Paddy smiled at the euphemism and then laughed. “Is that what we just did? ‘Saw’ each other?”
“Yeah.” He gave a satisfied sigh. “I gave you a seeing-to, yeah.”
She felt unbelievably relaxed and calm as she yanked her tights up, pulling her coat around her hips for privacy, and fell back in the seat, grinning. “Take me home, Burns.”
They drove back listening to the radio. “Killing Moon” finished and the DJ announced a change of pace and played a Madness record. They sang along-even though they were a teenybopper’s band, somehow they knew every word. It didn’t take them long to get back to Eastfield.
“Okay.” Paddy gathered her things together. “I know a lot of policemen. If you ever tell anyone about this I’ll phone your wife.”
He clutched his chest prudishly. “Listen, I’m as ashamed as you are.”
She didn’t want to smile or look at him again in case she stayed. Opening the passenger door, she stepped out of the car and watched him drive away, leaving her alone on the broken pavement.
If her mother had seen them pull up earlier and then drive off, she’d say she forgot something at the comedy club. Her scarf. And they went back for it and stayed for another drink.
She watched him leaving. Burns didn’t look back but she could tell by the inclination of his head that he was watching her in the rearview. It was only then that she saw the red Ford Capri parked outside Mrs. Mahon’s house. She looked carefully, though it was in the shadow of the streetlamp, but couldn’t see anyone inside. She was being paranoid. Cars could park on the roundabout without her permission.
It wasn’t until she was lying in her bed, reliving every touch and caress of the night, that she remembered the Ford hadn’t been there when they first got home. Mrs. Mahon was in her seventies. She wouldn’t be receiving visitors at one thirty on a Friday night.
Paddy sat up, pulled on her dressing gown, and padded silently down the stairs, looking out of the front door into the silver-frosted street.
The Ford was gone.
SEVENTEEN. SUBJECTS NOT OBJECTS
I
Bernie sipped cold tea from the plastic flask mug and glanced at his watch. It was late but he was into the rhythm of the work now, lost in it. The jack was well fitted under the car, he had his tools fanned out around the boogie board so that he could reach them easily without having to get up. It was a complicated job, requiring concentration, and any cracks or crevasses in his thinking were filled with the jabber of a phone-in on the radio.
The tea was bitter but he drank it down, hoping to sate his hunger. He hadn’t eaten for six hours but didn’t want to go back to his flat for food and sit, wide awake, thinking about Kate and Vhari and glancing down at the “sorry, sorry” message on the newspaper. Vhari dead and Kate gone. The police had left him in no doubt as to how Vhari died, either; they spared him no detail because they suspected him, briefly.
When the police made him look at photographs of a bloody trail through the house and Vhari crumpled at the end of it, Bernie sobbed so hard that he threw up. The policemen made him breathe into a paper bag and the smell of his own vomit got stuck around his nose and under his chin.
He frowned at his watch. It was two thirty. If he worked on until three or four he’d be so tired when he got home that he might even sleep.
He was sliding back under the car when the radio discussion turned to the morality of private schools. He remembered waiting at the bus stop with Vhari and Kate on wet winter mornings, fighting with each other as a way of keeping warm, the girls’ bare legs mottled pink from the cold. He remembered the journey back as well, standing at the bus stop, hoping hard that none of the kids from the local comprehensive would come past and see them there in their blue Academy uniforms. He was the only boy at their bus stop until Paul came to the school. He came in fifth year and everything changed forever.
Paul Neilson had been expelled from Fettes boarding school for stealing. They all knew that even before he started because someone’s brother was at Fettes and told them. A lot of the girls had decided not to talk to him. All the good girls. Vhari said it was wrong to treat people meanly because of rumors and would try to be kind to him. Kate, he noted at the time, said nothing.
But then Paul arrived and everyone changed their minds. Paul wasn’t just handsome, he was cool as well. He wore his rugby shirt with the collar turned up and exuded a vague sense of rebel threat. Kate, the prettiest girl in the school, was captivated from the first bus journey. She watched him introduce himself to the group, invite questions, tell them where he lived, that his dad had a business importing from South Africa and what the turnover was every year. She watched him with her pretty gray eyes, curling a blond trestle of hair behind her ear. By the time they stepped off the bus at Mount Florida she deigned to smile at him. He walked up the road with them even though his house was in a different direction. By the next morning Kate and Paul stood apart from the waiting crowd, backing up against the wall, talking privately. If Bernie had known what would happen he would have dragged Kate away by the hair.
Down in the darkness under the engine, tears rolled down Bernie’s temples into his hair and he shook his head. She’d stolen a fucking car from him. Even for Kate that was very bad. The Mini wasn’t worth much but he didn’t have much. Just as well it wasn’t a punter’s car, in for a service. Everyone she knew had more money than him, but then he was quite glad she had chosen to steal from him and not them. The people she knew now were not people you wanted to piss off.
The discussion on the radio moved on to yuppies and tax evasion, and Bernie, unable to ignore the insistent hunger pangs in his stomach, finished off retightening everything and slipped out from under the car. He still wasn’t tired.
Trying to listen to the fuck-wit callers on the radio, down with this and up with that, he lowered the jack on the car slowly, bringing the front wheels back to the floor and pulling the jack out from under it. A man with a Birmingham accent was railing against the south of England inflicting the Thatcher government on the rest of the country for a second term as Bernie picked up his spanners and began to wipe the oil off them. Old news.
Bernie walked over to the table and crouched down to open the top drawer of his toolbox. He pulled it out, sat the spanners in place, and shoved it back. It didn’t close. He opened it again, checking along the lip to see if anything was sticking out but nothing was. He tried shoving it back in but again it stuck out half an inch, just far enough for him to be able to see inside. Something was stuck around the back.
Crouched by the side of the table, Bernie waddled sideways and saw the corner of the clear plastic sheeting. He smiled, thinking it was food, something he could pick the mold off of that would keep him going for another hour or so. He pinched the plastic corner between two fingers and pulled. It was heavy and bigger than a sandwich wrapper. He pulled and it kept coming until he had to reach blindly with both hands and pull it out. It was the size of a small cushion, square and heavy.
The clear plastic had been folded over many times, the inside obscured by white dust, but the much used silver duct tape, losing its adhesiveness, had rolled off a slit in the front when he lifted it and Bernie knew what was inside. White powder spilled out into a little pile on the floor. Panicked, Bernie found his breath stuck in his throat like a fish bone. He couldn’t exhale.
This was why Kate was so, so sorry. This was why she loved him. Stealing a car, inadvertently getting Vhari murdered, they were minor sins in comparison to this.