The Dead Hour

by Denise Mina

  Tonight the shopkeeper had had enough and, fly to the woman and sick of losing stock, had left an empty coffee jar and box of teabags on the shelf. The woman had come in and, as usual, made straight for the coffee. She stood, holding the empty jar, trying to understand, holding her coat open ready to pinch it. Finally convinced that the jar was empty, the woman turned to the shopkeeper, dropped the jar, and flew at him, screaming, aiming for the bottles of drink under the cloth.

  The shopkeeper claimed he was simply trying to restrain her when a group of young Goths waiting at the bus stop outside the window saw him wrestle the old lady to the ground and rifle through her clothes.

  There is no sense of justice quite as uncompromising as drunken nightclubbers’ justice. The Goths ran in and counterattacked the shopkeeper, pulling him off the old woman. A couple of girls sat on him while the rest helped themselves to juice and smokes and packets of crisps, leaving the old woman free to roam at will for the ten minutes it took the police car to arrive.

  There weren’t enough officers to arrest the mob so they limited their inquiries to the two main players. Outside, the heavily made-up youngsters in a mess of black and purple, genders indistinguishable, watched shiftily through the window. Littering the pavement around them were half-eaten packets of crisps and biscuits. Incriminating cans of Coke emptied themselves into the gutter.

  Paddy came out of the small shop with two pages of shorthand notes but knew it wouldn’t be worth calling it in to the night subs.

  Back in the car Sean was mesmerized by the crowd and desperate to hear what had happened inside. “Man.” He smiled, shaking his head in wonder. “You wouldn’t believe these things go on until you’re actually there. Will I find a phone?”

  “No point. It won’t make it into the paper.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not a car crash or a murder. They don’t print vignettes, just hard news.”

  “Shame.” Sean started the engine. “It was bloody entertaining to watch.”

  Sensing that Paddy’s job had taken her away from him, Sean had always been a bit sneery about it, cutting her off when she tried to talk about the sights in the night city. It was affirming to see him so buzzed about it. Suddenly she loved the job she’d been trying to shed for months. By the morning Shug Grant would either know or not know about her fifty-quid kickback, depending on how the leak felt about it. If Shug had been told, everyone at the News would know too. Ramage would call her. She wouldn’t be allowed to take her coat off. Or he might call her at the hotel later and tell her to get out of the room, she was sacked.

  “You like this job, then, Sean?”

  He pulled the car out to the road. “Don’t tell anyone, but I think I’d probably do it for nothing.”

  Sean drove down through the empty town, a high yellow sky with a fat moon hanging low in it. His driving was improving, she had to admit, even in the single night he’d been working.

  “You’re less swervy tonight. You’re getting the hang of it.”

  “It’s good practice.” He smiled to himself. “It’s great money as well.”

  She didn’t want him thinking he was a shoo-in for a permanent job. “This might not be permanent, you know? When you hand in your license they might make an issue out of the fact that you’ve just passed.”

  He nodded. And nodded and nodded. She knew him far too well to think it meant nothing. “What?”

  “What ‘what’?”

  “Why did you nod so much then?”

  A pained panic in his eye told her something was wrong. She took a horrified breath and sat forward. “Sean, tell me you passed your test.”

  He nodded and nodded again but she knew he was lying.

  “Sean, I put you up for this job. If you got it fraudulently I’ll get in trouble.”

  “Well, I will pass it now, won’t I? With all this great practice.”

  “For Christ’s sake, we’re spending every night chasing police cars. You could lose the license before you get it.”

  He looked at her in the mirror. “Even if I had passed, the license wouldn’t come through for months. If I get caught I’ll say you knew nothing about it, okay?”

  Paddy didn’t answer. Sean was prepared to get married at seventeen to please his mum. He was a prefect all the way through school. He attended chapel on every Holy Day of Obligation. Breaking the law to get a job was the most audacious thing she’d ever known him to do. She looked at him with renewed interest.

  “Okay?” he said again.

