Still Midnight (13 page)

“There’s a fucking dog shit in your living room.” Pat raised his voice, restating his case so that Eddy could hear.

“Naw.” Shugie sighed with the effort of talking. “There hasnae been a dug in here for three month, man.”

“Then it’s been here for three month. Look at the bloom on it.”

Shugie did as instructed. “Nah,” he said unconvincingly, “that’s just an old tangerine or something.”

Pat looked accusingly at Eddy but didn’t get the chance to speak.

“Your watch,” said Eddy, thumbing over his shoulder to the stairs.

“This place…” Pat found himself lost for words. He pointed at the furry white intruder by the wall.

Shugie threw his hands up and rasped an appeal to Eddy. “He’s going mad over an old orange or something.”

In a gesture of solidarity Eddy flopped onto the settee next to Shugie. He sat suddenly straight, his eyes widened. He jumped to his feet again, turning to look at the damp seat of his trousers, moving his hand to brush the urine off and then thinking better of it, flapping his hand at it instead. “Oh, ya dirty fucking…”

Pat grabbed his arm and pulled him roughly into the kitchen. “Come in here.”

The kitchen looked even worse in the weak morning light. The window above the sink was broken, a triangle of glass missing from the bottom corner, the rest of it documenting every splash of dirty water that had ever hit it, a thick layer of gray dots emanating from behind the mixer tap. Beyond the lace of dirt the very tip of the Lexus’s silver bonnet shone in the sun.

The wall of bin bags blocking the passage to the back door were not just leaking sticky mess onto the floor, the ones on the bottom were stuck in a pool of white.

“I can’t stay here,” said Pat.

Eddy was standing too close to him, chewing his bottom lip.

“It’s not…” Pat looked around the floor. “Healthy.”

“Pat—”

Pat pointed into the living room. “
There’s a shit with mold on it in there
.”

Eddy pinched his nose, paused, and shut his eyes. When he spoke it was with forced patience. “The trouble I had to find this place—”

“Trouble?”
shouted Pat. “The cunt drinks in your fucking local. All ye did was buy a pint and turn around.”

Eddy’s eyes were still shut. “I looked at a number of places as possible—”

“Oh, ‘A pint o’eighty,’ ” shouted Pat, flailing his hands about indignantly. “ ‘Aye, you, you seem to smell of pish, have ye a house? Can I hold a hostage there? Would that have a shit in the corner?’ ”

Pat looked up for a response and found the barrel of Eddy’s gun pointing at his eye. Eddy spoke quietly to the tip of his gun. “Patrick,” he told it, “I’ve went to a lot of trouble and you’re not really appreciating that.”

Pat was hypnotized by the circle of deep blackness.

“I have tried reasoning with you,” whispered Eddy, a tremor in his voice as the enormity of what he was doing sunk in. He was looking at Pat’s mouth, quite close, as if afraid to look at the eye he was about to shoot. They were wet again, the eyes, the bastard fucking eyes brimming with panic.

“I’ve tried so
fucking
hard…”

“Edward.”

“I’ve really fucking tried.”

“Get the gun away from my face or I will kill you.”

“Oh,
you
’ll kill
me,
” and Eddy waggled the end of the barrel in Pat’s face, afraid to drop it now, in case Pat did kill him. “I’ve got a gun on you and you’re threatening to kill me, is it? You’re threatening me? Who are you tae fucking threaten me?”

They both knew who Pat was. Pat was a Tait, and he didn’t need to threaten Eddy. Being a Tait, even an estranged Tait, meant that he was a walking threat. The barrel was pointing at Pat’s ear now. “Point the gun at the floor,” he said carefully.

Eddy didn’t know what else to do. He lowered the barrel, spluttering a sob of relief.

Calmly, Pat reached over and, hand over hand, took the pistol from him. He held it away from Eddy and flicked the safety on, took a deep breath and spoke: “This is a fuckup from start to finish. We both know it.”

“Aye,” whispered Eddy urgently, tears rolling down his face. “Aye, I know it’s a fucking mess, I don’t know what to…
I just sat in that old cunt’s pish
.” He rubbed his eyes with the ball of his palm, smearing tears into his hairline.

