The Dead Hour (12 page)

“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.”

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.

ARCHIE’S PLACE

The moment she stepped into the newsroom Paddy knew some terrible, seismic shift had occurred. The last pages of the paper had gone to stone but instead of the usual hemorrhage of staff the newsroom was full of people behaving as if they were extremely busy.

A senior editor on the news desk was talking seriously on the phone while a couple of guys stood behind him, glancing nervously around to see if they were being watched. Even the sports desk looked busy. One reporter was typing and three others sat next to him reading the rival papers. No one read the rival papers except first thing in the morning. They were filling in time, waiting for some great event to unfold.

The photographers were all hiding in their office at the far end of the room. The door was ajar and Paddy could see Kevin Hatcher, the pictures editor, standing by a chair, looking out into the busy room, waiting. Kevin drank bigger quantities more often than anyone else at the paper: that he was standing up at seven o’clock at night was a minor miracle.

She shrugged off her coat and, as she was hanging it up, saw the two copyboys on the bench were sitting tall, their attention not in the newsroom but behind their backs, listening hard to what was being said in the editor’s office.

Paddy watched Reg, a sports reporter, apparently enthralled by a Daily Mail report about the Spud-U-Like shops. He felt her gaze on him and looked up, eyes red and open slightly too wide.

“Farquarson’s getting the bump,” he said quietly. “They didn’t even call him down to editorial to tell him. They came up here and did it in his office.”

Paddy looked at Farquarson’s closed office door and suddenly understood the air of shock and horror in the room. The board were making changes. Farquarson had been in the job for four long years, so it wasn’t because he wasn’t fit for the job: they were making changes because the paper wasn’t making money. Any one of them could go next.

“Who’s coming in?” she asked. “Do we know yet?”

“A bastard from London.”

“How do you know he’s a bastard?”

“Because he’s from London.”

At the far end of the newsroom the door of the office opened and Farquarson stepped out into the newsroom. Behind him a dejected crowd of his favorite editors and subeditors had gathered, along with his star columnist and a couple of red-eyed PAs.

Farquarson cleared his throat. “Right.” He paused as if the room needed a chance to turn its attention to him, as if they weren’t waiting for him. “Well, I don’t need to tell you what’s happened today. If I do you shouldn’t fucking be here.” A polite laugh rolled around the room and stopped abruptly. He held his hands out, like a fisherman describing a fish, but stopped, shaking his head at the floor. “You’ve been …” He stopped again, swallowing hard, looking as if he might cry. He took a deep breath and when he spoke again his voice was loud: “Let’s all go and get pissed.”

A great roar of approval rose from the room, largely, Paddy suspected, gratitude at Farquarson’s managing not to break down in public. Everyone stood up and began to applaud him as Farquarson made his way through the room shaking hands and accepting grand statements of loyalty.

Paddy stayed by the wall as he came past, keeping out of the way. He had been kind to her but she meant nothing to him. He’d known most of the men in the room for ten years or more. His PA carried his coat and briefcase as she followed him two steps behind, smiling at the kindness of those he passed, gracious as a politician’s wife.

Quite quickly the room emptied through the double doors as everyone was carried in the wake of Farquarson’s departure. Paddy heard the loud burble in the stairwell and went over to the window in time to see Farquarson and his coterie burst through the fire doors, leaving them swinging open as he walked down to the Press Bar, shaking hands with the van drivers and the print setters gathered in the street. His grin was forced.

Usually she only saw it at night when she was tired but Paddy turned back to look at the suddenly empty room. It was a shabby mess. The walls were marked where chairs had banged into them, the tables scuffed and the great gray typewriters all looked ancient and tired. The first thing the new editor would ever hear about her was that she took a bribe. In times of economic crisis they always sacked the women first on the grounds that they had no one at home depending on their wages.

Paddy shook her head, her mind rolling over an endless oh-no and the panicked certainty that she’d be out of a job before the summer was over. There was nowhere else for her to go. She didn’t have much experience, her shorthand was so crap even she couldn’t understand half of it. It wasn’t just a career and a future she had to lose. They needed the money. Her mum needed the money.

She looked up and saw Reg still sitting at the desk, his head in his hands, staring terrified at the tabletop. She’d seen the same look in her father’s eyes.

She walked over to him and tugged his arm to make him stand.

“Reg, ’mon,” she said briskly. “Up.”

The red-eyed man got to his feet, looking to her for further instructions.

“Everyone’s shitting it, Reg, you’re not special.” She gestured to him to follow her and prodded and waved him through the double doors and downstairs, into the street and along the pavement.

She opened the door to the Press Bar. A wall of mildly manic cheerfulness met them. Farquarson was drinking in the middle of the room, surrounded by concentric circles of jolly men, all raising glasses and making loud, happy noise, their eyes sad and frightened.

Paddy felt the emotion catch in her throat. A great man had fallen and no amount of chirpiness would make it anything but another fucking economic tragedy. She pushed Reg in front of her. Farquarson looked to the door and saw her there, his face a little lost, unsure.