Still Midnight (12 page)

They looked at each other across the office and Bannerman smiled. He hadn’t asked Omar about it because it came from her. He’d been unprofessional and she should let it go, win some, lose some, but the point wasn’t about her and Bannerman: a small man was sitting in a cold van somewhere, surrounded by armed malevolent strangers and the information could be material.

“You didn’t ask?”

Bannerman refreshed his smile.

“Look, come over here.” She held up the headphones.

Bannerman looked wary, didn’t budge from his seat and instead swung his feet up on the edge of his desk, crossing them, stubbornly chewing his health bar. The interview had been a disappointment, viewed by the entire squad. She understood how foolish he would have felt if the only significant question was on a note from her but she was sure she was right. She called up the audio file of Meeshra’s phone call, a tiny box on her screen with a jagged visual of her speech. She pulled the earphones out of the hard drive, double-clicked, and Meeshra’s voice burst into the office, weaving through the crackle of switchboard operators.

“She’s dodging the question,” she said. “And Billal said ‘Bob’ instead of ‘Rob.’”

Bannerman didn’t react.

Morrow tutted and held her hands up. “Well, I’ve told you. MacKechnie knows I did, Wilder’s a witness I sent the note, so if it goes tits up because of you it’s nothing to do with me.”

He narrowed his eyes at her.

“OK?” She leaned across the desk towards him. “You can’t say I haven’t told ye.”

“OK,” he said slowly, as if trying to calm her down. “Thanks.”

“If you want to fuck it all up, that’s up to you.”

Bannerman smiled condescendingly at his health bar, peeling the wrapper off the end and popping it in his mouth. He would tell MacKechnie that she’d said that, tell it as a funny story about what a character she was, knowing MacKechnie would hear it as confirmation that she was impossible, mad, no team player.

“This animosity,” he was muttering, “you and me, professional jealousy, you know, I’m sure we can work around it.” He was turning it around, making it about her and him, not Aamir Anwar’s safety.

“Not if you’re going to act like a cunt, we can’t.”

She was too angry, almost dizzy, and the words fell out of her before she could catch them. A hot blush ran up her neck. MacKechnie would hear that comment too.

A perfunctory rap at the door was followed by Harris looking in. “Ma’am?”

“What!”

He paused, looked frightened, and addressed himself to Banner-man. “Just looked the DVD of the interview over. Omar says they were looking for Bob, not Rob.”

Without a word Bannerman swung his feet to the floor, stood up, and left the office, shutting the door behind him, leaving her alone in the rancorous silence. Outside some guys were talking in another room, having a laugh, and she listened jealously for his voice, suspecting, as always, that everyone had more allies than she did.

She was filling out the forms, cooling down to a cold rage, when she heard excited footsteps in the corridor, an exclamation and a scurry.

Bannerman threw her door open. “Found the van.”

They took a car from the yard and Bannerman drove. All the cars in good condition were out and they had an old Ford with an engine so noisy that idle chat was impossible.

Bannerman concentrated on the road, uncomfortable at the silence, but Morrow was glad to be let alone, her face slack as the warm orange lights of the motorway clicked past. The drive was long and effortless, all the way to Harthill on a smooth and empty road.

Bannerman didn’t know the area they were going to and made a big production of looking for road signs, muttering inaudibly to himself about turns and directions, winding himself up. Morrow said nothing. They took a roundabout, a side road, and finally a rough road down the side of open fields with intermittent hedgerows. It had been tarmacked at one time, but a decade or so of harsh winters and tractors had churned the ground uneven. They pulled up outside the perimeter tape.

Blue and white was strung up between some of the hedges, blocking the roadway, and a fat copper was standing next to it, a local plod, warming his hands by rubbing them together and stamping his feet. He wasn’t acting it either; his nose was red and his top lip looked damp.

Bannerman cut the engine. “Noisiest bloody car I’ve ever fucking been in,” he said to himself.

“Saved us having to talk to each other for forty minutes, though.”

Bannerman swung to her aggressively, ready to take it out on her, but found her smiling pleasantly. Despite himself he smiled, swinging away from her so she wouldn’t see him concur. He opened the door and stepped out. She liked him better away from their bosses.

