Still Midnight

13

It was only a twenty-minute drive from her house at this time of the morning but the brand new block of luxury flats was a world away.

Morrow looked up at the verandas as she pulled on the handbrake. Thrown up during the housing boom they were already beginning to disintegrate. A number of them had been bought with dirty cash, at a time when all property was a good investment. But the gangsters wouldn’t pay the exorbitant maintenance fees and now the flats were coming apart.

They dumped bags of rubbish in the lifts and left police cones in the best parking spots. The factor wasn’t attending to the building any more and lights were out all over the halls, dents in communal walls were being left. One lift in the block was always well maintained though, no one would have dared piss in it or use a lighter to melt the plastic buttons: it was the lift that went to Danny’s penthouse.

She had passed the entrance to the underground car park and pulled up in the street. Going down to the underground car park was safer but buzzing up to Danny would give him advance warning that she was coming up. If he had the chance he’d hide anything incriminating, and they’d have to go through the embarrassing pretence of talking about his security firm and the problems of book keeping and managing men. He was on the cusp of legal, running a string of security firms that ring-fenced a territory and won the contracts in it through threats and sabotage. Anyone who didn’t use Danny’s firm would find their site subject to a spate of fires or assaults on staff until they capitulated. Danny had even made the papers once, a full page stop-this-evil-man. Ambushing him in the early morning was brutal, but at least it was honest.

She took a long breath and looked out at the street. Ahead of her the motorway was choking up with morning traffic. Behind, the road running along by the river was getting busy too, but this street was broad and empty. Bad place to park, she knew. Exactly the sort of spot cars got stolen from.

This used to be the dockside, wild sailors’ bars and flop houses, huge warehouses full of goods from all over the world, waiting to be lifted by light-fingered dockers. No longer. For decades the riverside had been an empty series of sheds until it was cleared to become an industrial estate: carpet warehouses and furniture sheds struggled there for a while until recently, when the housing boom cleared them away to make room for luxury riverside apartments. Twelve storeys of plasterboard and gimmicks, wet rooms, wall-mounted coffee makers, all with verandas looking over the water to one of the most deprived boroughs in Scotland. House buyers had camped overnight for the privilege of buying the first phase of the development. The market changed so quickly the builders could hardly give away the final phase.

Weak with tiredness Morrow climbed out of the car, pulling her coat closed against the wind coming off the river, and opened the boot. The presentation bottle of single malt had been in there for two weeks. She picked it up, cradling it like a puppy under one arm, locked the car and went around to the front entrance. Dan’s buzzer: 12.1.

‘What?’

‘Danny, it’s me.’

She sensed him hesitate, then the entrance door clicked and hummed and she pushed it open. The clip-clop of her modest heels ricocheted off the stone floor as she walked over to the steel lifts and pressed the button. Plastic plants were placed on either side of the doorway, improbably green palms that were dusty, cigarette butts scattered around the gravel at their feet. Canvases were screwed tight to the wall: slashes of green and red.

The lift came to a stop in front of her, the doors opened and two hoodies and a business woman in a trouser suit stepped out, the hoodies shifty and smirking, the woman newly coiffed for the day, looking alarmed.

Morrow stepped back to let them pass, got in and pressed the button for the twelfth floor. The button lit up pink but still she stared at it, wondering. Because it opened straight into the flat the button for the penthouse suite only worked if a key was used or someone in the flat pressed a button to allow it. She always wondered if Danny would refuse her, not because he ever had, but just because he could. The doors slid shut, the metal box giving a little jolt downwards before setting off for the roof. Her stomach tightened at the thought of seeing him.

Softly, the lift came to a standstill and the doors slid open into the bright daylight. Crystyl was standing fifteen feet away in full make-up, blonde hair brushed down her back, wearing skinny jeans over four inch heels, a pink sequinned T-shirt stretched tight over the tennis balls she’d paid someone to surgically implant on her chest. Disconcerted at the sight of Morrow glaring out at her, Crystyl raised her hand to her waist and gave her a little wave, whispering her hellos in a child’s breathy voice.

Morrow stepped out onto the stone floor. ‘Right, Crystyl?’

‘Aye, brilliant, how are ye, yourself?’

