Still Midnight

36

Pat’s heart beat a bossa nova rhythm, a joyful tat tat tat at the thought of her being in there, through those locked wooden doors, sitting upright in bed bathed in yellow sunshine, a bride awaiting her groom, facing the corridor with the beginning of a smile on her lips. It was almost forty-eight hours since they had seen each other but it felt much longer.

He had been hanging about by the lifts, uncertain that this was the right floor, when he saw the mother waddle towards him, still wearing her nightie and overcoat. He turned away, covered his face and read the signs on the wall until she was past. There were orders posted all over the walls in the corridor: no mobiles, no visitors other than family before a certain time, no hot drinks, no this, no that. He swung behind her and made his way to the ward doors.

He saw through the glass panel that the corridor ahead of him was empty, buffed, glinting like a river. Acutely aware of every sensation, of his head tipping, of his heels leading the step of his feet, he reached forward and pushed the door.

Locked. He pushed lightly with his fingertips. Really locked, not stuck. He looked in through the window but couldn’t see anyone in there. It was definitely the right ward if the mother had just been there.

‘No one there?’

A woman standing behind him, slim, fifty, suited, glasses on a gold chain, carrying a sheaf of papers wrapped in a glossy yellow envelope. He gave her his best smile and shrugged. She smiled back, shifted the folders to balance on her raised knee and stabbed zero on the keypad five times. The door dropped open and he touched it with his fingertips, pushed, opening the passage into the river.

Pat held the door open for the woman and her folders and she thanked him with a simpering smile and a glance at his torso. ‘Not many gentlemen left, these days,’ she said as if everyone else had let her down.

Pat smiled again. He had held the door so that she would go ahead of him, so she wouldn’t be watching as he looked around. She walked down the corridor, standing straight and swaying her hips, certain of his attention.

But Pat wasn’t watching. He looked from left to right, into single rooms with yellow curtains half drawn across dark windows. Quiet ward. An old woman in a bed watching a wall-mounted television tuned to a chat show. A fat woman with both legs in plaster, sleeping, a teenage daughter next to her reading a celebrity magazine. Acute surgical.

The corridor snaked around a dog leg turn and each of the rooms had four beds in them, curtain partitions running on rails above them, many half pulled or yanked open incompletely. He could see who was in which room but he couldn’t stop for a good look in case anyone asked him who he was and what he was doing there.

As he approached the far end of the ward his courage began to fail him. Two toilet doors marked the end of the corridor and he had made up his mind to go into one, sit in it and decide what to do. It was then that he saw her.

He stood, staring in through the window at an old woman lying flat on a bed alone in the room. She had an oxygen mask on over her nose and mouth and he knew the grey look. She was dying, like Malki, alone, deserted.

‘Sorry…?’ A fat student nurse was ten feet away, wondering who he was.

Pat pointed at the window. ‘How long…?’

He meant how long until she dies but the nurse misunderstood. ‘Mrs Welbeck has been here for five days. Are you her…?’

Pat turned back to the window and whispered, ‘Nephew?’

‘Oh dear.’ She tilted her head. ‘So sorry. They did try to find family…’

He shook his head sadly, ‘No worries.’

Not knowing what to say now, he turned back to the window. The woman was in her seventies, eighties, balding like a baby bird, grey hair on a skull. She was propped up on pristine pillows but hadn’t moved. As she exhaled a barely perceptible skin of condensation formed on the mask. She was hardly breathing at all.

The nurse put a kindly hand on his arm. ‘Would you like to go in and see her?’

Pat nodded sadly and she took him by the hand, led him through the door into the room. A silent heart monitor blinked an orange eye at him. The room smelled of diluting orange tempered with talc. The sympathetic nurse led him to the bedside and brought a plastic chair over for him to sit on, which he did.

Grey flesh on a skull. Hands covered in paper-thin skin, veins you could see the pulse bump through. A thin wedding band, a miserly engagement ring, hanging loose on thin fingers. He could see a sticking plaster rolled around the back of the engagement ring to stop it falling off.

‘I’ll leave you alone.’ She walked around to the far side of the bed and began to pull the curtain between the window and the corridor.

‘No, no, no, please – it’s better to have the light…’

It sounded stupid. There was a window behind him, there wasn’t any light coming out of the corridor, but the nurse was used to dealing with grieving people making stupid comments and she went along with it. ‘Of course,’ she said and backed off out of the room, leaving Pat alone.

