The Dead Hour (24 page)

“Aye.” Lafferty stood up slowly, knuckles on the table, and craned his neck toward the mirror. “Sullivan. Cunt.”

The two officers were on their feet, hands out and ready to stop him if he went for the mirror, but Lafferty lowered himself back down to his seat.

Paddy looked at the man standing next to her. The dull light through the mirror caught the beads of sweat on Sullivan’s forehead. He glanced at her, tipping his head back, acknowledging how frightened he was and apologizing. He clasped his hands in front of him, as if protecting his genitals, shifted his weight uncomfortably, and turned back to watch the mirror.

Paddy looked at Lafferty and imagined him in Vhari Burnett’s living room. She had been a slim woman, seemed slight when Paddy glimpsed her. Compared to Lafferty she’d seemed no more than an ethereal strip of white light.

“I wiz in the Lucky Black Snooker Club in the Calton until seven in the morning. Jamesie Tobar’ll stand for me. Anyone else who was there’ll stand for me. I got home at eight in the morning and went tae my bed. The missus’ll tell ye.” He glanced at the mirror again. “The fuck else d’yeez want?”

The officers sitting at the table bristled at this news, pulling their notepads toward them and starting to take notes, asking him to go over it again and again in detail, giving them times only an obsessive with a new watch would know.

“We’ve got your prints on an object from the house.” The officer watched him carefully. “On the night she died.”

Paddy saw Lafferty’s mask slipping as he thought about it. His lips twitched. “Object? What’s that, then?”

“It puts you there that night, Lafferty.”

“What is it? Anyway, it can’t,” he said confidently. “I was at the Lucky Black.”

Sullivan’s hand landed gently on the small of her back and made her jump. He nodded to the door and she followed him back out into the dim corridor outside and down a longer passage. Neither of them spoke until they reached the stairs.

Sullivan cleared his throat uncomfortably. “If his alibi pans out we’ll have to release him in a couple of hours.”

“He might guess it was the fifty quid his prints were found on. He’ll come after me if he does. He knows where I work and everything, for God’s sake. What the hell did they tell him that for?”

Sullivan avoided her eye. “Sometimes they have to go in heavy. He’s much more likely to think it’s something in the house.”

“If they wiped the house clean of prints they were being pretty careful. It wasn’t a fight in a pub, they’re going to remember what they did and didn’t do.”

Sullivan nodded slowly. “Well, we have to confront him with the evidence. If he doesn’t find out now he will later. It’s better to spring it on him and try to get something out of it.”

They walked down a flight of stairs and Paddy stopped him on the no-man’s-land of a landing. “Sullivan, what’s the story with the cops at the front door of Burnett’s house? Why is the investigation being steered in completely the wrong direction?”

“I have bosses. I don’t make those decisions.” Sullivan looked down the staircase, sad and a little broken; he took the banister to steady himself. “You had to be a journalist, didn’t ye? Couldn’t be a Meals-on-Wheels or Avon lady.”

“You know he’s not the guy I spoke to at Burnett’s front door, he’s not the well-spoken guy.”

“I know. We found other prints on the note. Don’t worry. We’ll follow Lafferty, work out who he’s with, and that’ll give us the boss’s name.”

“But if the cops at the door won’t tell us who they were speaking to, all that ties Lafferty to the scene is me and the note. He’ll come for me.”

“You’ll be safe enough. I’ve told no one about the note and neither’s McDaid.”

Paddy wasn’t convinced but Sullivan was and she found this comforting.

“Did you arrest Lafferty or did he come in on his own?”

Sullivan looked suspicious. “Why?”

Paddy shrugged. “Just asking. I don’t know how these things work.”

“We called his solicitor and he drove in himself. We’d have arrested him if he hadn’t. He’d know that.”

As she listened she remembered Sullivan sweating in the dark, his paunch hanging over his belt buckle, his eyes afraid of the animal in front of him. “I don’t usually swear, Detective Sullivan, but I’ll say this: that Lafferty is one fucking scary bastard.”

Sullivan cuffed her playfully over the back of the head, half-smiling at the gesture of sympathy. “Language, lady.” He dropped a foot onto the step in front of him and led her down the empty staircase to the front desk.

