The Dead Hour (32 page)

“Why? Has Kate done something illegal?” He didn’t answer. “I’ll protect her as much as I can, Bernie, but you need to give me something to go on, a name or a place or something, please? For Vhari.” Bernie shook his head. “For Mark?”

He drew in a deep breath and looked around the garage. “I don’t even know who he is but he’s important.” He worked his fingernail into the seam of his chair. “It’s Knox. Look for someone called Knox.”

The clippings library was a pocket of calm order in the chaos of the newspaper. Helen, the chief librarian, dressed like a real librarian would, in tweed pencil skirts and jerseys. Her glasses hung on a red beaded chain around her neck. Paddy had never liked her when she was a copyboy but Helen seemed to have mellowed since Paddy got her promotion. Paddy sometimes dropped in for a chat when she was feeling beleaguered, a fellow female in the middle of a gang of nasty men. The rumors about Burns would be all over the newsroom by now and she wanted to linger in the safety of the library.

Helen dropped an envelope onto the counter and smiled at Paddy. “Here’s one set of Robert Lafferty clippings. We’ve got Neilson the musician but nothing for a Paul Neilson.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Not as much as a birth announcement. There’s so many clippings for the name Knox I’d need to let you in here to trawl through them yourself. Will I give you the first twenty sets?”

“Uch, no, Helen, I don’t have time this morning.”

“Yeah, I heard you’re going in front of the police inquiry into the Bearsden murder this afternoon.”

Paddy flinched. “Who told you that?”

“Shug Grant was in. He’s covering the inquiry.”

It was bad. Shug Grant already hated her for her Margaret Mary jibe and he was a loudmouthed bastard. He once slept with a sub ed’s wife after a party and came in the next day and told everyone. If he was reporting on the inquiry half of Scotland would know about the fifty quid before the first edition went to press.

The doors opened behind Paddy and a copyboy came in and stood next to her, his hands on the partition, looking around expectantly, but Helen ignored him.

“I heard,” she said quietly, “that the squad car took twenty-five minutes to get to the house. Someone’ll get their books.”

“I thought it was a closed committee?”

“It is, but Grant knows someone on it.”

Paddy smiled nervously and lifted the envelope. “Shug knows someone everywhere, doesn’t he?”

“Seems to.”

She hesitated on the stairs but climbed them slowly, making for the newsroom. She couldn’t dodge them forever or they’d know she was scared.

Slipping gingerly through the doors, she settled on the nearest seat, at the edge of the sports desk, and took the Lafferty clippings out of the envelope.

She was listening with half an ear to what was happening around her and sensed a murmur of something strange, a kind of hysterical edge to the atmosphere in the newsroom. Men were smiling fixed grins, looking busy, moving fast and typing, working unashamedly hard. At the epicenter of the oddness was a man she had never seen before, a dark, small, hairy man, simian, square-shouldered and no-necked, typing hard and looking pleased with himself, an awkward, angular smirk on his blue-shadowed face.

She nudged a fat sports boy sitting two seats away. “Who’s that?”

He glanced over, averting his eyes immediately. “JT’s replacement. From London. Famous hound, apparently. Going to make us all get our act together.” He dropped his voice. “Spy.”

“Did JT come back?”

He shook his head. “Not even having a drink out for him. He was told by phone. Don’t come in. Two subs got the bump yesterday and Kevin Hatcher as well. Fair enough. They’re keeping a book on how long it’ll take Kevin to drink himself to death.”

Paddy hadn’t seen Kevin sober since she started on the paper. He was the picture editor and miraculously managed to do an adequate job while so drunk he could hardly form consonants. The old soaks used Kevin as a measure to justify their own drinking: if they got as bad as him they’d stop, but no one ever was as bad as him.

She looked around the room at the fixed grins of fifty people moving around a room trying to look unaffiliated. When news of her fifty quid trickled back she’d be nothing more than a whisper under the breath too.

Sweating with nerves, she tried to still her mind by getting lost in her reading. Lafferty was a graduate of the Christian Brothers reform school, a brutal regime that created a common background for the most violent men in Glasgow. Bad boys from all over the region were sent there at twelve, their well-being and moral development left to monks who were not much more than spiteful, frustrated boys themselves. It was Lord of the Flies without table manners.

