Still Midnight by Denise Mina Page B

there”—he lay his forearm over the bottom of his rib cage, like the queen carrying a heavy handbag—“and lifted him up”—he tipped back in his chair—“and took him out the house.” Omar’s arms flailed expressively at the door, making Morrow think of a stage magician diverting an audience’s eye.
    “Me and Mo ran after them, saw a big white van, like a Merc panel van, pull away. So we ran to Mo’s car and got in and followed them but we lost them at the motorway. They weren’t driving fast, just within the law, didn’t want to get caught, I suppose, and we shouldn’t have lost them but we were panicking and driving fast and following taillights in the dark and they didn’t go the most obvious way, down the main roads.
    “Then we saw a police car and stopped and I said to them that my dad had been taken by men in a van and about Afghanistan and that, but they tried to arrest us.”
    Morrow saw the boy on the screen stop waving his hands and the hurt in his voice. To be treated with suspicion at a moment of grief. She knew the deep stinging cut of that feeling. That was why he looked like that in the road, he and Mo, because they knew they were not among friends, that they were other.
    She sat back and glanced at the officers in the viewing room. Smart men, top of their game, all staring at the screen, willing him to be it. He must sense that.
    When she stood up to leave, someone called, “Down in front.” Their voice tailed off when they realized it was her.
    The officer who had given up his seat was leaning against the wall, tipped his forehead out of respect. “He’s good, isn’t he?” He meant Bannerman, wrongly supposing they were friends.
    “Aye.” She leaned over to Harris and tapped his shoulder. “Have a word?”
    Out in the corridor they dropped their voices. “What happened, just before he started rambling?”
    Harris shrugged. “I was trying to remember myself.”
    “Get the disc, would you? As soon as…”
    Still frowning Harris looked back into the room. “His mum said, ‘Not my Omar.’ ”
    She turned her computer on, waited for what felt like ten minutes, signed herself in, and called up her e-mail. The digi recordings had already been forwarded to her. The transcript would take a few days to weave its way through form-filling and desk-landing but the digi recording was immediate.
    Opening her bottom desk drawer she took out a brand-new pad of cheap paper, a sharp new pencil from a box, and a plastic container with a set of earphones in it. Plugging them into the hard drive stack, she clicked on the attachment.
    The first file was numbered and she jotted it down on the pad before starting the recording. A caller panted loudly and a bored operator asked them: “Which service do you require?”
    Barely contained sobs demanded, “Ambulance! Please! Tell them to come, please come! She’s bleeding all over the place!”
    “Who’s bleeding, please?”
    “My daughter has been shot by… men, they came into our home and threatened—” The mother, Sadiqa, had an English accent, a crisp fifties accent, and made the operator sound as coarse as a farmhand.
    “Can ye give us your address?”
    Sadiqa gave it, becoming calm in the familiar recitation, but she was interrupted by a girl crying out in the background and began panting again, “Oh dear, my God, my husband has been taken, my Aamir—”
    The operator’s voice was nasal and bland, told her to calm down, the ambulance was on its way. No, there wasnae any point in her getting off the line because the ambulance was on its way right now. She made Sadiqa spell her name, her husband’s name, what sort of guns were they?
    “I have no idea. Black guns? Big—”
    “Are they still in the actual house?”
    “Gone! Left! I’ve told you that.”
    “Did they leave on foot or in a car?”
    “I’m afraid no, I didn’t see. But my son, my Omar, ran out into the street.”
    “Has your son come back in? Could he come to the