The Dead Hour (3 page)

She had started going with Sean at school. They were close and both came from big families so neither of them bothered with other friends. It was too late now; the lifelong friendships that trail on after school, that made for best men and holiday companions, were out of reach for them now. They found themselves stuck together, not engaged or even dating, just hanging around during the day watching County Court on TV, or grainy pirate videos of the three films his brother owned: Airplane!, Evil Dead, and The Exorcist, or else going for pointless walks up the Brae.

Mimi Ogilvy was pulling on her coat on as she opened the door. “Come in, Paddy, wee hen, good of you to come.”

Paddy stepped into the hallway, into the warmth and the cozy smell of toast and strong tea. The holy water font inside Mimi’s door was large enough for a small chapel: a Disney-ish Our Lady gazing lovingly down at a fat baby Jesus who was holding a pink oyster shell full of holy water. Paddy dipped two fingers of her right hand and dabbed her head, her breastbone, and both shoulders as she crossed the threshold. It was an old habit she couldn’t shake. She had no faith but knew the gesture soothed her mother’s fears about her. Every time she did it she felt like a hypocrite, but a hypocrite with a calm mother.

She noticed a new set of leaflets stacked under the telephone table. Black text on red paper this time, proclaiming Callum Ogilvy’s innocence. It cost a lot of money to print them—she wondered where the hell Sean was getting it from—but just then Mimi ambled out of the kitchen, peeled two pound notes from her purse, and laid them on the telephone table, answering her question.

“That’s for his ciggies and a pint at teatime. And,” she pulled out a fiver and three more pound notes, “he’s got his last driving lesson later.”

It was meant as a compliment that she did it in front of Paddy, a mark of acceptance. Paddy looked away. Mimi had paid for so many lessons that Sean had his test in a few days. Sean didn’t need to drive, he wouldn’t be able to afford a car, and anyway, no one was paying for her driving lessons.

Mimi glanced at the clock on the far wall of the galley kitchen and stepped past Paddy to the door.

“There’s porridge in the pot for ye and the honey’s in the cupboard next to the fridge.”

She was gone, leaving Paddy in the hall listening to her ex-fiancé snoring and trying to resist the pull of warm porridge after a long night shift. Sean didn’t take porridge for his breakfast. Poor Mimi had gone to all that trouble just for her. It would be unkind to leave it.

He was awake. His breathing had become lighter, but he was still facing the wall and keeping his eyes shut, curled up to hide his morning glory.

She rapped on the open bedroom door once more. “Get up.”

Sean stretched out under the blankets, savoring the hazy sleep in his limbs. He was wearing his brown pajamas with a yellow trim on the pocket. He looked like a six foot two ten-year-old.

“Hey, smelly boy, wake up, come on, you need to sign on.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He clasped his hands in front of himself and gave a luxurious stretch, smiling up at her standing in the doorway, his eyes puffy with sleep, his lashes pressed this way and that by the pillow.

She felt a burst of righteous anger. Both she and his mother were working hard at thankless jobs and cooking and caring for him. She knew his brothers gave him money on the fly as well, two quid here, a packet of cigarettes there. One of them had bought him a season ticket to Celtic Park so that they could all go together. Paddy came straight over from work every two weeks to make sure he got up and went to claim his Supplementary Benefit. He couldn’t even do that himself.

“You’re a lazy bastard. You want to get on your bike and look for work.”

They locked eyes and grinned at each other across the soft darkness of the bedroom, a look that lingered too long. Ambushed by the sudden moment of tender connection, their smiles slid gently into awkward until Sean stretched his arms behind his head and broke it off. “Anyway, milk and five sugars, love.”

“Fuck you.” It was a little too angry for a play fight and he was surprised into looking at her. She wasn’t angry at Sean, she was angry at herself for eating the porridge and then going back for more porridge with more honey and then standing, watching old ladies with string grocery bags passing by the kitchen window, picking at the papery skirt of dried porridge around the rim of the pot, eating it and wondering why she was doing it. It didn’t taste of anything, it didn’t even have a pleasant texture. But while she was eating all she thought about was eating. She didn’t worry about work or her family or her weight. Even unpleasant food made her feel happy. Except cottage cheese with pineapple. She could hardly look at it now, after a reckless weeklong attempt to eat nothing else.

