by Denise Mina
‘Two million in cash? Did they get it?’
‘There was no one called Rob here.’
‘What colour were the gunmen? Were they Asian?’
‘White. They had balaclavas on but they were white.’
‘Who’s Rob?’
‘Dunno. Everyone’s Indian, I mean, has Indian names at least, so . . . no one called Rob.’
‘No lodgers? No dodgy boyfriends?’
‘No one. Money not forthcoming,’ continued Bannerman, ‘left with father as hostage.’
Morrow was puzzling at the house still. ‘Could it just be a matter of the wrong address then?’
‘As yet undetermined,’ said Bannerman, meaning he didn’t know.
‘It’s not a case of the wrong address,’ she spoke to MacKechnie, making him look up the road, ‘because Albert Drive’s just over there—’
‘Millionaires’ row,’ interrupted Bannerman, leaning between them and nodding as if he’d thought of it.
She ploughed on. ‘If they were just looking for a family with money they’d go there and smash a door in.’
‘So?’ MacKechnie encouraged her to draw a conclusion. Bannerman’s nodding became manic.
‘So, they came here deliberately, sir. They had intel about someone here that made them think there was money here. Ready money, maybe.’
‘Unless . . .’ Bannerman had to get MacKechnie’s attention back on him, ‘unless, they went to go to another house, set off the alarm or something, and turned back? I mean, we should check it out . . .’ His voice faded halfway through the sentence, his confidence waning.
It was a fucking stupid suggestion.
‘If armed men had burst in anywhere else tonight incident room control would have notified FAU, I think.’ MacKechnie’s voice was softer, correcting.
Morrow looked back at the squad cars littering the street and asked, ‘D’ye say they were warned not to call us?’
Bannerman shrugged uncomfortably. He should have thought of that.
The cop answered, holding his witness statements up for support. ‘Yeah. “Call the cops and this fu—” ’ He thought better of a word-for-word recitation. ‘Um, threats to the hostage.’
MacKechnie looked at the squad cars and the menacing FAU van pulling out. ‘Let’s move this visible presence.’
Bannerman sloped off to give orders to that effect.
‘If they said not to call us,’ Morrow continued the thought, ‘they must have been confident that the family would comply. Maybe they’re right, maybe there is money here after all.’
MacKechnie checked that Bannerman was out of earshot. ‘Morrow, we both know this is your case but I can’t give it to you.’
‘Sir, you said the next—’
‘We’ve had a lot of trouble here recently, minorities, gangs fighting, the Boyle boy. Don’t need any trouble with cultural misunderstandings.’
Morrow ground her jaw and stared at the house as if it had offended her. ‘I’m from here, sir, I know the people in this area—’
‘DS Bannerman can handle this,’ he continued. ‘You’ll get the next one.’
This case was a career maker and MacKechnie was here guiding Bannerman by the elbow. The decision was made, fair didn’t come into it, but her eye began to twitch again and she couldn’t even bring herself to look at MacKechnie.
‘Why not this one, sir?’
He didn’t answer. When she looked back at him she followed his eyes to the Asian guys standing beyond the tape. They had the lost, limp look of victims. The oldest guy was big, and dressed in a plain sweatshirt and cotton trousers, bearded. The two younger ones were tall and thin, wore a shalwar kameez, hoodies and trainers, traditional, religious.
‘Personal factors make us suitable for some cases,’ he said, ‘and not for others. You’ll get the next one.’
Typical MacKechnie. Never said anything outright. Delicate situation, he wanted to say, all Asians hate women and anyway, you’re a nut case.
Morrow could tell by the size of the boys and the softness of their builds that they were second generation. They had short hair, buzz cut by a barber. One of them had top of the range Nikes on, and they weren’t to impress his pious pals at Mosque. Those guys didn’t care if she was female or male. She was ten years older than them, she might as well have been a man and she knew the South Side. If anyone’s personal factors made them suitable it was her. But MacKechnie no longer trusted her, sensed that she was slowly tipping over the edge. It was unfair, but the service was all about unfair and she knew she should let it go.
