Still Midnight (37 page)

“Well.” Morrow took her notebook out for show. “Your name came up a couple of times and we wondered if we could talk to you about your relationship with Mr. Anwar.”

She looked a little uncomfortable and glanced at the little prince in the armchair. “OK.”

“How did you meet?”

She shrugged. “At school.”

Morrow looked at her, “You were at school…”

“Omar and Billal, yeah. Same year as Billal.”

“Right.” She wrote it in her notebook, giving herself time to think. “OK, and what is your relationship?”

“Well, Billal is Oliver’s father…”

The child looked furiously back and forth, knowing he was being talked about and not pleased about it.

“And how old is Oliver?”

“Three years and four months,” she said, as if it was a triumph.

Morrow wrote it in longhand in her notebook. Her pencil tip ripped the paper. “But you’re not with Billal?”

“No.” Lily was looking at the paper, at the rip, frowning her gorgeous forehead.

“And,” said Morrow, “you know he’s just had another baby with his wife.”

“Hmm.” She looked from the rip to Morrow, knowing the woman was trying to upset her. “Fine by me.”

“You’d split up anyway?”

Lily took her thick hair in her hand and leaned on her elbow. “Billal’s…” A glance at the child. “Hard work, to be honest. Not for me.”

“What do you mean hard work?”

She hesitated and dropped her voice. “He’s very into family.”

“Your family?”

Lily looked hard at her and avoided the question. “I split up with him shortly after Mr. Nutkins arrived.” She nodded to the boy. “But he didn’t split up with me until quite a long time afterwards.”

“You mean he’s been hassling you?”

Clearing her throat Lily sat up and looked at the wall clock. “Look, um, my nanny’s going to come in very soon. Could we wait and talk about this then? I’m not that comfortable…”

“No,” said Morrow flatly, “this is urgent.”

She wasn’t pleased. She looked from Morrow to the rip in the notebook and back again, chewed her cheek, and turned to the child. “Nutkins, how about putting on a play jersey and going into the garden for a run around?”

The kid shrugged and stood up, dropping his cup carelessly. She went over, pulled a pale blue jersey from the floor over his head, checked his laces, and opened the back door, shoving him out. “Stay away from the nettles.”

She left the door open and came back to the table, suddenly looking much harder. “OK, I don’t know what that fucker told you. I’m mental probably, I’m a grasping bitch probably—”

“Is Billal involved with your family business?”

“Right.”
She raised a furious finger in Morrow’s face. “First off, it’s not
my family business
. We can none of us help where we come from. I haven’t seen my father for five years. Two: Bill and I knew each other from school. Nothing I can do about that. He met my dad then. If they’re going on fucking holiday together now it’s nothing to do with me. I’m nothing to do with either of them, nothing. I never see him. He gets supervised visitation once a month and I’m not even there—”

Her fury was losing momentum and Morrow used it as an opportunity to take charge. “Did you start going out at school?”

“No. It was at a friend’s wedding. He was fine at first but I got pregnant, fine, OK, still together, but then suddenly, out of fucking
nowhere,
he gets all wrapped up in business and suddenly he’s got religion—big time.”

“He join any groups, start hanging about with anyone?”

“No, he’s not… it’s not that sort of religion. It’s not political.”

“What then? Spiritual awakening?”

“Spiritual? God, no.” She laughed, shook her head. “Spiritual? No. You’re not from religious people, are you?”

Morrow shook her head. Harris gave a sideways nod that suggested he was, if anyone was interested. No one was.

“It’s not just about… you know, Jesus or whoever. It’s about… you know…” Lily seemed puzzled, struggled to find the words. “
Belonging
to people, you know?”

She looked to them for understanding. Morrow nodded. “Go on.”

“Billal wanted me to convert, go and live with his mother. Don’t get me wrong, I love Sadiqa, she’s gorgeous, but I’m Catholic, I’m Scottish, I’m not going to move in with total strangers and cover my head with a fucking scarf for the rest of my life.”

“That would be a shame.”

The women looked at Harris, who started, as if he hadn’t realized he’d said it out loud.

Morrow brought her back. “But Billal didn’t take it well?”

