The Dead Hour

by Denise Mina

  Trisha poured milk into both cups of tea. “Yes, Miss Smarty-Pants: they always mention it when someone’s Catholic. Anyway, she lives in Bearsden and her name’s Burnett.” She held out the mug to Paddy, just far enough beyond the reach of her fingertips so that she would have to step into the kitchen to take it. “The news’ll be on again in a minute.”

  Paddy was being sucker-punched and she knew it. Trisha lifted the mug of strong hot tea a fraction, releasing a puff of comfort. Paddy could smell it at the door. She reached for it and no sooner had her fingers curled around the handle than Trisha pulled a chair out.

  “Isn’t Caroline down today?” Paddy only asked the question to upset her mother and they both knew it.

  Usually Caroline would be in when Paddy arrived home late, and it was ominous that her seat was empty. Baby Con had started school and Caroline came home most days. When she didn’t get the two buses down to Eastfield it was always because of her husband: John’d either given her a sore face or raised hell about the housework and she had to stay home and scrub.

  “She called from the phone box. She’s got too much to do today.” Trisha raised her mug to her mouth. “Sit. Just give us your chat for a wee minute.”

  Feeling small and unkind, Paddy sat down. “Well, first we went to this car crash but no one was hurt, and then we went over to the police station in Anderston.” She monologued as she knew her mother wanted, giving her the highlights of the night shift but skipping the visit to Bearsden.

  Same as all her women friends, Trisha’s life was vicarious. Paddy heard them in the Cross Café and outside the chapel: they passed on secondhand stories about their kids’ friends, got angry about fights their husbands had at work, boasted about their families’ achievements while they themselves stayed in the kitchen. With an unemployed husband and three of her kids sitting at home waiting for the recession to abate, Trisha had very little material. She couldn’t talk honestly about Caroline’s home life and Mary Ann spent her life in the chapel. Marty and Gerard were monosyllabic at the best of times. If Paddy didn’t take the time Trisha wouldn’t have anything to offer.

  She was gibbering about last week’s newspaper awards and JT’s prize, when the news came on. The Bearsden murder was the first item. The police had attended a call at the house earlier in the evening. An inquiry was being called to investigate why the officers left Vhari Burnett in the house. Trisha was right: Vhari was from an aristocratic family; the villa had recently been left to her by a grandfather and she had only just moved in. She was an active member of Amnesty International and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

  “There,” said Trisha, “you should go and ask about her, get a story. Then they wouldn’t be able to keep you back.”

  In a paranoid morning of exaggerated despair, Paddy had confided in her mother her conviction that the editors hated her and wouldn’t print any story she phoned in anyway so it was all pointless. It was really just the tiredness talking but Trisha took it literally. Paddy suspected that Trisha had told some of her lady friends about it: she often asked about the conspiracy and suggested reporting them to the union. Paddy didn’t know how to take back the allegation without making herself look foolish.

  “It’s political.” Trisha pointed at the radio. “You wait and see. She knew something important and they killed her. You should question the folk she was in the CND with.”

  “CND don’t meet that often. Amnesty do but everyone else’ll think of it first. They’ll be out this morning.”

  “Well, go earlier then. Go today. Go just now.”

  “I need to sleep, mum.”

  “Fine.” Trisha stood up and began to wash her mug without pouring the last bit of tea out.

  Con smiled quietly into his mug. Paddy knew she was cheating her mother of a triumph. She finished her tea quickly and sloped upstairs to sleep.

  FOUR

  CLOSING CREDITS

  I

  It was like watching the closing credits to an action movie. Every time Paddy came in to work on the night shift she had the feeling that everyone exciting and interesting was floating out of the door. At every desk people were gathering their coats and cigarette packets, turning off lights, looking relieved and happy that it was home time.

  An air of damp disappointment clung to the night shift workers. It was so all-pervasive they didn’t even really want to associate with each other.

