The Dead Hour

I

Kate looked out between two rotting planks of wood. She could see the cottage from here, though the drop to the loch side was so steep that she was almost invisible. A stranger, someone who had never visited before, wouldn’t know the boathouse was part of the same property. She was chewing her tongue, knowing she could gnaw it raw again if she kept it up. She stopped herself, stepping back from the rotting boards and opening her mouth wide, rolling her unnaturally pink tongue around in a wide circle.

A small yellow rowing boat hung high above the lapping water, tethered to the ceiling. The oars were fixed to the wall, everything where it should be, nothing changed in the two decades she had known it. She should sell the cottage, advertise it in the Times and sell it to a Londoner with bags of dough as a highland retreat. She had only owned it for three months but the caretaker handed in his notice and the property was already falling into disrepair. The garden was overgrown, the mint in the back had tumbled over everything else, choking all other vegetation as it crept toward the house.

She drank some more watery powdered milk out of the measuring jug and looked out through the crack again.

She had the tin of ham with her but no can opener. Stupid. She needed a bath as well and hadn’t even turned on the immersion heater before she took sudden stomach-churning fright and, grabbing what she could, had run out of the cottage and come down here to hide. She had brought the jug of reconstituted milk. It tasted nasty but she drank it down like medicine for thirst. It was good but not what she needed. Even knowing that she was about to give in made her shoulders relax away from her ears, her face soften, her outlook calm.

She put the jug down carefully and took a flat silver box from her handbag. It had a secret compartment in the side and she stroked it with her thumb, reminding herself of all the good times. Looking around for somewhere to sit, she chose the big orange plastic box they kept the life jackets in. She sat down, wiggling backward one buttock at a time, imagining how pretty she looked while she did it. She smiled as she opened the box.

“Fucking hell almighty fucking shit god.”

It was all gone. Every grain. Even the corners were empty and she couldn’t get in there with her spoon. She must have hoovered it up with a note. She didn’t like that. The spoon was the mark of a lady. Sad addicts used notes. She tried to think who else had been there so that she could blame it on them but she had been alone for days and days.

Angry and disappointed at her lapse in manners, she wiggled off the orange chest, the heels of her pumps landing on the wooden deck with an emphatic clack-click. All sense of danger was lost now that she had promised herself relief and been denied it. She walked quickly along to the door and pulled it open without even listening for cars or people outside, her heart skipping a beat when she realized what she had done. She paused and heard exactly nothing. The water lapped against the shore outside. Wind ruffled the trees. Stupid.

Hurrying and breathless, heart racing, Kate scuffled sideways down the steep incline to her car parked at the water’s edge. She fitted the keys in and opened the boot in a single, graceful motion. She smiled down at it.

The bag of coke was as big and full and welcoming as a freshly plumped pillow.

Working carefully, her hands suddenly steady as a surgeon’s, she unpeeled the tape from the top seam of the bag and dipped her snuffbox into it, scooping, overfilling it so that the gritty powder spilled over the sides. She was being anxious and greedy about it. That was very sad addict. She poured a third of the powder back into the pillow and snapped the snuffbox shut again, reapplying the tape to the open wound, smoothing the edges down. She couldn’t stand the thought of the pillow coming open during a drive and her not knowing until it was all blowing out of the back and gone.

He had left a lot of tools in there, heavy-duty things for heavy work. She wondered what he needed such things for and why he needed to hide them in her car before the familiar trap door shut in her head. He did a lot of odd things. Men who made money like he did couldn’t go about explaining themselves all the time, silly girl. None of my business.

She shut the boot, holding her snuffbox tightly as she tiptoed back up the muddy slope and along to the boathouse. She sat the snuffbox on the orange box and opened it, pulling the spoon out of the little compartment on the side, scooping a single portion for one nostril and breathing it in like powdered oxygen.

