Still Midnight

by Denise Mina

  T didn’t look up when Eddy arrived and ran around the back, popping the boot, chucking the bag carelessly in and skipping around to the passenger side. He opened the door and T leaned across, blocking his seat. ‘Check the money for trackers? Check for paint bombs?’

  Eddy’s lungs were burnt. He’d run too long without drawing breath, but he staggered back to the boot and pulled the bag onto the road as T had told him to. He tugged at the zip until it came open all the way.

  Bundles of twenties held together with red elastic bands, messy, like someone had done it at home. Bricks in the bottom to weigh the bag, in case it had been blown away, but no tracker boxes, no paint bombs in amongst it all. Eddy ran his hand over the money and found that he was salivating.

  ‘Well?’T was calling to him from the front seat.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Hurry then.’

  He threw the bag back in, slammed the boot and lunged for the passenger door, aware that his knees were aching and strained from running in unwieldy boots. He was too old for this, for the excitement and the physical strains. Next time he’d mastermind it and sit in a car while someone else ran half a mile to the roadside and climbed up a steep hill. He could feel the hot scorch of the cold night air in his windpipe, felt the dull pain in his knees and his heart battering in his chest. He threw himself into the passenger seat and slammed the door after him.

  ‘Well done, son,’ said T. ‘Very well done,’ and he drove off at a regular speed, as if they were out for a late night dawdle, lights still off, a small smile on his face.

  ‘Now, you know, Eddy, you can just give me back the guns and we’ll call it even. Have ye them on ye now?’

  Eddy looked at him and it occurred to him suddenly that maybe T didn’t really think he had done well, that maybe T was planning to shoot him in the face.

  The outside world suddenly flashed, bright white light flooding in through every window, scorching Eddy’s retina so he couldn’t see T but he could hear him: a gasp and gargle, a kind of mad hissing groan in response to the blinding light. It seemed an odd thing to say.

  Slowly the Peugeot rolled off the road and veered into a shallow ditch with a small, harmless bump. Eddy couldn’t open his eyes but heard the horn groan loudly, mournfully. He threw his hands over his face and peered under his elbow.

  T was facing him, his cheek pressed into the centre of the wheel, eyes rolled back. His top set of dentures had slipped to a diagonal in his mouth and Eddy knew that he wasn’t breathing, saw the special quality of the stillness about him.

  ‘Wake up!’ He was whimpering, not talking. ‘Wake up!’

  The car settled into the ditch, the bright white lights began to dim around them as a series of search lights were switched off. The car was surrounded and T’s body tipped forward, taking the weight of his head off the horn.

  Eddy dropped his hands from his face.

  In front of him, around the bonnet, by both doors were the black silhouettes of men in flack vests, heavily armed, all with weapons trained on him.

  Standing outside Morrow knew it would take a month to preserve the scene properly. A square half-mile of drab concrete littered with rubble, dust and fibres. A marsh beyond it made the place damp, meaning everyone who had been here in the past five years would have left a detectable trace of themselves.

  Stunned that his co-conspirator was dead of a heart attack, Eddy Morrison had confessed and given them a map of Breslin’s machine works, a crude drawing of a loading bay opening with a lintel dropped over the doorway and a pathway cut through a couple of big halls into the very back of the dark building. This was the last place they had seen Aamir, in a boiler at the back Aamir had killed his guard, Eddy claimed, and run off. Morrow didn’t believe it. It made Eddy sound too innocent. Those stories were rarely true.

  Harris sidled up next to her. ‘What ye thinking, ma’am?’

  They could preserve the scene for evidence or plough straight in and find out what happened. She looked at the split lintel over the door. ‘OK, let’s call it life and limb. Harris, you’re coming with me.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ He sounded obsequious and immediately blushed and regretted it.

  They got torches out of the boot, issue searchlights with handles and batteries that weighed four pounds. Harris used his weight to lift one and Morrow lugged the other one through the doorway, carefully picking a roundabout path that no one else would choose, skirting around the obvious way in order to preserve the evidence. The place was crumbling in on itself. As her torch beam licked up the walls she could see layers of the walls collapsing down to the floor, dust thick as snowdrifts, a great bubbled mess on the floor. Harris spotted the trails of footsteps back and forth from one room and silently made her aware of it by circling his torch over it. As they approached the back room the footsteps took on a darker colour; Morrow thought at first it was a quality of the dust, that it was just darker underneath, until Harris stopped swinging his light and she saw the smears on the bare concrete. Brown, like the Anwars’ wall in the hall. Blood.

