Still Midnight

by Denise Mina

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Critical acclaim for Denise Mina’s novels

  ‘Something special. A tour de force.’

  The Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Denise Mina is arguably proving to be one of the finest crime writers of her generation. This is intelligent, humane and complex story-telling at its best. It’s studded with images that stick in the mind long after the book is closed. Denise Mina is set to carve a niche for herself as the Crown Princess of Crime.’

  Val McDermid

  ‘All the characters are richly drawn, though especially brilliant are Mina’s depictions of the forlorn Jimmy - unemployed, hapless, lovingly caring for his four “weans” - and of the ambivalent Maureen, aggressive and needy, independent yet desirous of affection, confident of the future but unable to purge the demons of her past.’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘The plot is unrolled artfully. The writing is lucid, and the minor characters breathe with an almost Dickensian life.’

  The Sunday Times

  ‘Mina once again explores complex characters that live on the edge of society and brings the curtain down on one of the best series of thrillers to emerge in years.’

  Daily Record

  ‘An urgent, compelling read.’

  The List

  ‘A clever, pacy, realistic thriller. The characters are all too touchingly human.’

  Punch

  ‘A deeply moving work and a gripping narrative.’

  Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Genuinely gripping novel, written in diary form, with sinewy prose . . . Glasgow has found itself an Ian Rankin.’

  The Times

  Also by Denise Mina

  The Last Breath

  The Dead Hour

  The Field of Blood

  Sanctum

  Resolution

  Exile

  Garnethill

  Still Midnight

  DENISE MINA

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Orion Books,

  an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House, 5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Denise Mina 2009

  The moral right of Denise Mina to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (Hardback) 978 1 4091 0052 2

  eISBN : 978 1 4091 0716 3

  Typeset by Input Data Services Ltd, Bridgwater, Somerset

  Printed in Great Britain by CPI Mackays, Chatham, Kent

  The Orion Publishing Group’s policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  For Gerry, A.K.A. Coffee,

  for the story, for shoving me

  off walls/bunk beds/sheds and for

  introducing me to The Clash.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to Peter, Jon, Jade and everyone who helped me get this done.

  And to Stevo, Mum, Tonia and Ownie and Ferg for their support.

  1

  An orange Sainsbury’s plastic bag in full sail floated along the dark pavement. Belly bowed, handles erect, it sashayed like a Victorian gentleman on a Sunday stroll, passed a garden gate and followed the line of the low rockery wall until a sudden breeze buffeted it, lifting the fat bag off its heels, slamming it into the side of a large white van.

  Air knocked from it, the bag crumpled to the floor, settling softly under the van’s back wheel.

  The van was barely three weeks old, had already been stolen and bore false number plates. It was parked carefully at the kerb, still warm from the heat of the engine, and in six hours’ time it would be found smouldering in woodland, all forensic traces of the men inside obliterated.

  Three men sat in the cabin, faces turned in chorus, watching the bungalow across the road.

  The driver, Malki, leaned over the steering wheel. He was junkie-thin. From deep inside the dark hood of his tracksuit his sunken eyes darted around the street like a cat hunting a fly.

  The two men next to him moved as one animal. Eddy in the middle and Pat sitting by the far door. Both in their late twenties, they’d worked for seven years as a two-man door crew on the graveyard shift. They’d watched films together, met and dumped women together, went to the gym together and, in the manner of married couples, their style had harmonised. Both were meaty, dressed identically in brand new black camouflage trousers, high lace boots, flack waistcoats and balaclavas rolled up to their foreheads. All the gear was fresh from the packet, the display creases still discernable.

  A longer look would identify the differences between them. Eddy in the middle drank too much since the wife and kids left. He ate greasy takeaways late at night when he got in from work, undoing all the good he’d done himself in the weights room, and had become bloated and bitter. His eye was forever fixed on what he didn’t have.

  It had long been a bone of contention between them that Pat was handsome. Worse, he looked younger than Eddy. More moderate in his character, he didn’t eat or drink as much and fumed less. He was blessed with a head of lush yellow hair, appealingly regular features, and had a stillness about him that made women feel safe. His nose had been broken but even that only served to make his face look vulnerable.

  It was Eddy who had come up with the scheme and he had bought the kit. Belligerently, he had bought both sets in the same size, in his size. As they’d dressed together in Eddy’s messy bedsit he’d brought out a tin of black camouflage make-up for them to smear on their faces, like they did when they went paintballing. Softly, almost tenderly, Pat said no and made him put it away. They’d be wearing balaclavas; it wasn’t necessary and that stuff dried out and made Pat’s skin itchy. The glee with which E
ddy had produced it worried Pat. It was as if they were putting the final touches to a surprising Halloween costume instead of planning a home invasion that could lead to a twenty-year stretch. Pat had never even done an overnight. Now he fingered the flattened bridge of his nose, covering his face with his hand, hiding his doubt.

