‘Maybe the others didn’t notice he’d been smoking. High functioning, you know?’
‘Long habit then?’
‘Yeah, not mixing or out of control.’
‘Yeah, I think you could be right.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah.’
Sensing that they were getting on, Bannerman bit his lip. ‘You all right with me?’
Morrow cleared her throat and shrugged. ‘Sorry I called you a cunt. I’s tired…’
He flinched at that. ‘You didn’t. What you said was that we wouldn’t get on if I was going to be a cunt about it, but you didn’t call me a cunt.’
This semantic difference seemed to matter to him. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘No, that’s right.’
‘We’ve been kind of put in an awkward situation here, you know? Kind of competing when we could be working together. Bad management.’
The implied slur on MacKechnie was meant to be a bonding move, or trap. Queasy with sleep deprivation and tired of having to guess what the fuck was going on with Bannerman, she could feel the anger building behind her eyes. ‘Grant, I feel that you’re very into your career…’ She stopped, took a breath, stopped again. He waited for her to get it together. ‘… Less about the service… you know.’ She gestured outwards with both hands, as if she was opening a book, meaninglessly. ‘I feel I’m more about the case… expending energy, y’know?’
Bannerman took it in good part. ‘My dad was a copper, you know.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Grew up with the service.’
‘Yeah.’ Morrow scratched her face, a little too hard. Just because his father was in the force didn’t mean she was less committed.
‘If you grow up in it,’ he frowned at the windscreen, ‘you know it, a bit more maybe. Know what it’s really like, what’s likely to happen at the end of a career. New recruits, they’re idealistic, yet to lose faith with it.’ He was talking about her.
‘I’m not a new recruit,’ said Morrow.
‘No, but you’re not old police family, are you? I mean, in some ways you’re lucky because you’ll have to find those things out yourself. Just… it can be a bit of a shocker when you do.’
‘TJF,’ she said sullenly.
He nodded. ‘TJF. But me, I know what to take on and when to make my moves, I know the limits of the job. You don’t have that killer instinct…’
She suddenly found herself confused. ‘Killer instinct?’
‘How to work the system to get the job done right.’
She didn’t understand but had a bad feeling about the way it was going.
‘Anyway,’ he said, as if that had cleared all that up, ‘if Omar is Bob, why does anyone think he’s got two mill kicking about? He’s twenty-one, he’s been studying since leaving school, doesn’t have a job. Why would they think he has millions of pounds?’
‘Oh, I dunno.’ She looked at Bannerman, saw him concentrating on the road and realised that the conversation hadn’t bothered him at all. Killer instinct. Somehow she felt he was telling her that he was indeed, as she suspected, a complete self-serving arsehole.
He looked out at the road. ‘This junction’s a pain in the arse.’
‘Go right,’ she said quickly, keen to maintain the forward momentum in the conversation. ‘Round the side there to the left.’
Bannerman followed her directions into the visitors’ car park in front of the infirmary, found a spot near the far wall and stopped. He took the key out and stepped out of the car into the wind coming off the bare junction in front of them.
Still suspicious, she opened her door, climbed out and shut it, watching him carefully over the roof of the car. He was squinting at the Battlefield Rest, a restaurant in a converted Edwardian tram depot. ‘Looks like a seaside ice cream parlour or something. Why’s it called the Battlefield Rest?’
‘You don’t know this area?’
‘No.’
‘Mary Queen of Scots fought her last battle here. Against her son’s army. She lost.’
‘What were they fighting about?’
‘Religion.’ She stopped to frown. ‘I think.’
He pointed to the little rotunda. ‘And she rested in there?’
The tram stop was built during the Great War, over three hundred years after Queen Mary was executed. Morrow looked for a note of humour on his face but found nothing. ‘No,’ she said, ‘she just sent in for a lasagne.’
Bannerman didn’t react. He turned and walked into the hospital. Morrow wished she had a pal at work to tell the story to.
The lobby was busy but the lifts were efficient, sucking in groups gathering in front of them and spiriting them off to different floors. Bannerman checked his notes as they stepped into a lift. They were crammed in next to a woman and her very fat toddler in a pushchair. The fair-haired girl was three, sleeping, her head dropped forward onto her chest, dressed in clothes that didn’t quiet fit her. A roll of belly peeked out from under her T-shirt. Morrow noticed the back of the pram was littered with sweetie wrappers and empty juice bottles.
The mother herself looked nippy, a skinny strip of anxious annoyance, hair yanked up into a ponytail, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and perfume.
Morrow saw Bannerman looking at the wrappers and frown a reproach at the mother. The doors opened on the second floor and the woman shoved the pram out, spitefully bumping it over the metal ridges, jerking the fat sleeping child around in her chair.
Bannerman tutted when the doors shut and muttered, ‘Feed your kids shit like that…’
Morrow didn’t join in the cosy sanctimony. Bannerman didn’t have kids. He knew fuck all about it. ‘Have you got the statements there?’
Bannerman opened the folder and pulled out three sheets. One was Aleesha’s statement. She had been out of it and said nothing. The second one was Sadiqa’s, taken at the hospital, probably while Aleesha was in the operating theatre. Sadiqa had been in the kitchen, heard a noise, went to see what it was. The lift doors opened on floor five but Morrow continued to read, stepping out into the lobby, standing to the side as she quickly scanned the notes. Men with guns threatened them, pulled her up the hall. Aleesha was shot. Then Omar came in and she screamed and then they took Aamir.
When Morrow looked up she was smiling. ‘She says they were asking for Bob.’
Bannerman sighed and conceded, ‘I know. I only got it this morning. Feel like an arse now.’
She gave him back the statement as they approached the ward doors, walking slightly behind him, a disingenuous gesture of companionship. She wanted him to trust her. When she reached forward to press the security buzzer on the door she saw that he was smiling quietly to himself. It worried her. A wash of exhaustion swept over her, shift change from night to day was always painful.
A voice on the intercom interrupted her train of thought; ‘Yes?’ A young nurse in glasses was looking out at them from an office a hundred yards down the corridor.
‘DS Bannerman and DS Morrow from Strathclyde Police. We’re here to talk to Aleesha Anwar.’
‘OK.’ The nurse reached back into the door and pressed a button to release the lock, walking down to meet them as they entered.
Two coppers had been ordered to stay outside Aleesha’s room and were stationed in the corridor, one sitting on a chair in the corridor, the other leaning against the wall facing the door, watching the nurse’s arse as she passed him.
Morrow and Bannerman walked into the ward corridor, getting out their warrant cards. The nurse gave them a brief glance. ‘Anwar’s in IC.’ Without a word of explanation she turned on her white heels and led them to the room opposite the nurse’s station.
A large window looked into the room from the corridor. A tangle of wires was threaded through a hole in the wall, plugged into monitors sitting on a metal trolley in the corridor, where the nurses could watch the numbers. The DCs standing outside stood upright when they approached. Bannerman told them to go and take a ten-minute piece break. They thanked him and shuffled off out the doors.