Even though Alex forced social pleasantries out of her mouth she knew her face twisted with annoyance when she spoke to Crystyl. It wasn’t Crystyl herself so much as the type: glam, fluffy, sentimental, but underneath the glitter nail varnish she was hard enough to live off a man who broke legs in the course of his business. Crystyl pretended she didn’t know, that the business existed in some parallel universe, but she used notes greasy with grief and sweat and terror to buy thoughtful greetings cards and angel key rings. Alex wanted to slap the woman and tell her to get a fucking job.

‘Yeah. Dan about?’

‘Be down in a wee tiny minute.’ Crystyl giggled at this, a nervous titter that sounded like a high heel grinding glass into a dirty pavement. ‘Um, could ye go a coffee at all?’

On the basis that they could either stand here and try to talk to each other, or busy themselves with the rigmarole of making a drink, Alex nodded and followed Crystyl through the living room, heading for the kitchen.

The living space in the flat was gorgeous: warm yellow sandstone two storeys high with a wall of glass looking down the river towards the Irish sea. A big L-shaped sofa faced the view. Throughout the flat all the fittings were either yellow or stone, all the furniture show-flat tasteful, included in the price. Alex had been in Crystyl’s own flat years ago, when she and Danny first got together. Decorated exclusively in pink it felt vaguely obscene to Alex, like walking into an instructive model of a vagina.

Crystyl led her across the living room and into the kitchen. The lowered ceiling had dazzling halogen lights punched into it. Glassy black granite worktops shone around the room meeting at a massive double-door fridge with a wooden pediment built over it, like a mausoleum to food.

‘I’ll make ye a real coffee, in the coffee machine. I love real coffee. Do you like it?’

Alex shrugged.

Running out of things to say about coffee Crystyl hummed tunelessly to fill the awful, prickly quiet. Silence was the most basic interview technique; Alex knew most normal, innocent people would try to fill the conversational void. Glaswegians would give up their own mother rather than sit quietly with a stranger. She didn’t want Crystyl to talk but couldn’t think of anything to say herself.

Crystyl went to a cupboard and took out an unopened silver tin of Illy coffee, took the plastic lid off and peeled back the metal, looking into the tin, bewildered. ‘Oh,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘It’s wrong,’ said Crystyl.

Alex went over and looked in. Beans. ‘Can’t you grind them up?’

She looked at the food processor. ‘In that?’

‘Haven’t you got a coffee grinder?’

Crystyl looked at the wall-mounted coffee maker. ‘Is there one on that?’

It had a button for pushing warm water through coffee grinds and a nozzle for frothing milk. Crystyl pressed buttons, trying to decipher the symbols. Getting nervous she opened a small door in the machine and took out the water tub, yellowed because it had never been used. ‘Do the beans go in here?’

As Alex watched Crystyl a burst of compassion for the silly woman came from nowhere. ‘Look, never mind coffee, I’ll have a cup of tea if you’re having one.’

‘But I’m not.’ Crystyl looked up, over Alex’s shoulder and her face brightened. ‘Hi, darlin’.’

Alex hadn’t heard Danny coming in. He had his jacket on already and was pointedly twirling his car keys around his index finger. The jacket was down-quilted for warmth and bulked him up, made him look as if he’d spent a two stretch lifting weights in prison. His shaved head and the long scar on his cheek didn’t contradict the impression.

‘What you doing here?’ he said, trying not to smile.

‘Visiting,’ she replied, chewing her cheek so that she didn’t either.

‘At seven thirty in the morning?’

‘I’m on nights, on my way home. Wanted to see you before ye set off for the day.’

He pursed his mouth. ‘Easy to miss each other.’

‘It is.’ They nodded away from each other, both wishing in their separate ways that this was easier.

‘Baby?’ he asked.

‘Not recently,’ she answered quickly, making a joke to deflect the question. She reminded herself to breathe in. They smiled away from each other. ‘Nah, he’s fine. Good. Brought ye this.’

She set the bottle of single malt on the kitchen counter and he sniggered at it, touching the lid lightly with a finger. ‘Thoughtful.’

Confused, Crystyl looked from one to the other. Danny didn’t drink.

Alex smiled away from him. ‘I’m always that. Happy birthday, Danny.’

