Still Midnight

3

They drove the entire distance in silence, as per the plan. Say nothing in front of the hostage. But it wasn’t a smug professional silence: Pat was too angry to speak, Eddy was determined to get one part of it right and Malki was so wasted he was incapable of driving and speaking at the same time.

Malki was well used to being the cause of bad atmospheres; he lived with his mother, and assumed the sour mood in the van was his fault, because of the thing with the wall, so he was extra careful and his driving exemplary. He took the slip road to the motorway, drove at legal speeds the whole way into town, came off at Cathedral for a circuit of the Sighthill back road to break the camera tracking and then turned and headed back onto the motorway from a different angle. Flawless.

All the way the old man stayed face down on the rumbling floor of the van, lying in exactly the same position he had landed in after they pulled the pillowcase over his head and shoved his face to the van floor: legs straight out, one arm flat by his side, the other hand by his face, still, as the heavy white plastic petrol cans swam slowly about the floor.

He lay so still that Pat began to worry. He looked back often, concerned that he might have suffered a head injury when they chucked him into the van. Pat’d watched a guy die outside a club once. The guy, mid-thirties, staggered and tripped on the step, toppled backwards, hitting the pavement like a comedy drunk and lay there, out of the way. Everyone coming out of the club assumed he was pissed and sleeping. They laughed about it.

As they had zipped up the black rubber bag a sad-eyed ambulance guy explained that the skull has limited space in it. A bleed into the brain is like dropping a pickled egg into a full pint of lager, only there’s nowhere for the extra volume to go so the brain gets sucked down into the spinal column. That’s what kills you.

Remembering that night took Pat back to the door at the Zebra Wine Bar. Ugly drunks and the orange women staggering about on icy pavements in summer shoes. The women all had long hair that winter, he remembered. Nylon hair extensions that looked like bad wigs. 1669, they called the Zebra, because the women there looked sixteen from behind and sixty-nine from the front.

So he worried that the old man was dying under the pillowcase and he thought of the young girl he had shot and the pleasant, toast-smelling house, wishing he had stood up to Eddy and refused to go in. Eddy was a substitute family for Pat, had been for years, but suddenly Pat realised he’d picked the same family again: nasty loser fucking twats.

As though he could hear Pat shifting away from him, Eddy slapped the old man’s foot and asked his name. The pillowcase lifted slightly off the floor, said he was called Aamir and Pat knew then that Eddy had been afraid too. It was good because maybe Eddy wasn’t totally wrapped up playing soldiers, could still be reasoned with.

Eddy knelt next to the man in the back of the van, his balaclava rolled up around his forehead half an inch above his eyes. He wouldn’t look at Pat.

They were at Harthill, the heart of central Scotland, a bleak stretch of high ground littered with TV and mobile phone masts, where the winds were always brutal. Malki took a slip road, a perfect turn at the roundabout, took the sharp turn off the road into a field and rolled the van quietly along the foot of a hill into a coppice of windswept trees. He stopped, pulled on the handbrake and sighed, smacked his lips. He smiled at Pat.

Without a word to either, Eddy stood up, opened the van door and slipped out, closing it after himself.

Eddy stepped out of the tree cover into a vast muddy field.

The ground was frozen solid, the churned mud covered with a fur of sliver frost. A swollen blue moon lit the ground like a harsh strip light. Eddy, arms out for balance, kept his eyes on the uneven ground. The light was so sharp and blue that he could see individual icy fronds as he followed the tracks of the van, heading back towards an opening in the hedge. He stopped and looked around. The fallow field stretched over the horizon. He could hear the hum of cars passing on the distant motorway. No houses in view, no van loads of people camping in the field. No one. Perfect.

He followed the tracks of the van, walking down the churned middle for another two hundred yards, his breath crystalline in front of him. Though he had parked it there himself, Eddy still wanted to rest his tired eyes on the Lexus.

Stopping, he looked up the road at the side of the field and could see the edge of the silver boot, the red tail lights. It was a hire car. As he drove here, trying all the buttons, loving the bucket seat and the steering wheel CD controls, he’d promised himself he’d get one of these, when the money came through. The sight of it now calmed him and slowed his heart from a sprinter’s gallop.

Despite everything that had happened it might still be OK. Blinking back tears, Eddy made his way back to the van.