The Dead Hour

by Denise Mina

  Lafferty blinked, hunched his shoulders, and spun on his heel to Sean, lifting the knife as he turned.

  The base of the copper pan was actually very heavy. The dusting of flour on the handle strengthened her grip as Paddy used two hands to lift it over her head and bring it down on his.

  Lafferty paused again as the knife slipped from his fingers; the tip stuck into the wooden floor, the handle vibrating from the force.

  The great bull of a man slid to his knees and toppled sideways against the leg of the table, snapping it as his chest fell against it. He reached out a big hand to steady himself and found nothing but air. He landed on his face.

  Sean looked down at Lafferty’s still back and over at Kate curled into a small ball by the sink. “Fucking hell, Paddy, I’m due more than two twenty an hour for this.”

  Kate’s broken leg twitched, making them both startle. She was trying to speak.

  Paddy rushed over to her side. “It’s all right. You’re safe now, Kate.”

  Her curly blond hair was stuck to her face. She was just like Vhari apart from her nose. It looked as if it had been crushed with a flatiron. She was mumbling, desperate to be heard. Paddy put her ear to Kate’s mouth but it was hard to make out the words because her voice was so faint and nasal.

  “Darling,” she said, “lovely.”

  “Lovely?” repeated Paddy, puzzled and wondering if she had heard right.

  “To see you, darling. Lovely. I can hear you, darling.”

  Kate’s lips slid back; her front teeth were missing, her mouth hinged with sticky blood. Her breath smelled foul.

  Her lips parted and Paddy heard what she thought was a death rattle, a gurgle at the back of the throat. Kate was laughing.

  II

  The hall stand had a shallow seat on it for Edwardian ladies and gentlemen to sit on while they pulled galoshes and riding boots on and off. It was wide enough for any single bottom, however prosperous, but Paddy and Sean were squashed in side by side, thigh pressing hard against thigh. Paddy was glad of the heat. The police insisted on keeping the front door wide open to the cold night, and frost was settling on the rug.

  Ambulance men worked on Kate in the kitchen. Paddy could hear her gurgling and laughing and groaning as the paramedics expressed concern and then bewilderment. They didn’t know what she was laughing about, either. There was nothing for her to laugh about, that leg was a hell of a mess, hell of a mess.

  When the police arrived in response to Sean’s call from the phone in the hallway they assumed that Lafferty was the householder and screamed at Paddy and Sean for a bit, putting handcuffs on them and then taking them off after the radio confirmed that Paddy did indeed fit the description of a News journalist and that she should be in the car they found parked around the corner.

  Lafferty was dead. There was no bleeding that they could see, no violent spills of guts or anything that made Paddy feel it was real. He had died of a massive bleed into his brain where the saucepan had hit him.

  They carried him past her with a sheet over his face but she didn’t feel anything but relief that he hadn’t killed Sean. She thought of poor Mark Thillingly handing over Vhari’s new address after a minor scuffle. She would have stood on the bridge as well if Sean had died because of her. She wouldn’t have jumped, but she would have stood there.

  The police officers were gathered by their cars, one of them taking charge of the radio while three others stood in a semicircle around the open doors, rubbing cold hands together, listening bright-eyed to the familiar buzz and crackle of the radio. One of them was still suspicious and scowled in at Sean and Paddy.

  “You’re engaged,” Paddy said flatly.

  Sean seemed startled but nodded. “Aye.”

  “Congratulations.” She held her hand out at an awkward angle for him to shake. He took it and pumped once. “You’ll be happy.” She meant it well but it sounded like an order rather than a wish.

  “Maybe.”

  Two uniformed policemen came to the front door and gestured for them to follow. “We’ll take your car,” said one, leading them past the waiting police cars.

  “Are they not coming with us? Why are we going in our car?”

  The policeman waited until they were out of earshot and on the dark road before he spoke. “They’ve found another body out the back. A man. He was stabbed in the eye. They reckon the bird killed him.”

  “Why do they think that?”

