nose swollen from a blunt hit. His cheek had burst, flesh blooming outward like a meaty flower. The rip was so deep that Paddy could see flashes of his white jawbone. His ear was slack, hanging too low toward the back of his head. It turned her stomach and she was repelled, but found her eyes drawn to it, racing across the mess, doing a mental jigsaw, trying to make sense of it.

“What do you think?” The joker stood back and looked at him. “Someone put him in there or a suicide?”

The policemen closed in around the body.

A stocky policeman who hadn’t spoken yet bent over the body and flicked at the messy tear with the blunt end of a biro, dropping the flap of skin back to where it should have been. The ear twisted like a doorknob coming back to true.

“Yeah, something in the river got stuck in his face and ripped it open. The nose looks like a straight punch. I’m guessing suicide.”

Paddy didn’t want to give away her fright so she focused on his eyes. They were open, staring blankly, black speckles of mud filigreed over from the drag up the cliff face. His skin was a terrible vibrant white and, when her eyes strayed back to the cheek again, the face resolved itself and she could make out the messy tear, now just a puffy black crease across the cheek. His nose was swollen between his eyes, the bulbous skin split in a thin crack. He’d lost a loafer and a wet silk sock perfectly outlined his toes. A sharp big toenail was slicing against the material.

“That’s enough,” said the stocky policeman, stepping back. “I’ll phone it in as a possible murder, just in case.” He pulled away from the crowd and made his way back to the car and the radio.

Paddy kept looking, memorizing the details for the piece in the paper. The man was in his thirties, a bit pudgy and self-conscious about it: she knew the tricks. He wore a vertically striped shirt under a long overcoat. Paddy could spot someone who hated their body across a room. The overcoat was straight cut with rolled-back cuffs and thin lapels, diagonal pockets. Under the coat his pale gray trousers were pleated and baggy coming into a narrow ankle with a thin turn-up.

The joker rifled through the man’s pockets, pulling melted clumps of paper hankies out of one pocket. He found the wallet in the inside pocket and flipped it open.

“Money not missing. Twenty quid in here. Lived in Mount Florida. Thirty-two years old.” He pulled cards and sodden paper out of the wallet, flipping them dismissively onto the ground after he read them. “Visa card. Member of the Law Society. Chairman of the local Amnesty International chapter, and the Child Poverty Action Group. Our Mother Theresa’s name is: Mark Thillingly.”

“Maybe someone killed him for having a dick’s name,” said the not-funny one but everyone laughed anyway, just for relief.

The boatman didn’t laugh. Still sitting in his boat at the bottom of the cliff, he used a single oar to negotiate the water, remaining steady among powerful eddies. Paddy caught his eye over the heads of the policemen. She could see that he hadn’t lost his compassion for the people he dredged out of the water. He’d been doing the job for ten-odd years and she knew his father had done it before him. If anyone needed a laugh for relief at the sad fate of the late and lost it was him.

“Thillingly,” repeated Not-funny, chuckling again and enjoying his triumph. “And he was a lawyer.”

“I’ll go then.” The boatman raised a hand and the wooden rowing boat slid back into the bank of fog.

The policemen stared down at the body lying limp on the frozen ground, waiting until the boatman was out of earshot, and hesitating because they were unsure when that would be. The joker spoke for everyone but Paddy. “That guy’s a creep.”

III

Kate had been watching through the dark wood for over an hour, listening to the noises of smashing glass and breaking furniture coming from the cottage. A lot of the furniture had been made for the house in the late eighteen-hundreds, when it was built as a holiday home for her great-greats. The dresser in the kitchen, that was irreplaceable. She wouldn’t get half as much for the place if they ripped it apart.

It was bad of him to do that when he didn’t need to. She would hardly have stashed the pillow in the cottage and left on her own. It was bad of him not to know that.

Her eyes were getting tired, focusing through the bald trees to the cottage so far away. She’d seen them going back to the cars a couple of times to get things and assumed that was what the man in the sheepskin was doing when the yellow light from the hallway was interrupted by his big frame. He passed the car, not turning to the passenger door or the boot, but walking straight past, pausing at the side of the road to look up and down. He stood, turning his head slowly, scanning the wood for movement of any kind. Kate held her breath.

He spotted the boathouse and stopped scanning. He stuck his head out on his neck and looked again. Crossing the road, walking lightly for such a big man, he held big arms out to steady himself as he tiptoed over the muddy ground, hesitating when he snapped sticks before taking the next step, always coming straight for her. She recoiled from the rotting wooden boards, feeling for the orange box lid and her snuffbox. She needed to hide. She looked up at the boat hanging from the ceiling. She was slight but didn’t think the ropes and ceiling would hold her. She tried the orange box lid, knowing it was kept locked, had always been kept locked and the key was in the cottage pantry, hanging up behind the cups.

She looked up at the oars on the wall but they were too unwieldy. By the time she got a good swing he could have grabbed her arm. She picked up her one shoe, hugging it together with her snuffbox, flattening her body against the wall behind the door.

She could hear him approaching through the sticky mud and wet mulching leaves. He was outside the door and had stopped to look around. He wouldn’t be able to see her car from there but if he took ten steps north he’d see the bonnet and know she was there for sure and call the others.

He took a step, toward the boathouse she was sure, then another, definitely toward. The round handle turned silently and slowly and after a moment the door swung open. He hesitated before stepping into the dark.

The wooden floor groaned beneath his weight and no wonder. He was a big, big man. Six foot to her five foot five, shoulders broad and sloping as a buffalo’s. He stood with his feet apart looking away to the right, taking in the boat attached to the ceiling, the oars, the lip of floor that sat over the water. He stepped forward to look underneath it and Kate sensed that her only possible moment was now.

She lashed blindly at him with her pump, holding it by the sole and flicking the heel at him sideways. She might have tapped him on the shoulder with it but as it happened he turned to look to the left just as she did. The reinforced three-inch heel plunged through his eye and beyond to a thin wall of bone. The sensation was like punching a drum of paper with a pencil.

With the grace of a felled bull, the big man dropped to his knees, swayed and toppled to the side, twisting the shoe in the socket and shutting the door hard. His shoulder twitched in a shrug.

Kate opened her snuffbox and took a trembling sniff right there, freestyle, standing in the damp dark of her grandfather’s boathouse, over the corpse of a dead stranger. Then, newly steadied, she pulled the shoe out of his eye and slipped it on her foot, dragged him away from the door and, opening it, stepped out into the wood.

She headed down to the car and found her other shoe by the boot, sitting in the mud as if an invisible one-legged woman was standing there. Shocked into an unfamiliar stoicism, she calmly fitted the shoe on her other foot and climbed into her car, backing out of the dark, deep little valley onto the road in a smooth movement.

She left her lights off until she had safely passed the cottage and, unnoticed, headed back down the loch side to Glasgow.