Aamir could hear them talking outside the window. The white light of the night flooded in through the pillowcase, a new-smelling pillowcase. He sat, small and still, listening as they laughed and one of them said he wanted to shoot him. One of the men walked away, he didn’t know which one.
In passing, a hand brushed against the door handle and Aamir’s stomach turned to stone. The door didn’t open, the hand left the door, but suddenly, like the memory of a migraine, Aamir felt the heat in the car and the red dust rise from the road.
Time began to melt.
The heat of the Kampala road rose in the car until he felt himself engulfed.
A taxi with his mother. They should have got out sooner but she was an optimist. In the back seat with his mother, heading for the airport and, afraid, she reached for his hand along the hot plastic seat. He withdrew his hand, did not want to admit that he was afraid himself.
A jolt beneath the car, a former person on the road. No one felt safe enough to stop and care for the ragged mess of skin and bone, shirt ripped into rags, buffeted by passing cars and coaches.
He smelled the jasmine oil his long dead mother put in her hair. He withdrew and refused her hand and then he saw what she was afraid of. Up ahead: another road block. The brightly coloured contents of suitcases scattered across the dusty red road, the soldiers looked crazy, army shirts unbuttoned, rifles slung over shoulders, a hostile tribe. His mother made a sound he had never heard from her before, a sharp sound that came from her throat, like a long ago contented sigh snatched back from the world.
Now, in the bubble before, as the brakes on the taxi squealed, Aamir knew he should have reached over and taken her hand. He should have comforted his mother because now he understood the noise and knew how afraid she had been. He had remembered her only vaguely in the decade since she died in hospital in Glasgow of a weak heart, but found himself now muttering soft words under the pillowcase, telling her not to worry, that all would be well, his voice strangled by the knot of terror throbbing in his throat.
The hand brushed against the door again and the heat, the smells were gone, his mother, the hot wet blood blooming through the seat of her yellow sari, was gone.
Aamir was alone, in the dark, in bloody Scotland.
6
Alex Morrow stopped outside the bedroom door, pulling it closed, feeling for the click. The white-suited Forensics team moved like ghosts through the hall and living room. They worked in a studied calm silence, gathering and measuring, face masks giving them an air of graceful anonymity.
The wall opposite the bedroom was splattered with blood. A short guy was worrying holes in the plaster with tweezers, another picking up fibres from the carpet, both kneeling on small stools that matched their outfits.
Morrow picked her steps through the hall to the door shadowed by the woman officer who had been taking notes. Outside the darkness was deeper, turning bitter. They took the path down to the gate, faces closed against the chill, and Morrow made her way across the road to the witnesses behind the tape.
The neighbours had gone back indoors leaving just two of the three Asian boys clustered together; the younger, thinner ones.
They were silent now, smoking, standing as if they were in a line-up, shifty and shocked. The passive weight of guilt.
She was surprised, doubted her impression, but she knew that her first thought was often her best and she recognised the stance, the head hanging, the exhausted slope of the shoulders, eyes flicking about the floor. They weren’t just running through the night, she felt; it was deeper, they were mapping the shift in their world. CID saw it all the time, the aftermath of lives taking violent turns and the turmoil of victims re-engaging with a changed world: I was a wife, now a widow, I was a child, now an orphan. The young were better at it, their identities not yet fixed, but she saw the boys struggling hard and sensed that there was more to it than lucky/unlucky. The shift in their world view was more fundamental.
She stopped and looked again: the boys looked straight, they seemed to be from good, moderate homes. Hair cuts, straight teeth, well nourished, no big flash cars or clothes. And yet they were standing as if they had done something very bad indeed. She found herself salivating with the desire to know.
Turning to the officer who had been taking notes during her questioning with Meeshra, Morrow spoke quietly, asking her opinion about Meeshra but not listening to the response, using the opportunity to examine the two boys. Not brothers, but very alike. They must be friends, close friends, shared values. They were smoking. The one bearing a family resemblance was wearing Nikes. The other: same age, same dress, more traditional though. The son held his cigarette between finger and thumb, cupped against the wind like an outdoor worker. It didn’t look like an affectation either, it looked working class but his family weren’t.
She watched him bring his cigarette to his lips and draw hard, puffing out his chest to hold the breath. Blow. Definitely. She guessed blow was forbidden by Islam. It wasn’t exactly a gin or a ham sandwich but Islam didn’t encourage people to use mood-altering chemicals. She looked at their beards and salwar kameez and smiled to herself. Ostentatious show of faith but they were Glasgow boys underneath.
Taking out her mobile phone, she pretended to fumble for a number, calling up the camera and taking a picture of each of the boys over the officer’s shoulder.
‘Could you get yourself back to the station?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Absentmindedly she said, ‘Thanks very much.’ She didn’t mean it and the uniform looked puzzled. ‘For the notes.’ Morrow thumbed back to the house but she hadn’t even seen the fucking notes, they might be crap.
‘Sure.’ The officer still seemed unsure but turned and left.
Morrow felt foolish as she looked around. Bannerman and MacKechnie were off somewhere, probably scheming Bannerman’s golden future.
But she was here, on the ground, fitting facts and impressions together to make her own picture, making sense of the fractured night, godlike, forming order from chaos. She loved the process, but tonight, with the dread of home weighing on her, it felt more like a compulsion.
The first taste of a hard winter was in the air. She pulled her jacket tight around her. The moment Bannerman knew the boys were involved he wouldn’t let her near them. As conscious of the threat of interception as a gazelle on a grassy plain, Morrow stepped across the empty road towards them.
7
Pat could hear nothing but his own shallow breath as he stepped back along the path to the field. His skin was anxious-clammy, his face veiled in a thin layer of greasy sweat. They had battered guys, hurt women sometimes, but always for a reason, never just so they could get a shot of a gun. The shit-smelling wind chilled his skin, the electric blue moonlight lit the shards of frost crunching under his every step. At the end of the path he turned into the field and chanced a glance back at the Lexus.
Eddy had his back to him, his head dropped forward, looking at his gun. Pat broke into a trot, stumbling gracelessly over the lumpy ground, running from him.
It was age that had brought them to this. Age and coke.
Seven good years sharing doors all over the city. They were liberal with their hands, known for it, good at the job, until Eddy’s missus left. Then came the fights and restraining orders and the drinking. He was drinking that night, now that Pat thought about it.
It must have been cut with something, the coke. The boy was thin, too young for that bar really, granny grabbing, but his pupils were pins and he was twitching when he stumbled out and into Eddy, his mouth staggering to keep up with the words drenching his chin – fucking old fuck fat fucking old.
Afterwards, Eddy said he was off balance, the boy was lucky, the night was wrong. He was probably right; on another night, at a different angle the boy’s first punch wouldn’t have got him down. The boy never went for Pat, just Eddy, the one who had nothing left to be but hard. He kicked Eddy’s face in.