Still Midnight (8 page)

“They arrested you?”

“Yeah.” Omar smirked at Mo. “For a BB offense.”

She didn’t understand. “You had a BB gun with you?”

“No, BB offense: Being Brown.” Omar became embarrassed, as if he was growing out of the adolescent sentiment while he was saying it.

“I’m very sorry,” she said formally, feeling defensive. “I sincerely hope you don’t feel that race has been an issue in the investigation. We really are trying our very best to help.”

“No, sorry, no.” Mo looked shamefaced too. “Sorry, it’s just a daft thing they say, you know, see, they looked at our clothes and, you know, think stuff about you…”

“Well,” she said softly, “if
anyone
here has given you the impression that race was any kind of an issue for them I do hope you’d feel free to tell us. We certainly wouldn’t want politics like that interfering with an investigation like this.”

They were mortified now, caught out in an unsupportable myth between them, and Morrow leaned in and went kindly for the kill. “You know, you weren’t arrested. If you’d been arrested you wouldn’t be here now, you’d be in a station somewhere being questioned. It creates a lot of paperwork, they don’t just do it for a laugh.”

“You know what?” Omar’s knee buckled and he looked at her. “We’re being stupid. It was my fault, we did an emergency stop, leapt out at them. I forgot, you know, what we’d look like to…” He scratched his head hard and sighed. “And I said a series of key words… that would alarm anyone really, I suppose.”

“Like what?”

“Guns. Van. Took my daddy.”

“Afghanistan!” interjected Mo, as if it was a guessing game.

“Why did you say Afghanistan?”

“Well, they said it, the gunmen, as they were leaving: ‘This is for Afghanistan,’ but it didn’t sound right.”

Mo nodded. “Yeah, it didn’t sound kosher.”

“Sounded like some bullshit Steven Seagal tagline. Like someone who watches a lot of action movies and is in a fuckin’—sorry—is like in a dream or something.”

They were talking to each other, not to her, and their speech speeded up, took on color and motion.

“Aye, yeah, but shit action movies,” confirmed Mo and affected a Schwarzenegger accent:
“This-is-pay-back,”
but his joke was halfhearted, addressed to no one but the pavement.

Omar smiled dutifully and echoed, “
Pay-back
. Anyway, we jumped out and they were just asking questions and then I saw the van going under the bridge and I forgot and I ran off towards it. They must have got a fright and they grabbed me in a hold. Hurt my shoulder a bit, actually.”

Mo reached out and patted his pal’s back. They were close, she liked that, and Omar had an insight and honesty rare in a young man.

“You saw the van?”

“We were on the bridge over the motorway and we saw it going underneath and I ran over to it but they stopped me.”

“On the bridge?”

“At Haggs Castle.”

“Great.” She pulled out her notebook and wrote it down. “We can get the CCTV footage and trace it.”

“They hurt my shoulder…”

“Well, I can only apologize for that.”

“Yeah and we were shitting ourselves anyway, buzzing because of the blood and Aleesha and that anyway.”

“She’s been taken to hospital.”

“I know.”

“I’m sure she’s fine.” She didn’t actually know how Aleesha was doing, she’d heard someone else say it but hadn’t spoken to the hospital herself. “In the right place…” She was slipping into hollow clichés as a barrier to empathizing. Bitter night streamed down the road, chilling their ankles. “Were you in the hall when the men came in?”

“No.”

“Where were you?”

“In the car outside.”

“Where?”

They pointed up to the evidence markers for the cigarette butts. She looked and saw that the cigarettes they had in their hands now were brand matches for the stubs she had seen in the road and she was pleased, found she wanted to trust them, whatever the story.

“What sort of car?”

“This car.” Omar pointed to a blue Vauxhall parked behind him. “The Vauxhall. His Vauxhall.”

“What were you doing out there?”

“Chatting.”

“Where had you been?”

“Mosque.”

Morrow read Omar’s face. What she had taken for guilt could have been shock and tiredness. He looked drained and spent, but there was something else there too, a reticence. “Did you see the van waiting in the road?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Were around the corner. Couldn’t see it.”

“It’s a one-way street. You must have passed it when you drove up.”

“We’d been there for twenty minutes. Must have arrived after us.”

