The Dead Hour (37 page)

“I’d better go and call this in.” She backed off toward the car.

Burns watched her mouth as she moved away and she watched his. His pink tongue glistened behind the rim of his white teeth.

It was the middle of the night or so. Or day. Or night. Kate was lying down on something soft. A sofa. A sofa draped in a sheet. Her fingertips ran over the sheet and it felt marvelously comforting, familiar and kind and warm to the touch. Like skin. Soft like skin and smelling comforting, like the comfort pillow. Paul was talking to her, reminding her how much they liked each other, how it was important to be kind to each other and help each other. She felt wonderful.

Suddenly the cold realization made her eyes spring open. The comfort pillow was plastic. She was lying on a plastic sheet.

Paul was sitting on a chair next to her, his legs crossed, talking softly to her. He was dressed nicely, a tailored blue shirt and slate gray slacks with a pleated front. He liked to dress like a businessman. He could see that she was alarmed but said she didn’t need to be afraid. Everything was going to be fine. Not to worry.

He blinked slowly and Kate knew that he was lying. She knew what Paul Neilson was seeing. A woman with no nose, an underweight woman who hadn’t eaten more than a tin of ham and some biscuits in more than a month. He despised women who lost their looks. And she knew what Paul could do to people he despised.

They were in an unfamiliar living room with nasty decor. A varnished gas fire surround that ran the full length of the room had small promontories for ugly ornaments: china dogs, cut crystal, some Limoges figurines in swirling skirts. Hanging from the ceiling was a bulb in a small shade. It was shining right into her eyes.

Knox was standing behind Paul’s chair, watching her.

“Kate.” Paul leaned forward and used a finger to lever a trestle of blond hair from her forehead. “Katie, tell me where it is. The package.”

She didn’t think it would make any difference but she had a habit of deference. “In the Mini. Across the road. It’s … it’s almost empty.”

Paul looked beautiful. His dark hair was swept back off his face, his chin smooth and shadow free despite the late hour. He always looked expensive, groomed. His shirt was white linen, pressed by a professional, his cuffs starched and pinned with silver-and-tigereye studs. He didn’t have a tie on but the shirt was buttoned to the neck, the top button open to the hollow of his throat.

He crossed his arms and curled his lip at her. “Why did you come here, Katie?”

She started crying, pitiful whimpers bubbling up from her tummy. Uncomfortable at scenes, Paul looked away, drawing his fingernails down his neck, leaving welts that rose and reddened as she watched. He waited until she stopped making noise and spoke quietly again.

“I can’t have you threatening our friends, Katie, it’s rude.” His voice was calm but his eyes were livid. “Where’s the BMW? You’ve lost it, haven’t you?”

She was aware of a noise behind her head. It was Lafferty and he was watching Paul, waiting for a signal, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. She craned her neck to see his big body and his musclebound arms. The soft plastic crinkled sweetly by her ear. A hammer hung limp from his big hand. He was here to kill her. He wouldn’t be here otherwise.

Lafferty saw her looking at him and backed out of view. Kate struggled to sit up but Paul reached forward and pressed her throat firmly, putting pressure on her airway, pushing her back down onto the plastic-covered sofa.

“I came here looking for you,” she said desperately. “I wasn’t threatening anyone. I wanted to see you, to tell you I’m sorry.”

Paul tilted his head and looked her in the eye. “You’ve told me you came here to threaten Knox, Kate. You’ve just told me that.”

“No, no I haven’t.”

“You told me a moment ago. If he doesn’t want you to go to the papers he should tell me to back off. You just said it.”

Kate was lost. She had delivered the perfect speech to the wrong man, hadn’t negotiated or bought any time for herself. She’d just blurted it out for nothing. It was a child’s voice and surprised her, rising from the pit of her stomach: “Why did you kill my Vhari?”

Paul breathed in, puffing his chest defensively at her, sucking his cheeks in and tipping his head back, diffident. “She wouldn’t tell me where you were.”

“She didn’t know. I didn’t go to her.”

He loomed over her, face flushed and furious, and shouted, “Well, how the fuck was I supposed to know that? You’re the one who ran away with sixty grand’s worth of car and kit. What was I supposed to do?”

