Still Midnight (22 page)

“What were you reading?” asked Morrow. She seemed confused. “In the kitchen,” said Morrow. “You said you were reading, what was it?”

“Oh, a test: it was a poetry collection.
The Rattle Bag
.”

Morrow liked her honesty. “Who in the family is called Bob?”

Sadiqa averted her gaze. “No one: Billal, Omar, and Aleesha.”

“No, Sadiqa,” said Morrow softly, “I didn’t say which of your children, I said who.”

Sadiqa nodded sadly at the floor, understanding that they knew already. “Don’t make…” The conflict was unbearable. The fat on her cheeks began to tremble.

Morrow threw a hand out, cuffing her clumsily on the forearm, “ ’S OK.”

Sadiqa nodded at her arm and muttered, “Thank you.”

“ ’S OK,” she repeated and fell back a step, embarrassed in front of Bannerman at having bottled it and cut the moment off.

Sadiqa rubbed her nose and looked up. “But where is my Aamir?”

“We don’t know.” Bannerman took over.

“Is he alive, do you think?”

“We don’t know that either. We’re trying very hard to find him but we need your help,” said Bannerman, who didn’t seem to appreciate how much she had helped them already and how conflicted she was about it. Them and us. Typical cop. “Omar is sometimes called Bob, isn’t he?”

She bit her lip, couldn’t look at them. “I don’t, well, I call him Omar. That’s the name we chose…”

Morrow would have thought less of her if she had given her son up happily. “Sadiqa, how long have you been married?”

She had to think about it, moving her lips as she counted. Aamir wasn’t one for big anniversaries, then. “Twenty-eight years.”

“How old are you?”

“Forty-eight.” She didn’t have to think about that.

“Aamir’s older than you?”

“By twelve years. Met him when I was sixteen.” She glanced in at Aleesha. “Her age.”

“Was it arranged?”

“God, no. I fell for him. My parents asked me to wait until after uni. We’re not all that traditional, to be honest.”

“But Billal and Meeshra…”

“Yeah, Billal asked for an arranged marriage. That was his idea. Wanted his wife to come and live with us and all that whole… thing. That setup. Young people nowadays, they’re a bit disenchanted. Harking back to a past that isn’t even really ours, you know? They think our generation are a bit slack.” She wrinkled her nose. “Bit multicultural.”

“How’s it working out with Meeshra?”

She cleared her throat, and focused on Aleesha. “Good and bad. Meesh is nice enough but she’s a stranger coming into a close family. Can be tricky. Still, the baby’s in the house so we can see him all the time. And their room’s far enough away from ours so we don’t even get woken.” She smiled at her joke and Morrow smiled back.

“What did you do at uni?”

“English literature. But I never did anything with it. Wanted to marry Aamir.” She sucked her cheeks in, a micro-expression that Morrow couldn’t read. Frustration maybe. Not a good thing anyway.

“A strong-willed girl,” said Morrow.

“Very. You don’t understand until you’re a parent yourself. Try to be firm but, you know… Because my parents didn’t think he was good enough for me that made him especially beguiling.” She looked in at Aleesha again. “Stubborn girls. Family trait.”

“She a bit of a handful too?”

“Aleesha?” Sadiqa looked adoringly in the window at her sleeping daughter. “Thinks she knows everything.”

“Boy trouble?”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so…” She looked bewildered and a little hurt. “Her major problem seems to be that I’m an idiot.”

“Aleesha doesn’t wear traditional dress?”

“No.” Sadiqa smiled to herself, a little proud. “No, she’s… no, she won’t. She’s an atheist.”

“What does her dad think about that?”

“Horrified. In front of her. Thrilled when she’s out of the room.”

“He’s not a disciplinarian, then?”

“Aamir?” She half giggled at the suggestion, remembered he was in mortal danger and became tearful. “God, no, he’s… a nag, a worrier, but not heavy-handed. He’s…” She looked for a moment as if she might cry but caught herself, raised a hand to cover her face, hiding for a moment. “Sorry.”

Morrow reached out a hand to her arm but didn’t touch her. “No, don’t, it’s awful…”

Tired of being excluded by the women, Bannerman blurted, “Why wasn’t Aamir good enough for you?”

She took a breath, pulled herself upright. “Poor Ugandan refugee. Had nothing but a strong work ethic.”

“And twenty-eight years later…” Morrow left it open.

