Still Midnight

Her driver was pulling a long turn. ‘Are you… um, should I back…?’

‘Just stop.’

For a second his lips parted in dismay but then he clamped them shut, staring forwards as he pulled on the handbrake, not reacting. Forget fair. She knew she was wrong to speak to him like that, but she never knew how to fix these things. She opened the door and stepped out into the soft October rain, took a deep breath and leaned back into the cabin. ‘Sorry,’ she said abruptly, ‘for being rude.’ The driver looked frightened. ‘To you.’ The explanation didn’t help. She got flustered and slammed the door, cursed herself. She should just be rude; it would be easier.

An older cop with the crime scene log clipboard approached her.

‘DS Alex Morrow,’ she said and he wrote it down. ‘ London Road.’

‘Thank you, ma’am. DS Ba

‘MacKechnie’s here?’

He seemed surprised too. MacKechnie meant it was a big case. A career case, but not her case, she remembered with a grind of her jaw.

‘You first here?’

‘Aye.’

‘Taped off all entrances?’

‘Aye. Alerted the Firearms Unit and they’re just pulling out now.’

‘Gunmen gone then?’

‘Aye. They’ve searched front, back and sides.’

‘Shots fired?’

‘One, sixteen-year-old girl’s hand blown off.’

‘’Kin hell.’

He hummed in agreement.

‘Residents?’

‘All over there giving statements.’ He gestured straight down the road to the tape where the cars were blinking. Gathered beyond them were a crowd of people dressed in combinations of overcoats and pyjamas, slippers and shoes, and cops with notebooks talking to them one at a time. Everyone who lived inside the taped-off area would have been pulled out of their houses until the FAU had secured the area.

‘Well done,’ she said. ‘Good job,’ aware that she was making up for her rudeness to the driver by being nice to him. She knew it wasn’t how to develop allies; you have to be nice to the ones you’ve insulted. He looked pleased anyway.

‘Where’s the path?’

He used his pencil to point her along the centre of the road and around the corner.

Morrow dipped under the tape and picked her way carefully, keeping her eye on the tarmac for missed evidence. She stopped and looked up. The house was on her right: a small wall on the pavement and then elevated ground, a bit of grass and then bricked over. A series of cars were parked there: a Nissan people carrier, an Audi, a new Mini and a small, dirty white van.

In the road next to her, marked with big white evidence cards, lay two cigarette ends. She bent down and squinted at them: the brand was Silk Cut. They had burnt out where they lay, the log of ash sitting on a strip of tar-yellowed paper. They were five feet apart, as if they had been thrown out of either window of a car. She looked back to the cop who had stopped her car.

‘You – why aren’t these bagged up?’

‘Said to wait until the photographer had a picture, ma’am.’

They should have bagged them. It was raining and any DNA on the stubs would be lost. Bad scene management. Morrow was secretly glad.

She carried on to the corner, could see the residents better now: three Asian men standing together, young, talking to uniformed cops. An elderly white couple were there as well, both in overcoats with pyjamas underneath. A scowling housewife, young, alone, hair a sleepy tangle, stared at her. Morrow glared back: let us apologise for the inconvenience caused by saving you from armed raiders.

Morrow looked over at the house. There were two entrances to the garden: a wide metal gate leading straight up to off-road parking and a small ornamental one, open onto the path up to the front door. She turned the corner and saw a puddle of fresh safety glass on the pavement. Above it on the wall a few bricks were caved in.

Despite herself, her interest was piqued. She could feel it happening: facts, disjointed, irrelevant, being card indexed and filed away in her mind, the familiar private landscape of deduction. All the niceties of politics, personal or professional, eluded her always, but she could do this. It was the one absolute certainty for Alex Morrow. She was good at this.

She looked up and saw them standing just outside the ornamental gate, arms folded, waiting for Firearms to leave the property. DS Grant Ba

Ba

Morrow and Ba

Ba

‘Sir.’ She tipped a nod at MacKechnie but couldn’t bring herself to look at Ba

Grant Ba

She could feel the blood draining from her face. ‘Hello’ wouldn’t do for Grant. ‘Good evening’ wouldn’t do. It had to be some cheesy greeting, a bit of a song, a line from Elvis or some fucking thing. He strove to be different because he wasn’t. Her ambition was to fit in and she couldn’t. Jealousy made her focus on him, notice small vulnerabilities like the occasional sunbed flush to his skin, how he often implied credit to himself for other people’s work, and although superficially confident, how lost he sometimes looked in the company of other men.

Heat rose in her cheeks and she knew she had to cover up quickly. ‘There’s evidence getting wet around there,’ she said. ‘Two cigarette butts needing bagged up.’

Ba

‘No point proving they came from here if the traces have been washed off, is there?’

MacKechnie blinked indulgently. ‘Best to go and get them bagged.’

Ba

The Firearms Unit were coming out of the house. They crowded out of the front door, looking terrifying. Four big men in black body armour blocking the light of the hallway. They each held intimidatingly large pistols, holding them with two hands as if they were likely to go off of their own volition and blow a hole in something vital.

They were laughing at something as they came down the path towards them, the relief marked in their shoulders and faces. Whenever a gun was used Firearms had to come to either disarm or ensure that no gun-toting nutters were hanging around in cupboards waiting to leap out when the police got there. It was a high-stress, short-life job. They were recruiting all the time, month on month getting more and more calls. A flood of redundant weapons were coming to Glasgow from Ireland, selling for buttons.