She took a step into the lane and felt herself swallowed by the darkness. She could smell a wet mattress on the cobbles and imagined the sickly scent of formaldehyde. Cardboard melted slowly into the stone. It smelled like the neighbors’ debris in her garage.
She was ten yards into the inky dark when she saw his shadow. Sullivan was waiting for her at the side door to the morgue, just as he said he would be. He had asked her to come about six thirty or quarter to seven. He couldn’t say it but she understood the implication: police shifts changed at that time and most officers would be getting briefed for their shift; they wouldn’t be coming past the morgue on routine business.
Sullivan nodded at her and kicked his heel back, pushing the usually locked door open into the bright white tiled corridor. Paddy shut the door behind her.
Wordlessly he led the way along the corridor. Glassy Victorian tiles covered the walls and floor. The overhead strip lights glinted yellow off the glaze. She could smell bleach.
“Thanks for coming,” he said. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention this wee visit.”
“You’re sticking your neck out here, aren’t you?”
Sullivan shrugged, reluctant to voice his suspicions. Paddy touched his back, telling him to lead on, that she would follow. He was a brave man.
They came through a reception area with a vacant desk, a gray school cardigan slung over the back of the office chair. Behind stood a stack of oak boxes of index drawers, each fronted by a letter of the alphabet written in gothic script. Sullivan stopped at a set of double oak doors and looked back at Paddy.
“You been in here before?”
“No.”
He didn’t offer her words of comfort or warning and she appreciated it. He took a deep breath, rolling his finger to warn her to do the same, and then pushed the door open.
The sharp compost smell was tempered by the cold, but not enough. Across the tiled floor, a steel wall of big drawers splintered the overhead light and standing in front of it was a man in a white coat, facing the door expectantly. He was young but bearded, his mustache grown down over his top lip, wet at the tips. He smiled shyly, trying to be welcoming, but his teeth were stained and broken. Sullivan looked away and Paddy saw the sadness in the man’s eyes.
“All right, Keano? Here’s the wee lady I was telling ye about.”
Shamed, Keano pressed his lips together and nodded at Paddy. “Don’t get many birds in here.” He tapped a fingernail against the metal drawer behind him. “Don’t mean in here. Birds die just the same as us, eh?” He looked to Sullivan for confirmation that women couldn’t cheat death.
“Oh, aye, they die just the same.”
Keano cringed, aware that he sounded stupid. “Die just the same.”
They were looking at Paddy, expecting a response. She gave Keano an unthreatening smile. “Good,” she said, wanting it to be all right for him.
Sullivan leaned in confidentially. “Is our guy handy then?”
Keano took two steps across the steel wall and took hold of the handle. The drawer slid open easily, a narrow seven-foot-long tray. Mark Thillingly’s corpse was wrapped tight in a crisp white linen sheet, patches of the material translucent where water had dampened it. The earthy smell of river water rose as soft as mist.
Keano flipped the sheets open left and right. Thillingly was naked, his skin waxy and luminous. Paddy tried not to look further down than the nipples but she could see Keano’s hand reach out and pull the sheet back over the genitals.
A raw Y-incision across the chest and stomach had been sewn back up with big stitches and thick thread. The rip on his cheek had been sewn more carefully but still puckered around the heavy thread. Thillingly was fat. Paddy looked at his sagging stomach and slight breasts and felt for him, imagined all the times he had avoided taking his top off in front of others, how, like her, he dreaded hot weather and never went swimming.
She knew one thing for sure: he wasn’t the man at Vhari Burnett’s front door on the night of the murder. She looked up to speak but Sullivan was shaking his head softly.
“Keano, my man,” he said cheerfully, stepping away from the tray. “Thanks, pal.”
“You owe me a drink then, eh?” Keano forgot himself and grinned again.
“Sure do.” Sullivan backed off out of the room, taking Paddy with him. “Sure do, my man.”
“Aye.” Keano watched them leave. “We don’t get many women visiting, is what I mean.”
“Right enough,” called Paddy, as the door swung shut behind them. “Sullivan, that’s not him.”
“Okay.” It wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
She tried not to sound excited. “This is a big story. This is going to be massive.”
“Okay.” He led her farther down the corridor and when he turned back she could see how troubled he was. No policeman wanted to take a stand against another. “The board of inquiry into the Burnett call are meeting next week. They’re calling witnesses. You’ll get a letter but they’ve got you penciled in for Tuesday afternoon. You’ll have to tell them about the fifty quid then. I can’t guarantee word won’t get out after that.”
He was reminding her that she had a lot to lose too. “Fair enough. I’m going to need this story, then. I’ll wait for it but I really need it.”
Sullivan nodded. “Pet, if the story is what I think it is, I’m going to need you. Do you know what I mean?”
They looked at each other, neither of them favored by colleagues, both in need of a boost and someone at their back.
“Hundred percent.”
II
It was still dark outside the car but Kate had been awake for ten minutes. She smoked a breakfast cigarette and looked out of the window at the car park. She had slept in the driver’s seat, arms folded, her chin on her chest, secure in the bad area as long as the doors were locked. She’d taken a small sniff too, just to give the cigarette a nice morning edge.
She shook her right hand again, irritated, banging her fingertips off the steering wheel. A sharpened pencil through a drum of paper; she could feel it in her fingers, the sensation of resistance followed by a snap and give. She blinked hard when she saw the man on the floor with the shoe heel in his eye. Her coke-widened eyes shut tight and opened again, hoping the image burned onto the back of her retinas would change. She couldn’t take the image in, it felt like two distinct pictures overlapping. A shoe and a man. Not a shoe in a man. A shoe and a man. Even through a fog of drugs and tiredness she sensed the world moving beyond her capacity to grasp it. She had killed a man.
Kate did know not to park the car outside the restaurant. She wasn’t a complete idiot. She drove the car three streets away and pulled up in the dark far corner of an office car park, turning off the engine. She drummed her fingers on the leather-clad wheel. If she left it here, in the dark, all alone, it would certainly attract attention. It was a new BMW, for God’s sake. Most of the people around here had never seen a new pair of shoes. She wouldn’t mind them taking the actual car itself but the parcel in the boot was another matter.
It came to her very suddenly: if she was to stay alive she had to get the pillow out of the car and plant it somewhere safe. That way if they came for her, and she knew they would eventually, she would have a negotiating tool. She felt like an ex-wife trying to negotiate a deal, driving around with a car stuffed with collateral, art or bonds or share certificates or something. Alone in the dark car park, with nowhere to go and brain tissue from a stranger on her heel, she smiled at the thought.
But where to leave it. She rolled through possibilities: a safe-deposit box. She’d be too easy to trap because she’d have to go back and back to fill up her snuffbox. Who did she know that could keep it safe without knowing what it was? Her parents, but she dismissed the idea immediately. She hadn’t seen them for three years and it would take too much explaining. Alison, her best friend at school. She had two kids, though, and might not be sympathetic to a party girl. She thought about people Vhari knew, old old friends from back when they were so close most of their friends were sort of mutual. The Thillinglys. But he had a dreadful wife and Mark was too straightlaced. Bernie. She loved Bernie even if he wasn’t nice to her. His garage/shed thingy was down by the motorway and would be empty at night.