  She nodded. “Okay,” and watched the back of his head. By now even the emergency rooms would be empty. “Let’s drive up to Killearn.”

  II

  Radio reception gradually died as they left the city behind, the pip and crackle of calls reducing to a soft, comforting buzz. Rich yellow moonlight played on sparkling frost, coating the tilled muddy fields, and jagged skeletons of deciduous bushes lined the dark road.

  This was rich countryside, soft hills dotted with gentle copses of old trees, with picturesque villages strung along the traditional drovers’ road that the highland cattlemen had used for centuries to bring their stock down to the city. The population was growing, the tiny villages spreading into farmland on their outskirts with big new houses built by golfers posing as country folk.

  On the approach to Killearn they passed houses set back from the road, new and old, sitting in big patches of lawn and elaborate ornamental gardens, some with boats parked in the driveway, most with big cars.

  It was four in the morning, everyone was asleep, and the alert watchfulness that usually hangs over wealthy areas was absent: no dog barked, no expensive cars slowed at the passing places, drivers peering carefully into their cheap car, noting the faces of strangers who were hanging around and might cause trouble.

  The driveway to Huntly Lodge looked like nothing at all, a small break in the bushes with a run-down gate, algae-smeared and rotting, held shut with a shiny new chain and a padlock.

  Paddy told Sean to pull off the road, keep the lights off, and wait for her.

  “Where are you going? I’ll come with you.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m just going for a look at something. You wait here.”

  She wasn’t dressed for it. She’d been wearing the same pencil skirt since Sunday and her sweater was getting distinctly stale. The pencil skirt was too narrow for climbing but she had her leather on and hiked the skirt up to her hips before clambering over the gate. At the top, when one leg was over, the unsteady gate shifted in the mud below and she felt herself falling backward headfirst. She threw her weight forward and caught her tights on the rough wood, ripping them at the knee. Thick woolly tights cost a tenner, and she cursed Paul Neilson as she climbed down the other side. Her knee was bleeding lightly through the scratch.

  She limped along the mud road, pulling her skirt down, following the high ground of a deep rut where heavy cars had passed in and out. The trees closed in behind and over, shifting threateningly in the light wind. Paddy walked slowly, letting her eyes adjust to the dark, rubbing her knee and feeling sorry for herself.

  When she turned the corner and saw the huge house she stepped nervously back into the bushes. Someone was very rich.

  The house was new and vast, an ill-considered barn of a place with an inappropriately small front door and windows that would have been the right size for a semidetached house. An attempt had been made at dignifying the door by flanking it with plaster lions, but they were too small and only emphasized the cheap look. To the left, built as an extension of the house, was a three-door garage.

  Keeping to the bushes, Paddy skirted around to the side, stepping through mud carpeted in dead leaves. The ground was soft under her feet, noisily sucking the rubber soles of her pixie boots. Hoping there wasn’t a dog in the house, she picked her way carefully, stepping on tiptoes, keeping as quiet as possible.

  The window at the side of the garage was too high for her to look through properly. She cou
ld see the inside of the sloping roof and three skylights in a row, one over each section, but couldn’t see down to the cars.

  She glanced around for something to stand on but the narrow lane was tidy. Creeping around to the back of the house, she saw a large gray concrete base with a glass conservatory perched on it, plonked in the middle of a large sloping lawn. Moonlight shimmering on the underside of the glass told her that it housed a swimming pool. It was not a routinely inhabited back garden: there were no old lawnmowers or toys abandoned by the back wall, no boxes left over from plants or seed, not even a broken washing machine like the Meehans had in theirs. There was nothing for her to stand on.

  She skirted back around to the garage window again and, checking the ground beneath the window, jumped several times, piecing together the layout and content of the garage from what she could glimpse. There were only two cars in the three-car garage, a big one and a small one, exactly the shape and size of the BMWs she had seen outside Vhari Burnett’s house.

