Denise Mina: The Dead Hour

A thin smattering of drinkers were hanging around the bar or sitting at the tables, reading or staring. No one was talking much. Behind the bar, McGrade was cleaning glasses and greeted her with a welcoming nod.

McVie was alone at a small table and Paddy was relieved that Patrick Meehan hadn’t turned up. She stood up straighter and walked over to the table. “Did you get a dizzy?”

“Eh?”

“A disappointment. Did Meehan not show?”

McVie nodded behind her and she turned to see him walking back from the toilet, checking his fly as an afterthought. He was small and dressed in a heavy black overcoat. His skin was acne scarred and yellow and he looked pissed off. He arrived at the table, looking down his nose at Paddy.

“Hiya,” she said.

“You’re just a girl.”

She couldn’t really argue with that. “I am, aye.”

McVie intervened. “This girl’s one of the brightest young journalists in Scotland.”

Patrick Meehan stuck his tongue in his cheek. He looked Paddy over again and put his hand out to her.

Given that he had just come from the lavatory, she didn’t really want to take his hand but she forced herself. He squeezed it a little too hard, letting her know he was strong. His shortness and arrogant demeanor, the russet hair and short legs, suggested that he had never been very attractive to women and she suspected he had the resentment she met all the time from men like that, as if she was responsible for every knockback and slight every woman had ever given him.

“I’m Paddy Meehan too,” she said.

He nodded at McVie. “He said that. You’ve got the same name as me,” he said, picking a stubby cigarette from the packet on the table and lighting it.

“Aye.”

He looked her over. “Meehans from Eastfield? Where are your people from?”

“Donegal, I believe, around Letterkenny.”

“We’re from Derry.”

“Most of the Meehans are, eh?”

“Aye.”

He seemed to trust her more, now that they had established which Irish county their great-grandparents had fled from. “Will we sit?”

“Aye.” She shook herself awake. “Let me get you a drink, Mr. Meehan.”

Appreciative of the courtesy, Meehan pulled a chair out and sat on it. “I’ll have a half and a half.”

Paddy looked at McVie but he frowned, indicating that he’d like to make the meeting as short as possible, or duck out before it finished.

The barman, benign McGrade, smiled as she came toward him. “See you’re interviewing a local notary over there?”

Paddy smiled and ordered. “I think I’ve been pipped at the post by just about everyone else in the paper business.”

He put the large whisky and half of beer down next to each other. “Ah, there’s always something new to say, isn’t there?” he said, letting her know that even he knew the Meehan story was dead in the water.

The round cost her more than four pounds.

They sat and smoked and Meehan talked, telling his story. He started when he was arrested for the Ross murder. She didn’t want to hear about that but he wanted to talk about it.

“I was particularly interested in your time behind the iron curtain,” Paddy said at last.

He gave her a slow, warning blink. “As I was saying, the lineup was a fix.” And he continued from where he’d left off. By the time of the trial McVie got up and left, leaving Paddy to listen to the end.

During her painfully earnest childhood Paddy had read and reread every article and book ever printed about the Meehan case. She recognized some of his phrases from articles. He’d clearly given the speech often before. His eyes clouded over, and at times, even he didn’t seem very interested.

Finally he came to a stop and they looked at each other. His beer glass was half-empty. It would have been polite to offer him another but she didn’t have enough money.

Paddy explained that she wanted to write a book about the case, not focusing on the Rachel Ross murder, but on his time as a spy, the year and a half behind the iron curtain and his part in the Blake escape.

“I told them how to do it-”

“I know.”

He gave her a slow blink, a curl in his lip that meant it would be a bad idea to interrupt again.

“Yeah, I told them the way to get the radio in to him. You knew that, did ye?”

He was a man used to being listened to and Paddy spent her professional life appeasing men like that. “I did, kind of, but I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me again.”

He had drunk half his beer and taken a sip from his whisky. He picked up the shot glass and dropped it into the beer glass. It was a perfectly measured maneuver: the beer fizzed a little, rising to the brim of the glass and bulging over, threatening to spill but contracting back down again.

“Old man’s drink,” said Paddy thoughtlessly.

Meehan liked that. He smiled at her. “I was in a prison in East Germany. They wanted me to tell them how they could get a two-way radio in to a prisoner and I thought about it, mulled it over in my mind. I’d drawn them maps of every prison I knew. It’s easier to get about in a prison than most people think, you know. A lot of screws are corrupt, you can move around all you like. But the problem is high-security prisoners, and that’s what they were talking about.

“I told them: send a radio to the high-security prisoner. Just a normal radio, nothing to attract attention.” He leaned across the table. “Get a radio that looks the same in to a low-security prisoner but make it a two-way radio. They wouldn’t check it, he’s low-security, see? Do you see?” He waited, making her say yes. “D’you know what a pass man is? A pass man is someone the screws trust, a prisoner who’s an inside man.” She thought of Tam Gourlay. “Get two radios into the prison, then swap them. That was my idea. Get the pass man to swap them, see what I mean?”

She did see. She understood perfectly.

“When George Blake escaped from prison what d’ye think they found in his cell?”

Paddy nodded. “A two-way radio.”

“A two-way radio,” Meehan agreed, “hidden in a tranny. And they’d checked the tranny’s insides the week before.”

Paddy stood up abruptly. “I’m sorry. I have to go. I need to call someone.” She shuffled out from behind the table.

Meehan looked up at her, offended.

“Mr. Meehan, I want to write a book about you.”

“There’s been enough books about me.”

“No, not a trashy book about the Ross murder, just a book about you. About the Communist Party and the agent provocateur who sent you to East Germany and the life of a professional criminal in the fifties. A good book. Will you let me buy you lunch one day next week and we can talk about it?”

He hunched his shoulders. “But I’m here now.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve got to make a call.”

Meehan looked at his half-empty glass. “I don’t know about that. Maybe I’ll write my own book.”

“I’ll phone ye.” Paddy pulled her coat on as she opened the door to the street. “I’ll call ye.”

She took her place at the news desk and lifted the phone, calling McCloud at the Marine.

“Cloudy? I need to talk to Colum McDaid.”

“Ah, wee Meehan, is it yourself?”

“Aye, it is. Any chance I could get his home number?”

“McDaid’s? Here, he’s not your boyfriend, is he?” McCloud laughed at the thought until someone came to the desk to ask him for something. “Aye, aye. Not now, no. Hello? Meehan?”

“Still here.” She had her pen poised above the page.

McCloud gave her the number, a local Partick number.

She called it and got Mrs. McDaid. “Aye, he’s here, dear.”