The Dead Hour (30 page)

She had to tell the board of inquiry about her fifty-quid bribe this afternoon; that, coupled with the knowledge that Lafferty was out there somewhere, prowling for her, made her sleep fitful and tense. Syrupy dreams bled through her mind of Billy burning in sudden bright lights and Ramage scowling and blaming her.

A knock on the door startled her awake. She sat up, hot-faced and bewildered, not knowing where she was for a moment. The officious knock came again, three raps and a pause before the fourth. A man’s voice called out that he was from room service and she was suddenly conscious of being naked and alone in a quiet part of the hotel.

“I didn’t order room service,” she said, sitting up, disoriented and wobbly, dragging her sweater over her head and standing up unsteadily to pull her pencil skirt on.

Someone was breathing behind the door.

There was no spyhole and no chain. She stood behind the door and listened for clues. The knock came again; the same slow rhythm sounded sinister this time. Glancing back into the room her eye fell on the trouser press, on a chair, on the telephone for reception. The phone cord was long enough for her to carry it across the floor to the door and she brought it over, lifting the receiver and pressing “0” for reception, holding the handset behind the door as she slipped the lock and opened it an inch, keeping her foot behind it in case the man in the corridor tried to push his way into the room.

Burns was out of uniform, dressed in a shirt and slacks so clean that they looked as if they had just come out of the packet. He gave a penitent little smile and she slammed the door on him.

“Hello, room seven-four-five?” The receptionist’s voice was insistent. “Room seven-four-five, may I help you?”

“No, it’s fine, my mistake.” Paddy hung up the receiver and turned back to the door.

“Paddy,” Burns breathed. “I didn’t tell anyone, honestly.”

Paddy stood panting behind the door. “How did you find out which room I was in? I’m supposed to be in hiding here.”

“I’m a polis.”

So was Tam Gourlay. Lafferty might be on his way up in the lift right now. She was doing his job for him, frightening herself. Paddy rubbed her face and wished she had a mirror. She’d look terrified and pink and sweaty and puffy and didn’t want Burns to see her this vulnerable.

“I heard about Billy,” he said. “I just want to see that you’re all right. Can I come in?”

“I’m fine.” She brushed her hair up at the sides and composed her face.

“Please?”

She hesitated for effect before letting him in. She let the door swing open a couple of inches and backed off into the room. There was nowhere to sit down but on the bed or the single chair. It would seem suggestive to sit on the bed so she took the chair and sat, one arm slung stiffly over the back, mock casual, as Burns stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. He looked very tall and broad in the confined space. He stood for a moment, awkward, his hands patting the side of his thighs, looking around the mean little room with a strangely nervous look on his face. “I didn’t tell anyone what happened between us.”

“No, I know. Tam Gourlay did it.”

He frowned. “How would Gourlay know?”

“He’s been following me, trying to warn me off about the inquiry. He was outside my house that night, I think he saw us.”

Burns’s lips thinned, his eyes widened. “Did he indeed? Ye sure?”

“I saw his car outside my house that night.”

“Right, right.” He calmed himself and looked at her. “You think Gourlay’s bent anyway, don’t you? The guys who questioned you yesterday told me.”

“Well,” she said, unsure whether she could trust him. “I dunno. We’ll see. They didn’t seem to be listening to anything else I told them. I said it was Lafferty who firebombed the car but they were hell-bent on not listening.”

“They don’t always seem interested in the stuff that matters. It’s a bit of an act.”

“Those guys weren’t acting.”

Burns tapped his hands on the side of his thighs again, looking unsure. He looked at the bed and a small smile flitted across his face, suppressed as soon as it occurred to him. “Can I … ?”

She gestured to him to sit if he wanted. He pushed the blankets back and perched on the side of the small bed, bouncing once and smiling again. It was her first private bed and she didn’t like him colonizing it. “Why are you here, Burns?”

“I was worried about you. You seemed upset the other night … and then the fire. I asked around about Lafferty for you.”

“Why won’t the police listen to me?”

He sighed heavily and stroked the bedsheet. “Look, you have to understand, the police just want this story to go away. Gourlay … guys like him, they’re small-fry, he’ll never get promoted into any position of power.”

