Denise Mina: The Dead Hour

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.

“Ye need to hand it in to the police though, Pad.”

“Aye,” she agreed quickly, as if that was what she had been going to do all along. “Aye, I know.”

“You’ll get it back, I’m sure.”

“Oh, aye.” She turned back to face the telly and nodded, a little too vigorously. “I’ll get it back.”

Kate had been awake for almost two days. Sitting behind the wheel of her smart new car she felt panicked and buzzed at the same time, giggly almost when she thought about the value of the thing in the boot, frightened when she thought about the consequences of what she had done. She turned a corner and saw a lorry lumbering along in front of her on the straight road. She stepped on the brake, touching it lightly, just curling her bare toes over the soft leather insole of her navy blue pump, and the sensitive car slowed on the wet road. Beautiful motion. Reflexively, her thumb stroked the enameled BMW badge at the center of the wheel. The blue matched her woolen Chanel suit, her earrings and watch. Lovely to be surrounded by lovely things.

The Loch Lomond Road was quiet this morning. It was too cold for tourists, too rainy even for Germans. The summer crowds were hardly even a memory now. As she drove through the little settlements dotted along the bare road all the bed-and-breakfast signs had NO VACANCIES notices attached at the bottom. Kate came here every summer when she was young and knew the rota of visitors to the Loch, from the pasty-faced city dwellers who came on the bus for a day in a tea shop during the drizzly, midge-infested summer to the other old established families who, like hers, came to their holiday homes for Christmas and Hogmanay, trooping from one house to another bringing season’s greetings and good bottles of malt with them.

He would probably suspect she’d come to the Balmaha cottage, and look for her there. She didn’t have keys for the front door but could easily break in around the back. She imagined herself in bra and stockings and garters, sitting on a chair in the hall, seductively smoking a cigarette as he opened the door. He’d love that, she smirked to herself, he’d go mad for that. She imagined the scene again, lowering the lights, making it at night, pulling her curly blond hair up but letting tendrils tumble about her shoulders and putting her glasses on. Sexy secretary. He loved that look. Unfortunately she didn’t have any of that sort of underwear with her.

She was overtaking the lorry, a third of the way up the side, flicking the wipers on to smear away the spray from the tall tires, when she saw the red car coming straight toward her, twenty feet away and closing.

“Shit!” Eyes wide, suddenly awake, she took her foot off the accelerator, slammed the brake, and managed to pull in behind the lorry so neatly that the red car narrowly missed clipping her near corner of the bonnet.

“Shit!” She shouldn’t be driving, suddenly doubted her perception of space and time and safety. The lorry pulled ahead of her and Kate let the car slow to a stop, pulling into the side, not even waiting to find a resting place, just letting the car roll to a stop, the bonnet dipping into the ditch, crunching into a bank of shingle.

Ahead of her the windscreen view was filled with sheer black rock, jagged and wet, covered in netting to stop loose boulders tumbling onto the road and making it any more treacherous than it already was.

She had been awake for two days, driving around for a lot of that, and now realized that it was a wonder that she hadn’t killed herself. She needed to sleep. She hadn’t eaten either, now she thought about it. She would get to the cottage and have a bath. There were always some tins of ham in the cupboard. Some dried milk too, she could make up a jug and have some tea. She took deep breaths, well practiced at bringing her heart rate down. She was trembling. Her fingers were actually trembling with fright.

Reaching over to the well of the passenger seat, she pulled up her navy blue handbag and sat it on the seat, feeling blind for the packet of cigarettes. She lit one. It wasn’t what she really wanted but she needed to slow down, calm down, keep steady. Get it together and drive to the cottage, have a bath. Eat some ham. Make milk from the powder in the cupboard. The police might pass her here and come to talk to her because the car was parked strangely. They’d recognize her, maybe, check the car, go into the boot.