In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide

by Malcolm Mackay

  He lived on the top floor, right on the corner of the building, and from the living-room window he could see the long sea loch, and the lights of the city up both sides of it. It had a living room, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom and one bedroom; the smallest flat on the block because it was on the corner. It was as much as he needed, living alone. The furniture was cheap and basic and there was little enough of it to make the floor look work-shy. The living room had a couch, a chair that didn’t match and a TV. That was it.

  Darian had always wanted to be a police officer, but he couldn’t follow in his father’s footsteps because of where they stopped. If things had been different, well, that’s not a sentence there’s much point in finishing, is it, because things weren’t different. There were still moments, like that night, when the good outweighed the bad, and he believed the future, while not the one he had hoped for, could belong to him.

  The Private Security Industries Act 2004

  This act states that all companies/individuals involved in private investigations should be licensed. Under this act you will require a PSI licence from the domestic security office of the security department of the Scottish government if you are involved in any surveillance, enquiries or investigations that are carried out for the purposes of:

  – gaining information about any individual or about the activities or whereabouts of any individual; or

  – gaining information about the circumstances in which property has been lost or damaged.

  Anyone involved in providing contracted private investigation services will require a licence. This includes employees, employers, managers, supervisors and directors or partners of private investigation companies.

  According to this Act, the following activities will not require a licence:

  • activities solely for the purposes of market research;

  • activities solely concerned with a credit check;

  • professional activities of practising solicitors and advocates;

  • professional activities of practising accountants;

  • professional activities of journalists and broadcasters, and activities solely relating to obtaining information for journalists and broadcasters;

  • activities solely relating to reference to registers open to the public; registers or records to which a person has right of access; and published works;

  • activities carried out with the knowledge or consent of the subject of the investigation.

  PENALTIES

  The penalty for operating as an unlicensed private investigator will be:

  • upon summary conviction at a Sheriff Court, a maximum penalty of twelve months’ imprisonment and/or a fine of up to £10,000.

  The penalty for supplying unlicensed staff will be:

  • upon summary conviction at a Sheriff Court, a maximum penalty of twelve months’ imprisonment and/or a fine of up to £10,000;

  • upon conviction on indictment at High Court or Sheriff and jury trial, an unlimited fine and/or up to seven years’ imprisonment.

  4

  DARIAN ROSS MIGHT have been the only person who enjoyed the commute to work in Challaid, or at least admitted it. A short walk down to the crowded Bank Station, making his way through the bustle of bleary-eyed miserablists at half-eight. Onto the train and east through the tunnel, off at the next stop, which was Glendan Station. That was the closest stop to the tunnel where all those people were killed digging it, so they claimed they would name the station in honour of those lost. Their choice? The title of the company the dead men worked for, that had sent them to excavate in treacherous conditions with no thought for their safety. Apparently the people of influence who picked the name couldn’t understand why none of the families accepted their invitations to the opening. Anyway, that was also the closest stop to Darian’s work, and it was a twelve-minute walk through the morning to Cage Street. On a nice day, admittedly rare, the stroll through busy streets could be pleasant.

  Here we’ll talk a little about what Darian did for a living. He was, in truth, a sort of private detective, but if you asked him about his job those would be the last two words that would fight their way through his lips. He worked for a man called Sholto Douglas, a former detective now running Douglas Independent Research. How Sholto had managed to last fifteen years as a detective was one of the great many mysteries he never solved, and he was relieved to get out of it. Now he was in a single-room office on the second floor of a building in need of repair on a narrow old street in the city centre, pretending his company limited itself to market research and credit checks.

  When he started Darian asked Sholto about the fact he was a private detective dressed up as something else and nearly provoked an aneurysm. Sholto growled and said, ‘It is research, really, when you think about it. That’s what all of police work is, or detective work, or whatever you want to call it.’

  Then the conversation would switch to who was to blame, and while Scotland hadn’t had a proper war with England since the Trade Wars of the eighteenth century, Sholto was all for kicking off another.