Opening her own door she stepped out into the bristling cold. Harthill was on higher ground than the city and the air was thinner here, the skies often brutally clear. Tonight a giant white moon lit it. The tarmac on the road had snapped like a slab of toffee. The motorway was hidden behind a hill, the lights glowing over the low horizon. Whoever brought the van here knew the area. Looking to the foot of the hill she saw a clump of wind-gnarled trees gathered around a smoldering white van, well lit by the Forensic Fire team.

The Scene of Crime Forensic team would not be here for a few hours, not until it got light. There wouldn’t be any point in the dark. Unless Osama bin Laden personally organized a massacre in the Glasgow city center over the next few hours theirs would be the first crime scene they came to. In the meantime a crew of two were trying to pat out the dying fire, preserving what little trace evidence they could.

It was hard to put out a fire in a vehicle that would serve as evidence. Smother it in foam and you might as well wash it under a tap. Throw water at it and any accelerants would disperse and start an ancillary fire elsewhere. In the morning they’d do a fingertip search of the surround and lift the van without opening it, take it to a sterile environment for analysis.

“Harthill,” she said. “On their way to Edinburgh?”

Bannerman shrugged a shoulder. “Not an obvious place, is it?”

“Maybe they knew it from somewhere.”

“Can’t exactly make that the basis of a search, though, can we?” Bannerman pointed to the ground. “No marks.”

She was desperate to know but embarrassed to ask. “What else did Omar say?”

Bannerman looked at her curiously, surprised by the tone in her voice, not knowing what it meant. “Not much. I thought he was it, but…”

She shrugged and looked off towards the van. “I thought he was too.”

Mistaking consensus for intimacy Bannerman leaned into her, quite close, and drew a breath. Suddenly panicked by his proximity she scurried away, over to the fat copper guarding the tape.

He was freezing but still nervous, asked their names and rank and where they were from, jotting it longhand in his notebook, as if he was doing an exam. He probably didn’t have much crime scene experience. He must have been the same age as them, Morrow thought, early thirties, but his ruddy face and fatness made him look much older. People got old quicker in the country.

Sensing Bannerman coming up behind her Morrow ducked under the tape and walked over to the mouth of the field, staying on the far side, away from the obvious path anyone leaving the field would be likely to have taken. A farmer was standing there with a copper but she didn’t look at them. She was looking at the ground.

The moonlight was so bright she could see the shadow of marks in the frost: tires from a car were picked out in the tarmac, a parked car had sheltered a rectangle from the ground frost and then driven away. She looked up the road, squinted, crouched.

Indistinct footsteps trailing back and forth to the car from the field, muddying one another: some deep zigzagged treads, like army boots, size eightish; some flat-soled, like slippers; another pair of trainers. Disappointing: frost was a useless medium for prints.

Bannerman saw her looking at them and shouted back to the plod by the tape, “Get the photographer out here and get them before they disappear.”

The plod looked shocked and hurt, as if he had been reprimanded, and swung away to talk into his radio.

She looked away from the footprints and saw the press of tire tracks. New wheels, clear zigzags and deep lines, which was bad. It was easier to match worn tires to track marks. Chips and wear in the rubber could be as effective as a fingerprint, but factory-fresh all looked the same and there were only a few manufacturers.

Bannerman was behind her and nodded at her thought. They traced the movements wordlessly, pointing and tutting and humming, keeping their eyes on the ground. They traced the footsteps to the break in the hedge and looked into the long stretch of churned mud in the field. The footsteps broke up here, the ground was too lumpy, but some of the partial impressions were clearer, a toe, a heel, the side of a sole.

Morrow took what she could from it: three sets of feet coming towards her, muddied by steps that were there already, perhaps meeting others who had been waiting. She looked back, sorting the impressions in her eye: two sets coming towards her, a scuffle of overlaps, but they looked like the same treads on the soles.

Finally Bannerman asked, “What ye seeing?”