“What were you doing there for twenty minutes?”

Omar drew himself up, straightening his back, looking at her properly for the first time. She felt plain. The suit made her look tidy but not attractive. No elegant details, no statement stitching or anything that would draw the eye, make a casual viewer wonder about her as a person. Bland was the look she was going for.

“Shouldn’t you wait until there’s another officer here before we speak to you?”

Morrow was surprised. “Why—what makes you say that?”

“For corroboration, for if the case comes to court.”

She gave an unconvincing half laugh. “What would you know about that?”

“I’m a law graduate,” he said, looking unaccountably sad about it.

“Oh.” She nodded for a minute, only vaguely aware of the car drawing up behind the boys. “Oh. When was your… when did you…?”

“Graduated in June,” he said.

“Morrow!” Bannerman was out of the car almost before it stopped. The bigger brother climbed out of the back and strode over to them, almost overtaking Bannerman in his eagerness to get to his brother’s side. They’d been on their way to the station for a formal interview, she realized, and both wanted to break up the conversation she was having, for different reasons.

“Morrow?” asked Omar.

“I’m Morrow,” she said. “Who’s the big guy?”

“My brother, Billal.” Omar dropped his chin to his chest and when she looked back she found the brother was glaring at him.

“Morrow,” scowled Bannerman, “could I have a word?”

She blushed high on her cheeks, and turned away, stepping over to him with her head down.

Bannerman turned her away from the boys and muttered reprovingly, “What are you doing?”

“Just talking to the boys…” She sounded flat, as if she’d done a bad thing herself. She looked for something to attach the feeling of guilt to: “Any word from the hospital?”

“Yeah.” Bannerman took her elbow and moved her out of earshot of the boys. “Fine. Going in for emergency surgery but should be OK. Hand’s mangled. She’s only sixteen.”

“Her mother with her?”

“Yeah, we’ve left some cops there. We’ll get a proper statement off her when she comes out of it.”

“Something funny about the family,” she murmured. “I grew up on the South Side. I know dead religious families and this one isn’t right.”

“How do you mean?”

“Omar, the son? Smokes fags like he’s smoking a joint. Aleesha wears jeans and T-shirts, Meeshra’s embarrassed about it, but kind of suggested that they’ve only recently become very observant. They’re from Uganda originally. Traditionally that’s a pretty assimilated pro-British community.”

“Are they recent converts?”

He wasn’t listening to her. “No. They’re not converts, just become more observant.”

Now he wasn’t even looking at her. “Yeah, great, Morrow: local knowledge. Let’s get them to the station.”

Omar couldn’t look back at Billal. He seemed to be shrinking under his brother’s gaze.

“We’re
all
going to the station,” Bannerman called to him.

“The boys saw the van,” she said. “They tried to get a squad—”

“Yeah,” he cut her off and called Billal over to his side. “Let’s get the boys into a car. We’re going to the police station, right?”

“Have I to come too?” Mo was asking Billal.

“We’re
all
going,” Billal said sternly.

Bannerman waved the boys to a car door and they trotted obediently over. As Omar came past, Billal reached out a meaty hand and grabbed his arm, with unnecessary force. “Just tell the truth,” he said loudly. Omar didn’t look at him.

Bannerman watched approvingly, as if he had located the biggest boy in the class and made friends with him.

“Tell them the truth.” But Billal was talking in exclamations, so loud he wasn’t really talking to Omar.

The two boys got into the backseat of the squad car and Billal shut the door on them.

Morrow sidled over to him, touching his elbow gently, guiding him away for a moment. “Billal, I’m DS Alex Morrow. Can I just ask you quickly: why were they waiting outside the house while it all went on?”

Billal looked at her as if he had misheard. “What?”

“The guys,” said Morrow, pointing back to Mo and Omar, “they were waiting in the car for twenty minutes before they came in.”

Billal looked shocked. “Really?”

Bannerman hurried, came back around the car, possessive of the brother, slipping in almost between them.

“Yeah,” said Morrow.

Billal looked at the police tape, along the road, to the open front door of his house, frowning as he tried to answer the question. “Where?”

Morrow pointed up the road. “There, where those markers are.”

Billal imagined it for a moment. “But the gunmen were parked down there.” He pointed around the corner to the garden path.