Pat reached out and touched Eddy’s back with his fingertips and Eddy covered his face like a girl and cried, high-pitched, helpless. Beyond the kitchen door Shugie crossed his legs and Pat saw that he was wearing trainers with the wrong laces, brown laces from brogues. I don’t belong here, he said to himself, knowing that he really meant that he didn’t want to belong here.

“If she hadn’t taken the fucking kids, man,” squeaked Eddy. “If she’d only let me see my fucking weans…”

It wasn’t the wife stopping him from seeing the kids. This lie had developed slowly, like a lot of other lies in Eddy’s life. Pat went along with it but now, abruptly, he looked at Eddy and saw a man refused access to his children by the courts because he was an unreliable, moody arsehole, a man who brought Shugie in so that people in their local would know he was up to something big, a man who, over the course of today, would misremember last night, rewrite events so that Pat was the nervous one who fucked up. He looked at Eddy, self-pity seeping out of him. Eddy wasn’t capable of being honest. I do belong here, Pat admitted, I do belong, but I don’t want to.

As Eddy bubbled, Pat calmly took himself away, back to the pink hall of the toast-smelling house. He wasn’t in this kitchen, wasn’t in the house with a disputed moldy shit in the living room and fossilized bin bags in the kitchen. He was back in the pink hall, watching a lock of perfect silky black slide over a young shoulder. He was back in the clean, where bad smells elicited disgust and a shit on the floor wouldn’t even get the chance to get moldy. That’s what he wanted.

She had just brushed her hair before they came in, he realized. Sat in front of the telly and brushed her long hair. The image made him smile, made him warm, until Eddy’s shrill sob shattered the image.

Pat reached out to still him. “Don’t…”

“That Irish cunt… I don’t know what to do…”

“Let’s go and get some toast or something.” Pat’s voice was expressionless.

“We can’t leave that pishy cunt to mind him,” said Eddy, looking out to the living room.

“OK. We need to get moving.” Aleesha’s hand came up and touched his face, the hand that was no more, but he wrote that part out. Her fingertips touched his face, her pretty gold rings glinting in the corner of his eye. “I’ll call Malki, get him over here to mind Shugie.”

“How are we, how are we gonnae do that? I mean, we can’t move now. That fucker’ll go and get pissed and tell everyone.”

“Malki’ll come, I’ll get him to bring bevy for Shugie, get him to stay in the house, say we’ll be back any minute. You and me, we’ll go get some toast or something—”

“
Toast?
What ye on about
toast
for?”

“And we’ll phone the family.” Pat imagined himself arriving at the door of the Anwar family home, being greeted by the brothers as a long-lost friend, being offered tea as he slipped his jacket off in the pink hall. “Ask about the money. I’ll sort it out, man, don’t worry.” He pointed to Eddy’s pocket. “I’ll speak to the Irish.”

Eddy took his phone out and selected a number, pressed Call, and handed the phone over.

The Irish had been asleep. His voice was an angry, startled bark.
“Whit?”

“We’ve got the father and we’re calling them this morning.”

“Who’s this?”

“The other one.”

Pat could hear the Irish consider the angles. “I don’t know you.”

“I’ll call you after,” said Pat and hung up.

Eddy took the phone back, dropping his chin so he was looking up, puppyish, “Pal…,” he said, meaning thank you, meaning to express affection, hinting at words he would never say.

Pat was thinking words he would never say too.

Pat was thinking that the world would be better off if a cunt like Eddy wasn’t in it.

TWELVE

Morrow sat in her car as the sun came up over the young trees in Blair Avenue. It had been a warm autumn, plenty of rain, and the gardens were bursting with life. Balding branches of well-tended trees shadowed the road and the hedges, verdant, waxy leaved, littered the pavement below. A smattering of rain had cleared the sky to an uninterrupted solid blue.

Her bum was numb. She had been sitting there for forty minutes, tiredness and indecision pinning her to the seat. In every fraction of a second she was poised to reach for the car key, pull it out, and open the door. The muscles on her forearm twitched in rehearsal, her mind focused on the plastic casing around the key, the crunch of the lock as she pulled the key out, the warm mottled plastic of the door handle, but still she didn’t move.

