Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

“I came here looking for you,” she said desperately. “I wasn’t threatening anyone. I wanted to see you, to tell you I’m sorry.”

Paul tilted his head and looked her in the eye. “You’ve told me you came here to threaten Knox, Kate. You’ve just told me that.”

“No, no I haven’t.”

“You told me a moment ago. If he doesn’t want you to go to the papers he should tell me to back off. You just said it.”

Kate was lost. She had delivered the perfect speech to the wrong man, hadn’t negotiated or bought any time for herself. She’d just blurted it out for nothing. It was a child’s voice and surprised her, rising from the pit of her stomach: “Why did you kill my Vhari?”

Paul breathed in, puffing his chest defensively at her, sucking his cheeks in and tipping his head back, diffident. “She wouldn’t tell me where you were.”

“She didn’t know. I didn’t go to her.”

He loomed over her, face flushed and furious, and shouted, “Well, how the fuck was I supposed to know that? You’re the one who ran away with sixty grand’s worth of car and kit. What was I supposed to do?”

“Sorry.”

He stood up off the chair to lean closer but his voice didn’t drop and she shut her eyes.

“What was I supposed to do, Kate? Sit at home and wait for you to come back?”

He left a pause for her to defend herself but her voice was too small to match his. “You hit me,” she said, keeping her eyes shut.

His voice was so loud it blew a hair from her cheek. “You were out of it again. What kind of man comes home every day to an unconscious junkie?”

“You didn’t need to kill her.”

He fell back into the chair and she opened her eyes to look at him. He looked sorry. “She was very stubborn. We had to turn the music up to drown out the noise she made but she still wouldn’t tell us where you were. Lafferty got angry after the police came to the door. He doesn’t like the police. They make him angry. The mess you’ve made, Kate, you’ve no idea. There’s only so much I can take. And now it’s over.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.” He blinked slowly. “It’s over. You know it is.”

Suddenly and completely she saw herself and how dumb she was, how ugly she had become, how worthless. And how lost. She whimpered, cringing, bringing her knees up to her chest and making the plastic rumple noisily below her.

“Please, Paul, don’t make it like the kaffir on the wire?”

He told her the story when they very first got to know each other. It was a turning point in their relationship, when they made their deal, when she agreed to accept everything about him. It happened on their estate in South Africa, outside J’burg. One morning before school, Paul’s father spotted a kaffir he didn’t recognize standing in the garden, in full view, looking at the ground. Grabbing the gun, he ran outside. The kaffir ran when he saw a white man after him. He ran so fast Paul’s father thought he might need to go back for the truck.

The kaffir ran out of sight, across a meadow and behind some bushes. He ran straight, that’s how they knew he was just in from the country. He ran straight for over a mile and into a barbed-wire fence on the perimeter of the property. The more he struggled the more he became entangled.

Paul’s father watched the man ripping himself to ribbons on the wire. When he was sure the kaffir couldn’t possibly get away he walked slowly back to the house and got Paul to come with him, to see how stupid the kaffirs were, that they would make it worse and worse and worse and not know to stop. It took the man three days to die.

Paul and Katie looked at each other one last time. They had known each other for seven years, had barely spent a day apart. She could see disgust in the twist of his lips and his hooded eyes.

“Don’t worry.” He flicked his hand in signal to Lafferty. “It won’t be like that.”

Kate Burnett shut her gray eyes and breathed out for the last time, dismayed at her stupidity, exhausted. She heard Lafferty step forward, felt the plastic crumple as she cringed, ready for the blow.

A flash of electric white pain and then came a velvet darkness.

Paddy didn’t know how much a chief superintendent’s wage amounted to but Knox’s house seemed huge to her, not as self-consciously wealthy as the Killearn house, perhaps, but a large detached house all the same, with a bit of land around it.

“Can we go now?” Sean had smoked two cigarettes and eaten the sandwiches his mother had made him for the shift.

“No. Let’s wait a bit longer.”

“What are we waiting for?”

“Dunno. Just waiting.”

Paddy was expecting Sean to tell her about Elaine but he hadn’t. She was afraid to bring it up herself, worried that she might give herself away. She practiced faint surprise and disinterest in her head as they sat there, watching the house. That’s lovely, Sean. Good for you. You must be gagging for it; no, that sounded ungracious. You must be pleased. I’m pleased for you.

With half an eye she watched shapes of figures in the front room, behind the curtains, moving, sometimes quickly like the flurry of movement in Vhari Burnett’s living room, sometimes slow shifts of light. It was two thirty in the morning and anyone with a clear conscience would be asleep. But Knox probably had a family; the house looked far too big for a single man. She hadn’t looked for a wedding ring on his finger because she didn’t fancy him.

She counted three dark windows on the second floor, none of them mottled for a bathroom. He could be innocently having an argument with a wayward child. A teenager could be watching television in the front room, perhaps have some friends over, they could be getting cups of tea from the kitchen, standing up to change the channel.

Parked at a discreet distance farther down the street was the familiar shape of a BMW but she didn’t set any store on it: the car could easily be a neighbor’s and Lafferty could be somewhere else, in Ireland or parked in the Eastfield Star right now, watching her mother and father’s darkened bedroom window, while she and Sean idled outside the house of an innocent man she didn’t like the look of.

She looked around the car park. Behind them, the pub was shut and dark, the empty hooks for hanging baskets like gibbets for midgets. The only thing between them and the big house was a rusted yellow Mini parked as if abandoned, looking onto the road.

Sean whispered, “Someone’s coming out.”

Paddy sat forward and flinched when she saw the shape of the man stepping out of the front door and into the glass porch. He was broad and bald and she knew him immediately. “Turn the radio down.”

“Why?”

She leaped forward to the radio, pressing her sore stomach hard against the passenger seat. Silence fell over the car. She could hear Lafferty’s feet clipping on the pavement as he swaggered down to the BMW, fitted the key in the door, and climbed into the passenger seat. He left the lights off as he backed the car up the road toward them.

“Get down.” She pushed Sean’s shoulder and he slumped down in the seat. “Keep your head below the dash.”

“Who is he?”

The smooth engine burred toward them.

“The firebomber. That’s the guy.”

They crouched in the dark car, blind to what was going on in the street. The engine changed tone as Lafferty managed a maneuver and then stopped. A door opened and shut gently. At the first click of his heel Paddy imagined him walking toward them, but the second and third footsteps headed away and suddenly became muffled. She heard the distant click of a door handle carried through the cold night air and pulled herself up enough to see Lafferty step back into the glass porch.