The Dead Hour (16 page)

Paddy was finishing up her notes, checking the junction number on the overhead sign, when she noticed the funny officer from Thillingly’s drowning holding forth to a crowd of uniformed officers. Remembering Dub, she walked over and joined them, momentarily distracting his audience and causing him to mistime an important line. She held up her hands and waited for him to finish his story.

“So I go, ‘That woman’s had more miscarriages than the Argentine judiciary.’”

The men laughed dutifully and drifted off.

“Thanks very much; you just ruined my story.”

“I didn’t know you were in full flow. I wanted to ask you something. The river death the other night, is it definitely murder?”

“Well, yeah, that’s how they’re dealing with it.”

“Was there some physical evidence, then? Was the torn cheek a wound from something?”

“Nah, they found a bit of stick in there from the river. But the guy was functioning fine on the actual day, his wife said. He left a note in his car, didn’t say why really, just blah blah can’t go on.”

“What kind of car was it?”

“A Golf GTI, top spec.” He nodded approvingly. “Nice.”

“Right, right.” Paddy glanced down the road. “Ever heard of a thug called Lafferty?”

“Bobby Lafferty?”

She wasn’t sure of his first name but repeated Sullivan’s description: “Big guy? Broad shoulders, bald head?”

“Aye. I arrested him for drunk driving a few years ago. He was so pissed he was in the backseat looking for the steering wheel.”

She laughed loud, pleasing him enough to prompt another story.

“I was lucky he was too pissed to fight me. He bit someone on the eye, ye know. Blinded the guy. He’ll do anyone, his relatives, his school pals, anyone.”

Paddy watched him, an obsequious smile on her face, privately observing. Lafferty was a known criminal and Vhari Burnett was a prosecutor. There had to be a link between them. She might have been prosecuting him for something, something that would cause him to attack her.

“He kicked his dog to death. His own dog. Can you imagine the mentality of the man? Threw it out the window, from twenty up.” His eyes were shining and if she blocked out the words he could be talking about a great sportsman or a war hero.

“Anything recent? Has he been charged with anything?”

“Nothing I’ve heard of. Doesn’t mean anything, though. They’re always up to something. Animals, these people, animals.” He nodded at her to concur but she was thinking about Lafferty and Thillingly and Burnett and she missed her cue by a half beat.

“Aye,” she said. “Aye, right enough.”

He looked wary. “You don’t know Lafferty, do you?”

“Like you, I also believe violent people to be animals.” The grammar was all wrong. She was talking like a bad robot. She giggled, looking away down the black glistening road to the three-car police cordon. “Oh, dear. Have you ever done continuous night shift for months on end?”

He frowned. “We do rotation shifts.”

“Well, this is my fourth consecutive month. If I seem a bit odd or my timing’s off … it’s not because … I don’t mean anything by it.”

“Yes.” She could already see him forming a story about the journalist who couldn’t speak. “You seem to be aware of English yet not familiar with it. Is this your first time in our country?”

She laughed so hard her head reeled on her neck. “Okay.” She calmed herself down. “Right, let’s give up on conversation and just get to the important bits. Does Lafferty work alone?”

A policeman by the squad car twenty feet away called across to them.

“Nah, he’s a hired hand.” He looked over her shoulder to the squad car and saw that he was being shouted back. “I need to go.”

She meant to grab his arm and stop him slipping past but she misjudged the distance and took hold of his first two fingers, squeezed to check if she was indeed holding his hand.

They were standing shoulder to shoulder, like flamenco dancers. He smiled down at her, not displeased at the intimacy. Opening her fist and releasing his fingers, she considered acting as if the flirty gesture was deliberate. He was attractive and funny, he was tall and he wasn’t Sean, all good things, but she imagined touching him, kissing him and being kissed, and nothing stirred anywhere. All she felt was a little bit hungry. He was definitely funny, though; she should tell him about the Comedy Club and invite him to meet Dub McKenzie.

“My friend—” She hesitated, wondering if it was a good idea to invite him out after touching his hand, and realized that she sounded as if she was addressing him as “friend.” “Um, my friend’s a comedian. He’s doing a stand-up gig tomorrow night at the comedy club in Blackfriar’s. You should come and meet him.”

Surprised, he raised his eyebrows, smiling as though he had just seen her tits. “Okay. Maybe see you there.”