The cases against Lafferty tended to be assault charges for pub fights or extortion rackets. There was an unproven murder charge: a prostitute had been thrown off a multistory car park, according to one witness, because she wasn’t kicking back enough money. Lafferty was pictured outside the court, younger but no less wired than he had been when she saw him being questioned, pleased at the outcome, his tiny eyes making him look like an angry pig about to charge.

Paddy thought about the fifty-quid note Neilson had given her. Ramage would be perfectly justified in sacking her: he wouldn’t even need to pay her a severance package.

She looked up at the newsroom, at the men walking back and forth, delivering copy to their subs, typing hard on the heavy machines. Shug Grant was sitting at a desk, watching her from across the room, chewing gum with his mouth open. Fluorescent light glinted off his oily forehead. He raised his hand and pointed a long finger, jabbing the tip at her, and stood up, holding her eye as he walked across the newsroom toward her. “Just back from the inquiry. Typing up my notes.”

“Aye.” She affected unconcern. “Great.”

“You’re up today, yeah? Ye nervous?”

“Why would I be nervous?”

“Tam Gourlay was there this morning. Came over very badly. He contradicted you about the cars. Said they weren’t BMWs.” She hadn’t told anyone but the police about the cars. Shug was letting slip the unimportant details to let her know he was connected. It would suit the police case if she was discredited.

“So, you know someone on the inside?”

He pressed his lips together in a mock smile. If he had known about the money, he would have hinted at it. Sullivan had kept his word. The thought of being unceremoniously sacked was awful, but the idea that it might give Shug a good story stung even more.

“Who is it, Shug? It’s not Sullivan. The minutes secretary? Is it the woman taking notes?”

Targeting the secretarial staff was the obvious move. Journalists would find out where they drank or shopped or danced, mine their weaknesses and pump them for information. Shug smiled enigmatically.

She waggled a finger at him. “No, it can’t be the seccy. Your information’s very specific.” She picked her teeth in a way she hoped looked casual.

Perturbed, Shug frowned down at her. “How do you mean,

‘specific’?”

“So.” She nodded. “Who’d want to selectively control the information coming out of the inquiry? If it’s not a seccy or a clerk, there’s only policemen left. How many members of the committee are there? Usually three, isn’t it? Narrows it down a bit.”

Grant was professional enough to suppress his bruised ego, and ask the right question. “What is it? What are you holding back?”

She tried to smile confidently. “You’re being played, you know that, don’t you?”

“Three o’clock.”

Shug watched her pack up her clippings, slip them back into the envelope, and stand up. She turned to back out of the door and saw him again, a bitter twist at the corner of his mouth. He’d warn his leak that she knew and tell them to go for her.

Out on the drafty stairs she thought of Sean. Paul Neilson lived up in Killearn and she’d like to get a look at the house, see the cars outside it and get a sense of the man, but the village was well outside the city limits and she couldn’t justify getting Sean to drive her there when they were supposed to be on call. Sean brought Burns to mind and she remembered him standing in the hotel room in his underpants. She wished to Christ she had slept instead. It might be her last chance for a while.

Exhaustion was creeping through her bones, making her skin feel clammy. She could have thrown up on the stairs.

The gray waiting room smelled of dust. Blinding low winter sun shone in through tall windows, making one half of the room uninhabitably bright. Huddled in the shadowed half, in among the thick air swirling with dust motes and the scent of floor wax, sat Paddy, Shug Grant, and three guys from other papers. The men chatted among themselves, sharing cigarettes, gossiping about Random Damage and the reshuffle at the News. JT had walked straight into another paper across town on the same day that he was sacked. He claimed that his new job paid better money but no one was sure. Kevin Hatcher, the drunkest man at the News, had slept on a bench in the Press Club last night. They’d have sent him home in a taxi but no one knew where he lived. This morning he left the second half of a pint on the bar, said he was going to the toilet, and disappeared. Shug had a fiver on him dying in four weeks. A guy from the Mirror knew Kevin when he was a sober freelancer and won prizes for his photo-essays. He was funny, apparently, back in those days, a clever man, educated and erudite.

