Still Midnight

10

London Road Police Station was down the road from Bridgeton Cross. Bridgeton was pretty, near the vast expanse of Glasgow Green, had a couple of listed buildings and a museum. For years it had been mooted as an up and coming area but Bridgeton stubbornly neither upped nor came. Drunken fights were vicious and hourly, streets were graffiti-declared Free States, and the children’s language would have made a porn star blush.

The station itself was relatively new. From outside it looked like a cross between a three-storey office building and a fortress. Built of shit-brown bricks, the front was shored up with supporting pillars, the windows sunk defensively into the facade. It was set back from the main road by overgrown bushes in massive concrete pots that served as bollards to stop nutters driving into the reception area.

The door was always open to the public, welcoming them into an empty lobby with free-standing poster displays of friendly policemen and women chortling happily. For safety reasons the front bar wasn’t manned. The duty sergeant could see the lobby through a one-way mirror and CCTV. He came out in his shirt sleeves if the member of the public didn’t look tooled up or mad with the drink, but if they had as much as an air of melancholy about them he brought his deputy and a night stick.

Morrow’s driver took a street up the side and a sharp right into the police yard. A high wall topped with broken glass was arranged around a windowless block of cells. He cruised around to the back side of the cell block and found a space next to the police vans.

‘You better lock up,’ said Morrow as they got out.

Most officers didn’t bother locking their vehicles but the yard gate had been broken for a fortnight and spite-theft from a police station wasn’t much deterred by cameras.

Morrow walked up the ramp to the door, stopped outside, looked straight into the camera, and punched in the door code. John was behind the processing bar, always immaculately uniformed, leaning his weight on a tall stool preserving the creases in his trousers.

He bid her good morning and she gave him a smile. She pushed through the door to the duty sergeant’s lair and saw Omar and Billal through the striped window, sitting on the visitor’s chairs by the front door, waiting. Their postures didn’t match: Billal was upright, his arm around the back of the chair, his expression hurt. Omar was slumped over his knees, his mouth pressed hard into his hand, holding in a scream.

The senior duty sergeant, Gerry, grunted an acknowledgement at her and went back to filling out some time sheets. Morrow had been on at weekends when fights broke out in the waiting room and had seen Gerry plough into a crowd, peeling the drunks off one another like a surgeon easing skin back, never breaking a sweat. Gerry’s hair seemed whiter every time she saw him. They kept starting new trainees but it would be a rare copper who could follow Gerry. The blend of meticulous form-filling and sudden violence took a particular kind of man.

She grunted back and opened the door into the lobby. Omar and Billal recognised her. Omar stood up, hopeful she would take him away from his growling brother.

‘No,’ she raised a hand, ‘I’m not here to get you guys, I’m not doing the questioning, just going in here.’

She backed off to the CID corridor on her left. She punched in the security code and opened the door, glad to get into the long green corridor. MacKechnie’s office was at the far end, so he could stand at his door and look down at all of them. He never did.

The clarity of rank structure was one of Morrow’s favourite things about the force. She knew who she had to take shit from and who she could give it to. It made sense to her. MacKechnie was not comfortable being in charge, she felt, and apologised for his status by pretending to listen. He had a leadership style that would be described with a lot of bullshit buzzwords: inclusive, facilitative, enabling.

Even at half three in the morning the corridor was relatively busy. MacKechnie’s lights were on, his door open, his office empty. An incident room was being set up next to the tea room. She could see two uniforms moving a table through, negotiating the legs around the door frame.

She walked into her own office, flicked on the light and dropped her handbag. Bannerman’s computer was on, his screen saver a photoshopped picture of himself on a body builder’s body. Hilarious. His mouse had purple lights on the underside that distracted her eye when she was working. He kept chewing gum and healthy snack bars in his desk drawer, afraid of getting fat, she thought.

Everything on Morrow’s desk was new and ordered and anonymous. A drawer of neat pens, a sharpener and spare jotters, always three, for making notes. She liked them new, threw them away once they had been used. She liked to think the desk could have been anyone’s anywhere, devoid of history, that she kept her personality out of it, bland as beige, how she liked it.

She was hanging her jacket up by the door when she saw Harris standing outside. DC Harris was small and coarse-featured, as if he’d grown up outdoors. He was likeable, had a flat Ayrshire accent and a perpetual look of surprise on his face: eyebrows raised, mouth in an open ‘O’.

‘Ma’am?’ He seemed excited. ‘Great, eh?’

‘Is it?’

‘Aye.’ He had probably been expecting a routine night but found himself confronted with an actual genuine mystery instead of depressing, go-nowhere domestics and drunks clubbing each other for the price of a packet of fags. ‘My piece break. Coming to watch?’

