Still Midnight (21 page)

She did. “When they leave the tank full and it explodes and burns itself out?”

“Exactly.” He smiled a little, pleased that she knew what he was talking about. “Well, no sign of that. They doused the inside thoroughly and it burned nice and steady so there’s no fiber or hair traces or anything.”

“Did the family have any Afghanistan visas?”

“Nah, no connection. Doesn’t seem to be one. Mum and dad are both refugees from Uganda. Any extended family they have is from there as well. Couple of cousins from Pakistan, distant, Ugandan émigrés.”

“I think Mo and Omar were right, it’s just the thing an idiot would say to Asian people. If they are unprofessional enough to use a gun they’ve never fired before… you’d think they’d try it out.”

“I know.” The lights changed to green and he eased the car through the junction and down the Vicky Road. “They did make one big mistake: tinfoil wrap found in among the trees.”

“No!” She grinned at him. “No!”

“Yeah.” He was smiling too. “Heroin. But let’s not get too excited because even if it was from the kidnappers and not the van thieves, it’s so hard to trace anything from a wrap.”

“The gunmen weren’t mellow.”

“Yeah, well, it was just one wrap, there’s tar on the inside.”

“Maybe the others didn’t notice he’d been smoking. High functioning, you know?”

“Long habit, then?”

“Yeah, not mixing or out of control.”

“Yeah, I think you could be right.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

Sensing that they were getting on, Bannerman bit his lip. “You all right with me?”

Morrow cleared her throat and shrugged. “Sorry I called you a cunt. I’s tired…”

He flinched at that. “You
didn’t
. What you said was that we wouldn’t get on if I was
going
to be a cunt about it, but you didn’t
call
me a cunt.” This semantic difference seemed to matter to him.

“Yeah,” she said. “No, that’s right.”

“We’ve been kind of put in an awkward situation here, you know? Kind of competing when we could be working together. Bad management.”

The implied slur on MacKechnie was meant to be a bonding move, or trap. Queasy with sleep deprivation and tired of having to guess what the fuck was going on with Bannerman, she could feel the anger building behind her eyes. “Grant, I feel that you’re very into your career…” She stopped, took a breath, stopped again. He waited for her to get it together. “… less about the service… you know.” She gestured outwards with both hands, as if she was opening a book, meaninglessly. “I feel I’m more about the case… expending energy, y’know?”

Bannerman took it in good part. “My dad was a copper, you know.”

“Hmm.”

“Grew up with the service.”

“Yeah.” Morrow scratched her face, a little too hard. Just because his father was in the force didn’t mean she was less committed.

“If you grow up in it”—he frowned at the windscreen—“you know it, a bit more maybe. Know what it’s really like, what’s likely to happen at the end of a career. New recruits, they’re idealistic, yet to lose faith with it.” He was talking about her.

“I’m not a new recruit,” said Morrow.

“No, but you’re not old police family, are you? I mean, in some ways you’re lucky because you’ll have to find those things out yourself. Just… it can be a bit of a shocker when you do.”

“TJF,” she said sullenly.

He nodded. “TJF. But me, I know what to take on and when to make my moves, I know the limits of the job. You don’t have that killer instinct…”

She suddenly found herself confused. “Killer instinct?”

“How to work the system to get the job done right.”

She didn’t understand but had a bad feeling about the way it was going.

“Anyway,” he said, as if that had cleared all that up, “if Omar is Bob, why does anyone think he’s got two mil kicking about? He’s twenty-three or so, he’s been studying since leaving school, doesn’t have a job. Why would they think he has millions of pounds?”

“Oh, I dunno.” She looked at Bannerman, saw him concentrating on the road, and realized that the conversation hadn’t bothered him at all. Killer instinct. Somehow she felt he was telling her that he was indeed, as she suspected, a complete self-serving arsehole.

He looked out at the road. “This junction’s a pain in the arse.”

“Go right,” she said quickly, keen to maintain the forward momentum in the conversation. “Round the side there to the left.”

Bannerman followed her directions into the visitors’ car park in front of the infirmary, found a spot near the far wall, and stopped. He took the key out and stepped out of the car into the wind coming off the bare junction in front of them.

Still suspicious, she opened her door, climbed out, and shut it, watching him carefully over the roof of the car. He was squinting at the Battlefield Rest, a restaurant in a converted Edwardian tram depot. “Looks like a seaside ice cream parlor or something. Why’s it called the Battlefield Rest?”