She had been there so long that the blood had drained from her hands resting on the steering wheel. Several times she had thought about turning the radio on for company, but that would have meant admitting that she wasn’t going to get out of the car.

She could go back to the station. Bannerman was giving a briefing but she could still hide in her office. She had the day off. She could go into the office and say she couldn’t stay away—never mind that she wouldn’t get overtime—show willing, instead of going indoors and dealing with Brian.

She looked up at the brand-new house. All the lights were off, the curtains still drawn in the living room.

This had been her dream once, when she was little, to live in a clean, bland house with a clean, bland husband. A man who would never raise his voice or say anything alarming. A man who never shouted “Fire!” into her sleeping face in the middle of the night because he was pissed and wanted attention. A man who would never get taken away by the police at six fifteen in the morning and spit saliva streaked with blood on his own hall carpet as they dragged him away.

The Blair Avenue house was new, they were the first people ever to live in it, and she savored the absence of history. They chose it because it was quiet and there were so many children in the neighborhood.

The front door was painted red, the brass letter box polished, glinting a chirpy answer to the early morning sunlight. She’d liked that door when they bought the house. Most of the new-builds had white plastic doors. It was the first thing she’d liked about it, at the viewing.

“Look at this, Brian.” She ran her fingers down the watered sheen of red paint and looked up to find him smiling at her hand. She had looked at his lips and known precisely the words they were going to form.

“That’s a lovely color, isn’t it?”

She glared at the door now, her mouth moved soundlessly, reforming the words—
that’s a lovely color
.

The straightness of the man was gone, the steadiness she had fallen in love with. Brian had become the chaos she was running from.

The postman’s back suddenly obscured her view. He opened the gate and left it wide as he stepped up the path, looking through a bundle of letters, pulling their junk mail and bills out and shoving them through the door. He didn’t look up as he came back down towards her, already sorting the mail for the next house. Birds twittered in trees. A commuter with a briefcase and gray suit crossed the road to his car. People were beginning to stir. She had to go in or be spotted spying on her own home.

A sudden longing struck her, to see Danny, speak to him, be back in that familiar set of tracks. She knew Danny, understood him, could predict him. He was never a straight line and a sudden curve. Danny was always the same and not sorry about it either.

Somehow in her head the thought of Danny became entangled with the Anwar case because of the area, because they were both at school there. She had never asked for his help before, always kept those worlds as far apart as possible, but she was so angry with Bannerman she was prepared to consider it.

Brian was in there, awake possibly, wondering where she was, why she hadn’t come home, why her phone was switched off.

Reaching for the car key her hand lingered for a moment. She turned it, starting the engine and pulling out into the street, heading back into the vibrant, screaming city.

THIRTEEN

It was only a twenty-minute drive from her house at this time of the morning but the brand-new block of luxury flats was a world away.

Morrow looked up at the balconies as she pulled on the hand brake. Thrown up during the housing boom they were already beginning to disintegrate. A number of them had been bought with dirty cash at a time when all property was a good investment. But the gangsters wouldn’t pay the exorbitant maintenance fees and now the flats were coming apart.

They dumped bags of rubbish in the lifts and left police cones in the best parking spots. The factor wasn’t attending to the building anymore and lights were out all over the halls, dents in communal walls were being left. One lift in the block was always well maintained, though. No one would have dared piss in it or use a lighter to melt the plastic buttons: it was the lift that went to Danny’s penthouse.

She had passed the entrance to the underground car park and pulled up in the street. Going down to the underground car park was safer but buzzing up to Danny would give him advance warning that she was coming. If he had the chance he’d hide anything incriminating, and they’d have to go through the embarrassing pretense of talking about his security firm and the problems of bookkeeping and managing men. He was on the cusp of legal, running a string of security firms that ring-fenced a territory and won the contracts in it through threats and sabotage. Anyone who didn’t use Danny’s firm would find their site subject to a spate of fires or assaults on staff until they capitulated. Danny had even made the papers once, a full-page stop-this-evil-man. Ambushing him in the early morning was brutal, but at least it was honest.

She took a long breath and looked out at the street. Ahead of her the motorway was choking up with morning traffic. Behind, the road running along by the river was getting busy too, but this street was broad and empty. Bad place to park, she knew. Exactly the sort of spot cars got stolen from.