Denise Mina - Still Midnight

Copyright © Denise Mina 2009

Many thanks to Peter, Jon, Jade and everyone who helped me get this done.

And to Stevo, Mum, Tonia and Ownie and Ferg for their support.

An orange Sainsbury’s plastic bag in full sail floated along the dark pavement. Belly bowed, handles erect, it sashayed like a Victorian gentleman on a Sunday stroll, passed a garden gate and followed the line of the low rockery wall until a sudden breeze buffeted it, lifting the fat bag off its heels, slamming it into the side of a large white van.

Air knocked from it, the bag crumpled to the floor, settling softly under the van’s back wheel.

The van was barely three weeks old, had already been stolen and bore false number plates. It was parked carefully at the kerb, still warm from the heat of the engine, and in six hours’ time it would be found smouldering in woodland, all forensic traces of the men inside obliterated.

Three men sat in the cabin, faces turned in chorus, watching the bungalow across the road.

The driver, Malki, leaned over the steering wheel. He was junkie-thin. From deep inside the dark hood of his tracksuit his sunken eyes darted around the street like a cat hunting a fly.

The two men next to him moved as one animal. Eddy in the middle and Pat sitting by the far door. Both in their late twenties, they’d worked for seven years as a two-man door crew on the graveyard shift. They’d watched films together, met and dumped women together, went to the gym together and, in the manner of married couples, their style had harmonised. Both were meaty, dressed identically in brand new black camouflage trousers, high lace boots, flack waistcoats and balaclavas rolled up to their foreheads. All the gear was fresh from the packet, the display creases still discernable.

A longer look would identify the differences between them. Eddy in the middle drank too much since the wife and kids left. He ate greasy takeaways late at night when he got in from work, undoing all the good he’d done himself in the weights room, and had become bloated and bitter. His eye was forever fixed on what he didn’t have.

It had long been a bone of contention between them that Pat was handsome. Worse, he looked younger than Eddy. More moderate in his character, he didn’t eat or drink as much and fumed less. He was blessed with a head of lush yellow hair, appealingly regular features, and had a stillness about him that made women feel safe. His nose had been broken but even that only served to make his face look vulnerable.

It was Eddy who had come up with the scheme and he had bought the kit. Belligerently, he had bought both sets in the same size, in his size. As they’d dressed together in Eddy’s messy bedsit he’d brought out a tin of black camouflage make-up for them to smear on their faces, like they did when they went paintballing. Softly, almost tenderly, Pat said no and made him put it away. They’d be wearing balaclavas; it wasn’t necessary and that stuff dried out and made Pat’s skin itchy. The glee with which Eddy had produced it worried Pat. It was as if they were putting the final touches to a surprising Halloween costume instead of planning a home invasion that could lead to a twenty-year stretch. Pat had never even done an overnight. Now he fingered the flattened bridge of his nose, covering his face with his hand, hiding his doubt.

He looked down at the gun in his lap. It was heavier than he would have thought, he was worried about being able to hold it up with one hand. He glanced at Eddy and found him glaring at the bungalow as if it had insulted him.

Pat shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t have volunteered Malki to be here either. This wasn’t about trying to cheer Eddy up any more. This was dangerous, this felt like a mistake. He looked away. Eddy had been through too much recently. Not big stuff but sore stuff, and Pat felt as if a single reproachful glance might snap him in half. Still, he looked up at the neat little garden path, at the quiet glowing house and thought that a twenty-year stretch was an awful lot of sorry-about-your-wife.

It was a nice family bungalow, well proportioned, with a shallow garden stretching all the way around the corner into the next street. The current owner, pragmatic, without thought for aesthetics, had bricked over the lawn and flower beds to create a car park. A blue television tinge flickered in the living-room window and a warm pink shone through the glass front door into the hall.

‘See?’ Eddy said softly, keeping his eyes on the house. ‘Single hostile in living room. Small, possibly female.’

A woman in her own home. Nothing hostile about that. Instead of saying it Pat nodded and said, ‘Check.’

‘We’re going in along the back wall, ’member to stay in the dark, until we get to the front door.’

‘Check.’ Pat didn’t really know the military patter and was wary of straying from that one word. Eddy was enjoying it, the whole special ops thing, and Pat didn’t want to spoil it for him.

‘Then-’ Eddy broke off into quasi-militaristic signs. He pointed at Pat, indicated forwards, touched his own chest and swivelled his head to show he’d be on lookout. He mimed Pat knocking on the front door, his eyes widened with warning as an imaginary hostile opened it, and his hand chopped a Go! Go! Go! through the air. His hand got into the house and then, zigzagging like a fish through reeds, looked into all the rooms off the hall, circling all the hostiles they had gathered in the hallway.

‘ Then we ask for Bob. Not before. Not before . Don’t give the cunt warning while he could still be concealed. And no names once we get in. Clear?’

‘Check.’

Eddy turned and slapped the jittery driver’s arm with the back of his hand. ‘When the door opens for the second time, we’re coming out. You start the engine, pull up over there.’ He pointed to the garden gate. ‘Got it?’

Malki stared steadily into the street, his face slack, his eyes glazed over.

‘Malki.’ Pat leaned across Eddy and touched Malki’s forearm gently. ‘Hey, Malki-man, d’ye hear Eddy just then?’

Malki came alive. ‘Aye, no worries, man, like, soon as I see the light – doof! Up there, right? Straight there, man.’ He held the steering wheel tight and nodded adamantly, half affirmation, half wired-junkie tremor. His eyelashes were as ginger as his hair, straight and long as a cow’s.

Pat bit his lip and sat back, looking out of the side window. He could feel Eddy’s reproachful glance burning his cheek. Malki was there because he was Pat’s young cousin. Malki needed the dosh, he always needed dosh, but he wasn’t fit for it. Neither was Pat, if he was honest.

For a moment all three looked back at the bungalow, Pat chewing the inside of his cheek, Eddy angry and frowning, Malki nodding and nodding and nodding.

The wind picked up.

Below the van’s back wheel the stunned plastic bag was waking up. As the breeze streamed below the car the bag filled up at one corner and began tugging its feet free until it slid out from the undercarriage.

In the wide, still street the bag rose to its feet, performed an elegant cartwheel across the road, towards the house and took flight in a sharp cross draft at the corner. It parasailed ten feet into the air, an orange moon, up and up, drifting out of sight of the van, around the corner to the other side of the bungalow and over the roof of a blue Vauxhall Vectra.