Still Midnight

27

Aamir had been waiting for a change, a passage to somewhere else, for nothingness, nothingness would have done. He waited a long time in the dark, hearing no change and seeing no change.

Slowly, as the urgent pain in his wrist throbbed and the blood gathered in his cupped hand, drip-dripping between his fingers and soaking into the dusty rust on the floor, slowly, despite himself, he began to feel hope. He resisted, reminding himself of the betrayal, of the certainty he’d had a moment ago that nothing meant anything and he had wasted his efforts. But the absolute conviction that he should die had evaporated.

Suddenly the balance tipped and he could see it up ahead, like a pinpoint of light in the darkness, the moment when he would not be able to remember clearly why this was definitely a good idea.

Suicide should be sudden, he decided. Slow suicides could struggle, forget, change their minds. He saw himself in a misty plastic bag strugging wildly against the masking tape at his neck. He saw himself in a dark garage, jumping from a chair with a rope around his neck and fighting hard against it, scrabbling for purchase on a shelving unit. Too slow. Himself sleepy in an exhaust-filled car, slowly lifting a regretful hand to the lock. Too slow.

Slow. He wondered if he was hoping hard or the bleeding had slowed. He opened his fingers. Thick gummy blood fell softly onto the spongy rust below and he swept his hand beneath the cut on his wrist. It had stopped. A trickle was running down his arm but the flood of blood had stopped. He looked around the blackness, feeling ridiculous, embarrassed at his previous outburst. Ashamed before God. He imagined his sons watching him in the dark and cleared his throat authoritatively, holding his clean hand to his mouth, making the slash on his wrist gape. It hurt.

Slowly, for want of anything else to do, he stood up. He was aware suddenly of the pains in his scratched knees, of the awful slash of pain in his wrist and how sticky his right hand was.

What a mess to get yourself in, said Johnny Lander. He had said it to Aamir, but while looking at an alki who had come into the shop for fags. The man had a dead moth stuck to his jaw. What a mess to get yourself in.

Arms out to the side, shuffling his feet to orientate himself in the filthy dark, Aamir followed the camber to the end of the drum and found the door he had come in by, feeling along the rim with his sticky hand. He could feel the outline of the bottom of the door, no light or breeze, sealed tight.

In the absence of any other ideas he raised a bloody knuckle and knocked politely, three raps that clanged and swirled around the drum. He couldn’t hear anything. There was no one out there.

Suddenly the drum quivered with a scratch of metal. A pause and another clang. The door opened two inches. The stab of light made Aamir stagger backwards, lifting his bloody hand to shield his eyes.

A disembodied voice spoke softly: ‘Fuckin’ hell.’

A figure in white, an angel, was in the doorway. A skinny angel. ‘Man, what the fuck happened to you?’

Aamir shut his eyes against the blinding day and heard the voice clearly. Not an angel. A ned. The voice was nasal, high, indignant. A junkie voice, familiar somehow. The door opened further, making Aamir cry out at the brutal light and the ned stepped into the drum. ‘Wee man, you’re all bloody. S’there rats bothering ye in here or something?’

It was the sudden realisation of what he had done that made shame and fury explode in Aamir’s chest. He flailed his good hand out wildly and hit the man. It was awkward, less a punch, not even a slap, more of a clumsy glancing entanglement and Aamir turned away from the terrible light, baring his back to take the beating.

He waited. The emotion subsided. He became conscious of the small needling pains everywhere, in his wrist, in his knees, under his fingernails and the balls of his hands.

A small scuffle behind him. It sounded as if the ned was doing a dance, small, quick, delicate steps. Not dancing but shuffling on the platform at the top of the ladder, not shuffling but falling.

In the very moment that Aamir realised the man was struggling to stay upright, the ned toppled, crashing down into the drum. He landed heavily, flat, with a clang so loud it crashed over them in a cold wash. Aamir covered his head, expecting the man to jump to his feet, furiously swing his arms, punch, kick, a jab-jab-jab in his back. But he lay where he fell. The soft sound of a wet cough. Then a military beat, growing louder, faster, more insistent.

Still cringing Aamir stole a glance behind, towards the door. He could see a foot in a pristine white trainer, heel jerking off the floor, beating time, faster, tapping out a crazy beat, too fast to follow. It stopped. Aamir waited with his arms over his eyes, watching the foot below.

The sound of wet.

Keeping his eyes covered Aamir retreated to the shadows at the back of the drum, turned and finally managed to open his burning eyes.

A ned in white, his skip cap half covering his face. White legs, white wrists but the rest was as red as roses. Wet. Dark. And the blood was still coming. Aamir looked at his own hand. The slice of metal was still in it. He had thought it was bigger in the dark. It was sharp. Not where he had thought it was sharp, not along the ridge but on the end. And it was glinting.

