Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

Next to her Burns pulled the condom off and tied a knot in it, smiling to himself in a way that made her feel excluded and stupid and angry. The windows were opaque with condensation. Burns ran a finger down the windscreen and smirked again. Turning on the engine, he sat back, waiting for the windows to clear, and tapped his knee patiently. He reached forward to the radio but Paddy panicked, thinking he was going to touch her again.

“We should go,” she said unnecessarily. “I’m tired.”

It was half two and she worked the night shift five days a week. She would be awake all night and they both knew it. Burns gave half a smile and stumbled across a station playing Lionel Richie’s “Running with the Night.” A childlike pleasure came over his face until he heard her snigger; his fingers flicked onward to another station and Echo and the Bunnymen.

“Better?”

“I don’t like Lionel Richie but put it back if you want to hear it.”

“No, I don’t like him either.” He cringed at his obvious lie. “Okay, I do like him. Is he not cool?”

She smiled. “Lionel Richie?”

“Yeah? He’s not, is he?” He bit his lip.

“Burns, what age are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“You’re only two years older than me. How come you dress like Val Donigan?”

He sat back and smiled at her, pulling his V-neck straight. It wasn’t his usual toothy matinee idol smile but a coy asymmetric face crumple. “I’m a polis. This gear is cool in the polis. You like this crowd?” He pointed to the radio.

“I like Echo and the Bunnymen, yeah.” She didn’t really but she wanted to.

“See, I just think that guy can’t sing.”

They each nodded hesitantly, looking unguardedly at each other. She imagined him dressed well for a moment, without the severe haircut and the terrible outfit. He had dark eyes and a big, character nose. He scratched his neck. “I want to see you again.”

Paddy smiled at the euphemism and then laughed. “Is that what we just did? ‘Saw’ each other?”

“Yeah.” He gave a satisfied sigh. “I gave you a seeing-to, yeah.”

She felt unbelievably relaxed and calm as she yanked her tights up, pulling her coat around her hips for privacy, and fell back in the seat, grinning. “Take me home, Burns.”

They drove back listening to the radio. “Killing Moon” finished and the DJ announced a change of pace and played a Madness record. They sang along-even though they were a teenybopper’s band, somehow they knew every word. It didn’t take them long to get back to Eastfield.

“Okay.” Paddy gathered her things together. “I know a lot of policemen. If you ever tell anyone about this I’ll phone your wife.”

He clutched his chest prudishly. “Listen, I’m as ashamed as you are.”

She didn’t want to smile or look at him again in case she stayed. Opening the passenger door, she stepped out of the car and watched him drive away, leaving her alone on the broken pavement.

If her mother had seen them pull up earlier and then drive off, she’d say she forgot something at the comedy club. Her scarf. And they went back for it and stayed for another drink.

She watched him leaving. Burns didn’t look back but she could tell by the inclination of his head that he was watching her in the rearview. It was only then that she saw the red Ford Capri parked outside Mrs. Mahon’s house. She looked carefully, though it was in the shadow of the streetlamp, but couldn’t see anyone inside. She was being paranoid. Cars could park on the roundabout without her permission.

It wasn’t until she was lying in her bed, reliving every touch and caress of the night, that she remembered the Ford hadn’t been there when they first got home. Mrs. Mahon was in her seventies. She wouldn’t be receiving visitors at one thirty on a Friday night.

Paddy sat up, pulled on her dressing gown, and padded silently down the stairs, looking out of the front door into the silver-frosted street.

The Ford was gone.

Bernie sipped cold tea from the plastic flask mug and glanced at his watch. It was late but he was into the rhythm of the work now, lost in it. The jack was well fitted under the car, he had his tools fanned out around the boogie board so that he could reach them easily without having to get up. It was a complicated job, requiring concentration, and any cracks or crevasses in his thinking were filled with the jabber of a phone-in on the radio.

The tea was bitter but he drank it down, hoping to sate his hunger. He hadn’t eaten for six hours but didn’t want to go back to his flat for food and sit, wide awake, thinking about Kate and Vhari and glancing down at the “sorry, sorry” message on the newspaper. Vhari dead and Kate gone. The police had left him in no doubt as to how Vhari died, either; they spared him no detail because they suspected him, briefly.

When the police made him look at photographs of a bloody trail through the house and Vhari crumpled at the end of it, Bernie sobbed so hard that he threw up. The policemen made him breathe into a paper bag and the smell of his own vomit got stuck around his nose and under his chin.

He frowned at his watch. It was two thirty. If he worked on until three or four he’d be so tired when he got home that he might even sleep.

He was sliding back under the car when the radio discussion turned to the morality of private schools. He remembered waiting at the bus stop with Vhari and Kate on wet winter mornings, fighting with each other as a way of keeping warm, the girls’ bare legs mottled pink from the cold. He remembered the journey back as well, standing at the bus stop, hoping hard that none of the kids from the local comprehensive would come past and see them there in their blue Academy uniforms. He was the only boy at their bus stop until Paul came to the school. He came in fifth year and everything changed forever.

Paul Neilson had been expelled from Fettes boarding school for stealing. They all knew that even before he started because someone’s brother was at Fettes and told them. A lot of the girls had decided not to talk to him. All the good girls. Vhari said it was wrong to treat people meanly because of rumors and would try to be kind to him. Kate, he noted at the time, said nothing.

But then Paul arrived and everyone changed their minds. Paul wasn’t just handsome, he was cool as well. He wore his rugby shirt with the collar turned up and exuded a vague sense of rebel threat. Kate, the prettiest girl in the school, was captivated from the first bus journey. She watched him introduce himself to the group, invite questions, tell them where he lived, that his dad had a business importing from South Africa and what the turnover was every year. She watched him with her pretty gray eyes, curling a blond trestle of hair behind her ear. By the time they stepped off the bus at Mount Florida she deigned to smile at him. He walked up the road with them even though his house was in a different direction. By the next morning Kate and Paul stood apart from the waiting crowd, backing up against the wall, talking privately. If Bernie had known what would happen he would have dragged Kate away by the hair.

Down in the darkness under the engine, tears rolled down Bernie’s temples into his hair and he shook his head. She’d stolen a fucking car from him. Even for Kate that was very bad. The Mini wasn’t worth much but he didn’t have much. Just as well it wasn’t a punter’s car, in for a service. Everyone she knew had more money than him, but then he was quite glad she had chosen to steal from him and not them. The people she knew now were not people you wanted to piss off.

The discussion on the radio moved on to yuppies and tax evasion, and Bernie, unable to ignore the insistent hunger pangs in his stomach, finished off retightening everything and slipped out from under the car. He still wasn’t tired.