“I’m just saying. Comedy’s a good thing. I’m not asking ye out on a date.”

“’Course not.” His glance flickered down to her neck and he licked his bottom lip, leaving a glistening trail that glinted silver in the dark. “’Course not. Mibbi see you there, then.”

There was no saving the situation. He smiled at her, eyes narrowed so that she couldn’t see what was in them. He swaggered back to his colleagues who were watching him, curious about wee Paddy Meehan grabbing his hand.

The cold white motorway lights glinted at her from his left hand and it took her a moment to realize that it was a ring. The joker was married.

Kate was surprised that the Mini held out as well as it did. The tank was half-full when she left Bernie’s garage but the needle kept slipping down toward empty and she thought the tank was leaking. She drove slowly, far more slowly than she had in the BMW, missing the suspension of the big German car.

The sun was setting softly through the trees as she neared the corner before the cottage. She held her breath when she passed it, expecting to see cars outside, but there were none. She stole a glance toward the boathouse on the left side, down by the water’s edge, but there were no signs of anyone there, either. She slowed and took another deep breath as she pulled the car over to the verge. Better not to park in front of the house, she might need to get away quickly.

The inside of the house was a turmoil still-life. They had broken everything, smashed everything that wasn’t attached to the walls, pulled cushions off the sofas, yanked the mirrors and all the photographs off the walls, leaving them facedown where they lay on the floor. It was worse in the kitchen. Every shelf had been emptied onto the floor, heavy stoneware jars had been dropped into the Belfast sink so that a giant white crack skittered across it. The table had been overturned. She could hear the message clearly. We will do this to you.

Kate lifted a wicker hen basket from the floor and filled it with all the tins of food she could find. She had left the cardboard box of powdered milk on the worktop when she ran off to the boathouse and they had knocked it over but left it. She folded the waxed paper over at the top and placed it carefully in her basket. She could use it to cut the dunes in the brown envelopes. She could stay up here for weeks if she did that.

She looked out of the kitchen window, up the hill to the chimney on her nearest neighbors’, knowing it would be empty until May when they always came back from Kenya for the summer, watching for smoke to be certain she was right. The house was still, the ochre of the chimney blending perfectly into the green of the conifers in the foreground. A casual viewer would never know it was there.

She was smiling to herself when she realized that something had changed in the garden. A patch, a big patch, of disturbed earth by the back wall.

She knew exactly who it was and knew how easily it might have been her.

It was her night off and Paddy had considered skipping Blackfriar’s pub comedy club this week, nervous that the married policeman might turn up. But she’d slept well during the day and been sitting in the living room, watching Junior Superstars, when she realized that she’d be up all night anyway, sitting on her own, worrying about Ramage hearing the details of the Burnett call after next week’s police inquiry. She might as well go into town.

The pub was on the edge of the old warehouse district. Most of the buildings were high-walled, small-windowed storage facilities for tobacco bales and mountains of sugar, monuments to the end of Empire now empty rat runs.

It was reported to be up and coming as a residential area. New York-style lofts had been carved out of rat-infested grain stores by developers who didn’t really understand the qualities of the space. They had crammed small new townhouses inside the grand walls of the warehouses, cutting windows in half and leaving cast-iron pillars in the middle of kitchens and hallways.

The regeneration had only just begun and the council had put in a lot of streetlights to make the new yuppie residents feel confident about leaving their Volvos and Saabs in the street. It still felt like a well-lit ghost town. Paddy knew that McVie’s flat was here somewhere. She was curious but afraid he meant to try to touch her or something. McVie was a strange man, sometimes avuncular, sometimes leering, sexual signals shooting out every which way.

Through the doors Blackfriar’s was smoky and full of good Friday cheer. A crowd of psycho-billys were gathered at a table near the bar, all wearing denim and battered leather, every one of the girls with a slash of scarlet lipstick, regardless of her coloring. Three hard-looking mohawk mullets were playing the slots, their pints of snakebite-and-black delicately balanced on a thin shelf.

Paddy made her way through the throng. In a narrow corridor leading to the back exit, a small black door sat open in a wall pasted with posters for events past and future. A girl sat guarding it from a little console table. She had a dainty face and pretty brown corkscrew curls that she wound endlessly around her finger. Miserable, she tapped the tabletop with a thick black marker.

