Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

Diana looked back at her, incredulous. “The hydrangeas?”

“Is that what they are? They must take some looking after.”

“No.” She sounded belligerent. “They pretty much take care of themselves.”

Sensing she had the upper hand, and being a bit drunk, Diana was going to make her work for every snippet. She wasn’t, Paddy guessed, a woman you’d want to have any power over you at all.

Stopping herself from gibbering, Paddy took out her packet of ten Embassy Regals and flicked them open. Regals were a poor person’s cigarette, a brand women smoked at bingo nights and parish dances; cigarettes for women who didn’t know the names of flowers. She looked at the pretty, slight woman opposite her and a spark of sharp, unwarranted resentment flared in her throat. She took in Diana’s delicate features and good teeth and thought that she could go and fuck herself. Fuck herself and her fancy fucking house and her lawyer husband.

Holding the stubby cigarette between her teeth, Paddy took out her notebook and flicked to a clean page, drawing the tiny pencil out of the leatherette sheath on one side and writing “bollocking fuck” at the top of the page in indecipherable shorthand, underlining it twice to draw Diana’s attention to her world, a world of women making their own way, a world of jobs and special skills where only Paddy knew the language.

“So,” she said, pencil poised, “d’you have any kids?”

It was the perfect mark. Diana shook her head sadly. Her hand trembled as she lifted her cigarette to her mouth.

“And Mark worked at Easterhouse Law Center?”

“Yeah. We’re all right for money. He could choose to do that.”

“The law center isn’t a money spinner, then?”

Diana snorted, “God, no. Legal aid’s peanuts compared to what you can get for private work.” She raised her hands, as if coming to the tired conclusion of a well-worn argument. “But that’s what Mark wanted-to help people. See the sort of person he was? He used to come home at night and cry, I mean sometimes he’d actually cry when he told me about the people he had met that day. The poverty of the people. The poorness of their lives. Terrible.”

Paddy could imagine them both sitting in their conservatory, drinking a bottle of French wine in the evening, smoking dear cigarettes together as they looked out over the large garden left by his mother, glorying in pity for people less well off than themselves. At that moment, thinking of her brothers and father and the cheap mince her mum padded out with onions and carrots, Paddy could have leaned across the table and slapped Diana Thillingly.

“Did he see Vhari Burnett?”

Diana’s face grayed. She picked up her cigarette from the ashtray and puffed on it.

Paddy filled in the space. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”

“Vhari and Mark weren’t a sore point.” She sucked hard. “They split up and it was fine. We met afterward at parties. She seemed resigned to it. Never went out with anyone else, as far as I knew. She was well over Mark, though. They were actually quite good friends.” She gave a shaky smile, finishing on an up-note, and stubbed her half-smoked cigarette out badly, leaving it smoldering. “He’d hardly kill her out of the blue.”

Paddy thought of Sean and how she still regarded him as hers. Maybe Vhari felt that way too. “But he died the night after Vhari, didn’t he? He must have heard about her murder on the radio. How did he react?”

Diana shook her head and looked around the table. “I don’t know.” She took a deep breath as a defense against the attack of tears, but it did no good. A convulsion started in her chest. Her face contorted, her mouth stretching wide to the sides, eyes shutting with the pressure behind them.

“Were they involved in a case together? A prosecution or something?”

Diana shook her head. “I can’t…” She wheezed her breath away and started again. “I can’t…” She sat crying at the table, disinhibited by drink, crippled by the racking pain of loss.

Paddy picked up the packet of Regals. “Come on now, will I get you another coffee?”

Diana nodded, still struggling to speak. “I’d… no, I’m okay.”

Paddy lit two Regals and gave her one. They were short cigarettes and made the hands holding them look thick and stubby too. Diana took one, rubbing her eyes with the ball of her hand, her back rounded.

“I think I should get you a brandy,” said Paddy, standing up. “I think you need one right now.”

Diana looked around the room, feigning confusion, as if the existence of brandy was a fact she couldn’t quite grasp. “Oh, dear, perhaps. You could try in the cupboard under the sink. I think. I remember Mark put it there. I think.”

The bottle was wet on the outside where Diana had run it under a tap earlier, and a wet, sticky ring had formed on the floor of the cupboard.

Paddy took a glass from the draining board and poured a generous inch into it, sitting it in front of Diana.

“Now, I don’t want any fighting from you, but I know a bit about these things and this’ll calm you down.”

Diana sipped the drink as if she’d never tried it before, shivering as it slid down. “Why don’t you have one?”

“D’you know, I’m not a great drinker. I’m taking my mum out tonight and she’ll be annoyed if I turn up half cut.”

“Where are you going?”

“The All Priests Holy Roadshow. It’s a stage show that makes a school nativity look slick.”

“I’ve never heard of it. Is it a Catholic thing?”

“Yeah. My family are Catholic. I don’t believe any of it.” Paddy leaned across the table confidentially. “But don’t tell my mum.”

Diana liked her a little more now, Paddy could tell, because of the Catholicism and the brandy. She smiled weakly, and raised her glass. “Slainte.”

Paddy raised an imaginary one back. “And yourself.”

Random arrests and torture of suspects by the special forces in Northern Ireland had given all Catholics the cachet of an oppressed minority. Paddy had never experienced any kind of prejudice other than the favorable regard of well-meaning liberals, but she enjoyed the status just the same. Sometimes she let it be known that she was Catholic to prompt the benefit of the doubt Diana was giving her now.

They smoked for a while, watching the light fail outside and the colors in the garden fade to a hundred shades of gray.

When Diana finally spoke she seemed to have sobered up. Her voice was small and she addressed the ashtray, rolling the tip of her cigarette endlessly against the glass.

“Vhari Burnett hadn’t been on the scene for a while. She’d been working at the prosecutor’s office, I think. She and Mark didn’t see each other professionally. The night she was murdered Mark came home later than usual, about eight o’clock. He was very upset. His nose was swollen and bleeding, as if he’d been punched on it.”

“Eight o’clock on the night she died? That’s before she died?”

“Yeah. I heard on the telly that Vhari spoke to a policeman at about half one in the morning. But Mark came home at eight that same evening.”

“Did he go back out again?”

“No, but it was a strange night.”

Paddy knew that the police were assuming a connection between Mark’s broken nose and his death but none of them had guessed it happened so long beforehand. “You said he was upset?”

“He was. Very.” Diana stared at the table, nodding softly, over and over, comforting herself with the rhythm. “It was raining that night. When he came in his nose was swollen and bloody and his woolen overcoat was soaking wet down one side because he’d been pushed over.”

Paddy remembered the cold rain, the wet outside Vhari’s door, and her own reluctance to get out of the car. Diana touched the bridge of her own nose, as if in sympathy. “Mark wasn’t a physical person, he wasn’t tough. He didn’t like violence.”