“What did he say had happened?”
“He came in late, but he could be late sometimes so I wasn’t worried-it was only eight o’clock. He came in and said he’d been mugged in the car park outside his office. He wouldn’t call the police or go to the emergency room. He said it was a client, someone he knew, and he didn’t want them to get into trouble.”
“Did you believe that?”
“Not for a minute. It wasn’t even Mark’s style, to let people off things. He thought everyone should do their time if they were guilty. That’s why he didn’t go into criminal law; he did civil work claims against the council, unfair dismissal, stuff like that. When he said he didn’t want to call the police I knew he was lying. I checked his wallet when he was in the shower and his wallet had money in it, so I knew it was a lie. I begged him to call the police but he was determined not to.”
Paddy could see the scene: Diana half cut after a couple of glasses of wine, stinking of cigarettes, secretly furious that Mark was home late, the implacable fury of bright women locked in houses all day long, moving objects around, wiping dust, making meals for people who grabbed a sandwich on the way home.
“I’m afraid I got annoyed.” Diana’s eyes filled up again. “In the end I went to bed but when he thought I was in the loo I heard the bedroom phone extension ‘ting’ and knew he’d picked up the receiver. He thought I couldn’t hear him.” She looked a little guilty. “I only listened because I thought he’d changed his mind and was calling the police.”
“Thank God you were listening.”
“He spoke to someone. He asked them who they were and where Vhari was, and could she come to the phone. I came back down then, and asked him who he’d called, but he denied calling anyone. She’d just moved house, you know, Vhari. Her grandfather had died and left her that ridiculous huge house. Mark knew where it was, he’d been there with her when they were younger.” She slumped over her glass. “He wouldn’t come to bed with me. Sat up watching Late Call and drinking.”
Her voice faded as she thought herself back to the evening. “The next morning he was gone before I woke up. I think he slept on the settee and went straight to work. It was lunchtime before I turned on the radio and it was all over the news: Vhari had been murdered. I called the law center but he wasn’t there. He never came home again.”
“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.