“Do you think he killed himself?”
Diana downed the brandy, emptying her glass, pausing to catch her breath at the end. Paddy considered offering her more but it might suggest that she could drink more than one brandy. She made herself sit still, willing Diana to continue.
“Yes.” Diana tapped her cigarette over and over, hesitating. “Mark was a disappointed man. He was disappointed in himself, quite… depressive, you know. He always said if he killed himself it would be in the river, by the footbridge. It was his favorite place in the city. His dad’s office was by the river and he used to walk there with him when he was a boy. I think something happened in that car park that he couldn’t cope with and the next night he walked into the river. I tried to make him happy.” She glanced up. “I don’t always… you know, drink.”
“I heard he left a note in his car?”
“Yeah,” she said softly, turning the glass in her hand. “He said he was sorry but he couldn’t, you know… go on. He was sorry he let everyone down, that he’d let me down and Vhari. Depressive silliness. It didn’t mean anything. Certainly not that he’d killed her.”
“But he mentioned her in the note?”
Diana nodded miserably. “That’s why they think he killed her.”
“What did he say exactly?”
“Sorry he’d let her down. That was it.” She shrugged. “He put her name before mine. As if she was the one that mattered.”
Paddy sat with Diana, rolling over the same facts: Mark’s nose, the car park attack, the phone call to whoever was with Vhari. She waited for a suitable break in which to leave Diana, knowing she was abandoning her to a drunken night of lonely grief.
By the time she stood up it was dark outside. The only light in the kitchen was the throbbing scarlet glow of Diana’s cigarette. Paddy struggled for something nice to say but couldn’t think of anything.
“Would you have a photograph of Mark I could use?”
Diana twitched awake. “Sure. Sure I do.” She went out into the hall, navigating fluently through the thick dark, and came back with a large walnut cigar box which she opened to reveal piles of snaps. “This is nice.” She handed Paddy a graduation photo of Mark, slim and smiling in the summer. It didn’t look like him and wouldn’t go with a story about a dead solicitor who was approaching middle age.
“Lovely picture,” said Paddy, laying it firmly down near Diana, letting her know that it wouldn’t do at all.
Diana took out another one. Mark looking awkward at a wedding, wearing a kilt. He was standing apart from a happy trio of friends, looking lost and left out. It would be perfect for a suicide story.
Paddy stood up, ostensibly to put the picture in her coat pocket. Diana watched her pull her coat on and then looked away into the garden.
Paddy stood next to her, hoping to be dismissed. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry all of this has happened to you.”
She really meant it-she was sorry for Diana-but noted uncomfortably that the sentiment sounded exactly the same as if she didn’t.
II
Kate woke up thrashing, hitting the back of her hand off the Mini’s steering wheel. Her left arm was on fire. She rubbed her shoulder, hoping it would stop, but could only reduce it to pins and needles. When she had calmed down and looked up she realized that she was parked right outside her mother and father’s house. They could have come out at any time and seen her sleeping there. She’d rather meet Lafferty and the dead man than her mother.
She started the car and drove off, slowing cautiously at the junction up ahead, letting the fat girl in the green coat pass in front of her before heading for Bernie’s garage, obeying the soft call of the comfort pillow.
NINETEEN. THE ALL PRIESTS HOLY ROADSHOW
I
It was black night outside the train window. Paddy took the same journey to work every day but found herself seeing it for the first time because Trisha was there.
As she sat across from her mum on the quiet commuter train she wondered who had answered Vhari Burnett’s phone when Mark Thillingly called her. It could have been Lafferty or the good-looking man at the door. And why had Thillingly called Vhari and felt the need to lie to Diana about it? It didn’t sound as if they were having an affair. It sounded as if Burnett and Thillingly were in a lot of trouble, as if he was phoning her to warn her, to tell her what had happened to him in the car park, to tell her to run. Wondering about the relationship between Burnett and Thillingly reminded her of her hot breath wetting Burns’s neck. She looked quickly away from her mother.
Trisha saw Paddy frowning and squirming and smiled, leaning across the aisle to pat her knee. Paddy smiled back reflexively. Her mum looked lost outside her house or the chapel or Rutherglen Main Street, her clothes slightly threadbare. She was wearing a stiff beige raincoat and Paddy could see a cross-hatched patch on the sleeve where she had scrubbed a mark away. Below the hem she wore thick tights over swollen ankles and little black sensible walking shoes that made her look old and spent.
And Trish was well aware of being outside her usual orbit. As she watched the moonlit landscape passing the window, anxious little thoughts would flare in her eyes, suppressed immediately with a blink and a glance at her handbag. Paddy guessed what she was thinking: she had the bus fare home in her purse. Whatever happened she could still get back. Paddy had already moved further out into the world than her mother ever would.
“The buffet car’s open,” said Paddy.
“Don’t be daft.” Trisha frowned and looked inquiringly down the aisle. “This train’s only going into town. There’s no buffet car.”
“Is that right?” Paddy reached into her pocket and pulled out a crumpled white paper bag. “Where d’ye think I got these, then?” She stretched the neck open and handed the bag of her mum’s favorite sweeties to her.
Trisha grinned into the bag. “Lemon Bonbons.” The golden light from the sweets lit up her chin like a buttercup.
“Lemon Bonbons.” Paddy smiled back.
Trisha offered a couple of times but Paddy insisted she was on a diet, and anyway, they weren’t her favorites, they were for Trish. It wasn’t hard to resist. Her teeth still ached from her binge in the morning.
It was dark in Argyle Street as they emerged from the low-level train platform, the street wet and glistening from a shower they had missed on the way in. The Evening Times seller had parked his stall under the lip of the shop opposite and Paddy found herself half-listening for the headline: a football special. A bedraggled man in a rain-warped wool overcoat approached them with his hand out and a desperate alcoholic look in his eye. Trisha linked arms with her daughter, anxiously steering her away from him.
She shrank during the walk through town. Paddy felt the pangs of fear rippling through the muscles on her arm. She had meant the night to cheer Trisha up, not scare her. Every person dressed in party clothes made her draw closer to her daughter, pulling her sleeve, veering her out to the curb to stay in the light, and always just one degree of fright from throwing her arm out and hailing a bus to take them home.
The crowds were gathering outside the City Halls. They found their way through the chatting happy crowd gathered outside and bumped into Mary O’Donnagh inside the door. Mary was the chief chapel groupie at St. Columbkille’s, one of a number of women who did unpaid work at the chapel and graded themselves according to their closeness to the priests. Rarely seen without a pinny, this evening Mrs. O’Donnagh was dressed in navy blue slacks and was sporting a big set hairdo like a hairy halo.