Still Midnight (4 page)

She could see all the way down the empty street to the tape at the far end. The house was on her right, taking up the corner, the crime scene forming an awkward T junction around the house. Straight ahead of her, beyond the second line of tape, squad cars were parked with their siren lights still blinking, bathing the street blue, then red, like Cinderella’s dress. At Morrow’s end of the road a couple of uniforms lingered in front of the tape, backs rod-straight, hands clasped behind, formal poses that alerted anyone in the know to the fact that very senior officers were very nearby.

Her driver was pulling a long turn. “Are you… um, should I back…?”

“Just
stop
.”

For a second his lips parted in dismay but then he clamped them shut, staring forwards as he pulled on the hand brake, not reacting. Forget fair. She knew she was wrong to speak to him like that, but she never knew how to fix these things. She opened the door and stepped out into the soft October rain, took a deep breath, and leaned back into the cruiser. “Sorry,” she said abruptly, “for being rude.” The driver looked frightened. “To you.” The explanation didn’t help. She got flustered and slammed the door, cursed herself. She should just be rude; it would be easier.

An older cop, with the crime scene log on a clipboard, approached her.

“DS Alex Morrow,” she said, and he wrote it down. “London Road.”

“Thank you, ma’am. DS Bannerman and DCI MacKechnie are over there.” He pointed around the corner to the front of the house. She could see a huddle of heads beyond the low garden wall.

“MacKechnie’s here?”

He seemed surprised too. MacKechnie meant it was a big case. A career case, but not her case, she remembered with a grind of her jaw.

“You first here?”

“Aye.”

“Taped off all entrances?”

“Aye. Alerted the Firearms Unit and they’re just pulling out now.”

“Gunmen gone, then?”

“Aye. They’ve searched front, back, and sides.”

“Shots fired?”

“One, sixteen-year-old girl’s hand blown off.”

“ ’Kin hell.”

He hummed in agreement.

“Residents?”

“All over there giving statements.” He gestured straight down the road to the tape where the cars were blinking. Gathered beyond them were a crowd of people dressed in combinations of overcoats and pajamas, slippers and shoes, and cops with notebooks talking to them one at a time. Everyone who lived inside the taped-off area would have been pulled out of their houses until the FAU had secured the area.

“Well done,” she said, “good job,” aware that she was making up for her rudeness to the driver by being nice to him. She knew it wasn’t how to develop allies; you have to be nice to the ones you’ve insulted. He looked pleased anyway.

“Where’s the path?”

He used his pencil to point her along the center of the road and around the corner.

Morrow dipped under the tape and picked her way carefully, keeping her eye on the tarmac for missed evidence. She stopped and looked up. The house was on her right: a small wall on the pavement and then elevated ground, a bit of grass and then bricked over. A series of cars were parked there: a Nissan people carrier, an Audi, a new Mini, and a small blue van.

In the road next to her, marked with big white evidence cards, lay two cigarette ends. She bent down and squinted at them: the brand was Silk Cut. They had burnt out where they lay, the log of ash sitting on a strip of tar-yellowed paper. They were five feet apart, as if they had been thrown out of either window of a car. She looked back to the cop who had stopped her car.

“You—why aren’t these bagged up?”

“Said to wait until the photographer had a picture, ma’am.”

They should have bagged them. It was raining and any DNA on the stubs would be lost. Bad scene management. Morrow was secretly glad.

She carried on to the corner, could see the residents better now: three Asian men standing together, young, talking to uniformed cops. An elderly white couple were there as well, both in overcoats with pajamas underneath. A scowling housewife, young, alone, hair a sleepy tangle, stared at her. Morrow glared back: let us apologize for the inconvenience caused by saving you from armed raiders.

Morrow looked over at the house. There were two entrances to the garden: a wide metal gate leading straight up to off-road parking and a small ornamental one, open onto the path up to the front door. She turned the corner and saw a puddle of fresh safety glass on the pavement. Above it on the wall a few bricks were caved in.

Despite herself, her interest was piqued. She could feel it happening: facts, disjointed, irrelevant, being card-indexed and filed away in her mind, the familiar private landscape of deduction. All the niceties of politics, personal or professional, eluded her always, but she could do this. It was the one absolute certainty for Alex Morrow. She was good at this.

She looked up and saw them standing just outside the ornamental gate, arms folded, waiting for Firearms to leave the property. DS Grant Bannerman and DCI MacKechnie stood flank-to-flank, shoulders almost touching, looking back up to the front door as they listened to two animated uniforms brief them on the witnesses’ statements. Bannerman was nodding as if he already knew what had happened and was just there to check up on everybody. Next to him MacKechnie watched his prodigy approvingly, a little echo of the nod on his neck.