“It’s Gourlay and McGregor.”

“Okay, both of them, we know about them. We’re dealing with it.”

“But you don’t want outsiders objecting when a murderer gets away with it?”

He grinned at her and shook his head, looked up at the sky through the small window. The low morning light suited his face, highlighting his large nose and casting a shadow from his black eyelashes over his cheek. “Paddy, murderers get away with it all the time. Lack of evidence, no witnesses, happens every day. We’ll get Lafferty. We might not get him for this, but we’ll get him for something.”

“Like you got Patrick Meehan?”

“Ah, Paddy Meehan. See, now, that wasn’t a police call. MI5 did that. Stupid. It was a fuck-up from start to finish.”

She sat back and glared at him. “So the system works? You set people up all the time?”

“Our job is to make the streets safe for people like you, Paddy. The truth is, the justice system doesn’t work. People get out all the time, bad people, vicious men just like Lafferty. If Lafferty gets done for something and it takes him off the streets so you can go home, would you be as against the way we work then?”

“Principles matter. Doing the right thing matters even if it’s against your own interests.”

He was looking at her neck, distracted, his eyes half-closed.

“Burns, have you been sent here to tell me to back off?”

“You know why I came here.”

“No, I don’t.”

He swung his weight off the bed suddenly and was across the room in one fluid step. He cupped her face in both his hands and lifted her to her feet until her face was tight to his, her nose to his nose, eye to eye, open mouth to open mouth. She felt the stubble on his chin scratch her lips. He hadn’t been home yet, hadn’t shaved after the night shift or had a wash. He smelled delicious.

George Burns stood in his flash shirt and trousers, in his adulterous Protestant shoes and explored her with his dirty, dexterous fingers, peeling her clothes off and letting them drop to the floor.

They fell on the single bed, Paddy underneath him, and they laughed because it was so narrow. They worked their way to the side of the bed and Burns’s hard purple cock stuck out of his trousers as she knelt between his knees. He sighed like a slit tire as she kissed and licked it. Lost in a fog of sensations and smells they slid onto the carpeted floor, gliding noiselessly over one another, fuck-fuck-fucking until they both came in glorious messy Technicolor.

They lay on the floor panting, occasionally flapping hands across to cover up the most damning bits of skin.

Burns caught his breath. “Wait till I tell the guys about this one.”

Paddy grinned and flailed a lethargic slap at him with the back of her hand. She could have slept in the chair. She could have slept on a sack of jaggy sticks, actually, she was so relaxed.

Burns sighed into her hair. “That’s why I came to see you.”

“So you could get your end away?”

He shook his head and pulled her close, still breathless from the exertion. “Don’t be like that with me. Just for a minute, let’s be nice to each other.”

“You haven’t got your ring on today,” she said spikily.

“No, come on.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Give it five minutes.”

She leaned heavily on Burns’s chest to push herself up to sitting and turned away to pull her sweater on. “I won’t back off about Lafferty, no matter how often you do that to me.”

“I did it to you?” he said playfully. “You did it to me. I was just lying there.”

She lay back, resting her chin on his chest, breathing in the smell of him. A floor below they could hear the low hum of a vacuum cleaner. A car hooted its horn a mile away in the street.

“Okay.” Burns looked at her, his fingers in her hair. “Lafferty works for a guy called Paul Neilson. Neilson used to go out with Vhari Burnett’s sister. He’s squeaky clean, no record for anything.”

“Vhari had a sister?”

“Kate Burnett. She’s disappeared.”

“Is she dead?”

“No one knows. There’ve been a couple of sightings but nothing solid. Someone saw her at a restaurant a few nights ago but we’ve heard nothing since then.”

“What about the brother?”

He frowned down at her. “There isn’t a brother. The parents never mentioned a boy. Just the two girls.”

She was sure Evelyn at the Easterhouse Law Center had said Thillingly spent his last day with Vhari’s brother. She cast her mind back over the conversation: Bernie, Evelyn said his name was Bernie, and he had a garage. But if Vhari’s parents wouldn’t admit to him, there had to be a reason.

“What about Thillingly? Do they still suspect him?”