‘Sir, that’s . . .’ she was regretting it before the word even tumbled past her lips, ‘racist.’
They both stood quite still, looking at the house. Cold rain pattered on their heads. A trickle ran down Morrow’s cheek, dripping off her chin, soaking into her lapels, marking a ragged bullet hole over her heart. Behind them marked squad cars reversed slowly out of the street. She felt a weight on her chest and realised that she was trying not to breathe.
MacKechnie didn’t turn to speak and his voice was less than a murmur. ‘Never speak to me like that again.’
He turned sharply and walked away from her, over to Bannerman.
Fuck.
3
They drove the entire distance in silence, as per the plan. Say nothing in front of the hostage. But it wasn’t a smug professional silence: Pat was too angry to speak, Eddy was determined to get one part of it right and Malki was so wasted he was incapable of driving and speaking at the same time.
Malki was well used to being the cause of bad atmospheres; he lived with his mother, and assumed the sour mood in the van was his fault, because of the thing with the wall, so he was extra careful and his driving exemplary. He took the slip road to the motorway, drove at legal speeds the whole way into town, came off at Cathedral for a circuit of the Sighthill back road to break the camera tracking and then turned and headed back onto the motorway from a different angle. Flawless.
All the way the old man stayed face down on the rumbling floor of the van, lying in exactly the same position he had landed in after they pulled the pillowcase over his head and shoved his face to the van floor: legs straight out, one arm flat by his side, the other hand by his face, still, as the heavy white plastic petrol cans swam slowly about the floor.
He lay so still that Pat began to worry. He looked back often, concerned that he might have suffered a head injury when they chucked him into the van. Pat’d watched a guy die outside a club once. The guy, mid-thirties, staggered and tripped on the step, toppled backwards, hitting the pavement like a comedy drunk and lay there, out of the way. Everyone coming out of the club assumed he was pissed and sleeping. They laughed about it.
As they had zipped up the black rubber bag a sad-eyed ambulance guy explained that the skull has limited space in it. A bleed into the brain is like dropping a pickled egg into a full pint of lager, only there’s nowhere for the extra volume to go so the brain gets sucked down into the spinal column. That’s what kills you.
Remembering that night took Pat back to the door at the Zebra Wine Bar. Ugly drunks and the orange women staggering about on icy pavements in summer shoes. The women all had long hair that winter, he remembered. Nylon hair extensions that looked like bad wigs. 1669, they called the Zebra, because the women there looked sixteen from behind and sixty-nine from the front.
So he worried that the old man was dying under the pillowcase and he thought of the young girl he had shot and the pleasant, toast-smelling house, wishing he had stood up to Eddy and refused to go in. Eddy was a substitute family for Pat, had been for years, but suddenly Pat realised he’d picked the same family again: nasty loser fucking twats.
As though he could hear Pat shifting away from him, Eddy slapped the old man’s foot and asked his name. The pillowcase lifted slightly off the floor, said he was called Aamir and Pat knew then that Eddy had been afraid too. It was good because maybe Eddy wasn’t totally wrapped up playing soldiers, could sti
ll be reasoned with.
Eddy knelt next to the man in the back of the van, his balaclava rolled up around his forehead half an inch above his eyes. He wouldn’t look at Pat.
They were at Harthill, the heart of central Scotland, a bleak stretch of high ground littered with TV and mobile phone masts, where the winds were always brutal. Malki took a slip road, a perfect turn at the roundabout, took the sharp turn off the road into a field and rolled the van quietly along the foot of a hill into a coppice of windswept trees. He stopped, pulled on the handbrake and sighed, smacked his lips. He smiled at Pat.
Without a word to either, Eddy stood up, opened the van door and slipped out, closing it after himself.
Eddy stepped out of the tree cover into a vast muddy field.
The ground was frozen solid, the churned mud covered with a fur of sliver frost. A swollen blue moon lit the ground like a harsh strip light. Eddy, arms out for balance, kept his eyes on the uneven ground. The light was so sharp and blue that he could see individual icy fronds as he followed the tracks of the van, heading back towards an opening in the hedge. He stopped and looked around. The fallow field stretched over the horizon. He could hear the hum of cars passing on the distant motorway. No houses in view, no van loads of people camping in the field. No one. Perfect.
