The sun was setting softly through the trees as she neared the corner before the cottage. She held her breath when she passed it, expecting to see cars outside, but there were none. She stole a glance toward the boathouse on the left side, down by the water’s edge, but there were no signs of anyone there, either. She slowed and took another deep breath as she pulled the car over to the verge. Better not to park in front of the house, she might need to get away quickly.
The inside of the house was a turmoil still-life. They had broken everything, smashed everything that wasn’t attached to the walls, pulled cushions off the sofas, yanked the mirrors and all the photographs off the walls, leaving them facedown where they lay on the floor. It was worse in the kitchen. Every shelf had been emptied onto the floor, heavy stoneware jars had been dropped into the Belfast sink so that a giant white crack skittered across it. The table had been overturned. She could hear the message clearly. We will do this to you.
Kate lifted a wicker hen basket from the floor and filled it with all the tins of food she could find. She had left the cardboard box of powdered milk on the worktop when she ran off to the boathouse and they had knocked it over but left it. She folded the waxed paper over at the top and placed it carefully in her basket. She could use it to cut the dunes in the brown envelopes. She could stay up here for weeks if she did that.
She looked out of the kitchen window, up the hill to the chimney on her nearest neighbors’, knowing it would be empty until May when they always came back from Kenya for the summer, watching for smoke to be certain she was right. The house was still, the ochre of the chimney blending perfectly into the green of the conifers in the foreground. A casual viewer would never know it was there.
She was smiling to herself when she realized that something had changed in the garden. A patch, a big patch, of disturbed earth by the back wall.
She knew exactly who it was and knew how easily it might have been her.
II
It was her night off and Paddy had considered skipping Blackfriar’s pub comedy club this week, nervous that the married policeman might turn up. But she’d slept well during the day and been sitting in the living room, watching Junior Superstars, when she realized that she’d be up all night anyway, sitting on her own, worrying about Ramage hearing the details of the Burnett call after next week’s police inquiry. She might as well go into town.
The pub was on the edge of the old warehouse district. Most of the buildings were high-walled, small-windowed storage facilities for tobacco bales and mountains of sugar, monuments to the end of Empire now empty rat runs.
It was reported to be up and coming as a residential area. New York-style lofts had been carved out of rat-infested grain stores by developers who didn’t really understand the qualities of the space. They had crammed small new townhouses inside the grand walls of the warehouses, cutting windows in half and leaving cast-iron pillars in the middle of kitchens and hallways.
The regeneration had only just begun and the council had put in a lot of streetlights to make the new yuppie residents feel confident about leaving their Volvos and Saabs in the street. It still felt like a well-lit ghost town. Paddy knew that McVie’s flat was here somewhere. She was curious but afraid he meant to try to touch her or something. McVie was a strange man, sometimes avuncular, sometimes leering, sexual signals shooting out every which way.
Through the doors Blackfriar’s was smoky and full of good Friday cheer. A crowd of psycho-billys were gathered at a table near the bar, all wearing denim and battered leather, every one of the girls with a slash of scarlet lipstick, regardless of her coloring. Three hard-looking mohawk mullets were playing the slots, their pints of snakebite-and-black delicately balanced on a thin shelf.
Paddy made her way through the throng. In a narrow corridor leading to the back exit, a small black door sat open in a wall pasted with posters for events past and future. A girl sat guarding it from a little console table. She had a dainty face and pretty brown corkscrew curls that she wound endlessly around her finger. Miserable, she tapped the tabletop with a thick black marker.
Paddy took her scarf and mittens off, tucking them inside her coat pocket, and then she saw the sign that made her heart sink. OPEN-MIKE NITE. In two years of hanging about comedy clubs Paddy had never ever seen an open-mike spot go well. Any idiot with a nervous complaint could get up onstage and die and have it witnessed by a paying audience. Dub said she was a jinx: he’d seen people storm at an open mike and sometimes established comedians used it to showcase new material but whenever Paddy was there it was always gut-shittingly awful.
Lorraine saw Paddy grimace at the blackboard. “One, is it?”
“Hi, Lorraine, how are ye? I’m on the guest list. I’m here with Dub MacKenzie.”
Lorraine nodded uncomfortably, pulled the lid off her black marker with an adamant phut. Paddy held her fist out and Lorraine scribbled her initials on the back of her hand.
“I like your leather.” Paddy pointed to Lorraine ’s brown coat. It wasn’t nice at all. It was made of stiff, shiny PVC and didn’t fit around the shoulders.
“Thanks.” Lorraine shifted in her cardboard coat. Paddy smiled and stroked her own soft green coat as she traipsed downstairs.
The cellar doorway opened out into an oppressively low-ceilinged room. The bar ran at ninety degrees from the entrance. To the right was the smaller stage area with collapsible chairs in a few rows in front of it.
In among a thin crowd of milling drinkers, stooped over the bar, was Dub MacKenzie. Since he had left the Daily News, skinny Dub had taken up smoking and had actually managed to lose weight. He was wearing a pair of red checked trousers, a blue surfer shirt, and blue suede shoes with an inch-high crepe sole. He turned to the door as she stepped in, raising a hand and letting his long fingers unfurl into a greeting.
“You might have told me it was an open mike,” she said, pulling her bulky scarf out of her pocket. “I wouldn’t have come. It’s inhuman.”
Dub took her scarf out of her hands, bundled it into a ball, and threw it into a corner behind the bar where the coats were kept. The barman caught her eye and she ordered a half-pint of shandy for Dub and a Coke for herself.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come tonight,” he said.
“Where else am I going to go? The Press Club? You’re the only man I know who isn’t thinking about leaving his wife.”
“Apart from Sean.”
He always sneered when he said her ex’s name and Paddy didn’t really know why. It wasn’t as if they’d ever met or anything. “Who’s up first?”
“Some guy, does a bank manager with a lisp.”
“Funny?”
He shrugged. “Punters laugh and clap. It’s not comedy song clapping either, it’s all the way through.”
Dub had a theory that comedy songs were never funny and audiences were applauding with relief when they finished. A comedy theologian, he had formulated innumerable laws of comedy and had an encyclopedic knowledge of comedy history, could trace a joke through a hundred incarnations. He had an amazing library of comedy albums ranging from early Goons to bootlegged Lenny Bruce tapes and early Ivor Culter. Paddy had been to his house many times to listen to them in Dub’s cramped bedroom in his parents’ bungalow. They sat on the bed drinking tea and smoking, his mum didn’t mind, listening and laughing at the wallpaper. Occasionally Dub lifted the needle off to explain why it was funny. She could count the number of times she’d seen Dub laugh on the fingers of one hand, but nothing engaged him like comedy. She’d seen him in a trance watching a good visiting act.