  He shrugged. “It’s her house, isn’t it? They figure someone else came for her and she popped him.”

  They took the keys from Sean and made the two of them sit in the back, even though they hadn’t done anything wrong. Sean asked them to pump up the heating and turn the fan on and they drove away from the house in a sweltering wave of warmth, rubbing their cold fingers back to life and drying their noses.

  The sun was coming up, climbing low over the ancient wind-warped trees on the hillside as they drove back down the road they had come. They passed a few other cars on the road, the police driver refusing to stop in passing places, driving as arrogantly as if he was in a police car and had the right.

  They passed from the wood into farming land and looked at each other when they realized where the car was headed. They were back on the road to Huntly Lodge.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE LINEUP

  I

  The lichen-stained gate was open, shoved back against a hedge. Judging from the depth of the ruts in the muddy entrance a lot of cars had been up the small lane since they passed it earlier.

  The place looked different in thin morning light. The woods around the drive weren’t as dense as they had seemed in the dark. Paddy could see through them to the mild slopes of the fields beyond. They turned the corner to the house and Paddy saw Sullivan standing by one of the three cars parked outside, wearing a thick coat and gray woolly police-issue gloves. He looked up at her, a broad, slow smile breaking over his face.

  The police driver slowed to a stop and Sullivan padded over to the car.

  “I’ll take them from here, Kevin.”

  The two policemen got out of the calls car and went over to join their uniformed pals.

  Sullivan opened the passenger door next to Paddy and crouched down. His knees objected to the reckless gesture by clicking loudly but Sullivan pretended not to notice.

  “You’ve had quite a night.” His glance flickered over to Sean.

  “This is my driver, Sean Ogilvy.”

  The two men made a big deal of respectfully shaking hands across her face. “Good job you were there, young man.”

  “It was me that hit him,” said Paddy indignantly.

  Sullivan pointed at her but spoke to Sean. “Greedy for glory,” he said, and she could see he was impressed without being able to say it to her face.

  She slapped his hand away. “Did you arrest Neilson?”

  “Can’t. We’ve got nothing on him. No witnesses tying him to Lafferty or the house on Loch Lomond or to the Bearsden Bird’s house.”

  “Well, you’ve got me, I saw him at Vhari’s door.”

  Sullivan nodded and grinned. “And there are prints on the note. If we only had an eyewitness that wouldn’t be enough, we need corroboration, and we haven’t his prints on file. It’s only because you called this in that we can bring him in for questioning and take his prints. That’ll give us a comparison.”

  “What about Gourlay and McGregor? No way they’ll corroborate seeing him there?”

  Sullivan sighed and looked at his feet. “I think we both know the answer to that one, don’t we?”

  She wondered about the wisdom of mentioning Knox. If Sullivan was this cagey about fingering two officers of lower rank he wouldn’t want to know about his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. But she had to try. “Look, we saw Lafferty bringing Kate Burnett out of a house in Milngavie; that’s how we picked him up in the first place.”

  Sullivan prompted her on with a head nod.

  “Fifteen Ornan Avenue,
do you know it?”

  Sullivan’s neck stiffened so suddenly that his head wobbled a little. He looked as if his kidneys had burst but he was too polite to say anything.

  “There’s a glass porch outside and it’s opposite a pub.” He didn’t want to hear what she was saying, Paddy could tell. “An old sort of Englishy pub. With a car park.”

  “Right.” He nodded tetchily. “We’ll look into that. We will.”

  “Can you look into that?”

  He gave her an imploring look. “We’ve got plenty to go on as it is. Let’s do what we can.”

  “You’re not going to, are you?”

  Before he had the chance to answer, a policeman next to one of the other cars shouted over that they were ready. Sullivan tried to stand up to answer him but his knees wouldn’t let him. He dropped back on his haunches and looked embarrassed. “We’re doing our best. We’re doing all we can.” He took his time rising slowly to his feet. “I’m driving.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You need to pick Neilson out of a lineup. Are you game?”