A sign above the bed said her name was Minnie Welbeck. In case the nurse was looking back into the room Pat took her right hand in both of his and found the fingertips cold, the palm warm, as if she was dying from the extremities inwards.

He had come here to cheer himself up, see the beautiful girl sitting in a bed, bathed in sunshine. He had thought about nothing but seeing her since he got in the car and drove away from Breslin’s, but there was something about Minnie that he couldn’t tear himself away from. She’d been married, maybe widowed. And now she was dying, alone, tucked out of everyone’s way, next to the toilets.

Slowly, like a tall flower dying on a fast exposure film, Pat wilted over his knees towards the little hand held between both of his. Gentle as air, he held Minnie’s knuckles to his forehead and wept.

They weren’t selling Lamborghinis here, that was for sure. The Lexus had been driven there by an unknown male, young, neddy-looking, clearly not the owner, certainly not Edward Morrison, the holder of the driver’s licence who’d hired the car and left a photocopy of his photo ID at the Avis office. The boy stopped outside the chicken wire fence, made a phone call and was let through the gates by an old guy. Morrow and Harris drew up across the road, and heard the FAU report over the radio that there was an Audi drawing up and an unidentified male, big, broad, letting himself through the gates, locking the two padlocks after himself and driving into the building.

‘Saw an Audi outside the Anwars’ the night the old man got taken,’ she said to Harris.

‘Reckon it’s Billal?’

‘Could be.’

It had been purpose built as a garage but a long time ago. The forecourt lay empty, weeds growing out of the cracks. Sun and rain had bleached the cheerful bunting clinging to the rusting chicken wire. It was on an industrial estate two miles out of town, visible from nowhere. It had probably failed under a couple of owners and been sold on cheap. The company that owned it now was a shell company, according to Routher’s investigations. They were still registered at Companies House but did business with no one and had filed a tax return that suggested they were still waiting to go into business. No known names on the list of directors. Billal was smart.

For a sleeping company they were taking a hell of a lot of precautions. Two padlocks on the gates, new automatic doors on the workshop, fresh bars on the windows and an elaborate CCTV system, a fish eye camera on every corner. The building itself was low slung, solid grey, unremarkable apart from the security measures. There wasn’t even a name on the door that she could see.

‘D’you think he’s in there?’ asked Harris.

‘Yeah, but we won’t get anywhere near him until FAU’ve had all their toys out.’

FAU were around the back, their van hidden a street away, crouching, working out a path in.

‘Think it was spite?’ asked Harris.

She kept her eyes on the door. ‘What?’

‘Going after Billal, because he’d hassled Lily? Think it was the Taits?’

‘Nah.’ She thought of the boy scowling at them from the armchair, of his thick brown hair and the perfect roundness of his chin, his fingers, his eyelashes. She imagined the softness of his cheek meeting her lips. ‘Grandad Tait must be desperate to see that boy. He wouldn’t risk it. Might pass the intel on to someone else but he’d never risk that, I don’t think. His wife died…’

‘How would he know about Billal having a VAT scam, though?’

‘Suppose he’d keep his ear to the ground, wonder where the money for Lily was coming from, dig about.’

‘Aye, dirt sees dirt, eh?’

Morrow smiled at that. ‘Yeah, dirt sees dirt right enough.’

The radio crackled to life, the FAU officer notified her that they were ready to go in around the back and Morrow and Harris looked at each other, excited as children.

They saw nothing. Watching the bland front of the garage they heard a crash, some shouting, another crash, someone shouting back and then silence. A long silence. When the FAU officer came back on the radio he sounded out of breath and angry. ‘We’ve got three guys. No firearms. A room full of…’ he broke off to ask someone what the room was full of, and then came back onto the radio, ‘broken-up cars. No papers to verify the ownership. Seems like… um… not, eh, legitimate.’

Morrow and Harris threw the car doors open and ran around to the back of the building. FAU had clipped a big hole through the chicken wire and battered the back door flat so it lay in the back entrance like a bridge. It led straight into the workshop.

It was so much colder inside that Morrow found herself shivering as she looked around at the engines and car doors stacked up against the wall. She was smiling as she looked up at the big FAUs in their protective gear and the three men they had nicked. Two wee guys and the big broad man in the Audi. The only one not wearing a cheap gaudy tracksuit. Danny McGrath looked at Morrow coldly, as if he’d never seen his sister in his life before.

She had skated straight into the path of the train.