He followed the tracks of the van, walking down the churned middle for another two hundred yards, his breath crystalline in front of him. Though he had parked it there himself, Eddy still wanted to rest his tired eyes on the Lexus.
Stopping, he looked up the road at the side of the field and could see the edge of the silver boot, the red tail lights. It was a hire car. As he drove here, trying all the buttons, loving the bucket seat and the steering wheel CD controls, he’d promised himself he’d get one of these, when the money came through. The sight of it now calmed him and slowed his heart from a sprinter’s gallop.
Despite everything that had happened it might still be OK. Blinking back tears, Eddy made his way back to the van.
4
It was as a punishment that MacKechnie made her come in here, sitting on a hard chair in the soporific light of the bedroom, interviewing the bed-bound daughter-in-law who was little more than a bystander.
Morrow could hear them behind the door, out there, behind her in the hall, a happy gang, muttering, looking at details, gathering important scraps of information that would flesh out the story while she was in here, being kept busy and out of the way.
Meeshra looked rough, black fuzz grew down the sides of her face and her hair was wild, knotted at the back where she had been sleeping on it.
The door was shut behind them, for the sake of modesty, while Meeshra threatened the baby with her engorged nipple. The two-week-old child bucked and struggled, his gummy, desperate mouth clamping to skin and fingers but failing to meet the breast. It was too full, Alex knew, so heavy with milk that the baby couldn’t get his mouth around it. But the advice stuck in her throat. It seemed improper and intimate. It wasn’t her job, it was for a health visitor to tell her.
‘They were waving the gun and shouting. Looking for a guy called Rob. “Robbie”. A right Scottish name, in’t it?’
Lancaster lingered in Meeshra’s accent but it was fading to Scottish. She had been here for less than a year, she said, moving in with her in-laws after her wedding. They were a happy family, and here she blinked, a prosperous, hard-working family, and she blinked again.
A female officer was standing behind Alex, jotting the lies down, allowing Alex to simply watch. Every individual had a tic that signalled a lie, and the best way to find it was ask them about their family.
Morrow was sure that Meeshra wasn’t lying deliberately. Family myths and fables were more than conscious fibs; they were a form of self-protection, conversational habits, beliefs too embedded to challenge: she loves me, we are happy, he will change. But there was always a tic. It amazed Alex, the craven need of people to tell the truth. During questioning, when inconsistencies started to show in a story, people often broke down, sobbed with the desire to be honest, as if getting caught lying was the very worst that could happen. She’d seen men carve fingernails into the palms of their hands, breaking the skin to relieve the pressure to tell. Adamance was the most common giveaway. She’d never again trust anyone who began a sentence, ‘Honestly’, or, ‘To tell the truth’. These were flags raised high above a statement, drawing the casual viewer’s attention; here be dragons.
Professional liars thought out excuses beforehand and stuck to them, but synthetic memories were unwieldy; ask for a colour or a detail and they were too slow to answer. Fluent liars were dangerous, either because they were so malevolent or suggestible.
The skill of spotting lies had given Morrow a jaundiced view of the world. The worst of it was that it denied her the luxury of lying to herself. The cold light of day was no place to live.
So she envied Meeshra’s insistence that they were all happy together. Sure, there were tensions but her mother-in-law was basically a good person, a bit educated but still good, and she knew how she wanted the house run and where the furniture should go and she had her own ways of cooking, eh? That was natural, right? And the baby was such a blessing, a son, first grandchild. She blinked at that and Alex noted it, filed it away. We will be happy, Meeshra said, stopping, surprised to find herself using the future tense.
She pressed the baby towards her tit again. He rolled his bald head back and gave out a dry, thin squeal. Frustrated, Meeshra squeezed her nipple between her fingers and a powerful arc of watery milk jetted across the bed and soaked into the sheet. Tearful with embarrassment, she cursed herself in a language Alex didn’t recognise.
‘Try again now you’ve emptied it a bit,’ said Alex.
