The Dead Hour

by Denise Mina

  III

  Kate had been watching through the dark wood for over an hour, listening to the noises of smashing glass and breaking furniture coming from the cottage. A lot of the furniture had been made for the house in the late eighteen-hundreds, when it was built as a holiday home for her great-greats. The dresser in the kitchen, that was irreplaceable. She wouldn’t get half as much for the place if they ripped it apart.

  It was bad of him to do that when he didn’t need to. She would hardly have stashed the pillow in the cottage and left on her own. It was bad of him not to know that.

  Her eyes were getting tired, focusing through the bald trees to the cottage so far away. She’d seen them going back to the cars a couple of times to get things and assumed that was what the man in the sheepskin was doing when the yellow light from the hallway was interrupted by his big frame. He passed the car, not turning to the passenger door or the boot, but walking straight past, pausing at the side of the road to look up and down. He stood, turning his head slowly, scanning the wood for movement of any kind. Kate held her breath.

  He spotted the boathouse and stopped scanning. He stuck his head out on his neck and looked again. Crossing the road, walking lightly for such a big man, he held big arms out to steady himself as he tiptoed over the muddy ground, hesitating when he snapped sticks before taking the next step, always coming straight for her. She recoiled from the rotting wooden boards, feeling for the orange box lid and her snuffbox. She needed to hide. She looked up at the boat hanging from the ceiling. She was slight but didn’t think the ropes and ceiling would hold her. She tried the orange box lid, knowing it was kept locked, had always been kept locked and the key was in the cottage pantry, hanging up behind the cups.

  She looked up at the oars on the wall but they were too unwieldy. By the time she got a good swing he could have grabbed her arm. She picked up her one shoe, hugging it together with her snuffbox, flattening her body against the wall behind the door.

  She could hear him approaching through the sticky mud and wet mulching leaves. He was outside the door and had stopped to look around. He wouldn’t be able to see her car from there but if he took ten steps north he’d see the bonnet and know she was there for sure and call the others.

  He took a step, toward the boathouse she was sure, then another, definitely toward. The round handle turned silently and slowly and after a moment the door swung open. He hesitated before stepping into the dark.

  The wooden floor groaned beneath his weight and no wonder. He was a big, big man. Six foot to her five foot five, shoulders broad and sloping as a buffalo’s. He stood with his feet apart looking away to the right, taking in the boat attached to the ceiling, the oars, the lip of floor that sat over the water. He stepped forward to look underneath it and Kate sensed that her only possible moment was now.

  She lashed blindly at him with her pump, holding it by the sole and flicking the heel at him sideways. She might have tapped him on the shoulder with it but as it happened he turned to look to the left just as she did. The reinforced three-inch heel plunged through his eye and beyond to a thin wall of bone. The sensation was like punching a drum of paper with a pencil.

  With the grace of a felled bull, the big man dropped to his knees, swayed and toppled to the side, twisting the shoe in the socket and shutting the door hard. His shoulder twitched in a shrug.

  Kate opened her snuffbox and took a trembling sniff right there, freestyle, standing in the damp dark of her grandfather’s boathouse, over the corpse of a dead stranger. Then, newly steadied, she pulled the shoe out of his eye and slipped it on her foot, dragged him away from the door and, opening it, stepped out into the wood.

  She headed down to the car and found her other shoe by the boot, sitting in the mud as if an invisible one-legged woman was standing there. Shocked into an unfamiliar stoicism, she calmly fitted the shoe on her other foot and climbed into her car, backing out of the dark, deep little valley onto the road in a smooth movement.

  She left her lights off until she had safely passed the cottage and, unnoticed, headed back down the loch side to Glasgow.

  EIGHT

  HOMELAND OF TRAMPS AND WHORES

  I

  It was two thirty in the morning and the streets were so quiet that they didn’t need to stick close to the squad car to follow it. Paddy sat in the back, half-listening to the radio. She couldn’t believe the police had invited her to go with them at the start of a murder inquiry. Usually they kept journalists away from families they had to deliver bad news to, but as they left the scene at the river the not-funny policeman had spoken to someone over the radio and then suggested that she tag along. If she was interested.

