The Dead Hour Read Online Free PDF Page B

party in Chelsea, Sloane Rangers in hairbands and guys in suits who worked in the City. Rich, rich people. Lot of money, champers, no one eating because they were all as coked up as she was. A room full of striped furniture and lovely things, well made. Italian things.
    She felt warm and comfortable. She drew on her cigarette again and smiled at the passenger window as though it were a fellow guest at the party. She nodded at a woman across the room. A titled woman. Someone who had house parties in her country place. People could stay all weekend because the house was so big they’d never run into each other. Never get sick of each other. She invited Kate away for the weekend. She’d invited half the party, but only half, and Kate was included. Kate smiled over at her again. Hi.
    Duran Duran stopped and the news announcer came on the radio. Vhari Burnett. Kate heard the name and for a millisecond thought Vhari had done something lovely. Been proposed to by a royal, given an MBE, won a big case. Vhari Burnett had been murdered in her home. Her body was found by a colleague arriving to give her a lift to work. Her body. Murdered. Kate took three sharp, consecutive drags on her cigarette until she was almost certain there was no corner of either lung unfilled by smoke. She tried to see the titled woman from the party again but couldn’t.
    She punched the radio off. It was impossible to imagine Vhari being dead. Vhari being away on holiday was possible, she could imagine that, but not dead. Not murdered.
    Kate rolled her window down a fraction and felt the skirl of a bitter wind against her cheek as she pushed the cigarette out into the road. She wound it up again and restarted the car.
    A hot bath and a tin of ham and a think about things. She watched the road behind her, turning, her right arm slipping over the seamed cream leather seat back. Lovely thing, the car. Lovely things.

II
    Paddy put her key carefully in the front door and pushed it open. In front of her the stairs were still, the bathroom door on the landing lying open, the light off. Through the living room to her right, coming from the kitchen, she could hear the burble of the radio. Two plates crashed together, louder than was necessary. A cup hit a saucer.
    Trisha was smashing around in the kitchen, washing and putting away, wiping and preparing breakfast ready for a family with nowhere to go. They didn’t know whether it was the change of life or the family’s circumstances but Trisha was as likely to shout over nothing as burst out crying and Paddy was worried about her. The news was full of stories about families breaking up under the strain of the recession, of mothers being found dead in spare bedrooms with bottles of pills next to them or fathers disappearing off to London. But no one else seemed to have noticed. Con was a shadow and everyone was distracted by their own worries.
    Paddy took her leather off and hung it up in the cupboard under the stairs. She imagined she felt the crumple of dry paper from the pocket and blushed that the bloody note should be so near her mother. She walked through the living room, leaning in the kitchen door and hanging onto the door frame, trying to communicate the fact that she wouldn’t be coming in.
    The table was set for two people to have breakfast together, Paddy and Trisha. Martin and Gerard were still in bed though it was ten thirty. Mary Ann would be out at mass. Her father, Con, was sitting at the table, flushed with the weather, having been out walking for a couple of hours.
    “Been out already, Da?”
    Con nodded, stroking his little David Niven mustache. He used to color it, she knew he did, some powdery concoction Trisha bought in a paper bag from the chemist’s, but he’d stopped recently. Now it was turning gray, disappearing against his gray skin apart from a little patch of red making itself known at the side, looking like a trace of ketchup from a distance. Con had been laid off two years ago and