Still Midnight (10 page)

“You better lock up,” said Morrow as they got out.

Most officers didn’t bother locking their vehicles but the yard gate had been broken for a fortnight and spite-theft from a police station wasn’t much deterred by cameras.

Morrow walked up the ramp to the door, stopped outside, looked straight into the camera, and punched in the door code. John was behind the processing bar, always immaculately uniformed, leaning his weight on a tall stool, preserving the creases in his trousers.

He bid her good morning and she gave him a smile. She pushed through the door to the duty sergeant’s lair and saw Omar and Billal through the striped window, sitting on the visitor’s chairs by the front door, waiting. Their postures didn’t match: Billal was upright, his arm around the back of the chair, his expression hurt. Omar was slumped over his knees, his mouth pressed hard into his hand, holding in a scream.

The senior duty sergeant, Gerry, grunted an acknowledgment at her and went back to filling out some time sheets. Morrow had been on at weekends when fights broke out in the waiting room and had seen Gerry plow into a crowd, peeling the drunks off one another like a surgeon easing skin back, never breaking a sweat. Gerry’s hair seemed whiter every time she saw him. They kept starting new trainees but it would be a rare copper who could follow Gerry. The blend of meticulous form-filling and sudden violence took a particular kind of man.

She grunted back and opened the door into the lobby. Omar and Billal recognized her. Omar stood up, hopeful she would take him away from his growling brother.

“No.” She raised a hand. “I’m not here to get you guys, I’m not doing the questioning, just going in here.”

She backed off to the CID corridor on her left. She punched in the security code and opened the door, glad to get into the long green corridor. MacKechnie’s office was at the far end, so he could stand at his door and look down at all of them. He never did.

The clarity of rank structure was one of Morrow’s favorite things about the force. She knew who she had to take shit from and who she could give it to. It made sense to her. MacKechnie was not comfortable being in charge, she felt, and apologized for his status by pretending to listen. He had a leadership style that would be described with a lot of bullshit buzzwords: inclusive, facilitative, enabling.

Even at half three in the morning the corridor was relatively busy. MacKechnie’s lights were on, his door open, his office empty. An incident room was being set up next to the tea room. She could see two uniforms moving a table through, negotiating the legs around the doorframe.

She walked into her own office, flicked on the light, and dropped her handbag. Bannerman’s computer was on, his screen saver a Photoshopped picture of himself on a bodybuilder’s body. Hilarious. His mouse had purple lights on the underside that distracted her eye when she was working. He kept chewing gum and healthy snack bars in his desk drawer, afraid of getting fat, she thought.

Everything on Morrow’s desk was new and ordered and anonymous. Neat pens, a sharpener, and spare jotters, always three, for making notes. She liked them new, threw them away once they had been used. She liked to think the desk could have been anyone’s anywhere, devoid of history, that she kept her personality out of it, bland as beige, how she liked it.

She was hanging her jacket up by the door when she saw Harris standing outside. DC Harris was small and coarse-featured, as if he’d grown up outdoors. He was likeable, had a flat Ayrshire accent and a perpetual look of surprise on his face: eyebrows raised, mouth in an open “O.”

“Ma’am?” He seemed excited. “Great, eh?”

“Is it?”

“Aye.” He had probably been expecting a routine night but found himself confronted with an actual genuine mystery instead of depressing, go-nowhere domestics and drunks clubbing each other for the price of a packet of fags. “My tea break. Coming to watch?”

“Watch what?”

“Bannerman thinks the youngest son’s it. He’s getting him into Three.”

Bannerman had clocked her interest in Omar and she rolled her eyes without thinking, annoyed at herself for being so obvious. Harris saw her and misunderstood, remembered that it was supposed to be her case and felt bad about it. As a consolation he said, “Coming anyway?”

She chewed her cheek, tried to change her face from huffy to neutral, said, “Aye, fuck it,” and followed him out of the door, past Billal and through the far door to the stairs.

They trotted up to the second floor, into a room that always smelled of vegetable soup.

Everyone on CID was on their tea break apparently. Orange plastic chairs were laid out in two ramshackle rows of four but they were full already. MacKechnie must have given them permission. A short DC stood up to give Morrow his seat in the front row and everyone else in the room lifted their arses off the chairs as she sat down, respecting the rank.

