The Dead Hour

by Denise Mina

  Reid and Sullivan nursed their mugs of tea and looked at the clear evidence bag sitting on the desk. The blood had dried on the fifty-quid note tucked inside it, creating a rusty residue that sat in the seam of the plastic. Paddy’s attention was more drawn by the packet of digestive biscuits sitting next to it, the wrapper messily ripped up the side, scattering greasy crumbs onto the paperwork. The tantalizing brown edge of a biscuit peeked out of the red packet, promising Paddy a logy carbohydrate euphoria. She wished she was alone with the packet.

  “Why didn’t you tell us last night?”

  “I didn’t know how to bring it up. I tried, I was hanging about at the door, d’ye remember?”

  Sullivan glanced up at the doorway as if she might still be there and nodded softly.

  Reid tried to take charge. “How do we know that you didn’t get this fifty from someone else?”

  It was a preposterous suggestion but Paddy didn’t want a fight, she just wanted to go home. She took a deep breath. “I was reluctant to tell you because I don’t want it to get out.”

  She looked up at them but they averted their eyes. Sullivan suddenly straightened his straight tie and Reid watched him, studying his senior partner for tips on how to behave.

  “Look, it’ll get out eventually,” said Sullivan. “There’s going to be an inquiry into the call to the Bearsden Bird’s house. They’ll want to talk to you. No one can keep a secret in the police. You might want to tell your boss before he hears it from someone else.”

  Paddy’s stomach cramped at the thought of having to tell Farquarson what she had done.

  “Let’s go over this again,” said Reid. “You still printed the story after taking the bribe?”

  “Well, I didn’t really take the bribe. The guy just put it in my hand and shut the door in my face. It’s a lot of money.” She looked longingly at the fifty-quid note and then up at Reid, angry, as if he was trying to steal it from her. “I want that back, by the way, especially if it’s no use, and if you can’t use it I want it back in jig time.”

  “You’ll get it back,” said Sullivan, blinking slowly as he spoke.

  “Now”—Paddy held a finger up to get his attention—“please don’t think I don’t mean that. I’ll be phoning every day until that money is released into my hand. Where does the evidence get kept?”

  “There’s a constable upstairs,” he said. “His job is to be the production keeper. He’ll trace it coming in and out of the lab and keep it in a safe.”

  “A constable? What does that mean? Someone who’s nineteen?”

  Sullivan looked offended. “McDaid’s fifty-five. A lot of the old constables never changed rank.”

  “Can I ask him about getting the note back?”

  Reid curled his lip. “You want a fifty-quid note covered in some dead woman’s blood. What are you going to spend it on? Makeup?”

  Paddy felt a hot spark at the nape of her neck. “I’ve got rent on a four-room apartment to pay for my mother who’s never owed anyone in her life so, no, I don’t think it’ll be getting spent on makeup.”

  Sullivan pulled himself straight. “I’ve got three brothers at Scott Lithgow, been there all their working lives.”

  Scott Lithgow shipyard was about to shut and if it did thousands of workers knew there were no jobs waiting for them elsewhere. The dole money was so low it was effectively a life sentence. Mrs. Thatcher publicly insulted the workers, and when a committee of wives traveled to London with a petition she refused to meet them, nor would the deputy prime minister or the chancellor. The beleaguered women had gone to 10 Downing Street.

  Sullivan was flushed and angry. “The doorman wouldn’t even take the petition through the door. What would it have cost him?”

  It was unusual for a policeman to speak against the government. Sullivan smoothed his hair back and, she suspected, regretted what he had said in front of Reid.

  “Anyway,” Sullivan changed the tone, “I’ll give you the production number and you can call the lab about it and the evidence room as well. Once it’s in the evidence room there’s a wee old guy in charge and he’s the most trusted man on the force. You’ll get it back, don’t worry.”

  Reid glanced nervously at him and took over. “What made you come back?”

  “I met Tam Gourlay and it reminded me.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “I was at the house of a drowning suicide in Mount Florida and ran into him.” She looked straight at Sullivan, hoping they wouldn’t press her further.