“Sorry.”

He stood up off the chair to lean closer but his voice didn’t drop and she shut her eyes.

“What was I supposed to do, Kate? Sit at home and wait for you to come back?”

He left a pause for her to defend herself but her voice was too small to match his. “You hit me,” she said, keeping her eyes shut.

His voice was so loud it blew a hair from her cheek. “You were out of it again. What kind of man comes home every day to an unconscious junkie?”

“You didn’t need to kill her.”

He fell back into the chair and she opened her eyes to look at him. He looked sorry. “She was very stubborn. We had to turn the music up to drown out the noise she made but she still wouldn’t tell us where you were. Lafferty got angry after the police came to the door. He doesn’t like the police. They make him angry. The mess you’ve made, Kate, you’ve no idea. There’s only so much I can take. And now it’s over.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.” He blinked slowly. “It’s over. You know it is.”

Suddenly and completely she saw herself and how dumb she was, how ugly she had become, how worthless. And how lost. She whimpered, cringing, bringing her knees up to her chest and making the plastic rumple noisily below her.

“Please, Paul, don’t make it like the kaffir on the wire?”

He told her the story when they very first got to know each other. It was a turning point in their relationship, when they made their deal, when she agreed to accept everything about him. It happened on their estate in South Africa, outside J’burg. One morning before school, Paul’s father spotted a kaffir he didn’t recognize standing in the garden, in full view, looking at the ground. Grabbing the gun, he ran outside. The kaffir ran when he saw a white man after him. He ran so fast Paul’s father thought he might need to go back for the truck.

The kaffir ran out of sight, across a meadow and behind some bushes. He ran straight, that’s how they knew he was just in from the country. He ran straight for over a mile and into a barbed-wire fence on the perimeter of the property. The more he struggled the more he became entangled.

Paul’s father watched the man ripping himself to ribbons on the wire. When he was sure the kaffir couldn’t possibly get away he walked slowly back to the house and got Paul to come with him, to see how stupid the kaffirs were, that they would make it worse and worse and worse and not know to stop. It took the man three days to die.

Paul and Katie looked at each other one last time. They had known each other for seven years, had barely spent a day apart. She could see disgust in the twist of his lips and his hooded eyes.

“Don’t worry.” He flicked his hand in signal to Lafferty. “It won’t be like that.”

Kate Burnett shut her gray eyes and breathed out for the last time, dismayed at her stupidity, exhausted. She heard Lafferty step forward, felt the plastic crumple as she cringed, ready for the blow.

A flash of electric white pain and then came a velvet darkness.

Paddy didn’t know how much a chief superintendent’s wage amounted to but Knox’s house seemed huge to her, not as self-consciously wealthy as the Killearn house, perhaps, but a large detached house all the same, with a bit of land around it.

“Can we go now?” Sean had smoked two cigarettes and eaten the sandwiches his mother had made him for the shift.

“No. Let’s wait a bit longer.”

“What are we waiting for?”

“Dunno. Just waiting.”

Paddy was expecting Sean to tell her about Elaine but he hadn’t. She was afraid to bring it up herself, worried that she might give herself away. She practiced faint surprise and disinterest in her head as they sat there, watching the house. That’s lovely, Sean. Good for you. You must be gagging for it; no, that sounded ungracious. You must be pleased. I’m pleased for you.

With half an eye she watched shapes of figures in the front room, behind the curtains, moving, sometimes quickly like the flurry of movement in Vhari Burnett’s living room, sometimes slow shifts of light. It was two thirty in the morning and anyone with a clear conscience would be asleep. But Knox probably had a family; the house looked far too big for a single man. She hadn’t looked for a wedding ring on his finger because she didn’t fancy him.

She counted three dark windows on the second floor, none of them mottled for a bathroom. He could be innocently having an argument with a wayward child. A teenager could be watching television in the front room, perhaps have some friends over, they could be getting cups of tea from the kitchen, standing up to change the channel.

Parked at a discreet distance farther down the street was the familiar shape of a BMW but she didn’t set any store on it: the car could easily be a neighbor’s and Lafferty could be somewhere else, in Ireland or parked in the Eastfield Star right now, watching her mother and father’s darkened bedroom window, while she and Sean idled outside the house of an innocent man she didn’t like the look of.

