Still Midnight (34 page)

The man’s office was really just a large circular desk in the corner of the room, big enough to look fancy but up close just four curved tables shoved next to one another. He took his jacket off and hung it on a hanger, sat down in a wheeled office chair, and walked himself across to the computer monitor. Bending sidelong to flick on the hard drive, he sat, eyes on the screen, hands poised above the keyboard, a concert pianist waiting for the maestro’s signal.

It took a long time. Behind Morrow the vacuum hummed and the fan heaters grumbled to one another. She’d been turning away from Brian since they left the hospital, since the lift down in the hospital in fact, insisting that she would carry both the plastic bags of Gerald’s belongings, refusing to even let him take the SpongeBob doll from under her arm. She’d never felt it was a choice until now.

The monitor flicked bright suddenly and made them both jump. He smiled up at her. “Oh.” He stood up formally and held his hand out. “I’m Bill Prescott.”

Morrow shook the hand, wondering why she hadn’t asked his name, worrying that she hadn’t.

He sat back down, the smile lingering on his face, adding, “General manager.”

Morrow nodded, shifted her weight, cleared her throat softly. It was suddenly getting warm in the showroom. She felt a prickle of sweat in her armpits.

“Here we go.” He used the mouse to select a file, and picked up the phone next to him, dialing the number on the screen. Holding the receiver to his ear he smiled up at her, waiting, and suddenly his face brightened. “Ah, hello, is this Mr. Omar Anwar?” He nodded. “This is Stark-McClure over on Rosevale, yeah, sure yeah uh, brilliant. OK, well, listen, Mr. Anwar, I have a police officer with—” He listened, looked at Morrow as if she was being discussed, smiled the million-dollar smile. “Great. That’s OK with you, then? All and any documentation, Mr. Anwar? Great.” Looking suddenly worried he nodded and tried to interrupt. “I see. It is refundable. The full deposit isn’t refundable but that deposit is. OK, will—will do. Fine, as I said before, sir, that’s absolutely—OK, OK? Well, if you wanted to come in and look for any—OK, straight back to the account, OK. Great. Great. Bye. Bye.”

Bowing obsequiously he leaned forward, following the receiver down to the port, and hung up. He sat up and managed a faltering smile and spread his hands. “Canceled the order. Wants a refund. And he said you can have anything.”

Alex sat in her car in the car park and looked at the photocopies. The deposit had been paid in the name of Aamir Anwar. Bill Prescott explained at length that it was a deposit to secure a place on the Lamborghini waiting list, not actually a deposit for the car. Omar had canceled it and wanted a full refund into Aamir’s account.

Two grand was hardly evidence of massive international fraud. He could have saved it up himself from a bar job.

The receipts were confirmation of everything Omar had said the night before. It bothered her, though. Three kids, a religious father, and he was helping his unemployed youngest son to buy a Lamborghini. Not even the oldest son. And the father was frugal. He had a cheap blue van parked in front of the house. That level of flash didn’t sound consistent. She looked at the receipt again.

Aamir Anwar’s account details had been blanked out by Bill Prescott but his name was there. Omar said yesterday that he could empty these accounts to pay for his father’s return. He had access to those accounts. There was nothing to stop him paying for a car out of them as long as he repaid the money.

She realized what it meant: Omar was a fantasist. He didn’t have money or a rich father, or a fraud scam. He was, at worst, optimistic about a bad business idea.

They had nothing but Malki Tait’s fingerprints and the chances were they were from an old foil.

THIRTY-THREE

The office seemed unnaturally quiet when she got there. She went into her office, shed her bag and jacket, and looked at Bannerman’s desk. His computer was turned off and there was no coffee cup. She looked out into the corridor. MacKechnie’s office was shut and dark too. They were off together somewhere. They were off to see the Fraud Squad. She should have phoned ahead about the garage.

The incident room was busy, DCs following up on leads and scraps, making notes, phoning. She didn’t go in but turned and saw Harris sitting on his own in the small office, staring hard at a screen and looking even more pissed off than yesterday. She leaned into him. “Ye right?”

He groaned. “Up half the night with a blinding headache from watching this shite.”

“Poor you. Where’s Bannerman?”