Sean kept her eye and rolled away from her, farting lightly in her general direction. She tried not to smile.

“Saw this in the hall.” She held up the Callum Ogilvy pamphlet.

“Yeah, a woman took one from Elaine’s salon yesterday,” he said, propping himself up on an elbow. “She’s a reporter from the Reformer, said she was interested. It could be the start of something.”

Paddy grunted. The Rutherglen Reformer was an advertising paper. They covered local swimming galas and wheelie bin controversies. They wouldn’t touch a story like Callum’s but Sean was trying to worry her, make her write about his campaign for the Daily News before someone else scooped the story.

Callum was eleven when he and another boy were convicted of killing a three-year-old they had taken from outside his front door. Looking back it seemed bizarre that Paddy alone was convinced that there must have been an adult hand in the murder. The rest of the city settled happily on the two boys as lone culprits.

Paddy had found the man behind the killing, she still had the mental scars to prove it, but even she knew that Callum had killed the wee boy. He might have been driven to the spot and terrorized into doing it, but Callum Ogilvy was still guilty. He had blood on him from the baby, his hair was found at the scene, and Callum had more or less confessed.

Only Sean wouldn’t accept it. Callum’s innocence had become an article of faith with him and she thought he had half convinced Callum now too. The Ogilvys had abandoned the wee cousin to his fate once, leaving him to be raised by an unstable mother, and Sean wasn’t going to betray him again. The adamancy of his conviction and the sincerity with which he wrote letter after letter to MPs and journalists and anyone who might be able to help was starting to have an impact.

“Sean,” she said with forced patience, “there’s no new evidence—”

“The old evidence could be made up.”

“Mrs. Thatcher could be an evil robot but she isn’t. Just because something’s plausible doesn’t make it possible.”

They looked at each other again. All it would take, she thought, was for one of the animals at work to see a career boost in the story and Sean would be eaten alive.

“You’d be better off dropping it. No one wants to keep this story going but you.”

“Pad,” he used the fond diminutive of her nickname but sounded serious, “it’s not just a story to me. I won’t side with the world against that wee guy. I’m all he’s got.”

“Couldn’t you be all he’s got and still accept that he did it? Does he have to be innocent for you to like him? He was ten years old when he did it, who knows anything at ten?”

“Don’t start that.”

Resigned, Paddy nodded. “Come on anyway, get up.”

Sean stretched back. “Put the kettle on, eh? And a couple of slices.”

“Playschool’s on in a minute.” She backed out of the room and hesitated at the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. She had come here straight from a night shift but she drew the line at cooking his breakfast. She chose the living room door, fell onto the settee, and looked around the room.

The Ogilvys were good little soldiers of the church, just like her own family. Their furniture was nice enough, built to be hard wearing but not to look good or feel modern. All the pictures on the walls were either religious or sacrament-related triumphs of the various family members: Sean’s parents at their silver wedding anniversary, the ordination of a distant cousin, one brother’s small wedding to a pretty girl from Hamilton and the subsequent christenings of their four children, all outside the same ugly little chapel during different seasons. Paddy and Sean had been engaged for two of the children’s christenings and she was pictured in the family group, although, in her only expression of annoyance at Paddy for breaking it off, Mimi had framed one of them so that she was sliced in half by the edge of the frame.

Paddy took a copy of the Daily News out of her pale leather backpack, frowning heavily to stop herself grinning at the second page. Her insert was printed there: police were called to a party at 173 Drymen Road, Bearsden, after neighbors complained of the noise. A woman was found to be injured but police made no arrests. It was her first piece of copy in four night shifts.

Putting down the paper, she listened for noises from the hall. Nothing.

“Sean,” she shouted, irritated, “they won’t let you off with it anymore.”

“I’m eating a fry-up in the shower.”

She could tell by his voice that he was still lying down. If he was late again they wouldn’t process his giro check until later in the afternoon, which meant the check would arrive in three days instead of two. They did it to punish latecomers and Mimi needed the money.

“Your mum’s behind on all her catalogs. Mr. McKay’ll come and repo all your underpants.”