Bannerman. His sun-bleached hair was too long, hung slightly over his eyes, muscular, suntanned. She thought he aspired to look like a surfer but he looked like a careerist to her, a boy whose dad was in the force and introduced him to senior officers. That’s how he got the promotion to DS while still in CID. Morrow had to leave, go back into uniform, do the exams that way, and then transfer back. Friendless, without a sponsor, she’d done it through merit. No one retired and few got promoted out of CID; it was a destination and the jobs were few and far. To make DS within CID an officer had to suck up to senior officers, go to the football with them, play golf and let them win.

Morrow and Bannerman had been sharing an office for a month but it wasn’t going well. However many coffees he made her, however many KitKats he brought her from the machine, she could see in his eyes that he joked about her behind her back, couldn’t take to her, feared her moods. He had already been settled in their office for two months before she arrived, seemed easygoing, was four years younger than her. And she was hard work, she knew that. If Morrow worked with herself she’d try and sit a few desks away.

Bannerman saw her now, walking towards him, and his smile lingered too long, going stale on his lips.

“Sir.” She tipped a nod at MacKechnie but couldn’t bring herself to look at Bannerman. “Grant.”

Grant Bannerman nodded back. “All right, Morrow? What’s happening?”

She could feel the blood draining from her face. “Hello” wouldn’t do for Grant. “Good evening” wouldn’t do. It had to be some cheesy greeting, a bit of a song, a line from Elvis or some fucking thing. He strove to be different because he wasn’t. Her ambition was to fit in and she couldn’t. Jealousy made her focus on him, notice small vulnerabilities like the occasional sunbed flush to his skin, how he often implied credit to himself for other people’s work, and although superficially confident, how lost he sometimes looked in the company of other men.

Heat rose in her cheeks and she knew she had to cover up quickly. “There’s evidence getting wet around there,” she said. “Two cigarette butts need bagging up.”

Bannerman was wrong and knew it. “We’re waiting for the photographer.”

“No point proving they came from here if the traces have been washed off, is there?”

MacKechnie blinked indulgently. “Best to go and get them bagged.”

Bannerman nodded at one of the cops, briefing them to go and do it.

The Firearms Unit were coming out of the house. They crowded out of the front door, looking terrifying. Four big men in black body armor blocking the light of the hallway. They each held intimidatingly large pistols, holding them with two hands as if they were likely to go off of their own volition and blow a hole in something vital.

They were laughing at something as they came down the path towards them, the relief marked in their shoulders and faces. Whenever a gun was used Firearms had to come to either disarm or ensure that no gun-toting nutters were hanging around in cupboards waiting to leap out when the police got there. It was a high-stress, short-life job. They were recruiting all the time, month on month getting more and more calls. A flood of redundant weapons was coming to Glasgow from Ireland, selling for buttons.

As the unit came past they assumed MacKechnie was the senior and gave him the lowdown: no one in there, no guns in the house, one bullet in the wall, and a lot of blood. One resident still in the house, a bedridden new mother.

“Bedridden?” asked Morrow.

As if they were seeing her for the first time, all of the men looked at her.

“Well,” their DS answered weakly, “she’s just had a baby. A week ago or something.”

“How’s she bedridden?”

“She’s not to get up. Said she could hemorrhage.” The sergeant was embarrassed and laughed. “I’m not qualified to check her stitches, am I?”

She watched as they all giggled together. Even MacKechnie had a titter. Bannerman looked away. The sergeant opened his mouth to add to the joke, say something crude, but he saw the look on Morrow’s face and bottled it.

“Anyway, that’s us done,” the sergeant said, giving Bannerman a sympathetic look about Morrow. “We’re off.”

They watched the gaggle of big men pick their steps carefully down the far stem of the T junction, tiptoeing until they were carefully beyond the tape and out of the crime scene. They climbed back in their shiny black van.

Morrow wished she was alone and could bite herself again but she took a breath and asked the cop, “What’s the story?”

The plod drew a breath to speak but Bannerman cut him dead. “Family, at home after Ramadan prayers in the mosque—”

“Which mosque?”

“Central for the kids, Tintagell Road for the daddy.”

Morrow nodded, it made sense. Central was a citywide mosque, young people from all over the city got to check one another out. Tintagell was smaller, local, had a tighter community feeling about it. If the kids were going to Central, then they weren’t territorial, weren’t gang-marked. Good kids.

“Gathering back at the house,” Bannerman continued, “doorbell rings, thinking that a family member had forgotten their keys, daughter opens door, father in hall. Two masked gunmen enter shouting threats, looking for someone called Rob. Demanded money and ordered them not to call us—”

“Much?”

“Two million.”

“
Pounds
?”

“Aye.”

They looked back at the house, valued it. MacKechnie said, “Worth about three hundred K, do you think?”

Morrow and Bannerman nodded in agreement.

“Two million in cash? Did they get it?”

“There was no one called Rob here.”

“What color 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 plowed 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 glared at the house. “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; one wore a salwar kameez, a hoodie, and trainers. Traditional, religious.