Paddy took her scarf and mittens off, tucking them inside her coat pocket, and then she saw the sign that made her heart sink. OPEN-MIKE NITE. In two years of hanging about comedy clubs Paddy had never ever seen an open-mike spot go well. Any idiot with a nervous complaint could get up onstage and die and have it witnessed by a paying audience. Dub said she was a jinx: he’d seen people storm at an open mike and sometimes established comedians used it to showcase new material but whenever Paddy was there it was always gut-shittingly awful.

Lorraine saw Paddy grimace at the blackboard. “One, is it?”

“Hi, Lorraine, how are ye? I’m on the guest list. I’m here with Dub MacKenzie.”

Lorraine nodded uncomfortably, pulled the lid off her black marker with an adamant phut. Paddy held her fist out and Lorraine scribbled her initials on the back of her hand.

“I like your leather.” Paddy pointed to Lorraine’s brown coat. It wasn’t nice at all. It was made of stiff, shiny PVC and didn’t fit around the shoulders.

“Thanks.” Lorraine shifted in her cardboard coat. Paddy smiled and stroked her own soft green coat as she traipsed downstairs.

The cellar doorway opened out into an oppressively low-ceilinged room. The bar ran at ninety degrees from the entrance. To the right was the smaller stage area with collapsible chairs in a few rows in front of it.

In among a thin crowd of milling drinkers, stooped over the bar, was Dub MacKenzie. Since he had left the Daily News, skinny Dub had taken up smoking and had actually managed to lose weight. He was wearing a pair of red checked trousers, a blue surfer shirt, and blue suede shoes with an inch-high crepe sole. He turned to the door as she stepped in, raising a hand and letting his long fingers unfurl into a greeting.

“You might have told me it was an open mike,” she said, pulling her bulky scarf out of her pocket. “I wouldn’t have come. It’s inhuman.”

Dub took her scarf out of her hands, bundled it into a ball, and threw it into a corner behind the bar where the coats were kept. The barman caught her eye and she ordered a half-pint of shandy for Dub and a Coke for herself.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come tonight,” he said.

“Where else am I going to go? The Press Club? You’re the only man I know who isn’t thinking about leaving his wife.”

“Apart from Sean.”

He always sneered when he said her ex’s name and Paddy didn’t really know why. It wasn’t as if they’d ever met or anything. “Who’s up first?”

“Some guy, does a bank manager with a lisp.”

“Funny?”

He shrugged. “Punters laugh and clap. It’s not comedy song clapping either, it’s all the way through.”

Dub had a theory that comedy songs were never funny and audiences were applauding with relief when they finished. A comedy theologian, he had formulated innumerable laws of comedy and had an encyclopedic knowledge of comedy history, could trace a joke through a hundred incarnations. He had an amazing library of comedy albums ranging from early Goons to bootlegged Lenny Bruce tapes and early Ivor Culter. Paddy had been to his house many times to listen to them in Dub’s cramped bedroom in his parents’ bungalow. They sat on the bed drinking tea and smoking, his mum didn’t mind, listening and laughing at the wallpaper. Occasionally Dub lifted the needle off to explain why it was funny. She could count the number of times she’d seen Dub laugh on the fingers of one hand, but nothing engaged him like comedy. She’d seen him in a trance watching a good visiting act.

The club began to fill up for the nine o’clock start and people approached Dub, complimenting him on his performance the week before, asking favors, and passing on messages from comics they’d run into on the circuit. Paddy stayed in his gangly shadow, glancing nervously at the door every time she saw a shape that looked like the funny policeman. He wouldn’t come, she felt sure. If he did turn up she’d try to give him the impression that Dub was her boyfriend. She’d hang close to him and laugh at his jokes or something. Maybe touch his arm.

It was the usual sort of crowd: a lot of friends of the acts, a few genuine punters, some terrified, sheet-white boys there for the open spot. The few punters were pretty straight looking, guys in shirts or C&A sweaters with girlfriends wearing lemon yellow knits or kitten-bow blouses, all shop-bought style. They had heard about the comedy scene and had come in from the suburbs to spot the next Ben Elton. They were pleasant, amenable people, looking for an excuse to laugh, not the famously intolerant Glasgow Variety audiences who had bottled off most of the great British acts of the last half century.