‘I missed yours.’

‘Don’t care,’ she said honestly.

Crystyl gasped and brushed past Alex to Danny’s side, wrapping her arms around his middle and pressing her tits into his side. She gave him a weak mock punch. ‘Your wee sister’s birthday! What a bastard – pardon my French – you’re a bad bastard, Danny.’ She smiled. ‘Total.’

Danny straightened his face. ‘Right, doll,’ he said, wrapping a hand around Crystyl’s tiny waist and giving her a squeeze. ‘I’m off then, I’ll get Alex here downstairs,’ and to Alex, ‘did ye park on the street?’

‘Aye.’

He understood why and it hurt him a little, she could tell.

Crystyl trotted out to the lift door on her tiptoes, ponytail swishing ahead as they followed her. She stopped in the same place she had been in when Alex had arrived, and let them pass her. She must think she was well lit there, that whoever was looking out from the lift would get the best view of her from this angle and would perhaps remember her fondly while he was shutting a car door on someone’s fingers during the day.

‘Bye, da’lin’.’ She blew a kiss.

Seeming rather tired Danny raised his hand to catch it in his fist. The doors shut.

Mirrors on all four walls threw their reflections back at them: both tall, blonde, both thirty-four, both with their father’s baby dimpled cheeks. They looked sweet on both of them now, babyish, but they knew from their father that ageing dimples sagged into gashes. Their father looked as if he’d been in a fight with a knifeman plagued by a need for symmetry. Apart from that they didn’t look alike: Alex took after her mother’s side for eyes and chin, and Danny had his own mother’s mouth, tight, mean.

Three months between them. Their father was a charmer in his day, and had all of his many families concurrently. Alex’s mother was naive and loved him with a passion that congealed when the baby arrived. Danny’s mother was younger but already inured to disappointment. Danny didn’t grow up with shame and anger, just in a household governed by a series of bad men and drink.

Alex and Danny met on their first day at school. They looked like twins, everyone said so, it was an innocent joke. They were sweethearts for their first term of school but it all ended abruptly when their mothers met at the gates. The most vivid memory of Alex’s early life was walking home through a park, blood dripping from her sobbing mother’s mouth onto the grey path. She’d ripped her blouse in the fight and everyone could see her bra strap.

People didn’t move schools in those days. Danny and Alex went all the way through primary school together, and secondary. And all the time there was the ever present threat of their mothers fighting, of the other boot falling.

She was glad when Danny’s mum died of the drink in second year and no doubt he was glad when they were sixteen and hers died, but she never knew: he was long gone from school by then.

She was lucky never to have had the McGrath name, she realised later. Her mother always wanted it for her but her father wouldn’t admit she was his. Somehow that mattered then. If she’d had his name the police admissions board might have worked out where she was from, who she belonged to and not let her into the force.

Neither spoke until they were three floors down.

‘I came to ask ye about someone,’ said Alex, taking out her mobile. She flicked through the pictures until she reached the photo she had taken in the road the night before. Standing behind police tape was Omar Anwar, as clear as she could get him, smoking and looking sorry. She showed it to Danny, ‘Know him?’

Danny narrowed his eyes. ‘Nut,’ and handed her back the phone. ‘Seen anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Lan Gallagher go’ married last month.’

Morrow smiled. ‘Who in the name of God’d marry her?’

‘Well, ye know,’ he shrugged, ‘for every ugly there’s a bugly.’

She smiled. Charm that sagged into gashes. That’s how the McGrath men got you.

Before the doors were open properly Danny nipped through them, stepped quickly across the lobby and through a side door marked ‘car park’. Alex went after him.

The door led into a bare concrete corridor radiating damp with cold, brutal strip lights. She turned the corner and found Danny standing still, waiting for her. He was pressed up tight into a corner at a turn in the corridor. ‘We’ve put up hundreds of cameras.’ He circled his finger to the ceiling. ‘Trouble in the halls. I know where they are so… never say nothing…’

Disappointed at having to acknowledge who Danny really was, Alex slumped her shoulders, but Danny ignored the reproach and reached for her, pinching the elbow of her coat and pulling her into the corner with him. He took the phone from her hand, called up the photo of Omar and examined it.