‘Watch what?’

‘Bannerman thinks the youngest son’s it. He’s getting him into Three.’

Bannerman had clocked her interest in Omar and she rolled her eyes without thinking, annoyed at herself for being so obvious. Harris saw her and misunderstood, remembered that it was supposed to be her case and felt bad about it. As a consolation he said, ‘Coming anyway?’

She chewed her cheek, tried to change her face from huffy to neutral, said, ‘Aye, fuck it,’ and followed him out of the door, past Billal and through the far door to the stairs.

They trotted up to the second floor, into a room that always smelled of vegetable soup.

Everyone on CID was on their piece break apparently. Orange plastic chairs were laid out in two ramshackle rows of four but they were full already. MacKechnie must have given them permission. A short DC stood up to give Morrow his seat in the front row and everyone else in the room lifted their arses off the chairs as she sat down, respecting the rank.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she flapped a hand at them, ‘calm down, it’s not a parade.’

She could see them from the corner of her eye, sloping down in the chairs, not as they had been but relaxing within regulation stipulations, wary. It made her feel powerful. She kept her eyes on the boxy black television against the wall.

CID recorded their interviews and the cameras could be used as a feed to keep everyone briefed. Not everyone liked being watched though and it wasn’t always because they were bashful: some preferred to do an interview themselves and highlight lines of questioning themselves. It took a lot of balls to let other officers watch.

Morrow felt that being watched had forced a strange, strained quality on interview technique. Questioning was different now; guarded and formal and questioning officers were routinely respectful of even the lowest scrote. They spoke in a bizarre police-ese, as if they were giving evidence in court.

It never used to be this way. When she was younger Morrow remembered questioning as a drunken polka, officers and suspects swinging each other wildly around the facts, faster and faster, until something got broken. Now it was a strained quadrille where the rules of the dance stood hard and fast until one capitulated or the tension of the moves strangled the breath out of one of the participants.

Morrow thought people’s responses to being watched said a lot about their view of themselves: some enjoyed it, assumed a positive response from a viewer. Some couldn’t cope, froze, glanced at the camera and had to hand over to a colleague. Morrow felt she looked shifty on camera, guiltier than the crims she was interviewing.

The shot of the room was badly set up. It wasn’t there to capture the nuances of the suspect’s facial expressions but to prove that no one had been throwing punches. Because the camera was mounted high up on the wall the room looked narrower on camera than it seemed when she was in there, more claustrophobic. And the image was grainy, the colour drained from the room into a palate of grey and blue and yellow. A table with a wooden top, four chairs, a light switch and the door which had been left open slightly, the dusty top of it visible.

The door opened suddenly and Omar Anwar walked in. A muted cheer rose from the officers in the viewing room, muted because she was there, but it was as close to camaraderie as she had felt since her promotion and she found herself not exactly joining in but smiling along.

They liked that.

Omar sloped into the room as if he had extra vertebrae, hips first, bending like a question mark as he put his plastic tumbler of water on the table. Bannerman came into the room after him and some of his fans gave another cheer. Morrow didn’t concur with that one and felt them clock it.

A fat officer nicknamed ‘Gobby’ came in after them. Gobby rarely spoke. Bannerman had chosen him over her, she realised, so he could shine.

Someone at the back muttered to themselves, ‘The BannerMan’ll nail him.’ The nickname brought a sting of bile to the back of her throat.

At Bannerman’s invitation Omar sat down facing the camera, sitting well back from the table to make room for the splay of his legs. They couldn’t quite see his face but his body was expressive enough. He was jittery, reached for his water, withdrew his hands, wriggled in the seat as Bannerman took off his suit jacket and hung it carefully on the back of his chair.

He took his time, sitting down, rolling his shirt sleeves up, assessing the tall, anxious boy without addressing him. Gobby handed him one of the tapes and they turned away in their seats to the tape recorder, noisily pulling the cellophane off two cassette tapes which they slipped into the tape recorder behind them. Omar watched, frightened, as the policemen looked at each other, nodded and shut the cassette cases, pressing record. A high-pitched yowl filled the room as they turned back to the table. Reverently they waited until it had finished.

Omar looked quizzically at Gobby.

‘Blank bit o’ tape,’ said Gobby quietly.

Pathetically grateful for the explanation, Omar smiled and leaned towards him, clutching at the implied kindness, pleading with Gobby to be his ally.

Gobby looked away.

Bannerman opened the play with a lingering explanation of what had brought them all here today, the rules, telling Omar that he was being watched by third parties, slowing his speech to a languorous drawl as if to counter Omar’s frantic interjections of yes, thank you, thank you, he understood, his face twitching into micro-frowns and frights, his leg vibrating up and down under the table.