She snorted. “Under-fucking-statement.” Hurt eyes skirted the table, weaving through a thousand arguments and midnight calls. “I mean if it wasn’t for Aamir and Sadiqa insisting, he wouldn’t even pay the support.”

“Why? Does he think you make enough yourself?”

“Oh, I don’t work.” She seemed surprised at the suggestion. “Oliver’s only three and a bit.”

“I see.” Morrow looked around the big kitchen. “What about your family?”

“No.” She was indignant, thinking Morrow didn’t understand, “I wouldn’t take money, no way.” It seemed to be a point of pride for her that she wouldn’t take cash from her dad. The irony that she’d just found someone else to squeeze seemed lost on her. “Bill thought I’d marry him if he stopped paying the mortgage. He even stopped paying for the nanny at one point. Then he got even more into being a Muslim and married that girl from bloody Newcastle or wherever. Arranged, for fucksake, like it was the Middle Ages or something. I mean, I know Sadiqa was shocked. Hers and Aamir’s was a love match. She doesn’t like subservient women.” She shook her thick hair off her shoulders, implying that Sadiqa preferred her over Meeshra. “I don’t either.”

“Lily, what does Billal do for a living?”

Lily stopped, confused as to why the conversation had diverted from a thorough exploration of her complaints. “For a living? Bill’s in the motor business.”

“Bill?”

“Specialist cars.”

Morrow thought about the Lamborghini, smelled the damp, saw a set of ludicrously white teeth. “I see, I see,” she said, trying to slow her mind down by talking slowly. “Where’s his garage?”

“No, he hasn’t got a garage.”

“No garage?”

“No, no.” Lily waved a hand dismissively. “He’s just a middle man. Import-export.”

THIRTY-SIX

Pat’s heart beat a bossa nova rhythm, a joyful tat-tat-tat at the thought of her being in there, through those locked wooden doors, sitting upright in bed, bathed in yellow sunshine, a bride awaiting her groom, facing the corridor with the beginning of a smile on her lips. It was pushing two days since they had seen each other but it felt much longer.

He had been hanging about by the lifts, uncertain that this was the right floor, when he saw the mother waddle towards him, still wearing her nightie and overcoat. He turned away, covered his face, and read the signs on the wall until she was past. There were orders posted all over the walls in the corridor: no mobiles, no visitors other than family before a certain time, no hot drinks, no this, no that. He swung behind her and made his way to the ward doors.

He saw through the glass panel that the corridor ahead of him was empty, buffed, glinting like a river. Acutely aware of every sensation, of his head tipping, of his heels leading the step of his feet, he reached forward and pushed the door.

Locked. He pushed lightly with his fingertips. Really locked, not stuck. He looked in through the window but couldn’t see anyone. It was definitely the right ward if the mother had just been there.

“No one there?”

A woman standing behind him, slim, fifty, suited, glasses on a gold chain, carrying a sheaf of papers wrapped in a glossy yellow envelope. He gave her his best smile and shrugged. She smiled back, shifted the folders to balance on her raised knee, and stabbed zero on the keypad five times. The door dropped open and he touched it with his fingertips, pushed, opening the passage into the river.

Pat held the door open for the woman and her folders and she thanked him with a simpering smile and a glance at his torso. “Not many gentlemen left, these days,” she said, as if everyone else had let her down.

Pat smiled again. He had held the door so that she would go ahead of him, so she wouldn’t be watching as he looked around. She walked down the corridor, standing straight and swaying her hips, certain of his attention.

But Pat wasn’t watching. He looked from left to right, into single rooms with yellow curtains half drawn across dark windows. Quiet ward. An old woman in a bed watching a wall-mounted television tuned to a chat show. A fat woman with both legs in plaster, sleeping, a teenage daughter next to her reading a celebrity magazine. Acute surgical.

The corridor snaked around a dogleg turn and each of the rooms had four beds, curtain partitions running on rails above them, many half pulled or yanked open incompletely. He could see who was in which room but he couldn’t stop for a good look in case anyone asked him who he was and what he was doing there.

As he approached the far end of the ward his courage began to fail him. Two toilet doors marked the end of the corridor and he had made up his mind to go into one, sit in it, and decide what to do. It was then that he saw her.

