Denise Mina - Still Midnight

Shugie was dozing on the damp settee. A second blue plastic bag was sitting open and next to him with three new cans in it. The previous bag of cans lay empty, the tins discarded on the floor.

‘Dunno if three be enough,’ said Malki. ‘But it’s all they had left in the shop.’

Pat shrugged. He didn’t want to speak too much in front of the pillowcase. Carefully he reached around to his wallet and took out a twenty quid note. He looked at it, calculated that it was probably enough for an alki to buy drink but not enough for a really greedy drinker to spend a night in the pub with other people. He sat it on top of the cans in the bag.

They formed a strange parade, passing through the living room to the kitchen and out the back door: Malki ahead with his hurried junkie speed-walk, Pat behind him, the pillowcase puffing and jerking as he was prodded and shoved by Eddy following behind. Malki hesitated at the kitchen door, waiting for Eddy’s signal. Eddy nodded and Malki opened it, letting fresh air into the festering corridor of bin bags.

They had been in the house for almost ten hours, breathing in every nuanced smell a human being can make without dying and the back garden seemed impossibly lush and fresh. Each in turn stopped on the back doorstep to take a grateful breath.

It was a jungle: grass grew long and dark here, an enclosing wall of deep green waxy hedges exploding upwards, bursting in every conceivable direction, swallowing the light. As the wind caressed the blades the grass winked its silver undersides.

The Lexus had been driven into the long grass so that the boot was facing the kitchen door and Malki had left a trail through the grass from the driver’s door to the back step, from the boot to the passenger door as he emptied anything from it that might be used as a weapon. Pat followed the path to the boot, popped it and stepped back.

Eddy took his time, glancing spitefully at the old man. He seemed unsatisfied that the pillowcase was walking stooped, that he was limping on one foot, flinching at the pain in his back. Swinging him by the elbow Eddy turned the pillowcase so that his back was to the boot and punched him in the groin, winding him so that he doubled up. Eddy stood up with a snigger and looked at Malki and Pat. Malki looked away. Pat smiled weakly. Oblivious to the animosity, Eddy smirked again and, as if telling a joke, put his hand flat on the old man’s head and, with the smallest push, dropped him into the boot.

The excellent suspension echoed the fall of the old man’s body. Eddy looked around for support, smiling, lips parted. Pat and Malki were from a wild sprawling family, composed mostly of ineffectually worried mothers and bad apples, a model of complex social problems, but it took a special kind of man not to empathise with a punch in the balls. They wouldn’t meet his eye. Malki even tutted at the car.

Angry at having measured his violence wrong, yet again, Eddy picked up the feet in dirty slippers and dropped them into the boot, swinging the old man onto his side, and slammed it shut as if hoping to trap some small something between the metal lips.

Malki looked for Pat to say something. ‘In the car, son,’ said Pat and Malki obliged, shutting the door carefully behind him.

Eddy looked angrily at the back of Malki’s head. ‘Your Malki’s a twat.’ Pat glared at him. ‘OK, I know he’s your cousin, but he fucking is a twat.’

Pat’s eyes were open wide in warning. The pillowcase could hear them. The wind hissed through the grass as Eddy looked away and blushed. He couldn’t seem to stop fucking up. Pat turned away and walked around to the passenger door. The pillowcase knew two names now; Eddy had said them out loud and told him that two of them were cousins and so now Eddy couldn’t let him walk, he’d have to kill him and leave Aleesha fatherless, rudderless, looking for love in all the wrong places. Pat could be one of those places.

As he opened the passenger door and slipped inside the car his chest was warm, full of thoughts of sunny places and hair on pillows.

Morrow and Bannerman were parked in Alison Street, looking across the road to two big shop windows.

The restaurant didn’t have a name painted above the door, it wasn’t listed in the phone book, but everyone knew it as Kasha’s. It didn’t even look like a restaurant; it looked more like a community centre because of the modest furnishings and utilitarian decor. The seats were moulded grey plastic, the tables wood effect tops with steel legs. Even the wallpaper was slightly grey, a dado rail hinted at a different pattern but mirrored the dull colours in the rest of the room. The food service area was a modest four-foot sandwich bar, a fridge full of cans of mango juice, bottles of water and glass jars of mango lassie.

Morrow knew that later in the evening it would be full of men eating, sipping coffees and drinking fresh lassie out of long glasses, but it was Ramadan and the men were sitting around empty tables, keeping each other company but not eating.

One table was conspicuously eating, though. The four men were sitting at a table away from the window near the dimly lit back of the shop, their table shamelessly strewn with plates of food. A fifth man stood in the doorway, dressed like the others. He stood with his hands crossed over his groin, watching the street. He wasn’t the biggest of the men but Morrow knew him from his reputation. King Bo was a nasty, cold boy. He could break bones to order: one finger, two legs, even a thumb, which is a hard bone to break, did it without a flicker and he was fast too. But King Bo was a sideshow, a soldier. The men at the table were the main event.

There were four of them, all big, all dressed in T-shirts and tracksuits, all frowning as they worked their way through their food. The Shields bosses, and at their centre was Ibby Ibrahim.

‘Only be a minute,’ said Morrow and got out. He let her go alone without a fight in the end. Ibby was a good contact, the sort of contact to boast about to other officers, a name to drop and he was letting her have it for the good of the case. It was big of him and she found that, reluctantly, despite herself, Morrow was starting to hate him a fraction less.

She shut the car door and stepped across the empty street, looking King Bo in the face as she approached. He reared his head back. His hair was cut short and gelled into a fin, the quiff tip matching his pointy chin. Afflicted with a slight squint he gave her his best mean look. She looked down to pull out her warrant card as she approached, and when she looked back she found him grinning.

‘Nah,’ drawled King Bo, ‘that’s not a pass in here, lady.’

She stopped four feet from him, her heels hanging off the edge of the pavement and looked around. Ibby could see her standing in the street but she didn’t look at him. He might tell her to fuck off. She hadn’t seen him for twenty years, he might not even remember her.

She could just turn and leave, let the past be the past. Her Bob lead was already panning out and she was making herself vulnerable coming here. She was making herself traceable back to her maiden name, from there back to her family and she’d worked so hard to shed it all. But King Bo leaned backwards into the shop, listened to something and then bent towards her. ‘OK, aye, you’re in.’ He stepped back in the dark, flicked his hand to send her to the table of men, avoided her eye as if they were letting her in against his advice.

Morrow was the only woman in the place and her top was low enough cut to show half an inch of cleavage. She walked in feeling like a stripper entering a monastery.

‘Go.’ King Bo pointed her towards Ibby.

She walked over but stopped a few feet short of the table and looked at him. ‘Hello.’