  Sullivan tipped his head back. “You ran into Tam Gourlay on the south side in the middle of the night?”

  “Aye.”

  “Tam who works the north and never goes south of the river?”

  “Look.” She rubbed her eyes again. “Can I go home? Or at least have another biscuit to keep me awake?”

  She could feel Sullivan watching her, willing her to look at him. She didn’t.

  “I don’t think biscuits keep you awake,” he said, “but wire in, wee hen. We need to speak to someone.”

  They left her sitting at the desk for ten minutes, alone with the biscuit packet. She had another digestive and then another. The sugar gave her a little lift so she had another. The rhythmic chewing became hypnotic after a while and she stared at the desktop, eyes unfocused, munching and munching. Policemen came and went from the office. An officer at a desk across the room sniggered lasciviously down the phone. A young officer in stay-press gray slacks came and left some papers on each of the desks in turn.

  When she came to she found she had eaten two thirds of the packet. She brushed the crumb trail from the packet to her place onto the floor and pulled the sides of the packet straight, to hide the meager contents.

  Sullivan came back with Reid, carrying their jackets over their arms, smiling and nodding over at her as they snaked through the desks, licensed to be pleasant and friendly.

  “So.” Sullivan’s glance lingered on the erect packet for no more than a second and she knew he hadn’t even noticed. “Thanks for coming back in. We’ll drive you home but first we’ll take the note upstairs. You can come with us if ye like, and meet McDaid.”

  Paddy bounced to her feet and grinned. By the time Sullivan and Reid got back to their desks they would blame the missing biscuits on a greedy passerby.

  NINE

  COLUM McDAID

  I

  The station stairs were busy. Reid and Sullivan glanced back to Paddy periodically, checking she was behind them as they fought their way against the flow of officers coming down.

  “So,” she said, “have they found the guy who killed her yet?”

  “Aye.” Sullivan turned back. “They’ve got the guy, yeah.”

  She felt a wash of relief. “Brilliant. Is he in the cells here?”

  Sullivan shook his head and beckoned her to follow him. The stairwell was painted like a close: thick green gloss to shoulder height and then white. Judging from the skid marks and the chunks out of the green Paddy imagined the stairs had seen a lot of action and scuffles. The dark wood banister had been broken on the first landing and mended with a two-foot length of wood that was a bad color match. Paddy touched it as she passed, her finger noting the bump in the join. She thought of one of Terry Patterson’s articles about the torture techniques used by the Argentinean military. They threw unconscious political prisoners from helicopters into the sea so that the bodies would be found drowned and responsibility couldn’t be traced back to the army. She had heard unprintable rumors that the British government were dropping blindfolded suspects out of helicopters in the North of Ireland. The helicopters were only five feet off the ground but the accused didn’t know that.

  Sullivan dropped back to level with Paddy. “The guy who murdered Burnett’s dead. They pulled him out of the river last night.”

  “Out of the river?”

  “Aye.”

  “Was his face burst?”

  Sullivan stopped and looked down his nose suspicio
usly at her. “Why?”

  “The drowned man was identified as Mark Thillingly.” She dropped her voice to a mutter. “Sullivan, I saw the guy at the door: it wasn’t him.”

  Glancing at Reid, Sullivan nudged her to fall back out of earshot. “But he knew Burnett, knew her well. They went out together, grew up near each other. They were engaged.”

  “I can only tell you what I saw,” she whispered. “Even with the ripped face, I’m sure he wasn’t the guy who answered the door. That guy had her blood on his neck.”

  “It can’t just be coincidence, though, him dead within twenty-four hours of her murder.”

  Paddy nodded. “It might not be a coincidence but it still wasn’t him at the door.”

  Sullivan sighed through his nose. “If I could get you in for another look at Thillingly, would you come?”

  “Aye.”