“Yeah, yeah.” She flapped a hand at them. “Calm down, it’s not parade.”

She could see them from the corner of her eye, sloping down in the chairs, not as they had been but relaxing within regulation stipulations, wary. It made her feel powerful. She kept her eyes on the boxy black television against the wall.

CID recorded their interviews and the cameras could be used as a feed to keep everyone briefed. Not everyone liked being watched, though, and it wasn’t always because they were bashful: some preferred to do an interview themselves and highlight lines of questioning themselves. It took a lot of balls to let other officers watch.

Morrow felt that being watched had forced a strange, strained quality on interview technique. Questioning was different now; guarded and formal officers were routinely respectful of even the lowest scrote. They spoke in a bizarre police-ese, as if they were giving evidence in court.

It never used to be this way. When she was younger Morrow remembered questioning as a drunken polka, officers and suspects swinging each other wildly around the facts, faster and faster, until something got broken. Now it was a strained quadrille where the rules of the dance stood hard and fast until one capitulated or the tension of the moves strangled the breath out of one of the participants.

Morrow thought people’s responses to being watched said a lot about their view of themselves: some enjoyed it, assumed a positive response from a viewer. Some couldn’t cope, froze, glanced at the camera, and had to hand over to a colleague. Morrow felt she looked shifty on camera, guiltier than the crims she was interviewing.

The shot of the room was badly set up. It wasn’t there to capture the nuances of the suspect’s facial expressions but to prove that no one had been throwing punches. Because the camera was mounted high up on the wall the room looked narrower on camera than it seemed when she was in there, more claustrophobic. And the image was grainy, the color drained from the room into a palette of gray and blue and yellow. A wooden table, four chairs, a light switch, and the door that had been left open slightly, the dusty top of it visible.

The door opened suddenly and Omar Anwar walked in. A muted cheer rose from the officers in the viewing room, muted because she was there, but it was as close to camaraderie as she had felt since her promotion and she found herself not exactly joining in but smiling along.

They liked that.

Omar slunk into the room as if he had extra vertebrae, hips first, bending like a question mark as he put his plastic tumbler of water on the table. Bannerman came into the room after him and some of his fans gave another cheer. Morrow didn’t concur with that one and felt them clock it.

A fat officer nicknamed Gobby came in after them. Gobby rarely spoke. Bannerman had chosen him over her, she realized, so he could shine.

Someone at the back muttered to themselves, “The Banner-Man’ll nail him.” The nickname brought a sting of bile to the back of her throat.

At Bannerman’s invitation Omar sat down facing the camera, sitting well back from the table to make room for the splay of his legs. They couldn’t quite see his face but his body was expressive enough. He was jittery, reached for his water, withdrew his hands, wriggled in the seat, as Bannerman took off his suit jacket and hung it carefully on the back of his chair.

He took his time, sitting down, rolling his shirtsleeves up, assessing the tall, anxious boy without addressing him. Gobby handed him one of the tapes and they turned away in their seats to the tape recorder, noisily pulling the cellophane off two cassettes, which they slipped into the tape recorder behind them. Omar watched, frightened, as the policemen looked at each other, nodded, and shut the cassette cases, pressing Record. A high-pitched yowl filled the room as they turned back to the table. Reverently they waited until it had finished.

Omar looked quizzically at Gobby.

“Blank bit o’ tape,” said Gobby quietly.

Pathetically grateful for the explanation, Omar smiled and leaned towards him, clutching at the implied kindness, pleading with Gobby to be his ally.

Gobby looked away.

Bannerman opened the play with a lingering explanation of what had brought them all here today, the rules, telling Omar that he was being watched by third parties, slowing his speech to a languorous drawl as if to counter Omar’s frantic interjections of yes, thank you, thank you, he understood, his face twitching into micro-frowns and frights, his leg vibrating up and down under the table.

Bannerman looked straight at the boy suddenly. “Omar.” He flashed a smile that even looked cold from behind. “What do you do for a living?”

Omar looked at both of them. “Living?”

