Still Midnight

33

The office seemed unnaturally quiet when she got there. She went into her office, shed her bag and jacket and looked at Bannerman’s desk. His computer was turned off and there was no coffee cup. She looked out into the corridor. MacKechnie’s office was shut and dark too. They were off together somewhere. They were off to see the Fraud Squad. She should have phoned ahead about the garage.

The incident room was busy, DCs following up on leads and scraps, making notes, phoning. She didn’t go in but turned and saw Harris sitting on his own in the small office, staring hard at a screen and looking even more pissed off than yesterday. She leaned into him. ‘Ye right?’

He groaned. ‘Up half the night with a blinding headache from watching this shite.’

‘Poor you. Where’s Bannerman?’

‘Have you not heard?’ He leaned forward and pressed the pause button. ‘Bannerman’s taken compassionate. His mum’s got pneumonia apparently. She’s in hospital.’

‘Compassionate?’

‘Yeah, doesn’t know when he’ll be back.’

She bit the dirtiest word she knew back, chewing on her inner lip until she got back into her office and closed the door. Morrow sat down. The cunt was ducking the cunting fucking case because he was a cunt and he was using his stinking fucking mother’s pneumonia to do it. Killer fucking instinct, right enough. Cunt.

MacKechnie was fully aware of the situation Bannerman had put her in, but it was important for everyone to pull together and support him at this difficult time.

‘So,’ he said carefully, patting the desk in front of her chair, ‘it falls to you to take his place as the SIO.’

Morrow sat back in the office chair by his desk and read his face. If he knew his protégé was dodging the job because it wasn’t panning out, MacKechnie wasn’t letting on. They looked at each other for a long while until MacKechnie broke off. ‘You called me a racist a few days ago. You wanted this case so much you actually said that to me.’

She could see just how intensely he disliked her at that moment. Everything about her was wrong. It wasn’t just that she was a woman, wasn’t her habit of swearing or her brisk manner, her poor southsider accent, her lack of allies. What he disliked about her most was that she didn’t really give a fuck, because wherever she was, whatever was going on in the gentle heave and sway of office politics, all she really cared about in the world was gone. MacKechnie could sense that dark belligerent void and knew that he couldn’t touch her.

‘This case is a great opportunity for you-’

‘This case is big fat bollocks and you know it. The family are lying out of their arses. Thirty-six hours since he was taken and every minute that passes makes it less likely that we’ll find the man alive-’

MacKechnie couldn’t take it any more. He stood up and hissed at her, ‘Do your job. Get out.’

Harris pulled the car up carefully to the curb. He needn’t have been careful, there weren’t many other cars in the street and they were mostly tucked away in bricked-over gardens at the front of the houses, but he was delighted to be out of the office and away from the videos and enjoying kicking the facts of the briefing about.

‘Toryglen?’

‘Yeah, dropped him off at the main road, he said.’

‘Any Taits there?’

‘No.’

‘Didn’t you find anything on the shop’s CCTV tapes?’ she said.

‘Well, there are a couple of oddities but nothing major. I’ve highlighted them and asked Gobby to have a look at them, see if I was just going blind or what.’

‘Show them to me when we get back.’

‘Yeah. But boss, you know, even if it is VAT fraud it’s a bit irrelevant. Even if the family are screwing millions out of the VAT office that only tells us how they became targets, it doesn’t help us find the old man or get him out alive, does it?’

Morrow nodded. ‘Yeah, but finding out how they were targeted’ll lead us to the kidnappers. And when it comes to trial any defence lawyer’s going to bring it up to discredit them. Makes the whole case harder.’

‘S’pose.’ Harris opened his door and stopped with one foot in the road. ‘D’you reckon Bannerman’s bunking off?’

It would be breaking rank to say so. ‘DC Harris, whatever makes you say that?’ As they stood on either side of the car looking down the road, getting the measure of the place, she asked him: ‘Really, what makes you say that?’

He shrugged, still unsure of her. ‘Rumour.’

‘Oh.’ He wasn’t prepared to go into it. She liked that.

‘What’s the rumours about me?’

‘There aren’t any rumours about you, boss.’

She looked at him, worried they were skating close to sincerity and felt uncomfortable about it. ‘Shame. I started a couple of good ’uns.’

‘Except that you’re getting the squeeze.’

She almost choked, she’d never expected sympathy and it touched her deeply. She looked away, hiding her face.

They were poor houses. A long curving street of flat-fronted council houses with telephone and electrical wires slung across them, grey plaster facades that had blackened into the architectural equivalent of a skin complaint. A lot of the houses had been bought by the tenants though: incongruous wooden porches were built around a couple of doors. One of the houses had mock Tudor windows, all lead strips and flouncy nets behind. The gardens were well kept too, carefully organised gravel and flower baskets hanging from walls, garden pots too big to pick up and walk away with, and hedges carefully trimmed where they grew. She wouldn’t have chosen to live here but the people who did clearly liked it. Pink plastic toys littered the grass in one garden and a deflated football was resting by the curb in the street. Morrow noticed that the street was a dead end. It was a nice safe playground for kids. The street was empty though; all the children off at school, all the parents tending house or out working. At the end of the street a modern chapel loomed on a hillock like a village jail.

