Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

Paddy hadn’t gone straight back to the calls car after Sullivan saw her to the door. She’d headed across the road toward Billy until she saw the yellow slice of light on the pavement in front of her fold into black and knew the door was shut behind her. Then she turned and headed to the car park behind Govan police station. Fords and Minis and Rovers, two Mini Metros, even a Honda station wagon and an old brown Morris Minor but no BMW. Whatever Lafferty came in, it wasn’t one of the cars from the back of Burnett’s house on the night she was killed.

Paddy sat back in the car and watched the lights outside the window, thinking about the person who owned the BMW. If his alibi panned out they’d have to release Lafferty and whoever had been at the house that night would probably die. She thought of Lafferty’s neck again, of the brute force and all the harm and misery reflected in his eyes and she could have cried. Vhari Burnett and Mark Thillingly’s deaths weren’t accidents. These were deliberate. People were choosing to do these things to each other.

It was a quiet night in the city. Sunday-night trouble was always nasty, personal. A raft of domestic incidents followed the pubs shutting early as weekend drinking drew to a reluctant close, leaving people with nowhere left to go but home and no one left to fight with but family.

Billy was furious about the Daily News layoffs. He was even angrier about the fact that no one was doing anything about it. It wouldn’t have happened in the old days, no way, they never used to let the management dictate terms like that. Letting them give Farquarson his books was the first mistake. They should all have stood up for the guy, all gone out for him.

Paddy thought Billy was wrong. The sales figures were dropping faster than a bag of bricks. If they didn’t make changes the paper would go under. She had other things on her mind anyway and just nodded vaguely when he looked to her for a reaction.

The night was so quiet that they stopped early at the death burger van for their dinner. The lateness of the hour and deplorable standards of hygiene made the food at the van ultra-delicious. Nick, the mesmerizingly fat server, used the tiny handwashing sink to store a trash bag of buttered rolls.

Despite his enormous girth, Nick negotiated the tiny space with balletic grace. His dance began by the sink: he whipped a prebuttered roll from the bag, sauced it, and did a smooth half turn to the handle of the fryer, lifting and emptying the basket’s contents onto the drip tray and pinching the burger or chips or sausage into the mouth of the bun. The only thing he didn’t deep fry was the mugs of tea and coffee. Everything else, from fish sticks to frozen pizzas, went into the bubbling mess, creating an aromatic aura that radiated fifty yards downhill to the main road.

The van sat on a steep ramp that led from a busy thoroughfare along an empty side road leading to the park where taxis could park easily. When Billy and Paddy stopped, around two or three in the morning, only motorized night-shift people gathered, nodding hellos, enjoying the city’s calmest hours.

Usually Paddy’d get the burgers for herself and Billy, no F-plan option here, and climb back in the car. They’d sit with the radio turned down a notch, sometimes in a cozy silence, sometimes sharing speculative gossip about people at work that they didn’t know very well. Tonight Billy was out of the car by the time she turned back, chatting to a cabbie he knew, passing on the news of the layoffs, no doubt, glad of a fresh audience to vent his indignation to. Pleased she wouldn’t have to deal with him, Paddy took his burger over to him and went back to the car alone, relishing the prospect of a quiet half hour.

She was licking the burger grease from her fingers, wishing she could have another one, when the police car drew up. For a moment her throat tightened until a door opened and the cab light went on, showing that the two uniformed officers inside were no one that she knew and certainly not George Burns.

She watched them swaggering over to the death burger van, looking around at the parked cabs, claiming the territory like cowboys entering a saloon. They accepted free rolls from Nick, toasting him before wandering over to join Billy and the cabbie. A couple of other cabbies gravitated over to them to find out what was happening in the city tonight, where the accidents were and which routes to avoid. She noticed them glancing over to her, sitting alone in the car.

Sullivan had seemed certain that Lafferty wouldn’t connect her to the fingerprints but she wasn’t sure. The thought of his thick neck and mean eyes turned her stomach.

The group of men around the burger van broke up with a bit of shoulder slapping and a final joke, and Billy walked slowly over to the car. A cabbie sounded his horn and pulled his cab a full circle, driving off, and Billy raised his hand in a slow wave.

She had never heard a door slam quite as loudly. The sudden change in air pressure made her eardrums smart. Billy stopped for a moment, sighed at his hands on his knees before turning the key to start the engine and yanking the car in a fast, tight turn, throwing Paddy against the side of the cab, knocking her forehead on the cold window.

She shouted at him over the noise of the radio but Billy sped up, taking the junction with hardly a glance either way. Paddy peeled herself off the backseat and sat forward, slapping his shoulder. “Fucking calm down!”

Billy sped the car up and ran a red light, racing through a junction to the motorway. It would have been busy during the day and Paddy could imagine cars plowing into her side. She reached forward through the seats and grabbed the hand brake, her thumb hovering over the button.

“Stop this car or I will.”

Abruptly, Billy stepped on the brakes. Good driver that he was, he tapped the pedal three times. Paddy was thrown forward, her shoulder jammed between the two front seats. The engine spluttered to a stop. Behind them in the deserted road, the cab who had been at the death burger van hooted irritably and drove around them.

Paddy touched Billy’s hair at the back. “What happened there?”

He shook his head and looked at her in the mirror, a deep hurt vivid in his eyes.

“Billy?”

“You stupid cow.” He pressed his lips together and for a moment she thought he was going to cry. “You fucked a cop. In his own car.” He reached forward and restarted the stalled engine. “You stupid cow.”

He drove off at ten miles an hour through the bleak, dead city.

An hour later Paddy was still chilled and silent, sitting in the back of the car, pressed tight up against the backseat as if Billy was doing ninety. She nodded dumbly when Billy asked her if she wanted to follow up the only radio call they’d had so far, a minor domestic in Govanhill. They drew up behind two panda cars, badly parked at angles from the pavement as if something enormously important was going on.

When Paddy got out and shut the door, she paused by the side of the car to pull her scarf up around her neck. Billy didn’t lift his packet of smokes off the dashboard like he usually did. He sat looking at her, straight at her, hurt and angry and disgusted. Paddy bent her knees and looked in at him, gesturing for him to unwind his window. He carried on staring at her, watching as the bitter wind blew her hair hard against her head and pinched her cheeks.

She took a step back down the body of the car, opened the passenger door, and shouted in at him, “You mind your own fucking business, you ugly prick.”

Billy started the car before she’d pulled back, driving along the road for fifty yards with the passenger door swinging wildly. He stopped, threw one foot into the street, shut the passenger door, and reversed toward her, slowing as he came past her, to show that he was in control. Paddy lifted her leg and kicked the passing car with the heel of her foot as hard as she could, pulling herself off balance and staggering over to the side. She left a heel-shaped dent in the door. Billy sped off.