  Paddy kept her flattering coat on as she walked across the floor to the blacked-out office door. The long copyboy bench seemed very low to her now. When she first started at the paper she used to take her place on the bench and run her thumbnail along the grain of the wood, gouging little channels into the soft pulp, and imagine herself seeing the marks in the future, when she had reached the heights of a junior reporter, and remembering her former self. Seeing the marks never gave her the buzz she had expected. They made her feel disappointed and despise her naïveté in hindsight.

  Behind the bench a glass cubicle had black venetian blinds covering the windows and door, the plastic turning gray from a decade of being wiped with abrasive solutions, looking as if gray mold was creeping over it at the edges.

  The paper’s editor, Farquarson, had big hair. His pomade had worn off during a long day of head holding and his hair had risen like warm white dough. The skin below his eyes was very blue. He had his coat on and was pulling his office door shut just as she caught up with him.

  “Boss, can I talk to you?”

  “Not again, Meehan.”

  “It’s important. And personal.”

  Reading her face and seeing that she wouldn’t shut up and piss off, he opened the office door again and flicked on the light, dropping his briefcase and holding out his hand to invite her in.

  The messy office charted a long day shift, from the cups abandoned during morning and afternoon editorial meetings to page plans scattered all over the floor. The filing cabinet next to the door had an open bottom drawer and Paddy could see packets of sweets and boxes of biscuits in there. Murray Farquarson had the diet of a housefly: he survived exclusively on sugary foods and alcohol and yet was still rake thin. His hair had turned white over the past few years.

  He followed her into the room and pulled the door shut behind them. He didn’t bother walking around the long table that served as his desk but slumped against the electric-crackling venetian blinds, keeping his tired eyes on her shoes.

  “Quick.”

  “I need a move.”

  He rolled his eyes. “For fuck’s sake.”

  “Boss, I’m going stone mad—”

  Farquarson sagged against the blinds, each slouch articulated by the snap of unhappy plastic. “That’s neither important nor is it personal.”

  “Please?”

  He sighed at the floor, his head hanging heavily on his limp neck. She knew not to interrupt him. Eventually he spoke. “Meehan, just keep your head down.” He lifted his tired eyes to her and she thought for a moment he was going to confess some awful personal secret. She flinched, blinked, and when her eyes opened again he was looking past her to the door. “Keep on the shift for another wee while, okay, kiddo?”

  And then another bizarre and frightening thing happened: he cupped her elbow and gave it a little squeeze. “You’ll be fine.”

  In a crumple and snap of blinds he stood up straight and reached for the door. Paddy, rigid with alarm, stood as still as she could. He pulled the door open and the bottom of it hit her hard on the heel. She had to shuffle to the side to let him pass.

  “It doesn’t need to be a promotion . . .” she said.

  “Yeah.” He rubbed his eyes. “Bollocks anyway. There was a call from Partick Marine police station. They saw your para about the house call in Bearsden last night. Want you to go in, tell them what you saw. She was pretty, the dead girl. Can’t you think of anything there you could write up? No obvious hook we could spin from?” Farquarson’s bloodshot eyes were sympathetic for a moment, but it passed. “You were the l
ast person to see her alive, I think. Do me a hundred-word description, scene at the house, atmosphere, bookend it with facts. I want it before you go out in the car. Finish it by nine thirty and I’ll tell the night desk to use it as an insert in the coverage. Anything else?”

  She shook her head. If she was a male reporter who had come up with nothing from a scene like that Farquarson would have said she was fucking useless. A fucking waste of fucking space.

  “Well, piss off and get it done then.”

  She turned to go, bumping into Keck from the sports desk. He brushed past her dismissively, snorting at the miserable look in her eyes.

  “Hoi,” Farquarson shouted, always looking for an excuse to tick him off, “mind your fucking manners in front of a fellow professional.”

  Keck tried to make a face that would simultaneously convey mannerliness to Farquarson and superiority to Paddy, his face quivering between the two. Farquarson raised an eyebrow. Paddy nodded and backed out.