Bannerman looked straight at the boy suddenly. ‘Omar,’ he flashed a smile that even looked cold from behind, ‘what do you do for a living?’

Omar looked at both of them. ‘Living?’

‘A job. What do you do for a job?’

‘I’ve just graduated.’

‘From uni?’

‘Glasgow Uni, yeah, law school.’

‘Law school?’ He was building to something but Omar interjected.

‘Got a first.’

‘Good, good. Have you got a job to go to?’

‘No, still looking around, ye know…’

‘Had interviews and so on?’

‘Well, no, not really, not sure if Law’s for me really.’

At the back of the viewing room someone made a joke about one less of ’em. No one laughed. Jokes about lawyers were fine but the guy was Asian and the racist connotations were uncomfortable.

‘I want you to talk us through what happened tonight.’

‘OK, OK.’ Omar took a sip of water.

‘Whenever you’re ready,’ said Bannerman, meaning hurry up.

‘OK, well me and Mo-’

Bannerman read from his notes, ‘Mohammed Al Salawe?’

‘Yeah, Mo. Me and Mo were sitting in the car-’

‘The Vauxhall?’

‘I was outside with Mo, in the Vauxhall, round the corner, smoking actually, and had the radio on, just chatting and, and we heard a loud sort of ‘pop‘ like a ‘pwomf’ sort of noise, never heard anything like that, and there’s this light, sort of white light in Meeshra’s window…’ The story got faster and faster, the words splattering into the room. ‘And we never even said anything to each other just, like, ran-’

‘What did you think it was?’

Omar looked confused.

‘The noise,’ explained Bannerman. ‘What did you think made it?’

‘Honestly?’ Omar tipped his head sincerely.

Bannerman nodded.

‘I thought it was a gas canister on a stove cooker. It’s stupid because we don’t use a stove cooker but in Pakistan you often hear of honour killings where a mother kills a daughter-in-law if she’s had an affair or something and the way they do it is tamper with the gas canister on the stove. Stupid,’ he shrugged, ‘but that’s what came to my mind…’

‘Are your family from Pakistan?’

‘No.’

‘Why would you think that then?’

‘Dunno.’

Bannerman tipped his head to the side, as if Omar had said something significant, wrong-footing him. ‘And so you ran to the house, which way did you go?’

Omar shook his head and blinked, bringing himself back to the memory. ‘Um, I was on the passenger side, the road side. I opened the door, stepped out into the street,’ he flicked his hand to the side, as if he was throwing a cigarette butt away, ‘ran around the bonnet of the car-’

‘Mohammed’s car?’

‘Yeah, yeah, Mo’s car…’ He had lost his thread.

‘To the house?’

‘Yeah, jumped onto the wee garden wall there, ran over, slipped at the corner a bit, caught myself, didn’t fall, ran to the door-’

‘Was the front door open or shut?’

‘Um, shut.’

Morrow felt sure he was telling the truth, from his short sentences, the distant look in his eyes, the way he glanced downwards to see the road, the garden wall and the reflexive flattening of his hand in front as he stopped himself from falling.

‘The door was shut-’

‘And you opened it?’

Bannerman should stop interrupting, Morrow observed, he was breaking up the memory. It was easier to spot the lie in a long flow, the break in style was more obvious. It was the intrusion of the camera, Bannerman was determined to be seen. She envied his confidence but she could see that it was a handicap sometimes.

‘Yeah, I opened it.’ Omar looked at Bannerman for a prompt.

‘And?’

‘ And. ’ He stopped, glanced into the camera and froze a moment as he realised that the eye was judging him. His forehead wrinkled suddenly, a child giving an excuse, and he looked away. ‘And what?’

‘What did you see when you opened the door?’

Omar looked at the camera again but his brow had straightened defensively. ‘Saw my folks standing in the hall, on the right.’ He put his hand out to indicate their position. ‘Saw my brother Billal there too, near the door, standing in front of his room. The door was open behind him. Saw my wee sister, Aleesha,’ his throat caught when he said her name, ‘standing to the left, with her hand up.’ He raised his left hand, twisting the wrist like the Statue of Liberty. ‘Everyone was looking at her hand…’ His chin buckled at the memory and he lost his breath.

‘What about the men?’ said Bannerman briskly. He was busy looking at his notes, he was missing all of it.

‘The men.’ Omar shook himself. ‘The men were standing in the hall, yes. One with my folks, between me and my folks, the other in front of Aleesha, looking at her. His gun was down there.’ Omar slung his hand down, at ninety degrees to his thigh.

Morrow sat forward.

Omar was pointing two fingers at the floor, his hand wide, out of kilter to his body. ‘The gun had smoke on it. I looked at his face and I thought he had a really long jaw because he was wearing a balaclava and I only saw him from the side. But then he shut his mouth…’

‘There were two men?’

