The Dead Hour (23 page)

Paddy looked at the blank page again and tried to imagine Patrick Meehan doing anything, meeting Betty, being questioned, standing trial. All she could see was a pockmarked man sitting at a table, looking at her expectantly, waiting impatiently for her opening gambit. But she didn’t have one.

If she was ever going to write any of it she’d need to do something. McVie was the only man who could help her.

For reasons as deep as a volcanic plug, Scotland mourned Sundays. Churches and pubs and newsagents were the only things open. Even the telly was rubbish. By teatime most areas were shuttered and fly-blown. Cars in the streets moved slowly, as though afraid to stir up the leaden air.

The address McVie had given her was in the back lane of the old warehouse buildings that were being renovated and sold to yuppies. His building was down a narrow street, the high buildings on either side swallowing what light there was. On the corner of his building was a pub: a grubby, tired working-man’s bar, a remainder from a time when the area had a workforce and a purpose.

Paddy passed the pool of light outside the pub and made a mental note that she could run back here if anyone jumped out at her from the shadows.

The doorway to McVie’s building was a grand double door set in an arched frame of pale green glazed bricks, its splendor lost in the narrow alley. A pristine panel of buzzers with names next to them hummed. Paddy pressed the button marked MCVIE and waited.

“Yes?”

It was a man’s voice, but he was English and sounded young.

“H-hello?” she stuttered. “I was looking for George McVie?”

He paused for a moment. “Who are you?”

“I’m Paddy Meehan, from his work.”

The voice asked someone something and came back to the intercom. “Come in. Two flights up.”

Intrigued, she pressed one of the big doors with her fingertips and it clicked open in her hand, letting her into a wood-paneled lobby with a modern staircase on the right. Above her, somewhere along the ribbon handrail, she heard a door open and the soft sound of a piano concerto playing on a radio station.

Climbing the stairs toward the sound she wondered if George might have a son from England, or a cousin perhaps. She didn’t know what his domestic situation was. Before the recent change in his behavior she’d assumed he lived somewhere middle-class with grown-up children who sided with their mother, that they all lived together in a house in the suburbs that looked nicer from the outside than it did on the inside, that they were unhappy and too cowardly or unimaginative to leave each other.

A barefoot man was standing on the landing above her. He smiled as she turned the corner. He shifted his weight, resting his hip against the railing as he dried his hands on a tea towel, standing to attention as she approached, holding his hand out to her. He had a flattop haircut, and he wore a white T-shirt worn soft with a hundred washings and a pair of stonewashed denims with a pleated front.

Paddy took his hand and shook it.

“I’m Ben,” he said, an excited throb in his voice.

Paddy was so distracted by Ben’s face she almost forgot to introduce herself: she could have sworn he was wearing mascara and lip gloss. Either that or he had just been swimming, climbed out of the pool, and ate a greasy chicken portion without licking his lips.

She took his hand. “Paddy.”

“Hello.” Ben shook her hand and held onto it, pulling her through a small door, into a low corridor, and out into a large room with a strip of kitchen against the back wall. Facing the kitchen, magnificent windows ran the full length of the room. Unfortunately, the view was of a brick wall twenty feet away, the monotony of it broken only by a few small, dirty office windows, dark now.

Below the big windows, as far from the door as was possible in the room, sat McVie. He was in a chintzy armchair, chosen for a different sort of house, stagily holding a book as if he were reading it. Every muscle on his face was taut, creating deep inverted commas above his eyebrows.

“Georgie.” Ben spoke his name as if he was giving him a warning.

McVie looked up and pretended to be surprised. “Oh, hello. Paddy.”

Something was going on, something homosexual, but Paddy wasn’t worldly enough to know what it was. Her mother said homos were men so debauched that they had tried everything else, the implication being that nothing was dirtier than a man with a man. She’d laughed at Trisha’s naïveté, but the fraught atmosphere was making her wonder. The only homosexual she had seen in the movies was the lonely guy in Fame who had a psychiatrist and a ginger Afro. Would there be nudity? Would she be expected to dance? Would she be expected to dance nude? She made a panicked face at McVie.

