Still Midnight (3 page)
Glass tinkled cheerfully onto the pavement. Malki bit his lip.
Omar kicked the door open and found everyone frozen-still in the hall. Two strange men were there, dressed in army fatigues. The air smelled odd, smoky, sulfurous. Everyone was staring at Aleesha and for a moment neither Mo nor Omar could work out why.
She was standing with her arm up, as if she was pointing at the wall clock, looking over her shoulder. Omar followed her eyes to her hand. A blur of black-red, violent red, fingers jumbled like a scattered jigsaw.
A sudden red snake raced down her arm.
Wild-eyed, she turned to face the stranger in front of her. “My fucking hand!” she said, using both accent and words that were forbidden in the house.
The gunman whimpered a sorry.
A fatter gunman leapt across the hall to Omar and Mo, pointing his gun in each of their faces and back again. “ONE OF YOU FUCKERS IS BOB.”
Neither spoke.
“YOU.” He poked the gun at Mo’s chest. “You’re Bob.”
But Mo had a different nose from the rest of them. Omar had the family features, Aamir’s long nose and Sadiqa’s narrow jaw. Without waiting for Mo to answer he turned his gun on Omar and said quietly, “You’re Bob.”
Sadiqa couldn’t contain herself any longer. She reached for her favorite child and shouted, “Not Omar! Not my Omar!”
At this Eddy became confused. In the silence, through the open front door, came the sound of shattered glass falling from the lights as Malki backed the van away from the wall’s embrace.
“Fuck yees,” said Eddy spitefully. He reached over and wrapped a hand tight around Aamir’s throat. The small man didn’t object; he kept his eyes down, implicating no one.
Eddy squeezed, saw that the old man was not going to resist or defend himself, and was suddenly calm. “Yous can tell Bob this: I want two million quid, used notes, by tomorrow night. Call the polis and this fucker dies. Fucking payback. For Afghanistan.”
“Afghanistan?” spat Sadiqa. “I’m from Coatbridge, what’s that…” She caught her indignation, dropped her chin to her chest, shutting up.
Aleesha’s hand was slowly coming down and she watched the blood pulse from the messy end of it. “My fucking hand,” she whispered.
Letting go of Aamir’s throat, Eddy skipped behind him, wrapping his forearm around the old man’s chest, holding him along the Empire line.
Everyone in the hall braced themselves for a gun to Aamir’s head, more shouting, but Eddy did neither. Instead he tipped his weight back, easily lifting the old man off his feet, and carried him backwards out of the front door like a heavy lamp.
Sheepish, Pat broke eye contact with Aleesha, muttered another sorry, and followed him outside.
The hall suddenly came alive: Sadiqa lumbered across the hall to catch Aleesha, whose knees were giving way. Holding her daughter’s arm above her head to stem the bleeding, she knocked the phone from its cradle and stabbed 999 on the keypad. Billal blocked the bedroom door with his body as he pulled his mobile from his pocket, punching the number in with his thumb. Even in the bed, the baby thrashing at her breast, Meeshra lunged for the mobile on the side table and called the emergency services.
Omar and Mo chased after the gunmen, out into the street.
The van had one headlight gleaming extra bright from the smashed casing. As it drove off along the street the back door was shutting, a chubby hand pulling at it, and Omar gave a plaintive little cry. “Nugget…”
Mo grabbed his shoulder and tugged him towards the Vauxhall. The boys bolted for the car.
Mo drove as Omar watched for the van. It was a dark road. On the left was a golf course, on the right a dark stretch of balding bushes and shrubs leading up to a blank wall. Though the road was broad and straight, though the streets were quiet, they’d lost a massive white van, the only other car on the fucking road.
They had it at one point, they were sure: Mo had spotted taillights ahead, high enough off the road to be a van. He saw a glimpse of white door creep cautiously around a corner, defying a red light.
As they came up to the road over the M8 motorway Mo slowed for a red light and Omar suddenly swung his arm over Mo’s face, hitting his chin. “Stop!” he shouted. “Stop!”
Mo stamped on the brake, bringing the Vauxhall to an abrupt skidding standstill. Beltless, Omar slid like a comedy drunk into the footwell, his cheek smacking off the dashboard.