  ‘And the licences, and the restrictions, they’re all nonsense anyway, just there to stop you doing the work. They only did it because the English put the same stuff into law so they thought they had to copy it. Just copying another country because they couldn’t think of anything better to do with their time, that’s all it was. Bloody English. Bloody Scottish government. You look at the two laws; they’re almost identical except ours are harsher. Also, it’s Raven’s fault... Don’t get me started on Raven...’

  Raven Investigators was a large firm of private detectives based in Edinburgh and with offices in our own fair city who were raking up more muck than a landscape gardener. Their respect for the law was considered inadequate, so the law was tightened hard and Raven Investigators shrank accordingly. Companies like Douglas Independent Research existed so that people who couldn’t afford the shiny corporate professionalism of Raven had someone to pester small-scale criminals for them, or that’s how Sholto liked to present it, anyway. So that was the not exactly noble world of half-truths and delusions that Darian walked into each morning, including this Saturday.

  Sholto was at the office before him, which wasn’t always the case. Darian had a key for the days when his boss was late. He used to be DC Douglas, and he had struggled to escape the comfort of the marital bed and get in to work those days as well. The one piece of timing he got right was retiring early before they invited him to do so, and that left him as a man in his late forties with nothing to get up for. He started Douglas Independent Research, and needed someone to help him, someone young enough to do most of the heavy lifting. Sholto had worked with Darian’s father, so he knew him already, knew he had wanted to be a cop, so offered him the job. He never said it out loud, but there were probably days he regretted it.

  Both of them spent too much of their lives on Cage Street. Darian turned down onto the short and narrow pedestrianised street, slipped in between two larger ones. There were three buildings on each side of the walkway, and the office was in the middle on the right as you went down. It had all become quickly familiar to Darian, a place of comfort, the grey three-storey building with the entrance to the stairs at the side.

  Their office was on the top floor.

  The ground floor was a Chinese restaurant, The Northern Song. It was owned by Mr Yang and Darian and Sholto lived on his rather fine grub.

  Mr Yang and his family lived in the flat on the first floor, the other room on the first floor an office for an entertainment agency that never seemed to be occupied and can’t have been entertaining anyone but the taxman with its creativity.

  There were three small offices on the top floor. Sholto’s not-quite-a detective agency was the first door on the left at the top of the stairs, and the third office was occupied by a data services company that had no nameplate on their door but had told Mr Yang they were called Challaid Data Services, which didn’t expend much of their imaginative powers. The room
in between had never been occupied in the three years Sholto had been there. He and Darian occasionally heard people from the data company coming and going from it, and it sounded like they used it as a storeroom.

  Darian had asked, ‘What does a data services company need to store?’

  ‘I don’t know. Data, I suppose.’

  They bumped into the three men from that company in the corridor often enough and they were all polite and likeable fellows in their thirties, well dressed and groomed. If ever there was an issue with the building, those three were happy to chip in and prove themselves good neighbours. One day, Darian was going to have a deeper look at them and their work, try to figure out who they really were and what they were up to, but there were so many other more urgent things to do first. Taking a look at the owner of the building could be one of them.

  The building was owned by Randall Stevens, a man in his fifties, no more than five feet tall. Darian had never met him, or even seen him, he never visited the place. Sholto was half- sure he’d seen him at a distance once, but he’d never spoken to him. Apparently, he lived in the Cnocaid district, somewhere near the Challaid Park football stadium, and took his money from this and two other buildings. Didn’t seem like enough income for the house he had, but Darian hadn’t dug any deeper. If he’d just Googled the name he might have realised something was amiss, but he didn’t care to look when there were cases already on his desk to tackle.

  Darian went in the side door and up the stairs, in through the office door to see Sholto at his desk, reading what looked like a good old-fashioned letter.

  Darian said cheerfully, ‘Madainn mhath.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘We got anything interesting today?’

  He didn’t mention Ash Lucas because he wasn’t supposed to be chasing after the man. People came to them and asked for their help but Sholto, with the wisdom of many years dodging difficult cases, didn’t always choose to get involved. There were cases, like Lucas, which he felt should have been left to the police and would risk his cover as a ‘researcher’ if they got involved. Sometimes Darian would accept that, sometimes he wouldn’t, and Ash Lucas had been a target he couldn’t stop himself aiming at.

