The Dead Hour

I

Paddy opened the door, stepping out into a soft muddy bank that swallowed the sole of her boots.

“Fuck.”

Sean leaned over from the driver’s seat and whispered loudly. “Should I come too?”

Paddy tutted. “Of course ye should bloody come. This guy’s an animal.” She found herself echoing Burns’s words.

Sean climbed out of the car and looked anxiously back down the road. “Sure ye don’t want me to wait with the car?”

“He’s going to kill her. He’s built like a brick shithouse. I could do with a wee hand.”

“But the police…” Sean shrugged nervously. “Can’t we drive until we find a phone and tell them to come here?”

“She could be dead by then.”

“We could be dead.” He felt immediately ashamed and slipped her eye. “I didn’t really sign up for this.”

“Okay.” She was furious. “You just keep watch then.”

“I’m not much of a fighter, Paddy-”

“Please your fucking self, Ogilvy.”

“Paddy-”

“I’m trying to save someone’s life, here, I haven’t got time to squabble.”

“Can’t I-”

But she’d moved off already, creeping down the lane heading back to the cottage, angry at Sean and sick with fright. Reluctantly Sean tripped after her.

It was a small Victorian cottage, a miniature mansion. A low slate roof hung over the whitewashed walls; picturesque windows had black wooden shutters open at either side. The front door was low, the heavy black lintel giving it a frown, flanked by cast-iron foot scrapers for horse riders to clean their boots on.

Across the road Paddy and Sean hung back behind the trees. Through the front windows they could see light seeping through doorways from the hall. Lafferty believed he was alone: he didn’t need to leave the lights off anymore.

Paddy looked back to the loch and saw the shape of a rickety wooden boathouse down by the water. She looked around the ground and picked up a thick branch. It was rotten and crumbled in her hand when she gripped it. There was nothing else by the roadside, no bits of metal or big round stones. She didn’t even have a plan.

Sean looked over at the house, fists firmly in his pockets, elbows locked tight. He saw her looking at his hands and smiled nervously. “Cold, isn’t it?”

“I’m going in,” she said angrily. “You do what ye like.” She crossed the road and headed around the side of the house alone.

Unlike at the Killearn house, the path here was overgrown with plants. She had to negotiate her way through the branches of an old tree that had snapped and fallen against one of the windows. A bush at her feet released the smell of spearmint as she brushed through it.

Around the back the lane opened up into a steep garden, shallow, with a sheer wall of black wet rock at the back. It was neatly set out but untended. The only part bare of vegetation was a big patch of turned earth at her feet.

The back wall of the house had two small windows on either side of a set of French doors leading from the kitchen. The far window was dark, a bathroom maybe. The window next to Paddy looked in over the sink.

She crept along the wall, the soft bare earth under her feet giving at every step. She stood flush to the wall and looked in. It was a pretty Edwardian kitchen, with beautifully crafted wooden shelves and pierced doors on the pantry, painted pale yellow and cornflower blue. An old-fashioned black cooking range sat in a large inglenook.

The kitchen had been beaten up: the wall cupboards lay open, doors had been yanked off hinges, the table overturned. Matching sets of plates and cups lay shattered on the black slate floor. Below the window the Belfast sink had loose tea and empty jars lying under a dripping tap, and a thick black crack snaked from one side to the other. A packet of flour had been emptied around the room, leaving a thin Christmas dusting on all the surfaces.

She didn’t see the legs at first. It was the drag mark from the doorway that led her eye to the filthy stocking feet near the window. Kate’s lower calf was horribly swollen, bent at an illogical angle, the pale sheer material of her tights holding the bloody mess together. Her feet were filthy, caked in mud, and a big toenail had come off, Paddy could see the coin-sized shape and the raw bloody mark underneath.

She tore her eyes from the figure on the floor and looked for a weapon. There were no knives visible in the kitchen; a couple of copper pots lay by the doorway but they didn’t look very heavy. She stepped back in the soft earth and looked around the garden. No tools. Big stones in the rockery but her hands were too small to pick them up.

Panicking, she stepped back to the window and peeped in. Something about the drag marks on the floor caught her eye. Paddy looked carefully at Lafferty’s footsteps next to the twin track marks from Kate’s feet. The footsteps were confused, as if Lafferty had turned around. Not around. He’d turned back. Lafferty’s footsteps doubled back, heading out of the kitchen.

He’d gone back out to the car, to the front of the house where Sean was waiting. Paddy froze in horror. Sean was alone with him. She listened hard, every sense heightened, listening for a cry or a call or a noise.

Wind rasped through the trees on the high hill behind her, dead leaves hissed around her ankles. So rigid with indecision that she could hardly blink, she stood there, a woman dying in front of her, her own breath frosting and clearing the small panel on the window, listening for Sean’s death.

A shift in the light at the kitchen doorway made her jump back into the dark and her heel sank into the soil.

Lafferty sauntered back in through the kitchen door, calmly stepping over the table to Kate, holding a large knife. He took the hem of his sweatshirt and wiped the blade with it, a faint smile on his lips.

Paddy could hear her heartbeat drumming in her ears. As Lafferty dropped to his knees in front of Kate his free hand brushed the broken leg and she saw Kate’s leg twitch, heard a desperate groan through the window.

She couldn’t move. She had walked away from Vhari, had stood silently in a rockery while Lafferty killed Sean, and now she was going to watch him cut Kate’s throat. Suddenly, she saw a shadow in the kitchen doorway.

