Denise Mina - Still Midnight

Ibby looked up at her. He was a big man, brooding, wide shoulders, big fists. His nose had been broken many times, the bridge of it ruined. He was dressed in a tracksuit as if it was pyjamas, no attempt to make an impression or sway an audience. Everyone he met already knew about him. Ibby looked at her cheap work suit, looked at her face. ‘Heard about you,’ he said, chewing a mouthful of dark green sag aloo. Morrow could almost feel the mustard seeds popping on her tongue.

‘How’re you, Ibby?’

‘No bad.’ Ibby tore off a handful of virgin white flat bread from a plate in the middle of the table and used it to pinch a mouthful of spinach from his plate and put it in his mouth. ‘How’s Dimples?’

She shrugged, aware of Bannerman watching outside, hoping she looked professional through the window.

Ibby glanced at her cleavage and pointed, drawing the attention of the other men to it. ‘Evening all,’ he said. The boys sitting next to him laughed, not really understanding, she felt, but toadying to their boss none the less.

When the sycophantic laughter died down she spoke again. ‘Your nose…’

‘I was in a accident,’ he said too loud, too flat.

‘Some accident.’

He chewed the mouthful, smiling to himself and Morrow found herself smiling too. It was nice to see him again. It was nice that he wasn’t dead. Nice that neither of them were mad or in prison or jagging up.

Ibby grinned back, mustard seeds littering his teeth. ‘Fuck, man, ye went polis?’

She shrugged. ‘Couldn’t handle the accident rate on the other side,’ she said and looked out at Bannerman in the car. He wasn’t looking at her; he seemed to be wiping the dust from the dashboard with a tissue.

Ibby picked up a paper napkin and rubbed his meaty fingers with it, ripping it into bits. He sat back and tipped his head at her. ‘Go on then. Say whatever.’

‘OK, erm, you’ve heard about the hostage-taking last night?’

He nodded at his dinner.

‘They were looking for Omar Anwar. For Bob.’

His face was blank, neither listening nor contradicting.

‘ Bob . You called him that.’

‘I never called him Bob.’

‘I don’t mean you personally, Ibby, I mean yous.’

He felt for something in his teeth with his tongue, couldn’t get it and picked at it with his pinkie fingernail. ‘Hmm.’

‘Bob?’

‘Hmm.’ He agreed. ‘Some people call him Bob.’

‘Only some people?’

Ibby looked up at her. ‘No,’ he said carefully.

She understood. ‘OK. Anything you want to share about the events of last night?’

‘Tell ye what, yous must be stuck to come here.’

‘We could go to the community leaders but they’ll just give us a load of, you know.’

‘ Community leaders? We’re community leaders.’ The men around him nodded smugly. ‘Oh, legitimate community leaders, ye mean? Like MPs or Councillors or whatever?’ The men were smiling, less at what he was saying than the tone of his voice. Ibby was enjoying himself. She wondered if he knew he was surrounded by arseholes. ‘Well, we’re a community, we’re leaders, this table.’ He pressed his finger down hard on the flat bread. ‘This table’s a community.’

He was talking shit so she took her chance and interrupted him, ‘Yeah, so anyway, you know anything about last night then or what?’

‘Nothing,’ he said flatly and meant it.

He looked to see if she doubted him. It was the angle as much as anything, him looking up at her. His face had broadened, darkened but the eyes were the same. Deep brown, hooded. She couldn’t see Ibby now. Instead she saw the child who sat next to her in first year of secondary school, the wee boy who scratched himself a lot, was small for his age. She was inexplicably fond of Ibby at the time, felt protective when he was asked anything by unthinking teachers, because he knew nothing. He was only in her school briefly. They sent him away after he nearly killed a boy.

The child was in their year and had a thing about Ibby’s sister. He probably fancied the girl, Morrow thought in hindsight, but he’d got to that stage a month or so before everyone else, so that his chasing her seemed bizarre. Ibby thought it was a threat. Morrow could still see Ibby’s fingers threaded through the boy’s hair. His deep brown eyes were wet as he ground the boy’s broken nose into the asphalt playground floor.

She understood him perfectly back then, the disproportionate wild quality of his violence. Social work got involved, she’d heard, and Ibby was taken away and never came back. They were all afraid of the social work, those children, the ones who stood, hands hanging by their sides and calmly watched Ibby do that, the ones whose parents didn’t come up to the school after and demand answers. They kept their heads down because to get noticed was to disappear. When the teachers came to drag Ibby off, Alex was who he reached for. She managed to wriggle her way through the teachers’ legs and touch his hand for a moment. Fingertips reaching for each other through a scuffle of legs. His knuckles were skinned raw.

Morrow said, ‘Aamir Anwar’s a nice man, isn’t he?’

Ibby conceded that Aamir was OK with a dip of his head and a glance at the table top.

‘No rumours you want to share?’

‘White guys, Glasgow accents. Nothing to do with us.’

‘You’ve got contacts.’

‘So have you.’ He smiled at his dinner as a plan formed in his mind. ‘What station you working out of, then?’

The Young Shields were just head cases. They still had gang fights in the streets. It was all about territory still, they’d never gone professional or money-making. He might imply that he’d like a corrupt police officer on his payroll but Morrow was pretty sure Ibby didn’t have a payroll.

‘Here and there,’ she said. ‘Move about.’

He smirked. ‘Might come and visit you at your work one day.’ He wasn’t really talking to her, just showing off to his pals.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Do that.’

‘Tell Dimples hello from me.’

Morrow stopped. She hadn’t noticed the first time he mentioned Danny because she’d been distracted by Bannerman outside but Ibby had name dropped Dimples twice now and each time he did the fat boy next to him pushed his chin out, proud. A protective familial reflex made her notice, wonder if they’d battered Danny or bettered him somehow. Instinct made her square up to the henchman, but she forced her eyes to the floor. She was being sucked back in, she should leave.

‘Take care, Ibby,’ she said. ‘Try not to have any more accidents.’

She turned to the door when Ibby spoke again, under his breath, ‘Hey, anyway, your da… Sorry he’s no well. In the infirmary…?’

Morrow read his face. The old man was such a has-been no one would have bothered to pass on the information. Danny must have told him. ‘Aye,’ she said gently. ‘Fuck him, anyway.’ She walked away.

King Bo stepped aside when she came to the door, lifting his arm away from her, as if being in the police was something you could catch from social contact.

‘Bye bye,’ she said pleasantly, and the big gangster sneered to show how hard he was.

She crossed the street back to the car. As she opened the door she looked through the window of Kasha’s again. King Bo had a mean face on, arms crossed, looking down the road for invading hordes. Inside Ibby was stuffing bread into his face. She could see under the table that his belly was heavy. He was getting fat. They were all heading for old. She climbed into the car and Bannerman started the engine.

‘Well, it wasn’t the Shields,’ she said.

‘We knew that.’

‘No. We suspected that. Now we know it definitely wasn’t them.’