by Denise Mina
‘DI Morrow, hello.’
‘Hi, Pete.’
He looked past her, anxious. ‘All right, out there?’
‘Fine. Nothing to worry about.’
Pete watched the door. Morrow picked up her coat, walked out into the lobby and opened the note the macer had given her.
There, in a beautiful italic hand, Atholl had written
DI Morrow:
Mr Brown says ‘No’,
AA
The message made no sense.
‘Ma’am?’
It made no sense.
‘Are we going round to the holding cells, ma’am?’ McCarthy was standing in front of her, holding the MobileID bag.
‘No.’ She put the note in her pocket. ‘Office.’
She need a bit of quiet to think about it properly. They walked together to the car park just outside the front doors. McCarthy unlocked the car and got in. Morrow followed suit.
They drove in silence to the office. Morrow watched out of the window, at the city, towards the wasteland of the east, through the new Dalmarnock road.
She was having to roll right back: she had assumed that the murder was a set-up to get Brown off the new charges but the match they had on the guns was good. She knew they were good. Did she? The whole history of the case had to be reviewed. As she went back through the evidence and events she wondered how she had managed to end up at a dead end this solid, with no spurs, no dog legs, there seemed to have been no point at which she had made a faulty decision, or even made a decision.
‘There’s a van ...’ muttered McCarthy.
She wasn’t listening. She was drawing the events as a mind map: they arrested Brown on fingerprint evidence. Took his prints, got a match with his CRO number. A high-confidence match, the database said. Charged him. Straight to custody. While in prison the same prints appeared near a dead man at a recent site. It wasn’t her case. She didn’t need to bring it up now. He refused to give a fresh set of prints that would confirm the match.
As McCarthy drew up into the car park behind the police station it occurred to her that Atholl would be bringing the prints up during the fingerprint evidence. She should have stayed.
‘Shall I just put this back?’ asked McCarthy, reaching back into the well of the back seat for the MobileID bag.
‘Yeah,’ she said, unsettled and pulling out her phone. ‘Put it away, maybe.’
She got out and stood in the car park, scrolling through her numbers. She knew it was in there somewhere. She found it and called Pete Heder’s number.
He might still be giving evidence. She glanced at her watch. Ten minutes to lunch for the court. Pete could have his phone on him and when she heard it ring out she imagined him panicking on the witness stand, patting his pockets and apologising.
He answered, and she could hear that he was outside.
‘Pete Heder?’
‘Alex Morrow, is that you?’
‘Aye, just a quick question, Pete: did anything strange come up on the stand today?’
‘No. Straightforward ID, point by point comparison site and ten-prints. A palm print. Nothing unusual.’
‘OK. Thanks very much. Bye.’
‘No probl—’
But she’d hung up. She didn’t want to interrupt her train of thought.
McCarthy was gone when she looked around. He must have gone in.
She walked slowly up the ramp to the back bar where Mike, the desk sergeant, was sitting quietly behind a round glass window around the computer terminals.
‘DS Harkins.’
‘DI Morrow.’ He stood up, ready for a bit of banter. ‘How are we today?’
‘Mike, give us a look at the ten-prints logbook, would you?’
He straightened up. ‘For today?’
‘No, for Michael Brown’s date of arrest.’ She scribbled it down and handed it over.
Mike read it. ‘That’s in the storeroom, ma’am.’ He saw the blank look on her face. ‘I’ll go and get it.’
He went off, using his keys to get into the storeroom. Morrow looked over at the LiveScan fingerprint machine around the back of the desk. It looked like an arcade game: the screen was at eye level, bulky, not especially pleasant to look at. They had to replace the screen a while ago when a junkie head-butted it. Next to it sat a spray bottle of disinfectant, plastic gloves and wipes. She remembered Brown standing in front of it, she’d walked through the back bar when he was having his prints taken.
She stood in the quiet, watching the monitors, listening to quiet shifting from the cells. She looked at the blackboard: two in custody. Quiet day.