“Have you not heard?” He leaned forward and pressed the Pause button. “Bannerman’s taken compassionate. His mum’s got pneumonia apparently. She’s in hospital.”

“Compassionate?”

“Yeah, doesn’t know when he’ll be back.”

She bit back the dirtiest word she knew, chewing on her inner lip until she got back into her office and closed the door. Morrow sat down. The cunt was ducking the cunting fucking case because he was a cunt and he was using his stinking fucking mother’s pneumonia to do it. Killer fucking instinct, right enough. Cunt.

MacKechnie was fully aware of the situation Bannerman had put her in, but it was important for everyone to pull together and support him at this difficult time.

“So,” he said carefully, patting the desk in front of her chair, “it falls to you to take his place as the SIO.”

Morrow sat back in the office chair by his desk and read his face. If he knew his protégé was dodging the job because it wasn’t panning out, MacKechnie wasn’t letting on. They looked at each other for a long while until MacKechnie broke off. “You called me a racist a few days ago. You wanted this case so much you actually said that to me.”

She could see just how intensely he disliked her at that moment. Everything about her was wrong. It wasn’t just that she was a woman, wasn’t her habit of swearing or her brisk manner, her poor South Sider accent, her lack of allies. What he disliked about her most was that she didn’t really give a fuck, because wherever she was, whatever was going on in the gentle heave and sway of office politics, all she really cared about in the world was gone. MacKechnie could sense that dark belligerent void and knew that he couldn’t touch her.

“This case is a great opportunity for you—”

“This case is a big fat bollocks and you know it. The family are lying out of their arses. Thirty-six hours since he was taken and every minute that passes makes it less likely that we’ll find the man alive—”

MacKechnie couldn’t take it anymore. He stood up and jabbed his finger at her three times for emphasis. “Do your job. Get out.”

Harris pulled the car up carefully to the curb. He needn’t have been careful, there weren’t many other cars in the street and they were mostly tucked away in bricked-over gardens at the front of the houses, but he was delighted to be out of the office and away from the videos and enjoying kicking the facts of the briefing.

“Toryglen?”

“Yeah, dropped him off at the main road, he said.”

“Any Taits there?”

“No.”

“Didn’t you find anything on the shop’s CCTV tapes?” she said.

“Well, there are a couple of oddities but nothing major. I’ve highlighted them and asked Gobby to have a look at them, see if I was just going blind or what.”

“Show them to me when we get back.”

“Yeah. But, boss, you know, even if it is VAT fraud, it’s irrelevant, isn’t it? Even if the family are screwing millions out of the VAT office that only tells us how they became targets, it doesn’t help us find the old man or get him out alive, does it?”

Morrow nodded. “Yeah, but finding out how they were targeted’ll lead us to the kidnappers. And when it comes to trial any defense lawyer’s going to bring it up to discredit them. Makes the whole case harder.”

“S’pose.” Harris opened his door and stopped with one foot in the road. “D’you reckon Bannerman’s bunking off?”

It would be breaking rank to say so. “DC Harris, whatever makes you say that?” As they stood on either side of the car looking down the road, getting the measure of the place, she asked him: “Really, what makes you say that?”

He shrugged, still unsure of her. “Rumor.”

“Oh.” He wasn’t prepared to go into it. She liked that. “What’s the rumors about me?”

“There aren’t any rumors about you, boss.”

She looked at him, worried they were skating close to sincerity, and felt uncomfortable about it. “Shame. I started a couple of good ’uns.”

“Except that you’re getting the squeeze.”

She almost choked. She’d never expected sympathy and it touched her deeply. She looked away, hiding her face.

They were poor houses. A long curving street of flat-fronted council houses with telephone and electrical wires slung across them, gray plaster facades that had blackened into the architectural equivalent of a skin complaint. A lot of the houses had been bought by the tenants, though: incongruous wooden porches were built around a couple of doors. One of the houses had mock Tudor windows, all lead strips and flouncy nets behind. The gardens were well kept too, carefully organized gravel and flower baskets hanging from walls, garden pots too big to pick up and walk away with, and hedges carefully trimmed where they grew. She wouldn’t have chosen to live here but the people who did clearly liked it. Pink plastic toys littered the grass in one garden and a deflated football was resting by the curb in the street. Morrow noticed that the street was a dead end. It was a nice safe playground for kids. The street was empty, though, all the children off at school, all the parents tending house or out working. At the end of the street a gray modern chapel loomed from a hillock like a village jail.