“What?” He stood up from his chair, rattled and frightened.

Paddy waved her open palms at him.

“What’s wrong with her?” said Ben tartly.

She wanted to leave but Ben was between her and the door. She looked around the flat for an alternative exit. Everything in it was brand new but the furniture was old-fashioned. The walls were new, the kitchen looked immaculate. She doubted the cooker had ever been used.

“Nice flat,” she said, as a filler.

Ben pulled his T-shirt up at the waist to scratch his stomach. “We just moved in.”

“Where were you before?”

“He lived in Mount Vernon. I was in a bedsit in Govanhill.” He looked accusingly at McVie. “It was shit. I was there for months.”

McVie looked at Ben, a staggered look that started on his bared stomach and rose, softening, until it reached Ben’s eyes. She suddenly understood that McVie loved him. There would be no naked dancing, no untoward touching. Ben was the reason McVie had bought flowers, the reason he looked younger and dressed himself nicely.

“Am I the first person you’ve had up from work?”

Ben answered for him. “Yes. Georgie’s met all my friends from college and I’ve not met any of his friends.”

“Because I haven’t got any friends,” explained McVie, dropping his book.

“So.” Paddy didn’t want to get in the middle of a fight. “Which college are you at?”

“Royal Academy of Music.”

“Brilliant. What do you play?”

Ben smiled arrogantly. “Most things,” he said.

McVie frowned and looked out of the window at the brick wall. Her invitation was a test. Paddy knew he had given her his address and asked her up because she didn’t matter. If the visit went badly it would be a containable disaster because no one at work listened to her anyway. To be a sexually active woman in the newsroom was hard, she realized, but to be a poof in love would be very hell.

“McVie, I’m on my way to work but I stopped by to ask a favor. I need to meet Patrick Meehan, can you set it up?”

McVie looked surprised. “I thought you didn’t want to meet him.”

“I’m trying to write a book about him.” Admitting a personal ambition was almost as dangerous as admitting to be gay. “But it’s not happening.”

“Take your coat off,” said Ben, tugging at her sleeve. “This isn’t a station.”

“No.” Paddy brushed his fingers from her as kindly as she could. “I need to go to work.”

“Your friend is rude,” said Ben, spinning on his heel and walking off to the bedroom.

Paddy smiled down at McVie. “Georgie?”

McVie grinned back and stood up, dropping his book and pushing her toward the front door.

It was cold on the landing and he was wearing his slippers without socks. He tried to talk to her but she pulled his sweater sleeve until they were two flights of freezing steps down, standing close together behind the drafty front door.

They stood close, she noticed, closer than they ever had before and McVie looked down at her, shivering but giddy with relief. “You don’t like Ben, do you?”

“No.”

They giggled together for a moment, neither quite sure why, and looked at the rows of brass mailboxes on the wall behind the door. Paddy didn’t like Ben but McVie did. He liked him so much he was dressing well and buying flowers and smiling without witnessing an accident. When they first met he was the most unhappy, bitter person she had ever sat next to. He was a homosexual but she was having mad sex with married men in cars and it was making her pretty happy.

“I’ve known you for four years and you’ve been nothing but miserable and hateful. But now …” She looked at him; a compliment would embarrass them both. “You’re … not.”

McVie nodded at the brass postboxes, eyes flicking across the handwritten scraps of paper shoved into the windows. “Aye. That’s a nice thing to say.”

“It is. I’m nice.” They giggled together again. “I’ll not say anything. It’s not my business.”

McVie closed one eye and looked at her again. “You really don’t like him?”

“What’s the difference whether I like him or not? I’m not shagging him.”

He blanched, shocked at her frankness. “What are you talking about? You’re supposed to be a good Catholic girl.”

She didn’t want to talk about her own sexual behavior. “I’m just saying. Not being depressed has to be a good thing, doesn’t it? Those instincts are there for a reason.”

“I suppose …” He scratched the gummy residue of a sticker off the face of one of the postboxes. “It was either kill myself or give into it.”

They bridled at the sudden honesty, looking away from each other.

