Denise Mina - Still Midnight

Struggling to drink the water through a wide grin Aleesha looked at him. He sat watching her, eyes narrowed in appreciation, mapping her arms, her shoulders, loving her. Her heart rate was increasing, her breaths deepening, as she looked at him across the plastic bottle. She swallowed, felt the narrow nozzle suck on her lip as she took the bottle from her mouth.

‘Roy?’

He smiled just hearing her say the name.

‘Roy, do you have a car?’

Morrow didn’t recognise the car. It wasn’t their car but she looked into it because it was the only civilian car in the yard that she didn’t recognise immediately. A lumbering pale blue Honda Accord. The gesture was so unexpected it took the breath from her. She stopped on the ramp, holding the handrail for support.

He was in the driver’s seat, hands resting on his thighs, looking out at her. Brian had bought a car without asking her. A second-hand car. Not a remarkable car, bit of a shit car actually, but an exact replica of the car he’d owned when they met.

He had stopped at the bus stop outside the Battlefield Rest Rotunda at the Vicky and offered her a lift home when they were both at Langside College. They weren’t friends but had sat near each other in history a few times, were aware of each other, had coffee with the same people once or twice.

Now, with a jaundiced policewoman’s knowledge of the world, now, she would never get into a car with a man she didn’t know. Now she would have leaned down, the rain pattering on her hood and her ankles freezing, and said thanks but no, she was fine to get the bus, she’d see him tomorrow, did he know he was parked in a yellow square? Now she’d never get in the car with Brian. But back then she’d felt the warmth billowing out of the passenger window and climbed in from the cold bus stop on the exposed road and pulled her hood down and he drove her to her door. They talked about music and the weather and the history teacher and how Brian liked hill walking and would she like to come sometime.

He had the car for two years and sold it for scrap before they got married. At her insistence they went together and bought a new car, more modest but fresh, new, with a promise of no problems.

At the bottom of the ramp the wind swirled around the floor of the police yard, ushering leaves under cars. The station door slapped shut behind her and some coppers squeezed past down the narrow ramp. She let them by and then hurried down to the pale blue car, standing in front of the bonnet, looking in at him. Brian looked back through the windscreen, reached up, took his glasses off. The bridge of his nose had two red oval indents, his eyes looked raw without glass over them. He looked younger.

Morrow wanted to fly through the windscreen and engulf him then, smother him with her body, swallow him. Instead she dropped her chin to her chest, hiding her face in case anyone saw her on the many cameras that were dotted around the yard, and stomped around to the passenger door. She opened it, the handle mechanism so much like a physical memory that she felt her hand cup her own younger trusting hand, felt the warmth from her smooth skin.

Heat billowed out from the cabin. Brian had the heater up full, just as he had the day at the bus stop. Later he’d told her it was so that she’d feel it when he wound the window down and asked her in, so she’d be tempted to come into the warm.

She dropped into the seat and slammed the door behind her. Raising a hand she flipped the sun shield down so that her wet eyes couldn’t be seen from outside, not by the cameras or passersby coming on shift or going out in cars.

Morrow looked out of the side window, searching for a phrase or a line or a thing to say, but there were no words for this. Her eyes skirted over the bonnets of the cars lined up with theirs, over to the shit-brick wall around the yard, and she began to trace a journey through the mortar to the building. Next to her, far away, she was aware of Brian sighing.

A wrist touching her wrist. For the first time since Gerald died she didn’t draw away from him, didn’t flinch at the touch. It was so warm in the car she’d hardly noticed the movement of his hand as it flattened against the back of her hand.

Hand against hand, his wrist slipped up until it was on top of hers, edge to edge. His pinkie moved a millimetre, stroking her pinkie, and then, quick as a landslide, their fingertips found each other, working through and over in the secret language of lovers, saying things there were no words for.

Morrow’s face was wet, her breath short, her eyes smarting bitterly, but she kept working her way across the wall, through the rough dips and dark valleys as she struggled for breath, remembering her place in the maze even when she shut her eyes to shed the shuddering veil of tears. She kept going until, quite suddenly, she found herself at the far wall with no further to go.

Out of the blue Brian said, ‘I got sacked.’

She looked at the hand wound tightly around hers. A fine hand. Tiny hairs. The fingers loosened on hers, the tips stroking her fingertips. ‘Haven’t been in since…’

She looked out of the window at the wall. People were moving outside, blurred uniforms, getting in cars, pulling out. ‘We in trouble? Financially?’

‘Might need to sell that house.’ His fingers were moving quickly over hers, anxious, nervous, waiting for the warmth to turn.

She turned to look and found him turned away, face to the window, fat tears dripping off his chin. ‘Oh, Brian. I hate that fucking house.’

Fingers through fingers, tight, tight and unmoving, Morrow raised Brian’s hand to her lips and there it stayed.

Her belly touching the steering wheel, Sadiqa looked up apologetically at Morrow and MacKechnie. ‘I’m fat…’ she said simply.

It didn’t look very safe. ‘Can’t you push the seat back a bit?’ asked McKechnie.

‘My legs are short,’ she said, looking around the cabin as if she might find something there to lengthen them.

Morrow leaned down to the open window. ‘Can you drive it though?’

Drawing her stomach in Sadiqa made a determined face, nodded at the wheel. ‘Yes. Yes, I can drive. I‘m not really confident about motorway driving though.’

‘Will you be OK?’

She looked at the dashboard, uncertain, as if she had been asked to fly a plane and decided, ‘Yes.’

‘Now, the officers are there already, you know where you’re going?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You get out, put the bag behind the emergency telephone, get back in and rejoin the motorway, OK?’

‘Then come back here?’

‘Then come back here.’

It was freezing in the Obs van. Gobby was crouching on a small foldaway stool by the back doors. There was no room for him on the bench; MacKechnie and Morrow were perched there, giving them the best vantage point to watch the boxy grey screens.

The motorway cameras were high up and the images angled, one of four grey lanes, crash barrier in the middle. It was a long stretch of straight road, good for reading the number plate on any car, and the camera was angled so that the drivers’ faces could be clearly seen, well lit by the street lights. They could go back over any one of them and still and print it. Great in court.

It was a main artery, a busy bit of road for the time of night. A steady parade of cars and vans and lorries came towards the camera, drove under it, front seat faces talking, silent, singing, picking noses or slack, hypnotised by the blandness of the road. Another boxy screen showed a lay-by with an emergency phone in the foreground. The image was still apart from passing lights licking the edge of the image. They had two other screens, both trained on junctions, in case the kidnappers got that far before they were intercepted.