Denise Mina - Still Midnight

They had a laugh at the mug shot, Morrow and Bannerman, sitting in their office looking at the record pulled from central, but it was partly relief that they were getting somewhere. The other part was how sorry for himself Malki Tait looked.

He was dressed for a really good night out. Though his colouring was very Scottish, pale skin, eyebrows and lashes brighter than a polished orange, Malki had dyed his hair black and carefully styled it in a bowl cut. The black was uniform and so lush and conditioned that it looked like a lady’s wig. He was dressed in a grey jacket with epaulettes and what looked like a sort of cravat. According to the report he had been arrested outside of Rooftops nightclub with a pocket full of pills, too much to consume alone but not really enough to deal. But what really made them laugh was his expression. Malki’s face was an eloquent expression of injustice. His mouth turned down, eyebrows raised over his brow, like a skinny child being picked on.

‘Look.’ She pointed out his previous: car theft and reset. He’d burnt out cars before, early in his career.

‘And he’s a Tait,’ said Bannerman with a smile.

Morrow nodded. It couldn’t be coincidence. It had to mean they were getting close to something. She stood up off the desk. ‘I’ll go tell MacKechnie-’

‘No.’ Bannerman stood up so fast he toppled his chair and had to reach back to catch it and stop it falling. ‘No, I’ll tell him.’ He was determined to be the bearer of the developments. He wouldn’t look at her as he yanked his jacket off the back of the chair and pulled it on, straightening his tie.

Morrow sat and watched him, stone faced, letting him sweat. She waited until he was dressed and standing in front of her.

‘Good work today, Morrow.’ He didn’t want her to come with him and share the glory but couldn’t say it outright.

She stayed where she was. ‘Yeah, cheers.’

Uncomfortable, Bannerman looked at his watch. ‘Four fifteen.’

‘Yeah.’ She stood up. ‘We should go and pick Omar up.’

‘No, I’ll go with a squad.’ Bannerman blinked and looked at his desk. When he looked at her again all the warmth was gone. ‘If you could look through the hard drive from the shed, see if you can get anything else for probable on it.’ He stood back, angling himself towards the door, telling her to get out and get on with the tasks he had allotted her.

Morrow curled her lip and stepped towards the door. She opened it, flinging him a dirty backward glance and left.

Bannerman was fixing his tie as he walked up the corridor, paused outside MacKechnie’s office door to clear his throat and knocked twice. At the call to ‘come’ he opened it and stood in the door frame, just as she knew he would. He was in a hurry to do good work, couldn’t stay, just passing on the good news about his discoveries. He didn’t hear Morrow creep up behind him, or notice that she had put herself directly in MacKechnie’s line of vision so that they looked as if they were together. With affected modesty he related the developments of the day, using the singular ‘I’ throughout. Morrow watched him, drawing MacKechnie’s eye with big swoops of her eyebrows.

‘The Taits?’ MacKechnie was talking to her. ‘Really?’

‘Well,’ answered Morrow, startling Bannerman with her presence, ‘his name is Tait but we don’t honestly know if he’s any connection. Judging from his sheet,’ Bannerman was staring at her, his neck jerking indignantly, ‘he’s just a junkie headcase and aspiring dealer. All his arrests are drugs-related or for joyriding. He lives in Cambuslang, so he could be a cousin.’

‘I didn’t-’ Bannerman stopped himself.

‘Anyway,’ Morrow held up her hands, ‘I’ve got things to get on with. I’ll leave you to pick up Omar Anwar, Bannerman, OK?’

And she backed away, grinning at him.

Eddy was breathing through his nose, snorting like a bull, leaning forward in the seat, over the wheel, as if he wanted to jump someone.

Pat should ask, he knew, what happened with Eddy’s daughter, how she was, what birthday it was or something. He could cue Eddy up for a vent about how his ex was responsible for him forgetting the wee lassie’s birthday, but he knew of old that it would only make it worse. Once Eddy got going on his ex no good came of it. Pat had spent endless shifts trapped, listening to Eddy digging over her crimes, telling ridiculous lies about it all, trying to convince himself that everything was her fault.

Pat never liked the woman, even in the good times. She never fucking shut up talking, but he could see that Eddy was no picnic. And Malki was wrong; they weren’t nice kids. They were half wild. Pat grew up around big families but until he met Eddy’s kids he’d never known that children could make noise like that, for as long as that.

So he didn’t ask and Eddy’s arse was making buttons trying to get him to. ‘Never trust a fucking woman, man,’ he said, grinding his teeth.

Pat looked out of the window and thought of the cold of the Vicky’s wall sinking into his hand, numbing his fingertips. His hand was on his lap and he smiled at his fingers as he thought about it. ‘Hope Malki’s OK.’

‘Cunt better be, the dough we’re paying him.’

Pat wanted to say it wasn’t that great a rate, not for what he was doing, not for the sentence he could be facing. He was good Malki, reliable. They didn’t have to make sure he was too pissed to walk, like Shugie, so that he couldn’t go to a pub and blurt something about it to a moody wide-o who’d go and tell someone. And you knew Malki wasn’t going to get in a temper and kill the fucking guy. He wouldn’t be blurting everyone’s fucking names either, making it impossible to send the old guy home.

Pat could change his name. He imagined himself in a sunny country with Aleesha. His arm was resting on her shoulders, relaxed, and she was smiling away from him, at something, they were posing as if someone was taking their photo but taking ages about it and they couldn’t be bothered standing still any more.

Aleesha and Roy. He smiled to himself. Roy? He laughed and pinched his nose. Who the fuck was called Roy?

Eddy stopped too fast and the seat belt bit into Pat’s chest and waist. He looked and saw Eddy staring up at the sky through the windscreen, looking for cameras. They were in a street off Maryhill Road, it would have been a busy road once but everything around it was knocked down and the street was one way now. A lone phone box stood at a street corner.

Eddy undid his seat belt and Pat felt suddenly panicked and hurried to undo his. ‘No worries mate, I’ll do it.’

‘Naw.’ Eddy had that face on him, the let’s-have-a-big-fucking-fight face. ‘ I’ll do it.’

Pat stared him out and slid his belt buckle back into the clip. ‘Go on then.’

Eddy’s jaw jutted once, a small punctuation mark to the fight they hadn’t had, and he turned and got out, slamming the door. Pat knew Eddy would be doing his hard man swagger. As a petty act of spite he didn’t watch Eddy stride across the road. He knew the walk well enough: shoulders up, head wheeling left and right, looking for the fates that defied him.

This was the sort of thing Morrow excelled at, looking, seeing, processing. She pulled her office door shut, set her chair at a good distance from the monitor and clicked on the first of Omar’s files.

It was an Excel spreadsheet of meaningless figures, the years at the top, starting with the present, and in the columns below gradually increasing numbers following a starkly straight trajectory. She snorted a laugh when she saw that rounded figure of £80,000 in the final column. Not a penny less, no odd bits of change. It was a joke, a fiction, a bedtime story to himself.