Malki Tait’s address was number twelve. It looked like a pensioner’s house from the outside. Modest china ornaments were lined up along the window sill; an Alsatian dog, a tiny China bouquet of flowers, a mouse holding a bit of cheese. The front step had just been washed, was damp but drying, the sweep of the wet handbrush lingering grey on the concrete.

The door was council, flat panelled and painted a jaunty cornflower blue, not a bought house, no money here, but the door hadn’t been changed since the seventies. The tenant had been here since then. The council stripped out older fittings when new tenants moved in. They offered new doors and windows to existing tenants too but the older ones usually wanted to keep things the same, being members of a generation who liked what they liked and didn’t believe decor was subject to yearly fashions.

‘Old lady,’ guessed Morrow, pressing the doorbell.

‘A quid,’ bet Harris.

Shuffling steps, a weak call of ‘hello’ in an old lady’s voice.

Morrow smiled at the step. ‘Mrs Tait?’

‘Hello?’

Harris and Morrow looked at each other. Either she hadn’t heard Morrow or she was working for time. Malcolm Tait could be walking out of the back door right now.

Suddenly animated, Morrow raised her fist to bang on the door and Harris backed away to the street, looking for a lane to the back garden. The door opened suddenly and a thin woman looked out at them, tipping her head back to see them through the bottom portion of red plastic bifocal glasses.

Annie Tait was wearing a pair of baggy red joggers and a white vest with bra straps showing. She had the arms of a much younger woman. She’d once had red hair like her son, but had dyed it blonde, two inch roots of red and grey mingled at her scalp. It was wild frizzy hair, the tips not helped by the drying effect of the hair dye. It looked like a rain-flattened afro. Embarrassed by her appearance she raised her hand to it. ‘Who are you?’

Morrow stepped forward. ‘I’m DS Morrow, this is DC Harris. We’re here about Malcolm.’

‘What about him? He’s not been arrested?’

‘No, Mrs Tait, we’re just really keen to talk to him.’

Annie pulled the door shut so that she blocked the view of the house with her body. ‘Keep the heat in…’ she explained to Harris and turned back to Morrow, as if she was the natural leader. ‘I’m looking for Malki too. I’m always looking for bloody Malki. Did you get the taxi firm number?’

‘We did, aye, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about.’

‘How?’ Annie tipped her chin down, trying to see better through the top portion of the bifocals. Unsatisfied she went back to the bottom portion. The lenses were warping Morrow’s view of her eyes, it was making her feel a bit sick.

‘Can we come in, Mrs Tait? Would that be OK?’

Annie looked across the street, then up the road to the chapel, as if checking that Jesus wasn’t watching and opened the door. ‘Aye,’ she wrinkled her nose as if she was letting a wet stray in for a drink of water, ‘come in.’

Harris followed behind Morrow, closing the door behind himself. The hall was narrow and plain, painted green with matching carpet. To the left was a front room, as neat in its way as the Anwars’ but with older, cheaper furnishings. A set of stairs led up the right-hand wall to the bedrooms. Along the wall by the stairs were click-frame collages of family photos, all of Malcolm and ginger Annie in different fashions, in the front garden here, in ugly halls at weddings, never abroad, never on a beach. There didn’t seem to be any pictures of a dad.

Malcolm making his first communion, standing stiff as a board in a shirt and tie, solemn-faced, hair watered flat, rosary beads strapped around his prayer-clasped hands like a parlour Houdini. It was outside the chapel down the road, Morrow realised, she could just see this house in the far background.

Annie saw her looking at the photo. ‘That’s him, when he was cute. He’s still cute now, just not in the same way. So, did ye find the taxi cab? He’s never phoned home and he usually does if he’s staying out and can remember, if he’s gageing off his nuts.’

‘Gageing?’ repeated Harris, thinking he had misheard.

Annie crossed her arms. ‘D’ye not know? Malki’s a heroin addict.’ She pointed at a pile of photocopied leaflets sitting on the floor by the door. ‘M.A.D.: Mothers Against Dealers.’ She touched her chest. ‘Founder member,’ she said proudly.

‘Good for you,’ said Harris.

‘It’s a family disease,’ she said, as if that explained it.

‘Is it?’ Harris looked genuinely perplexed and interested. Morrow was impressed. ‘What do you do about it?’

‘Oooh,’ Annie rolled her eyes back into her head, ‘talk about it.’

‘Hm.’ Harris didn’t know what else to ask so he tipped his head in sympathy.

Annie seemed appeased by this, she led them into the front room, offering them the threadbare brown settee. They sat down side by side. A large sacred heart picture of Jesus was on the wall, the colours blue and red, Disney-ish. The television was boxy and old, the carpet worn.

‘You’ll notice that the ornaments in here are shite,’ she said proudly. ‘That’s what it’s like to live with an addict. Ye have to watch the fuckers every minute or they’ll rob the eyes out your head, swear to god.’

‘Must be hell,’ said Harris lightly.

‘It is.’ Annie hung her head. ‘It’s especially hard on the mothers. That’s why we set up M.A.D.’