Carefully Aamir stepped towards the white legs and looked down at the man’s face. Blood gurgled from his neck like oil from the ground. The skin was drained to a ferocious blue-white marble, slowly clashing with the ginger of his hair, orange stubble on his face sprouting vivid. Eyes rolled up under the lids, irises coming to rest just below his upper eyelids. Blue as a vein under white skin.

He knew suddenly where he recognised the voice from. The boy in the bedroom offered him sweeties and apologised for the mess of the place. Aamir didn’t take them in case they were poisoned but he’d been impressed that when he gave a religious objection it was understood and respected.

Aamir looked at the cut on his own wrist. Hardly bloody at all. No gash marks, just a dried dribble around his wrist like a drawing of a bangle.

Softly, slowly, Aamir sank to his knees. He stayed there for a long time until his knees were so stiff he could hardly stand to move them, until the pains shot into his hips and the bruises on his back throbbed. Even then he sat still.

Beyond the door the sun was going down, the dark creeping back in to swallow the day. It was time to pray but Aamir couldn’t. He couldn’t make himself known to God. Keeping his eyes shut, feeling his way with his feet and the sound of his whimper, Aamir shuffled back into the hateful dark at the end of the drum and awaited his fate.

They had a laugh at the mug shot, Morrow and Bannerman, sitting in their office looking at the record pulled from central, but it was partly relief that they were getting somewhere. The other part was how sorry for himself Malki Tait looked.

He was dressed for a really good night out. Though his colouring was very Scottish, pale skin, eyebrows and lashes brighter than a polished orange, Malki had dyed his hair black and carefully styled it in a bowl cut. The black was uniform and so lush and conditioned that it looked like a lady’s wig. He was dressed in a grey jacket with epaulettes and what looked like a sort of cravat. According to the report he had been arrested outside of Rooftops nightclub with a pocket full of pills, too much to consume alone but not really enough to deal. But what really made them laugh was his expression. Malki’s face was an eloquent expression of injustice. His mouth turned down, eyebrows raised over his brow, like a skinny child being picked on.

‘Look.’ She pointed out his previous: car theft and reset. He’d burnt out cars before, early in his career.

‘And he’s a Tait,’ said Bannerman with a smile.

Morrow nodded. It couldn’t be coincidence. It had to mean they were getting close to something. She stood up off the desk. ‘I’ll go tell MacKechnie-’

‘No.’ Bannerman stood up so fast he toppled his chair and had to reach back to catch it and stop it falling. ‘No, I’ll tell him.’ He was determined to be the bearer of the developments. He wouldn’t look at her as he yanked his jacket off the back of the chair and pulled it on, straightening his tie.

Morrow sat and watched him, stone faced, letting him sweat. She waited until he was dressed and standing in front of her.

‘Good work today, Morrow.’ He didn’t want her to come with him and share the glory but couldn’t say it outright.

She stayed where she was. ‘Yeah, cheers.’

Uncomfortable, Bannerman looked at his watch. ‘Four fifteen.’

‘Yeah.’ She stood up. ‘We should go and pick Omar up.’

‘No, I’ll go with a squad.’ Bannerman blinked and looked at his desk. When he looked at her again all the warmth was gone. ‘If you could look through the hard drive from the shed, see if you can get anything else for probable on it.’ He stood back, angling himself towards the door, telling her to get out and get on with the tasks he had allotted her.

Morrow curled her lip and stepped towards the door. She opened it, flinging him a dirty backward glance and left.

Bannerman was fixing his tie as he walked up the corridor, paused outside MacKechnie’s office door to clear his throat and knocked twice. At the call to ‘come’ he opened it and stood in the door frame, just as she knew he would. He was in a hurry to do good work, couldn’t stay, just passing on the good news about his discoveries. He didn’t hear Morrow creep up behind him, or notice that she had put herself directly in MacKechnie’s line of vision so that they looked as if they were together. With affected modesty he related the developments of the day, using the singular ‘I’ throughout. Morrow watched him, drawing MacKechnie’s eye with big swoops of her eyebrows.

‘The Taits?’ MacKechnie was talking to her. ‘Really?’

‘Well,’ answered Morrow, startling Bannerman with her presence, ‘his name is Tait but we don’t honestly know if he’s any connection. Judging from his sheet,’ Bannerman was staring at her, his neck jerking indignantly, ‘he’s just a junkie headcase and aspiring dealer. All his arrests are drugs-related or for joyriding. He lives in Cambuslang, so he could be a cousin.’

‘I didn’t-’ Bannerman stopped himself.

