Denise Mina - Still Midnight

‘She’s dodging the question,’ she said. ‘And Billal said “Bob” instead of “Rob”.’

Bannerman didn’t react.

Morrow tutted and held her hands up. ‘Well, I’ve told you. MacKechnie knows I did, Wilder’s a witness I sent the note, so if it goes tits up because of you it’s nothing to do with me.’

He narrowed his eyes at her.

‘OK?’ She leaned across the desk towards him. ‘You can’t say I haven’t told ye.’

‘OK,’ he said slowly, as if trying to calm her down. ‘Thanks.’

‘If you want to fuck it all up, that’s up to you.’

Bannerman smiled condescendingly at his health bar, peeling the wrapper off the end and popping it in his mouth. He would tell MacKechnie that she’d said that, tell it as a funny story about what a character she was, knowing MacKechnie would hear it as confirmation that she was impossible, mad, no team-player.

‘This animosity,’ he was muttering, ‘you and me, professional jealousy, you know, I’m sure we can work around it.’ He was turning it around, making it about her and him, not Aamir Anwar’s safety.

‘Not if you’re going to act like a cunt, we can’t.’

She was too angry, almost dizzy and the words fell out of her before she could catch them. A hot blush ran up her neck. MacKechnie would hear that comment too.

A perfunctory rap at the door was followed by Harris looking in. ‘Ma’am?’

‘What!’

He paused, looked frightened and addressed himself to Bannerman. ‘Just looked the DVD of the interview over. Omar says they were looking for Bob, not Rob.’

Without a word Bannerman swung his feet to the floor, stood up and left the office, shutting the door behind him, leaving her alone in the rancorous silence. Outside some guys were talking in another room, having a laugh and she listened jealously for his voice, suspecting, as always, that everyone had more allies than her.

She was filling out the forms, cooling down to a cold rage when she heard excited footsteps in the corridor, an exclamation and a scurry.

Bannerman threw her door open. ‘Found the van.’

They took a car from the yard and Bannerman drove. All the cars in good condition were out and they had an old Ford with an engine so noisy that idle chat was impossible.

Bannerman concentrated on the road, uncomfortable at the silence, but Morrow was glad to be let alone, her face slack as the warm orange lights of the motorway clicked past on the quiet road. The drive was long and effortless, all the way to Harthill on a smooth and empty road.

Bannerman didn’t know the area they were going to and made a big production of looking for road signs, muttering inaudibly to himself about turns and directions, winding himself up. Morrow said nothing. They took a roundabout, a side road and finally a rough road down the side of open fields with intermittent hedgerows. It had been tarmacked at one time, but a decade or so of harsh winters and tractors had churned the ground uneven. They pulled up outside the perimeter tape.

Blue and white was strung up between some of the hedges, blocking the roadway, and a fat copper was standing next to it, a local plod, warming his hands by rubbing them together and stamping his feet. He wasn’t acting it either; his nose was red and his top lip looked damp.

Bannerman cut the engine. ‘Noisiest bloody car I’ve ever fucking been in,’ he said to himself.

‘Saved us having to talk to each other for forty minutes though.’

Bannerman swung to her aggressively, ready to take it out on her, but found her smiling pleasantly. Despite himself he smiled, swinging away from her so she wouldn’t see him concur. He opened the door and stepped out. She liked him better away from their gaffers.

Opening her own door she stepped out into the bristling cold. Harthill was on higher ground than the city and the air was thinner here, the skies often brutally clear. Tonight a giant white moon lit it. The tarmac on the road had snapped like a slab of toffee. The motorway was hidden behind a hill, the lights glowing over the low horizon. Whoever brought the van here knew the area. Looking to the foot of the hill she saw a clump of wind-gnarled trees gathered around a smouldering white van, well lit by the Forensic Fire team.

The Scene of Crime Forensic team would not be here for a few hours, not until it got light. There wouldn’t be any point in the dark. Unless Osama Bin Laden personally organised a massacre in the Glasgow city centre over the next few hours theirs would be the first crime scene they came to. In the meantime a crew of two were trying to pat out the dying fire, preserving what little trace evidence they could.

It was hard to put out a fire in a vehicle that would serve as evidence. Smother it in foam and you might as well wash it under a tap. Throw water at it and any accelerants would disperse and start an ancillary fire elsewhere. In the morning they’d do a fingertip search of the surround and lift the van without opening it, take it to a sterile environment for analysis.

‘Harthill,’ she said. ‘On their way to Edinburgh?’

Bannerman shrugged a shoulder. ‘Not an obvious place is it?’

‘Maybe they knew it from somewhere.’

‘Can’t exactly make that the basis of a search though can we?’ Bannerman pointed to the ground. ‘No marks.’

She was desperate to know but embarrassed to ask. ‘What else did Omar say?’

Bannerman looked at her curiously, surprised by the tone in her voice, not knowing what it meant. ‘Not much. I thought he was it, but…’

She shrugged and looked off towards the van. ‘I thought he was too.’

Mistaking consensus for intimacy Bannerman leaned into her, quite close, and drew a breath. Suddenly panicked by his proximity she scurried away, over to the fat copper guarding the tape.

He was freezing but still nervous, asked their names and rank and where they were from, jotting it longhand in his notebook, as if he was doing an exam. He probably didn’t have much crime scene experience. He must have been the same age as them, Morrow thought, early thirties, but his ruddy face and fatness made him look much older. People got old quicker in the country.

Sensing Bannerman coming up behind her Morrow ducked under the tape and walked over to the mouth of the field, staying on the far side, away from the obvious path anyone leaving the field would be likely to have taken. A farmer was standing there with a copper but she didn’t look at them. She was looking at the ground.

The moonlight was so bright she could see the shadow of marks in the frost: tyres from a car were picked out in the tarmac, a parked car had sheltered a rectangle from the ground frost and then driven away. She looked up the road, squinted, crouched.

Indistinct footsteps trailing back and forth to the car from the field, muddying one another, some deep zigzagged treads, like army boots, size eightish, some flat soled, like slippers, another pair of trainers. Disappointing: frost was a useless medium for prints.

Bannerman saw her looking at them and shouted back to the plod by the tape, ‘Get the photographer out here and get them before they disappear.’

The plod looked shocked and hurt, as if he had been reprimanded, and swung away to talk into his radio.

She looked away from the footprints and saw the press of tyre tracks. New wheels, clear zigzags and deep lines, which was bad. It was easier to match worn tyres to track marks, chips and wear in the rubber could be as effective as a fingerprint, but factory fresh all looked the same and there were only a few manufacturers.

Bannerman was behind her and nodded at her thought. They traced the movements wordlessly, pointing and tutting and humming, keeping their eyes on the ground. They traced the footsteps to the break in the hedge and looked into the long stretch of churned mud in the field. The footsteps broke up here, the ground was too lumpy, but some of the partial impressions were clearer, a toe, a heel, the side of a sole.