Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

She could hear him approaching through the sticky mud and wet mulching leaves. He was outside the door and had stopped to look around. He wouldn’t be able to see her car from there but if he took ten steps north he’d see the bonnet and know she was there for sure and call the others.

He took a step, toward the boathouse she was sure, then another, definitely toward. The round handle turned silently and slowly and after a moment the door swung open. He hesitated before stepping into the dark.

The wooden floor groaned beneath his weight and no wonder. He was a big, big man. Six foot to her five foot five, shoulders broad and sloping as a buffalo’s. He stood with his feet apart looking away to the right, taking in the boat attached to the ceiling, the oars, the lip of floor that sat over the water. He stepped forward to look underneath it and Kate sensed that her only possible moment was now.

She lashed blindly at him with her pump, holding it by the sole and flicking the heel at him sideways. She might have tapped him on the shoulder with it but as it happened he turned to look to the left just as she did. The reinforced three-inch heel plunged through his eye and beyond to a thin wall of bone. The sensation was like punching a drum of paper with a pencil.

With the grace of a felled bull, the big man dropped to his knees, swayed and toppled to the side, twisting the shoe in the socket and shutting the door hard. His shoulder twitched in a shrug.

Kate opened her snuffbox and took a trembling sniff right there, freestyle, standing in the damp dark of her grandfather’s boathouse, over the corpse of a dead stranger. Then, newly steadied, she pulled the shoe out of his eye and slipped it on her foot, dragged him away from the door and, opening it, stepped out into the wood.

She headed down to the car and found her other shoe by the boot, sitting in the mud as if an invisible one-legged woman was standing there. Shocked into an unfamiliar stoicism, she calmly fitted the shoe on her other foot and climbed into her car, backing out of the dark, deep little valley onto the road in a smooth movement.

She left her lights off until she had safely passed the cottage and, unnoticed, headed back down the loch side to Glasgow.

It was two thirty in the morning and the streets were so quiet that they didn’t need to stick close to the squad car to follow it. Paddy sat in the back, half-listening to the radio. She couldn’t believe the police had invited her to go with them at the start of a murder inquiry. Usually they kept journalists away from families they had to deliver bad news to, but as they left the scene at the river the not-funny policeman had spoken to someone over the radio and then suggested that she tag along. If she was interested.

It would be her first death knock. Calling on a bereaved family and trying to cajole or steal a photo of the loved one was regarded as the most soiling, horrible thing a junior journalist had to do. Grown-up growling journalists remembered their own early death knocks with a shudder.

“You’re not going to annoy the wife, are you?” Billy asked from the front seat.

“I won’t annoy her. It wasn’t my idea. The police told me to come along.”

“They suggested you should come?”

“Yeah, it was their idea.”

Billy nodded, raised his eyebrows, and fell quiet again. She could hear his reproach through the white noise of the radio: she should have been reluctant to do a death knock, should have been sent by a bastard editor who gave her no option and, anyway, decency commanded that she leave it for a couple of hours after a victim’s family heard the news. She could see why McVie had lost patience with Billy and found him irritating.

They followed the squad car to Mount Florida on a left turn, into a wide curving road of large semidetached houses, each with a garden at the front and bushes blocking the view from the road. The squad car they had been following pulled up behind another police car already parked at the curb.

Billy pulled up behind the second squad car and turned to look at Paddy.

“I’m not going in to hassle the guy’s family, Billy,” she said defensively. “But if I need to I need to. It’s my job. I can’t refuse because it’s a little bit rude.”

“It’s not a little bit rude.”

At that moment the passenger door on the front squad car opened and she saw why the police had insisted she follow them. Tam Gourlay got out. He must have heard she was at the river from the radio calls and asked them to bring her. Tam walked over to the car, uniform jacket unbuttoned, hitching his trousers up by the belt. Without looking into the car for her, he knocked on her window, three harsh raps commanding her to get out.

Paddy opened the door and stepped out onto the pavement, leaning back into the cab.

“Okay,” she said, hoping to give the impression of an ongoing conversation, “give me a shout if anything comes over the radio, Billy, eh?”

Billy nodded and looked bewildered. He would have called her back anyway but she wanted to emphasize that she wasn’t alone. She shut the door.

Tam looked in the window at Billy leaning forward to the dashboard for his packet of cigarettes. “Was he the driver from the other night as well?”

Paddy took Tam’s elbow and pulled him away from the car, over to the dark shadows of a wet, dripping hedge.

“He’s nothing to do with the likes of you, so just leave him alone.”

“Who is he, though?”

“Billy’s been the News driver since Moses was a boy. Leave him out of it.”

Tam looked over at Billy, narrowing his eyes, trying to look scary.

Two officers got out of the second squad car: the not-funny one and another guy, but not the joker, who’d gone elsewhere.

A small nineteen-thirties cottage stood at the end of a long strip of garden. Paddy looked through the hedge as the two uniformed policemen tramped up a gray gravel path running diagonally across a busy bushy lawn, their heads hanging heavy with the awful weight of what they were about to do.

“Nice house,” she said, hoping that Tam’s being there was a coincidence and she was still on for a story.

“The dead guy’s a lawyer and comes from money. No kids.” Tam sounded bitter. “Must be rolling in it.”

“Didn’t kill himself over a debt, then?”

Tam turned his attention to her. “You saw Sullivan and Reid at the Marine. Heard you were talking about the motors.”

His tough-guy act was starting to grate.

“‘Motors’? What d’ye mean by that? ‘Cars’? Is that what ye mean?”

Tam nodded, a little sheepish.

“Why didn’t you tell them? Shouldn’t we tell them everything to help them catch the animal that killed Burnett? Didn’t they find him yet?”

He sneered down at her. “Did you tell them everything? ”

Beyond the hedge and over the lawn, cutting through the still night, Paddy heard a woman’s voice, rough with sleep, keen a desperate “no.”

Tam was staring at her. The fleshy leaves on the hedge glistened behind his head and a drip of sticky dew dropped onto his shoulder like a gob of saliva.

“Tam, why did you tell them to bring me here?”

He looked over his shoulder. “You keep your mouth shut,” he muttered, “because we know as much about you as you do about us.”

Tam knew she had taken the money; he was implying there was more to know but there wasn’t. He couldn’t possibly imagine how mundane and uneventful her life was. She grinned at the thought. Being threatened with exposure seemed unbearably funny and she laughed to herself, shaking and holding onto the tip of her nose to hide her mouth.