‘Anyway,’ Morrow held up her hands, ‘I’ve got things to get on with. I’ll leave you to pick up Omar Anwar, Bannerman, OK?’

And she backed away, grinning at him.

Eddy was breathing through his nose, snorting like a bull, leaning forward in the seat, over the wheel, as if he wanted to jump someone.

Pat should ask, he knew, what happened with Eddy’s daughter, how she was, what birthday it was or something. He could cue Eddy up for a vent about how his ex was responsible for him forgetting the wee lassie’s birthday, but he knew of old that it would only make it worse. Once Eddy got going on his ex no good came of it. Pat had spent endless shifts trapped, listening to Eddy digging over her crimes, telling ridiculous lies about it all, trying to convince himself that everything was her fault.

Pat never liked the woman, even in the good times. She never fucking shut up talking, but he could see that Eddy was no picnic. And Malki was wrong; they weren’t nice kids. They were half wild. Pat grew up around big families but until he met Eddy’s kids he’d never known that children could make noise like that, for as long as that.

So he didn’t ask and Eddy’s arse was making buttons trying to get him to. ‘Never trust a fucking woman, man,’ he said, grinding his teeth.

Pat looked out of the window and thought of the cold of the Vicky’s wall sinking into his hand, numbing his fingertips. His hand was on his lap and he smiled at his fingers as he thought about it. ‘Hope Malki’s OK.’

‘Cunt better be, the dough we’re paying him.’

Pat wanted to say it wasn’t that great a rate, not for what he was doing, not for the sentence he could be facing. He was good Malki, reliable. They didn’t have to make sure he was too pissed to walk, like Shugie, so that he couldn’t go to a pub and blurt something about it to a moody wide-o who’d go and tell someone. And you knew Malki wasn’t going to get in a temper and kill the fucking guy. He wouldn’t be blurting everyone’s fucking names either, making it impossible to send the old guy home.

Pat could change his name. He imagined himself in a sunny country with Aleesha. His arm was resting on her shoulders, relaxed, and she was smiling away from him, at something, they were posing as if someone was taking their photo but taking ages about it and they couldn’t be bothered standing still any more.

Aleesha and Roy. He smiled to himself. Roy? He laughed and pinched his nose. Who the fuck was called Roy?

Eddy stopped too fast and the seat belt bit into Pat’s chest and waist. He looked and saw Eddy staring up at the sky through the windscreen, looking for cameras. They were in a street off Maryhill Road, it would have been a busy road once but everything around it was knocked down and the street was one way now. A lone phone box stood at a street corner.

Eddy undid his seat belt and Pat felt suddenly panicked and hurried to undo his. ‘No worries mate, I’ll do it.’

‘Naw.’ Eddy had that face on him, the let’s-have-a-big-fucking-fight face. ‘I’ll do it.’

Pat stared him out and slid his belt buckle back into the clip. ‘Go on then.’

Eddy’s jaw jutted once, a small punctuation mark to the fight they hadn’t had, and he turned and got out, slamming the door. Pat knew Eddy would be doing his hard man swagger. As a petty act of spite he didn’t watch Eddy stride across the road. He knew the walk well enough: shoulders up, head wheeling left and right, looking for the fates that defied him.

This was the sort of thing Morrow excelled at, looking, seeing, processing. She pulled her office door shut, set her chair at a good distance from the monitor and clicked on the first of Omar’s files.

It was an Excel spreadsheet of meaningless figures, the years at the top, starting with the present, and in the columns below gradually increasing numbers following a starkly straight trajectory. She snorted a laugh when she saw that rounded figure of £80,000 in the final column. Not a penny less, no odd bits of change. It was a joke, a fiction, a bedtime story to himself.

Hurriedly she looked through the other files: badly scanned VAT forms. He didn’t have any capital, or income, didn’t even know how to fill out the form. It was as if he’d heard a rumour about the scam but hadn’t listened properly.

‘Malki Tait’s ma says he was out till two last night.’ Bannerman was smiling at the door, standing a little outside so that she wasn’t really sure he was talking to her. She’d expected him to be annoyed at her for crashing his glory meet with MacKechnie but he seemed quite calm.

‘Where is he now?’

‘Doesn’t know.’

‘Did he just walk out of the house this morning?’

‘Left the house in a minicab this morning. Gobby and Routher called around the local firms and found the cab that attended the address. They’re tracking down the driver for a destination. Anyway,’ he fell back into the corridor, ‘move it. We’ve got Omar upstairs. His lawyer’s with him. I want you with me.’

She looked at the thumbnail images on her screen. ‘I don’t think he’s doing a VAT fraud, Grant, to be honest-’

‘Yeah, let’s go up and find out.’ Bannerman wasn’t looking at her. He was smiling down the corridor.