He was good at this, she knew that, but was either trying to be friendly or intending to steal her ideas for his own. She almost hoped it was the latter. “Two gunmen,” she said. “Same boots on. Thought for a minute they were met here but unlikely. Two big men, a driver, and a hostage. They wouldn’t all fit in a car unless they were met by just one other guy. Only the army boots go to the driver’s door.” She pointed back up to the large patch left bare of frost by the car. “They must have left a car here to pick up. We can check the CCTV at Harthill, see what pulls off earlier and match it with what pulls out later.”

Bannerman was still looking back at the rectangle. “How do you know that’s the driver’s door?”

She drew her finger along the tire marks. “They didn’t reverse out, did they?”

Bannerman looked pleasantly surprised. “Hmm.”

He was going to steal that, she fucking knew it, he was known for it below ranks. Bosses thought he was a genius.

“That’s the third one this year, burnt-out cars on my land.” The farmer standing opposite her was wearing a Barbour coat and had a pissed-off, sleep-puffed face. His accent was almost impenetrable and Morrow found herself watching his lips for clues.

“Is this your land, sir?” she said.

“It is my land, aye, aye, mine, yeah.”

“Would you mind standing behind that tape over there? We’ve got frosty feet marks here and we’re trying to keep them good until the photographer gets here.”

“But it’s my land.”

“Ye can see my point, though, eh?” She gave the copper a look, tipped her head to the side to get the farmer out of the crime scene.

“It’s my land,” mumbled the farmer, unsure if he’d been reprimanded, but proactively annoyed anyway. “I’m staying here if I want to stay here. And why did you not bother before and now you’re bothering about this one? They’ve burnt out cars before this one and ye did nothing at all. Had to shove the cars out mysel’.”

He was almost unintelligible. Too long Bannerman’s eyes stayed on his mouth and when he finally broke off it was to nod, bewildered, and frown at his feet. He turned to the uniform. “Officer, were you the first here?”

The uniform nodded at Bannerman as if he was meeting a film star. He had a red farmer’s face and round body, not flattered by the double-breasted plastic police-issue jacket buttoned tight across his belly.

“Find anything? A passport or a home address? No letters with photo ID on the path up here?”

“Nothing like that so far, sir, no, as far as I know, like.” Same accent, voice quiet because he was intimidated by the specialist from the town, almost as hard to understand as the farmer.

Bannerman snorted, looking to Morrow to laugh along with him: a bonding moment between colleagues.

“Have you actually done a search?” she pointed towards the van.

“Not yet, ma’am, no.”

“How do you know, then? Get that man out beyond the tape.” She walked off into the field, leaving Bannerman to stand with the two men he had been ridiculing a moment ago.

Even she was starting to wonder if she was an arsehole.

ELEVEN

“I am not sitting down
anywhere
here.” Pat crossed his arms and looked around the living room. There was not a surface on floor, walls, or ceiling without a suspicious stain nearby.

Sitting in the least damp corner of the balding brown corduroy settee, Shugie looked up at him, tipping his head back to compensate for the puff on his eyes, and whispered, “OK, then.” His smoke-fucked voice was barely a rasp.

“Because”—Pat leaned in to provoke him—“it’s fucking
ginking
.”

Shugie blinked, sanguine about the charge. “OK.”

Foiled, determined that Shugie should be as upset as he was, Pat looked around the floor, at the settee, through the door to the kitchen.
“You live like a dirty fucking animal.”

But Shugie was unperturbed, distracted, perhaps by the profundity of his hangover. He shut his rheumy eyes to sniff, the violent action disturbing the delicate balance of forces behind his eyes, and he cringed with pain. “Oooh.”

“Did you hear me?”

“Oh aye. OK.” He kept his eyes shut, awaiting equilibrium. “You’re saying it’s dirty and that’s fair enough.”

“Look at that.”

With supernatural effort Shugie peeled one swollen eye open and followed Pat’s finger to a distant meeting of floor and wall. He squinted at it: something small and brown had grown its own white fur coat.

“Whit the fuck is that?”

Shugie shrugged at the distant object. “A orange?”

“An orange?”

“Or a tangerine?”

“It’s a shit.”

Dropping his feet heavily on the stairs they heard Eddy coming down from keeping guard outside the old man’s room.