Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

He nodded. And nodded and nodded. She knew him far too well to think it meant nothing. “What?”

“What ‘what’?”

“Why did you nod so much then?”

A pained panic in his eye told her something was wrong. She took a horrified breath and sat forward. “Sean, tell me you passed your test.”

He nodded and nodded again but she knew he was lying.

“Sean, I put you up for this job. If you got it fraudulently I’ll get in trouble.”

“Well, I will pass it now, won’t I? With all this great practice.”

“For Christ’s sake, we’re spending every night chasing police cars. You could lose the license before you get it.”

He looked at her in the mirror. “Even if I had passed, the license wouldn’t come through for months. If I get caught I’ll say you knew nothing about it, okay?”

Paddy didn’t answer. Sean was prepared to get married at seventeen to please his mum. He was a prefect all the way through school. He attended chapel on every Holy Day of Obligation. Breaking the law to get a job was the most audacious thing she’d ever known him to do. She looked at him with renewed interest.

“Okay?” he said again.

She nodded. “Okay,” and watched the back of his head. By now even the emergency rooms would be empty. “Let’s drive up to Killearn.”

Radio reception gradually died as they left the city behind, the pip and crackle of calls reducing to a soft, comforting buzz. Rich yellow moonlight played on sparkling frost, coating the tilled muddy fields, and jagged skeletons of deciduous bushes lined the dark road.

This was rich countryside, soft hills dotted with gentle copses of old trees, with picturesque villages strung along the traditional drovers’ road that the highland cattlemen had used for centuries to bring their stock down to the city. The population was growing, the tiny villages spreading into farmland on their outskirts with big new houses built by golfers posing as country folk.

On the approach to Killearn they passed houses set back from the road, new and old, sitting in big patches of lawn and elaborate ornamental gardens, some with boats parked in the driveway, most with big cars.

It was four in the morning, everyone was asleep, and the alert watchfulness that usually hangs over wealthy areas was absent: no dog barked, no expensive cars slowed at the passing places, drivers peering carefully into their cheap car, noting the faces of strangers who were hanging around and might cause trouble.

The driveway to Huntly Lodge looked like nothing at all, a small break in the bushes with a run-down gate, algae-smeared and rotting, held shut with a shiny new chain and a padlock.

Paddy told Sean to pull off the road, keep the lights off, and wait for her.

“Where are you going? I’ll come with you.”

“No,” she said. “I’m just going for a look at something. You wait here.”

She wasn’t dressed for it. She’d been wearing the same pencil skirt since Sunday and her sweater was getting distinctly stale. The pencil skirt was too narrow for climbing but she had her leather on and hiked the skirt up to her hips before clambering over the gate. At the top, when one leg was over, the unsteady gate shifted in the mud below and she felt herself falling backward headfirst. She threw her weight forward and caught her tights on the rough wood, ripping them at the knee. Thick woolly tights cost a tenner, and she cursed Paul Neilson as she climbed down the other side. Her knee was bleeding lightly through the scratch.

She limped along the mud road, pulling her skirt down, following the high ground of a deep rut where heavy cars had passed in and out. The trees closed in behind and over, shifting threateningly in the light wind. Paddy walked slowly, letting her eyes adjust to the dark, rubbing her knee and feeling sorry for herself.

When she turned the corner and saw the huge house she stepped nervously back into the bushes. Someone was very rich.

The house was new and vast, an ill-considered barn of a place with an inappropriately small front door and windows that would have been the right size for a semidetached house. An attempt had been made at dignifying the door by flanking it with plaster lions, but they were too small and only emphasized the cheap look. To the left, built as an extension of the house, was a three-door garage.

Keeping to the bushes, Paddy skirted around to the side, stepping through mud carpeted in dead leaves. The ground was soft under her feet, noisily sucking the rubber soles of her pixie boots. Hoping there wasn’t a dog in the house, she picked her way carefully, stepping on tiptoes, keeping as quiet as possible.

The window at the side of the garage was too high for her to look through properly. She could see the inside of the sloping roof and three skylights in a row, one over each section, but couldn’t see down to the cars.

She glanced around for something to stand on but the narrow lane was tidy. Creeping around to the back of the house, she saw a large gray concrete base with a glass conservatory perched on it, plonked in the middle of a large sloping lawn. Moonlight shimmering on the underside of the glass told her that it housed a swimming pool. It was not a routinely inhabited back garden: there were no old lawnmowers or toys abandoned by the back wall, no boxes left over from plants or seed, not even a broken washing machine like the Meehans had in theirs. There was nothing for her to stand on.

She skirted back around to the garage window again and, checking the ground beneath the window, jumped several times, piecing together the layout and content of the garage from what she could glimpse. There were only two cars in the three-car garage, a big one and a small one, exactly the shape and size of the BMWs she had seen outside Vhari Burnett’s house.

A sudden rustle in the bushes made her think of Lafferty. She turned and hurried back down the drive, reckless of noise, pulling her skirt up over her waist, and climbed quickly back over the gate. She caught her breath when she saw Sean still parked where she had left him, speeding up as she approached the car. She felt so relieved as she climbed back into the warm car that she almost slammed the door on the frightening night but remembered herself and stopped, shutting it quietly.

“Let’s go.”

“Why have you taken your skirt off?”

“Let’s go, Sean, and leave the lights off.”

Larry Gray-Lips, the night editor, was looking at her regretfully. “Meehan, you’ve to wait on.”

Paddy was standing by the pigeonholes with one arm in her leather and her scarf around her neck. “Why?”

He flapped a yellow memo sheet at her. “Got this last night after you went out: Ramage wants to see you when he gets in.”

Her last vestige of courage left her. Knox had told Shug about the fifty quid. Ramage was going to sack her.

Larry and Paddy had never liked each other but he saw how hard she was hit by the news and reached out to her, then thought better of it and withdrew. “Might not be that.”

She thought of her mother and covered her face with her hand as frustration welled up in her. “I’m the only one working.”

“Aye, well.” Alarmed by the display of emotion, Larry moved away sharpish. “Sorry.”

She kept one arm in her coat and slid into a chair by the door. Shug fucking Grant. Years she had given to this job, years of waiting for it to get better and now it had come to nothing. She’d never wanted to do anything else. She didn’t have the exam results to go to university. All she could see in her future was an infinity of sitting in the damp garage at home, staring at an aching blank page. She felt so defeated she couldn’t even face walking across to the tea room to make a coffee or get some biscuits from the tin.