Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

The great bull of a man slid to his knees and toppled sideways against the leg of the table, snapping it as his chest fell against it. He reached out a big hand to steady himself and found nothing but air. He landed on his face.

Sean looked down at Lafferty’s still back and over at Kate curled into a small ball by the sink. “Fucking hell, Paddy, I’m due more than two twenty an hour for this.”

Kate’s broken leg twitched, making them both startle. She was trying to speak.

Paddy rushed over to her side. “It’s all right. You’re safe now, Kate.”

Her curly blond hair was stuck to her face. She was just like Vhari apart from her nose. It looked as if it had been crushed with a flatiron. She was mumbling, desperate to be heard. Paddy put her ear to Kate’s mouth but it was hard to make out the words because her voice was so faint and nasal.

“Darling,” she said, “lovely.”

“Lovely?” repeated Paddy, puzzled and wondering if she had heard right.

“To see you, darling. Lovely. I can hear you, darling.”

Kate’s lips slid back; her front teeth were missing, her mouth hinged with sticky blood. Her breath smelled foul.

Her lips parted and Paddy heard what she thought was a death rattle, a gurgle at the back of the throat. Kate was laughing.

The hall stand had a shallow seat on it for Edwardian ladies and gentlemen to sit on while they pulled galoshes and riding boots on and off. It was wide enough for any single bottom, however prosperous, but Paddy and Sean were squashed in side by side, thigh pressing hard against thigh. Paddy was glad of the heat. The police insisted on keeping the front door wide open to the cold night, and frost was settling on the rug.

Ambulance men worked on Kate in the kitchen. Paddy could hear her gurgling and laughing and groaning as the paramedics expressed concern and then bewilderment. They didn’t know what she was laughing about, either. There was nothing for her to laugh about, that leg was a hell of a mess, hell of a mess.

When the police arrived in response to Sean’s call from the phone in the hallway they assumed that Lafferty was the householder and screamed at Paddy and Sean for a bit, putting handcuffs on them and then taking them off after the radio confirmed that Paddy did indeed fit the description of a News journalist and that she should be in the car they found parked around the corner.

Lafferty was dead. There was no bleeding that they could see, no violent spills of guts or anything that made Paddy feel it was real. He had died of a massive bleed into his brain where the saucepan had hit him.

They carried him past her with a sheet over his face but she didn’t feel anything but relief that he hadn’t killed Sean. She thought of poor Mark Thillingly handing over Vhari’s new address after a minor scuffle. She would have stood on the bridge as well if Sean had died because of her. She wouldn’t have jumped, but she would have stood there.

The police officers were gathered by their cars, one of them taking charge of the radio while three others stood in a semicircle around the open doors, rubbing cold hands together, listening bright-eyed to the familiar buzz and crackle of the radio. One of them was still suspicious and scowled in at Sean and Paddy.

“You’re engaged,” Paddy said flatly.

Sean seemed startled but nodded. “Aye.”

“Congratulations.” She held her hand out at an awkward angle for him to shake. He took it and pumped once. “You’ll be happy.” She meant it well but it sounded like an order rather than a wish.

“Maybe.”

Two uniformed policemen came to the front door and gestured for them to follow. “We’ll take your car,” said one, leading them past the waiting police cars.

“Are they not coming with us? Why are we going in our car?”

The policeman waited until they were out of earshot and on the dark road before he spoke. “They’ve found another body out the back. A man. He was stabbed in the eye. They reckon the bird killed him.”

“Why do they think that?”

He shrugged. “It’s her house, isn’t it? They figure someone else came for her and she popped him.”

They took the keys from Sean and made the two of them sit in the back, even though they hadn’t done anything wrong. Sean asked them to pump up the heating and turn the fan on and they drove away from the house in a sweltering wave of warmth, rubbing their cold fingers back to life and drying their noses.

The sun was coming up, climbing low over the ancient wind-warped trees on the hillside as they drove back down the road they had come. They passed a few other cars on the road, the police driver refusing to stop in passing places, driving as arrogantly as if he was in a police car and had the right.

They passed from the wood into farming land and looked at each other when they realized where the car was headed. They were back on the road to Huntly Lodge.

The lichen-stained gate was open, shoved back against a hedge. Judging from the depth of the ruts in the muddy entrance a lot of cars had been up the small lane since they passed it earlier.

The place looked different in thin morning light. The woods around the drive weren’t as dense as they had seemed in the dark. Paddy could see through them to the mild slopes of the fields beyond. They turned the corner to the house and Paddy saw Sullivan standing by one of the three cars parked outside, wearing a thick coat and gray woolly police-issue gloves. He looked up at her, a broad, slow smile breaking over his face.

The police driver slowed to a stop and Sullivan padded over to the car.

“I’ll take them from here, Kevin.”

The two policemen got out of the calls car and went over to join their uniformed pals.

Sullivan opened the passenger door next to Paddy and crouched down. His knees objected to the reckless gesture by clicking loudly but Sullivan pretended not to notice.

“You’ve had quite a night.” His glance flickered over to Sean.

“This is my driver, Sean Ogilvy.”

The two men made a big deal of respectfully shaking hands across her face. “Good job you were there, young man.”

“It was me that hit him,” said Paddy indignantly.

Sullivan pointed at her but spoke to Sean. “Greedy for glory,” he said, and she could see he was impressed without being able to say it to her face.

She slapped his hand away. “Did you arrest Neilson?”

“Can’t. We’ve got nothing on him. No witnesses tying him to Lafferty or the house on Loch Lomond or to the Bearsden Bird’s house.”

“Well, you’ve got me, I saw him at Vhari’s door.”

Sullivan nodded and grinned. “And there are prints on the note. If we only had an eyewitness that wouldn’t be enough, we need corroboration, and we haven’t his prints on file. It’s only because you called this in that we can bring him in for questioning and take his prints. That’ll give us a comparison.”

“What about Gourlay and McGregor? No way they’ll corroborate seeing him there?”

Sullivan sighed and looked at his feet. “I think we both know the answer to that one, don’t we?”

She wondered about the wisdom of mentioning Knox. If Sullivan was this cagey about fingering two officers of lower rank he wouldn’t want to know about his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. But she had to try. “Look, we saw Lafferty bringing Kate Burnett out of a house in Milngavie; that’s how we picked him up in the first place.”

Sullivan prompted her on with a head nod.

“ Fifteen Ornan Avenue, do you know it?”

Sullivan’s neck stiffened so suddenly that his head wobbled a little. He looked as if his kidneys had burst but he was too polite to say anything.