‘Two men-’

‘What did the other one do?’

Bannerman was missing it. Morrow wanted to jump into the screen and make him look at the angle of Omar’s hand, at the gestures of his jaw. The gunman’s mouth had been hanging open in surprise; the recoil from the shot had thrown his hand to the side. He hadn’t been ready for it, didn’t have his elbow at the proper angle or his muscles relaxed. He’d been shocked by the force of the recoil, which meant either the gun had gone off by accident, or he had never fired a shot before.

Anxiously she looked at the officers sitting next to her and noted which were straining towards the screen along with her, who was willing Bannerman to shut up. Three out of eight. Sitting two seats down in the front row, Harris was one of them: he caught her eye, the ‘O’ of his mouth tightened.

Back on the television Omar carried on. ‘He shouts “Rob”, “Where is Rob?” He came running up to Mo and goes, “You’re Rob,” and then they grabbed my dad and took him away.’

‘Did they ask if you were Rob?’

‘Me?’ Omar touched his chest and looked surprised. ‘Me? Well, he sort of looked around and said, “Who is Rob? One of you is Rob.” ’

‘But did he ever say, “You are Rob?” ’

‘To me?’ His eyebrows rose indignantly to his hairline.

‘Yeah, to you.’

‘Um, yeah, I suppose he did but my mum said, “Oh no, not my Omar,” and then he just sort of backed off because, obviously, then, he knew I was Omar, that I wasn’t Bob.’

Bannerman, looking at his notes, failed to see the twitch on Omar’s neck, head flicking back a little, but Morrow noted it. Something had happened there but Morrow didn’t know what. She looked at Harris. He was straining forward on his chair, alert, looking for clues as to what had just happened.

They both watched as Omar leaned across the table, his hand under Bannerman’s eye, drawing him back up. ‘And then, and then, the other one, the fat one, he grabbed my dad, like around the neck with his hand.’ Then Omar did a strange thing: he wrapped his own hands around his neck to illustrate the hold but somehow he pressed a little too tight, too adamant about it, as if he was actually trying to hurt himself. ‘And I thought he was going to kill him!’ He let go and stopped for breath. ‘I did! And then he said he wanted two million quid by tomorrow night and not to call the police or he’d kill my dad. And then he’s like: “This is payback for Afghanistan.” ’

He stopped talking, watching Bannerman to see if the dissemble had worked.

Bannerman had noted the change in tone, the excitement. He spoke calmly, ‘Do you know anyone in Afghanistan?’

Omar was bewildered. ‘No!’

‘Have you ever been there?’

‘Never.’

‘Does your dad have any dealings with Afghanistan, any family there or anything?’

A hand swept the table top. ‘No connection with Afghanistan whatsoever.’

‘OK. And then what?’

‘Then he grabbed dad there,’ he lay his forearm over the bottom of his rib cage, like the Queen carrying a heavy handbag, ‘and lifted him up,’ he tipped back in his chair, ‘and took him out the house.’ Omar’s arms flailed expressively at the door, making Morrow think of a stage magician diverting an audience’s eye.

‘Me and Mo ran after them, saw a big white van, like a Merc panel van, pull away. So we ran to Mo’s car and got in and followed them but we lost them at the motorway. They weren’t driving fast, just within the law, didn’t want to get caught, I suppose, and we shouldn’t have lost them but we were panicking and driving fast and following tail lights in the dark and they didn’t go the most obvious way, down the main roads.

‘Then we saw a police car and stopped and I said to them that my dad had been taken by men in a van and about Afghanistan and that, but they tried to arrest us.’

Morrow saw the boy on the screen stop waving his hands and the hurt in his voice. To be treated with suspicion at a moment of grief. She knew the deep stinging cut of that feeling. That was why he looked like that in the road, he and Mo, because they knew they were not among friends, that they were other.

She sat back and glanced at the officers in the viewing room. Smart men, top of their game, all staring at the screen, willing him to be it. He must sense that.

When she stood up to leave someone called ‘Down in front’. Their voice tailed off when they realised it was her.

The officer who had given up his seat was leaning against the wall, tipped his forehead out of respect, ‘He’s good, isn’t he?’ He meant Bannerman, wrongly supposing they were friends.

‘Aye.’ She leaned over to Harris and tapped his shoulder. ‘Have a word?’

Out in the corridor they dropped their voices. ‘What happened, just before he started rambling?’

Harris shrugged. ‘I was trying to remember myself.’

‘Get the disk would you? As soon as…’

Still frowning Harris looked back into the room. ‘His mum said, “Not my Omar.”’

