The Dead Hour

Lafferty was dead. There was no bleeding that they could see, no violent spills of guts or anything that made Paddy feel it was real. He had died of a massive bleed into his brain where the saucepan had hit him.

They carried him past her with a sheet over his face but she didn’t feel anything but relief that he hadn’t killed Sean. She thought of poor Mark Thillingly handing over Vhari’s new address after a minor scuffle. She would have stood on the bridge as well if Sean had died because of her. She wouldn’t have jumped, but she would have stood there.

The police officers were gathered by their cars, one of them taking charge of the radio while three others stood in a semicircle around the open doors, rubbing cold hands together, listening bright-eyed to the familiar buzz and crackle of the radio. One of them was still suspicious and scowled in at Sean and Paddy.

“You’re engaged,” Paddy said flatly.

Sean seemed startled but nodded. “Aye.”

“Congratulations.” She held her hand out at an awkward angle for him to shake. He took it and pumped once. “You’ll be happy.” She meant it well but it sounded like an order rather than a wish.

“Maybe.”

Two uniformed policemen came to the front door and gestured for them to follow. “We’ll take your car,” said one, leading them past the waiting police cars.

“Are they not coming with us? Why are we going in our car?”

The policeman waited until they were out of earshot and on the dark road before he spoke. “They’ve found another body out the back. A man. He was stabbed in the eye. They reckon the bird killed him.”

“Why do they think that?”

He shrugged. “It’s her house, isn’t it? They figure someone else came for her and she popped him.”

They took the keys from Sean and made the two of them sit in the back, even though they hadn’t done anything wrong. Sean asked them to pump up the heating and turn the fan on and they drove away from the house in a sweltering wave of warmth, rubbing their cold fingers back to life and drying their noses.

The sun was coming up, climbing low over the ancient wind-warped trees on the hillside as they drove back down the road they had come. They passed a few other cars on the road, the police driver refusing to stop in passing places, driving as arrogantly as if he was in a police car and had the right.

They passed from the wood into farming land and looked at each other when they realized where the car was headed. They were back on the road to Huntly Lodge.

THIRTY-FOUR. THE LINEUP

I

The lichen-stained gate was open, shoved back against a hedge. Judging from the depth of the ruts in the muddy entrance a lot of cars had been up the small lane since they passed it earlier.

The place looked different in thin morning light. The woods around the drive weren’t as dense as they had seemed in the dark. Paddy could see through them to the mild slopes of the fields beyond. They turned the corner to the house and Paddy saw Sullivan standing by one of the three cars parked outside, wearing a thick coat and gray woolly police-issue gloves. He looked up at her, a broad, slow smile breaking over his face.

The police driver slowed to a stop and Sullivan padded over to the car.

“I’ll take them from here, Kevin.”

The two policemen got out of the calls car and went over to join their uniformed pals.

Sullivan opened the passenger door next to Paddy and crouched down. His knees objected to the reckless gesture by clicking loudly but Sullivan pretended not to notice.

“You’ve had quite a night.” His glance flickered over to Sean.

“This is my driver, Sean Ogilvy.”

The two men made a big deal of respectfully shaking hands across her face. “Good job you were there, young man.”

“It was me that hit him,” said Paddy indignantly.

Sullivan pointed at her but spoke to Sean. “Greedy for glory,” he said, and she could see he was impressed without being able to say it to her face.

She slapped his hand away. “Did you arrest Neilson?”

“Can’t. We’ve got nothing on him. No witnesses tying him to Lafferty or the house on Loch Lomond or to the Bearsden Bird’s house.”

“Well, you’ve got me, I saw him at Vhari’s door.”

Sullivan nodded and gri

“What about Gourlay and McGregor? No way they’ll corroborate seeing him there?”

Sullivan sighed and looked at his feet. “I think we both know the answer to that one, don’t we?”

She wondered about the wisdom of mentioning Knox. If Sullivan was this cagey about fingering two officers of lower rank he wouldn’t want to know about his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. But she had to try. “Look, we saw Lafferty bringing Kate Burnett out of a house in Milngavie; that’s how we picked him up in the first place.”

Sullivan prompted her on with a head nod.

“ Fifteen Ornan Avenue, do you know it?”

Sullivan’s neck stiffened so suddenly that his head wobbled a little. He looked as if his kidneys had burst but he was too polite to say anything.

“There’s a glass porch outside and it’s opposite a pub.” He didn’t want to hear what she was saying, Paddy could tell. “An old sort of Englishy pub. With a car park.”

“Right.” He nodded tetchily. “We’ll look into that. We will.”

“Can you look into that?”

He gave her an imploring look. “We’ve got plenty to go on as it is. Let’s do what we can.”

“You’re not going to, are you?”

Before he had the chance to answer, a policeman next to one of the other cars shouted over that they were ready. Sullivan tried to stand up to answer him but his knees wouldn’t let him. He dropped back on his haunches and looked embarrassed. “We’re doing our best. We’re doing all we can.” He took his time rising slowly to his feet. “I’m driving.”

“Where are we going?”

“You need to pick Neilson out of a lineup. Are you game?”

“Oh, aye,” said Paddy. “I’m always game.”

Sullivan drove carefully back to Glasgow, following the car in front. Every so often Paddy could see the back of Paul Neilson’s well-groomed head in the other car. It was the guy she had met at Vhari Burnett’s door. She felt sure of it.

II

Listening to the noises through the door, Paddy waited, her stomach cramping with exhaustion, imagining the cause of the noises next door. Feet shuffled and men chatted casually, the sounds of men who didn’t know each other passing occasional comments. Two of them gurgled phlegmatic smoky laughs.

They were gathering men who looked a bit like Paul Neilson for the lineup and she, star witness, was waiting in a dull side room, walls painted industrial beige, a table and three chairs arranged against a wall. There was no window, just a bare lightbulb hanging overhead, throbbing sixty watts into the cupboard room.

She couldn’t help but think of Patrick Meehan. His lineup for the Rachel Ross murder was the trap he didn’t see coming. He may have been a career criminal but he still had a naive belief in the justice system and hadn’t anticipated the police tipping the witnesses off. Meehan had actually leaned over to one witness, a young girl, and told her not to be nervous, it was okay, she could say it was him, thinking she was his alibi. But in court she was called as a witness for the prosecution. Paddy remembered reading about the murder victim’s husband; old Abraham Ross was kept in the room the witnesses were taken into after they had picked Meehan out. No one ever proved it, but they must have talked to each other: who did you get? I picked the guy at the end of the line, short, plump, acne scarred. I got him too, same guy, at the end of the line, sandy hair.