Having come in from the dark, Sean was blinded by the overhead light and blinked hard. Lafferty was on his feet, standing straight, twisting from the waist toward the doorway, holding the big knife in front of him.

Tearing her eyes from the window, Paddy grabbed a huge stone at her feet and stood up, surprised by the weight. She swung it at the French doors. The loud shattering of glass panels and aged wood splitting into kindling hit the back wall of the garden, reverberating through the doors. The French doors swung languidly inward. They were unlocked.

Clueless as to what she’d do when she landed, Paddy jumped into the kitchen, feet skidding on the shards of glass. Lafferty spun toward her, his neck a solid flex of muscle, his teeth bared. Sean swung a wild punch at the back of Lafferty’s head.

Paddy watched Lafferty’s face as he received the blow. His jaw slackened and the anger left his eyes for a moment. Behind him Sean retracted his arm and watched.

Lafferty blinked, hunched his shoulders, and spun on his heel to Sean, lifting the knife as he turned.

The base of the copper pan was actually very heavy. The dusting of flour on the handle strengthened her grip as Paddy used two hands to lift it over her head and bring it down on his.

Lafferty paused again as the knife slipped from his fingers; the tip stuck into the wooden floor, the handle vibrating from the force.

The great bull of a man slid to his knees and toppled sideways against the leg of the table, snapping it as his chest fell against it. He reached out a big hand to steady himself and found nothing but air. He landed on his face.

Sean looked down at Lafferty’s still back and over at Kate curled into a small ball by the sink. “Fucking hell, Paddy, I’m due more than two twenty an hour for this.”

Kate’s broken leg twitched, making them both startle. She was trying to speak.

Paddy rushed over to her side. “It’s all right. You’re safe now, Kate.”

Her curly blond hair was stuck to her face. She was just like Vhari apart from her nose. It looked as if it had been crushed with a flatiron. She was mumbling, desperate to be heard. Paddy put her ear to Kate’s mouth but it was hard to make out the words because her voice was so faint and nasal.

“Darling,” she said, “lovely.”

“Lovely?” repeated Paddy, puzzled and wondering if she had heard right.

“To see you, darling. Lovely. I can hear you, darling.”

Kate’s lips slid back; her front teeth were missing, her mouth hinged with sticky blood. Her breath smelled foul.

Her lips parted and Paddy heard what she thought was a death rattle, a gurgle at the back of the throat. Kate was laughing.

II

The hall stand had a shallow seat on it for Edwardian ladies and gentlemen to sit on while they pulled galoshes and riding boots on and off. It was wide enough for any single bottom, however prosperous, but Paddy and Sean were squashed in side by side, thigh pressing hard against thigh. Paddy was glad of the heat. The police insisted on keeping the front door wide open to the cold night, and frost was settling on the rug.

Ambulance men worked on Kate in the kitchen. Paddy could hear her gurgling and laughing and groaning as the paramedics expressed concern and then bewilderment. They didn’t know what she was laughing about, either. There was nothing for her to laugh about, that leg was a hell of a mess, hell of a mess.

When the police arrived in response to Sean’s call from the phone in the hallway they assumed that Lafferty was the householder and screamed at Paddy and Sean for a bit, putting handcuffs on them and then taking them off after the radio confirmed that Paddy did indeed fit the description of a News journalist and that she should be in the car they found parked around the corner.

Lafferty was dead. There was no bleeding that they could see, no violent spills of guts or anything that made Paddy feel it was real. He had died of a massive bleed into his brain where the saucepan had hit him.

They carried him past her with a sheet over his face but she didn’t feel anything but relief that he hadn’t killed Sean. She thought of poor Mark Thillingly handing over Vhari’s new address after a minor scuffle. She would have stood on the bridge as well if Sean had died because of her. She wouldn’t have jumped, but she would have stood there.

The police officers were gathered by their cars, one of them taking charge of the radio while three others stood in a semicircle around the open doors, rubbing cold hands together, listening bright-eyed to the familiar buzz and crackle of the radio. One of them was still suspicious and scowled in at Sean and Paddy.

“You’re engaged,” Paddy said flatly.

Sean seemed startled but nodded. “Aye.”

“Congratulations.” She held her hand out at an awkward angle for him to shake. He took it and pumped once. “You’ll be happy.” She meant it well but it sounded like an order rather than a wish.

“Maybe.”

Two uniformed policemen came to the front door and gestured for them to follow. “We’ll take your car,” said one, leading them past the waiting police cars.

“Are they not coming with us? Why are we going in our car?”

The policeman waited until they were out of earshot and on the dark road before he spoke. “They’ve found another body out the back. A man. He was stabbed in the eye. They reckon the bird killed him.”

“Why do they think that?”

He shrugged. “It’s her house, isn’t it? They figure someone else came for her and she popped him.”

They took the keys from Sean and made the two of them sit in the back, even though they hadn’t done anything wrong. Sean asked them to pump up the heating and turn the fan on and they drove away from the house in a sweltering wave of warmth, rubbing their cold fingers back to life and drying their noses.

The sun was coming up, climbing low over the ancient wind-warped trees on the hillside as they drove back down the road they had come. They passed a few other cars on the road, the police driver refusing to stop in passing places, driving as arrogantly as if he was in a police car and had the right.

They passed from the wood into farming land and looked at each other when they realized where the car was headed. They were back on the road to Huntly Lodge.