Alex found it strange, standing so close together but not touching. She could feel Danny’s breath on her neck. It was like being young together again, like when he tried to teach her how to smoke hash in a cupboard in Bosco Walker’s bedroom during a party and she vomited on his new trainers. She remembered being glad about it because the trainers had been nicked. Bosco and Lan and all of them inhabited a place in her life that was long ago, a network of memories she never accessed so that when she did it all seemed so crisp and immediate that it was more real than the grey now.

Danny held up her phone and handed it back. ‘This boy’s a southsider.’

‘I know. Is he… you know…’ To another policeman she’d say ‘dirty’ but she could hardly say that to Danny.

He helped her out. ‘Into anything?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Nut, good family, Daddy runs a twenty-four-hour shop. Two boys went to St Als, both done degrees I think.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘The young one did law.’

‘Right?’

Watching him make a mental note, she wished she hadn’t been so specific. Danny could retain information for decades before he used it. ‘How do you know him?’

‘Used tae run with the Young Shields when he was a wee guy. Got out of it, haven’t seen him about for years.’

Most Asian guys ran with a gang at some point in their lives, usually for protection from other gangs of Asian guys. It didn’t mean Omar was good or bad, all it confirmed was that he had once been young and frightened. From Alex’s recollection they were the same thing.

‘’Member his brother?’

Danny cast his mind back. ‘Bill?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Big soft boy, never got in tow with anyone.’

They heard the door from the lobby open, steps and a trendy young guy turned the corner, started with surprise when he saw them standing so close together in an otherwise empty corridor. He averted his eyes and slipped past.

Alex scowled at Danny for scratching his nose as the guy came past. He was hiding, obscuring his face with his hand. He always did that when anyone looked at him. It was one of his many giveaways, like thinking before he admitted to being anywhere, or mapping the doors when he entered a room.

‘Does this make me an informant?’

‘Naw.’

When Morrow abandoned her family ties she did so completely. It was out of character for her to ask for anyone’s help, Danny’s help especially, and she knew it would excite his interest, that he would wonder about it until he understood why she had come to him. She didn’t understand it herself.

‘Da’s dying,’ he said abruptly.

‘Is he?’

‘Moved him from Gen Pop to the infirmary block. Cancer. Said it’ll be a couple of months.’

She nodded at her feet. ‘Right?’ she said, noticing how tight her lips had suddenly become. ‘Asking for us?’

‘No. Dunno.’ Danny was muttering too. ‘Why? Have ye heard he was asking for ye?’

She smirked. ‘No.’

Danny laughed too. ‘Well, why did ye ask then?’

‘Dunno, just something ye say, isn’t it?’

‘Suppose. If he’s only got a couple of months he won’t have time to see his kids.’

‘How many of us are there, do ye think?’

‘Dunno.’

‘D’you ever see people and wonder if they’re his?’

He smirked. ‘Nut. D’you?’

‘Nah.’ He knew she was lying too and they smiled warmly at each other.

‘You OK?’ He said it so fast it sounded like a burp, as if he couldn’t wait to get the concern out of him.

‘Fine!’ She sounded shocked when she’d meant to sound breezy, and corrected herself. ‘Fine.’

‘The boy.’ Her heart tightened until she saw him looking at her phone. ‘You asking…’

She shrugged and found she was breathless. ‘Just thought you could help, ’cause it’s near the old house… old stomping…’ She couldn’t bring herself to look at him, afraid he would see the spark of loss in her eye.

‘I need to go,’ he said, but stood still.

‘Me too,’ said Alex but she didn’t move either.

Finally, they couldn’t drag it out any longer. She stepped away from him. ‘Happy birthday, Danny.’

‘Aye.’ Danny stayed where he was, watching her walk away until she was out of sight around the concrete corner. His voice came after her. ‘Phone me.’

‘Nah,’ she wrinkled her nose and reached for the handle on the lobby door, ‘haven’t anything to say to ye.’

‘Phone and tell me what happens with Bob.’

Alex dropped her hand and backed up to the corner. Danny was still pressed into the cramped corner where she had left him. ‘Bob?’

‘Bob.’ Dan flicked a finger at the phone in her hand. ‘The wee guy…’

‘Omar?’

‘Aye, Bob’s his street name.’