  He looked down at the gun in his lap. It was heavier than he would have thought, he was worried about being able to hold it up with one hand. He glanced at Eddy and found him glaring at the bungalow as if it had insulted him.

  Pat shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t have volunteered Malki to be here either. This wasn’t about trying to cheer Eddy up any more. This was dangerous, this felt like a mistake. He looked away. Eddy had been through too much recently. Not big stuff but sore stuff, and Pat felt as if a single reproachful glance might snap him in half. Still, he looked up at the neat little garden path, at the quiet glowing house and thought that a twenty-year stretch was an awful lot of sorry-about-your-wife.

  It was a nice family bungalow, well proportioned, with a shallow garden stretching all the way around the corner into the next street. The current owner, pragmatic, without thought for aesthetics, had bricked over the lawn and flower beds to create a car park. A blue television tinge flickered in the living-room window and a warm pink shone through the glass front door into the hall.

  ‘See?’ Eddy said softly, keeping his eyes on the house. ‘Single hostile in living room. Small, possibly female.’

  A woman in her own home. Nothing hostile about that. Instead of saying it Pat nodded and said, ‘Check.’

  ‘We’re going in along the back wall, ’member to stay in the dark, until we get to the front door.’

  ‘Check.’ Pat didn’t really know the military patter and was wary of straying from that one word. Eddy was enjoying it, the whole special ops thing, and Pat didn’t want to spoil it for him.

  ‘Then—’ Eddy broke off into quasi-militaristic signs. He pointed at Pat, indicated forwards, touched his own chest and swivelled his head to show he’d be on lookout. He mimed Pat knocking on the front door, his eyes widened with warning as an imaginary hostile opened it, and his hand chopped a Go! Go! Go! through the air. His hand got into the house and then, zigzagging like a fish through reeds, looked into all the rooms off the hall, circling all the hostiles they had gathered in the hallway.

  ‘Then we ask for Bob. Not before. Not before. Don’t give the cunt warning while he could still be concealed. And no names once we get in. Clear?’

  ‘Check.’

  Eddy turned and slapped the jittery driver’s arm with the back of his hand. ‘When the door opens for the second time, we’re coming out. You start the engine, pull up over there.’ He pointed to the garden gate. ‘Got it?’

  Malki stared steadily into the street, his face slack, his eyes glazed over.

  ‘Malki.’ Pat leaned across Eddy and touched Malki’s forearm gently. ‘Hey, Malki-man, d’ye hear Eddy just then?’

  Malki came alive. ‘Aye, no worries, man, like, soon as I see the light - doof! Up there, right? Straight there, man.’ He held the steering wheel tight and nodded adamantly, half affirmation, half wired-junkie tremor. His eyelashes were as ginger as his hair, straight and long as a cow’s.

  Pat bit his lip and sat back, looking out of the side window. He could feel Eddy’s reproachful glance burning his cheek. Malki was there because he was Pat’s young cousin. Malki needed the dosh, he always needed dosh, but he wasn’t fit for it. Neither was Pat, if he was honest.

  For a moment all three looked back at the bungalow, Pat chewing the inside of his cheek, Eddy angry and frowning, Malki nodding and nodding and nodding.

  The wind picked up.

  Below the van’s back wheel the stunned plastic bag was waking up. As the breeze streamed below the car the bag filled up at one corner and began tugging its feet free until it slid out from the undercarriage.

  In the wide, still street the bag rose to its feet, performed an elegant cartwheel across the road, towards the house and took flight in a sharp cross draft at the corner. It parasailed ten feet into the air, an orange moon, up and up, drifting out of sight of the van, around the corner to the other side of the bungalow and over the roof of a blue Vauxhall Vectra.

  The Vauxhall’s headlights were off but two men sat inside, slumped in the front seats, arms folded, waiting.

  They were a scant five years younger than the pretend soldiers in the van around the corner but were better fed, better groomed, altogether more shiny and hopeful.

  Omar was spindly and awkward, a walking elbow-jab. He still had the sort of ethereal thinness young men have before they fill out; everything about him was elongated: his nose was long, his jaw pointed, his fingers so long and thin they seemed to have extra joints on them. Mo, in the driver’s seat, was round faced, with a bulbous end to his nose that would worsen as he aged.

