Still Midnight

by Denise Mina

  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.’

  34

  Annie was the one person in the world Pat wanted to see less than Eddy at the moment but she wouldn’t be shaken off and she wouldn’t shut up about Malki’s twenty quid.

  She stood too close to Pat, so close he couldn’t focus on her face without hurting his eyes. And she wasn’t standing still either, she was reeling towards and away from Pat, peering at him top and bottom through ridiculously thick glasses.

  ‘I mean if he’s getting money from somewhere it should come through me,’ said Annie, a grasping smile at the corner of her mouth. ‘I pay for everything, he owes me about seven hundred quid or nine hundred quid anyway.’

  ‘I dunno anything about it, Auntie Annie, honest.’

  Pat was waiting to be told the Big Man wouldn’t see him, waiting to be told he should deal with Parki, who was reading a newspaper at the far end of the room and ignoring him. They always made you wait.

  Pat didn’t want to see the Big Man really, it was too complicated, too much bowing and scraping. He had knocked them back for job after job, for security positions in the family firm, for one-off muscle shifts. Worse than that, Pat wouldn’t let them use his name on any of the legal papers for the security firm. Relations with his relatives were cold to say the least. That’s how they got everyone involved, freezing them out if they didn’t comply. Pat had been pretty straight his whole life until now, until this. Loyalty to Eddy had made him go along with it.

  ‘Where’d he get it from?’ Annie persisted. ‘From you? For what?’

  Pat shrugged and looked away. He hated this cold house. They’d knocked two into one, knocked down a wall to make a living room that was double the size. It was all wrong, the shape was wrong, ceilings too low to fit with the room, four big windows from the front and back, like a waiting room or something. Impossible to heat. Stupid. The big man had money but no taste, he’d bought expensive stuff, desks and antiques and that, but the stuff was all dotted around the room like a garage sale.

  ‘Never came from me, Annie, I dunno why he’s got money.’

  Big Man wouldn’t let anyone clean it now either, not since his wife died, and everything looked sticky and dirty. Pat focused his eye on a glass display cabinet. It looked like something that should be in a shop, a glass box with three shelves in it and a dead bulb at the top, hanging slightly out of its socket. Inside were three sculptures of Chinese women, one sitting under a brolly, one leaning against a tree, one sitting on a bench. They all had the same face.

  ‘Mean, everb’y knows I handle his money. If they’ve got anything else to give him they should gae it tae me.’

  This was what he had to get away from. All of this. Mothers chiselling money from weans, cold rooms, waiting for knock-backs. He wanted toast and warm and pink and hair on pillows. He wanted family members who cried when one of them was taken away. Kindness.

  ‘See, Pat, son—’

  ‘Auntie Annie, he never got that money from me. I don’t know where he got it.’

  She crossed her arms and looked him up and down. ‘He’s been hanging about Toryglen. Who lives in Toryglen?’ She was threatening him.

  Pat stared at her. ‘Did he tell ye he was going to Toryglen?’

  ‘Nut,’ she glanced out of the window, ‘polis are looking for him.’ She was looking at a couple in a black Ford outside. ‘He got a cab yesterday and they found out he’d went there.’

  The police were sitting in a car outside the house right now looking for Malki. Pat felt suddenly violently sick. He shrugged awkwardly. ‘I dunno anyone in Toryglen.’

  ‘Shugie Wilson,’ said Annie, flatly.

  She was so fucking fly. Pat always forgot. ‘I don’t know Shugie.’

  ‘Aye, ye do,’ she said, looking at him through the bottom of the lenses. ‘Alki. Drinks in Brian’s. Used to run wi’ the Bankshead buoys.’

  Parki coughed a dry bark and turned the page of his newspaper noisily. He was telling Annie to shut up, that Pat was an outsider and not to be trusted. He had been a knife-fighter when he was young. He had a scar across his face, a slash that took his bottom lip apart. They mismatched the slit when they put it together. It still made Pat flinch to look at it.

  Annie was standing close to Pat, smiling over at Parki as if they were together. ‘Auntie Annie, do you mind?’

  ‘What, son?’

  ‘I want to talk to Parki in private.’

  She looked at Parki to overrule Pat but he didn’t say anything, his face didn’t flicker. They both stared at her.

