Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

It had to be here. Blinded by tears, she stood up and pulled some things off the table, toppling a stack of receipt pads onto the floor before stopping, exhausted. If Lafferty had been here he would have made the same sort of mess as he had in the cottage. Everything would be broken. It was Bernie. He had stolen her pillow.

Kate walked out of the garage, leaving the doors lying open and the light on, and climbed back into the Mini. On second thought she realized that she would need to keep Bernie sweet if she was to get her pillow back from him. She climbed out of the car, flicking the garage lights off and pulling the doors to.

She started the engine, patting the wheel encouragingly when it started, and headed off to Bernie’s flat.

Sullivan let Paddy lead the way into the black corridor and shut the door softly behind him. The tiny narrow room smelled of dust and sweat, the black walls around her thick to keep the noise out. She could just make out Sullivan’s face in the silver gloom coming through the two-way mirror. He turned away from her, craning his neck as he peered though the mottled glass into the cream room. His belly had been pulled in as they climbed the stairs and walked to the door but now, fascinated by the scene in front of him, he relaxed, his back slouching and his belly hanging out in a way that made her think of her dad and smile.

Sullivan had warned her not to speak, that the room wasn’t soundproof, but Paddy found herself inadvertently sighing an exclamation. His head was shaved and his shoulders broad, as if he worked out in a gym. His neck was thick, a bushel of tendons stood out on either side, the skin on it wrinkled, hard, knife-slash criss-crosses over thin skin where the muscles had been tensed for thirty years. He looked like a thick-necked dog. If Lafferty went for you, he’d be making contact with his teeth.

His eyes roved around the room as one of the two officers sitting in front of him asked questions. Where was he on the night of Tuesday the fifteenth? Had he been in Bearsden that night? Lafferty’s angry animal eyes flickered back and forth across the wall and the mirror, gliding over Paddy’s face and Sullivan’s chest. They were dead eyes, unkind and cold, vicious.

Opening his mouth to speak, Lafferty displayed a mouth of broken and dead teeth. He stared straight at the mirror and demanded in a hard man’s drawl to know who was asking “theze quesjinz.” The officer ignored him and repeated himself, sounding bored, as if he’d been saying the same thing over and over for quite a long time.

“Aye.” Lafferty stood up slowly, knuckles on the table, and craned his neck toward the mirror. “Sullivan. Cunt. ”

The two officers were on their feet, hands out and ready to stop him if he went for the mirror, but Lafferty lowered himself back down to his seat.

Paddy looked at the man standing next to her. The dull light through the mirror caught the beads of sweat on Sullivan’s forehead. He glanced at her, tipping his head back, acknowledging how frightened he was and apologizing. He clasped his hands in front of him, as if protecting his genitals, shifted his weight uncomfortably, and turned back to watch the mirror.

Paddy looked at Lafferty and imagined him in Vhari Burnett’s living room. She had been a slim woman, seemed slight when Paddy glimpsed her. Compared to Lafferty she’d seemed no more than an ethereal strip of white light.

“I wiz in the Lucky Black Snooker Club in the Calton until seven in the morning. Jamesie Tobar’ll stand for me. Anyone else who was there’ll stand for me. I got home at eight in the morning and went tae my bed. The missus’ll tell ye.” He glanced at the mirror again. “The fuck else d’yeez want?”

The officers sitting at the table bristled at this news, pulling their notepads toward them and starting to take notes, asking him to go over it again and again in detail, giving them times only an obsessive with a new watch would know.

“We’ve got your prints on an object from the house.” The officer watched him carefully. “On the night she died.”

Paddy saw Lafferty’s mask slipping as he thought about it. His lips twitched. “Object? What’s that, then?”

“It puts you there that night, Lafferty.”

“What is it? Anyway, it can’t,” he said confidently. “I was at the Lucky Black.”

Sullivan’s hand landed gently on the small of her back and made her jump. He nodded to the door and she followed him back out into the dim corridor outside and down a longer passage. Neither of them spoke until they reached the stairs.

Sullivan cleared his throat uncomfortably. “If his alibi pans out we’ll have to release him in a couple of hours.”

“He might guess it was the fifty quid his prints were found on. He’ll come after me if he does. He knows where I work and everything, for God’s sake. What the hell did they tell him that for?”

Sullivan avoided her eye. “Sometimes they have to go in heavy. He’s much more likely to think it’s something in the house.”

“If they wiped the house clean of prints they were being pretty careful. It wasn’t a fight in a pub, they’re going to remember what they did and didn’t do.”

Sullivan nodded slowly. “Well, we have to confront him with the evidence. If he doesn’t find out now he will later. It’s better to spring it on him and try to get something out of it.”

They walked down a flight of stairs and Paddy stopped him on the no-man’s-land of a landing. “Sullivan, what’s the story with the cops at the front door of Burnett’s house? Why is the investigation being steered in completely the wrong direction?”

“I have bosses. I don’t make those decisions.” Sullivan looked down the staircase, sad and a little broken; he took the banister to steady himself. “You had to be a journalist, didn’t ye? Couldn’t be a Meals-on-Wheels or Avon lady.”

“You know he’s not the guy I spoke to at Burnett’s front door, he’s not the well-spoken guy.”

“I know. We found other prints on the note. Don’t worry. We’ll follow Lafferty, work out who he’s with, and that’ll give us the boss’s name.”

“But if the cops at the door won’t tell us who they were speaking to, all that ties Lafferty to the scene is me and the note. He’ll come for me.”

“You’ll be safe enough. I’ve told no one about the note and neither’s McDaid.”

Paddy wasn’t convinced but Sullivan was and she found this comforting.

“Did you arrest Lafferty or did he come in on his own?”

Sullivan looked suspicious. “Why?”

Paddy shrugged. “Just asking. I don’t know how these things work.”

“We called his solicitor and he drove in himself. We’d have arrested him if he hadn’t. He’d know that.”

As she listened she remembered Sullivan sweating in the dark, his paunch hanging over his belt buckle, his eyes afraid of the animal in front of him. “I don’t usually swear, Detective Sullivan, but I’ll say this: that Lafferty is one fucking scary bastard.”

Sullivan cuffed her playfully over the back of the head, half-smiling at the gesture of sympathy. “Language, lady.” He dropped a foot onto the step in front of him and led her down the empty staircase to the front desk.

Paddy followed him down, feeling the damp trail from his hand on the banister, and realized that he probably had a daughter her age and that this was why he was nice to her.

“Just you leave it to us,” he told her. “You’re too pretty to ask so many questions.”

She smiled back and watched him open the door to the waiting room, holding the door and ushering her through ahead of him. He definitely had a daughter her age. And she probably half-hated him too.