“Police!” shouted Omar from the footwell, pointing past Mo to the door. “ ’S police car!”
A squad car was tucked neatly into a small cutoff, lights dark, poised to catch speeding motorists. The two police officers inside had been watching the Vauxhall battering down the empty road towards them, had expected to follow it onto the motorway, pull it over, and practice their sarcasm, but the emergency stop surprised them. They watched as Omar jumped out of the car, leaving his door swinging wide as he ran over to them.
“Police! Please…” A rude pink bruise was forming on his cheek from the collision with the dashboard.
Wary, the officers unclipped their belts, opened the doors, and stepped out to meet him. “Were you wearing a seat belt just then, sir?”
“Sorry, no, but listen, my dad, my dad’s been taken away in a van.”
But they weren’t listening to him. The policemen were looking at his clothes.
Both the boys were wearing traditional white baggy trousers and shirts. They had just come from mosque and so appeared to the officers as particularly clean and strange-looking. Omar had a zip-up Adidas hoodie over his kameez and trainers, but Mo had a cardigan on and loafers and his scraggly beard was untrimmed.
Suddenly aware of how alien they looked, Mo attempted a friendly smile. “All right, mate?” he said cheerfully to the nearest policeman but tension and fright distorted his voice and his face. Both officers’ hands strayed to their belts. A lorry rumbled along the motorway below them.
“No,” Omar said helplessly. “Please help us. Men took my dad away in a van. They had guns.”
The police examined them in silence. From the open Vauxhall doors the sounds of Radio Ramadan floated out over the still suburban midnight: some guy, young, talking in a phony Arab accent, arguing about the Koran.
Both boys suddenly realized how foreign this whole thing was going to look to the police.
Taking this as a cue, the officer standing nearest Omar opened his notebook and spoke slowly. “Could you tell me your name, sir?”
“Omar Anwar.” He carried on talking as the officer wrote it down. “Look, men with guns came to our house and stole my dad, took him, they’d guns.”
The officer refused to look up from his notebook. “How are you spelling that, sir?”
“He’s been kidnapped.”
“I see. O-M-A-R, A-N-W-A-R?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, we followed the van as far as the last set of lights but we lost them then and I think they’re headed for the motorway. They could go anywhere…”
The officer taking the notes glanced up at the car, at the voices, at Mo’s beard. Omar let out a weak laugh. “No, look, my dad’s just a wee guy that runs a shop, it’s not a security matter, it’s just guys with guns. They wanted money. Afghanistan, they said it was, something about Afghanistan.”
“Turn around and put your hands on the roof of the car, please, sir.”
“They’re criminals!”
“Just put your hands on the car, please, sir.” He said it more firmly this time. Omar did as he was asked.
The other officer moved round to the other side of the car and motioned for Mo to come and copy Omar’s example. With the boys arranged on either side of the car, the officers took a man each, patting them down.
Mo knew he looked the most alien because of his beard and so he started talking quietly to the officers searching him, thickening his accent to its private school best. “Officer, we really appreciate that you have to do this, really, we do, but my friend’s dad is just a very ordinary member of the public. He’s Scottish.”
Omar watched across the roof of the car and saw the officer’s eyes narrow spitefully at the back of Mo’s neck. He knew, suddenly, that sounding posh was not the way to invite sympathy and he tried to signal to Mo, but Mo wasn’t looking at him.
“You see,” continued Mo, “my friend’s dad was taken from his home by gunmen, they’ve injured his sixteen-year-old sister.”
“ ’S that right?”
“Yes. They bundled him into a van and we ran after them, following the van, but we seem to have lost it.”
“Why didn’t you call the police,
sir?
”
“Well, we went after them.”
“D’yees not have a mobile? One can drive, one can call.”
“I suppose… we didn’t think…. It’s a big white van, possibly a Merc, a panel van, the left light at the front’s broken, it’s brighter, because they went into the wall near the house—”
“Right? Really?” The officer’s pace was slow. He stopped searching Mo, half smirked, pressed the end of his automatic pencil.
Just then, looking over Mo’s shoulder at the motorway below, Omar saw the van with one bright light coming out of the empty motorway towards them. He screamed, “Hoi!” put two hands on the Vauxhall’s bonnet, and skimmed across it, sprinting to the crash barrier just as the van shot underneath the bridge. Omar hung over the railing, shouted after it, “Nugget! Nugget!”