  ‘Oh that’s fucking nice.’ She stepped back along the room. ‘Tell your old auntie to go fuck herself.’ She stopped, waiting for them to insist on her coming back but they didn’t. Sulking, she sloped off. Gordon, the Big Man’s other heavy, let her out of the front door.

  Pat and Parki looked at each other across the football pitch of a room. ‘’S a wonder Malki’s such a nice wee guy, innit?’ said Parki.

  Gordon came in from the door. He’d been a body builder in his day. Took steroids but hadn’t worked out since his back injury. All the muscle had turned to fat. Even his fingers were fat now. Rumour was his dick was the size of a cigarette. ‘The big man’ll see ye now, Pat.’

  Dumb with surprise Pat followed Gordon out of the room and up the stairs. Gordon’s back was so fat that his neck wasn’t visible from one step down. At the top of the stairs Gordon turned to Pat and smiled. ‘Nice to see you here, by the way,’ he said. It struck Pat as strange that he said it like that, warm, as if Pat was back with them. He motioned to the door, knocked twice on Pat’s behalf and swung it open into a small living room.

  The Big Man probably didn’t recognise it himself and Pat only saw it because he’d been away for so long, but the pokey upstairs living room was a recreation of the house he used to live in. A brown armchair faced its twin, empty now that the wife was dead. A small telly sat on top of a lacy doily over a wee chest of dark wood drawers that they’d had in the old house. The sideboard was even running away from the door the way it did in the old room, before he bought the next house and had the wall knocked down. On the walls and dotted around the room were the symbols of his tribe, a big wooden crucifix with a brass Christ writhing on it, novenas propped up against devotional candles, a framed picture of Padre Pio on the wall. School photos of his daughter, smiling, gap-toothed.

  The Big Man wasn’t big but he was square, like professional footballers in another age, a terrier of a man. He looked up at Pat from his armchair and seemed old but still vital, still threatening. ‘Son.’ He nodded, almost smiled, and Pat wondered if he’d been missed. It seemed unlikely. The Big Man had a lot of nephews and Pat’s mother had been dead a long time. ‘What’s your business?’

  ‘Um.’ Pat stood awkwardly by the door, his hands in his pockets, wanting to leave. ‘I’m sorry to come here . . .’

  The Big Man waved his hand, telling him to get
on with it.

  ‘I’ve got a hire car outside, need to get rid of it and get another motor. I didn’t know who else to come to . . .’

  ‘Hired in your name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Model?’

  ‘Lexus.’

  The Big Man nodded. ‘OK. Tell Parki I said it’s OK and you’ve to get a few grand as well.’ He looked at Pat expectantly.

  ‘Oh. Um, thanks very much.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Bewildered by the non sequitur Pat glanced behind him.

  ‘No . . . ?’ prompted the Big Man, turning his ear, wanting to hear something. Pat frowned, he couldn’t guess what that was.

  ‘Sorry?’

  Bizarrely, the Big Man chortled to himself and said Pat’s name a few times. He sighed and looked at him. ‘I knew it.’ He stood up and walked over to the sideboard, reached down and took out a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label. He unscrewed the lid and poured two shots into crystal glasses that looked dusty, smiling all the while.

  It hit Pat like a slap on the back of the head. The Big Man knew. He knew about the van, the guns and the pillowcase, and he thought Pat understood or he’d have dragged it out, made him guess.

  He handed Pat a glass, and lifted the other to his mouth. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Going?’

  ‘The thing. With Eddy, how’s it going?’

  Pat held the glass to his mouth and breathed in a cloud of bitter whisky.

  ‘Aye,’ said the Big Man. ‘Ye can see me after - square up then.’

  They owed him money. Eddy owed the Big Man money. That’s how they got the van, the guns, the brand new clothes, the fucking face paint Eddy had asked him to put on in the bedsit before. Pat had struggled to stay out of all this and it turned out now that Eddy had gone to the Big Man for capital and betrayed him from the off.

  ‘Still attending to your devotions?’ He was frowning up at Pat, serious, nodding, as if this was what really mattered to him.

  Pat downed the whisky in a oner, gasping, ‘No. I’m not religious.’

  The Big Man held his glass but didn’t drink. ‘That’s a shame,’ he said into the glass. ‘That’s a shame. Our faith is what holds us together. Used to be a culture, a family, what kept us together. Now folk go sometimes, don’t do confession, only pray sometimes. It’s not a finger buffet. Ye can’t just pick and choose bits of it to please yourself.’