Denise Mina - Still Midnight

‘Everybody where they should be?’ asked MacKechnie, not actually knowing where they should be.

‘Sorted, sir,’ said Morrow.

MacKechnie was delighted with her but it only highlighted how poorly he had thought of her before. He was imagining the glory before them, she felt, and points at which to siphon it off. His respectfulness made her uncomfortable. Morrow was born on the back foot and only ever felt easy as an underdog.

They sat in silence for ten tense minutes, watching the grey shapes shifting in front of them, their eyes flicking from screen to screen. She had ordered radio silence; if the kidnappers were at all professional they’d be listening to the police frequencies. She rang Harris on his mobile. He was where he was supposed to be and nothing had happened.

‘’Kay,’ she said. ‘Be ready.’

The bench was small and there wasn’t a lot of room to move. MacKechnie looked at her casually and it felt like a prelude to an awkward kiss. Morrow checked her watch – they were almost ten minutes late for the one hour deadline.

‘There!’ she said pointing to the four lane screen.

They could see Sadiqa trundling slowly towards them, saw another driver change lanes to avoid her. Then, on monitor two, a lorry hurried past and frightened her into slowing down even more. Unused to motorway driving, Sadiqa took the outside lane, drawing attention to herself by driving at the speed limit and verging slowly to the right every time she checked her rear mirror. She disappeared off camera for a moment, should have been pulling into the drop point.

On another monitor, in grainy black and white, reverse lights flashed on the emergency phone as Sadiqa backed up in the lay-by. MacKechnie breathed a curse, watching as she missed the emergency phone post by inches.

Sadiqa stopped, pulled on the handbrake so hard the car seemed to be taking a deep breath. The door opened and she got out. Stagily, she looked at the cars passing, standing at the open door, and waddled around to the boot, opened it and pulled out the black holdall. Sadiqa then dropped it heavily onto the road, tried to pick it up again and seemed defeated. She bent down, inelegantly bending her little legs out to the side, taking one of the handles, dragging it over behind the emergency post. She stood up, looking at it. She seemed to be talking to the bag. She turned and went back to the car, opened the door, sat down and shut the door. The engine restarted,

‘I can hardly bear to watch her pull back out,’ said MacKechnie to no one.

A couple of stalls, and she finally made it back onto the road, reappearing in a further screen a good bit further down the road. But they weren’t watching Sadiqa. They were watching the bag.

Car headlights strobed past, oblivious to the forty grand in the bag. A lorry rumbled past. A ragged plastic bag floated by. Morrow’s eyes strayed to the other screens. Steady, no special driving, no strange vans with too many men in the front seat for the time of night.

‘There!’ MacKechnie was on his feet, watching as a car pulled into the lay-by, hazards flashing, pulling in too far along, just the front half of the vehicle in shot.

‘Shit,’ said Morrow who was on her feet too. ‘I asked them to broaden the shot. Shit!’

A bald man got out of the car, a saloon, came around to the boot, bent down to look at his tail lights. He stood up, stroked his head as if he was trying to comfort himself, looked around. Cars flashed past him as he stood and watched. Gobby scribbled down the number plate and called it in for a check.

The man got back in his car and went away. Gobby hung up his mobile and looked at Morrow. ‘Random?’

She shrugged. Even if it all went tits up, if Aamir died and the money was lost, she had Brian, had held his hand and a future felt possible.

The change was so slow that the apparent movement seemed at first to be a feature of the weak light in the empty lay by. The bag was moving.

MacKechnie squinted. An arm, from off-camera, coming out of the dark hillside out of shot, a foot just visible getting purchase to pull the heavy load up the steep incline. Two hands on the handle, suddenly moving fast, swinging it up the hill and disappearing. MacKechnie panicked and stood up. ‘Shit, shit! The other side, they’ve come from the other side of the motorway! ’ He turned on Morrow, blocking her view of the monitors. ‘What’s on the other side of the motorway?’

Morrow didn’t get to her feet. She sat still, watching all the screens intently. Gobby looked down at her and spoke: ‘They never came on the motorway, ma’am.’

She reached forward and touched MacKechnie’s hip, pushing him out of the way of her view. ‘OK,’ she said slowly. ‘OK.’

Eddy hardly had a breath in him. As well as having to negotiate the steepness of the hillside he had to pick his steps. The slope was covered in wide netting to stop stones tumbling down onto the motorway and he caught his toes, almost falling over, almost dropping the bag. At the crest of the hill he stopped for a gasp and lunged forward, leaving the bright lights from the motorway and tumbling into the dark field.

Stubs of cut straw crumpled beneath his heavy boots. Two hundred yards to the dark Peugeot, T had the wit to turn the lights off but Eddy could see his outline in the driver’s seat, his puff of silver hair a beacon in the dark.

Eddy had forty grand in his hand, forty grand in readies, but more than that, better than that, he had done it. Not Malki, not Pat, none of them. He had successfully organised and done it. A surge of energy made him lurch forward, his feet in the flat boots stumbling after him, the heavy bag swinging at his knees, dragging him back and forth off centre. His heart was bursting in his chest.

T didn’t look up when Eddy arrived and ran around the back, popping the boot, chucking the bag carelessly in and skipping around to the passenger side. He opened the door and T leaned across, blocking his seat. ‘Check the money for trackers? Check for paint bombs?’

Eddy’s lungs were burnt. He’d run too long without drawing breath, but he staggered back to the boot and pulled the bag onto the road as T had told him to. He tugged at the zip until it came open all the way.

Bundles of twenties held together with red elastic bands, messy, like someone had done it at home. Bricks in the bottom to weigh the bag, in case it had been blown away, but no tracker boxes, no paint bombs in amongst it all. Eddy ran his hand over the money and found that he was salivating.

‘Well?’T was calling to him from the front seat.

‘Nothing.’

‘Hurry then.’

He threw the bag back in, slammed the boot and lunged for the passenger door, aware that his knees were aching and strained from running in unwieldy boots. He was too old for this, for the excitement and the physical strains. Next time he’d mastermind it and sit in a car while someone else ran half a mile to the roadside and climbed up a steep hill. He could feel the hot scorch of the cold night air in his windpipe, felt the dull pain in his knees and his heart battering in his chest. He threw himself into the passenger seat and slammed the door after him.

‘Well done, son,’ said T. ‘Very well done,’ and he drove off at a regular speed, as if they were out for a late night dawdle, lights still off, a small smile on his face.

‘Now, you know, Eddy, you can just give me back the guns and we’ll call it even. Have ye them on ye now?’

Eddy looked at him and it occurred to him suddenly that maybe T didn’t really think he had done well, that maybe T was planning to shoot him in the face.

The outside world suddenly flashed, bright white light flooding in through every window, scorching Eddy’s retina so he couldn’t see T but he could hear him: a gasp and gargle, a kind of mad hissing groan in response to the blinding light. It seemed an odd thing to say.