  It would be her first death knock. Calling on a bereaved family and trying to cajole or steal a photo of the loved one was regarded as the most soiling, horrible thing a junior journalist had to do. Grown-up growling journalists remembered their own early death knocks with a shudder.

  “You’re not going to annoy the wife, are you?” Billy asked from the front seat.

  “I won’t annoy her. It wasn’t my idea. The police told me to come along.”

  “They suggested you should come?”

  “Yeah, it was their idea.”

  Billy nodded, raised his eyebrows, and fell quiet again. She could hear his reproach through the white noise of the radio: she should have been reluctant to do a death knock, should have been sent by a bastard editor who gave her no option and, anyway, decency commanded that she leave it for a couple of hours after a victim’s family heard the news. She could see why McVie had lost patience with Billy and found him irritating.

  They followed the squad car to Mount Florida on a left turn, into a wide curving road of large semidetached houses, each with a garden at the front and bushes blocking the view from the road. The squad car they had been following pulled up behind another police car already parked at the curb.

  Billy pulled up behind the second squad car and turned to look at Paddy.

  “I’m not going in to hassle the guy’s family, Billy,” she said defensively. “But if I need to I need to. It’s my job. I can’t refuse because it’s a little bit rude.”

  “It’s not a little bit rude.”

  At that moment the passenger door on the front squad car opened and she saw why the police had insisted she follow them. Tam Gourlay got out. He must have heard she was at the river from the radio calls and asked them to bring her. Tam walked over to the car, uniform jacket unbuttoned, hitching his trousers up by the belt. Without looking into the car for her, he knocked on her window, three harsh raps commanding her to get out.

  Paddy opened the door and stepped out onto the pavement, leaning back into the cab.

  “Okay,” she said, hoping to give the impression of an ongoing conversation, “give me a shout if anything comes over the radio, Billy, eh?”

  Billy nodded and looked bewildered. He would have called her back anyway but she wanted to emphasize that she wasn’t alone. She shut the door.

  Tam looked in the window at Billy leaning forward to the dashboard for his packet of cigarettes. “Was he the driver from the other night as well?”

  Paddy took Tam’s elbow and pulled him away from the car, over to the dark shadows of a wet, dripping hedge.

  “He’s nothing to do with the likes of you, so just leave him alone.”

  “Who is he, though?”

  “Billy’s been the News driver since Moses was a boy. Leave him out of it.”

  Tam looked over at Billy, narrowing his eyes, trying to look scary.

  Two officers got out of the second squad car: the not-funny one and another guy, but not the joker, who’d gone elsewhere.

  A small nineteen-thirties cottage stood at the end of a long strip of garden. Paddy looked through the hedge as the two uniformed policemen tramped up a gray gravel path running diagonally across a busy bushy lawn, their heads hanging heavy with the awful weight of what they were about to do.

  “Nice house,” s
he said, hoping that Tam’s being there was a coincidence and she was still on for a story.

  “The dead guy’s a lawyer and comes from money. No kids.” Tam sounded bitter. “Must be rolling in it.”

  “Didn’t kill himself over a debt, then?”

  Tam turned his attention to her. “You saw Sullivan and Reid at the Marine. Heard you were talking about the motors.”

  His tough-guy act was starting to grate.

  “‘Motors’? What d’ye mean by that? ‘Cars’? Is that what ye mean?”

  Tam nodded, a little sheepish.

  “Why didn’t you tell them? Shouldn’t we tell them everything to help them catch the animal that killed Burnett? Didn’t they find him yet?”

  He sneered down at her. “Did you tell them everything?”

  Beyond the hedge and over the lawn, cutting through the still night, Paddy heard a woman’s voice, rough with sleep, keen a desperate “no.”

  Tam was staring at her. The fleshy leaves on the hedge glistened behind his head and a drip of sticky dew dropped onto his shoulder like a gob of saliva.