She turned her computer on, waited for what felt like ten minutes, signed herself in and called up her email. The digi recordings had already been forwarded to her. The transcript would take a few days to weave its way through form-filling and desk-landing but the digi recording was immediate.

Opening her bottom desk drawer she took out a brand new pad of cheap paper, a sharp new pencil from a box and a plastic container with a set of earphones in it. Plugging them into the hard drive stack, she clicked on the attachment.

The first file was numbered and she jotted it down in the pad before starting the recording. A caller panted loudly and a bored operator asked them: ‘Which service do you require?’

Barely contained sobs demanded, ‘Ambulance! Please! Tell them to come, please come! She’s bleeding all over the place!’

‘Who’s bleeding please?’

‘My daughter has been shot by… men, they came into our home and threatened-’ The mother, Sadiqa, had an English accent, a crisp fifties accent, and made the operator sound coarse.

‘Can ye give us your address?’

Sadiqa gave it, becoming calm in the familiar recitation, but she was interrupted by a girl crying out in the background and began panting again, ‘Oh dear, my God, my husband has been taken, my Aamir-

The operator’s voice was nasal and bland, told her to calm down, the ambulance was on its way. No, there wasnae any point in her getting off the line because the ambulance was on its way right now. She made Sadiqa spell her name, her husband’s name, what sort of guns were they?

‘I have no idea. Black guns? Big-’

‘Are they still in the actual house?’

‘Gone! Left! I’ve told you that.’

‘Did they leave on foot or in a car?’

‘I’m afraid no, I didn’t see. But my son, my Omar ran out into the street.’

‘Has your son come back in? Could he come to the phone and tell me if it was on foot or in a vehicle, maybe?’

But Sadiqa wasn’t listening to her any more. ‘Aleesha, oh Lord, Aleesha is bleeding. Please, please come quickly.’ She dropped the receiver noisily and spoke urgently to someone. A thump sounded like a body falling. Someone picked up the receiver and hung it up.

The call lasted one minute fourteen seconds. The second call started ten seconds later than Sadiqa’s.

Billal was calling from a mobile so the line was less clear. In the background she could hear Sadiqa’s voice repeating one side of the conversation she had just listened to. Shock made Billal shout a series of exclamations: ‘Police! Police! And an ambulance!’

‘And what is your call concerning, sir?’

‘Two men! Two men!’

‘Two men what, sir?’

‘Two men came in our house! They took my daddy away!’

‘So, they’re not there now?’

‘They shot my wee sister. In her hand!’

‘They shot her hand, sir?’

‘Yes! Yes! She’s bleeding really… God… badly! It’s all… blood-’

‘Did you see them shoot her?’

‘Yeah, with guns! Big guns, real guns.’

The female controller tried to get him to spell his name and the address but Billal could barely hear her he was so shocked.

‘Please come and help us, help us, please come.’

‘We are on our way, sir, right now, but-’

‘We’ve got a baby here, a new baby! They pointed the gun at a baby!’

‘Did they say what they wanted, sir?’

‘ Ob. ’

Billal had moved his face, his chin was slightly over the receiver, so it wasn’t very clear. Morrow had to use the mouse to listen to the portion of speech again.

‘… what they wanted, sir?’

‘Hob. Were after someone called Bob.’

It was clearer the second time he said it, the puff of air from his lips popping gently on the receiver as he said the ‘b’s.

Morrow wrote ‘Bob’ on the pad and put a question mark next to it.

‘Mum! She’s falling-’ He hung up. The conversation had lasted less than a minute.

The last call was from Meeshra, sobbing loudly, wailing about Aamir and Aleesha. She sounded calmer than the other two, even a little excited but much more upset, the way a distant acquaintance sobs at a funeral of a child while the family hold tight, afraid the force of grief will rip the earth from under their feet.

‘They’ve taken my dad-in-law, just lifted the poor man up and went off wi’ him-’

‘Could you tell me your-’

‘Lifted him off-’ She broke off to sob theatrically and ask Dear God to help them.

‘Could I have your name and address, please? Madam, are you there? Can I have your name, please?’

‘Meeshra Anwar. They’ve took ’im.’

They were talking at the same time, the controller and Meeshra, and their voices coiled around one another:

‘… wanted ’im…’

‘… spell that…’

‘… shouting, looking for…’

‘… out for me?’

‘… some bloke called…’

‘… spell that name?’

Both voices stopped dead for half a second of dead air, and then Meeshra spoke: ‘Aye, they was shouting for some bloke but they couldn’t find him and just took Aamir instead.’

Morrow looked at the pad. Meeshra was avoiding saying the name. She looked at her writing: small and regular, the word less than half a centimetre long but pressed so hard into the paper that the free edges at the bottom of the page curled up to meet it. Bob? She touched it tenderly with her fingertip. Bob?

