Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

She found herself in a short lobby, painted a calming pale lilac that made her feel faintly panicky. A kind, matronly woman smiled up at her from behind a desk, asking if she could help. Paddy gave Billy’s name and watched the nurse’s face for a reaction, revulsion or something, she didn’t quite know. The woman smiled and looked at a chart on her table,

“Are you family, pet?”

“No, I’m… I was with him.” Paddy thumbed out to where she imagined the car park was.

The nurse looked at her, reading her face. “What we don’t want is visitors who are going to get very upset,” she said in a careful voice. “I don’t want anyone to upset the patients. Do you feel able to do that? To stay calm?”

Paddy nodded, though she wasn’t sure it was true. “Are his family with him?”

The nurse nodded. “I’m sure they’ll be glad you came.” She stood up and opened the door for Paddy, pointing her down a shabbily constructed corridor of white emulsioned cubicle walls. Paddy had been in other wards in the hospital, she knew that only the burns ward had these walls and doors. Presumably they needed them to keep visitors from staring at the boiled and blistered men in the beds.

She crept along to the door the nurse had indicated, hearing the beep of the machines and the rustle of crisp sheets against moist skin. A strong medicinal stench came from the walls, mint over disinfectant.

She knocked gently on the door, half-hoping no one would answer. A smoker’s voice called to come in. Paddy turned the handle and pushed the door open.

A high, metal-framed single bed sat in the middle of a room. A tiny sink was against the back wall alongside a locker with a plastic jug of orange squash and a glass.

Billy was sitting bolt upright in the bed, flanked on one side by a standing woman and on the other by a young man in a plastic chair reading a tabloid newspaper. Billy looked astonished and mortified at the same time: his eyelashes and eyebrows had been seared off and his skin scorched into a permanent flustered blush. He was dressed in a blue paper nightie, his hands wrapped up into massive white bandage mittens like oversized Q-tips. He seemed small and then she realized: his hair was gone.

In all the time she knew him, Billy had sported the same shoulder-length wavy perm. She knew it was a perm because she watched it carefully from the backseat, night after night, the small hint of a straight root here or there and then the sudden two-week flush of distinct flatness just before he went to the hairdressers’ and had it redone. The hairdo was five years out of date when she first saw it four years ago, but she had developed a grudging respect for Billy’s persistence. It was a brave man who’d risk baldness out of loyalty to the age of disco. Sean and her brothers were terrified of losing their hair.

But Billy was going to have to find a new look: the perm had melted. Over his left ear-away, she imagined, from the source of the fire-a bush of hair remained as it was before, but the rest of his head was bald, furnished in small tufts or pink fleshy patches.

Relieved and surprised, Paddy barked an unkind, shrill laugh and pointed at him. The wife and son stared at her blankly.

“Bloody hell, Billy.” She sidled into the room. “I thought you were really hurt.”

Half-amused, Billy held his giant bandaged hands up to her. “This is pretty bad.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry, I thought it would be much worse.”

The wife was staring at her aggressively. She was stout, tanklike, her hands clasped together over an onerous chest and belly. The son was built like his mother, although young and footballer-fit; he looked as if he’d run to fat given a chance. He glanced at his mother, taking her cue about the stranger giggling at his burned father.

“I might never have the use of my hands again,” said Billy. “I might never be able to drive again. And it’s bloody sore.”

It was wrong of her but she was so relieved to see him looking like himself that she laughed again.

The wife widened her eyes, retracted her lips, and stepped up to meet her. “Who in the eff are you-” Her voice was the gravel growl of a heavy smoker and even as she stepped across the room to her Paddy smelled a whiff of smoke.

Billy called her off with a small, firm, “Agnes.”

His son huffed behind his hand. Billy asked them to go down to the canteen for a cup of tea and leave him alone with Paddy for ten minutes.

They gathered their things together, the wife giving Paddy a filthy look and banging shoulders with her on the way out. “She’s had a scare,” he explained when the door clicked shut behind her. “She reacts like that when she’s frightened.”

“You been married a long time, Billy?”

“Since we were seventeen.”

He was a long way from that now. Paddy took the seat next to him, still warm from his son, and realized that Billy was pretty old. In his late forties at least. They only ever met in the dark and she was generally staring at the back of his head, but she had imagined him younger.

They looked at each other and smiled. Paddy patted the bed in a symbolic contact. “Is this you from the front, then, Billy?”

Billy pointed his big white mittens at his face. “Is it bad?”

“You just look embarrassed.”

“They won’t let you see yourself. That’s scary.”

She looked around for a mirror but there wasn’t one, so she felt in her bag and pulled out a powder compact, opening it and handing it to him. Billy peered in at himself, turning the mirror to different angles. “Red, eh?”

Paddy nodded and grinned. “Is it sore?”

“Oh, my hands are murder.”

But she couldn’t stop smiling. “I thought you’d be in a big tent and have all cream on everywhere and no eyelids or something.”

“That’s next door.”

They nodded together for a while. She could almost hear the comforting crackle of a ghost police radio. “When we were at the Burnett house, did you see anyone come in or go out?”

He thought about it. “No.”

“Could you have seen anything I didn’t see?”

“Like what?”

“Like someone coming around the side of the house or a car outside or the police do something?”

He took himself back to the scene again. “No. I smoked a cigarette, saw you at the door, nothing happened.”

“Did you mention it to anyone?”

“Not a soul.”

“Right, well, I’m not as circumspect as you: I’ve been mouthing off all over town. I think they were after me and got you instead. Sorry about that.”

“I don’t look like you.”

“They don’t know what I look like. And from the back, your hair…” She didn’t want to press the point but swept her hand down the back of her head. “’Cause your hair’s long.”

“So they thought I was a woman?”

“Could be. Did you see anything before the fire? Anyone approaching the car?”

Billy thought about it. He looked down at his silly hands lying in his lap and she saw that his eyelids were completely unscathed. He looked straight ahead of himself, glancing up at the space where the rearview mirror would have been. “I’m smoking and waiting for you. You’ve not been long. I’m listening to the radio, listening for calls. Nothing’s coming. I was angry, thinking about you and the copper’s car.” He looked at her reproachfully and then at his hands. He raised his right elbow to where the windowsill would have been and pointed the Q-tip at his mouth, taking in a deep breath as he looked back at the mirror. “Smoking. I see a shadow behind me. Moving fast across the mirror. He was wearing black, whoever he was, next thing-whoosh. Flames everywhere.”

She asked him if the shadow he saw could have been of a big guy, a bald guy, but Billy said he’d only seen the guy’s torso from the neck down and no, he didn’t seem all that big, quite slim, actually. Had Billy seen a car behind him? But Billy laughed, opening his mouth and letting out a coughing sound so that he didn’t have to move his cheeks.