  Eddy had told them about Malki but Morrow wouldn’t have believed how pitiful he looked. A skinny boy, much too thin, not like Omar, not all muscle and sinew waiting to put on weight when his mouth finally caught up with his metabolism, but sickly thin, ill-fed thin, the bones of his skinny knees showing through his white tracksuit. And his brand new trainers, a shock of white against the black darkness of the boiler.

  She stood on the metal ladder and swept the torch across the belly of the boiler. Aamir Anwar was gone.

  They called it off. At seven in the morning the fingertip search around Breslin’s was called off and all the officers were bussed back to the station to sign up for their overtime claims. The helicopter veered across the bay, taking its searchlight with it, the dinghys on the marshes found mooring and their passengers disembarked. The diving teams packed up and went home. Not a trace had been found of Aamir Anwar.

  Morrow stood by the metal steps as SOC officers sorted around Malki Tait’s body, picking through the detritus of a building crumbling in on itself. It was freezing here and smelled of metal and dust. The SOCs had rigged up bright spotlights, pointing them at the ceiling for the soft, deflected light. Thick flexes from the portable generator were strung across the dirty floor. Morrow felt the cold, shuddered at the strange way sound moved around the room and thought of poor Aamir and how terrified he must have been alone here with a dead body, and how frightened he would have been for his daughter, how frightened and cold and lonely.

  She pulled her coat tight around her middle, thought warm thoughts of Brian, how still he was, how he could let her be and sit quiet in her company.

  Morrow smiled to herself. She knew exactly where Aamir was.

  40

  Towards Leadhills the M74 broadens into three lanes of perfect tarmac that snake gracefully through big soft hills. Great feats of engineering lift the road across the uneven ground so that it remains perfectly level while the land around it dips and rolls, making the road separate from the land, of it, but steadier, more perfect.

  Through a cleft of massive hills the road slopes down to the right for three miles and then rights itself to the left, rolling clockwise around a hill moulded by time and rain into a colossal green bowling ball. On the vale below a narrow silver river snakes deep through mossy green fields like a wire through cheese.

  Aleesha had chosen the music, Glasvegas, which she insisted Roy should love or not be regarded seriously as a person. It wasn’t the sort of music he was used to listening to, in the nightclubs he’d worked in the music was older, more dance tunes, everything she liked was a bit guitary.

  She was looking out of the window at the vale, her bare feet resting on the dashboard, a red enamelled ring on her big toe. She didn’t want a seat belt on. Said they scratched her neck.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Ever done this drive before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Beautiful.’

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nbsp; ‘Hm.’

  He was coming up to the curve, going fast because that was how she liked it, in the inside lane. Aleesha was in a hurry to get away.

  ‘Can I have my hand back?’ he said.

  She looked at the big meaty hand beneath her good one, resting on the gearstick. She held it up by the index finger. ‘This old thing? What do you need this for?’

  Roy smiled. ‘I need it to drive, to steer the car we’re driving in at seventy miles an hour.’

  She flipped around in the seat so that she was kneeling facing him, still holding his hand by the finger. ‘You know, Roy, if you loved me really, if you really, really loved me, as a sign of how much you loved me, I think you could do everything with one hand too.’

  ‘Like a love token thing?’

  ‘Like a sign of how incredibly close and alike we are, you could do that.’ She was leaning towards him, breathing on his ear in a way she knew was distracting, one of her lips touched the rim of his ear. He felt a shudder in his cock.

  Behind them an articulated lorry was nudging up the middle lane, and Roy was vaguely aware that the lorry was going too fast for the curve they were coming up to, too fast and in the wrong lane, boxing them in. Behind him, a hundred feet away but closing, was a pale blue sports car.

  Aleesha worked her warm tongue around the folds on his ear.

  Morrow and Harris, Gobby and Routher ran up the cold concrete stairs, the sound of their steps following them, echo catching the echo so that they sounded like a squadron running in formation.

  There he was, standing outside the door, sentry-stiff on the mat, his cardigan buttoned up to his neck, hands flat by his thighs. Honour may have dampened his eyes but his training allowed him to do hard things, bad things.