Burns took his fingers from her hair and sat up, hugging his knees with his arms and looking around at the mess of clothes on the floor.

“Well, do they?”

He found his underpants and stood up to pull them on, completely unabashed. “You have to understand, Paddy, the police’ll do anything to protect their own. But we get the job done. We do.”

“It’s not good enough.”

They looked at each other. Burns raised an angry eyebrow.

“You can’t frighten me when you’re standing there in nothing but your skanties, Burns.”

He ignored the comment and yanked his trousers on, pulling up the zipper like a final statement. His chest was broad with a T of black hair reaching down under his waistband. The scar on his stomach was pink and puckered. It looked like a bottle opener might well have pierced it and she wondered if he was lying about his wife at all.

“You’re giving evidence to the inquiry today, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.” She stood up and scrambled into her panties and skirt, anxious not to be the last one naked in the room, perching on the bed to fit her tights on over her feet. “Are they even looking for Kate Burnett?”

“Leave it, Paddy.”

“What if she turns up dead? What if I turn up dead?”

He slipped his feet into his toggle loafers and pulled his shirt over his head without undoing the buttons. “I was asking about the inquiry because I was going to take you there myself, make sure you’re safe.”

“Oh, that’ll be great for my reputation: pitching up in a flash sports car with the slag of the year.”

She meant the comment to be taken playfully but Burns misunderstood. He stared at her. “You’re a bit of a snide cow, actually, aren’t ye?”

She couldn’t think of an answer. Burns picked up his jacket and walked out of the room, leaving her sitting alone on the end of the mean little bed.

BERNIE’S IN

Bernie’s garage was not quite what she expected. Knowing what she did about Vhari Burnett’s family background Paddy had supposed her brother’s garage would be a dealership for smart new cars, but it was in a derelict area at the bottom of a sharp hill a long way from the main road.

She headed down toward the blackened Victorian railway arches. Beyond them lay the motorway and farther yet the river. Blocks of tenements had been knocked down on either side of the road, leaving just their footprint on the land. A couple of shanty workshops were still operating from what would have been the back court; she could hear radios blaring and see lights on inside, occasional drills and mechanical bits turning over. A square, single-story pub was set on the corner of a sea of dusty rubble.

The tall arches under the railway bridge had been converted into workspaces, not the ramshackle hodgepodge of organic economic development but uniform government-subsidized workshops that spoke of an economy in terminal decline. Yellow brick filled in the grand arches of blackened Victorian bricks, each with a double garage door in the middle, painted red with a unit number stenciled onto it.

Paddy walked toward them and felt the damp river air clinging to the bricks. Most of the units were dark and locked, some of them permanently. Only one or two had signs denoting a business operating out of them. Unit 7 was one of the few arches with the lights on and the red doors open. It was at the far end of the lane, across the road from a scrap merchant’s yard. A sign on the fence declared that the yard was PROTECTED BY DOG, and below the claim was a silhouette of a snarling wolf.

Wherever the Burnett family legacy was being used it certainly wasn’t being invested in Bernie’s business. He wasn’t leaving a smart Bearsden villa every morning to come here. A warm orange light spilled out from inside the door and the sound of a pop radio buzzed. The large hand-painted sign was propped up outside against the wall, BERNIE’S MOTORS, hardly visible behind a bank of engine parts. Two cars were parked outside, one with both back wheels off, the other apparently in good working order. Paddy didn’t know much about cars but she could see that it was a smart green Jaguar, an old one but with a perfectly preserved chrome trim and arched roof. The driver’s and passengers’ seats had been taken out, leaving jagged, uncomfortable axles pitted with bolts.

She was so engrossed in the handsome car that she didn’t see Bernie until she was almost standing on his toes.

“She’s a honey, isn’t she?”

He was looking lovingly at the Jaguar. She’d seen him before, in the photo of Grandfather Burnett’s funeral, holding Vhari’s arm. He had a James Dean haircut and wore a ripped navy blue boiler suit, smeared with black grease, going baggy at the knees. His red neckerchief served no purpose other than to make the oil-blackened boiler suit a fashion statement. His jaw was so square he looked as if he’d been drawn with a ruler. “I was trying to get oxblood leather seats for inside but they’re pretty hard to find.”