‘So it’s a support group?’ asked Morrow.

‘Oh, more than that.’ Annie was suddenly animated. ‘We’re activists. Chased two of the fuckers out of this scheme last year.’

‘Chased?’ asked Harris mildly.

Smirking, Annie mimed lighting a match and throwing it. Morrow did remember something in the papers about houses on that scheme being firebombed. ‘Ye firebombed their houses?’ she said. ‘That’s illegal, Annie, someone could get killed.’

‘Never said that, did I?’ She stuck her tongue deep into her cheek defiantly, almost flirtatiously, daring them to prove it.

‘If you know of dealing on the scheme you should phone us.’

Annie wasn’t used to being disagreed with. ‘Well, we can hardly call the polis on them, can we? Ye never appear. Half of ye are on the take anyway.’

Morrow gave her a warning look, flicking her eyes to Harris, suggesting that though she herself was tolerant he’d be liable to lift her. Aware that she’d said the wrong thing, Annie looked penitent. ‘Sorry,’ she said to Harris. ‘God forgive me. I know a lot of ye are on the level.’

‘Did you firebomb someone?’

‘Naw, we never really.’ she said, but she was smirking. ‘Just kidding.’

‘Look.’ Morrow took charge. ‘Malcolm took a taxi from here to Toryglen yesterday morning. We think he might be in a lot of bother.’ It was a lie but she could live with it. ‘Could ye tell us who he knows there?’

She was stunned at the news. ‘In Toryglen?’

‘Toryglen, yeah, on the Southside.’

‘Doesn’t know anyone there. Toryglen, are ye sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Toryglen’s twenty quid away.’

‘Yeah.’ Morrow looked at her notes. ‘The fare was… eighteen thirty.’

‘Well,’ Annie was furious, ‘that wee fucker better be in a lot of trouble, somebody else better have paid that for him, I can tell ye, if he had money like that and wasn’t hiding it in the house. He owes me a lot of dough.’ She looked hopefully at Morrow’s notes. ‘Did someone else pay it?’

‘No, he pulled out a twenty and took the change.’

‘I’ll fucking kill him.’

‘Who’s he been spending time with recently? Is he working? Do you know who he’s been hanging about with, say, over the past couple of days?’

Annie was too angry to think. ‘I’ll fucking kill him. God for-fucking-give me, so fucking help me…’ Leaning back she glanced out of the front window and froze. As they watched she seemed to be nodding a wild signal at the picture window. Harris and Morrow stood up to see what she was looking at. Nothing there but a silver car. Morrow looked at Annie and realised that she wasn’t nodding but peering into the street alternately through the bottom and top half of her glasses, trying to get focus.

‘Mrs Tait? Who’s Malcolm been spending time with?’

Keeping her eyes on the road Annie seemed suddenly very calm. ‘Just his usual pals. Dealer over in Shettleston. James Kairn, lives near the Tower Bar. Might want to check that out. Could ye excuse me?’ She hurried out into the hall, opened the door and ushered them out into the street. Despite still having her slippers on she grabbed a set of keys from the sill inside and shut and locked the door, bid them a perfunctory goodbye, and scurried across the road.

They watched as Annie opened a neighbour’s garden gate and hurried up the path to concrete steps leading up to the front door. The other side of the road was on a slight hill and the steps were steep. Standing at the top, turning to greet Annie, was a blond man.

He was handsome, square-jawed, slim, dressed in clean jeans and a white T-shirt, no coat. He didn’t look like a local, he looked healthy, had muscled arms and a flat stomach, but he did have a broken nose. Outside the house a brand new silver Lexus was parked at the gate.

‘Have you got the plate of the Lexus we were looking for?’ asked Morrow.

Harris looked at his notebook. ‘VF1 7LJ.’

It wasn’t a match. ‘Unusual car out here, I would have thought. Run that plate anyway. We’ll wait.’

Harris scribbled it down and went back to the car to radio, leaving Morrow to watch. The blond man seemed pleased and surprised to see Annie. He turned to her and kissed her cheek, gave her a chaste cuddle. Clearly fond of the guy Annie couldn’t stop herself smiling up at him, but tried to affect annoyance by frowning hard and putting her hands on her hips, elbows jutting angrily out to the side.

Harris came back to her side.

‘Not that worried about Malcolm, is she?’ observed Morrow.

‘More worried about the twenty quid he had.’

Across the street the door opened and they disappeared inside. Harris was opening his car door but Morrow stopped him. ‘Look.’

The house was bought, the front door had been exchanged for a solid oak thing with vicious bolts studded on it on a Castilian pattern. The windows all had alarm wiring threaded along the glass and cameras were dotted along the wall. But what was bizarre was that Annie was standing at a window in the next-door house, two windows along, as if the houses had been knocked into one another.

‘Fortress Tait,’ said Harris. ‘I knew it was here somewhere, just never got the actual address.’

‘You call that number plate in?’

‘Yeah, boss, they’re checking it out now. Probably bogus, though.’

‘Yeah. What d’ye think she’s doing in there?’

Harris watched and shrugged. ‘Visiting family? Maybe she’s in there setting a firebomb.’