She grunted back and opened the door into the lobby. Omar and Billal recognised her. Omar stood up, hopeful she would take him away from his growling brother.
‘No,’ she raised a hand, ‘I’m not here to get you guys, I’m not doing the questioning, just going in here.’
She backed off to the CID corridor on her left. She punched in the security code and opened the door, glad to get into the long green corridor. MacKechnie’s office was at the far end, so he could stand at his door and look down at all of them. He never did.
The clarity of rank structure was one of Morrow’s favourite things about the force. She knew who she had to take shit from and who she could give it to. It made sense to her. MacKechnie was not comfortable being in charge, she felt, and apologised for his status by pretending to listen. He had a leadership style that would be described with a lot of bullshit buzzwords: inclusive, facilitative, enabling.
Even at half three in the morning the corridor was relatively busy. MacKechnie’s lights were on, his door open, his office empty. An incident room was being set up next to the tea room. She could see two uniforms moving a table through, negotiating the legs around the door frame.
She walked into her own office, flicked on the light and dropped her handbag. Bannerman’s computer was on, his screen saver a photoshopped picture of himself on a body builder’s body. Hilarious. His mouse had purple lights on the underside that distracted her eye when she was working. He kept chewing gum and healthy snack bars in his desk drawer, afraid of getting fat, she thought.
Everything on Morrow’s desk was new and ordered and anonymous. A drawer of neat pens, a sharpener and spare jotters, always three, for making notes. She liked them new, threw them away once they had been used. She liked to think the desk could have been anyone’s anywhere, devoid of history, that she kept her personality out of it, bland as beige, how she liked it.
She was hanging her jacket up by the door when she saw Harris standing outside. DC Harris was small and coarse-featured, as if he’d grown up outdoors. He was likeable, had a flat Ayrshire accent and a perpetual look of surprise on his face: eyebrows raised, mouth in an open ‘O’.
‘Ma’am?’ He seemed excited. ‘Great, eh?’
‘Is it?’
‘Aye.’ He had probably been expecting a routine night but found himself confronted with an actual genuine mystery instead of depressing, go-nowhere domestics and drunks clubbing each other for the price of a packet of fags. ‘My piece break. Coming to watch?’
‘Watch what?’
‘Bannerman thinks the youngest son’s it. He’s getting him into Three.’
Bannerman had clocked her interest in Omar and she rolled her eyes without thinking, annoyed at herself for being so obvious. Harris saw her and misunderstood, remembered that it was supposed to be her case and felt bad about it. As a consolation he said, ‘Coming anyway?’
She chewed her cheek, tried to change her face from huffy to neutral, said, ‘Aye, fuck it,’ and followed him out of the door, past Billal and through the far door to the stairs.
They trotted up to the second floor, into a room that always smelled of vegetable soup.
Everyone on CID was on their piece break apparently. Orange plastic chairs were laid out in two ramshackle rows of four but they were full already. MacKechnie must have given them permission. A short DC stood up to give Morrow his seat in the front row and everyone else in the room lifted their arses off the chairs as she sat down, respecting the rank.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ she flapped a hand at them, ‘calm down, it’s not a parade.’
She could see them from the corner of her eye, sloping down in the chairs, not as they had been but relaxing within regulation stipulations, wary. It made her feel powerful. She kept her eyes on the boxy black television against the wall.
CID recorded their interviews and the cameras could be used as a feed to keep everyone briefed. Not everyone liked being watched though and it wasn’t always because they were bashfuclass="underline" some preferred to do an interview themselves and highlight lines of questioning themselves. It took a lot of balls to let other officers watch.
Morrow felt that being watched had forced a strange, strained quality on interview technique. Questioning was different now; guarded and formal and questioning officers were routinely respectful of even the lowest scrote. They spoke in a bizarre police-ese, as if they were giving evidence in court.
It never used to be this way. When she was younger Morrow remembered questioning as a drunken polka, officers and suspects swinging each other wildly around the facts, faster and faster, until something got broken. Now it was a strained quadrille where the rules of the dance stood hard and fast until one capitulated or the tension of the moves strangled the breath out of one of the participants.
Morrow thought people’s responses to being watched said a lot about their view of themselves: some enjoyed it, assumed a positive response from a viewer. Some couldn’t cope, froze, glanced at the camera and had to hand over to a colleague. Morrow felt she looked shifty on camera, guiltier than the crims she was interviewing.
The shot of the room was badly set up. It wasn’t there to capture the nuances of the suspect’s facial expressions but to prove that no one had been throwing punches. Because the camera was mounted high up on the wall the room looked narrower on camera than it seemed when she was in there, more claustrophobic. And the image was grainy, the colour drained from the room into a palate of grey and blue and yellow. A table with a wooden top, four chairs, a light switch and the door which had been left open slightly, the dusty top of it visible.
The door opened suddenly and Omar Anwar walked in. A muted cheer rose from the officers in the viewing room, muted because she was there, but it was as close to camaraderie as she had felt since her promotion and she found herself not exactly joining in but smiling along.
They liked that.
Omar sloped into the room as if he had extra vertebrae, hips first, bending like a question mark as he put his plastic tumbler of water on the table. Bannerman came into the room after him and some of his fans gave another cheer. Morrow didn’t concur with that one and felt them clock it.
A fat officer nicknamed ‘Gobby’ came in after them. Gobby rarely spoke. Bannerman had chosen him over her, she realised, so he could shine.
Someone at the back muttered to themselves, ‘The BannerMan’ll nail him.’ The nickname brought a sting of bile to the back of her throat.
At Bannerman’s invitation Omar sat down facing the camera, sitting well back from the table to make room for the splay of his legs. They couldn’t quite see his face but his body was expressive enough. He was jittery, reached for his water, withdrew his hands, wriggled in the seat as Bannerman took off his suit jacket and hung it carefully on the back of his chair.
He took his time, sitting down, rolling his shirt sleeves up, assessing the tall, anxious boy without addressing him. Gobby handed him one of the tapes and they turned away in their seats to the tape recorder, noisily pulling the cellophane off two cassette tapes which they slipped into the tape recorder behind them. Omar watched, frightened, as the policemen looked at each other, nodded and shut the cassette cases, pressing record. A high-pitched yowl filled the room as they turned back to the table. Reverently they waited until it had finished.
Omar looked quizzically at Gobby.
‘Blank bit o’ tape,’ said Gobby quietly.
Pathetically grateful for the explanation, Omar smiled and leaned towards him, clutching at the implied kindness, pleading with Gobby to be his ally.
Gobby looked away.
Bannerman opened the play with a lingering explanation of what had brought them all here today, the rules, telling Omar that he was being watched by third parties, slowing his speech to a languorous drawl as if to counter Omar’s frantic interjections of yes, thank you, thank you, he understood, his face twitching into micro-frowns and frights, his leg vibrating up and down under the table.