  Reid stopped and looked back at the two of them ten steps behind him on the final flight of steps. “. . . ’S a welder, apprenticed since he was a boy,” said Sullivan, hurrying her to catch up with his partner, “and there’s no work anywhere. Man, he’s got no chance of another job if the yard does shut.”

  Paddy caught the thread of the lie quickly. “They’re just wicked bastards, I know. They’re goading the coal miners into a summer strike as well, loading up stocks of coal so they can ride it out. It’ll be a disaster for the miners if they fall for it.”

  “You two and your politics,” said Reid indulgently. He led them up along a long corridor with a low ceiling and windows set deep into the wall.

  They stopped at a door and Reid knocked a jaunty little rhythm, glancing at Sullivan and smiling, anticipating the answer. They heard it as a cheery call from far away.

  “Hello out there?” A man’s voice, a highland accent like Murdo McCloud’s, in a high register with burrs and wide-mouthed vowels.

  Reid opened the door into a small attic office. The back of the room was walled in with padlocked chicken wire, fencing in two gray filing cabinets and an open set of shelves. A large blue steel safe stood next to the plump, white-haired man sitting at a desk. His eyes were warm and kindly, Santa Claus in a police uniform.

  The room was warmer than the rest of the station, pleasantly so, and smelled of polished leather and tea. On the desk was a blue teacup in its saucer with a small matching plate of gingersnaps at the side. He was holding one to his mouth, a crescent bitten out of it already.

  “Oh, no,” he said, looking crestfallen. “I’m just having my tea. Can you not come back later?”

  Sullivan held up the plastic bag with the fifty-quid note in it. “Important production. Needs to be filed right away. You can drink your tea in a minute.”

  PC Santa dropped his biscuit hand to the desk, rolling his eyes theatrically and pretending to be very angry. “I’ll have to make another cup and start all over again. Who is this fine young lady?”

  As if remembering that she was there, Reid and Sullivan parted and looked at Paddy with renewed interest to see if she was either fine or a lady. Uncomfortable at the assessment, Paddy took the initiative, stepping across the floor and holding her hand out.

  “Delighted to meet a man who takes tea and biscuits seriously. I’m Paddy Meehan.”

  The constable stood to meet her hand and shook it firmly once. “Ah, Meehan, now, what county would your people be from?”

  Normally, suggesting that someone with an Irish name wasn’t Scottish would be tantamount to hinting at repatriation, but highlanders were as obsessed with their ancestry as the Irish.

  “Donegal, I believe, around Letterkenny.”

  “Not Derry?”

  He was right and she was surprised and smiled. “Aye, the Meehans tend to be from there but ours were from Donegal.”

  “And you didn’t go to New York with the rest of them?”

  Paddy’s jaw dropped. “How would you know that?” Con’s glamorous cousin lived in New York, in the Bronx, where the cheers came from. Her own family talked about them as if they were movie stars.

  He winked. “Lucky guess, actually. I’m a McDaid.” He shook her hand once more and let go. “Colum McDaid.”

  He was letting her know he was Catholic too; a lot of the Western Islanders were, having never converted during or after the Reformation. Paddy was ashamed that she cared which religion he was or that it instantly made her trust him more. She was barely Catholic herself.

  “Now.” He sat back down and looked at the two policemen. “Now, what’s important enough to interrupt my tea, you godless pair?”

  Reid chortled and put the plastic bag on the table, prompting Colum McDaid to put his tea aside and open a drawer next to him, pulling out a large, black leather-bound book. Half the pages were rumpled and crisp from having been written on, with the facing pages flat and new. From the shallow drawer above he took out a thin three-ring binder and opened it to a page of stickers. Seven-digit numbers were penned carefully in a tiny script above the empty spaces where white labels had been peeled off.

  Colum McDaid opened the leather book. A margin and columns had been drawn in using a ruler and a red biro. A third of the page was filled in, again in tiny perfect writing. Paddy couldn’t read it upside down but she could just about make sense of it. Each row had a paragraph of jagged capitals describing an item, next to an entry for the case number, the location, a policeman’s name and rank, a date, and, finally, a seven-digit number to match the sticky labels.