“A job. What do you do for a job?”

“I’ve just graduated.”

“From uni?”

“Glasgow Uni, yeah, law school.”

“Law school?” He was building to something but Omar interjected.

“Got a first.”

“Good, good. Have you got a job to go to?”

“No, still looking around, ye know…”

“Had interviews and so on?”

“Well, no, not really, not sure if law’s for me, really.”

At the back of the viewing room someone made a joke about one less of ’em. No one laughed. Jokes about lawyers were fine but the guy was Asian and the racist connotations were uncomfortable.

“I want you to talk us through what happened tonight.”

“OK, OK.” Omar took a sip of water.

“Whenever you’re ready,” said Bannerman, meaning hurry up.

“OK, well, me and Mo—”

Bannerman read from his notes, “Mohammed Al Salawe?”

“Yeah, Mo. Me and Mo were sitting in the car—”

“The Vauxhall?”

“I was outside with Mo, in the Vauxhall, round the corner, smoking actually, and had the radio on, just chatting and, and we heard a loud sort of pop like a ‘pwomf’ sort of noise, never heard anything like that, and there’s this light, sort of white light in Meeshra’s window…” The story got faster and faster, the words splattering into the room. “And we never even said anything to each other, just, like, ran—”

“What did you think it was?”

Omar looked confused.

“The noise,” explained Bannerman. “What did you think made it?”

“Honestly?” Omar tipped his head sincerely.

Bannerman nodded.

“I thought it was a gas canister on a stove cooker. It’s stupid because we don’t use a stove cooker but in Pakistan you often hear of honor killings where a mother kills a daughter-in-law if she’s had an affair or something and the way they do it is tamper with the gas canister on the stove. Stupid.” He shrugged. “But that’s what came to my mind…”

“Are your family from Pakistan?”

“No.”

“Why would you think that, then?”

“Dunno.”

Bannerman tipped his head to the side, as if Omar had said something significant, wrong-footing him. “And so you ran to the house. Which way did you go?”

Omar shook his head and blinked, bringing himself back to the memory. “Um, I was on the passenger side, the road side. I opened the door, stepped out into the street”—he flicked his hand to the side, as if he was throwing a cigarette butt away—“ran around the bonnet of the car—”

“Mohammed’s car?”

“Yeah, yeah, Mo’s car…” He had lost his thread.

“To the house?”

“Yeah, jumped onto the wee garden wall there, ran over, slipped at the corner a bit, caught myself, didn’t fall, ran to the door—”

“Was the front door open or shut?”

“Um, shut.”

Morrow felt sure he was telling the truth, from his short sentences, the distant look in his eyes, the way he glanced downwards to see the road, the garden wall, and the reflexive flattening of his hand in front as he stopped himself from falling.

“The door was shut—”

“And you opened it?”

Bannerman should stop interrupting, Morrow observed, he was breaking up the memory. It was easier to spot the lie in a long flow, the break in style was more obvious. It was the intrusion of the camera. Bannerman was determined to be seen. She envied his confidence but she could see that it was a handicap sometimes.

“Yeah, I opened it.” Omar looked at Bannerman for a prompt.

“And?”

“And.” He stopped, glanced into the camera, and froze a moment as he realized that the eye was judging him. His forehead wrinkled suddenly, a child giving an excuse, and he looked away. “And what?”

“What did you see when you opened the door?”

Omar looked at the camera again but his brow had straightened defensively. “Saw my folks standing in the hall, on the right.” He put his hand out to indicate their position. “Saw my brother, Billal, there too, near the door, standing in front of his room. The door was open behind him. Saw my wee sister, Aleesha”—his throat caught when he said her name—“standing to the left, with her hand up.” He raised his left hand, twisting the wrist like the Statue of Liberty. “Everyone was looking at her hand…” His chin buckled at the memory and he lost his breath.

“What about the men?” said Bannerman briskly. He was busy looking at his notes, he was missing all of it.

“The men.” Omar shook himself. “The men were standing in the hall, yes. One with my folks, between me and my folks, the other in front of Aleesha, looking at her. His gun was down there.” Omar slung his hand down, at ninety degrees to his thigh.