The Dead Hour (21 page)

Paddy walked toward it, listening for sniffs and clues that Diana was in there. She heard the fizz of a match striking and her throat tightened with yearning for a harsh, scratchy cigarette.

The kitchen was a later addition to the little thirties house. It was a big room plonked on the back so that the kitchen cupboards ran underneath what was once the outside wall. At the end of the extension was a glass box with a sloping roof, overlooking a large back garden and concrete patio.

Diana was sitting at a dining table in the middle of the glass shed, puffing on a cigarette without inhaling. The tabletop debris suggested she had been sitting there for hours. A blue glass ashtray on the table had been emptied but not washed, and a recently crumpled cigarette, only half smoked and smoldering, lay facedown. A navy-and-gold packet of Rothmans sat next to a very dirty white coffee mug which Diana was clutching, the rim marred with dried brown drips.

Shedding her good coat and leaving it on the empty worktop, Paddy took a seat on the other side of the table. Diana exhaled and, even through the scent of cigarette smoke, Paddy could smell the sharp edge of the brandy in the coffee. Diana was as pissed as a tramp at a whisky tasting.

“I’ve kind of been here all day.” She took a fresh cigarette from the packet and lit it with a match. “Watching the garden. Mark’s parents owned this house. His mother left it to him a few years ago. That’s why the garden’s so well established. He didn’t want to change a thing.”

Paddy looked out at the small lawn bordered by bushes heavy with globe flowers in purple and red. She hardly knew enough about nature to differentiate an oak tree from a spider plant. “Those flowers are nice. The round ones on the bushes—they look like Christmas decorations.”

Diana looked back at her, incredulous. “The hydrangeas?”

“Is that what they are? They must take some looking after.”

“No.” She sounded belligerent. “They pretty much take care of themselves.”

Sensing she had the upper hand, and being a bit drunk, Diana was going to make her work for every snippet. She wasn’t, Paddy guessed, a woman you’d want to have any power over you at all.

Stopping herself from gibbering, Paddy took out her packet of ten Embassy Regals and flicked them open. Regals were a poor person’s cigarette, a brand women smoked at bingo nights and parish dances; cigarettes for women who didn’t know the names of flowers. She looked at the pretty, slight woman opposite her and a spark of sharp, unwarranted resentment flared in her throat. She took in Diana’s delicate features and good teeth and thought that she could go and fuck herself. Fuck herself and her fancy fucking house and her lawyer husband.

Holding the stubby cigarette between her teeth, Paddy took out her notebook and flicked to a clean page, drawing the tiny pencil out of the leatherette sheath on one side and writing “bollocking fuck” at the top of the page in indecipherable shorthand, underlining it twice to draw Diana’s attention to her world, a world of women making their own way, a world of jobs and special skills where only Paddy knew the language.

“So,” she said, pencil poised, “d’you have any kids?”

It was the perfect mark. Diana shook her head sadly. Her hand trembled as she lifted her cigarette to her mouth.

“And Mark worked at Easterhouse Law Center?”

“Yeah. We’re all right for money. He could choose to do that.”

“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.