Mike came back with a black logbook and put it on the desk in front of her, his hand on top. ‘Have to check it here.’
‘Can’t take it to my office?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Logbook has to stay here.’
She flicked through it to the right date, followed the column down to the time of day, around ten, and found his entry timed at ten twenty-three a.m. She found the job reference number next to Michael Brown’s name and jotted it down in her notebook. She slid the log back across to Harkins.
‘Thanks, Mike.’
She slipped into the CID wing, went into her office and switched on her computer, logging in and typing in the job reference number for the set of prints they had taken that day.
The computer took her straight to the National Fingerprint Form.
Morrow remembered when these had to be filled out by hand. It was substantially the same form as then but with a few extra fields. Michael Brown had signed it at the bottom. She looked closer. The criminal record number had been entered by the arresting officer – they had the number on the warrant. The prints were the same.
She went to his criminal record and looked up the history of who had accessed it and when. She reread it four times. She came back out and went in again, thinking she must have made a mistake, but the results were the same: Wainwright’s division had never accessed Michael Brown’s criminal record.
She checked again. In the past two years Brown’s fingerprint record hadn’t been accessed by anyone but her division.
She sat back. Wainwright wouldn’t be lying, he was straight, she was sure. But she’d never have believed Harris was bent either. She stopped, took a breath, felt a little bit sick. Not again. She couldn’t report a fellow officer again. They’d picked her because they knew that. They knew she was half ruined anyway, so they’d picked her.
No. That was crap. Morrow splayed her hands on the desk to steady her thoughts. If Wainwright was in Brown’s pay, if it was a simple attempt to muddy the value of the fingerprints on the guns in his garden then Brown would have agreed to the rescan. Unless he and Atholl were waiting to bring it up on appeal, but that was clumsy and unlikely to work: they’d be taking a chance.
Looking for something, anything, else, she typed in ‘Brown, Michael’ to the search engine of the Scottish Police Computer. Seven files came up, each with a distinct history. Wainwright had accessed the fifth one. She was afraid to open it in case she was wrong, shut her eyes, said a vague prayer and clicked. The database holding unidentified scene of crime finger-marks linked Brown, Michael to Wainwright’s case.
It was a different Michael Brown.
Relieved, she opened Wainwright’s file on Brown. He had been charged with the murder of his older brother Pinkie when he was fourteen and found guilty. He got life.
She opened the photo of him. It was Michael Brown as a young man, front and side. He had a yellow T-shirt on and glared into the camera. The record gave his height, weight, age. It showed the set of prints taken from him at the point of arrest and a serious-case number that she recognised from the last four digits, the date of his brother’s murder.
She made a note of the charging station code, and the rank and name of the officer who had signed the form verifying that he was identifying the exhibit: DC Harry McMahon.
Then she sat back and thought through the implications. Michael Brown, the
man she had spent three months interviewing, had two criminal records and, apparently, four hands. Two of those hands had touched guns and hidden them in his garden. Someone else’s hands had killed his brother when Michael Brown was fourteen. He’d been set up.
If she dug this up now it would be professional suicide for her: it would cost a fortune to reinvestigate, Brown would have to be released from prison immediately because he wouldn’t have a safe murder conviction or a life sentence hanging over him any more and, worse, Alex Morrow would be pursuing another corruption scandal on the force. Whoever set Brown up would be fifteen years further into their career than her. It could be anyone.
15
Julius McMillan had picked this site for his law practice because of the back door. The front of the office was unremarkable: a shop window with his name picked out in gold letters and all the usual solicitors’ stickers: legal aid, personal injury. The door was kept painted, the window kept clean and the doorstep brushed, but all of his business came in through the back door.