Malki Tait’s address was number twelve. It looked like a pensioner’s house from the outside. Modest china ornaments were lined up along the windowsill; an Alsatian dog, a tiny China bouquet of flowers, a mouse holding a bit of cheese. The front step had just been washed, was damp but drying, the sweep of the wet hand brush lingering gray on the concrete.

The door was council, flat-paneled and painted a jaunty cornflower blue, not a bought house, no money here, but the door hadn’t been changed since the seventies. The tenant had been here since then. The council stripped out older fittings when new tenants moved in. They offered new doors and windows to existing tenants too but the older ones usually wanted to keep things the same, being members of a generation who liked what they liked and didn’t believe decor was subject to yearly fashions.

“Old lady,” guessed Morrow, pressing the doorbell.

“A quid,” bet Harris.

Shuffling steps, a weak call of “hello” in an old lady’s voice.

Morrow smiled at the step. “Mrs. Tait?”

“Hello?”

Harris and Morrow looked at each other. Either she hadn’t heard Morrow or she was working for time. Malcolm Tait could be walking out of the back door right now.

Suddenly animated, Morrow raised her fist to bang on the door and Harris backed away to the street, looking for a lane to the back garden. The door opened suddenly and a thin woman looked out at them, tipping her head back to see them through the bottom portion of red plastic bifocal glasses.

Annie Tait was wearing a pair of baggy red joggers and a white vest with bra straps showing. She had the arms of a much younger woman. She’d once had red hair like her son, but had dyed it blond. Two-inch roots of red and gray mingled at her scalp. It was wild, frizzy hair, the tips not helped by the drying effect of the hair dye. It looked like a rain-flattened Afro. Embarrassed by her appearance she raised her hand to it. “Who are you?”

Morrow stepped forward. “I’m DS Morrow. This is DC Harris. We’re here about Malcolm.”

“What about him? He’s not been arrested?”

“No, Mrs. Tait, we’re just really keen to talk to him.”

Annie pulled the door shut so that she blocked the view of the house with her body. “Keep the heat in…,” she explained to Harris and turned back to Morrow, as if she was the natural leader. “I’m looking for Malki too. I’m always looking for bloody Malki. Did you get that taxi firm number?”

“We did, aye, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about.”

“How?” Annie tipped her chin down, trying to see better through the top portion of the bifocals. Unsatisfied she went back to the bottom portion. The lenses were warping Morrow’s view of her eyes, making her feel a bit sick.

“Can we come in, Mrs. Tait? Would that be OK?”

Annie looked across the street, then up the road to the chapel, as if checking that Jesus wasn’t watching, and opened the door. “Aye.” She wrinkled her nose as if she was letting a wet stray in for a drink of water. “Come in.”

Harris followed Morrow, closing the door behind himself. The hall was narrow and plain, painted green with matching carpet. To the left was a front room, as neat in its way as the Anwars’ but with older, cheaper furnishings. A set of stairs led up the right-hand wall to the bedrooms. Along the wall by the stairs were click-frame collages of family photos, all of Malcolm and ginger Annie in different fashions, in the front garden here, in ugly halls at weddings, never abroad, never on a beach. There didn’t seem to be any pictures of a dad.

Malcolm making his First Communion, standing stiff as a board in a shirt and tie, solemn-faced, hair watered flat, Rosary beads strapped around his prayer-clasped hands like a parlor Houdini. It was outside the chapel down the road, Morrow realized. She could just see this house in the far background.

Annie saw her looking at the photo. “That’s him, when he was cute. He’s still cute now, just not in the same way. So, did ye find the taxicab? He’s never phoned home and he usually does if he’s staying out and can remember, if he isn’t nodding off his nuts.”

“Nodding?” repeated Harris, thinking he had misheard.

Annie crossed her arms. “D’ye not know? Malki’s a heroin addict.” She pointed at a pile of photocopied leaflets sitting on the floor by the door. “M.A.D.: Mothers Against Dealers.” She touched her chest. “Founder member,” she said proudly.