Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

They’d sack him for leaving her there. They hadn’t even done the city center hospital calls round yet. She’d have to cover for him by getting a taxi back to the office and she wouldn’t be able to claim the money back or Ramage would find out what had happened.

Furious, she entered the damp of the green close. It was dark inside; the lights were out on the lower landings and only deflected light from higher up in the echoing stairs tempered the shadows. Following the sound of voices, she climbed up to the second landing. A drunk woman was protesting, drawling, “Nah, nah, nah,” over everyone who tried to speak to her. Two policemen were trying to calm a man who was saying that she had said this and he’d said that and then she went like this and he was like that: what would you do, pal? Eh? With a woman like that. What would you do?

His bottom lip was bloody and made her think of Vhari Burnett. Next to him, hanging on the door frame and keeping them all out of the flat, was a skinny woman in stonewashed jeans and a lemon sweater that had been stretched by a yank to her neck and hung off one bony shoulder.

The policemen looked up as Paddy climbed the stairs. It was George Burns and his partner. His eyes smiled spontaneously, a warm, loving grin, but he looked away immediately. He was wearing his wedding ring.

Paddy struggled to remember what an innocent would do in this situation. She took out her notebook, conscious of her hands, her neck, the way she was moving. The other policeman continued to question the woman and Paddy made a big deal of glancing around the doorway to get the right number and the names on the doorplate. She wrote everything in her notebook, working briskly as if it were a worthwhile story.

George’s pal managed to convince the woman to let them go inside to talk about it and give the neighbors a chance to go to sleep. As he stepped into the house, following the arguing couple, he turned and looked at her, smirking disparagingly. Burns hung back, waiting until the policeman and the couple were out of earshot. He didn’t get the chance to speak.

“You cunt,” Paddy said. She’d never used the word before and felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up at the sound of it.

He coughed a laugh and looked astonished. “Wha?”

“Everyone in Glasgow knows. Billy was told at the same time as a bunch of cabbies outside the death burger van.”

Burns looked flummoxed. “I’ve not said anything.”

She was so angry every muscle in her body was tense and her strangled voice barely audible. “Do you have any idea what this’ll do to me? For the rest of my fucking life I’ll be the stupid bitch who fucked a copper in his car.”

He was insistent and quite calm. “Paddy, I didn’t tell anyone.”

Weeping with rage, she turned and took the stairs on faith, holding onto the sticky banister and slowing down as soon as she was out of sight around the turn. She stopped in the dark close, rubbing her face dry and struggling to breathe in against her contracting ribcage. She could walk back to the office. It would only take an hour and it had been a quiet night anyway; she probably wouldn’t miss any major events so no one need know. She’d take a back road so that Burns wouldn’t pass in his squad car. If he stopped and tried to give her a lift she might punch him. But it wouldn’t be safe if Lafferty had been released and came looking for her. It wouldn’t be hard to find her on the only call of the night.

Stepping out to the street she saw the car parked right in front of the close, Billy watching the entrance hopefully. He saw her and gave a nervous smile and raised his hand. She opened the dented passenger door and fell in.

“’Kay?” he asked, turning in his seat to look at her.

“Nothing happened. ’S dead anyway. Let’s do the hospitals and go back to the office,” she said, dredging up the stock phrases they used each night.

“Okay then,” agreed Billy carefully, seeing how upset she was. “That’s what we’ll do, then.”

He wasn’t just worried about his job. She could tell that he was sorry for losing his temper and sad to see her crying in the street on her own. He tried to look at her a couple of times but she didn’t look back.

Burns’d told everyone. It was only two days ago and everyone in Glasgow knew. He looked her in the eye and lied about it. She would never, ever forgive him. And she would get him back. If she had to wait for years and years and years she’d humiliate him as much as he had her.

They were parked in the darkness outside the Royal Hospital. Apart from a couple of consultants’ discreetly posh cars the car park was empty. Yellow lights blazed in most of the windows of the huge soot-blackened Victorian hospital, and a brittle silver frost hung in the air. Inside the warm car it was snuggle-up bedtime dark. Paddy’s heart rate had slowed so much that she was having trouble remembering why it would be wrong to sleep.

Billy cracked the window and lit his cigarette but Paddy stayed in the backseat. Sundays were always quiet, but the Royal’s emergency room was a good place to pick up stories that missed the police’s attention. Gangsters often traveled across the city if they were stabbed or slashed, sometimes coming as far as ten miles in a taxi, clutching tea towels to their wounds, because the Royal surgeons were reputedly the best in the city.

For the first time Paddy wished peace on the city. She wanted a quick return to the twilight office, to get away from Billy, licking her wounds until home time.

Billy watched her in the mirror. “Ye not going in?”

“Yeah.” She looked across the car park to the hospital door. A man in a thin brown shirt stood outside the door, smoking and hugging himself against the cold air. He had a large white bandage over one ear. Paddy didn’t stir. “Can I have a cigarette, Billy?”

“You don’t smoke.”

“Just to gee me along a bit.”

He gave her a disapproving look but reached across his shoulder and handed her one. She lit it and took a deep breath, filling her lungs until her fingers tingled. She felt better, a little elated, and took another little drag for good luck before giving the cigarette back to him.

“Nip that for me, will ye? I’ll not be long.”

“Did it wake ye?”

She opened the door and stepped out into the car park. “Wee bit, aye.”

She stepped carefully across the slippery frosted asphalt and passed the man with the sore ear at the main entrance. Down a drafty beige corridor, she passed through automatic double doors and into the searing white light of the emergency department’s waiting room.

A motley crowd of people were scattered around the seats inside. Some looked miserable and worn, some excited and bright. From a cursory look Paddy couldn’t tell who was sick and who was a chaperone. The woman behind the Plexiglas was a pretty brunette with a Western Isles accent and a taste for gory stories.

“Hi, Marcelli, anything big tonight?”

Marcelli shook her head. “Nothing very much at all, I’m afraid.”

“No gangster action tonight? No stabbings or swordplay or anything?”

“Nope. Sorry. The German’s left.”

Paddy smiled. “The German doing the thesis?”

“Aye. I’m in mourning.” If the German doctor didn’t know that Marcelli fancied him he was either blind or gay or both, Paddy thought. He had been writing a thesis about the sword injuries he witnessed during his time at the Royal, arguing that the blunt heavy swords created injuries that would match those from a medieval battleground.

“How’s work? Keeping busy?”

“Aye, busy enough.”

Marcelli looked at the wipe-clean board behind her head. The morning shift cleaning women washed the board with soapy water so the buildup of blue smudges generally expressed how busy the department had been. The board was almost pristine tonight.