  A sudden rustle in the bushes made her think of Lafferty. She turned and hurried back down the drive, reckless of noise, pulling her skirt up over her waist, and climbed quickly back over the gate. She caught her breath when she saw Sean still parked where she had left him, speeding up as she approached the car. She felt so relieved as she climbed back into the warm car that she almost slammed the door on the frightening night but remembered herself and stopped, shutting it quietly.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Why have you taken your skirt off?”

  “Let’s go, Sean, and leave the lights off.”

  III

  Larry Gray-Lips, the night editor, was looking at her regretfully. “Meehan, you’ve to wait on.”

  Paddy was standing by the pigeonholes with one arm in her leather and her scarf around her neck. “Why?”

  He flapped a yellow memo sheet at her. “Got this last night after you went out: Ramage wants to see you when he gets in.”

  Her last vestige of courage left her. Knox had told Shug about the fifty quid. Ramage was going to sack her.

  Larry and Paddy had never liked each other but he saw how hard she was hit by the news and reached out to her, then thought better of it and withdrew. “Might not be that.”

  She thought of her mother and covered her face with her hand as frustration welled up in her. “I’m the only one working.”

  “Aye, well.” Alarmed by the display of emotion, Larry moved away sharpish. “Sorry.”

  She kept one arm in her coat and slid into a chair by the door. Shug fucking Grant. Years she had given to this job, years of waiting for it to get better and now it had come to nothing. She’d never wanted to do anything else. She didn’t have the exam results to go to university. All she could see in her future was an infinity of sitting in the damp garage at home, staring at an aching blank page. She felt so defeated she couldn’t even face walking across to the tea room to make a coffee or get some biscuits from the tin.

  The office filled up quickly with the morning shift, the casual timekeeping of Farquarson’s reign being long past. Journalists and subs poured through the door in twos and threes. Paddy hadn’t been in on a day shift for five months and had forgotten the look of the office when it was full. Copyboys were kept busy fetching teas and coffees, journalists organized their workspaces for the day, setting ashtrays by their smoking hand, feeding paper into the typewriters, while subs scanned copies of the morning edition for follow-up stories and section editors issued orders.

  Shug Grant arrived three minutes late with a fat editor from international news. He didn’t acknowledge Paddy but stopped near her to laugh ostentatiously at his companion’s joke. She didn’t look up.

  She stayed at the end of the desk, dully aware of the sharp scratch on her knee, hands folded across her stomach, nursing the pains she hadn’t been able to shake off for days until a copyboy was at her elbow. “Ramage wants to see you.”

  She looked around the office for anything she wanted to take with her. They might not let her back in. She had a big mug in the tea room but couldn’t be bothered walking the full length of the room and passing Shug Grant to get it.

  She stood up slowly and shoved her other arm into the coat. “Downstairs?”

  The copyboy nodded sadly. “Downstairs.”

  She paused at the door and looked back into the bustle and confusion. It was a sunny day outside. Shafts of golden morning sunshine sloped in through the wall of windows, settling on the dirty blue carpet. No one looked back at her. She hadn’t even been told she was being sacked and already she was nothing more to them than a sad shrug, a rumor. She wouldn’t be the last.

  She dragged her heels downstairs and along the quiet corridor, knocking twice and slumping against the wall. Ramage called for her to come in and she found him behind his big desk, leaning back smugly in his chair. There wasn’t a single sheet of paper on his leather desk blotter but there was a small brass cafetiere next to a dark green cup and saucer trimmed with gold. The rich chocolate aroma of real coffee filled the room.

  “Sorry to keep you on after your shift.”

  She stayed near the door and shrugged. “’S okay.”

  Ramage examined her for a moment. “It was only twenty minutes, Meehan, you don’t need to sulk.”

  Afraid she would cry when he said it, she bit the side of her mouth hard.

  Ramage pressed the flat of his hand on the brass plunger and pushed it down slowly, watching as the wheel crushed the coffee grains against the bottom of the glass. “Come over here.”

  She shuffled over to the desk.

  “What happened to your knee?”

