Denise Mina - Still Midnight

He looked picked on, and Morrow felt that this was the problem with the job now, not that it was fucked, but that no one wanted to take shit from anyone else, as if it was any other job, as if it was selling computer equipment or something and everyone had rights and no responsibilities. The job was all she had. If it was fucked, so was she.

‘Why would I?’ he said simply.

She had no answer for that. Of course he didn’t do it, he might be dumb and new and young but he wasn’t going to vandalise a toilet when he was the first person they’d ask about it.

‘Ridiculous,’ she said, looking him up and down, knowing she was being unreasonable. She turned on her heels and stabbed at the security pad on the CID door, turning, opening the door with her back so she turned back to the desk. She pointed at the toilet. ‘Get it cleaned off.’

The desk copper nodded, muttering after her, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

The door slammed behind her and she found herself looking down the CID corridor. MacKechnie’s office was dark at the far end, door shut. He wasn’t in his office, might not even be in the building. To her right she saw that her own office lights were on, the door hanging open. Shit. She put her head down and walked over to it.

There he was at his desk, hair carefully waxed and tousled, suited, looking tired but professional. His Elvis mug was sitting on the desk, by his elbow lay an empty health bar wrapper: Apples!Apples!Apples!

‘Bannerman,’ she said, notifying him of her presence.

His eyes narrowed with spite when he saw her. ‘Morrow. You missed my briefing.’

‘Um, well,’ she said uncertainly, ‘I had-’

‘You will not miss briefings under my command. We’ve got a million calls to make this morning. You cannot swan in and out.’

It was an order, a call to tow the line, inappropriate coming from someone of equal rank. ‘Bannerman, it’s supposed to be my day off.’

He held up a hand to stop her, shutting his eyes and turning his head away. ‘MacKechnie suspended days off. You got the email.’

Stunned, she watched him stand up and walk out to the incident room, keeping the staying hand up at her. It was always the soft ones who came down hard, she thought, the bastards who left the chain of command vague to make themselves feel like one of the troops. Then they had to enforce it by humiliating people. TJF.

The incident room desks had been arranged in a horseshoe. Five DCs were sitting, working phones, reading files and every single one of them had laptops. Three of them weren’t even part of this division; they must have been called in from somewhere else, which meant the case was having resources thrown at it. High profile, well resourced, every DS’s dream.

It took her a minute to spot MacKechnie. He was standing at the side of the room, glaring at her. Morrow brightened at the sight of him but he didn’t smile back. He kept his head down as he came over, as if he was walking through driving hail, across the lobby and into the office, Grant following in his wake.

Grant shut the door carefully behind himself. She could imagine the giggle of excitement in the briefing room, the looks passing between the DCs, mouthing her name to anyone whose view of her had been blocked, all speculating as to why MacKechnie, Mr Inclusivity, needed the door shut to speak to her.

Bannerman stayed out of his chair, leaving it to MacKechnie to sit. They were moving as a single animal, they had talked about her, the two of them, wound each other up over her absence, reading things into it that weren’t there. MacKechnie sat down heavily in Bannerman’s chair, pursing his lips, letting off a martyred sigh. It must be a struggle, she imagined, to blend his vegetarian management style with honest aggression. She stood at ease in front of the desk, her head tilted insolently.

‘DS Morrow, I am aware that you are unhappy with my choice of lead on this case,’ MacKechnie narrowed his eyes for emphasis, ‘but I never expected you to usurp the management of his investigation.’

‘Sir, I’ve-’

‘If you compromise these proceedings through sheer bloody-mindedness because you feel picked on…’

He caught her off guard. She expected them to say she was an arse, an idiot, malevolent but not that, not to accuse her of claiming to be a victim. ‘Sir-’

‘I will remind you that a man’s life is at stake here.’

‘I’m cooperating,’ she said. ‘I’ve done nothing that I know of. I didn’t mean to miss the brief this morning.’

MacKechnie shut his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He was too old to be up all night, she thought, too old to do anything other than desk work. He should fuck off to admin and leave the real coppers in peace. These small insults, never uttered, were what kept her head up and her gaze steady.

‘Sir, I didn’t receive the email about time off, or if I did-’

‘ Bannerman ,’ he cut across her. ‘DS Bannerman has done his utmost to make you feel welcome here, hasn’t he?’

She kept her face neutral.

‘Hasn’t he?’

‘Yes, sir,’ she hissed slightly. ‘He has.’

‘Can we agree that you will work with him to resolve this case as a matter of the utmost urgency? Let’s remember – a member of our community has been taken hostage.’

She kept her face straight, not even blinking at the emphasis that signalled the lie. When she looked at him his mouth twitched at the corner, a micro-expression, saying what he was really thinking: how kind he was to include a small Asian man with a beard in his definition of community.

‘Sir,’ she said to the back wall, ‘I haven’t been in my kip. I’ve been up all night, talking to informal contacts and I’ve uncovered information that materially affects our investigations.’

MacKechnie cleared his throat and dropped his voice as if he was disappointed. ‘Go on.’

‘The family lied about the gunmen asking for Rob. On the 999 calls Billal said ‘Bob’, Meeshra fluffed the question from the operator and Omar said Bob in Grant’s interview. It’s on the DVD. Harris spotted it as well.’

‘Harris?’

‘Yes, sir, Harris. And this morning an informant told me that Omar Anwar was in the Young Shields and his street name was Bob.’

In the pause that followed she could feel each calculating the likelihood of her having fabricated information like that. Would she make up a mystery informant to confirm the Bob allegation, just so she could be right? Was she mad enough to make a play that wild? Someone laughed loudly at the far end of the corridor and a door slammed. She was asking MacKechnie to referee between them and she knew that even if she won the argument he would hate her for it.

MacKechnie tried to claw back the high ground. ‘And Bannerman, what did Omar say about this?’

Bannerman became flustered. ‘We, um, I didn’t get the note…’

MacKechnie looked at him. When he spoke his voice was horribly quiet: ‘Do you mean Wilder didn’t give you the note?’

Wilder would get his books if Bannerman suggested he’d wandered off with her note. ‘No, sir.’ Bannerman’s mouth sounded dry. ‘Wilder did give me the note-’

‘It was a matter of minutes,’ Morrow burst in, appearing magnanimous, while winning the competition and not competing. ‘Between Wilder getting there and the interview ending, sir. We didn’t get the question in…’

United front. MacKechnie couldn’t afford to discipline both of them in the middle of an investigation. He cleared his throat. ‘Can we confirm that he uses the name Bob? Is this informant on the books?’

‘No, it’s an informal contact.’

It sounded weak. MacKechnie blinked and asked her straight, ‘How far are you prepared to go with this?’