  They had been waiting for twenty minutes, talking sometimes to fill the time, but mostly silent. The radio rumbled in the background and the soft yellow light lit their chins. Ramadan AM broadcast locally for only one month a year. It filled its schedules with young Glaswegians clumsily rehashing opinions they’d heard at Mosque or on tapes. Mo and Omar weren’t listening for moral instruction; it was a small community and sometimes they knew the speakers and got a laugh when they sounded nervous or said stupid things. The debates were best early in the evening, when everyone was hungry. Mo and Omar would chant over the rancour: ‘Give us a biscuit, give us a biscuit.’

  Mo sat in the driver’s seat resting his eye on a magazine with a double page spread about Lamborghinis.

  ‘Fuck, man,’ he said almost to himself, ‘couldn’t pay me to take that car.’

  Omar didn’t answer.

  ‘I mean park that car anywhere and it’ll get keyed to fucking ribbons.’

  ‘It’s not for going messages for your mum.’ Omar’s voice was surprisingly high. ‘’S for cruising up the neighbourhood, being seen in.’

  Mo looked at him. ‘Impressing fit birds and that?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Mo looked back at the pictures. ‘Aye, well, you’d know, being a noted ladies’ man.’

  Omar rubbed hard at his right eye with spidery fingers. ‘Listen, man women are fighting to get at me. Just, like, when you’re there they lay off, because, ye know, might make ye feel inadequate and that.’

  ‘Course they do.’ Mo nodded at the magazine. ‘You’re a good tipper.’

  Omar yawned and stretched, drawling when he spoke. ‘I’m an international lady magnet.’

  Mo jabbed an animated finger at an action photo of a yellow Lamborghini taking a corner on a sunny mountain side. ‘It looks like a speed bump. Folk won’t know whether to be impressed or slow down, man.’

  The pundit on Radio Ramadan gave a time check - 10.23 - and both did the mental calculation.

  Mo spoke first. ‘Give it five minutes or so.’

  ‘Aye.’ Omar yawned luxuriously again, juddering on the come-down, ‘Bloody knackered . . . Can’t have a smoke in here, can I?’

  ‘Nah, man, it’ll stink the motor out.’

  ‘Put my window down, then.’

  Mo huffed and pressed the button on his door to lower Omar’s window. Then he twitched a smile and lowered his own. Tutting, Omar took out his packet, handed a cigarette to Mo and took one himself before lighting them both up.

  They sat, puffing shallow breaths, blowing white streams of smoke that flattened over the windscreen. The October breeze outside tugged thin tendrils of smoke out, over the roof of the car and into the quiet street.

  Back around the corner, in the front seat of the stolen van, Eddy and Pat were pulling their balaclavas down, adjusting the eyeholes. Eddy picked up his gun and he and Pat looked at it. The barrel was vibrating, amplifying the shakes in his hand. Suddenly angry, Eddy nodded a ‘go’.

  Pat hesitated for only a moment before loyalty propelled him out of the van. By the time both his feet were on the street he was al
ready rueing it.

  Behind him Eddy slithered down, shut the door and thumped Pat on the back, knocking him towards the gate.

  Pat turned and squared up to him, ready to say his piece, but Eddy didn’t notice. Keeping his gun flush to his side, he ran in a low crouch across the road to the gate and up the dark path.

  The wind in the street made Pat’s eyes stream and through the tears he watched Eddy running up the path, fast and low, enjoying himself. Pat chased after him, aping him, his head down, back straight, a human battering ram. They took the steep garden path in single file, Eddy heading towards the pink glow at the front door, Pat running after Eddy to say no. Suddenly Eddy veered off the path, standing in the shadow of the fence.

  Pat caught up to him. ‘Eddy—’

  But Eddy swung his gun up parallel to his cheek and flicked the safety catch off. His chest was heaving with excitement as he wrapped both hands around the butt and scampered over to the front door.

  Pat watched Eddy, noting quietly that he was running too fast across the short space. Eddy arrived before he expected to, spun awkwardly and slammed his back flush against the wall, his head jerking back on his neck, his skull cracking loudly off the brickwork.

  Eddy’s eyes snapped shut at the pain. He bent forward from the waist slightly, panted, waggled the barrel of his gun at Pat to tell him to move.

  Pat wondered suddenly if he could grab Eddy’s arm, pull him back to the van. Or just turn and walk himself, get in the van with Malki, refuse to move, but they had shelled out for the van already, bought the guns, and anyway Malki needed to be paid. Malki really needed to be paid.

  Pat took a breath and, against his own best counsel, sauntered casually out of the dark, up to the front door.