Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

Mary Ann bowed her head to the gray beads, her fingers moving on to the next obligation. The toilet out on the landing flushed and their mother’s soft step padded back downstairs to the kitchen.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.

“Leave me alone, Paddy,” Mary Ann answered quietly. “I let you be how you are.”

Paddy stepped down from the bed and snapped on the light, pulling her nightie over her head, walking bare-breasted to the chair, and facing into the room as she pulled her sweater and trousers on. Mary Ann ignored her. Paddy shuffled past the tightly fitted beds and sidled by the wardrobe blocking the door, sliding into the hallway and down the stairs.

The house was full: Trisha was scrubbing the oven angrily, sweating and flushed but pretending she wasn’t. The boys were slumped in the living room, watching television.

Paddy made a plate of toast, took a mug of tea from the ever-full pot, and lifted the Daily News she had brought home with her. Out in the hallway she sat the plate and cup on the stairs as she pulled on her outdoor shoes, a pair of gloves, and a coat. She opened the front door and walked down the path. A lone car, parked at the end of the street, made her stop.

It was a red Ford Capri, quite new and very clean, the roof glinting from a recent wax. She couldn’t say why it caught her attention, other than she’d never seen it before. The Eastfield Star was a dead end; it wasn’t a place drivers passed through by mistake. She shivered lightly and stopped herself. She had been followed by a van during the Callum Ogilvy case and strange cars still frightened her sometimes, when she thought she’d seen them before or suspected the drivers of looking at her. It was the private space that scared her, the dark five feet square inside where passersby wouldn’t interrupt a man beating a woman to death.

As she looked she saw a shadow shifting in the Capri. The engine suddenly fired to life, headlights coming on as the car hurried backward, reversing left and then shooting forward, taking the roundabout the wrong way.

Paddy stood on the path and watched the car drive away. It left because she’d seen it, she knew it had. It wouldn’t be a burglar, there was no money here. It might be Sullivan, sitting in his own car; he’d insisted on dropping her home, after all, and knew where she stayed.

Worrying about it and wondering if she was right to, she crossed the garden and lifted the key out from under a brick, unlocking the garage side door and opening it, stirring up the musky smell of rotting paper. A damp fug hung in the air.

She knew before she flicked the light on that the neighbors hadn’t been to take their stuff out. Still, the pile of rotting cardboard boxes by the door made her feel a lethargic spark of annoyance.

She lifted the plate of buttery toast off her mug, sat it among the pencils and pens lying on the wooden box by the damp armchair, and fell in the chair, pulling the shelf of wood that fitted across the arms. She put her plate of toast and her mug of tea on it and began to eat, looking around the room.

She had set the garage as a study, to finally get down to writing her book about Patrick Meehan’s wrongful conviction. She kept every scene of his story in her head, after all, from the night the old lady was battered to death in Ayr to his release on a royal pardon. She even knew the details of his time in Communist East Germany as a young man, of his trip to Moscow, and about his family life and his background.

It should have been an easy book to write, but at first she couldn’t get going because the garage was too cold.

Her father found a wood burner on one of his long walks around the old industrial wastelands. He fitted it on a slab of concrete and fed a snake of aluminum tubing out of the window for a chimney.

Then she was uncomfortable at the wooden chair. Con found her an old armchair and made her a wooden shelf that sat over the arms for a table.

Having resolved the major impediments to writing the book she sat there afternoon after afternoon, winter light dying outside the small window, surrounded by research and fresh stationery lifted from work, still as a corpse, alone with her own resounding shortcomings. She spent a lot of time there, wishing she could write the book, but the pet project had turned into a monster. It felt like trying to swallow an elephant with a gulp.

Paddy chewed her toast and knew today would be no more productive than all the other days past. She tried to fire her interest by imagining Meehan in a scene from his life: his interview with MI5 in West Berlin, when he explained his brilliant method of springing spies from British prisons, the riot outside Ayr High Court when he was brought there to be charged with murder, the afternoon in gray Peterhead Prison when he broke the seal on the vellum letter that contained his royal pardon. Still, flat images all. All the characters in her mind struck cardboard poses, no one moved or spoke. If she couldn’t write this she couldn’t write anything.

Her dejected eyes strayed to the copy of the Daily News on the floor next to her. She lifted it onto the table. The Bearsden Bird was on the front page again; this time they were poring over her family history and a picture of her old school. She’d been engaged once, to Mark Thillingly, but was single now.

Paddy considered the engineering feat of pulling the teeth out of someone who was wide awake and not consenting. It would take two people: one to hold her and the other one to pull. That would explain the two cars parked around the back of the house. He must have already pulled one or two teeth out by the time Paddy spoke to him at the door. Vhari must have been in agony.

Paddy saw her face in the mirror again, sliding back into the living room. Vhari could have walked away. She could have pushed past the man at the door and climbed into a safe police car. Women stayed with men who hit them, she knew that. Leaving a husband was much more complicated than picking up a coat and walking, but the man wasn’t Vhari’s husband. His name didn’t seem to have come up in the police investigation yet, so he probably wasn’t even her boyfriend. She must have had a bloody good reason.

The police were useless. Most had set their heart on Thillingly and neither Dan nor Tam were admitting that Mark Thillingly wasn’t the man at the door, and they weren’t talking about the BMWs parked around the back, either. They had taken money and they knew the guy, she felt sure they did.

She was sitting back, wondering, when her eye fell on a page-two story. It was a picture of Patrick Meehan in a small living room, grinning bitterly and holding up a letter. His skin had a heavy smoker’s yellow tinge, dying from the outside in. The criminal injuries board had paid him a lump sum of compensation for his wrongful conviction. Meehan said he was accepting the money because he owed a lot of people and wanted to do the right thing by them, but fifty thousand pounds wasn’t enough.

He didn’t look anything like the one-dimensional Meehan in her weak imagination. She looked at his watery eyes and saw traces of bitterness, impotent anger, a tinge of self-disgust. She had heard gossip about the damage the case had done to his children. He was holding the letter too tightly: his fingernails were white at the tips. He must have been holding it for a while, the photographer probably had trouble with his lights.

Meehan had always been part of her life but he never seemed like a real person before.

Paddy hesitated at the mouth of the dark cobbled alleyway. Brigate lanes could be used for a lot of things, and being mugged for her monthly Transcard, the only thing of value she owned, was the least of her worries. A few of the lanes had mattresses in them, put there by forward-thinking prostitutes who still had the sense to attend to their own comfort.