She looked around the car park. Behind them, the pub was shut and dark, the empty hooks for hanging baskets like gibbets for midgets. The only thing between them and the big house was a rusted yellow Mini parked as if abandoned, looking onto the road.

Sean whispered, “Someone’s coming out.”

Paddy sat forward and flinched when she saw the shape of the man stepping out of the front door and into the glass porch. He was broad and bald and she knew him immediately. “Turn the radio down.”

“Why?”

She leaped forward to the radio, pressing her sore stomach hard against the passenger seat. Silence fell over the car. She could hear Lafferty’s feet clipping on the pavement as he swaggered down to the BMW, fitted the key in the door, and climbed into the passenger seat. He left the lights off as he backed the car up the road toward them.

“Get down.” She pushed Sean’s shoulder and he slumped down in the seat. “Keep your head below the dash.”

“Who is he?”

The smooth engine burred toward them.

“The firebomber. That’s the guy.”

They crouched in the dark car, blind to what was going on in the street. The engine changed tone as Lafferty managed a maneuver and then stopped. A door opened and shut gently. At the first click of his heel Paddy imagined him walking toward them, but the second and third footsteps headed away and suddenly became muffled. She heard the distant click of a door handle carried through the cold night air and pulled herself up enough to see Lafferty step back into the glass porch.

The front door opened, the hall darkened now. Plants obscured the glass panel. She couldn’t make out what was happening inside but seconds later she saw Lafferty reappear, carrying something at his side, a rug maybe. When he stepped out of the porch and into the street she saw that his arm was around the waist of a slumped figure. A tumble of hair had fallen over the face but Paddy recognized her anyway.

Kate was tiny. Lafferty carried her easily on one arm, her feet trailing along behind her, the toes scuffling along the ground. She looked dead but as Paddy watched the street, light caught her limp arm and the small right hand flexed as if she was in pain.

Paddy remembered Lafferty’s neck. He looked enormous and brutal next to the tiny figure, reckless of her feet. Paddy imagined the muscular arm around her own waist, squeezing the breath from her. He might just be taking Kate home. He could be fed up chasing around after his boss’s girlfriend.

At the BMW he opened the door to the backseat and dropped Kate into the car, taking hold of her feet and bundling her legs in after her. He turned and reached back to the door, slamming it shut just as a slim calf dropped back out to the pavement, catching the door full on the bone. Paddy inhaled sharply. The leg must have broken from the force, but Lafferty didn’t flinch. He peered at the obstruction dispassionately, bent down, pushed the offending leg back into the car and watched as he shut the door again. He wasn’t taking her home. He was going to kill her.

“Sean, can you follow that car without letting him know you’re there?”

“Which car?” He was slumped down as far as he could go in the driver’s seat, his long legs crossed in front of him, knees trapped under the steering wheel.

“Look.”

Pulling himself up to peer over the wheel he saw the BMW pull out onto the road. “I’ll try.”

“No swerving about.”

He turned the key. “I’ll try.”

The roads were too quiet to stay close without being seen and Sean hung back, making Paddy worry that they would lose Lafferty at every corner and junction. Soon they were out of the tangle of suburban streets and following the big open road to the north of the city.

Paddy clung to the back of the passenger seat, watching the distant red taillights, promising Vhari Burnett that she wouldn’t walk away this time. Vhari had died to protect Kate, she was certain of this now, and Thillingly had killed himself because he let the sisters down. Paddy had to do the right thing this time. She couldn’t take Lafferty on herself, though, and Sean wasn’t a fighter; Lafferty might easily kill them both.

Before long they had left the main road and were following a winding single strip of tarmac bordered by vegetation. Sean was having trouble keeping the car inconspicuous, but he dropped back so that the car was invisible ahead of them, reappearing just as they turned a corner. He flicked the lights off.

“Sean, that’s not safe.” Paddy had to blink hard to make out the road in front of them.

“It’s okay.” He leaned over the steering wheel and peered ahead. “I know this road. We took it last night. They’re headed to Killearn.”