Denise Mina: The Dead Hour

“Yeah, yeah.” He clasped his hands in front of himself and gave a luxurious stretch, smiling up at her standing in the doorway, his eyes puffy with sleep, his lashes pressed this way and that by the pillow.

She felt a burst of righteous anger. Both she and his mother were working hard at thankless jobs and cooking and caring for him. She knew his brothers gave him money on the fly as well, two quid here, a packet of cigarettes there. One of them had bought him a season ticket to Celtic Park so that they could all go together. Paddy came straight over from work every two weeks to make sure he got up and went to claim his Supplementary Benefit. He couldn’t even do that himself.

“You’re a lazy bastard. You want to get on your bike and look for work.”

They locked eyes and grinned at each other across the soft darkness of the bedroom, a look that lingered too long. Ambushed by the sudden moment of tender connection, their smiles slid gently into awkward until Sean stretched his arms behind his head and broke it off. “Anyway, milk and five sugars, love.”

“Fuck you.” It was a little too angry for a play fight and he was surprised into looking at her. She wasn’t angry at Sean, she was angry at herself for eating the porridge and then going back for more porridge with more honey and then standing, watching old ladies with string grocery bags passing by the kitchen window, picking at the papery skirt of dried porridge around the rim of the pot, eating it and wondering why she was doing it. It didn’t taste of anything, it didn’t even have a pleasant texture. But while she was eating all she thought about was eating. She didn’t worry about work or her family or her weight. Even unpleasant food made her feel happy. Except cottage cheese with pineapple. She could hardly look at it now, after a reckless weeklong attempt to eat nothing else.

Sean kept her eye and rolled away from her, farting lightly in her general direction. She tried not to smile.

“Saw this in the hall.” She held up the Callum Ogilvy pamphlet.

“Yeah, a woman took one from Elaine’s salon yesterday,” he said, propping himself up on an elbow. “She’s a reporter from the Reformer , said she was interested. It could be the start of something.”

Paddy grunted. The RutherglenReformer was an advertising paper. They covered local swimming galas and wheelie bin controversies. They wouldn’t touch a story like Callum’s but Sean was trying to worry her, make her write about his campaign for the Daily News before someone else scooped the story.

Callum was eleven when he and another boy were convicted of killing a three-year-old they had taken from outside his front door. Looking back it seemed bizarre that Paddy alone was convinced that there must have been an adult hand in the murder. The rest of the city settled happily on the two boys as lone culprits.

Paddy had found the man behind the killing, she still had the mental scars to prove it, but even she knew that Callum had killed the wee boy. He might have been driven to the spot and terrorized into doing it, but Callum Ogilvy was still guilty. He had blood on him from the baby, his hair was found at the scene, and Callum had more or less confessed.

Only Sean wouldn’t accept it. Callum’s innocence had become an article of faith with him and she thought he had half convinced Callum now too. The Ogilvys had abandoned the wee cousin to his fate once, leaving him to be raised by an unstable mother, and Sean wasn’t going to betray him again. The adamancy of his conviction and the sincerity with which he wrote letter after letter to MPs and journalists and anyone who might be able to help was starting to have an impact.

“Sean,” she said with forced patience, “there’s no new evidence-”

“The old evidence could be made up.”

“Mrs. Thatcher could be an evil robot but she isn’t. Just because something’s plausible doesn’t make it possible.”

They looked at each other again. All it would take, she thought, was for one of the animals at work to see a career boost in the story and Sean would be eaten alive.

“You’d be better off dropping it. No one wants to keep this story going but you.”

“Pad,” he used the fond diminutive of her nickname but sounded serious, “it’s not just a story to me. I won’t side with the world against that wee guy. I’m all he’s got.”

“Couldn’t you be all he’s got and still accept that he did it? Does he have to be innocent for you to like him? He was ten years old when he did it, who knows anything at ten?”

“Don’t start that.”

Resigned, Paddy nodded. “Come on anyway, get up.”

Sean stretched back. “Put the kettle on, eh? And a couple of slices.”

“ Playschool ’s on in a minute.” She backed out of the room and hesitated at the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. She had come here straight from a night shift but she drew the line at cooking his breakfast. She chose the living room door, fell onto the settee, and looked around the room.

The Ogilvys were good little soldiers of the church, just like her own family. Their furniture was nice enough, built to be hard wearing but not to look good or feel modern. All the pictures on the walls were either religious or sacrament-related triumphs of the various family members: Sean’s parents at their silver wedding anniversary, the ordination of a distant cousin, one brother’s small wedding to a pretty girl from Hamilton and the subsequent christenings of their four children, all outside the same ugly little chapel during different seasons. Paddy and Sean had been engaged for two of the children’s christenings and she was pictured in the family group, although, in her only expression of annoyance at Paddy for breaking it off, Mimi had framed one of them so that she was sliced in half by the edge of the frame.

Paddy took a copy of the Daily News out of her pale leather backpack, frowning heavily to stop herself grinning at the second page. Her insert was printed there: police were called to a party at 173 Drymen Road, Bearsden, after neighbors complained of the noise. A woman was found to be injured but police made no arrests. It was her first piece of copy in four night shifts.

Putting down the paper, she listened for noises from the hall. Nothing.

“Sean,” she shouted, irritated, “they won’t let you off with it anymore.”

“I’m eating a fry-up in the shower.”

She could tell by his voice that he was still lying down. If he was late again they wouldn’t process his giro check until later in the afternoon, which meant the check would arrive in three days instead of two. They did it to punish latecomers and Mimi needed the money.

“Your mum’s behind on all her catalogs. Mr. McKay’ll come and repo all your underpants.”

She heard the clip-clop of high heels in the close and a key rasping into the front door. She hoped it was Mimi but knew it wasn’t. Guilty, as if she had been caught skiving school, she tucked her hands between her knees and sat up straight on the settee.

Elaine McCarron stepped into the hallway, mac on over her blue work pinny, smiling to herself. Elaine had been two years below them at school, slim, slight, and fine featured. She hated Paddy but was too dainty to ask Sean to stop hanging about with his ex the whole time. A junior hairdresser, she worked hard on her feet all during the long afternoons that Paddy and Sean spent watching telly or wandering around Woolworth’s eating pick and mix and playing with the toys.

Paddy let herself be known by a stage cough. Elaine spun, infuriated, and Paddy tried a smile.

“I wouldn’t have come,” she whispered, “only Mimi asked me.”

Elaine pursed her lips hard, draining the blood from them, and looked away to Sean’s bedroom door. She pulled her pinny straight, composing herself before knocking prettily.