Denise Mina - Still Midnight

The realisation was slow but profound: whatever amount the family offered tonight Pat would accept it to get away from Eddy. All the years of listening to him, coaxing him, rearranging facts to suit him, smiling away from him, it was over. Pat had other things to do, other matters to take care of.

They had driven around quiet streets for half a mile before they hit the main road. Mid-morning traffic was building up and they joined a queue of cars trying to dodge through the traffic. Eddy saw the lights changing up ahead and squeezed the brake on, bringing the big car to a stop. A brand new Mini was next to him, blue, shiny, and the woman driver saw the Lexus’ silver bonnet and turned to look into the car. Her eyes were obscured by the Mini’s roof. All that was visible was a lipsticktackity mouth hanging open, looking at them. She smiled and Eddy drank it in, smiling at his steering wheel.

‘Check this cunt checking me, eh?’

Pat didn’t answer.

‘Pat, man, check this bird checking the car.’

Pat wasn’t looking at him.

‘Man…’

Eddy followed Pat’s eyeline, over the dash, over the bonnet, past the lights to a green and white tiled rotunda in a traffic island. It was a strange wee building, like something from a garden but in the middle of a sea of traffic. A hand-painted sign on the window read ‘The Battlefield Rest’. Eddy looked back at him.

‘Had your dinner in there?’ he asked.

But Pat didn’t answer. A horn tooted behind them, the lights had changed. Eddy cursed the driver and took off.

Pat wasn’t looking at the rotunda, he was looking over the road again, to a small wall around a visitors’ car park and a tall Victorian building. Built in a comma around the cars it was the Victoria Infirmary.

‘Pat, man, you’re miles away.’

Eddy was right. Pat stared at the building and his mind took him out of the car, away from the racial slights and the bad role play and the hint of Shugie’s piss on Eddy’s trousers.

Pat and his beloved newspaper were in the lift in the Victoria Infirmary. Pat was holding a bunch of flowers, yellow flowers, he could feel the cold damp from the stems creeping through the tissue paper in his hands. And he had a suit on.

Perhaps because Bannerman had believed her when she pretended to stand up for him over the 999 call detail, or because they were both tired and bored of fighting, for whatever reason peace broke out unexpectedly as Bannerman drove them to the Victoria Infirmary. He took the drive slow, hardly talking except to fill in the spaces in the briefing as they occurred to him. His delivery was thoughtful and Morrow found him beating her to conclusions a couple of times. More astute than she had given him credit for.

‘Why burn it out in Harthill, is the question. Either they went to Edinburgh or pass there often, knew it and sensed it would throw us off the scent.’

‘Serial number trace on the van’s origins?’

‘Nicked from a dealers in Cathcart. Nothing unusual about the theft.’ He slowed for the lights at Gorbals Cross.

‘Could explain them burning it out there, if one of them was an experienced car thief. The farmer said he’d had nicked cars there before.’

‘Yeah. Could be a known place to leave cars. Tried and tested, they’d know it would take a good few hours before anyone would find it.’

‘What’d the burnt-out look like?’

‘Professional. You know that fire ball effect you get sometimes? ’ He waved his hand flat over his head, skimming the roof of the car.

She did. ‘When they leave the tank full and it explodes and burns itself out?’

‘Exactly.’ He smiled a little, pleased that she knew what he was talking about. ‘Well, no sign of that. They doused the inside thoroughly and it burned nice and steady so there’s no fibre or hair traces or anything.’

‘Did the family have any Afghanistan visas?’

‘Nah, no connection. Doesn’t seem to be one. Mum and dad are both refugees from Uganda. Any extended family they have is from there as well. Couple of cousins from Pakistan, distant, Ugandan émigrés.’

‘I think Mo and Omar were right, it’s just the thing an idiot would say to Asian people. If they are unprofessional enough to use a gun they’ve never fired before… You’d think they’d try it out.’

‘I know.’ The lights changed to green and he eased the car through the junction and down the Vicky Road. ‘They did make one big mistake: tin foil wrap found in among the trees.’

‘No!’ She grinned at him. ‘No!’

‘Yeah.’ He was smiling too. ‘Heroin. But let’s not get too excited because even if it was from the kidnappers and not the van thieves, it’s so hard to trace anything from a wrap.’

‘The gunmen weren’t mellow.’

‘Yeah, well, it was just one wrap, there’s tar on the inside.’

‘Maybe the others didn’t notice he’d been smoking. High functioning, you know?’

‘Long habit then?’

‘Yeah, not mixing or out of control.’

‘Yeah, I think you could be right.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah.’

Sensing that they were getting on, Bannerman bit his lip. ‘You all right with me?’

Morrow cleared her throat and shrugged. ‘Sorry I called you a cunt. I’s tired…’

He flinched at that. ‘You didn’t . What you said was that we wouldn’t get on if I was going to be a cunt about it, but you didn’t call me a cunt.’

This semantic difference seemed to matter to him. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘No, that’s right.’

‘We’ve been kind of put in an awkward situation here, you know? Kind of competing when we could be working together. Bad management.’

The implied slur on MacKechnie was meant to be a bonding move, or trap. Queasy with sleep deprivation and tired of having to guess what the fuck was going on with Bannerman, she could feel the anger building behind her eyes. ‘Grant, I feel that you’re very into your career…’ She stopped, took a breath, stopped again. He waited for her to get it together. ‘… Less about the service… you know.’ She gestured outwards with both hands, as if she was opening a book, meaninglessly. ‘I feel I’m more about the case… expending energy, y’know?’

Bannerman took it in good part. ‘My dad was a copper, you know.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Grew up with the service.’

‘Yeah.’ Morrow scratched her face, a little too hard. Just because his father was in the force didn’t mean she was less committed.

‘If you grow up in it,’ he frowned at the windscreen, ‘you know it, a bit more maybe. Know what it’s really like, what’s likely to happen at the end of a career. New recruits, they’re idealistic, yet to lose faith with it.’ He was talking about her.

‘I’m not a new recruit,’ said Morrow.

‘No, but you’re not old police family, are you? I mean, in some ways you’re lucky because you’ll have to find those things out yourself. Just… it can be a bit of a shocker when you do.’

‘TJF,’ she said sullenly.

He nodded. ‘TJF. But me, I know what to take on and when to make my moves, I know the limits of the job. You don’t have that killer instinct…’

She suddenly found herself confused. ‘Killer instinct?’

‘How to work the system to get the job done right.’

She didn’t understand but had a bad feeling about the way it was going.

‘Anyway,’ he said, as if that had cleared all that up, ‘if Omar is Bob, why does anyone think he’s got two mill kicking about? He’s twenty-one, he’s been studying since leaving school, doesn’t have a job. Why would they think he has millions of pounds?’

‘Oh, I dunno.’ She looked at Bannerman, saw him concentrating on the road and realised that the conversation hadn’t bothered him at all. Killer instinct. Somehow she felt he was telling her that he was indeed, as she suspected, a complete self-serving arsehole.