The Dead Hour

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 suspiciously 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 wires 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.

“For goodness’ sake,” Paddy tutted, as if it were a misplaced table mat, “who put that there?”

III

The clock said four and it was dark outside. Paddy sat up with a start, thinking for a moment that it was four a.m. and she’d been asleep at work. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up before her legs were awake, staggering off to the side, and heard a giggle from her sister’s bed. Mary Ann was sitting in the dark, holding a set of plastic pearl rosary beads. She watched Paddy stagger back to the bed and kneel on it before carrying on with her prayers.

“It’s a bit dark, isn’t it?”

Mary Ann smiled as her fingers automatically clicked onto the next bead.

Unreasonably angered at the sight, Paddy climbed across the beds and took hold of her sister’s feet, lifting them up and down and whistling “Strangers in the Night” because their granny told them that when nice girls whistled Our Lady cried. Her sister smiled a little, looked down at her rosary beads, and carried on.

Paddy bounced to a stop on the bed and watched her sister repeating the ancient prayers by rote. “Don’t shut your eyes, Mary Ann, look up.”

But Mary Ann ignored her.

Since they were children Trisha had prayed every night that one of them would find a vocation and join a religious order. She’d set her heart on her eldest son, Marty, being a priest, but Marty wasn’t very nice or religiously inclined and Gerald wasn’t smart enough.

Mary Ann’s side of the bedroom didn’t have posters of heartthrobs anymore and the chest of drawers at the end of her bed no longer had makeup on it, but holy books and novenas. It started when Pope John Paul II gave a mass at Bellahouston Park.

Even Paddy was impressed by the spectacle and the pomp. They were an immigrant minority and the generation of young people at the open-air mass had grown up ashamed of their primitive Catholicism. But John Paul II dignified religious defiance. He had remained Catholic under a brutal Communist regime, openly proclaiming himself and ministering to anyone courageous enough to follow him. Young Catholic Scotland suddenly rewrote the meaning of their journey and felt proud that they had kept the faith despite being denied work and houses and being marched against by the Orange Order.

When the pope took the stage they stood shoulder to shoulder with two hundred thousand fellow faithful, the hot June sun warming their backs, applauding until their hands were scorched, clapping themselves as much as their priest.

Paddy went on the parish bus to please her mum but drifted off as soon as she could, standing at the back with the loose crowd of skeptics. She felt something in the summer air, a power maybe, the energy of conviction. The thrill caught the back of even her unbelieving throat. She could share in the pride of her people even if she didn’t share their faith. She never went to mass anymore but did her parents the courtesy of pretending she might by always being out on Saturday evenings during the hour of the teatime mass when the Sunday obligation could be fulfilled.

Mary Ann left the park deeply changed. She became a devout daily communicant and spent her days praying at home or passively engaged in the business of the church. She had tried the Charismatic Renewal, a highly emotive movement within the church that invited the Holy Spirit to manifest itself by making them behave in faintly ridiculous ways, like falling over, talking rubbish, or crying in public, but she was too giggly and shy for it.

A priest with a twitch at St. Columbkille’s was trying to get Mary Ann a place at Taizi, an ecumenical camp for young Christians, so she could try out the religious life and see how it suited her.

Paddy sat in the dim light at the foot of the bed, watching Mary Ann’s lips tremble in the dark as her finger found its mark on the row of beads. The light seemed to leave the room as she looked at her. She loved Mary Ann more than anyone alive and she didn’t want her life to consist of prayers in gray halls or being nice to people in trouble, an awful, humble half-life. She wanted Mary Ann to have great dangerous adventures in wild sunshine, trips to America, a passionate love affair that ended in tears on a bridge in Paris.

Mary Ann bowed her head to the gray beads, her fingers moving on to the next obligation. The toilet out on the landing flushed and their mother’s soft step padded back downstairs to the kitchen.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.

“Leave me alone, Paddy,” Mary Ann answered quietly. “I let you be how you are.”

Paddy stepped down from the bed and snapped on the light, pulling her nightie over her head, walking bare-breasted to the chair, and facing into the room as she pulled her sweater and trousers on. Mary Ann ignored her. Paddy shuffled past the tightly fitted beds and sidled by the wardrobe blocking the door, sliding into the hallway and down the stairs.