Still Midnight

33

The office seemed u

The incident room was busy, DCs following up on leads and scraps, making notes, phoning. She didn’t go in but turned and saw Harris sitting on his own in the small office, staring hard at a screen and looking even more pissed off than yesterday. She leaned into him. ‘Ye right?’

He groaned. ‘Up half the night with a blinding headache from watching this shite.’

‘Poor you. Where’s Ba

‘Have you not heard?’ He leaned forward and pressed the pause button. ‘Ba

‘Compassionate?’

‘Yeah, doesn’t know when he’ll be back.’

She bit the dirtiest word she knew back, chewing on her i

MacKechnie was fully aware of the situation Ba

‘So,’ he said carefully, patting the desk in front of her chair, ‘it falls to you to take his place as the SIO.’

Morrow sat back in the office chair by his desk and read his face. If he knew his protégé was dodging the job because it wasn’t pa

She could see just how intensely he disliked her at that moment. Everything about her was wrong. It wasn’t just that she was a woman, wasn’t her habit of swearing or her brisk ma

‘This case is a great opportunity for you-’

‘This case is big fat bollocks and you know it. The family are lying out of their arses. Thirty-six hours since he was taken and every minute that passes makes it less likely that we’ll find the man alive-’

MacKechnie couldn’t take it any more. He stood up and hissed at her, ‘Do your job. Get out.’

Harris pulled the car up carefully to the curb. He needn’t have been careful, there weren’t many other cars in the street and they were mostly tucked away in bricked-over gardens at the front of the houses, but he was delighted to be out of the office and away from the videos and enjoying kicking the facts of the briefing about.

‘Toryglen?’

‘Yeah, dropped him off at the main road, he said.’

‘Any Taits there?’

‘No.’

‘Didn’t you find anything on the shop’s CCTV tapes?’ she said.

‘Well, there are a couple of oddities but nothing major. I’ve highlighted them and asked Gobby to have a look at them, see if I was just going blind or what.’

‘Show them to me when we get back.’

‘Yeah. But boss, you know, even if it is VAT fraud it’s a bit irrelevant. Even if the family are screwing millions out of the VAT office that only tells us how they became targets, it doesn’t help us find the old man or get him out alive, does it?’

Morrow nodded. ‘Yeah, but finding out how they were targeted’ll lead us to the kidnappers. And when it comes to trial any defence lawyer’s going to bring it up to discredit them. Makes the whole case harder.’

‘S’pose.’ Harris opened his door and stopped with one foot in the road. ‘D’you reckon Ba

It would be breaking rank to say so. ‘DC Harris, whatever makes you say that?’ As they stood on either side of the car looking down the road, getting the measure of the place, she asked him: ‘Really, what makes you say that?’

He shrugged, still unsure of her. ‘Rumour.’

‘Oh.’ He wasn’t prepared to go into it. She liked that.

‘What’s the rumours about me?’

‘There aren’t any rumours about you, boss.’

She looked at him, worried they were skating close to sincerity and felt uncomfortable about it. ‘Shame. I started a couple of good ’uns.’

‘Except that you’re getting the squeeze.’

She almost choked, she’d never expected sympathy and it touched her deeply. She looked away, hiding her face.

They were poor houses. A long curving street of flat-fronted council houses with telephone and electrical wires slung across them, grey plaster facades that had blackened into the architectural equivalent of a skin complaint. A lot of the houses had been bought by the tenants though: incongruous wooden porches were built around a couple of doors. One of the houses had mock Tudor windows, all lead strips and flouncy nets behind. The gardens were well kept too, carefully organised gravel and flower baskets hanging from walls, garden pots too big to pick up and walk away with, and hedges carefully trimmed where they grew. She wouldn’t have chosen to live here but the people who did clearly liked it. Pink plastic toys littered the grass in one garden and a deflated football was resting by the curb in the street. Morrow noticed that the street was a dead end. It was a nice safe playground for kids. The street was empty though; all the children off at school, all the parents tending house or out working. At the end of the street a modern chapel loomed on a hillock like a village jail.

Malki Tait’s address was number twelve. It looked like a pensioner’s house from the outside. Modest china ornaments were lined up along the window sill; an Alsatian dog, a tiny China bouquet of flowers, a mouse holding a bit of cheese. The front step had just been washed, was damp but drying, the sweep of the wet handbrush lingering grey on the concrete.

The door was council, flat panelled and painted a jaunty cornflower blue, not a bought house, no money here, but the door hadn’t been changed since the seventies. The tenant had been here since then. The council stripped out older fittings when new tenants moved in. They offered new doors and windows to existing tenants too but the older ones usually wanted to keep things the same, being members of a generation who liked what they liked and didn’t believe decor was subject to yearly fashions.

‘Old lady,’ guessed Morrow, pressing the doorbell.

‘A quid,’ bet Harris.

Shuffling steps, a weak call of ‘hello’ in an old lady’s voice.

Morrow smiled at the step. ‘Mrs Tait?’

‘Hello?’

Harris and Morrow looked at each other. Either she hadn’t heard Morrow or she was working for time. Malcolm Tait could be walking out of the back door right now.

Suddenly animated, Morrow raised her fist to bang on the door and Harris backed away to the street, looking for a lane to the back garden. The door opened suddenly and a thin woman looked out at them, tipping her head back to see them through the bottom portion of red plastic bifocal glasses.

A