  “Oh, aye,” said Paddy. “I’m always game.”

  Sullivan drove carefully back to Glasgow, following the car in front. Every so often Paddy could see the back of Paul Neilson’s well-groomed head in the other car. It was the guy she had met at Vhari Burnett’s door. She felt sure of it.

  II

  Listening to the noises through the door, Paddy waited, her stomach cramping with exhaustion, imagining the cause of the noises next door. Feet shuffled and men chatted casually, the sounds of men who didn’t know each other passing occasional comments. Two of them gurgled phlegmatic smoky laughs.

  They were gathering men who looked a bit like Paul Neilson for the lineup and she, star witness, was waiting in a dull side room, walls painted industrial beige, a table and three chairs arranged against a wall. There was no window, just a bare lightbulb hanging overhead, throbbing sixty watts into the cupboard room.

  She couldn’t help but think of Patrick Meehan. His lineup for the Rachel Ross murder was the trap he didn’t see coming. He may have been a career criminal but he still had a naive belief in the justice system and hadn’t anticipated the police tipping the witnesses off. Meehan had actually leaned over to one witness, a young girl, and told her not to be nervous, it was okay, she could say it was him, thinking she was his alibi. But in court she was called as a witness for the prosecution. Paddy remembered reading about the murder victim’s husband; old Abraham Ross was kept in the room the witnesses were taken into after they had picked Meehan out. No one ever proved it, but they must have talked to each other: who did you get? I picked the guy at the end of the line, short, plump, acne scarred. I got him too, same guy, at the end of the line, sandy hair.

  Sullivan had stuck his neck out and desperately needed Paddy to pick out Neilson. Driving seven miles into town with the accused man riding in the car in front had to be bad practice: she saw Sullivan watching her in the mirror sometimes, when they stopped at lights or the car in front turned sharply, hoping she’d had a good look at Neilson. But Paddy wasn’t looking at the car in front. She could have picked him out with her eyes shut.

  It was warm in the room. Burned dust had turned the lightbulb yellow and brown. It must have hung there for a long time. The room didn’t get used much. Eyewitnesses weren’t called for very often and then it was usually for robberies. She knew from the calls car that most murders were solved by arresting the blood-splattered spouse, holding the knife and standing over the body.

  There was a sudden absence of movement outside the door; a reverent silence fell over the waiting men and feet shuffled into place. A final check was called for and she heard a shoulder brush against the waiting-room door.

  It opened and she surprised herself by standing up suddenly and finding that her legs were weak with tension. The door slammed shut.

  Slowly, the door swung open and an officious uniformed officer looked in. He frowned at her, looked her over, and asked if she was ready. She nodded, nervous and hot. Letting the door fall open, he gestured for her to come out into the room.

  Five men were standing up against the wall. The officer walked her along the line, watched by a group in the corner that included Sullivan and a tired-looking lawyer man in a brown suit.

  Paddy and the officer walked somberly down the line and she pretended to look carefully at each one, aware of the breathless hush from the audience behind her.

  The men were all dressed the same but she could have picked Paul Neilson out just by looking at his clothes. His white shirt was crumpled, an expensive linen shirt, probably discarded when he went to bed and thrown on again when the police came to the door in the middle of the night. The rest of the men had freshly pressed shirts on, made of a hard-wearing nylon blend, police issue, ill fitting, cuffs hanging over their wrists. Some of them had dark hair, some black like Neilson’s.

  She walked to the end of the line and turned back, walking to the middle. The men avoided eye contact, staring up at the back wall as if at a urinal, but Neilson still looked arrogant, a smug twist at the side of his mouth, weight resting on one foot. His haircut looked expensive.

  Paddy stood in front of him, showing him she wasn’t scared. He looked back at her. Behind him the lawyer coughed anxiously. She stepped toward Neilson, examining him, looking at the hands that had held Vhari Burnett’s door shut, at the neck that was speckled with Vhari’s blood. He looked down and smiled warmly.

  “That’s him,” she said.