  “Tam, why did you tell them to bring me here?”

  He looked over his shoulder. “You keep your mouth shut,” he muttered, “because we know as much about you as you do about us.”

  Tam knew she had taken the money; he was implying there was more to know but there wasn’t. He couldn’t possibly imagine how mundane and uneventful her life was. She grinned at the thought. Being threatened with exposure seemed unbearably funny and she laughed to herself, shaking and holding onto the tip of her nose to hide her mouth.

  “You know about me?” She pushed past him. “Tam, you’re a fucking idiot.”

  She climbed back into the car, glad to be away from him. Her hand was on the door handle, pulling it shut, when she heard Tam quite clearly through the burr of the radio.

  “We’ll get you.”

  II

  Paddy stood in front of the electric kettle and watched droplets forming around the spout. A rush of steam followed, rattling the base and threatening to flood the fridge the kettle was sitting on before turning itself off and calming down.

  They should have arrested the good-looking guy from the door by now. Tam and Dan would have been able to give a good description, and she was sure Dan knew him.

  She still had the fifty-quid note. She could hand it in to Sullivan but he might not be discreet about it. If she insisted on getting the note back afterward it might force him to keep it quiet. After all, the best way to keep a stationload of police officers from lifting a note was not to tell them it was there. Policemen were famously light fingered. She had read somewhere, in some newspaper she was poring over in the middle of some night, that the worst university students for stealing books were divinity and law. It was presented as a surprise fact but it made sense to her. They were closer to asking the why-not questions after all.

  She poured the hot water on top of the coffee and milk. It was a pint mug, extra large. She’d brought it into the office and kept it hidden away in the stationery cupboard. She sat at a desk and took out all the well-thumbed editions of different newspapers from the day before, opening each to the Bearsden Bird story and spreading them out on the table next to her, promising herself a nice read once she had done the chore of typing up the copy about Thillingly.

  No interesting details went into the story, not Thillingly’s ripped cheek or his trendy coat or his tidy little house at the end of a lawn that must have swallowed up his weekends. All she had to tell his story was a dry four lines, barren of humanizing details. She could try to write it another way but dry was the house style and nothing else would get past the editors. It took her nearly half an hour to get the dull four lines down.

  Carrying her copy, she padded across to Larry Gray-Lips, the night editor. Larry was reading a black-spined Penguin Classic and didn’t look up as she approached across the cavernous newsroom. She waited at the end of his desk for a moment before exclaiming “For fuck’s sake” so loudly a man sleeping on a nearby desk stirred momentarily, lifting his heavy head and splitting puffy lids open to see what was going on. Without lifting his eyes from the page Larry pointed at the spike on the end of his desk. Paddy tutted, skewered the copy on it, and walked away to make another pint of strong coffee.

  The newsroom was the heart of the newspaper. A cavernous room with desks arranged into three sections: news, sports, and features. Each section was a horseshoe arrangement of tables with big steel typewriters perched along the horseshoe’s legs. Paddy had learned shorthand but was afraid to type well in front of anyone: it was hard enough not to be taken for a secretary as it was. Rumor was that typing through three sheets and two carbons was a dying skill anyway. A new national daily was being set up in London using computers, editing on-screen and sending it all down a phone line to be printed up off-site for a fraction of the cost.

  At each section editors sat on the curve, giving out orders and chopping up the work or sending it back for rewrites. To the left of the room was Farquarson’s office behind the protective solid oak copyboy bench.

  The room was quiet. The people sitting at desks breathed in unison, like a sleeping pack. The worst hours on the night shift were between four and six, when time and space played tricks. Moments uncoiled into infinitely long endless pockets of waiting, and then, unexpectedly, a head turn would take up three quarters of an hour. There was rarely any real work to do but the News still had to remain staffed in case the Queen Mother died or war broke out.