A blinding whoosh of pain stabbed his shoulder, swept up his neck, and circled his rib cage, making his knees buckle. He twisted as he slid to the ground, trying to turn into the painful hold that the policeman had locked him in.
Holding him by the wrist, the officer lifted Omar to his feet as easily as a hollow stick, guiding him back across the road to the squad car. Omar saw the white van through the far railings, trundling off along the motorway, headed for the city.
Alex Morrow bit slowly into her index finger, pressing her teeth until she could hear a small crunch in the skin. She was so angry that the upper lid of her left eye was twitching, blurring the changing view through the rain-splattered car window. If she didn’t calm down before they got there she’d blurt something, make a fool of herself in front of him. The thought of meeting Grant Bannerman face-to-face made her bite her finger again.
Years ago a well-meaning training officer had told her never to question a superior’s decision, forget fair, just do the job, ignore the politics, and don’t take it home. What the hell did he know, she thought now, sinking her teeth a little deeper into the skin. He never rose above sergeant. At her level the whole job was politics, as if she had anything else to think about, as if she had a home.
The tinge of melodrama shamed her to her senses. She released her finger from the grip of her teeth. She had a home. Of course she had a bloody home. She just didn’t want to go there.
The car purred quietly, the uniformed driver carefully taking his time, observing every traffic bylaw because she was in the car, taking no chances. He pulled on the hand brake at each set of lights. It was all she could do not to slap him.
She knew her anger was disproportionate and scattered, leaking from her like water through a sock. It was being noticed, remarked upon in her assessments. It’s nothing, she said, it’s about nothing.
They’d had a quiet night up until now. October was the start of the cold weather, when the drunken street fighters scurried home to beat uncomplaining wives in the warm, when all the really bad men went off to winter in the sun. Start of the academic year, she remembered, a good time for long-term investigations and reviving cold cases.
The streets were empty. Cold rain pattered softly on the glass, swept aside by the rhythmic wipers, revealing and obscuring the Vicky Road. The address they were headed to was familiar from her childhood, so quiet a suburban area that she hadn’t been back in decades. The crimes here were burglaries, noisy teenage parties, local stuff.
She saw the driver glance uncertainly at his silent GPS for guidance. “Take a right at the roundabout,” she said, “then take a left.”
They were just a few streets away, so she went through the checklist she always followed before a public appearance. Hair tidy, touches of makeup in place, she ran a finger under each of her eyes. She had small eyes and her mascara tended to puddle underneath. Handbag on the floor of the car, nothing personal hanging out of the top, no tampons or photos. She pulled her suit jacket straight, touching the buttons with her fingertips, making sure her armor was secure.
The car pulled up at the mouth of the street, at an unfamiliar no-entry sign, and the driver hesitated, not knowing whether to break the law or observe it and piss about, circling the address through the back streets.
“Take it,” she snapped.
He turned into the road slowly, as if reluctant. He’d been reprimanded for a high-speed violation, she remembered now, and was showing the boss that all of that was behind him.
The street was smaller than she remembered, the houses low bungalows rather than the mansions of her memory. She used to cross this street to primary school every day. Her hand still remembered the warmth of her mother’s palm as she led her across the road. She curled her fingers around her palm at the thought. This area seemed hugely wealthy to them back then.
Straight ahead blue and white tape had been strung across the road, blocking the street. A uniformed cop was standing in front of the tape and approached the driver’s door as the car slowed to a stop. He was dressed against the cold in reflector jacket and big padded regulation gloves, scissoring the fingers of one hand into the other as he arrived at the window. Not long ago Alex had been in uniform, had worn the ridiculously padded gloves and remembered how uncomfortably they splayed her fingers. Her driver lowered the window.
The cop bent down. “Road closed.”
“I’m here with a gaffer.” Her driver pointed at Morrow.
“Oh.” The cop blushed, embarrassed that he hadn’t noticed her through the windscreen. “Sorry. Can you park up over there?”
“Aye, keep your eyes open, won’t you?” said Morrow.
The driver smirked, trying to side with her as he pulled up the road a little.