“Maybe you should have considered the first option more closely,” said Paddy quietly and made him smile. “Right, I’m off. Will you set up the Meehan meet for me?”

“Sure.”

She reached for the door.

“By the way, you were asking about Bobby Lafferty? He’s in Govan police station. Been there since this morning. They’re questioning him about the Bearsden Bird, apparently.” He looked at his watch. “You want to get yourself over there. They’ve only got another four hours with him.”

The street was quiet outside Bernie’s garage. Kate leaned into the backseat and lifted the blue-handled wire cutters over to the front, finding them incredibly heavy, so heavy that her wrists could hardly manage the weight of them. She sat with them in her lap, weighing down her skinny legs. She was so thin now that she could fit her fist sideways between her thighs. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door and stepped out into the street, cradling the bolt cutters on her arms as she walked along the railway arches.

Bernie had put a new padlock on the doors and she cut through the loop of metal on it, finding it harder to get through than the last one. She was getting weak. She hadn’t eaten anything for days, couldn’t remember what it was like to want food. The tinned, jellied ham she’d brought from the cottage stuck in her throat like a fist of dried leaves.

Unhooking the padlock, she slipped inside, feeling along the wall for the light switch, smiling to herself when she thought about the prize waiting there for her. She realized to her surprise that she was salivating, thinking about holding her pillow again, feeling the warm, skinlike texture under her fingers, smelling the clean, sweet plastic. The light flickered on, a sharp brutal whiteness that hurt, and she blinked several times to adjust her eyes. Each time she opened them again she thought she was mistaken but the image resolved itself in her eye and she managed to squint and keep her eyes open. The table had been pulled out, the red toolbox yanked away from the wall at one side. She hurried over to look behind it.

The pillow was gone.

Sobbing, she sank to her knees. She could stand Vhari being murdered, she could handle losing her looks, she could even, she realized now, cope with being told to get out of the Killearn mansion she had lived in for four years, but this was too much.

It had to be here. Blinded by tears, she stood up and pulled some things off the table, toppling a stack of receipt pads onto the floor before stopping, exhausted. If Lafferty had been here he would have made the same sort of mess as he had in the cottage. Everything would be broken. It was Bernie. He had stolen her pillow.

Kate walked out of the garage, leaving the doors lying open and the light on, and climbed back into the Mini. On second thought she realized that she would need to keep Bernie sweet if she was to get her pillow back from him. She climbed out of the car, flicking the garage lights off and pulling the doors to.

She started the engine, patting the wheel encouragingly when it started, and headed off to Bernie’s flat.

Sullivan let Paddy lead the way into the black corridor and shut the door softly behind him. The tiny narrow room smelled of dust and sweat, the black walls around her thick to keep the noise out. She could just make out Sullivan’s face in the silver gloom coming through the two-way mirror. He turned away from her, craning his neck as he peered though the mottled glass into the cream room. His belly had been pulled in as they climbed the stairs and walked to the door but now, fascinated by the scene in front of him, he relaxed, his back slouching and his belly hanging out in a way that made her think of her dad and smile.

Sullivan had warned her not to speak, that the room wasn’t soundproof, but Paddy found herself inadvertently sighing an exclamation. His head was shaved and his shoulders broad, as if he worked out in a gym. His neck was thick, a bushel of tendons stood out on either side, the skin on it wrinkled, hard, knife-slash criss-crosses over thin skin where the muscles had been tensed for thirty years. He looked like a thick-necked dog. If Lafferty went for you, he’d be making contact with his teeth.

His eyes roved around the room as one of the two officers sitting in front of him asked questions. Where was he on the night of Tuesday the fifteenth? Had he been in Bearsden that night? Lafferty’s angry animal eyes flickered back and forth across the wall and the mirror, gliding over Paddy’s face and Sullivan’s chest. They were dead eyes, unkind and cold, vicious.

Opening his mouth to speak, Lafferty displayed a mouth of broken and dead teeth. He stared straight at the mirror and demanded in a hard man’s drawl to know who was asking “theze quesjinz.” The officer ignored him and repeated himself, sounding bored, as if he’d been saying the same thing over and over for quite a long time.