Paddy followed him down, feeling the damp trail from his hand on the banister, and realized that he probably had a daughter her age and that this was why he was nice to her.

“Just you leave it to us,” he told her. “You’re too pretty to ask so many questions.”

She smiled back and watched him open the door to the waiting room, holding the door and ushering her through ahead of him. He definitely had a daughter her age. And she probably half-hated him too.

Paddy hadn’t gone straight back to the calls car after Sullivan saw her to the door. She’d headed across the road toward Billy until she saw the yellow slice of light on the pavement in front of her fold into black and knew the door was shut behind her. Then she turned and headed to the car park behind Govan police station. Fords and Minis and Rovers, two Mini Metros, even a Honda station wagon and an old brown Morris Minor but no BMW. Whatever Lafferty came in, it wasn’t one of the cars from the back of Burnett’s house on the night she was killed.

Paddy sat back in the car and watched the lights outside the window, thinking about the person who owned the BMW. If his alibi panned out they’d have to release Lafferty and whoever had been at the house that night would probably die. She thought of Lafferty’s neck again, of the brute force and all the harm and misery reflected in his eyes and she could have cried. Vhari Burnett and Mark Thillingly’s deaths weren’t accidents. These were deliberate. People were choosing to do these things to each other.

It was a quiet night in the city. Sunday-night trouble was always nasty, personal. A raft of domestic incidents followed the pubs shutting early as weekend drinking drew to a reluctant close, leaving people with nowhere left to go but home and no one left to fight with but family.

Billy was furious about the Daily News layoffs. He was even angrier about the fact that no one was doing anything about it. It wouldn’t have happened in the old days, no way, they never used to let the management dictate terms like that. Letting them give Farquarson his books was the first mistake. They should all have stood up for the guy, all gone out for him.

Paddy thought Billy was wrong. The sales figures were dropping faster than a bag of bricks. If they didn’t make changes the paper would go under. She had other things on her mind anyway and just nodded vaguely when he looked to her for a reaction.

The night was so quiet that they stopped early at the death burger van for their dinner. The lateness of the hour and deplorable standards of hygiene made the food at the van ultra-delicious. Nick, the mesmerizingly fat server, used the tiny handwashing sink to store a trash bag of buttered rolls.

Despite his enormous girth, Nick negotiated the tiny space with balletic grace. His dance began by the sink: he whipped a prebuttered roll from the bag, sauced it, and did a smooth half turn to the handle of the fryer, lifting and emptying the basket’s contents onto the drip tray and pinching the burger or chips or sausage into the mouth of the bun. The only thing he didn’t deep fry was the mugs of tea and coffee. Everything else, from fish sticks to frozen pizzas, went into the bubbling mess, creating an aromatic aura that radiated fifty yards downhill to the main road.

The van sat on a steep ramp that led from a busy thoroughfare along an empty side road leading to the park where taxis could park easily. When Billy and Paddy stopped, around two or three in the morning, only motorized night-shift people gathered, nodding hellos, enjoying the city’s calmest hours.

Usually Paddy’d get the burgers for herself and Billy, no F-plan option here, and climb back in the car. They’d sit with the radio turned down a notch, sometimes in a cozy silence, sometimes sharing speculative gossip about people at work that they didn’t know very well. Tonight Billy was out of the car by the time she turned back, chatting to a cabbie he knew, passing on the news of the layoffs, no doubt, glad of a fresh audience to vent his indignation to. Pleased she wouldn’t have to deal with him, Paddy took his burger over to him and went back to the car alone, relishing the prospect of a quiet half hour.

She was licking the burger grease from her fingers, wishing she could have another one, when the police car drew up. For a moment her throat tightened until a door opened and the cab light went on, showing that the two uniformed officers inside were no one that she knew and certainly not George Burns.

She watched them swaggering over to the death burger van, looking around at the parked cabs, claiming the territory like cowboys entering a saloon. They accepted free rolls from Nick, toasting him before wandering over to join Billy and the cabbie. A couple of other cabbies gravitated over to them to find out what was happening in the city tonight, where the accidents were and which routes to avoid. She noticed them glancing over to her, sitting alone in the car.

