The Dead Hour (25 page)

Paddy struggled to remember what an innocent would do in this situation. She took out her notebook, conscious of her hands, her neck, the way she was moving. The other policeman continued to question the woman and Paddy made a big deal of glancing around the doorway to get the right number and the names on the doorplate. She wrote everything in her notebook, working briskly as if it were a worthwhile story.

George’s pal managed to convince the woman to let them go inside to talk about it and give the neighbors a chance to go to sleep. As he stepped into the house, following the arguing couple, he turned and looked at her, smirking disparagingly. Burns hung back, waiting until the policeman and the couple were out of earshot. He didn’t get the chance to speak.

“You cunt,” Paddy said. She’d never used the word before and felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up at the sound of it.

He coughed a laugh and looked astonished. “Wha?”

“Everyone in Glasgow knows. Billy was told at the same time as a bunch of cabbies outside the death burger van.”

Burns looked flummoxed. “I’ve not said anything.”

She was so angry every muscle in her body was tense and her strangled voice barely audible. “Do you have any idea what this’ll do to me? For the rest of my fucking life I’ll be the stupid bitch who fucked a copper in his car.”

He was insistent and quite calm. “Paddy, I didn’t tell anyone.”

Weeping with rage, she turned and took the stairs on faith, holding onto the sticky banister and slowing down as soon as she was out of sight around the turn. She stopped in the dark close, rubbing her face dry and struggling to breathe in against her contracting ribcage. She could walk back to the office. It would only take an hour and it had been a quiet night anyway; she probably wouldn’t miss any major events so no one need know. She’d take a back road so that Burns wouldn’t pass in his squad car. If he stopped and tried to give her a lift she might punch him. But it wouldn’t be safe if Lafferty had been released and came looking for her. It wouldn’t be hard to find her on the only call of the night.

Stepping out to the street she saw the car parked right in front of the close, Billy watching the entrance hopefully. He saw her and gave a nervous smile and raised his hand. She opened the dented passenger door and fell in.

“’Kay?” he asked, turning in his seat to look at her.

“Nothing happened. ’S dead anyway. Let’s do the hospitals and go back to the office,” she said, dredging up the stock phrases they used each night.

“Okay then,” agreed Billy carefully, seeing how upset she was. “That’s what we’ll do, then.”

He wasn’t just worried about his job. She could tell that he was sorry for losing his temper and sad to see her crying in the street on her own. He tried to look at her a couple of times but she didn’t look back.

Burns’d told everyone. It was only two days ago and everyone in Glasgow knew. He looked her in the eye and lied about it. She would never, ever forgive him. And she would get him back. If she had to wait for years and years and years she’d humiliate him as much as he had her.

They were parked in the darkness outside the Royal Hospital. Apart from a couple of consultants’ discreetly posh cars the car park was empty. Yellow lights blazed in most of the windows of the huge soot-blackened Victorian hospital, and a brittle silver frost hung in the air. Inside the warm car it was snuggle-up bedtime dark. Paddy’s heart rate had slowed so much that she was having trouble remembering why it would be wrong to sleep.

Billy cracked the window and lit his cigarette but Paddy stayed in the backseat. Sundays were always quiet, but the Royal’s emergency room was a good place to pick up stories that missed the police’s attention. Gangsters often traveled across the city if they were stabbed or slashed, sometimes coming as far as ten miles in a taxi, clutching tea towels to their wounds, because the Royal surgeons were reputedly the best in the city.

For the first time Paddy wished peace on the city. She wanted a quick return to the twilight office, to get away from Billy, licking her wounds until home time.

Billy watched her in the mirror. “Ye not going in?”

“Yeah.” She looked across the car park to the hospital door. A man in a thin brown shirt stood outside the door, smoking and hugging himself against the cold air. He had a large white bandage over one ear. Paddy didn’t stir. “Can I have a cigarette, Billy?”

“You don’t smoke.”

“Just to gee me along a bit.”

He gave her a disapproving look but reached across his shoulder and handed her one. She lit it and took a deep breath, filling her lungs until her fingers tingled. She felt better, a little elated, and took another little drag for good luck before giving the cigarette back to him.