Reluctantly she pulled the sheet of paper out of the pad and stood up, stopping by the door, nodding a congratulations to herself for being honourable and giving up the information so quickly. She opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. Outside a uniformed copper was chatting lightly to a plain clothed DC showing him something in the paper. Night shift. Hard graft but there was a kindness about it. Everyone moaned about it but they missed it when they were promoted and went days only. There was a closeness in being sleepy together, in minding the drowsy city.

MacKechnie was still in, the light from his office spilling into the corridor. Morrow stood at the door and nodded politely. ‘Sir?’

‘Come!’ He always said that, not knowing it had another meaning and that they laughed at him. Morrow looked in and found him squinting at something on his computer. ‘Yes?’

‘Sir, I was listening to the 999 calls just now.’

MacKechnie frowned at her, one eyebrow arched accusingly. ‘Why?’

‘In case there was something on them.’

MacKechnie sighed at his clasped hands and sucked his teeth. ‘Sergeant Morrow.’ He had a way of pronouncing her name that made her flinch. ‘I have asked you to work with Bannerman on this.’

‘Bannerman told me to listen to the tapes, sir.’

‘Bannerman told you to listen to the tapes?’

She stepped into his office and held up a hand to fend him off. ‘OK, that aside, they’ve all said the gunmen were asking for “Rob”. On the 999s they’re avoiding it but I think the son said “Bob”.’

‘OK.’ He looked confused.

‘He’s interviewing Omar now, shall I send him up a note? Get him to ask about it?’

Confusion gave way to certainty. ‘Yes.’

She withdrew and stood in the corridor a moment. She’d expected a bit more of a reaction. It was something concrete after all, and she’d discovered it. Disappointed, she went back to her office and wrote out the details, marked that the note was from her and caught a DC lingering by the board in the incident room.

‘DC…?’

‘Wilder.’ He stood to attention and she appreciated that he knew who she was.

‘Wilder, take this up to Bannerman in Three right away.’

He took it from her and set off quickly, leaving the door to slam shut behind him. At least someone was taking it seriously.

Deflated, she went back to her office, dragging her eye and her pen across incident forms. The warm glow of her discovery was fading, swamped with tiredness and the mundane job. She broke off from the admin task to listen to the section of Meeshra and Billal’s emergency calls several times, her certainty paling a little each time.

She was about to do it again when Bannerman opened the door and leaned against the door jamb like a louche lover coming back from the bathroom. ‘All right, Morrow?’

‘Fine.’

‘How are you getting on?’

Morrow blinked hard, her eyes were burning. ‘Just… paperwork. ’ He slouched into the room. ‘Did you get my note?’

He had to think about it. ‘The note? About Bob. Yeah, the note. God, great, thanks for that. Great.’ He dropped into his seat and unlocked his drawer, pulling out a grain bar and ripping the wrapper open with his teeth.

‘And?’

He shrugged without looking at her.

She wanted to get up and go over and kick his shins. ‘What did Omar say about it?’

‘Well, I’d actually finished interviewing him by that point, so we’ll ask him next time.’

They looked at each other across the office and Bannerman smiled. He hadn’t asked Omar about it because it came from her. He’d been unprofessional and she should let it go, win some, lose some, but the point wasn’t about her and Bannerman: a small man was sitting in a cold van somewhere, surrounded by armed malevolent strangers and the information could be material.

‘You didn’t ask?’

Bannerman refreshed his smile.

‘Look, come over here.’ She held up the headphones.

Bannerman looked wary, didn’t budge from his seat and instead swung his feet up on the edge of his desk, crossing them, stubbornly chewing his health bar. The interview had been a disappointment, viewed by the entire squad. She understood how foolish he would have felt if the only significant question was on a note from her but she was sure she was right. She called up the audio file of Meeshra’s phone call, a tiny box on her screen with a jagged visual of her speech. She pulled the earphones out of the hard drive, double clicked and Meeshra’s voice burst into the office, weaving through the crackle of switchboard operators.

‘She’s dodging the question,’ she said. ‘And Billal said “Bob” instead of “Rob”.’

Bannerman didn’t react.

Morrow tutted and held her hands up. ‘Well, I’ve told you. MacKechnie knows I did, Wilder’s a witness I sent the note, so if it goes tits up because of you it’s nothing to do with me.’

He narrowed his eyes at her.

‘OK?’ She leaned across the desk towards him. ‘You can’t say I haven’t told ye.’

‘OK,’ he said slowly, as if trying to calm her down. ‘Thanks.’

‘If you want to fuck it all up, that’s up to you.’