Her head rolled back on her slim neck, her eyes tickled. The first spoon took the edge off the world, restarted her heart so that she could hear it pounding and nothing else. The second spoon would give her the buzz and bring the noises and colors of the world alive again, but she lingered between the cold of the deep water and the ragged heat of the dry shore for a moment, thinking of nothing, remembering nothing, imagining herself nowhere but here, present in the moment and content to be there.

She didn’t even need to open her eyes to fill the second spoon and find it with her nostril. The cocaine fired her up, making the blood too warm, lubricating it so that her brain slipped its moorings and slid sideways, crashing into the wall of her skull. She collapsed onto her side, her blond hair fanning out around her head, her legs bent and to the side, perfectly parallel with one another in a symmetry she would have found pleasing. A trickle of dark blood ran from her left nostril, crossing a white cheek and disappearing into her yellow hair.

II

The sun had been down a long time and the night had plummeted into a bitter, bone-cracking cold. No one lingered in the streets or bared any part of themselves to the elements that weren’t essential for navigation. Orange-lit taxis were hunting for fares in the city center, crawling past bus stops and slowing to tempt the few walkers. It was early evening and everyone in Glasgow had decided to stay indoors.

The station at Partick Marine would have been one of the stops they called at on their rounds anyway, trawling all the city police stations for the latest stories, so Paddy told Billy to make it the first of the night. She didn’t see why she should go and see the police on her own time. It was News business anyway.

It occurred to her that they might want to talk to Billy as well, he’d been there after all. If anyone had seen the money change hands it would be him.

“By the way,” she said, trying to be kind, hoping he would be if they asked him about it, “I told McVie about young Willie and the Partick Thistle tryout.”

“Oh, right, yeah. What did he say?”

“Said the Jags are shite.”

Billy smiled fondly at the road and looked at her in the mirror. “I like that.”

“I think he misses you.”

“Yeah, well, maybe we’ll get engaged.”

They were traveling west, passing the gothic university perched high on the hill. They took Dumbarton Road, a broad thoroughfare that cut through the west of the city. At one point the fast road became Partick high street. Billy called it the shooting gallery because the pedestrians would throw themselves across the road, defying buses and cars. It was deserted tonight, the only bright shop light from a chip shop window.

Billy pulled into a side street and drew up outside Partick Marine. The building looked like a mock-Georgian office block. The pale blue door was wide and rounded at the top, with a row of matching windows to the left. On the right side of the door, a blank wall was topped by a stone balustrade interspersed with wild shrubs and stringy tufts of grass. Behind, visible only now because it was so dark in the street, tired yellow lights leaked from tiny barred windows.

The Marine was once the busiest police station in Glasgow. It was a base for policing the river back when Partick and next door Anderston were stop-offs for fishermen from the north and the world community of sailors. Immigrants from the highlands and islands had settled in Partick. The older policemen tended to be from among them because, in the not too distant past, it had been an important skill for a Partick officer to be able to break up a fight between Gaelic-speaking sailors and immigrants.

Now the river had died and the Marine was separated from it by a motorway. The shipyards lay empty, rotting back into the river they had grown out of. The Partick Marine was a landlocked anomaly, a drunk tank for students from Glasgow University.

It looked quiet tonight. Lights from the tall arched windows glinted on the wet street.

Paddy opened her door. “Come and get me if anything comes over the radio, eh?”

“Sure thing.”

Paddy held her leather coat closed against the rain and ran across the deserted street to the door of the police station. She pushed it open and found herself in a noisy bacchanalian crowd of drunks in shiny suits and best dresses. She looked around, bewildered by the press of people waiting to be booked by the three uniformed officers working the wooden front desk. Then she saw the carnations in the buttonholes.

She pushed her way to the front of the queue and caught the attention of Murdo McCloud, a neat white-haired man with a soft highland accent. The rostrum he sat on night after night was a long wooden desk on a three-foot-high platform, built so that the officers could oversee the waiting room. Behind the desk the platform developed into a series of glassless windows. A corridor ran behind it, where efficient ghosts scuttled along on their nightly journeys. On a quiet night Paddy could hear footsteps and wooden creaks in the waiting room.