The first time Rose came here was ten years ago. She was fresh out of prison and though she was nineteen, she’d never been in a professional office before. She remembered hanging back in the doorway, looking around as Mr McMillan checked the answer-phone and Mrs Tait’s list of ‘to dos’ and ‘dones’. She was blown away by it: the desks, the staplers, the printers, the computer, all the stuff he owned, the sheer volume of things. He didn’t act rich though. Didn’t even seem to notice all of this stuff. Rose left prison with a bin bag and that was only half full.
She’d come in the back way then and it hadn’t changed much.
The back court was a square fortress: surrounded on all four sides by blocks of rotting tenements: small flats owned privately in a rough area. If a housing association had owned them there would always have been the danger of them renovating the back court. If the area had been better, the population more stable, the space in the middle could have been developed as allotments, a swing park, or even a car park. None of that had happened.
The ground was muddy and broken up. The old brick midden in the centre was listing, tipsy. Different windows were broken but it was more or less the same as the first time.
The back court could be entered through two openings in each wall around the square. The police couldn’t watch every entrance: it would have cost two polis all day on each wall. They could have asked a friendly shopkeeper to train a camera on the doorways, watch who went in, but the locals saw who went in and knew they were not to be crossed.
Rose walked over the muddy ground, keeping to the side of the midden, skirting the side of a wall and veering off suddenly to the near close. Taking the keys from her pocket, she used them on a door so inauspicious it might lead to a cool cellar. She slipped in and shut the door behind her, reaching over to punch the code for the alarm. 0883. Rose’s birthday. The alarm beeped twice.
She stood still in the dark. The smell of him. The air a bitter tang, tar radiating off the walls. Rose didn’t like the smell of smoke but she liked it here: the sour, kind edge of it like a sin, forgiven.
She shut her eyes tight, shaking her head, shedding heart-softening memories. She had things to do here. She couldn’t leave the children with Francine for too long.
In the front office the white blinds on the windows lent a twilight to the room. A reception desk, never manned since Mrs Tait retired three years ago. She took out the keys from the key cupboard and unlocked the grey filing cabinet, pulling each of the drawers out one by one. Nothing in any of them. Checking for stray documents on the floor of each one, she pushed the hanging folders to the back, to the front. Nothing. She shut them and locked the cabinet before moving on to the desk. Nothing in the drawers there either. Either he had emptied everything recently or else the money was the only business he had last been involved in. He didn’t seem to have been defending anyone.
She took the keys and fitted them in the locked office door. Pulling the door open she dredged a waft of Julius’s unique smell from the sealed room. She stood still for a moment, ambushed, trying not to breathe, waiting for the air on either side of the door to equalise.
She felt his smell, particles settling on her, bits of his skin on her skin, in her nose, trapped on eyelashes, settling like invisible snow in her hair. She wanted it to go on for ever. But it didn’t. The sensation of closeness evaporated, her mind drifted.
She opened her eyes and felt inside for the light switch. Click. It was a harsh sun he lived under, strip lights behind ceiling grilles that didn’t soften it at all.
Mr McMillan didn’t care about nice furniture, his eyes were always on the middle distance. The desk and chairs he had lived with day after day were perfunctory, as good as they needed to be for their function and not a bit better. A wallchart day planner on the wall behind looked industrial, red and black, a felt-tip hung on a frayed string next to it. Most days were marked with a symbol: a triangle, a star, a square or a dash. The markings stopped from the evening his lungs collapsed.
Her eyes had adjusted properly now and she looked at the floor. Nothing there except for a biro. The sight of it winded Rose. It was where it was dropped that caught her: on the floor under the desk, where his hand had been when she arrived, where he lay when she called the ambulance and let them in the front door to take him away. Aziz Balfour. She knew it was him before she saw the bruise on his hand, before he tried to explain, because his sticker was on the planner, a red star. And she knew Dawood was the yellow rectangle before him, both in the six thirty p.m. time slot. They must have seen each other. Aziz screamed it at her: he saw Dawood. Up in the Red Road, in the burning wind and dark, he screamed that he’d met Dawood coming out of Julius’s office, did they know what sort of man this was? He saw Dawood and was offended by the sight of him. That was his excuse for shoving Julius.