Bannerman smiled condescendingly at his health bar, peeling the wrapper off the end and popping it in his mouth. He would tell MacKechnie that she’d said that, tell it as a funny story about what a character she was, knowing MacKechnie would hear it as confirmation that she was impossible, mad, no team-player.

‘This animosity,’ he was muttering, ‘you and me, professional jealousy, you know, I’m sure we can work around it.’ He was turning it around, making it about her and him, not Aamir Anwar’s safety.

‘Not if you’re going to act like a cunt, we can’t.’

She was too angry, almost dizzy and the words fell out of her before she could catch them. A hot blush ran up her neck. MacKechnie would hear that comment too.

A perfunctory rap at the door was followed by Harris looking in. ‘Ma’am?’

‘What!’

He paused, looked frightened and addressed himself to Bannerman. ‘Just looked the DVD of the interview over. Omar says they were looking for Bob, not Rob.’

Without a word Bannerman swung his feet to the floor, stood up and left the office, shutting the door behind him, leaving her alone in the rancorous silence. Outside some guys were talking in another room, having a laugh and she listened jealously for his voice, suspecting, as always, that everyone had more allies than her.

She was filling out the forms, cooling down to a cold rage when she heard excited footsteps in the corridor, an exclamation and a scurry.

Bannerman threw her door open. ‘Found the van.’

They took a car from the yard and Bannerman drove. All the cars in good condition were out and they had an old Ford with an engine so noisy that idle chat was impossible.

Bannerman concentrated on the road, uncomfortable at the silence, but Morrow was glad to be let alone, her face slack as the warm orange lights of the motorway clicked past on the quiet road. The drive was long and effortless, all the way to Harthill on a smooth and empty road.

Bannerman didn’t know the area they were going to and made a big production of looking for road signs, muttering inaudibly to himself about turns and directions, winding himself up. Morrow said nothing. They took a roundabout, a side road and finally a rough road down the side of open fields with intermittent hedgerows. It had been tarmacked at one time, but a decade or so of harsh winters and tractors had churned the ground uneven. They pulled up outside the perimeter tape.

Blue and white was strung up between some of the hedges, blocking the roadway, and a fat copper was standing next to it, a local plod, warming his hands by rubbing them together and stamping his feet. He wasn’t acting it either; his nose was red and his top lip looked damp.

Bannerman cut the engine. ‘Noisiest bloody car I’ve ever fucking been in,’ he said to himself.

‘Saved us having to talk to each other for forty minutes though.’

Bannerman swung to her aggressively, ready to take it out on her, but found her smiling pleasantly. Despite himself he smiled, swinging away from her so she wouldn’t see him concur. He opened the door and stepped out. She liked him better away from their gaffers.

Opening her own door she stepped out into the bristling cold. Harthill was on higher ground than the city and the air was thinner here, the skies often brutally clear. Tonight a giant white moon lit it. The tarmac on the road had snapped like a slab of toffee. The motorway was hidden behind a hill, the lights glowing over the low horizon. Whoever brought the van here knew the area. Looking to the foot of the hill she saw a clump of wind-gnarled trees gathered around a smouldering white van, well lit by the Forensic Fire team.

The Scene of Crime Forensic team would not be here for a few hours, not until it got light. There wouldn’t be any point in the dark. Unless Osama Bin Laden personally organised a massacre in the Glasgow city centre over the next few hours theirs would be the first crime scene they came to. In the meantime a crew of two were trying to pat out the dying fire, preserving what little trace evidence they could.

It was hard to put out a fire in a vehicle that would serve as evidence. Smother it in foam and you might as well wash it under a tap. Throw water at it and any accelerants would disperse and start an ancillary fire elsewhere. In the morning they’d do a fingertip search of the surround and lift the van without opening it, take it to a sterile environment for analysis.

‘Harthill,’ she said. ‘On their way to Edinburgh?’

Bannerman shrugged a shoulder. ‘Not an obvious place is it?’

‘Maybe they knew it from somewhere.’

‘Can’t exactly make that the basis of a search though can we?’ Bannerman pointed to the ground. ‘No marks.’

She was desperate to know but embarrassed to ask. ‘What else did Omar say?’

Bannerman looked at her curiously, surprised by the tone in her voice, not knowing what it meant. ‘Not much. I thought he was it, but…’

She shrugged and looked off towards the van. ‘I thought he was too.’

Mistaking consensus for intimacy Bannerman leaned into her, quite close, and drew a breath. Suddenly panicked by his proximity she scurried away, over to the fat copper guarding the tape.

He was freezing but still nervous, asked their names and rank and where they were from, jotting it longhand in his notebook, as if he was doing an exam. He probably didn’t have much crime scene experience. He must have been the same age as them, Morrow thought, early thirties, but his ruddy face and fatness made him look much older. People got old quicker in the country.

