The Dead Hour by Denise Mina Page A

again. Who is this fine young lady?”
    As if remembering that she was there, Reid and Sullivan parted and looked at Paddy with renewed interest to see if she was either fine or a lady. Uncomfortable at the assessment, Paddy took the initiative, stepping across the floor and holding her hand out.
    “Delighted to meet a man who takes tea and biscuits seriously. I’m Paddy Meehan.”
    The constable stood to meet her hand and shook it firmly once. “Ah, Meehan, now, what county would your people be from?”
    Normally, suggesting that someone with an Irish name wasn’t Scottish would be tantamount to hinting at repatriation, but highlanders were as obsessed with their ancestry as the Irish.
    “Donegal, I believe, around Letterkenny.”
    “Not Derry?”
    He was right and she was surprised and smiled. “Aye, the Meehans tend to be from there but ours were from Donegal.”
    “And you didn’t go to New York with the rest of them?”
    Paddy’s jaw dropped. “How would you know that?” Con’s glamorous cousin lived in New York, in the Bronx, where the cheers came from. Her own family talked about them as if they were movie stars.
    He winked. “Lucky guess, actually. I’m a McDaid.” He shook her hand once more and let go. “Colum McDaid.”
    He was letting her know he was Catholic too; a lot of the Western Islanders were, having never converted during or after the Reformation. Paddy was ashamed that she cared which religion he was or that it instantly made her trust him more. She was barely Catholic herself.
    “Now.” He sat back down and looked at the two policemen. “Now, what’s important enough to interrupt my tea, you godless pair?”
    Reid chortled and put the plastic bag on the table, prompting Colum McDaid to put his tea aside and open a drawer next to him, pulling out a large, black leatherbound book. Half the pages were rumpled and crisp from having been written on, with the facing pages flat and new. From the shallow drawer above he took out a thin three-ring binder and opened it to a page of stickers. Seven-digit numbers were penned carefully in a tiny script above the empty spaces where white labels had been peeled off.
    Colum McDaid opened the leather book. A margin and columns had been drawn in using a ruler and a red biro. A third of the page was filled in, again in tiny perfect writing. Paddy couldn’t read it upside down but she could just about make sense of it. Each row had a paragraph of jagged capitals describing an item, next to an entry for the case number, the location, a policeman’s name and rank, a date, and, finally, a seven-digit number to match the sticky labels.
    Sullivan leaned forward and placed a note on the end of the desk. It was a scrap of paper torn from a ruled jotter with a seven-digit case number on it. McDaid read and understood it immediately.
    “Bearsden?” he asked.
    Sullivan nodded. “Miss Meehan’s very worried about getting her fifty-quid note back.”
    McDaid looked at her and poked the bag with his finger. “So this is yours?”
    “Aye.”
    “Well, you’ll certainly get it back but it might take a wee while. Depends on how important it turns out to be to the case. Rest assured, though: this production will be escorted by me to the laboratory and back, and the rest of the time”—he pointed to the blue safe behind his desk—“she’ll be keeping warm in there. And I’ll be sitting here watching everyone who comes in.”
    “No one else can get in?”
    “Not a soul. Top of the police station, manned twenty-four hours, and,” he patted the safe door, “you’d need a lorryload of dynamite to open this door.”
    “Can I phone you every so often to find out where it is?”
    “Miss Meehan, I shall eagerly anticipate your call.”

II
    Paddy sat in the back of the police car and tried to imagine how angry Farquarson would be when she told him about the fifty quid. She’d tell him when he was tired, when she got in tonight it would be the end of his