Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

“You know about me?” She pushed past him. “Tam, you’re a fucking idiot.”

She climbed back into the car, glad to be away from him. Her hand was on the door handle, pulling it shut, when she heard Tam quite clearly through the burr of the radio.

“We’ll get you.”

Paddy stood in front of the electric kettle and watched droplets forming around the spout. A rush of steam followed, rattling the base and threatening to flood the fridge the kettle was sitting on before turning itself off and calming down.

They should have arrested the good-looking guy from the door by now. Tam and Dan would have been able to give a good description, and she was sure Dan knew him.

She still had the fifty-quid note. She could hand it in to Sullivan but he might not be discreet about it. If she insisted on getting the note back afterward it might force him to keep it quiet. After all, the best way to keep a stationload of police officers from lifting a note was not to tell them it was there. Policemen were famously light fingered. She had read somewhere, in some newspaper she was poring over in the middle of some night, that the worst university students for stealing books were divinity and law. It was presented as a surprise fact but it made sense to her. They were closer to asking the why-not questions after all.

She poured the hot water on top of the coffee and milk. It was a pint mug, extra large. She’d brought it into the office and kept it hidden away in the stationery cupboard. She sat at a desk and took out all the well-thumbed editions of different newspapers from the day before, opening each to the Bearsden Bird story and spreading them out on the table next to her, promising herself a nice read once she had done the chore of typing up the copy about Thillingly.

No interesting details went into the story, not Thillingly’s ripped cheek or his trendy coat or his tidy little house at the end of a lawn that must have swallowed up his weekends. All she had to tell his story was a dry four lines, barren of humanizing details. She could try to write it another way but dry was the house style and nothing else would get past the editors. It took her nearly half an hour to get the dull four lines down.

Carrying her copy, she padded across to Larry Gray-Lips, the night editor. Larry was reading a black-spined Penguin Classic and didn’t look up as she approached across the cavernous newsroom. She waited at the end of his desk for a moment before exclaiming “For fuck’s sake” so loudly a man sleeping on a nearby desk stirred momentarily, lifting his heavy head and splitting puffy lids open to see what was going on. Without lifting his eyes from the page Larry pointed at the spike on the end of his desk. Paddy tutted, skewered the copy on it, and walked away to make another pint of strong coffee.

The newsroom was the heart of the newspaper. A cavernous room with desks arranged into three sections: news, sports, and features. Each section was a horseshoe arrangement of tables with big steel typewriters perched along the horseshoe’s legs. Paddy had learned shorthand but was afraid to type well in front of anyone: it was hard enough not to be taken for a secretary as it was. Rumor was that typing through three sheets and two carbons was a dying skill anyway. A new national daily was being set up in London using computers, editing on-screen and sending it all down a phone line to be printed up off-site for a fraction of the cost.

At each section editors sat on the curve, giving out orders and chopping up the work or sending it back for rewrites. To the left of the room was Farquarson’s office behind the protective solid oak copyboy bench.

The room was quiet. The people sitting at desks breathed in unison, like a sleeping pack. The worst hours on the night shift were between four and six, when time and space played tricks. Moments uncoiled into infinitely long endless pockets of waiting, and then, unexpectedly, a head turn would take up three quarters of an hour. There was rarely any real work to do but the News still had to remain staffed in case the Queen Mother died or war broke out.

Red-eyed men wandered through the half-lit newsroom with newspapers and novels. Some of them turned lights off and had a pragmatic hour’s sleep, slumped over desks so that the newsroom became a hastily assembled dormitory. The snoring and soft light made it harder for everyone else to stay awake and it was common for the nappers to wake up with their sandwiches eaten or Wite-Out in their hair. Ill-paced drunkenness caused the occasional fracas, when a man would throw things around and make grand statements of the I’m-leaving those-bastards variety. The rest of the night shift understood the paranoiac need for an outburst and covered up kindly, getting the cleaners to pick up anything broken and saying nothing the next night when everyone assembled at their desks for another frolic in sleep deprivation.

Paddy blinked hard to soothe her burning eyes and took a long drink of milky coffee before beginning to read about the Bearsden Bird.

Vhari Burnett came from money. A vast fortune had been made in textiles and slowly frittered away by the following generations. The death of Burnett’s grandfather three months ago had been expected to free up a lot of money. Instead it uncovered a huge hole in the family funds.

A file photo of the grandfather’s funeral four months before accompanied the story. A flurry of black stiff mourning clothes stood on the steps outside a small grim chapel, shaking hands with a gothic-faced minister. Vhari stood close to a young, square-faced man. Her hair was much longer in the photo than when Paddy met her and was curled into a horrible poodle perm that tumbled about on her head, pinned up here and puffed up there. Her face was hardly visible under the mess of it; just her sharp chin and slim neck were recognizable. She must have had all her hair cut off since the funeral. But she had a sleek bob when Paddy saw her and it would take longer than four months to grow the perm out. Maybe she’d had it straightened. A perm like that had to cost more than sixty or seventy quid and a good straightening job cost a fortune again.

Paddy had assumed that Vhari was someone’s wife, a spoiled and cared-for princess who’d never have to save up and pay for her own driving lessons, a woman devoid of social conscience. But Vhari had studied law and worked at the Easterhouse Law Center and later for the prosecutor’s office. Her political involvement and choice of jobs clashed with her big house and hairdo.

Paddy photocopied the picture of the funeral, folding it when it was dry, and slipped it into her pocket. She was standing in the photocopy room, dizzy from the adhesive stench of toner that always hung there, when it came at her like a truck doing ninety: Burnett and Thillingly were both lawyers and both in Amnesty. They’d have known each other. And someone had murdered them within a day of each other.

It was busy at the Brigate. Everyone was going about their business, paying no attention to the crumpled lady sitting at the corner. She had leaves in her hair and a trail of blood from her nostril to her hairline. The suit she was wearing was expensive but had seen better days, and she was giving off a bizarre smell, like dirt and curry, as if she had been wearing the clothes for a week, sweating into them when she slept.

A fat waitress with corned-beef legs came to the table and took Kate’s order without looking at her or reacting to her appearance. She tipped her head back a little as she wrote 1x tea and 1x egg roll in her order pad, stepping out of the field of the smell. But it wasn’t the first time she’d done that. The Brigate was in that part of the city that belonged to people who were down on their luck. Tramps and whores and miscreants of all kinds gathered there, between the flea market and the morgue and the cheap cafés selling fish teas and pig feet. Since the Middle Ages it had been their bit of the city, an area where they could walk tall and not be stared at, a homeland for lost people. Kate had never been here before. She’d driven through it often on her way to other places, watched the safari through the window, fascinated but unmoved.