She heard the clip-clop of high heels in the close and a key rasping into the front door. She hoped it was Mimi but knew it wasn’t. Guilty, as if she had been caught skiving school, she tucked her hands between her knees and sat up straight on the settee.

Elaine McCarron stepped into the hallway, mac on over her blue work pinny, smiling to herself. Elaine had been two years below them at school, slim, slight, and fine featured. She hated Paddy but was too dainty to ask Sean to stop hanging about with his ex the whole time. A junior hairdresser, she worked hard on her feet all during the long afternoons that Paddy and Sean spent watching telly or wandering around Woolworth’s eating pick and mix and playing with the toys.

Paddy let herself be known by a stage cough. Elaine spun, infuriated, and Paddy tried a smile.

“I wouldn’t have come,” she whispered, “only Mimi asked me.”

Elaine pursed her lips hard, draining the blood from them, and looked away to Sean’s bedroom door. She pulled her pinny straight, composing herself before knocking prettily.

Paddy sat sheepishly back on the settee. She couldn’t leave immediately. It would look as if she had done something wrong. She felt a familiar hollow sense of guilt, as if she had eaten the flake out of Elaine’s ice cream and no one knew it but the two of them. She could blame Mimi all she liked, she could deny it to everyone, but Paddy knew that she was clinging to Sean because he was the only person she felt completely comfortable with. She needed him even more now because she missed her sister Mary Ann so much.

From across the hall she heard Elaine give a sexy giggle, louder than she needed to, for Paddy’s benefit she was sure. She stood up suddenly and turned the telly on to the news. Unemployment was running at one in ten. The Scott Lithgow shipyard was threatening to close with six and a half thousand layoffs. Boy George was pictured arriving in Paris, at Charles de Gaulle with his Japanese girlfriend. Then the local news.

Mist rose from a lawn in a sharp morning. In the distance a Victorian villa with serious policemen in front of it, their frosted breath silver in the brittle morning air. It was the house she had stopped last night. The homeowner, Vhari Burnett, had been found this morning by a colleague who had come to give her a lift to work. They showed a grainy photo of the woman Paddy had seen in the mirror. Her hair was shorter in the picture and she was outside, her blond hair wind-ruffled, smiling crescent eyes.

Paddy sat upright: the good-looking man had killed her. She remembered the flurry of light at the Bearsden window and it seemed to her now an arm swung in a punch, a machete strike, a death blow. She recalled the night cold on her cheeks, the wind brushing her hair back, and saw again the fingers clench the door handle, holding the door closed, keeping the woman inside.

Burnett had been a prominent member of the prosecutor’s office, unmarried and a political activist. In the wide shot Paddy noticed that both BMWs were gone from the back of the house.

As Paddy sat on the settee, slack and horrified, vaguely aware of the sound of voices out in the hall, she shifted and felt the fifty quid crumple in her pocket. She should phone the police and tell them about it. It could be important—not many people had the odd fifty-quid note sitting about in their hall. But the police would gossip. Her first and only bribe would become public knowledge.

The front door clicked shut and Sean said something. She’d be known as corrupt and the note would end up in some policeman’s pocket. Evidence was misplaced all the time, generally money or other valuables, but it never seemed to happen to moldy jam sandwiches or hats with holes in them.

“Did ye not make tea?” asked Sean, repeating himself. He was standing at the door of the living room.

Paddy pointed at the telly. “He killed her.”

“Who?”

“I was at the door of that house last night and they’ve just said a woman was murdered after we left. I spoke to the guy who did it.”

Sean glanced at the television. “Creepy.”

Paddy drew a long breath, balancing the news of the fifty-quid note on the tip of her tongue, unsure if she wanted to commit herself to doing the right thing. She looked at Sean’s face and gave in. “He gave me money, a fifty-pound note, to go away.”

“Fucking hell.”

Paddy cringed. “Shitloads, isn’t it? Mum’d have a field day with a note that big.”

Sean’s eyes widened thinking of all the things he could do with fifty quid. It was five weeks’ worth of benefit for him. He could send his mum to Rome on pilgrimage. Buy shoes that fitted him. Get new carpet for the threadbare hall.