“Nip that for me, will ye? I’ll not be long.”

“Did it wake ye?”

She opened the door and stepped out into the car park. “Wee bit, aye.”

She stepped carefully across the slippery frosted asphalt and passed the man with the sore ear at the main entrance. Down a drafty beige corridor, she passed through automatic double doors and into the searing white light of the emergency department’s waiting room.

A motley crowd of people were scattered around the seats inside. Some looked miserable and worn, some excited and bright. From a cursory look Paddy couldn’t tell who was sick and who was a chaperone. The woman behind the Plexiglas was a pretty brunette with a Western Isles accent and a taste for gory stories.

“Hi, Marcelli, anything big tonight?”

Marcelli shook her head. “Nothing very much at all, I’m afraid.”

“No gangster action tonight? No stabbings or swordplay or anything?”

“Nope. Sorry. The German’s left.”

Paddy smiled. “The German doing the thesis?”

“Aye. I’m in mourning.” If the German doctor didn’t know that Marcelli fancied him he was either blind or gay or both, Paddy thought. He had been writing a thesis about the sword injuries he witnessed during his time at the Royal, arguing that the blunt heavy swords created injuries that would match those from a medieval battleground.

“How’s work? Keeping busy?”

“Aye, busy enough.”

Marcelli looked at the wipe-clean board behind her head. The morning shift cleaning women washed the board with soapy water so the buildup of blue smudges generally expressed how busy the department had been. The board was almost pristine tonight.

“It’s all colds and falls tonight, I’m afraid.”

The two women smiled at each other politely, inquired after one another’s families. Marcelli’s husband worked the oil rigs and spent two weeks offshore and two weeks on. She had the content, rested look she always had when he was away. Paddy guessed that they fought a lot when he was home.

She patted the counter and told Marcelli she’d see her tomorrow.

“I’ll see if I can rustle up a gang brawl for ye.”

“Cheers, Marcelli.”

She walked out of the department, through the lobby, and out to the cusp of the dark, dark night.

The sore-eared man was smoking a fresh cigarette at the doorway. Hunched against the cold, he caught her eye and smiled, a little hopefully, mistaking her frank stare for a come-on instead of rudeness born of exhaustion. Paddy glanced away, toward the calls car, and saw the red winking eye of Billy’s cigarette rise in the driver’s window. On the far side of the car a black shadow darted toward the road.

A scorching ball of orange light seared the delicate membrane of her eyes before she had time to blink. Paddy fell backward, tripping on a step, a hand over her eyes as she heard the back of her head crack on the stone step. Lafferty might be coming for her across the car park, he could have the hammer in his hand, the one he used to batter Vhari to death, but Paddy still couldn’t make her eyes open or get up to run away. Blind as a newborn puppy, she curled into a ball and waited for him. She heard the fire in the calls car whoosh and crackle, felt the wet of the frost on the step biting her cheek.

Someone was running toward her, urgent footsteps slapping on linoleum, and a sudden wordless cry. The feet were coming from inside the hospital, and were joined by others, a lot of people, flooding into the car park. Nurses and ambulance crews were running past her to the car. Billy was in the car.

Paddy sat up, holding the wall as she pulled herself onto her feet and stood up on unsteady legs. She could still feel the heat from the fire on her face as she forced her eyes open. Every window in the car was cracked and broken, angry orange flames lapping the roof. The driver’s door lay open and Billy was on the ground, his body obscured by a gathering of medics. Protruding between two sets of legs lay a charred arm, the fingers skinned red, curled into a tight claw.

A shoulder bumped hers and startled her into spinning around. It was the sore-eared man standing inside the door, flattened against one of the cold marble pillars, the bandage on his ear hanging crazily at the side of his head, hinged by white tape.

She grabbed his arm and shook him. “Did you see him? Did you see who it was?”

He shook his head at her, pointing at her lips, asking her to slow down because he couldn’t hear. She pointed out to the blackness and commotion and the burning car, being tackled by porters throwing buckets of sand over it.

