Denise Mina - Still Midnight

The front door was painted red, the brass letter box polished, glinting a chirpy answer to the early morning sunlight. She’d liked that door when they bought the house. Most of the new-builds had white plastic doors. It was the first thing she’d liked about it, at the viewing.

‘Look at this, Brian.’ She ran her fingers down the watered sheen of red paint and looked up to find him smiling at her hand. She had looked at his lips and known precisely the words they were going to form.

‘That’s a lovely colour, isn’t it?’

She glared at the door now, her mouth moved soundlessly, reforming the words – that’s a lovely colour.

The straightness of the man was gone, the steadiness she had fallen in love with. Brian had become the chaos she was running from.

The postman’s back suddenly obscured her view. He opened the gate and left it wide as he stepped up the path, looking through a bundle of letters, pulling their junk mail and bills out and shoving them through the door. He didn’t look up as he came back down towards her, already sorting the mail for the next house. Birds twittered in trees. A commuter with a briefcase and grey suit crossed the road to his car. People were beginning to stir. She had to go in or be spotted spying on her own home.

A sudden longing struck her, to see Danny, speak to him, be back in that familiar set of tracks. She knew Danny, understood him, could predict him. He was never a straight line and a sudden curve. Danny was always the same and not sorry about it either.

Somehow in her head the thought of Danny became entangled with the Anwar case because of the area, because they were both at school there. She had never asked for his help before, always kept those worlds as far apart as possible, but she was so angry with Bannerman she was prepared to consider it.

Brian was in there, awake possibly, wondering where she was, why she hadn’t come home, why her phone was switched off.

Reaching for the car key her hand lingered for a moment. She turned it, starting the engine and pulling out into the street, heading back into the vibrant, screaming city.

It was only a twenty-minute drive from her house at this time of the morning but the brand new block of luxury flats was a world away.

Morrow looked up at the verandas as she pulled on the handbrake. Thrown up during the housing boom they were already beginning to disintegrate. A number of them had been bought with dirty cash, at a time when all property was a good investment. But the gangsters wouldn’t pay the exorbitant maintenance fees and now the flats were coming apart.

They dumped bags of rubbish in the lifts and left police cones in the best parking spots. The factor wasn’t attending to the building any more and lights were out all over the halls, dents in communal walls were being left. One lift in the block was always well maintained though, no one would have dared piss in it or use a lighter to melt the plastic buttons: it was the lift that went to Danny’s penthouse.

She had passed the entrance to the underground car park and pulled up in the street. Going down to the underground car park was safer but buzzing up to Danny would give him advance warning that she was coming up. If he had the chance he’d hide anything incriminating, and they’d have to go through the embarrassing pretence of talking about his security firm and the problems of book keeping and managing men. He was on the cusp of legal, running a string of security firms that ring-fenced a territory and won the contracts in it through threats and sabotage. Anyone who didn’t use Danny’s firm would find their site subject to a spate of fires or assaults on staff until they capitulated. Danny had even made the papers once, a full page stop-this-evil-man. Ambushing him in the early morning was brutal, but at least it was honest.

She took a long breath and looked out at the street. Ahead of her the motorway was choking up with morning traffic. Behind, the road running along by the river was getting busy too, but this street was broad and empty. Bad place to park, she knew. Exactly the sort of spot cars got stolen from.

This used to be the dockside, wild sailors’ bars and flop houses, huge warehouses full of goods from all over the world, waiting to be lifted by light-fingered dockers. No longer. For decades the riverside had been an empty series of sheds until it was cleared to become an industrial estate: carpet warehouses and furniture sheds struggled there for a while until recently, when the housing boom cleared them away to make room for luxury riverside apartments. Twelve storeys of plasterboard and gimmicks, wet rooms, wall-mounted coffee makers, all with verandas looking over the water to one of the most deprived boroughs in Scotland. House buyers had camped overnight for the privilege of buying the first phase of the development. The market changed so quickly the builders could hardly give away the final phase.

Weak with tiredness Morrow climbed out of the car, pulling her coat closed against the wind coming off the river, and opened the boot. The presentation bottle of single malt had been in there for two weeks. She picked it up, cradling it like a puppy under one arm, locked the car and went around to the front entrance. Dan’s buzzer: 12.1.

‘What?’

‘Danny, it’s me.’

She sensed him hesitate, then the entrance door clicked and hummed and she pushed it open. The clip-clop of her modest heels ricocheted off the stone floor as she walked over to the steel lifts and pressed the button. Plastic plants were placed on either side of the doorway, improbably green palms that were dusty, cigarette butts scattered around the gravel at their feet. Canvases were screwed tight to the wall: slashes of green and red.

The lift came to a stop in front of her, the doors opened and two hoodies and a business woman in a trouser suit stepped out, the hoodies shifty and smirking, the woman newly coiffed for the day, looking alarmed.

Morrow stepped back to let them pass, got in and pressed the button for the twelfth floor. The button lit up pink but still she stared at it, wondering. Because it opened straight into the flat the button for the penthouse suite only worked if a key was used or someone in the flat pressed a button to allow it. She always wondered if Danny would refuse her, not because he ever had, but just because he could. The doors slid shut, the metal box giving a little jolt downwards before setting off for the roof. Her stomach tightened at the thought of seeing him.

Softly, the lift came to a standstill and the doors slid open into the bright daylight. Crystyl was standing fifteen feet away in full make-up, blonde hair brushed down her back, wearing skinny jeans over four inch heels, a pink sequinned T-shirt stretched tight over the tennis balls she’d paid someone to surgically implant on her chest. Disconcerted at the sight of Morrow glaring out at her, Crystyl raised her hand to her waist and gave her a little wave, whispering her hellos in a child’s breathy voice.

Morrow stepped out onto the stone floor. ‘Right, Crystyl?’

‘Aye, brilliant, how are ye, yourself?’

Even though Alex forced social pleasantries out of her mouth she knew her face twisted with annoyance when she spoke to Crystyl. It wasn’t Crystyl herself so much as the type: glam, fluffy, sentimental, but underneath the glitter nail varnish she was hard enough to live off a man who broke legs in the course of his business. Crystyl pretended she didn’t know, that the business existed in some parallel universe, but she used notes greasy with grief and sweat and terror to buy thoughtful greetings cards and angel key rings. Alex wanted to slap the woman and tell her to get a fucking job.

‘Yeah. Dan about?’