Unsure, Meeshra held the baby to the deflated nipple.
‘Nose to nipple,’ said Alex. ‘He’ll find it himself.’
Meeshra touched the baby’s milk-spotted nose with her black nipple and he arched his back, finding it with his mouth, clamping on awkwardly, furiously working his tiny jaw, drawing from her so hard she gave a little gasp. The tension left her shoulders as the baby relieved her of the press of milk and she looked gratefully at Alex.
‘You’ve done this, have ya?’
Alex faked a friendly smile. ‘Could you tell me what you remember of this evening? Starting from the beginning.’
‘Oh.’ Meeshra was surprised by the shift of topic but keen to please. ‘Um, well, I was lying in bed, with baby. Billal was sitting on the side of the bed, where your knees are,’ eyes flicked anxiously to the side, ‘helping me. We was having a bit of an argument actually,’ she smirked, awkward, ‘about feeding and that. We hear shouting in the hall and think Omar’s back.’
‘Why would there be shouting when Omar’s back?’
Meeshra rolled her eyes. ‘Well, him and his daddy don’t always get on, so, sometimes they do shout at each other, like, but we wasn’t listening.’
‘What sort of things do they fight about?’
‘I dunno, ask him.’ She shrugged, not quite of the family but still reluctant to betray. ‘Anyway, we wasn’t listening, yeah?’
‘You were talking to Billal ?’
‘Yeah, about feeding. So there’s shouting and then we realise. Billal’s like: “That’s not Omar’s voice.” ’
‘How would you describe the voice?’
‘Scotch. A right Scotch voice. Rrrob,’ she rolled her tongue, ‘where’s Rrrrobbie?’
She paused there, which Morrow found interesting, and needed prompting. ‘What then?’
‘Billal went out to see what was going on, because the shouting was getting, well, we knowed it wasn’t Omar shouting. So, he opened the door and popped out, keeping it closed because of me, you know.’ She looked down at the baby at her breast. ‘Me mam-in-law wants the bed here, opposite the door. I want it there.’ She looked up over to a private corner. ‘Anyway, ne’er mind. So, I hear Billal outside, speaking, saying, like, “No, man,” and th
en suddenly the door’s kicked wide open and me with my nightie all open and the baby here.’ She blushed at the memory, running her fingers over the baby’s down hair.
‘What could you see through the door?’
‘Little man, well not little, but he was standing next to Billal, who’s about six foot three and wide.’
‘How far up Billal did he come?’
‘Top of his head come up to Billal’s jaw, little bit past his jaw.’
‘So he was about . . . ?’
‘About five eight, ten, summat like that.’
‘And build?’
‘’Bout, dunno, wide, a bit fat. Had them shoulders, you know, where the neck’s gone slopey and the shoulders just go straight up to their ears?’
‘Like a weightlifter?’
‘Exactly. A weightlifter. But fat belly, like.’
‘And you didn’t see his face?’
‘He had a woolly mask on with eyeholes.’
‘A balaclava?’
‘Yeah. And he says, like, “You come out here,” or summat, and I’m like, “I can’t, I’ve just had a baby,” ’cause ye know how you’re not meant to get up, yeah?’ Alex remembered quite the opposite. She also remembered envying the gall of women who treated having a baby like full body polio, making visitors get them this, hand them that, though they usually staged miraculous recoveries the minute visiting was over. ‘So he’s like, “Get up,” right? I’m like, “No.” And then Billal stepped in front of us and says, “Come on, mate, that’s enough,” but then the gun fella says to the other bloke who’s wi’ him, shouts at him, really angry, “Lift your gun, Pat.”’
‘Pat?’
‘Yeah, that were his name, Pat, and they both froze then, like they’d shit themselves ’cause he’d said it.’
Alex had heard Billal’s accent as she came through the hall. Unless she missed her guess he had been educated at St Al’s, the private Catholic school in the city centre, an expensive highly academic institution. He had that confident public school charm and a particular turn in his ‘r’s. Meeshra was common, used swear words without a thought, had bad grammar, reported speech as if she was telling another girl on a street corner about a fight at school.