  Sullivan leaned forward and placed a note on the end of the desk. It was a scrap of paper torn from a ruled jotter with a seven-digit case number on it. McDaid read and understood it immediately.

  “Bearsden?” he asked.

  Sullivan nodded. “Miss Meehan’s very worried about getting her fifty-quid note back.”

  McDaid looked at her and poked the bag with his finger. “So this is yours?”

  “Aye.”

  “Well, you’ll certainly get it back but it might take a wee while. Depends on how important it turns out to be to the case. Rest assured, though: this production will be escorted by me to the laboratory and back, and the rest of the time”—he pointed to the blue safe behind his desk—“she’ll be keeping warm in there. And I’ll be sitting here watching everyone who comes in.”

  “No one else can get in?”

  “Not a soul. Top of the police station, manned twenty-four hours, and,” he patted the safe door, “you’d need a lorryload of dynamite to open this door.”

  “Can I phone you every so often to find out where it is?”

  “Miss Meehan, I shall eagerly anticipate your call.”

  II

  Paddy sat in the back of the police car and tried to imagine how angry Farquarson would be when she told him about the fifty quid. She’d tell him when he was tired, when she got in tonight it would be the end of his shift. She’d seen his blistering morning attacks, when he was full of sugary coffee and vim and hadn’t yet blunted his temper at the morning editorial meeting. She never wanted to witness one again, much less be the focus of one.

  “Here?” Sullivan was cruising up the Cambuslang Road, watching out of the corner of his eye as the house values progressively declined, finally tumbling into a black hole.

  “No, it’s on a wee bit yet. Go right here,” said Paddy. They took the lights and headed up the hill. “And first left here.”

  Paddy used to feel proud when people from work dropped her home but not anymore.

  The Eastfield Star was a small estate on the edge of the countryside. The central roundabout was broad and the houses on the radiating streets were cottage-style, some four in a block, some detached houses for bigger families like her own. The estate had been built for a colony of miners, but the Cambuslang seams were thin and the mines had shut down long ago. Residents were council tenants and workers in heavy industry, the very sector that had been decimated in the recent recession.

  An atmosphere of despair hung over the small housing scheme. Stick fences hung drunkenly on rusted wire
s and the grass and bushes on the roundabout were full of litter. Kids from the scheme farther up the road had scarred the blindsides of houses and garages with messy graffiti supporting splinter factions of the Irish troubles. The porridgey protective coating the council gave the houses was due to be renewed and had weathered badly, flaking off in big patches and exposing the weak brickwork underneath.

  Mr. Anderston, the gardener on the roundabout, had died of a heart attack in his kitchen. He was replaced by a family of drinkers who fought loudly with each other in the street and attacked anyone who asked them to keep it down. For the first time in their lives Paddy’s parents were afraid of their neighbors.

  The only person on the street this morning was old Ida Breslin. She was standing in the long, wild grass in Mrs. Mahon’s front garden as they approached, wearing a child’s green parka with the hood up, looking at something on the ground. They couldn’t see her face past the furry rim but Paddy prayed that she had her teeth in. When Ida heard the noise of the approaching car she turned, still as a startled gazelle, her tongue running along her collapsed lips.

  “Here.” Paddy let Sullivan glide past Quarry Road. “You can just stop here.”

  He looked out at Ida and Mrs. Mahon’s pink nylon curtains. “Is this your house?”

  “Um, no, not really.” She didn’t want them to go past her own house; stray vegetation and long grass had overrun the front garden and their gate was held shut with a rusting bit of wire hanger.

  “Well, which one is yours, then?”

  She realized that Sullivan wasn’t driving her home to be polite; he was there to see where she lived, so that they could keep tabs on her. He turned back to look at her. “You live here?”

  “Aye.” She glanced out of the window to the hillside overlooking the estate. A stolen car had been abandoned on the hill and set on fire. Lazy smoke crept out of smashed windows while the bonnet smoldered.