The Dead Hour

by Denise Mina

  “The law center isn’t a money spinner, then?”

  Diana snorted, “God, no. Legal aid’s peanuts compared to what you can get for private work.” She raised her hands, as if coming to the tired conclusion of a well-worn argument. “But that’s what Mark wanted—to help people. See the sort of person he was? He used to come home at night and cry, I mean sometimes he’d actually cry when he told me about the people he had met that day. The poverty of the people. The poorness of their lives. Terrible.”

  Paddy could imagine them both sitting in their conservatory, drinking a bottle of French wine in the evening, smoking dear cigarettes together as they looked out over the large garden left by his mother, glorying in pity for people less well off than themselves. At that moment, thinking of her brothers and father and the cheap mince her mum padded out with onions and carrots, Paddy could have leaned across the table and slapped Diana Thillingly.

  “Did he see Vhari Burnett?”

  Diana’s face grayed. She picked up her cigarette from the ashtray and puffed on it.

  Paddy filled in the space. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”

  “Vhari and Mark weren’t a sore point.” She sucked hard. “They split up and it was fine. We met afterward at parties. She seemed resigned to it. Never went out with anyone else, as far as I knew. She was well over Mark, though. They were actually quite good friends.” She gave a shaky smile, finishing on an up-note, and stubbed her half-smoked cigarette out badly, leaving it smoldering. “He’d hardly kill her out of the blue.”

  Paddy thought of Sean and how she still regarded him as hers. Maybe Vhari felt that way too. “But he died the night after Vhari, didn’t he? He must have heard about her murder on the radio. How did he react?”

  Diana shook her head and looked around the table. “I don’t know.” She took a deep breath as a defense against the attack of tears, but it did no good. A convulsion started in her chest. Her face contorted, her mouth stretching wide to the sides, eyes shutting with the pressure behind them.

  “Were they involved in a case together? A prosecution or something?”

  Diana shook her head. “I can’t . . .” She wheezed her breath away and started again. “I can’t . . .” She sat crying at the table, disinhibited by drink, crippled by the racking pain of loss.

  Paddy picked up the packet of Regals. “Come on now, will I get you another coffee?”

  Diana nodded, still struggling to speak. “I’d . . . no, I’m okay.”

  Paddy lit two Regals and gave her one. They were short cigarettes and made the hands holding them look thick and stubby too. Diana took one, rubbing her eyes with the ball of her hand, her back rounded.

  “I think I should get you a brandy,” said Paddy, standing up. “I think you need one right now.”

  Diana looked around the room, feigning confusion, as if the existence of brandy was a fact she couldn’t quite grasp. “Oh, dear, perhaps. You could try in the cupboard under the sink. I think. I remember Mark put it there. I think.”

  The bottle was wet on the outside where Diana had run it under a tap earlier, and a wet, sticky ring had formed on the floor of the cupboard.

  Paddy took a glass from the draining board and poured a generous inch into it, sitting it in front of Diana.

  “Now, I don’t want any fighting from you, but I know a bit about these things and this’ll calm you down.”

  Diana sipped the drink as if she’d never tried it before, shivering as it slid down. “Why don’t you have one?”

  “D’you know, I’m not a great drinker. I’m taking my mum out tonight and she’ll be annoyed if I turn up half cut.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “The All Priests Holy Roadshow. It’s a stage show that makes a school nativity look slick.”

  “I’ve never heard of it. Is it a Catholic thing?”

  “Yeah. My family are Catholic. I don’t believe any of it.” Paddy leaned across the table confidentially. “But don’t tell my mum.”

  Diana liked her a little more now, Paddy could tell, because of the Catholicism and the brandy. She smiled weakly, and raised her glass. “Slainte.”

  Paddy raised an imaginary one back. “And yourself.”

  Random arrests and torture of suspects by the special forces in Northern Ireland had given all Catholics the cachet of an oppressed minority. Paddy had never experienced any kind of prejudice other than the favorable regard of well-meaning liberals, but she enjoyed the status just the same. Sometimes she let it be known that she was Catholic to prompt the benefit of the doubt Diana was giving her now.