Sullivan had seemed certain that Lafferty wouldn’t connect her to the fingerprints but she wasn’t sure. The thought of his thick neck and mean eyes turned her stomach.

The group of men around the burger van broke up with a bit of shoulder slapping and a final joke, and Billy walked slowly over to the car. A cabbie sounded his horn and pulled his cab a full circle, driving off, and Billy raised his hand in a slow wave.

She had never heard a door slam quite as loudly. The sudden change in air pressure made her eardrums smart. Billy stopped for a moment, sighed at his hands on his knees before turning the key to start the engine and yanking the car in a fast, tight turn, throwing Paddy against the side of the cab, knocking her forehead on the cold window.

She shouted at him over the noise of the radio but Billy sped up, taking the junction with hardly a glance either way. Paddy peeled herself off the backseat and sat forward, slapping his shoulder. “Fucking calm down!”

Billy sped the car up and ran a red light, racing through a junction to the motorway. It would have been busy during the day and Paddy could imagine cars plowing into her side. She reached forward through the seats and grabbed the hand brake, her thumb hovering over the button.

“Stop this car or I will.”

Abruptly, Billy stepped on the brakes. Good driver that he was, he tapped the pedal three times. Paddy was thrown forward, her shoulder jammed between the two front seats. The engine spluttered to a stop. Behind them in the deserted road, the cab who had been at the death burger van hooted irritably and drove around them.

Paddy touched Billy’s hair at the back. “What happened there?”

He shook his head and looked at her in the mirror, a deep hurt vivid in his eyes.

“Billy?”

“You stupid cow.” He pressed his lips together and for a moment she thought he was going to cry. “You fucked a cop. In his own car.” He reached forward and restarted the stalled engine. “You stupid cow.”

He drove off at ten miles an hour through the bleak, dead city.

An hour later Paddy was still chilled and silent, sitting in the back of the car, pressed tight up against the backseat as if Billy was doing ninety. She nodded dumbly when Billy asked her if she wanted to follow up the only radio call they’d had so far, a minor domestic in Govanhill. They drew up behind two panda cars, badly parked at angles from the pavement as if something enormously important was going on.

When Paddy got out and shut the door, she paused by the side of the car to pull her scarf up around her neck. Billy didn’t lift his packet of smokes off the dashboard like he usually did. He sat looking at her, straight at her, hurt and angry and disgusted. Paddy bent her knees and looked in at him, gesturing for him to unwind his window. He carried on staring at her, watching as the bitter wind blew her hair hard against her head and pinched her cheeks.

She took a step back down the body of the car, opened the passenger door, and shouted in at him, “You mind your own fucking business, you ugly prick.”

Billy started the car before she’d pulled back, driving along the road for fifty yards with the passenger door swinging wildly. He stopped, threw one foot into the street, shut the passenger door, and reversed toward her, slowing as he came past her, to show that he was in control. Paddy lifted her leg and kicked the passing car with the heel of her foot as hard as she could, pulling herself off balance and staggering over to the side. She left a heel-shaped dent in the door. Billy sped off.

They’d sack him for leaving her there. They hadn’t even done the city center hospital calls round yet. She’d have to cover for him by getting a taxi back to the office and she wouldn’t be able to claim the money back or Ramage would find out what had happened.

Furious, she entered the damp of the green close. It was dark inside; the lights were out on the lower landings and only deflected light from higher up in the echoing stairs tempered the shadows. Following the sound of voices, she climbed up to the second landing. A drunk woman was protesting, drawling, “Nah, nah, nah,” over everyone who tried to speak to her. Two policemen were trying to calm a man who was saying that she had said this and he’d said that and then she went like this and he was like that: what would you do, pal? Eh? With a woman like that. What would you do?

His bottom lip was bloody and made her think of Vhari Burnett. Next to him, hanging on the door frame and keeping them all out of the flat, was a skinny woman in stonewashed jeans and a lemon sweater that had been stretched by a yank to her neck and hung off one bony shoulder.

The policemen looked up as Paddy climbed the stairs. It was George Burns and his partner. His eyes smiled spontaneously, a warm, loving grin, but he looked away immediately. He was wearing his wedding ring.