A happy woman would have grinned and nodded, smugly affirmed the rightness of her choice. Sadiqa smiled weakly. “Yeah, it’s a long time, right enough.” Absentmindedly her hand strayed to the crusted blood on the front of her nightie and she looked down, suddenly distressed, taking her hand away and looking at it.

“Haven’t the boys made it in yet?”

“No,” she said. “No, they can’t come because of the baby. I phoned them, though.
I
phoned
them
because you can’t even have a phone on in here. It interferes with the machines or something.”

The boys could have phoned the ward and been put through to their mother, Morrow knew that.

“Well, maybe it’s best if they don’t come up anyway.” Morrow touched her arm. “It’s bound to be quite frightening.”

She had given her an excuse and Sadiqa appreciated it. “Yes.” She looked around. “It is frightening. Very frightening. I’d actually rather they didn’t…”

“Would you like us to bring you some clothes from home?”

“No, no.” Sadiqa softened. “No, I’ll go home later in a cab, get some food. The food’s disgusting here. They cook vegetables by boiling them for an hour…”

“How’s Aleesha doing?” asked Bannerman, shutting his notebook when he saw the coppers being let back into the ward by the nurse.

“She’s not dying.” She raised her eyes in a silent prayer of thanks. “Stable. Probably move her out of intensive care today. Half a foot to the left and she’d be—”

“Oh that’s great,” he interrupted. “Well, listen, we’ll leave you with these officers and we’ll go downstairs and make a phone call. When we come back in a minute we’ll try to talk to her.”

They weren’t coming back. He was keeping Sadiqa on point.

“OK.” Sadiqa nodded, watching uncertainly as Bannerman shuffled off to talk to one of the officers. She looked at Morrow.

“Thank you very much, Mrs. Anwar.” Morrow nodded, letting her know she understood what she had done.

“Please,”
said Sadiqa desperately. “
Please
find him.”

“We’ll do our best.”

Sadiqa went back into the intensive care room, resuming her purple seat, watching them anxiously through the window as she pulled her pink blanket up protectively over her chest.

Bannerman was muttering orders to the coppers. “I don’t want that woman using a phone until I give the say-so. Not talking on the ward phone, not using a mobile in the loo, not nipping downstairs to buy biscuits, understand?”

Through the intensive care window Morrow could see Sadiqa sitting tensely, staring at her daughter, gnawing on a thumbnail.

TWENTY

When they opened the door to Shugie’s bedroom the little man was sitting as they had left him, upright on the bed, but something was wrong: the corners of the pillowcase met his corners. He looked too tidy. He’d taken it off and put it back on again, which was bad, but his posture troubled them more: he sat confidently, shoulders down, head up, facing them, not cowering. His head swiveled as he looked from one to the other through the pillowcase, his bearing so upright they both felt inexplicably afraid, as if it was a rehearsal for meeting them in court. It was creepy because his bearing made him seem human.

Eddy looked at Pat, glanced at the crack in the curtains, looked back at the confident man. Pillowcase knew the police had been there. He had been at the window and seen them or heard them downstairs and thought they were coming to save him, banged on the floor deliberately to fuck them up.

Pat could feel Eddy’s rage rise like a scream in a pitch too high to hear. Eddy stepped towards the bed, teeth bared, out of control, and grabbed the man by the forearm, shaking him hard, toppling him facedown into the mattress, twisting his arm up his back hard, the way the police did. The old man gave a squeal, “no” or “ah,” but it was high anyway, shocked, not what Pat had expected. Pinning the old man facedown on the bed, Eddy raised his other elbow high and jabbed a short punch into his kidney. The old man buckled and collapsed, groaning, the gush of air muffled in the mattress. Eddy punched again and again, hitting the soft skin on his back, missing the ribs deliberately, going for the soft tissue.

Pat looked away for part of the attack. Then he thought Eddy might see him looking elsewhere and forced his eyes onto the pillowcase. It twitched out a response to the blows.

Eddy stood unsteadily on the bed, over the body, saliva flecked on his chin, panting like a child on a bouncy castle. He was fighting off a smile. Pat watched as he wiped it away with the back of his hand. It was odd to enjoy it so much. A bit sadistic. You could kill a man doing that to him.

He looked down at the pillowcase, thinking vaguely about internal bleeding and the mysteries of the human body. If Eddy killed it he would have to sort out getting rid of the body, Pat wasn’t going to do it, he hadn’t laid a finger on him. But then Eddy would probably give a body to Shugie or some other arsehole and they’d get done for it.

