Free The Dead Hour by Denise Mina

orange box and opened her snuffbox again, finding the spoon sitting inside, covered in powder where it shouldn’t have been. She helped herself to a half portion, a maintenance sniff. She was rubbing her nose when she started crying, cried for herself again because her nose stung so much and now she couldn’t think straight or sort anything out.

II
    Her luck had changed. Paddy could feel it as a vibration coming off the city, buzzing off the gray concrete and the wet tarmac. She sat in the back of the car, bright-eyed as each dramatic call came in; a fight between neighbors that ended with a stabbing, a motorway pileup with two dead, and now a drowning. None of the stories were big or significant enough to be taken away and given to a better journalist. Her copy would be all over the paper.
    They were cruising along empty roads to the south bank of the Clyde where a body had been seen floating in the fast-moving water. A cold mist began to descend on the midnight city, a stagnant exhalation that clung to the tops of passing cars. Yellow streetlights jostled hard against the thickening dark.
    Billy pulled up under an iron railway bridge and yanked on the hand brake, switching off the engine, anticipating a long wait. Paddy sat forward and together they looked across the road, to beyond the marble handrail of Glasgow Bridge. They could see the tops of black police hats, all facing the river.
    “Dead, then,” said Billy, seeing no ambulance had rushed to the scene.
    “Aye, another poor soul,” said Paddy, hoping it was an interesting story. “God help us.”
    Billy was watching her in the mirror, skeptical at her pretense of emotional engagement. He could see how excited she was by the course of the night. Paddy dropped her eyes, opened the car door, and got out.
    As she crossed the empty road droplets of cold mist burst on her warm skin, catching on her black woolly tights and shining the toes of her shoes. The swirling river threw up the smell of decay as she crossed the empty bridge to the high fence.
    The riverbank was cut off from the street by a high Victorian railing, painted black and glistening wet. Through the fence she could see a crowd of black-coated policemen standing on the grass, looking down a gentle grassy slope, watching someone in the water.
    A tall fence was necessary because, beyond the inviting slope of green lawn, the ground suddenly fell away into a black cliff. A little wooden stepladder was leaning against the railings and a wooden box had been placed on the far side. The railings would have been a steep climb, even for a superfit policeman. Happily, not all the policemen were superfit, so they kept the stepladder hidden nearby; Paddy never found out where they stowed it. She climbed up the five steps now, swinging her legs over the spikes at the top and dropping down awkwardly on the box on the other side, toppling on an ankle as she stepped off but righting herself before anyone noticed.
    The dank fog was thick on the water, so close to the swilling surface that the far bank was hidden, backlit and glowing yellow. At the foot of the cliff a life-jacketed man in a wooden rowboat was prodding at something on the surface with a long pole. It looked like a submerged black balloon, bobbing in the fast-moving gray water, tugging the hook on the end of the pole, trying to free itself.
    The boatman poked and prodded the object, moving it toward the riverbank. Employed by the Glasgow Benevolent Society to dredge the river for bodies, he patrolled every morning looking for unlucky drunks and suicides from the night before. It was a rare occasion when he was called out beyond his hours.
    Paddy walked over and stood behind the policemen, watching the show on the river. The pack of policemen glanced back, noting that she was there but so used to her appearing at their back that the storyteller holding their attention didn’t bother to temper his chat.
    “She’d her shirt over her head and he’s