“You don’t know this area?”

“No.”

“Mary Queen of Scots fought her last battle here. Against her son’s army. She lost.”

“What were they fighting about?”

“Religion.” She stopped to frown. “I think.”

He pointed to the little rotunda. “And she rested in there?”

The tram stop was built during the Great War, over three hundred years after Queen Mary was executed. Morrow looked for a note of humor on Bannerman’s face but found nothing. “No,” she said, “she just sent out for a lasagna.”

Bannerman didn’t react. He turned and walked into the hospital. Morrow wished she had a pal at work to tell the story to.

The lobby was busy but the lifts were efficient, sucking in groups gathering in front of them and spiriting them off to different floors. Bannerman checked his notes as they stepped into a lift. They were crammed in next to a woman and her very fat toddler in a pushchair. The fair-haired girl was three, sleeping, her head dropped forward onto her chest, dressed in clothes that didn’t quite fit her. A roll of belly peeked out from under her T-shirt. Morrow noticed the back of the pram was littered with sweetie wrappers and empty juice bottles.

The mother herself looked nippy, a skinny strip of anxious annoyance, hair yanked up into a ponytail, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and perfume.

Morrow saw Bannerman looking at the wrappers and frown a reproach at the mother. The doors opened on the second floor and the woman shoved the pram out, spitefully bumping it over the metal ridges, jerking the fat sleeping child around in her chair.

Bannerman tutted when the doors shut and muttered, “Feed your kids shit like that…”

Morrow didn’t join in the cozy sanctimony. Bannerman didn’t have kids. He knew fuck-all about it. “Have you got the statements there?”

Bannerman opened the folder and pulled out three sheets. One was Aleesha’s statement. She had been out of it and said nothing. The second one was Sadiqa’s, taken at the hospital, probably while Aleesha was in the operating theater. Sadiqa had been in the kitchen, heard a noise, went to see what it was. The lift doors opened on floor five but Morrow continued to read, stepping out, standing to the side as she quickly scanned the notes. Men with guns threatened them, pulled her up the hall. Aleesha was shot. Then Omar came in and she screamed and then they took Aamir.

When Morrow looked up she was smiling. “She says they were asking for Bob.”

Bannerman sighed and conceded, “I know. I only got it this morning. Feel like an arse now.”

She gave him back the statement as they approached the ward doors, walking slightly behind him, a disingenuous gesture of companionship. She wanted him to trust her. When she reached forward to press the security buzzer on the door she saw that he was smiling quietly to himself. It worried her. A wash of exhaustion swept over her, shift change from night to day was always painful.

A voice on the intercom interrupted her train of thought. “Yes?” A young nurse in glasses was looking out at them from an office a hundred yards down the corridor.

“DS Bannerman and DS Morrow from Strathclyde Police. We’re here to talk to Aleesha Anwar.”

“OK.” The nurse reached back into the door and pressed a button to release the lock, walking down to meet them as they entered.

Two coppers had been ordered to stay outside Aleesha’s room and were stationed in the corridor, one sitting on a chair in the corridor, the other leaning against the wall facing the door, watching the nurse’s arse as she passed him.

Morrow and Bannerman walked into the ward corridor, getting out their warrant cards. The nurse gave them a brief glance. “Anwar’s in IC.” Without a word of explanation she turned on her white heels and led them to the room opposite the nurses’ station.

A large window looked into the room from the corridor. A tangle of wires was threaded through a hole in the wall, plugged into monitors sitting on a metal trolley in the corridor, where the nurses could watch the numbers. The DCs standing outside stood upright when they approached. Bannerman told them to go and take a ten-minute tea break. They thanked him and shuffled off out the doors.

Through the glass they could see Aleesha was asleep, propped upright against puffed-up pillows. Her left hand was heavily bandaged but the shape still discernibly distorted: three of her fingers were missing, the others stubs after the first knuckle. The dressings on the stubs of her two middle fingers were discolored with a translucent yellow fluid.

She was terribly pretty, Morrow thought, young and vulnerable, with the perfect skin and effortless grace that no one ever appreciates until they’ve lost them.

They stepped into the room. The lights were calmingly low, but vicious strip lighting outside the room kept it bright and clinical. On the near side of the bed, between the window and the patient, Sadiqa was dozing in a big purple recliner armchair, covered to her neck in a pink cellular blanket. She was very overweight, a heavy wattle of fat pooling around her chin, her massive stomach splayed to the sides.

