Aamir had been chased out of Uganda and came to Glasgow with nothing behind him. He’d worked as a dustman for two years, taking abuse everyday from colleagues, passing school children, everyone. Finally he opened a shop where someone called him a black bastard at least once a day, where he hid from his frightening new wife and the children when they came. Omar knew these facts, he understood the hardships that had formed his father, but he had never felt the gross injustice of all that had happened to Aamir until now.
He had wandered into a back court surrounded by smelly bin sheds and overgrown gardens. He was one wall away from the university. A white cat skittered away through a hole in a fence. Purposefully, he stepped into a bin shed.
In the dark, dank smell of rotting nappies and mouldy veg, Omar covered his face and sobbed with worry for his hard-done-by daddy.
25
They were dawdling. Bannerman and Morrow strolled from the car park around the station house and along the road as if they had all the time in the world, as if every moment was not a timeframe during which an old man who had worked blamelessly every waking moment of the last thirty years could be killed.
If they had thought about it neither of them would have been quite sure why they lingered in one another’s company. They didn’t like each other, had fuck all in common, but they had achieved a sort of truce over the day. They were reluctant to lose that in the company of others.
Bannerman spotted the mini supermarket down the road. ‘I need a paper…’ he said.
‘No.’ Morrow pushed him towards the yard door. ‘Come on…’
Miserably he punched the security code into the numbered pad. The door buzzed and they both stared at it until Morrow sighed and pushed it open. ‘Fucking get in.’
The processing bar was busy with a couple of easy collars having a laugh with the guys on the desk. Morrow and Bannerman kept their heads down and went through to the duty seargeant’s desk. The copper she’d been unkind to about the graffitti scowled when he saw her. For a moment she thought about apologising but decided it would be easier to scowl back.
She typed the code into the CID corridor and they sloped inside, both eyeing MacKechnie’s office. The lights were on but the door shut, as if he was on a phone call or picking his nose. They stepped up the corridor and Morrow tried to peel off and go to their office but Bannerman pinched her sleeve and made her come with him.
MacKechnie called them to come. Bannerman opened the door wide into the corridor and tried to get Morrow to go in first but she held firm. MacKechnie looked up expectantly at Bannerman.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘Omar Anwar wasn’t in…’
MacKechnie looked up from his paperwork and saw the look on his face. ‘What is it? Do you want me to guess?’
Bannerman slumped. ‘Omar is Bob. He’s got a business doing import/export to the EU.’
MacKechnie stiffened. ‘Bugger. Carousel VAT fraud? Is that what you’re saying?’
Bannerman shrugged. ‘That would be my supposition… We’ve taken his paperwork and his computer hard drive… They’re being processed now.’
‘Right… right. Do we have to call Fraud right now? Would you say it was that pressing?’ MacKechnie could see the danger of it; the public perception of a department prosecuting a victim of violent crime, the endless paper trails and his officers spending weeks milling in High Court corridors, waiting to be called to give evidence.
‘Well… we could see what’s on the hard drive first. It’s just a suspicion, we haven’t really got any evidence…’
‘OK,’ he said vaguely. ‘Lab reports are in, Morrow, go and check them out.’
Bannerman turned to her as she left, pleading for her to come back and save him. She grinned and slapped his back. She was glad to get outside the room and shut the door firmly behind her.
In her office someone had carefully stacked hard copies of lab reports, of the fingerprint evidence which had already been gone over with no anomalies found, over the lab reports on the van which turned up squat. She read them again. The tinfoil had opiate residue in it, cut solely with milk powder, no laxatives, no talc, just pure milk. It was unusual. She puzzled over it as she put the Anwars’ answerphone tape into a tape recorder. She made a copy and played it.
Billal answered, they asked for Bob and he handed it over to his brother. The kidnapper asked after Aleesha’s injuries and agreed to phone back at five to make an arrangement for a pick-up. He ended by saying he knew about Omar. She noted the interest in Aleesha, wondering if he knew her or was worried about the charges against him.
She took it into the incident room for transcription. DC Routher was prematurely balding and long overdue a promotion. He was good at paperwork though, efficient, and no one who got him ever wanted to let him go. She gave him the tape. ‘Anyone got a picture of the M8 motor?’
‘Aye.’ He pointed her over to a board of images and notes that MacKechnie had been adding to. In the centre was a big photo of a car. It was grainy, taken from CCTV cameras, enlarged and printed onto copy paper.
Because the cameras were up high on the motorway lights the driver’s face was obscured by the car roof. In the second picture the car was fuller, they could see a front passenger’s thighs and a hand on a knee. A final picture of the car driving back towards the town showed that the chassis was sitting low.
She went back over to Routher. ‘Where did it come off?’
‘Town centre, Charing Cross.’
‘Fuck.’ Charing Cross had seven exits and three broken cameras. The car could have gone anywhere. ‘Lost it?’
‘’Fraid so. The reg is out now anyway. Everyone in the city’s looking for it. If they’re not picked up in the next half hour they must be sitting in a garage somewhere.’
‘Did Bannerman drop in a bag of CCTV tapes from a shop?’
Routher pointed to a small office room across the corridor. She could see Harris in profile through the strip of glass on the door, sitting on a chair, arms crossed, watching the far wall intently. He didn’t look happy.
She walked across the corridor and opened the door. ‘Right?’
Harris didn’t look up. ‘It’s because I said about the DVD, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know why Bannerman loves you enough to give you this, Harris, he just does.’
‘Ma’am, it’s days and days’ worth.’
‘You don’t have to watch it in real time, you can speed it up.’
She looked at the image on the telly. A small man sitting on a stool behind the counter in Aamir’s shop. She’d seen the publicity photo they were releasing to the news, a family snap shot of him three quarters side on, but this man looked smaller, angrier, less sympathetic.
Harris pressed fast forward on the remote and, suddenly, the wee man was wriggling this way and that, getting down, messing with the shelves behind him, sitting back up. Someone came in and bought fags. A figure came in around the counter, got up on the stool next to him, got down, disappeared, came back with two mugs. She squinted and saw that it was Lander. It was a bad quality tape, a crap angle too.
‘My eyes’ll be bleeding in a minute,’ said Harris.
‘Harris, you’re the only man we trust this with,’ she said sarcastically, backing out of the room.
Bannerman shuffled miserably across her path.
‘Is everything turning to shit in front of ye?’
He didn’t answer but smirked at his shoes.
She filled him in on the kidnapper’s call and then, ‘Listen to this: the residue in the tinfoil wrap from the van? This heroin has been cut with milk powder, but only with milk powder. No talc, no ash, nothing extra. Just milk powder. It’s very clean.’