She blinked, forced herself to look away from the biro, back to the office, fighting the tightness in her chin, in her chest, the stinging in her eyes.
Julius McMillan might just have dragged himself next door, holding onto walls as he needed to at the end. She could hear his laboured breathing scraping through his throat and nose, each breath in a miracle of will, loud and defiant. He had been so ill for so long, they had all got used to his health being precarious, but none of them expected him to actually die.
She looked back at the pen and tenderness engulfed her. Julius McMillan at a door to an interview room, a fug of smoke was the first thing she noticed about him, his neat yellowed fingernails and the certainty of his handshake.
Hello, Rose, I’m Mr McMillan. I know what has happened and I, alone, will not turn away. You will be a child for them and only I will know. You can be yourself with me.
When Rose first saw McMillan she didn’t take him for a kind man. Even now, she didn’t think he was a kind man but he had been good to her. And yet, at the last minute, he chose Robert over her. He’d sent Robert to the office, not her. Atholl was wrong, Julius didn’t love her. He didn’t trust her in the end. He let her run the money deliveries to the couriers, he let her check his numbers and know his business, but he only loved Robert. In the end it was Robert he had sent down here with the code. He was wrong to trust him. Robert had let his father down, submitted a SOCA report. It was too much for him, they had kept him protected. They’d done the job too well. Julius didn’t love her or choose her in the end but she loved him.
Mr McMillan became the receptacle for all her fiery loyalties and she loved him still.
Rose shut the office door, checked that it was locked from the inside. She glanced around the room and under the desk, worried that someone was hiding. Silly, but she didn’t want to get locked in down there. You could die down there.
Opening the small door at the back of the office, she bent, climbing into a corridor to the old coal cellar.
The seven steps led down to a low room, just tall enough to stand up in, lower since Mr McMillan took it over because he’d had it lined in concrete. T
he cold settled in here like damp fog at the ankles. Set into the concrete on the back wall was the safe. Big enough to get a man into, he used to say. Rose took the handle, turned it down and it opened. Papers on one shelf. Below, leather-bound books. The books he would have wanted the Inland Revenue or the Law Society to find if they raided his office. There was usually cash in there, eight or ten thou, a distraction in case of burglars or cops. Robert or Dawood must have taken it.
She took the binders out and laid them carefully on the floor, took the cold steel shelf out and laid it next to them. She put one foot in and felt along the ceiling of the safe. It was a fake roof. Her fingers slid along the searing cold to the back edge, found the rim and slid it to the left, to the junction with the side. A small button, almost flush with the back wall, she had to feel for it. She took her hand away quickly and waited, counting slowly to eight. She reached back in and pressed again.
The back wall slid slowly to the right, into the concrete wall. Holding both walls of the safe Rose stepped in, stooping down the short low corridor to a crawl space below the pavement. Bright white motion lights flicked on inside. This room was warm, dry and warm because of the next-door launderette’s ventilation shaft running next to it.
A flimsy hotel safe, concreted low down on the wall, with a resettable four-digit code. It was nothing special. She remembered herself and McMillan laughing at the suggestion of a biotech safe with thumbprint or retinal lock. The salesman didn’t understand what was funny about it. The people they were hiding things from wouldn’t flinch from cutting off a hand or taking an eye if they needed it. No, said McMillan, no, it’s just a small one for the house. Best defence against attack was to give them what they wanted. Danegeld, he called it. They didn’t need a great safe, they needed a secret safe.
Rose sat cross-legged on the bare concrete in front of the safe. The code could be reset by anyone, with just a simple press of a hash button. Robert had reset it. She knew before she even tried that none of their birthdays would work, not the kids’, not hers, not Robert’s own, not Julius’s. She tried the date of Julius’s death. She tried the hour of his death. Nothing. Could be anything. It probably was anything. Random numbers. But random numbers chosen by Robert. She needed to think like Robert, at the moment he set the safe lock.