  They smoked for a while, watching the light fail outside and the colors in the garden fade to a hundred shades of gray.

  When Diana finally spoke she seemed to have sobered up. Her voice was small and she addressed the ashtray, rolling the tip of her cigarette endlessly against the glass.

  “Vhari Burnett hadn’t been on the scene for a while. She’d been working at the prosecutor’s office, I think. She and Mark didn’t see each other professionally. The night she was murdered Mark came home later than usual, about eight o’clock. He was very upset. His nose was swollen and bleeding, as if he’d been punched on it.”

  “Eight o’clock on the night she died? That’s before she died?”

  “Yeah. I heard on the telly that Vhari spoke to a policeman at about half one in the morning. But Mark came home at eight that same evening.”

  “Did he go back out again?”

  “No, but it was a strange night.”

  Paddy knew that the police were assuming a connection between Mark’s broken nose and his death but none of them had guessed it happened so long beforehand. “You said he was upset?”

  “He was. Very.” Diana stared at the table, nodding softly, over and over, comforting herself with the rhythm. “It was raining that night. When he came in his nose was swollen and bloody and his woolen overcoat was soaking wet down one side because he’d been pushed over.”

  Paddy remembered the cold rain, the wet outside Vhari’s door, and her own reluctance to get out of the car. Diana touched the bridge of her own nose, as if in sympathy. “Mark wasn’t a physical person, he wasn’t tough. He didn’t like violence.”

  “What did he say had happened?”

  “He came in late, but he could be late sometimes so I wasn’t worried—it was only eight o’clock. He came in and said he’d been mugged in the car park outside his office. He wouldn’t call the police or go to the emergency room. He said it was a client, someone he knew, and he didn’t want them to get into trouble.”

  “Did you believe that?”

  “Not for a minute. It wasn’t even Mark’s style, to let people off things. He thought everyone should do their time if they were guilty. That’s why he didn’t go into criminal law; he did civil work claims against the council, unfair dismissal, stuff like that. When he said he didn’t want to call the police I knew he was lying. I checked his wallet when he was in the shower and his wallet had money in it, so I knew it was a lie. I begged him to call the police but he was determined not to.”

  Paddy could see the scene: Diana half cut after a couple of glasses of wine, stinking of cigarettes, secretly furious that Mark was home late, the implacable fury of bright women locked in houses all day long, moving objects around, wiping dust, making meals for people who grabbed a sandwich on the way home.

  “I’m afraid I got annoyed.” Diana’s eyes filled up again. “In the end I went to bed but when he thought I was in the loo I heard the bedroom phone extension ‘ting’ and knew he’d picked up the receiver. He thought I couldn’t hear him.” She looked a little guilty. “I only listened because I thought he’d changed his mind and was calling the police.”

  “Thank God you were listening.”

  “He spoke to someone. He asked them who they were and where Vhari was, and could she come to the phone. I came back down then, and asked him who he’d called, but he denied calling anyone. She’d just moved house, you know,
Vhari. Her grandfather had died and left her that ridiculous huge house. Mark knew where it was, he’d been there with her when they were younger.” She slumped over her glass. “He wouldn’t come to bed with me. Sat up watching Late Call and drinking.”

  Her voice faded as she thought herself back to the evening. “The next morning he was gone before I woke up. I think he slept on the settee and went straight to work. It was lunchtime before I turned on the radio and it was all over the news: Vhari had been murdered. I called the law center but he wasn’t there. He never came home again.”

  “Do you think he killed himself?”

  Diana downed the brandy, emptying her glass, pausing to catch her breath at the end. Paddy considered offering her more but it might suggest that she could drink more than one brandy. She made herself sit still, willing Diana to continue.

  “Yes.” Diana tapped her cigarette over and over, hesitating. “Mark was a disappointed man. He was disappointed in himself, quite . . . depressive, you know. He always said if he killed himself it would be in the river, by the footbridge. It was his favorite place in the city. His dad’s office was by the river and he used to walk there with him when he was a boy. I think something happened in that car park that he couldn’t cope with and the next night he walked into the river. I tried to make him happy.” She glanced up. “I don’t always . . . you know, drink.”

