The Dead Hour

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.”

“What key?”

“Well, it’s a secret, but there’s no point in not telling you now: I have a key to the safe that I don’t leave at the station. People think it’s here but it’s not. No one can get in there without it, which means they must have taken the note during the day when I was here. Sitting in this very chair.”

She thought of Knox. “Do very senior officers know about the key?”

“No, just me.”

“And you know for certain that the note was here yesterday morning?”

“Definitely.”

“So, who came in yesterday?”

He pulled a blue notebook out of his top drawer and reluctantly pushed it across the desk to her with his fingertips. “I’m one year short of my full term.” He whispered, “I won’t even get my pension now. Mrs. McDaid’ll… I don’t know how we’ll manage.”

Paddy read down the list of three and there, first off, at nine ten in the morning, was Tam Gourlay’s signature. He must have gone in just before he was suspended, before Burns found him in the car park and beat him up. She showed McDaid the page and tapped the name.

“Him. Did he go into the safe?”

“Sure, he put a production in there. First thing.” He checked the seven-digit number next to Gourlay. “A shoplifting production. Straightforward case. But I know for certain it wasn’t him because he came in in his shirtsleeves and I watched him the whole time.”

“How did he stand?”

McDaid got up and leaned toward the safe with his bum in the air. “Summary charge productions go on the bottom shelf.” He adjusted his stance and they both realized that Gourlay’s hands would have been obscured from McDaid’s vantage point at the desk.

McDaid stood up, looking broken. “But he was in his shirtsleeves and I would have heard him fold it if he took it. A fifty’s a very big note. It was new. I’d have heard it.” His eyebrows furrowed with self-doubt. “I’m old, I know I am, but I’m alert. I’d have heard it.”

II

Paddy stepped back out into the cold morning street, feeling sick as she remembered Neilson’s wide crocodile smile. The missing note was good for her, though, her bribe would never come to light or be mentioned and she could still run her story with Lafferty as the sole villain. Without the note it was actually a better story, there would be no codicils or information held back until the court case. But Paul Neilson had walked, gone back to his vulgar villa in Killearn to take leisurely swims in his outdoor pool. It was all wrong.

Crossing the supermarket car park to the train station, her stomach spasmed and she doubled over, throwing up the cup of tea McDaid had made her at the station. She leaned over the brown puddle to see if more would come, waiting for her head to stop spinning, and deep inside she realized.

She stood up slowly, glinting at the light, and spoke aloud without meaning to. “Oh, shit.”

III

It was because she had so much to avoid thinking about that the words came so easily, flowing through her fingers and straight onto the page, perfect paragraphs in the new, punchy Daily News house style.

It was an exciting story to tell, the lawyer who had died to protect her sister from a crazy ex-boyfriend, beautiful Kate in terrible danger, the view from the garden window in Loch Lomond. She had to throw in a few comments from “sources,” facts framed as speculation so that the lawyers would pass it for publication, but she knew the police wouldn’t object. They came out of it looking good too.

Paddy stopped at the end of her seven hundred and fifty words and wondered why it had never been this easy before. Maybe exhaustion brought her down to the right level for this style of writing; she was usually too considered to bang out reams of short sentences, one fact in each, top and tailing the article with what she was going to say and a summary of what she had just said. Sullivan had given her a couple of on-the-record, ascribable statements to hang the whole thing on. It read perfectly well but she thought of everything she had to leave out: Neilson, Knox being the most important. She knew that although it satisfied as a News article and Ramage would be pleased, it didn’t satisfy her.

She looked up from her desk. Three copyboys were perched on the bench, scanning the room for the faintest signal. The newsroom was packed with men going about their business but everyone seemed altered. The energy of the room seemed to move around her and the scoop she was writing up. No one came near her desk. Shug Grant and Tweedle-Dum and – Dee were over at the sports desk, keeping their backs to her. A photographer looked away as she glanced over at him. The news desk editor caught her eye and smiled. A copyboy leaped to his feet and jogged over to her, gesturing with a phantom mug, asking if she wanted tea.

This was the respect of her peers. She ran her tongue over her teeth. It tasted metallic, like faintly sour milk.