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.
II
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.