He stood, staring in through the window at an old woman lying flat on a bed alone in a room. She had an oxygen mask on over her nose and mouth and he knew the gray look. She was dying, like Malki, alone, deserted.

“Sorry…?” A fat student nurse was ten feet away, wondering who he was.

Pat pointed at the window. “How long…?”

He meant how long until she dies but the nurse misunderstood. “Mrs. Welbeck has been here for five days. Are you her…?”

Pat turned back to the window and whispered, “Nephew?”

“Oh dear.” She tilted her head. “So sorry. They did try to find family…”

He shook his head sadly. “No worries.”

Not knowing what to say now, he turned back to the window. The woman was in her seventies, eighties, balding like a baby bird, gray hair on a skull. She was propped up on pristine pillows but hadn’t moved. As she exhaled, a barely perceptible skin of condensation formed on the mask. She was hardly breathing at all.

The nurse put a kindly hand on his arm. “Would you like to go in and see her?”

Pat nodded sadly and she took him by the hand, led him through the door into the room. A silent heart monitor blinked an orange eye at him. The room smelled of orange squash tempered with talc. The sympathetic nurse led him to the bedside and brought a plastic chair over for him to sit on, which he did.

Gray flesh on a skull. Hands covered in paper-thin skin, veins you could see the pulse bump through. A thin wedding band, a miserly engagement ring, hanging loose on thin fingers. He could see a sticking plaster had been rolled around the back of the engagement ring to stop it falling off.

“I’ll leave you alone.” She walked around to the far side of the bed and began to pull the curtain between the window and the corridor.

“No, no, no, please—it’s better to have the light…”

It sounded stupid. There was a window behind him, there wasn’t any light coming out of the corridor, but the nurse was used to dealing with grieving people making stupid comments and she went along with it. “Of course,” she said and backed off out of the room, leaving Pat alone.

A sign above the bed said her name was Minnie Welbeck. In case the nurse was looking back into the room Pat took her right hand in both of his. He found the fingertips cold, the palm warm, as if she was dying from the extremities inwards.

He had come here to cheer himself up, see the beautiful girl sitting in a bed, bathed in sunshine. He had thought about nothing but seeing her since he got in the car and drove away from Breslin’s, but there was something about Minnie that he couldn’t tear himself away from. She’d been married, maybe widowed. And now she was dying, alone, tucked out of everyone’s way, next to the toilets.

Slowly, like a tall flower dying on a fast-exposure film, Pat wilted over his knees towards the little hand held between both of his. Gentle as air, he held Minnie’s knuckles to his forehead and wept.

They weren’t selling Lamborghinis here, that was for sure. The Lexus had been driven there by an unknown male, young, rough-looking, clearly not the owner, certainly not Edward Morrison, the holder of the driver’s license who’d hired the car and left a photocopy of his photo ID at the Avis office. The boy stopped outside the chicken-wire fence, made a phone call, and was let through the gates by an old guy. Morrow and Harris drew up across the road, and heard the FAU report over the radio that there was an Audi drawing up and an unidentified male, big, broad, letting himself through the gates, locking the two padlocks after himself and driving into the building.

“Saw an Audi outside the Anwars’ the night the old man got taken,” she said to Harris.

“Reckon it’s Billal?”

“Could be.”

It had been purpose-built as a garage but a long time ago. The forecourt lay empty, weeds growing out of the cracks. Sun and rain had bleached the cheerful bunting clinging to the rusting chicken wire. It was on an industrial estate two miles out of town, visible from no-where. It had probably failed under a couple of owners and been sold on the cheap. The company that owned it now was a shell company, according to Routher’s investigations. They were still registered at Companies House but did business with no one and had filed a tax return that suggested they were still waiting to go into business. No known names on the list of directors. Billal was smart.

For a sleeping company they were taking a hell of a lot of precautions. Two padlocks on the gates, new automatic doors on the workshop, fresh bars on the windows, and an elaborate CCTV system, a fish-eye camera on every corner. The building itself was low-slung, solid gray, unremarkable apart from the security measures. There wasn’t even a name on the door that she could see.

“D’you think he’s in there?” asked Harris.

“Yeah, but we won’t get anywhere near him until FAU’ve had all their toys out.”