As an afterthought the old man gave a twitch again, raising his buttocks up in a futile attempt to get away, and he slumped back, facedown on the bed.

Suddenly stern, Eddy gestured to the other side of the bed. Pat shuffled over and they took an arm each and dragged the pillowcase off the bed, trying to stand him up on his cloth legs. He buckled forwards. Twice more they tried to stand him up and both times his knees flopped hopelessly outwards. It was getting worrying. On the final try he took his weight, just one knee buckled, swinging a circle but coming back. Eddy nodded Pat to the door.

They dragged it on its toes out to the landing, through the mildew cloud at the bathroom door, yanking it, giving it contradictory signals about which way to go. By the time they reached the top of the stairs the pillowcase was crying and muttering, sputtering and gasping for air between sobs.

Eddy stopped, looked down to the front hall and back to Pat. Pat could feel warmth through the sleeve, human warmth, but he looked down at the hall carpet and thought of Aleesha, of the depth of her grief for her father, of slipping his arm around her shoulders and her silky hair sliding across his bare arm. His hand gliding around her shoulder, his fingertips memorizing every hair, her sharp shoulder blades, vertebrae, the powdered softness of her skin. She would need him then. Desire made him peel his fingers away from the arm but as soon as he did he felt himself diminish and was ashamed.

Eddy took a step forward still holding the arm, yanking hard, but the pillowcase stood firm, upright, looked at him angrily. It yanked its arm away indignantly. He knew there were stairs there.

A clatter of feet made them look down: Malki was running up towards them, lifting his knees high, smiling. “Brought the car round the back,” he panted, stopping two steps down, holding the banister and swinging down a step again.

Eddy glared at him.

“Bloke’s already heard my voice,” explained Malki, a hand on the wall and one on the banister, barring the way. “I already spoke to him, when I give him the sweeties. He can’t eat them ’cause they’re not halal.”

Somehow the moment had passed. They couldn’t do it in front of Malki. In front of Malki would risk a long conversation about right and wrong, a dispute; he would ask about their motives, talk about the pillowcase as a person. Foiled. Pat felt proud of his wee junkie cousin.

Eddy motioned for Pat to take the stairs ahead of him and followed him down, pinching the old man’s elbow tight as he led him roughly down the steep steps.

Shugie was dozing on the damp settee. A second blue plastic bag was sitting open and next to him with three new cans in it. The previous bag of cans lay empty, the tins discarded on the floor.

“Dunno if three be enough,” said Malki. “But it’s all they had left in the shop.”

Pat shrugged. He didn’t want to speak too much in front of the pillowcase. Carefully he reached around to his wallet and took out a twenty-quid note. He looked at it, calculated that it was probably enough for an alkie to buy drink but not enough for a really greedy drinker to spend a night in the pub with other people. He sat it on top of the cans in the bag.

They formed a strange parade, passing through the living room to the kitchen and out the back door: Malki ahead with his hurried junkie speed-walk, Pat behind him, the pillowcase puffing and jerking as he was prodded and shoved by Eddy. Malki hesitated at the kitchen door, waiting for Eddy’s signal. Eddy nodded and Malki opened it, letting fresh air into the festering corridor of bin bags.

They had been in the house for so long, breathing in every nuanced smell a human being can make without dying, and the back garden seemed impossibly lush and fresh. Each in turn stopped on the back doorstep to take a grateful breath.

It was a jungle: grass grew long and dark here, an enclosing wall of deep green waxy hedges exploding upwards, bursting in every conceivable direction, swallowing the light. As the wind caressed the blades the grass winked its silver undersides.

The Lexus had been driven into the long grass so that the boot was facing the kitchen door and Malki had left a trail through the grass from the driver’s door to the back step, from the boot to the passenger door, as he emptied anything from it that might be used as a weapon. Pat followed the path to the boot, popped it, and stepped back.

Eddy took his time, glancing spitefully at the old man. He seemed unsatisfied that the pillowcase was walking stooped, that he was limping on one foot, flinching at the pain in his back. Swinging him by the elbow Eddy turned the pillowcase so that his back was to the boot and punched him in the groin, winding him so that he doubled up. Eddy stood up with a snigger and looked at Malki and Pat. Malki looked away. Pat smiled weakly. Oblivious to the animosity, Eddy smirked again and, as if telling a joke, put his hand flat on the old man’s head and, with the smallest push, dropped him into the boot.