III
Ramage had called the station looking for her and Sullivan allowed her to make a phone call from his desk.
She told him what had happened in detail, leaving out the fifty-quid note because that would come out at the trial and by then she would be bathed in glory. Sullivan had dodged every mention of Knox. She guessed that he wasn’t senior enough to go after him, so she didn’t mention him to Ramage. They couldn’t report on Neilson yet, either, and would have to wait for the trial, but Ramage promised her a front page on the scene at the cottage, the lady in peril and the Daily News’s own intrepid reporter. The story would include details of Kate’s attack and the body in the garden, and because Lafferty was dead, they could defame him as much as they wanted.
She was to come in and write it up for the Saturday edition and then she could go home. He sounded pleased with her, a little in awe at the story of the cottage, and she played up Sean’s part in case they found out that their new driver didn’t have a license.
“He was brilliant. Saved the day. I couldn’t have done it without him.”
“Well, you can keep the hotel room until tomorrow, if you want to go out and get pissed tonight.”
Paddy thought of Mary Ann leaving for France in the morning. “Ah, thanks, Boss, I think I’ll just go home after.”
“Excellent,” he said firmly. She felt he appreciated her being cheap almost as much as the story.
She hung up and found Sullivan standing across the room, sadly chewing a hangnail, as if he’d just heard Santa wasn’t real. He caught her eye and looked away.
He had heard about herself and Burns. She knew these old guys. They liked women but if they heard any hint of scandal they’d be the first at the front of the mob with a pocket full of stones.
Paddy stood up and walked over to him. “What?”
He shrugged guiltily, avoiding her eye.
“Sullivan, what’s going on?”
He dropped his hands to his sides and his back sagged. “We’ve let him go.”
“Neilson? But I picked him out. He was number two, right?”
“He was number two, but the fifty-quid note-” He bit his finger again, ashamed. “The note’s gone missing.”
THIRTY-FIVE. COLUM MCDAID’S SHAMEFUL EXIT
I
Colum McDaid was on the verge of being sacked from a job he had dedicated his life to, but it didn’t stop him being a gentleman and offering Paddy tea and biscuits.
“They’re sending someone up to replace me now, calling in a retired officer from another area. I’ll be out by lunchtime.”
She watched him move around the room, boiling the kettle, offering sugar, pouring in the milk first so that it didn’t scald. She watched him and noted that at no time did he allow her to be in his blind spot between himself and the evidence cupboard or the safe. The only chair in the room other than his own was bolted to the floor just inside the door.
He handed her the cup with two bourbon biscuits perched on the saucer and took his own seat back behind the desk.
“So it’s gone?”
McDaid nodded into his tea. “I’m here all the time, I check everyone on the way out. I don’t understand… they’ll say it’s because I’m old.”
“It’s just gone?”
“It’s gone. I stayed last night until three thirty in the morning looking for it. It’s gone. It’s not in this room or the next room, there’s no sign of a break-in, and I didn’t leave the room once the day before without locking up.”
“Couldn’t someone just have nicked the key and come in? There must be a spare set of keys in the station.”
McDaid shook his head. “No, see, I do what my predecessor did.” He looked a little shifty. “There’s an element of temptation in this job, you know, for the young men. They’ve got families, wee babies, and the basic pay’s not much. We older ones, we take it on ourselves to guard the young men against that. There’s money about, people who want favors, and so on. It’s harder for a young man to say no. That’s why we have the key.”
“What key?”
“Well, it’s a secret, but there’s no point in not telling you now: I have a key to the safe that I don’t leave at the station. People think it’s here but it’s not. No one can get in there without it, which means they must have taken the note during the day when I was here. Sitting in this very chair.”
She thought of Knox. “Do very senior officers know about the key?”
“No, just me.”
“And you know for certain that the note was here yesterday morning?”
“Definitely.”
“So, who came in yesterday?”
He pulled a blue notebook out of his top drawer and reluctantly pushed it across the desk to her with his fingertips. “I’m one year short of my full term.” He whispered, “I won’t even get my pension now. Mrs. McDaid’ll… I don’t know how we’ll manage.”
Paddy read down the list of three and there, first off, at nine ten in the morning, was Tam Gourlay’s signature. He must have gone in just before he was suspended, before Burns found him in the car park and beat him up. She showed McDaid the page and tapped the name.
“Him. Did he go into the safe?”
“Sure, he put a production in there. First thing.” He checked the seven-digit number next to Gourlay. “A shoplifting production. Straightforward case. But I know for certain it wasn’t him because he came in in his shirtsleeves and I watched him the whole time.”
“How did he stand?”
McDaid got up and leaned toward the safe with his bum in the air. “Summary charge productions go on the bottom shelf.” He adjusted his stance and they both realized that Gourlay’s hands would have been obscured from McDaid’s vantage point at the desk.
McDaid stood up, looking broken. “But he was in his shirtsleeves and I would have heard him fold it if he took it. A fifty’s a very big note. It was new. I’d have heard it.” His eyebrows furrowed with self-doubt. “I’m old, I know I am, but I’m alert. I’d have heard it.”
II
Paddy stepped back out into the cold morning street, feeling sick as she remembered Neilson’s wide crocodile smile. The missing note was good for her, though, her bribe would never come to light or be mentioned and she could still run her story with Lafferty as the sole villain. Without the note it was actually a better story, there would be no codicils or information held back until the court case. But Paul Neilson had walked, gone back to his vulgar villa in Killearn to take leisurely swims in his outdoor pool. It was all wrong.
Crossing the supermarket car park to the train station, her stomach spasmed and she doubled over, throwing up the cup of tea McDaid had made her at the station. She leaned over the brown puddle to see if more would come, waiting for her head to stop spinning, and deep inside she realized.
She stood up slowly, glinting at the light, and spoke aloud without meaning to. “Oh, shit.”
III
It was because she had so much to avoid thinking about that the words came so easily, flowing through her fingers and straight onto the page, perfect paragraphs in the new, punchy Daily News house style.
It was an exciting story to tell, the lawyer who had died to protect her sister from a crazy ex-boyfriend, beautiful Kate in terrible danger, the view from the garden window in Loch Lomond. She had to throw in a few comments from “sources,” facts framed as speculation so that the lawyers would pass it for publication, but she knew the police wouldn’t object. They came out of it looking good too.
Paddy stopped at the end of her seven hundred and fifty words and wondered why it had never been this easy before. Maybe exhaustion brought her down to the right level for this style of writing; she was usually too considered to bang out reams of short sentences, one fact in each, top and tailing the article with what she was going to say and a summary of what she had just said. Sullivan had given her a couple of on-the-record, ascribable statements to hang the whole thing on. It read perfectly well but she thought of everything she had to leave out: Neilson, Knox being the most important. She knew that although it satisfied as a News article and Ramage would be pleased, it didn’t satisfy her.