Still Midnight (40 page)

Roy seemed protective, stepped to the side when a trolley hurried past, shielding her. He gently put the second tray back, the sugar back, spoke softly to her. As he paid for the bottle of water for her and mug of tea for himself she watched his face. He was grieving, the sorrow so deep behind his eyes that it wasn’t shaken by superficial expressions like smiles to tea ladies and remembering the spoon.

When he took the change of his fiver she saw him glance at the charity box for the hospital, look at his change, knowing he should put some of it in, and then decide not to. She saw the micro-expression on his face as he felt bad about it. She liked that.

He led her carefully over to a corner seat, away from the bustle near the corridor, sat her in the chair least likely to be jostled, and took the opposite for himself. He sat down, put the bottle of water on the table in front of her, set the tea by his elbow, and put the tray on the floor resting against the table leg. He looked up at her, his eyes starting at her chin, weaving up past her lips, the bridge of her nose, luxuriating over her eyebrows, and finally meeting her eyes. She saw all the grief evaporate, the hurt lift from him, and was aware that she was doing that.

“Roy?”

“Yeah, I’m Roy.”

“Um, Roy, why are you sad?”

He shrugged, eyes slid to the side, sinking again into grief. “I’ve lost…” He seemed to forget what he was saying.

Aleesha peeled the label off the water bottle with her good hand, struggling to keep the bottle upright. He was looking at her.

“What’s your story?”

She smiled.

“Seriously,” he insisted. “What’s the deal with you?”

“The deal?”

“Why are you pretending to be off your tits?”

She squared up to him, picked up the water bottle, pointed the nozzle at him in a warning. But he was smiling. “I know what medicated looks like.”

She smiled back. “You really like me, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” He meant it so much he could hardly say it.

“Why do you like me?”

She was expecting a compliment, a cheesy list of good points: nice eyes, good hair, fit figure. Roy leaned back in his chair, pinched the handle to the mug, dropped his hand to the table, and said the only thing in the world that would make her trust him: “I’ve no idea. But I really, really do.”

Struggling to drink the water through a wide grin Aleesha looked at him. He sat watching her, eyes narrowed in appreciation, mapping her arms, her shoulders, loving her. Her heart rate was increasing, her breaths deepening, as she looked at him across the plastic bottle. She swallowed, felt the narrow nozzle suck on her lip as she took the bottle from her mouth.

“Roy?”

He smiled just hearing her say the name.

“Roy, do you have a car?”

Morrow didn’t recognize the car. It wasn’t their car but she looked into it because it was the only civilian car in the yard that she didn’t know immediately. A lumbering pale blue Honda Accord. The gesture was so unexpected it took the breath from her. She stopped on the ramp, holding the handrail for support.

He was in the driver’s seat, hands resting on his thighs, looking out at her. Brian had bought a car without asking her. A secondhand car. Not a remarkable car, bit of a shit car actually, but an exact replica of the car he’d owned when they met.

He had stopped at the bus stop outside the Battlefield Rest Rotunda at the Vicky and offered her a lift home when they were both at Langside College. They weren’t friends but had sat near each other in history a few times, were aware of each other, had coffee with the same people once or twice.

Now, with a jaundiced policewoman’s knowledge of the world, now she would never get into a car with a man she didn’t know. Now she would have leaned down, the rain pattering on her hood and her ankles freezing, and said thanks but no, she was fine to get the bus, she’d see him tomorrow, did he know he was parked in a yellow square? Now she’d never get in the car with Brian. But back then she’d felt the warmth billowing out of the passenger window and climbed in from the cold bus stop on the exposed road and pulled her hood down and he drove her to her door. They talked about music and the weather and the history teacher and how Brian liked hill walking and would she like to come sometime.

He had the car for two years and sold it for scrap before they got married. At her insistence they went together and bought a new car, more modest but fresh, new, with a promise of no problems.

At the bottom of the ramp the wind swirled around the floor of the police yard, ushering leaves under cars. The station door slapped shut behind her and some copper squeezed past down the narrow ramp. She let him by and then hurried down to the pale blue car, standing in front of the bonnet, looking in. Brian looked back through the windscreen, reached up, took his glasses off. The bridge of his nose had two red oval indents, his eyes looked raw without glass over them. He looked younger.