  “I heard he left a note in his car?”

  “Yeah,” she said softly, turning the glass in her hand. “He said he was sorry but he couldn’t, you know . . . go on. He was sorry he let everyone down, that he’d let me down and Vhari. Depressive silliness. It didn’t mean anything. Certainly not that he’d killed her.”

  “But he mentioned her in the note?”

  Diana nodded miserably. “That’s why they think he killed her.”

  “What did he say exactly?”

  “Sorry he’d let her down. That was it.” She shrugged. “He put her name before mine. As if she was the one that mattered.”

  Paddy sat with Diana, rolling over the same facts: Mark’s nose, the car park attack, the phone call to whoever was with Vhari. She waited for a suitable break in which to leave Diana, knowing she was abandoning her to a drunken night of lonely grief.

  By the time she stood up it was dark outside. The only light in the kitchen was the throbbing scarlet glow of Diana’s cigarette. Paddy struggled for something nice to say but couldn’t think of anything.

  “Would you have a photograph of Mark I could use?”

  Diana twitched awake. “Sure. Sure I do.” She went out into the hall, navigating fluently through the thick dark, and came back with a large walnut cigar box which she opened to reveal piles of snaps. “This is nice.” She handed Paddy a graduation photo of Mark, slim and smiling in the summer. It didn’t look like him and wouldn’t go with a story about a dead solicitor who was approaching middle age.

  “Lovely picture,” said Paddy, laying it firmly down near Diana, letting her know that it wouldn’t do at all.

  Diana took out another one. Mark looking awkward at a wedding, wearing a kilt. He was standing apart from a happy trio of friends, looking lost and left out. It would be perfect for a suicide story.

  Paddy stood up, ostensibly to put the picture in her coat pocket. Diana watched her pull her coat on and then looked away into the garden.

  Paddy stood next to her, hoping to be dismissed. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry all of this has happened to you.”

  She really meant it—she was sorry for Diana—but noted uncomfortably that the sentiment sounded exactly the same as if she didn’t.

  II

  Kate woke up thrashing, hitting the back of her hand off the Mini’s steering wheel. Her left arm was on fire. She rubbed her shoulder, hoping it would stop, but could only reduce it to pins and needles. When she had calmed down and looked up she realized that she was parked right outside her mother and father’s house. They could have come out at any time and seen her sleeping there. She’d rather meet Lafferty and the dead man than her mother.

  She started the car and drove off, slowing cautiously at the junction up ahead, letting the fat girl in the green coat pass in front of her before heading for Bernie’s garage, obeying the soft call of the comfort pillow.

  NINETEEN

  THE ALL PRIESTS HOLY ROADSHOW

  I

  It was black night outside the train window. Paddy took the same journey to work every day but found herself seeing it for the first time because Trisha was there.

  As she sat across from her mum on the quiet commuter train she wondered who had answered Vhari Burnett’s phone when Mark Thillingly called her. It could have been Lafferty or the good-looking man at the door. And why had Thillingly called Vhari and felt the need to lie to Diana about it? It didn’t sound as if they were having an affair. It sounded as if Burnett and Thillingly were in a lot of trouble, as if he was phoning her to warn her, to tell her what had happened to him in the car park, to tell her to run. Wondering about the relationship between Burnett and Thillingly reminded her of her hot breath wetting Burns’s neck. She looked quickly away from her mother.

  Trisha saw Paddy frowning and squirming and smiled, leaning across the aisle to pat her knee. Paddy smiled back reflexively. Her mum looked lost outside her house or the chapel or Rutherglen Main Street, her clothes slightly threadbare. She was wearing a stiff beige raincoat and Paddy could see a cross-hatched patch on the sleeve where she had scrubbed a mark away. Below the hem she wore thick tights over swollen ankles and little black sensible walking shoes that made her look old and spent.