  It was eight thirty in the evening, and she had an hour to write one hundred words. She went to the stationery cupboard and made a coffee, checked out the biscuit situation and chose two shortbread fingers that she meant to eat at the desk as she was writing. She found an empty typewriter at the end of the news desk and spooled in three sheets sandwiched around carbon paper.

  Still wearing her overcoat, Paddy stared at the angry blank page, eating the buttery biscuits and sipping her coffee, sifting through the incident for what to leave in and what to leave out. If she mentioned the fifty-quid note she’d have to hand it in to the police. They’d get the murderer anyway because Tam and Dan had seen him and it didn’t make sense to hand the note in and let it disappear in a police station when it could disappear into her mother’s pocket and take the weight of worry from her for a while. But the story didn’t make much sense without her and the police having a reason to leave the house. They had to believe the woman would have been safe, and the more Paddy thought about it the clearer it became: it was obvious the woman was in a lot of trouble.

  Paddy felt a pang of anger at Vhari Burnett for retreating back into the living room, slipping out of the mirror, instead of pushing past the man at the door and walking away to freedom. It was the same anger she felt toward Caroline for staying, a bewildered furious jag, as if by passing up the chance to leave they were letting other women down, making men think it was all right to beat them.

  Paddy took another sip of coffee and battered out the paragraph, rereading it to see if the facts were as jarring as she expected. A woman covered in blood and everyone had left. Actually, depressingly, it read perfectly well.

  II

  Shug Grant was watching Paddy across the table, pulling on his leather jacket. He was flanked by Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee, a couple of sideliners who always hung around newsroom bullies, sniggering at their jokes. All three were ready, jacketed, and going for a drink, she could tell by the excitement in their eyes and the fingers jingling loose change in their pockets.

  “You, Meehan, what fucking use are you?” Shug drawled at her. “One para of copy for four nights in calls car? What, are ye driving round and round George Square with your eyes shut?”

  Paddy shrugged, feigning a good nature and letting it go. “If it doesn’t happen it doesn’t happen.”

  “You want to start making yourself useful, woman.” He licked his lips, pausing before the delivery of a cherished killer line: “At least bend over and give us somewhere to put our pens.”

  They sniggered at her, three malevolent sets of bared teeth, breath choked out of their throats in little forced puffs.

  Paddy rose to her feet as the skin on her neck prickled, her lips curled into her teeth. “The phrase is overworked, Shug. Been up all night practicing that line, have ye?”

  -Dum and -Dee shifted away when they saw the muscles on Shug’s face tighten. He could see that Paddy was livid, mad with tiredness, and had lost her sense of proportion.

  “Did ye lie awake last night, Shug, staring down at your fat, ugly wife in the dark, wondering why your kids grew up to hate ye?” She was going at it too hard, hitting too low, but the fury warmed her. “And ye don’t have the guts to leave her or kill her so ye think, What I’ll do is, I’ll go into work and pick on someone to make myself feel big.” She needed to calm down. The three men across the table were beyond uncomfortable, Tweedle-Dee stepped sideways out of the group and Tweedle-Dum was trying to shift behind Grant’s shoulder. But she couldn’t stop herself. “Lying awake in the dark, hoping to glean a last shred of self-respect from the good regard of your peer group. Look at your peer group, Shug, -Dum and -Dee. That’s your audience.”

  As if from nowhere, George McVie appeared at her side. “Enough now,” he muttered.

  But she kept talking. “You’re a menopausal cliché. Margaret Mary said you’re impotent.”

  She heard a gasp from the sports desk behind her. Margaret Mary was a time-faded redhead who hung about the Press Bar and over the years had woken up next to almost every man in the office. She was famously indiscreet but most morsels of information weren’t passed on because every faction in the office had one member of the Margaret Mary club to protect.

  McVie took Paddy’s arm and guided her out from behind the chair to a corner. “Shut it, you stupid cow.”

  -Dum and -Dee shuffled out of the door to the newsroom. Shug Grant had more balls about him and lingered, complaining about his treatment to one of the photographers.