Morrow wanted to fly through the windscreen and engulf him then, smother him with her body, swallow him. Instead she dropped her chin to her chest, hiding her face in case anyone saw her on the many cameras that were dotted around the yard, and stomped around to the passenger door. She opened it, the handle mechanism so much like a physical memory that she felt her hand cup her own younger trusting hand, felt the warmth from her smooth skin.

Heat billowed out. Brian had the heater up full, just as he had the day at the bus stop. Later he’d told her it was so that she’d feel it when he wound the window down and asked her in, so she’d be tempted to come into the warm.

She dropped into the seat and slammed the door behind her. Raising a hand she flipped the sun shield down so that her wet eyes couldn’t be seen from outside, not by the cameras or passersby coming on shift or going out in cars.

Morrow looked out of the side window, searching for a phrase or a line or a thing to say, but there were no words for this. Her eyes skirted over the bonnets of the cars lined up with theirs, over to the shit-brick wall around the yard, and she began to trace a journey through the mortar to the building. Next to her, far away, she was aware of Brian sighing.

A wrist touching her wrist. For the first time since Gerald died she didn’t draw away from him, didn’t flinch at the touch. It was so warm in the car she’d hardly noticed the movement of his hand as it flattened against the back of her hand.

Hand against hand, his wrist slipped up until it was on top of hers, edge to edge. His pinkie moved a millimeter, stroking her pinkie, and then, quick as a landslide, their fingertips found each other, working through and over in the secret language of lovers, saying things there were no words for.

Morrow’s face was wet, her breath short, her eyes smarting bitterly, but she kept working her way across the wall, through the rough dips and dark valleys, as she struggled for breath, remembering her place in the maze even when she shut her eyes to shed the shuddering veil of tears. She kept going until, quite suddenly, she found herself at the far wall with no farther to go.

Out of the blue Brian said, “I got sacked.”

She looked at the hand wound tightly around hers. A fine hand. Tiny hairs. The fingers loosened on hers, the tips stroking her fingertips. “Haven’t been in since…”

She looked out of the window at the wall. People were moving outside, blurred uniforms, getting in cars, pulling out. “We in trouble? Financially?”

“Might need to sell the house.” His fingers were moving quickly over hers, anxious, nervous, waiting for the warmth.

She looked up and found him turned away, face to the window, fat tears dripping off his chin. “Oh, Brian. I hate that fucking house.”

Fingers through fingers, tight, tight and unmoving. Morrow raised Brian’s hand to her lips and there it stayed.

THIRTY-NINE

Her belly touching the steering wheel, Sadiqa looked up apologetically at Morrow and MacKechnie. “I’m fat…,” she said simply.

It didn’t look very safe. “Can’t you push the seat back a bit?” asked MacKechnie.

“My legs are short,” she said, looking around as if she might find something to lengthen them.

Morrow leaned down to the open window. “Can you drive it, though?”

Drawing her stomach in Sadiqa made a determined face, nodded at the wheel. “Yes. Yes, I can drive. I’m not really confident about motorway driving, though.”

“Will you be OK?”

She looked at the dashboard, uncertain, as if she had been asked to fly a plane, and decided, “Yes.”

“Now, the officers are there already. You know where you’re going?”

“Yeah.”

“You get out, put the bag behind the emergency telephone, get back in, and rejoin the motorway, OK?”

“Then come back here?”

“Then come back here.”

It was freezing in the surveillance van. Gobby was crouching on a small foldaway stool by the back doors. There was no room for him on the bench; MacKechnie and Morrow were perched there, giving them the best vantage point for watching the boxy gray screens.

The motorway cameras were high up and the images angled towards four gray lanes, crash barrier in the middle. It was a long stretch of straight road, good for reading the number plate on any car, and the camera was angled so that the drivers’ faces could be clearly seen, well lit by the streetlights. They could go back over any one of them and still and print it. Great in court.