“A guy ran out,” he said. “In the shadows, couldn’t see his face. Dressed in dark clothes. Crept up to the car. I didn’t shout, I thought he was playing a joke on his pal in the car. I looked at you and then back. Creeping up to the window. Arm up, threw something in the window. Next thing—” He made the sound of an explosion and staggered back.

“Was he a big guy? Was his head shaved?”

He shrugged. “He looked like a big, bald bastard.”

Paddy sat in the canteen at the top of the Daily News building, watching morning break over the dirty city, blankly eating her way through another chocolate bar. Sugar for shock, that’s what her mum said. That’s why they always made each other sweet tea in films about the war. Sugar for shock.

Her head was thrumming, her eyes kept drying out so much she had to sit with them shut for minutes at a time. She thought she might have a lot of soot in there.

She took another bite. All she could think or care about was Billy. The attacker had mistaken Billy for her, which meant he didn’t know what she looked like. Billy’s wife would be at the hospital now. His wife that he fought with all the time and the son he didn’t like anymore, standing next to him, claiming him.

They were alone in the big canteen; Scary Mary and her helpers wouldn’t be in for another hour and the room was cold and quiet.

“I’m telling you again: it was Bobby Lafferty.”

The three policemen sat in a rough circle around the canteen table, nodding disbelievingly. They had been listening to her patiently for an hour and a bit, she couldn’t be sure how long. Their tea was cold, anyway. They all looked the same to her, a big, square, disbelieving face. She knew perfectly well why they were staying with her, pretending to listen to answers she’d already given them.

“So,” said one, “let’s go through this again: why would a heavy like Bobby Lafferty want to kill you?”

“I’ve told you that already.”

He grunted and looked out of the window. “Lafferty didn’t kill the Bearsden Bird. The guy who did that killed himself. We pulled him out of the river last week. So why would Lafferty come after you?”

“I told you, ask Sullivan.”

“And we told you that we called Sullivan. He doesn’t know what you’re on about either.”

Paddy took another disconsolate bite of chocolate. She couldn’t be bothered chewing. The clump of thick chocolate melted in her mouth, coating her tongue until she moved it and generated some saliva.

Sullivan wasn’t on her side at all. She had begun to doubt him as they stood in the dark room and watched Lafferty being questioned. It wouldn’t take a genius-level IQ for Lafferty to work out that she was the only witness to what had gone on in the Bearsden house, and the note was the only thing he and the good-looking man hadn’t wiped before they left it. Lafferty had been released shortly after she left Partick Marine. Sullivan hadn’t even contacted her to let her know and now he wouldn’t back her up and admit that Lafferty was a danger. She couldn’t go home. If Lafferty had found her at the hospital, he’d find her home address and follow her there.

“What about the ear guy in the hospital car park? He saw someone who fitted the description.”

The officer sighed patiently. “We’ve told you already that we can’t find him.”

She sat up and looked at them. “He was treated in the emergency room for a sore ear. Marcelli always takes a name and address. He waited to talk to the police afterward. He saw the guy who did it and you’re telling me you can’t find him?”

The three officers each evaded her eye in turn.

Paddy felt as if she had been awake since the Middle Ages. “What would you do if you were me?”

No one said anything.

“How long is it until your shift finishes, then? Another twenty minutes?”

They glanced guiltily at each other and one of them smiled.

“So, if you sit here pretending to listen to me for another ten minutes, by the time you get back to the station it’ll be time to clock off?”

The man nearest bristled at the accusation. “Don’t get smart with us, Miss Meehan.”

“Look, Lafferty threw a pint of petrol in on Billy, and I can’t go home until you pick him up. I’m giving you his name. I can get his address if you like—if it would help. Am I not entitled to protection from the police? What if he hurts my family?”

The indignant one blinked slowly. “You’re a crime journalist, Miss Meehan, you’re bound to piss a lot of people off. Bad people.”

“So, it’s just a free-for-all? Does that make me a legitimate target, then? What about Billy? What did he do wrong?”

They were tired too, and so close to the end of their shift it was hardly worth their while engaging with a stroppy bird. One officer sat back, pushing himself away from the table and swinging on two legs of his chair. “I think you know a mate of mine. I heard you’re close friends.” He snickered at the ground.