“Good evening.”

“Miss Meehan, how are you this very fine evening?” He burred his r’s in a way that made the tip of Paddy’s tongue tingle.

“Is this someone’s wedding?”

He nodded solemnly. “The Curse of the Free Bar.”

Next to her a drunk man in gray pleated trousers, skinny leather tie, and wedge haircut was swaying wildly in the arms of a small, elderly woman, possibly his mother. She hoped it was his mother.

“Someone from this station phoned the paper and asked me to come in. It’s about the thing in Bearsden.”

Murdo gave her a look, as if the home team were under attack, and stood up, opening the door into a corridor behind the desk. He leaned through, leaving his feet in the waiting room, and called to someone that she was here about the Bearsden Bird. The name sounded like a character from a children’s TV show. Paddy had noticed an inverse relationship between the silliness of names and the brutality of the cases. “The Razor Attacks” was a spate of knife fights between drunks in pubs which usually resulted in cuts to hands and fingers. “The Bunhouse Guy” was a vicious rapist who operated in or around the waste ground on Bunhouse Lane and bit his victims until they bled.

Murdo came back to the desk and smiled at her, thumbing over his shoulder. “In you go, Sullivan’s waiting on you.”

Paddy took the steep steps up at the side of the desk, feeling as if she was climbing onto a stage, and opened the door behind Murdo.

Behind the partition wall was a rickety wooden corridor running parallel to the desk. The wooden walls had been painted white, giving a nautical impression. The floor was painted black, peeling and chipped so that the splinters of bare wood were visible below. There were three windowed doors in the facing wall. She guessed which one Murdo could have leaned into without leaving reception and, pushing it open, she peered into a small office.

Down three steps, the small, gray office had a large window looking straight out onto a wet brick wall. At a desk in front of the window sat two men in loosened ties and shirtsleeves, smoking and staring perplexed at a form. They looked up when she came in.

“I’m Paddy Meehan.”

“Ah.” The younger man stood up, smearing his short brown hair back with the flat of his hand. He had blotchy skin and a square face with hands and body to match. His partner was tall, white haired with sun-leathered brown skin. He had been slender once, before middle age. His frame was slim but odd pockets of fat sat on his chin, his belly, and the tops of his legs. He still moved like a young man, leading with his hips as he stood up to greet her.

“Here, sit down.” The younger man pointed at a chair on the other side of the table and the older man tipped his chair back, leaving the group, giving his colleague room to do the questioning.

Paddy sat down and shed her coat carefully over the back support. “Paddy Meehan.” She leaned across the table to shake hands, to make them introduce themselves and look her in the eye. It was a trick she had learned from long experience. No one would look her in the eye unless she made them: she was short and looked younger than her twenty-one years. She reached toward the older man first, making him right his chair.

“Gordon Sullivan,” he said, letting his eyes disengage from hers as soon as he could.

The geometric younger man held her gaze for longer. “Andy Reid.”

“Pleased to meet you. I’m from the Daily News.”

Gordon Sullivan wasn’t letting her tip the balance of power in her favor. “We know where you’re from.” He suppressed a smile. “We told you to come in.”

Paddy suppressed a smile back. “Just introducing myself, being polite. Having manners. You remember manners?”

He tilted his head. “That was a sixties thing, wasn’t it?”

“’S that the last time you were civil?”

Reid watched Sullivan and Paddy playing, inexperienced and sensing, but not quite understanding, what was going on.

“Well, then.” Sullivan took over the questioning and Paddy liked to think it was because he was going to enjoy it. “Miss Meehan. It is ‘Miss,’ is it?”

“No,” said Paddy. His eye flickered to her ring finger. “It’s ‘Ms.’”

Sullivan laughed in her face. “‘Ms.’?”