  Morrow gave him a look that ordered him back into the hall. As she followed him in Lander stumbled backwards into the living room, followed by Morrow and the three men. She raised a finger as if she might slap him. ‘Where is he?’

  He hesitated, ran his tongue along the stubbled line of his moustache and looked at them again. His hand came up slowly to a door at the back of the living room. For no reason other than annoyance, Morrow kicked the door open.

  The bed was army made, blankets and sheet, the corners folded as neatly as an envelope. It was his feet she saw first, gnarled old man’s feet, yellowed hard skin with a white tinge, like bracken, over brown skin. He was dressed in purple and gold striped pyjamas, Lander’s probably; they were too short for him. He had a cut on his ankle and a plaster on his wrist. His hands were limp by his side, his mouth hanging open, teeth worn down through to the pulp, like a sheep’s.

  Aamir Anwar was flat on his back, the pillow to Lander’s single bed sat neatly on a nearby chair. They had slipped off, the headphones tuned to the AM radio sat crazily so that one small disc of grey foam was on his cheek, the other tucked behind his head.

  Behind them Lander whispered, ‘He needs to sleep. He’s taken a pill.’

  Morrow spun to meet him. ‘How the fuck did he even get here?’

  ‘I dunno. He chapped my door. Said he needed a rest. I wanted to call ye but he said to give him a minute and could he have one of my sleeping pills.’ He pointed to the headphones. ‘Australia are getting gubbed.’ He smiled as if that was news that would please everyone.

  ‘His family are frantic!’ she said, knowing it was a lie, knowing she was really talking about herself.

  Lander looked at his old friend, at the soft rise and fall of his chest, and he grinned so wide that all of his own stubby worn old teeth were showing. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but Aamir’s all right. As for the rest, I don’t really give a hoot.’

  A crowd had gathered at the service station, an elderly coach party from Newcastle on their way to the Highlands. They were buying nice Marks and Spencer’s sandwiches to eat on the long journey north and standing in an orderly queue for the checkout along the window looking out over the motorway.

  Across the forecourt they were standing close, he holding the petrol pump, she leaning her forehead on his free shoulder. Aleesha and Roy were filling the car up for a long drive.

  The petrol hummed, the gauge clicked and she whispered into his side, ‘Roy?’

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘Roy.’

  He gave a deep contented sigh. ‘Aye.’

  She cleared her throat. ‘Roy? When we . . . you know . . . first . . .’

  Roy wrapped his free arm around her waist and drew her tiny frame towards him. ‘When we first what?’

  She didn’t answer.

  He smiled down at her and tried to rock her from foot to foot. She clung to him, head down, not looking at him, feet planted. She seemed a little afraid.

  He used his chin to rock her face up to his. ‘Doll, nothing’s wrong, nothing can be wrong, I’m here with you. Everything, anything . . . if you don’t want . . . you know, for years, that’s fine by me, either way, just as long as we’re together, anything. Anything you want.’

  ‘Not first that, I’m not . . . it’s not that.’

  ‘When we first what, then?’

  She pulled away from him, looked at the window of old people staring at them, drinking in how young and lithe and in love they were. ‘When we first met . . .’

  Roy frowned and shook the petrol gun in the hole, shaking off the drips. His jaw was clenched as he hung the gun on the petrol tank.

  They could make it a lie, all he had to do was say ‘at the hospital’ - ‘When we met at the hospital?’ She was young, biddable, he could make her say they met at the hospital. And if they said it enough, after a while, the lie would seem true, between them, would be the story they told the children. But he was Roy now and Roy couldn’t make himself tell Aleesha that lie.

  Panic tightened in his chest. She was moving away from him, he could feel the light dying and soon he would be alone in the darkness again. ‘When . . . ?’

  ‘I’s thinking, you know that, like, really, that’s one worry we don’t have.’ She drew in a breath so deep it arched her back and, staring at the old people in the window, spun on one foot and dropped an arm around his neck. ‘I mean, it’s good in a way,’ she whispered. ‘I mean, ’cause, you’ve kind of already met my parents. ’ Holding onto his neck she lifted her legs, wrapping them around his waist.

  A sob caught his throat, sounding like a hiccup and he pulled her flat against him, burying his face in her soft neck, tears wetting the perfect skin.

  Despite the odds Roy and Aleesha clung tight to each other for a long, long time, until her legs were stiff and he felt very, very old.