It was a main artery, a busy bit of road for the time of night. A steady parade of cars and vans and lorries came towards the camera, drove under it, front-seat faces talking, silent, singing, picking noses or slack, hypnotized by the blandness of the road. Another boxy screen showed a turnout with an emergency phone in the foreground. The image was still apart from passing lights licking the edge. They had two other screens, both trained on junctions, in case the kidnappers got that far before they were intercepted.

“Everybody where they should be?” asked MacKechnie, not actually knowing where they should be.

“Sorted, sir,” said Morrow.

MacKechnie was clearly delighted with her but it served only to highlight how poorly he had thought of her before. He was imagining the glory before them, she felt, and points at which to siphon it off. His respectfulness made her uncomfortable. Morrow was born on the back foot and only ever felt easy as an underdog.

They sat in silence for ten tense minutes, watching the gray shapes shifting in front of them, their eyes flicking from screen to screen. She had ordered radio silence; if the kidnappers were at all professional they’d be listening to the police frequencies. She rang Harris on his mobile. He was where he was supposed to be and nothing had happened.

“ ’Kay,” she said. “Be ready.”

The bench was small and there wasn’t a lot of room to move. MacKechnie looked at her casually and it felt like a prelude to an awkward kiss. Morrow checked her watch—they were almost ten minutes late for the one-hour deadline.

“There!” she said, pointing to the four-lane screen.

They could see Sadiqa trundling slowly towards them, saw another driver change lanes to avoid her. Then, on monitor two, a lorry hurried past and frightened her into slowing down even more. Unused to motorway driving. Sadiqa took the outside lane, drawing attention to herself by driving at the speed limit and verging slowly to the right every time she checked her rear mirror. She disappeared off camera for a moment, should have been pulling into the turnout.

On another monitor, in grainy black and white, reverse lights flashed on the emergency phone as Sadiqa backed up in the turnout. MacKechnie breathed a curse, watching as she missed the emergency phone post by inches.

Sadiqa stopped, pulled on the hand brake so hard the car seemed to be taking a deep breath. The door opened and she got out. Stagily, she looked at the cars passing, stood at the open door, then waddled around to the boot, opened it, and pulled out the black holdall. Sadiqa then dropped it heavily onto the road, tried to pick it up again, and seemed defeated. She bent down, inelegantly bending her little legs out to the side, taking one of the handles, dragging it over behind the emergency post. She stood up, looking at it. She seemed to be talking to the bag. Then she turned and went back to the car, opened the door, sat down, and shut the door. The engine restarted.

“I can hardly bear to watch her pull back out,” said MacKechnie to no one.

A couple of stalls, and she finally made it back onto the road, reappearing in another screen a good bit farther down the road. But they weren’t watching Sadiqa. They were watching the bag.

Car headlights strobed past, oblivious to the forty grand in the bag. A lorry rumbled past. A ragged plastic bag floated by. Morrow’s eyes strayed to the other screens. Steady, no special driving, no strange vans with too many men in the front seat for the time of night.

“There!” MacKechnie was on his feet, watching as a car pulled into the turnout, hazards flashing, pulling in too far along, just the front half of the vehicle in shot.

“Shit,” said Morrow, who was on her feet too. “I asked them to broaden the shot. Shit!”

A bald man got out of the car, a sedan, came around to the boot, bent down to look at his taillights. He stood up, stroked his head as if he was trying to comfort himself, looked around. Cars flashed past him as he stood and watched. Gobby scribbled down the number plate and called it in for a check.

The man got back in his car and went away. Gobby hung up his mobile and looked at Morrow. “Random?”

She shrugged. Even if it all went tits up, if Aamir died and the money was lost, she had Brian, had held his hand, and a future felt possible.

The change was so slow that the apparent movement seemed at first to be a feature of the weak light in the empty turnout. The bag was moving.

MacKechnie squinted. An arm, from off camera, coming out of the dark hillside out of shot, a foot just visible getting purchase to pull the heavy load up the steep incline. Two hands, suddenly moving fast, swinging it up the hill and disappearing. MacKechnie panicked and stood up. “Shit, shit! The other side, they’ve come from the other side of the motorway!” He turned on Morrow, blocking her view of the monitors. “What’s on the other side of the motorway?”