  Paul Neilson grinned, dark brown eyes twinkling, crow’s feet spreading across his cheeks. It was as if she had told him a great joke, flattered him on his choice of clothes, asked him to buy her a drink.

  The officer pointed at Neilson for confirmation. “Number two?”

  Paddy pointed at him, her fingertip three inches from his chest. “This one, number two.”

  Neilson’s grin spread until his eyes were almost shut.

  Sullivan stepped forward. “Okay,” he said. He took her elbow and steered her to a far door. “That’s it for now.”

  III

  Ramage had called the station looking for her and Sullivan allowed her to make a phone call from his desk.

  She told him what had happened in detail, leaving out the fifty-quid note because that would come out at the trial and by then she would be bathed in glory. Sullivan had dodged every mention of Knox. She guessed that he wasn’t senior enough to go after him, so she didn’t mention him to Ramage. They couldn’t report on Neilson yet, either, and would have to wait for the trial, but Ramage promised her a front page on the scene at the cottage, the lady in peril and the Daily News’s own intrepid reporter. The story would include details of Kate’s attack and the body in the garden, and because Lafferty was dead, they could defame him as much as they wanted.

  She was to come in and write it up for the Saturday edition and then she could go home. He sounded pleased with her, a little in awe at the story of the cottage, and she played up Sean’s part in case they found out that their new driver didn’t have a license.

  “He was brilliant. Saved the day. I couldn’t have done it without him.”

  “Well, you can keep the hotel room until tomorrow, if you want to go out and get pissed tonight.”

  Paddy thought of Mary Ann leaving for France in the morning. “Ah, thanks, Boss, I think I’ll just go home after.”

  “Excellent,” he said firmly. She felt he appreciated her being cheap almost as much as the story.

  She hung up and found Sullivan standing across the room, sadly chewing a hangnail, as if he’d just heard Santa wasn’t real. He caught her eye and looked away.

  He had heard about herself and Burns. She knew these old guys. They liked women but if they heard any hint of scandal they’d be the first at the front of the mob with a pocket full of stones.

  Paddy stood up and walked over to him. “What?”

  He shrugged guiltily, avoiding her eye.

 
“Sullivan, what’s going on?”

  He dropped his hands to his sides and his back sagged. “We’ve let him go.”

  “Neilson? But I picked him out. He was number two, right?”

  “He was number two, but the fifty-quid note—” He bit his finger again, ashamed. “The note’s gone missing.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  COLUM MCDAID’S SHAMEFUL EXIT

  I

  Colum McDaid was on the verge of being sacked from a job he had dedicated his life to, but it didn’t stop him being a gentleman and offering Paddy tea and biscuits.

  “They’re sending someone up to replace me now, calling in a retired officer from another area. I’ll be out by lunchtime.”

  She watched him move around the room, boiling the kettle, offering sugar, pouring in the milk first so that it didn’t scald. She watched him and noted that at no time did he allow her to be in his blind spot between himself and the evidence cupboard or the safe. The only chair in the room other than his own was bolted to the floor just inside the door.

  He handed her the cup with two bourbon biscuits perched on the saucer and took his own seat back behind the desk.

  “So it’s gone?”

  McDaid nodded into his tea. “I’m here all the time, I check everyone on the way out. I don’t understand . . . they’ll say it’s because I’m old.”

  “It’s just gone?”

  “It’s gone. I stayed last night until three thirty in the morning looking for it. It’s gone. It’s not in this room or the next room, there’s no sign of a break-in, and I didn’t leave the room once the day before without locking up.”

  “Couldn’t someone just have nicked the key and come in? There must be a spare set of keys in the station.”

  McDaid shook his head. “No, see, I do what my predecessor did.” He looked a little shifty. “There’s an element of temptation in this job, you know, for the young men. They’ve got families, wee babies, and the basic pay’s not much. We older ones, we take it on ourselves to guard the young men against that. There’s money about, people who want favors, and so on. It’s harder for a young man to say no. That’s why we have the key.”