A uniformed officer was stationed by the door to stop everyone talking about everything before they went into the inquiry. For a secretive committee Paddy thought it particularly stupid to allow journalists into the waiting room, doling out cigarettes to waiting witnesses, there afterward to take them for a friendly drink to calm their nerves. But she knew the witnesses weren’t Grant’s source; he knew what was coming up and what questions they were going to ask her, and the leaks were strategic, not random. They were coming from someone who wanted to control the way the story was reported.

She leaned her poor head against the wall and shut her eyes, just for a moment; she wasn’t going to fall asleep, it was just to give them a rest and avoid talking to Grant. As the skin of her scalp made contact with the plaster she felt the tingling sensation of sleep creeping over the back of her head. She saw Billy in bed in the hospital and smiled to herself about his hair. He might not be back at the job for a long time but he was alive and relatively unscathed. She saw the image of Lafferty in his rearview mirror, carefully creeping up on the car, and Billy inside, smoking, oblivious.

It was warm in the room, body temperature. A veil of sleep slid down from her brow like a black cashmere blanket until a finger poked her on the shoulder. She opened her burning eyes. Grant was watching her carefully.

“Hey, tubs, what’re ye going to say?” He smiled.

The uniformed officer stepped forward. “Ah, come on now, Mr. Grant, you’ve been well warned about that sort of behavior.”

It was as effective as a midgie trying to stop a mudslide. Grant raised a finger, telling her he’d get her later, and sat back. Paddy shrugged as if she was helpless and thought about all the other people Ramage could have sent to cover the inquiry. He was holding on to all the hungry hacks like Shug and herself, stripping the News of kindness and camaraderie. The other journalists were listening for her answers.

“Who have they had in this morning?” she asked them.

A slick guy in a cheap suit sat forward, making Grant sit back. “The operator who got the call for the address. And Tam Gourlay. Dan McGregor was yesterday.”

“Much of a morning, then?”

He smiled coldly. “No, not really.”

She smiled back, baring her teeth. Shug returned the warmth. The two other journalists joined in until they were all smiling insincerely and wondering when they could stop. The inquiry room door opened and Sullivan looked into the waiting room. He clocked Paddy and smiled wide. “Meehan, please.”

She was so tired that her legs felt rubbery, her footfalls uncertain, as she stood up and shuffled over to the door. She paused and took a breath before following Sullivan through the tall double doors, into the official inquiry.

It was a big, empty room for such a small committee. Four great long windows overlooked the Clyde River and a red marble bridge, currently choked with traffic. The ceiling was high but plain with thick, unembarrassed utility pipes snaking across it.

A long table was set to the side of the room. At the far end sat an older woman with thick glasses, head down over a notepad. Along the table, three men in fancied-up police uniforms—a strip of braiding here, some gold trim on a pocket—were sitting in a little line facing an empty chair. They seemed too old to be dressed in uniform, too dignified, and would have looked as if they were in fancy dress but for the obvious quality of the material. They didn’t look at Paddy as she came in but filled up a glass of water or checked through the sets of notes they had in front of them.

Sullivan invited Paddy to sit at the table opposite the men but remained standing himself, hovering in her eye line near the door.

These three were prosperous men, working-class boys who had slowly worked their way up through the ranks. She could see in their faces a kind of rake’s progress of middle age, a warning tableau of what might happen if you didn’t look after yourself. The man nearest the secretary had a red complexion and puffy, blood-pressured eyes. Next to him was a thin, sallow-skinned man with a pinched mouth, bitter perhaps over some blip in his career. The third man was cheerful, glancing sideways at his companions, seeming to look for reassurance or signs of friendship, needy and ungrounded.

Paddy fumbled with her coat and it slid inelegantly to the floor. Rather than bend the four miles to the floor, she kicked it under the chair and sat down, putting her hands on the table, trying to shake the dozy mist from her mind.

The sallow man tapped the table in front of her to get her attention. “Good afternoon, Miss Meehan.”

The secretary raised her pen and began to scribble.