Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

She was gibbering about last week’s newspaper awards and JT’s prize, when the news came on. The Bearsden murder was the first item. The police had attended a call at the house earlier in the evening. An inquiry was being called to investigate why the officers left Vhari Burnett in the house. Trisha was right: Vhari was from an aristocratic family; the villa had recently been left to her by a grandfather and she had only just moved in. She was an active member of Amnesty International and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

“There,” said Trisha, “you should go and ask about her, get a story. Then they wouldn’t be able to keep you back.”

In a paranoid morning of exaggerated despair, Paddy had confided in her mother her conviction that the editors hated her and wouldn’t print any story she phoned in anyway so it was all pointless. It was really just the tiredness talking but Trisha took it literally. Paddy suspected that Trisha had told some of her lady friends about it: she often asked about the conspiracy and suggested reporting them to the union. Paddy didn’t know how to take back the allegation without making herself look foolish.

“It’s political.” Trisha pointed at the radio. “You wait and see. She knew something important and they killed her. You should question the folk she was in the CND with.”

“CND don’t meet that often. Amnesty do but everyone else’ll think of it first. They’ll be out this morning.”

“Well, go earlier then. Go today. Go just now.”

“I need to sleep, mum.”

“Fine.” Trisha stood up and began to wash her mug without pouring the last bit of tea out.

Con smiled quietly into his mug. Paddy knew she was cheating her mother of a triumph. She finished her tea quickly and sloped upstairs to sleep.

It was like watching the closing credits to an action movie. Every time Paddy came in to work on the night shift she had the feeling that everyone exciting and interesting was floating out of the door. At every desk people were gathering their coats and cigarette packets, turning off lights, looking relieved and happy that it was home time.

An air of damp disappointment clung to the night shift workers. It was so all-pervasive they didn’t even really want to associate with each other.

Paddy kept her flattering coat on as she walked across the floor to the blacked-out office door. The long copyboy bench seemed very low to her now. When she first started at the paper she used to take her place on the bench and run her thumbnail along the grain of the wood, gouging little channels into the soft pulp, and imagine herself seeing the marks in the future, when she had reached the heights of a junior reporter, and remembering her former self. Seeing the marks never gave her the buzz she had expected. They made her feel disappointed and despise her naïveté in hindsight.

Behind the bench a glass cubicle had black venetian blinds covering the windows and door, the plastic turning gray from a decade of being wiped with abrasive solutions, looking as if gray mold was creeping over it at the edges.

The paper’s editor, Farquarson, had big hair. His pomade had worn off during a long day of head holding and his hair had risen like warm white dough. The skin below his eyes was very blue. He had his coat on and was pulling his office door shut just as she caught up with him.

“Boss, can I talk to you?”

“Not again, Meehan.”

“It’s important. And personal.”

Reading her face and seeing that she wouldn’t shut up and piss off, he opened the office door again and flicked on the light, dropping his briefcase and holding out his hand to invite her in.

The messy office charted a long day shift, from the cups abandoned during morning and afternoon editorial meetings to page plans scattered all over the floor. The filing cabinet next to the door had an open bottom drawer and Paddy could see packets of sweets and boxes of biscuits in there. Murray Farquarson had the diet of a housefly: he survived exclusively on sugary foods and alcohol and yet was still rake thin. His hair had turned white over the past few years.

He followed her into the room and pulled the door shut behind them. He didn’t bother walking around the long table that served as his desk but slumped against the electric-crackling venetian blinds, keeping his tired eyes on her shoes.

“Quick.”

“I need a move.”

He rolled his eyes. “For fuck’s sake.”

“Boss, I’m going stone mad-”

Farquarson sagged against the blinds, each slouch articulated by the snap of unhappy plastic. “That’s neither important nor is it personal.”

“Please?”

He sighed at the floor, his head hanging heavily on his limp neck. She knew not to interrupt him. Eventually he spoke. “Meehan, just keep your head down.” He lifted his tired eyes to her and she thought for a moment he was going to confess some awful personal secret. She flinched, blinked, and when her eyes opened again he was looking past her to the door. “Keep on the shift for another wee while, okay, kiddo?”

And then another bizarre and frightening thing happened: he cupped her elbow and gave it a little squeeze. “You’ll be fine.”

In a crumple and snap of blinds he stood up straight and reached for the door. Paddy, rigid with alarm, stood as still as she could. He pulled the door open and the bottom of it hit her hard on the heel. She had to shuffle to the side to let him pass.

“It doesn’t need to be a promotion…” she said.

“Yeah.” He rubbed his eyes. “Bollocks anyway. There was a call from Partick Marine police station. They saw your para about the house call in Bearsden last night. Want you to go in, tell them what you saw. She was pretty, the dead girl. Can’t you think of anything there you could write up? No obvious hook we could spin from?” Farquarson’s bloodshot eyes were sympathetic for a moment, but it passed. “You were the last person to see her alive, I think. Do me a hundred-word description, scene at the house, atmosphere, bookend it with facts. I want it before you go out in the car. Finish it by nine thirty and I’ll tell the night desk to use it as an insert in the coverage. Anything else?”

She shook her head. If she was a male reporter who had come up with nothing from a scene like that Farquarson would have said she was fucking useless. A fucking waste of fucking space.

“Well, piss off and get it done then.”

She turned to go, bumping into Keck from the sports desk. He brushed past her dismissively, snorting at the miserable look in her eyes.

“Hoi,” Farquarson shouted, always looking for an excuse to tick him off, “mind your fucking manners in front of a fellow professional.”

Keck tried to make a face that would simultaneously convey mannerliness to Farquarson and superiority to Paddy, his face quivering between the two. Farquarson raised an eyebrow. Paddy nodded and backed out.

It was eight thirty in the evening, and she had an hour to write one hundred words. She went to the stationery cupboard and made a coffee, checked out the biscuit situation and chose two shortbread fingers that she meant to eat at the desk as she was writing. She found an empty typewriter at the end of the news desk and spooled in three sheets sandwiched around carbon paper.

Still wearing her overcoat, Paddy stared at the angry blank page, eating the buttery biscuits and sipping her coffee, sifting through the incident for what to leave in and what to leave out. If she mentioned the fifty-quid note she’d have to hand it in to the police. They’d get the murderer anyway because Tam and Dan had seen him and it didn’t make sense to hand the note in and let it disappear in a police station when it could disappear into her mother’s pocket and take the weight of worry from her for a while. But the story didn’t make much sense without her and the police having a reason to leave the house. They had to believe the woman would have been safe, and the more Paddy thought about it the clearer it became: it was obvious the woman was in a lot of trouble.