  “Don’t act as petty and vicious as them.”

  Despite it being the end of his shift McVie was wearing ironed clothes and a smart pair of shiny trousers. His clothes were always clean nowadays, in sharp contrast to his crumpled hangdog face. Some of the outfits he wore veered close to fashionable: he had a gray leather bomber jacket that he sometimes wore with matching gray loafers with toggles. A few weeks ago he had been seen in the town carrying flowers.

  He was going through something of a personal renaissance. Having languished on Paddy’s calls car shift for years he had finally found a story that got him moved. The death of a nineteen-year-old boy from heroin shocked the city and McVie had interviewed his mother before anyone else. He was so sympathetic that she allowed the Daily News to photograph her dying boy in the hospital, as a lesson to other young people. McVie was now the drugs correspondent, a position that was becoming big news as cheap and plentiful class-A drugs, once the preserve of glamorous pop stars and Americans, flooded into Glasgow. “You went too far there.”

  “Sorry. I’m tired. I just asked Farquarson for a move and he touched my elbow. It kind of threw me. “

  McVie looked surprised. “Did he say anything?”

  “‘Keep going, kiddo,’ something like that.”

  “See,” he said, nodding seriously, “sales took another drop, the board are looking for people to lay off, and you’re not handing in. There’s only so much he can do.”

  Everyone was nervous. Print workers no longer took constant tea breaks or called for strikes at the first sign of a dispute. The board and their new chairman were trying to make cuts and increase the slow decline in sales with promotional giveaways and competitions and constant demands to Farquarson to drop the highbrow nature of the paper and give them a sex scandal every so often. The chairman, nicknamed King Egg, had made his money in chickens before moving into publishing. He bought a couple of magazines first and discovered a flair for interfering. Having bought the Scottish Daily News he was holding her close, peering over her shoulder to the south of England, cutting his teeth on a Scottish paper before he moved on to a national.

  Paddy tried to think of something positive to say. “Billy’s boy got a tryout for the Jags junior team next week.”

  McVie and Billy had worked together for three years. They stopped talking after the first few months but over the years their genuine loathing had mellowed into a pantomime. Paddy knew they missed each other and passed on information each way without making them ask for it.

&n
bsp; McVie’s face said he was impressed by Billy’s boy. “The Jags are shite.”

  “Aye.” Paddy didn’t want to get trapped in a football conversation. “I heard you were seen with flowers in the town.”

  “So?” McVie looked suspicious, tilting his head back and looking down his nose at her. “Who told you that?”

  She did it back. “Have you got a girlfriend?”

  They had a momentary standoff: she tried to read his face and he kept it blank, flaring his nostrils at the deception. She burst into a wonky smile and McVie got to “ha” in her face. His breath smelled of an expensive, slightly flowery breath freshener.

  Suddenly, gracelessly, JT slithered between them, staring at Paddy though his face was inches from hers, his eyes bright and shiny. “All right, Paddy? How are you?”

  JT hadn’t managed a career as chief news reporter by being gracious or having manners. He was drawn to good stories, had an astute nose on him. Only last week he’d won the news journalist of the year award at an annual industry celebration that Paddy wasn’t invited to. He never did anyone a favor if he could possibly get out of it. She had once seen him sit at a crowded table and eat an entire packet of Polo mints without offering one of them.

  “What is it, JT?” She shoved her hands into her coat pockets and pulled them out as suddenly. The fifty-quid note was still in there, where she had left it untouched since last night, crumpled in among the crumbs from biscuits and bits of gray pocket fluff. She was waiting for a blistering fit of conscience to tell her what to do, hoping that if she waited long enough the police would catch the guy and she might not have to hand it in.

  “Saw your in-brief this morning,” said JT. “Did you and Billy stop there?”

  “Aye, yeah, for a few minutes.”

  “And the police walked away and left her with her killer in the house?”

  Paddy shrugged.

  “Why did they leave? Were they in a hurry? Were they called to something else?”