“Yeah. Are you married, Mr. Sullivan?”

Sullivan had a paunch and an ill-defined chin but his white hair was thick and carefully quaffed into a late Elvis bouff. He’d have been attractive in his day and she guessed that he was fond enough of the ladies to enjoy casting a veil over his status.

His mouth twitched a pout. “So,” he said, “your reputation goes before you. I know what you did on the Baby Brian case.”

She sighed and patted the table patiently.

Sullivan nodded heavily. “I know, I’m just saying, you’re not as daft as ye, um…” Uncomfortable and a little lost, he flicked his finger up at her. “Ye know. Anyway, so, you were at the Bearsden call? What did you see?”

She hesitated, knowing she should tell them about the fifty-quid note. “I spoke to the guy at the door. Did Tam and Dan give you a good description?”

“Yeah, don’t worry about that. Did you see the Burnett woman?”

“I saw her in the mirror. She had blood all over her neck, all down her shoulder. So she was found by someone who came to give her a lift to work? Was the door left open?”

Sullivan ignored the question. “What else?”

Paddy thought back to the Bearsden driveway and the dark, remembered the rain on her face and the terrible coldness of the night.

“Lights were on in the hall. And in the room on the left, as I was facing the door. The room on the right was in darkness. The man had suspenders on and an expensive shirt. He was talking to Dan at the door, and Tam Gourlay was guarding the car, which I thought was funny because of the area.” She looked at them. They didn’t find it funny at all. “The man kept his hands behind his back, keeping the door closed, like he didn’t want anyone to see in. I caught Vhari Burnett’s eye in the mirror and I sort of went-” she raised her eyebrows “-you know, like, ‘d’you want a hand?’ She shook her head and kind of-” Paddy slipped her chin to her chest and sat back in the chair, miming Vhari slipping out of view. Neither policeman seemed interested in the minutiae of their interaction. “I saw two BMWs parked around the back.”

Both men sat forward. Sullivan tapped the desk. “Where?”

“Round the back. I came up the drive, passed the squad car, and saw round the side. Tucked in behind the house. Where it’s dark.”

“Are you sure it was two cars?”

“Certain.”

Sullivan took a sheet of paper out of a drawer and pushed it across the desk to her with a pencil. “Could you draw them?”

She sketched the rough shape and the men asked her about the details, how high off the ground was that one, this one, any idea of the license-plate numbers? What made her notice them if they were tucked around the back?

“Aye, well, Tam was talking about them. He pointed to the cars and said how flash they were. That’s why I thought Burnett and the man at the door were married, because of the matching cars.”

The officers glanced at each other and Andy Reid, not versed at hiding his feelings, raised an eyebrow.

“Wasn’t it her car?” asked Paddy.

Reid shook his head. “She’d hardly need a lift to work if she’d a BMW round the back, would she?”

Sullivan cleared his throat and watched his hands folding a sheet of paper as he spoke. “There’s going to be an inquiry into what the officers did at the house and why they left. You’ll be called, so you better, you know, be available.”

“’Kay.” Paddy took a breath and looked around the desktop.

Now was the time to say it but telling them about the fifty quid would be more than a confession; they would guess that Dan and Tam had been given money as well. Policemen stuck together like cooked spaghetti. Threatening one of them meant threatening all of them and she was already regarded suspiciously because of the Baby Brian case.

Paddy looked around the desk: two packets of cigarettes, a lighter, a form, two sheets of carbon paper, and a small bald circle on the wood to the right of the form where a previous occupant had placed a hot cup and burned through the varnish. She could just blurt it out.

“You can go now.”

They waited for her to get up but she sat there, trying to think of a way to tell them.

“I said you can go.”

She took a breath and stood up. “Okay,” she said finally. “See you later.”

Gordon Sullivan waited until she was at the door before calling good-bye.

Paddy Meehan stepped down from the front desk rostrum into the mess of the waiting room, knowing she had done a cowardly thing.