  And Trish was well aware of being outside her usual orbit. As she watched the moonlit landscape passing the window, anxious little thoughts would flare in her eyes, suppressed immediately with a blink and a glance at her handbag. Paddy guessed what she was thinking: she had the bus fare home in her purse. Whatever happened she could still get back. Paddy had already moved further out into the world than her mother ever would.

  “The buffet car’s open,” said Paddy.

  “Don’t be daft.” Trisha frowned and looked inquiringly down the aisle. “This train’s only going into town. There’s no buffet car.”

  “Is that right?” Paddy reached into her pocket and pulled out a crumpled white paper bag. “Where d’ye think I got these, then?” She stretched the neck open and handed the bag of her mum’s favorite sweeties to her.

  Trisha grinned into the bag. “Lemon Bonbons.” The golden light from the sweets lit up her chin like a buttercup.

  “Lemon Bonbons.” Paddy smiled back.

  Trisha offered a couple of times but Paddy insisted she was on a diet, and anyway, they weren’t her favorites, they were for Trish. It wasn’t hard to resist. Her teeth still ached from her binge in the morning.

  It was dark in Argyle Street as they emerged from the low-level train platform, the street wet and glistening from a shower they had missed on the way in. The Evening Times seller had parked his stall under the lip of the shop opposite and Paddy found herself half-listening for the headline: a football special. A bedraggled man in a rain-warped wool overcoat approached them with his hand out and a desperate alcoholic look in his eye. Trisha linked arms with her daughter, anxiously steering her away from him.

  She shrank during the walk through town. Paddy felt the pangs of fear rippling through the muscles on her arm. She had meant the night to cheer Trisha up, not scare her. Every person dressed in party clothes made her draw closer to her daughter, pulling her sleeve, veering her out to the curb to stay in the light, and always just one degree of fright from throwing her arm out and hailing a bus to take them home.

  The crowds were gathering outside the City Halls. They found their way through the chatting happy crowd gathered outside and bumped into Mary O’Donnagh inside the door. Mary was the chief chapel groupie at St. Columbkille’s, one of a number of women who did unpaid work at the chapel and graded themselves according to their closeness to the priests. R
arely seen without a pinny, this evening Mrs. O’Donnagh was dressed in navy blue slacks and was sporting a big set hairdo like a hairy halo.

  “Oh, Mary,” said Trisha politely, “isn’t your hair lovely?”

  Mary touched her head and smiled coyly. “Our Theresa did it for me. Ye must go to her, Trisha, she’s great.”

  “I will, I will, I will,” said Trisha, so adamantly that even Mary knew she wouldn’t.

  Paddy saw Trisha relax as they moved in through the crowd of women. Accompanying men were occasional and stayed on the edge of conversations, holding the coats, patiently waiting for their wives.

  Their seats were in the balcony. As Paddy sat down and looked to the stage she could see the center circle filling up with a sea of women just like her mother, shedding cheap coats onto the seats, bri-nylon tops in pastel shades underneath. The stage was already dressed with a drum kit, a table of props, and a couple of guitars on stands. Above it hung a sagging banner with brown writing on a white background: THE ALL PRIESTS HOLY ROADSHOW.

  Trisha sat forward in her chair and looked excitedly down at the crowd, occasionally spotting people she knew and pointing them out to Paddy, identifying each by the tragedies that had befallen their family. Mary O’Leery—son has multiple sclerosis; Katherine Bonner—husband died of a stroke and brother run over by a train; Pauline Trainer—parents died of flu two days apart, always had a limp at school, and a brother with TB. They weren’t allowed to touch her in case they caught it.

  The lights went down to a recording of Holst’s The Planets. The audience bristled, sitting back in their seats and giving an excited collective titter. Four shadows walked onto the stage and the lights rose to uproarious applause.

  Four ordinary-looking men of different ages were scattered around the stage, clutching instruments. Each of them wore a priest’s collar and nondescript black slacks and jersey. The man at the front raised his hands to wave a hello and the audience cheered as they started into a version of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” slipping quickly into “A Mother’s Love’s a Blessing.” Paddy had to admit that they knew how to work their audience.