  “Cut it. Climbing over a gate.”

  He poured himself a black coffee, lifted the saucer and cup and sipped noisily, his pinkie crooked to the side. “What’s happening with the police corruption story?”

  Paddy looked at Ramage’s face. He sipped the coffee again and watched her expectantly, waiting for her to speak. He wanted to talk to her, not sack her.

  She perked up. “Well, I’ve found the guy who owns the cars that were parked around the back of the Bearsden house. He went out with Burnett’s sister but she’s disappeared. I think he’s looking for her, he’s desperate, and I don’t think it’s because he loves her, either.”

  “He thought her sister was hiding her?”

  “Probably. Vhari Burnett had just moved house and the dead guy in the river knew her new address.”

  “So he went through him to find her?”

  “I think so.”

  “What about the police?”

  “Well, the two officers who were at the door call in Bearsden aren’t saying anything that could lead to him; they’re being very careful about that, which suggests they’re on the take. But more importantly, they’ve both just been transferred to the station the Burnett investigation’s based in. Everyone knows they’re bent, it’s highly irregular, and I think I know which senior officer okayed it.”

  “He’s bent too?”

  She shrugged. “I’m guessing. I don’t know for sure, but his name came up a couple of times.”

  “Good.” Ramage leaned back again. “Any evidence yet?”

  “Some fingerprints of a heavy who ties them all together.”

  “The one who attacked the car?”

  “Yeah, the firebomb guy. He’s the link but I’m the only thing that ties him to the Bearsden Bird’s house. I can witness that a piece of paper came out of the house that night and they’ve found his prints on it.”

  Ramage’s face didn’t register a flicker of recognition at the mention of the piece of paper, and Paddy guessed he didn’t know. Knox hadn’t told Shug Grant after all.

  “No sign of him? Is he following you, going to your house?”

  “No.” She paused. Ramage might make her go home. “Not so far. I haven’t seen him anyway.”

  “Was he the guy at the front door?”

  “No. The guy at the door’s prints are on the paper but not
on file.”

  “So they’d need to arrest him first before they can take his prints for comparison?”

  “Yes,” she said, forgetting to disguise her surprise that Ramage wasn’t an idiot. He noticed it, his right cheek twitching in irritation, so she hurried on. “Anyway, the police are dragging their heels about going for the right guy and keep trying to pin Burnett’s murder on other people. Someone’s definitely protecting him.”

  “And the investigation team? They clean?”

  She thought of Sullivan taking abuse from the officers in the inquiry, holding his stomach in for her because she’d done the right thing. “As a whistle. The officer in charge knows something’s fishy and he’s meeting me alone, giving me tips.”

  Ramage pointed at her quickly, as if she had followed his suggestion. “Good contact. Keep him quiet, Meehan. Don’t tell any of the dogs upstairs about him. He’s yours.”

  Relieved that her execution had been commuted, she smiled eagerly at Ramage. “Top tip,” she said, “thanks.” As if she needed a warning to be cagey around other journalists.

  Ramage sipped from his coffee again and looked a little sick, pressing his lips together and sucking his tongue hard. She guessed the coffee smelled better than it tasted. “And how did the inquiry go?”

  “They seemed determined to avoid all the important questions.”

  He nodded slowly. “So it’s someone on the board of inquiry?”

  Paddy was impressed again by how astute he was. “Could be.”

  “They do that. I’ve seen it before. Get themselves onto the board of inquiry and try to steer it.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure, same thing happened in a story we covered in Liverpool ten years ago. So, how much longer d’you think you’ll need to pin it?”

  She had no idea. “A few days,” she said, and wondered why she had. “At most.”

  “Good. Good.” He put the cup down, glancing at it resentfully. “I’ll only pay for the hotel for another two days and I want it done by then.” He flicked a hand to the door. “Out.”

  Paddy smiled at him, a genuine smile. He was smart and prepared to pay for the hotel and he wasn’t going to sack her. “Cheers, Boss.”