Sensing Bannerman coming up behind her Morrow ducked under the tape and walked over to the mouth of the field, staying on the far side, away from the obvious path anyone leaving the field would be likely to have taken. A farmer was standing there with a copper but she didn’t look at them. She was looking at the ground.

The moonlight was so bright she could see the shadow of marks in the frost: tyres from a car were picked out in the tarmac, a parked car had sheltered a rectangle from the ground frost and then driven away. She looked up the road, squinted, crouched.

Indistinct footsteps trailing back and forth to the car from the field, muddying one another, some deep zigzagged treads, like army boots, size eightish, some flat soled, like slippers, another pair of trainers. Disappointing: frost was a useless medium for prints.

Bannerman saw her looking at them and shouted back to the plod by the tape, ‘Get the photographer out here and get them before they disappear.’

The plod looked shocked and hurt, as if he had been reprimanded, and swung away to talk into his radio.

She looked away from the footprints and saw the press of tyre tracks. New wheels, clear zigzags and deep lines, which was bad. It was easier to match worn tyres to track marks, chips and wear in the rubber could be as effective as a fingerprint, but factory fresh all looked the same and there were only a few manufacturers.

Bannerman was behind her and nodded at her thought. They traced the movements wordlessly, pointing and tutting and humming, keeping their eyes on the ground. They traced the footsteps to the break in the hedge and looked into the long stretch of churned mud in the field. The footsteps broke up here, the ground was too lumpy, but some of the partial impressions were clearer, a toe, a heel, the side of a sole.

Morrow took what she could from it: three sets of feet coming towards her, muddied by steps that were there already, perhaps meeting others who had been waiting. She looked back, sorting the impressions in her eye: two sets coming towards her, a scuffle of overlaps, but they looked like the same treads on the soles.

Finally Bannerman asked, ‘What ye seeing?’

He was good at this, she knew that, but was either trying to be friendly or intending to steal her ideas for his own. She almost hoped it was the latter. ‘Two gunmen,’ she said. ‘Same boots on. Thought for a minute they were met here but unlikely. Two big men, a driver and a hostage. They wouldn’t all fit in a car unless they were met by just one other guy. Only the army boots go to the driver’s door.’ She pointed back up to the large patch left bare of frost by the car. ‘They must have left a car here to pick up. We can check the CCTV at Harthill, see what pulls off earlier and match it with what pulls out later.’

Bannerman was still looking back at the rectangle. ‘How do you know that’s the driver’s door?’

She drew her finger along the tyre marks. ‘They didn’t reverse out, did they?’

Bannerman looked pleasantly surprised. ‘Hm.’

He was going to steal that, she fucking knew it, he was known for it below ranks. Gaffers thought he was a genius.

‘That’s the third one this year, burnt out cars on my land.’ The farmer standing opposite her was wearing a Barbour coat and had a pissed-off, sleep-puffed face. His accent was almost impenetrable and Morrow found herself watching his lips for clues.

‘Is this your land, sir?’ she said.

‘It is my land, aye, aye, mine, yeah.’

‘Would you mind standing behind that tape over there? We’ve got frosty feet marks here and we’re trying to keep them good until the photographer gets here.’

‘But it’s my land.’

‘Ye can see my point though, eh?’ She gave the copper a look, tipped her head to the side to get the farmer out of the crime scene.

‘It’s my land,’ mumbled the farmer, unsure if he’d been reprimanded, but proactively annoyed anyway. ‘I’m staying here if I want to stay here. And why did you not bother before and now you’re bothering about this one? They’ve burnt out cars before this one and ye did nothing at all. Had to shove the cars out mysel’.’

He was almost unintelligible. Too long Bannerman’s eyes stayed on his mouth and when he finally broke off it was to nod, bewildered, and frown at his feet. He turned to the uniform. ‘Officer, were you the first here?’

The uniform nodded at Bannerman as if he was meeting a film star. He had a red farmer’s face and round body, not flattered by the double-breasted plastic police issue jacket buttoned tight across his belly.

‘Find anything? A passport or a home address? No letters with photo ID on the path up here?’

‘Nothing like that so far, sir, no, as far as I know, like.’ Same accent, voice quiet because he was intimidated by the specialist from the town, almost as hard to understand as the farmer.

Bannerman snorted, looking to Morrow to laugh along with him: a bonding moment between colleagues.

‘Have you actually done a search?’ she pointed towards the van.

‘Not yet, ma’am, no.’

‘How do you know then? Get that man out beyond the tape.’ She walked off into the field, leaving Bannerman to stand with the two men he had been ridiculing a moment ago.

Even she was starting to wonder if she was an arsehole.