  Red-eyed men wandered through the half-lit newsroom with newspapers and novels. Some of them turned lights off and had a pragmatic hour’s sleep, slumped over desks so that the newsroom became a hastily assembled dormitory. The snoring and soft light made it harder for everyone else to stay awake and it was common for the nappers to wake up with their sandwiches eaten or Wite-Out in their hair. Ill-paced drunkenness caused the occasional fracas, when a man would throw things around and make grand statements of the I’m-leaving those-bastards variety. The rest of the night shift understood the paranoiac need for an outburst and covered up kindly, getting the cleaners to pick up anything broken and saying nothing the next night when everyone assembled at their desks for another frolic in sleep deprivation.

  Paddy blinked hard to soothe her burning eyes and took a long drink of milky coffee before beginning to read about the Bearsden Bird.

  Vhari Burnett came from money. A vast fortune had been made in textiles and slowly frittered away by the following generations. The death of Burnett’s grandfather three months ago had been expected to free up a lot of money. Instead it uncovered a huge hole in the family funds.

  A file photo of the grandfather’s funeral four months before accompanied the story. A flurry of black stiff mourning clothes stood on the steps outside a small grim chapel, shaking hands with a gothic-faced minister. Vhari stood close to a young, square-faced man. Her hair was much longer in the photo than when Paddy met her and was curled into a horrible poodle perm that tumbled about on her head, pinned up here and puffed up there. Her face was hardly visible under the mess of it; just her sharp chin and slim neck were recognizable. She must have had all her hair cut off since the funeral. But she had a sleek bob when Paddy saw her and it would take longer than four months to grow the perm out. Maybe she’d had it straightened. A perm like that had to cost more than sixty or seventy quid and a good straightening job cost a fortune again.

  Paddy had assumed that Vhari was someone’s wife, a spoiled and cared-for princess who’d never have to save up and pay for her own driving lessons, a woman devoid of social conscience. But Vhari had studied law and worked at the Easterhouse Law Center and later for the prosecutor’s office. Her political involvement and choice of jobs clashed with her big house and hairdo.

  Paddy photocopied the picture of the funeral, folding it when it was dry, and slipped it into her pocket. She was standing in the photocopy room, dizzy from the adhesive stench of toner that always hung the
re, when it came at her like a truck doing ninety: Burnett and Thillingly were both lawyers and both in Amnesty. They’d have known each other. And someone had murdered them within a day of each other.

  III

  It was busy at the Brigate. Everyone was going about their business, paying no attention to the crumpled lady sitting at the corner. She had leaves in her hair and a trail of blood from her nostril to her hairline. The suit she was wearing was expensive but had seen better days, and she was giving off a bizarre smell, like dirt and curry, as if she had been wearing the clothes for a week, sweating into them when she slept.

  A fat waitress with corned-beef legs came to the table and took Kate’s order without looking at her or reacting to her appearance. She tipped her head back a little as she wrote 1x tea and 1x egg roll in her order pad, stepping out of the field of the smell. But it wasn’t the first time she’d done that. The Brigate was in that part of the city that belonged to people who were down on their luck. Tramps and whores and miscreants of all kinds gathered there, between the flea market and the morgue and the cheap cafés selling fish teas and pig feet. Since the Middle Ages it had been their bit of the city, an area where they could walk tall and not be stared at, a homeland for lost people. Kate had never been here before. She’d driven through it often on her way to other places, watched the safari through the window, fascinated but unmoved.

  The ugly waitress brought her tea in a stained mug, dropping the plate with the egg roll onto the table so that it rattled as it spun to a stop.

  Kate couldn’t bring herself to eat it. She didn’t belong here, she was sure of it. She’d tidy herself up in the loo and hang about for a bit, waste time reading the paper. Then she’d go to Archie’s. Archie’d help her.

  IV

  Paddy dropped her head into her hands and rubbed her eyes. “Please can I go? I haven’t slept.”

  She was back in the little gray office in Partick Marine, back with Sullivan and Reid, both of whom had the pink-faced freshness of men who had slept well and breakfasted. Behind them, out in the corridor, Paddy heard the noises of a busy police station firing up for the day. The wooden platform creaked as personnel scurried along it and the other desks in the room filled up with police officers coming from a morning meeting.