The chair was upholstered in waterproof plastic and reclined so that the footrest rose and the back dropped down. Morrow had slept on those chairs and knew how fantastically uncomfortable they were.

Sadiqa half opened her eyes, saw their feet, realized they weren’t hospital staff, and looked up.

“Mrs. Anwar, I’m DS Bannerman and this is DS Morrow from CID. We were at your house last night.”

Befuddled with sleep Sadiqa’s hand rose to her chest under the blanket. Morrow stepped forward and reached out to shake. “I don’t think I met you last night, Mrs. Anwar. I’m Alex Morrow.”

Sadiqa reached her hand out from under the cover. She was still wearing her nightie. “Nice to meet you…,” said Sadiqa, lost for forms of address in the strange circumstance.

“We wondered if we could have a word with you?”

She tried to sit up suddenly, as if she had just remembered. “Aamir?”

“No.” Alex held her hand up. “We haven’t come with any news. We just wanted to ask you about a couple of details that might help us find him.”

“OK, let me get…” Sadiqa struggled to get out of the chair. She kicked her heels at the footrest but her weight pinned her down. She had to use her arms to hoist her bottom off the chair and haul it into the upright position. She was embarrassed, gestured to her stomach, blaming it as if it was a separate entity. “Fat,” she said and stood up.

The blanket fell to the floor revealing the rest of her pink nightie, still splattered with dried blood. She slipped her feet into her shoes.

“Wouldn’t you like to change, Mrs. Anwar?” said Morrow.

“Into what?” Sadiqa wasn’t pleased by that. “I haven’t anything to change into.”

“Couldn’t your sons bring you something?”

It was impertinent, a reproach to those only Sadiqa had the right to reproach. She gave Morrow a steely stare and muttered something about the baby.

“I’m sure it’s been a huge shock for all of you,” said Bannerman, making it all right.

“Yes.” She looked at him. “Yes, it has.”

She glanced at her sleeping daughter and ushered them both out ahead of her into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind her. They stood outside the window, Sadiqa tugging them around by the elbows so that their backs were to the window and she could keep her eye on her daughter.

Bannerman looked around for a chair. “Couldn’t we go and sit down somewhere?”

“No.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not leaving. We’ll stay where I can see her. You can ask me questions here, can’t you?” It was the accent from the emergency call: prim, proper, like a fifties movie siren.

“Well.” Bannerman looked back at Aleesha sleeping in the bed. “We’d really prefer to speak to you so that you can concentrate, maybe somewhere private. We could get the nurses—”

“No.” Sadiqa had her hand up to his face, as if she was ordering a child to sit down again. She saw the expressions on their faces and her knee buckled in dismay. “Please excuse me, my manners…” She covered her mouth with a hand, drew a shuddering breath in, nodded as if she had decided something. “OK. OK.” She dropped her hand, stood straight, and looked at them. “Sorry. I’ll concentrate. Ask me anything.”

Bannerman looked at his notebook. “Just going over what you said last night… who were the men asking for?”

She nodded, as if affirming a decision she had already made. “Yes. They asked for
Bob
.”

Morrow was surprised. “You sure?”

“Yes.” It was hard for her to say that and she blinked as she did, nodding significantly.
“Bob.”

Morrow was impressed. Sadiqa seemed to understand the significance of what she was saying, knew there was an alternative to telling the truth and implicating her son, but she was doing the right thing anyway. She clasped her hands over her bulging stomach and nodded at them to ask her another.

“OK.” Morrow looked at Bannerman but he was pretending to look at the statement again. “Can you tell us the course of what happened?”

Sadiqa hesitated, still staring at her daughter. “What happened chronologically?”

“Yes.”

Sadiqa took a breath and stepped back. “We were in the house, I was in the kitchen. I hear shouting and go out into the hall to see what it is. There are two men there, I didn’t… I wear reading glasses, I was reading in the kitchen, and I took my glasses off, didn’t have my other ones, when I went out to the hall I couldn’t see properly, just shapes by the door. One of them”—she circled her wrist indignantly with her hand—“he grabbed me and dragged me back up the hall. “They were asking for Bob. Shouting. The shot went off…” She looked up to where the wall would have been, reliving the shock. “Then Omar comes in, one of them shouts, ‘You’re Bob,’ and to Mohammed, ‘You’re Bob.’ ” Sadiqa came out of her trance and her eyes focused on them. “Then he grabbed Aamir and left. The other one followed him out.”