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packets of sweets and boxes of biscuits in there. Murray Farquarson had the diet of a housefly: he survived exclusively on sugary foods and alcohol and yet was still rake thin. His hair had turned white over the past few years.
    He followed her into the room and pulled the door shut behind them. He didn’t bother walking around the long table that served as his desk but slumped against the electric-crackling venetian blinds, keeping his tired eyes on her shoes.
    “Quick.”
    “I need a move.”
    He rolled his eyes. “For fuck’s sake.”
    “Boss, I’m going stone mad—”
    Farquarson sagged against the blinds, each slouch articulated by the snap of unhappy plastic. “That’s neither important nor is it personal.”
    “Please?”
    He sighed at the floor, his head hanging heavily on his limp neck. She knew not to interrupt him. Eventually he spoke. “Meehan, just keep your head down.” He lifted his tired eyes to her and she thought for a moment he was going to confess some awful personal secret. She flinched, blinked, and when her eyes opened again he was looking past her to the door. “Keep on the shift for another wee while, okay, kiddo?”
    And then another bizarre and frightening thing happened: he cupped her elbow and gave it a little squeeze. “You’ll be fine.”
    In a crumple and snap of blinds he stood up straight and reached for the door. Paddy, rigid with alarm, stood as still as she could. He pulled the door open and the bottom of it hit her hard on the heel. She had to shuffle to the side to let him pass.
    “It doesn’t need to be a promotion …” she said.
    “Yeah.” He rubbed his eyes. “Bollocks anyway. There was a call from Partick Marine police station. They saw your para about the house call in Bearsden last night. Want you to go in, tell them what you saw. She was pretty, the dead girl. Can’t you think of anything there you could write up? No obvious hook we could spin from?” Farquarson’s bloodshot eyes were sympathetic for a moment, but it passed. “You were the last person to see her alive, I think. Do me a hundred-word description, scene at the house, atmosphere, bookend it with facts. I want it before you go out in the car. Finish it by nine thirty and I’ll tell the night desk to use it as an insert in the coverage. Anything else?”
    She shook her head. If she was a male reporter who had come up with nothing from a scene like that Farquarson would have said she was fucking useless. A fucking waste of fucking space.
    “Well, piss off and get it done then.”
    She turned to go, bumping into Keck from the sports desk. He brushed past her dismissively, snorting at the miserable look in her eyes.
    “Hoi,” Farquarson shouted, always looking for an excuse to tick him off, “mind your fucking manners in front of a fellow professional.”
    Keck tried to make a face that would simultaneously convey mannerliness to Farquarson and superiority to Paddy, his face quivering between the two. Farquarson raised an eyebrow. Paddy nodded and backed out.
    It was eight thirty in the evening, and she had an hour to write one hundred words. She went to the stationery cupboard and made a coffee, checked out the biscuit situation and chose two shortbread fingers that she meant to eat at the desk as she was writing. She found an empty typewriter at the end of the news desk and spooled in three sheets sandwiched around carbon paper.
    Still wearing her overcoat, Paddy stared at the angry blank page, eating the buttery biscuits and sipping her coffee, sifting through the incident for what to leave in and what to leave out. If she mentioned the fifty-quid note she’d have to hand it in to the police. They’d get the murderer anyway because Tam and Dan had seen him and it didn’t make sense to hand the note in and let it disappear in a police station when it could disappear into her mother’s pocket and take the weight of worry from her for a while. But the story didn’t make much sense