“That’s right.”

Billal frowned. “So, they might not have seen them?”

“They said they didn’t see anything.”

“And that’s possible?” Billal looked at Bannerman, asking him if his younger brother could be telling the truth.

“Yeah,” said Bannerman, trying not to smile, “it is perfectly possible.”

Billal looked angrily at the window of the squad car. “Good. Good.”

He turned back to look at Morrow and nodded back at the house. “Meeshra help you?”

“Yes, thanks, she was very helpful.”

Billal arched his back slightly at that. “She didn’t see very much. She was in the bed the whole time,” and he nodded, a strange pecking nod, slightly out of time. Morrow didn’t know what it meant. Billal looked at Morrow’s shoes, curled his lip, and turned, walking away without saying good-bye.

Bannerman backed up to Morrow’s side as they watched Billal fold his big frame into the backseat next to Mo. “Yeah,” he said as if Morrow had expressed her reservations out loud. “What did the daughter-in-law say?”

“Not much. Do you still think they got the wrong house?”

“Dunno. They rang nine-nine-nine. Neighbors put the shot thirty seconds or so before all the calls so, they rang immediately…”

Innocents call for the police, generally. It meant they didn’t feel responsible for the attack. Or else they were criminal but had a grotesque sense of entitlement. There were families who knew whole shifts by their first names. When they weren’t getting lifted they were calling cops in to resolve family arguments. Morrow dismissed that option, though: they’d have heard of them if that was the case.

Bannerman sighed heavily. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry about this, just… MacKechnie’s idea. I’ll be working for you next time.”

Morrow froze slightly. The skin on her finger was throbbing. “Yeah, well it looks complicated. Time-consuming. I know your mum’s not well.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” he said quickly. “She’ll be fine.” Bannerman’s mother had pneumonia, both lungs, not good when a woman was in her late seventies. He’d been milking it for sympathy in the office for a week but now he squinted at her, guessing at her motive for bringing it up. “You’ll cooperate on this, won’t you?”

“I’m not a child, Grant,” she said coldly.

He flinched at that and she regretted saying it. His mother wasn’t well and she was being mean.

“Sorry.” She said the word so quietly she saw him glance at her mouth for confirmation.

He brightened. “Yeah, can’t get a handle on this at all.” His bewilderment seemed feigned. “They seem as straight as anything, no crims in the family, no enemies, nothing. They haven’t even got a big telly.”

He was at it. She’d seen Bannerman do his wide-eyed fishing act before, letting people explain and damn themselves.

“Could be a wrong address…?” she said weakly.

Bannerman looked angry, knowing she had more than that. “Oh, thanks for that, Morrow. Really insightful. You want me to chisel it out of you?”

Morrow bit the corner of her mouth hard, watching Billal. Fury tinged with shame. Her emotional staples. “What do you want me for when we get back?”

He looked at her, his mouth twitching down at the corners. “What do you want to do?”

“I could talk to the young guys…”

“You think they’re it?”

“Dunno. They were hanging about outside…”

He read her face. She could feel him realizing that she did think they were it. He wouldn’t let her near them.

“No, I think I’ll talk to them. Could you do me a favor and listen to the tapes of the emergency calls? See what you can get off them?” He smiled, pleased to have thought of a punishment job that was out of the way, time-consuming, and menial. “That would be really helpful, Morrow, thanks.”

He pressed his lips together to stop himself smiling and sloped off to the car.

NINE

Pat watched the Lexus headlights sweep across Malki’s face, bleaching him. It was a narrow road and Malki had to stand flat against the chapel wall to let the car turn in the street.

Pat could see the quiet content on Malki’s face, a soft smile. He had a pocket full of dough, rare enough, and he was going home excited, off to his bedroom to see his powdery white darling. She never failed Malki, never bored or annoyed him. Malki’s only problem was getting enough of her. True love, thought Pat, and he envied Malki that certainty. He had never gone out with a woman he didn’t have reservations about. He thought about the girl in the hall, jeans and T-shirt and everyone else in Muslim gear, and found himself warm at the thought of her.

Eddy drove on, sticking to the big roads. A car as smart as a Lexus would only ever pass through streets like these, never stop. It would draw the eye of anyone who saw it, stick in the mind.