Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

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.