  Sholto put the letter down and looked at him. He was sitting at a mess of paper that everyone assumed had a desk underneath but you could only ever see the legs; there might have been nothing but a gravitational miracle holding up the paper, laptop and phone. He was just inside the door on the right, a short bald man, grey hair at the sides. He was chubby in a way that filled in all the worry lines he ought to have had, and he always tried, and just as often failed, to dress well. He wore a shirt but it was typically too small or badly tucked in, or he’d have tied his tie on wrong so the thin half was noticeably longer than the wider half. Darian’s desk was a less frantic affair, over by the window, looking down onto Cage Street.

  Sholto said, ‘Nothing exciting, just back to the south docks. Take a look at the warehouses again; see if you can find them importing drugs or people or plotting the downfall of decent society, something like that.’

  Darian scoffed. ‘They’re not importing drugs. They’re trying to run a legal business at the old docks and Glendan just wants to push them into the loch so they can build more flats normal people can’t afford.’

  ‘Yeah, well, abnormal people need places to live as well.’

  Darian sighed and Sholto sat and stared at him, not saying a word. He struggled to understand what Darian’s problem was. A small, family-owned, long-standing company was refusing to sell its two warehouses at the south docks, the last buildings down there still used for their original purposes. The rest had been turned into flats and trendy waterside bars years ago. Glendan, the building company, wanted to play with those last two buildings, but the Murdoch family had been there since they arrived in the city a hundred and fifty years ago and weren’t in the mood for budging.

  Douglas Independent Research was investigating it because some rich and powerful people had told them to, not because there was any suspicion of a crime. They were acting as intimidators, not investigators. Challaid was a city founded as a trading port in which authority was granted only to those who knew how to look the other way, and it had been occupied by an assortment of Vikings, pirates, mercenaries and crooks in the centuries since. The modern world had reached Challaid, but it hadn’t changed it.

  Sholto was a man who went to church every Sunday morning with Mrs Douglas, and she went every Sunday night and to a bible study on Wednesdays as well. Sholto seemed to feel his mortal soul didn’t need such a deep cleanse, just a regular wipe down. He was a person without malice, but he needed to make a living.

  ‘Just go and watch them, they might surprise us and we need the money.’

  Sholto always thought they needed the money. The last big payday had been three months before, £46,000 for three weeks’ work. They had been hired by Challaid FC to go down to London and investigate a player they wanted to buy and whose team were suspiciously keen to sell. The two premier league clubs in the city were fairly regular customers. In this case Challaid were planning to spend big money on a twenty-three-year-old called Arthur Samba and they wanted to know what sort of human being went with the footballing talent.

  Darian did most of the work, being young enough to move in the same circles as the target without looking ludicrous, and he stumbled across some alarming behaviour, even by the standards of a professional footballer. Sholto delivered the dossier to the club and assumed they would pull out of the deal. Instead they used the revelations to knock the fee down from £4 to £2.8 million. Saved themselves a fortune for the sake of a forty-six-grand investigation, and now they just had to hope that when they inevitably sold the troublemaker on, the buying club wouldn’t be as curious as they were. That’s how ‘research’ works.

  Darian left the office and walked down to the old docks on the south bank. The new, much bigger ones, up in Whisper Hill, had been built for modern industrial ships in the 1930s, but there had been some sort of dock on the south bank of the loch, they said, since the city was founded.

  The sort of history lessons you get in primary school will tell you the city was founded by warriors, regrouping at the loch before they defended their fair lands from invading Norsemen or other enemies.

  The sort of history lessons you get in secondary school will tell you it was founded by a group of Hebridean pirates who needed safe shelter from which to raid boats sailing to Ireland or further north.

  The sort of history lessons you get in college will tell you Challaid was founded by groups of Highland and Norse traders who needed a safe bay to exchange goods, and the city grew from there.

  The last is the most likely but nobody knows because we’re a thousand years old and the first thing you lose in old age is memory. The one thing every story agrees on is that the south bank was the original port.

  Boats still landed there, Darian could see them from the glass-fronted café he stopped at twenty yards along the dock from one of the Murdoch warehouses, but they were mostly yachts. Pretty white things that rich people played with because other rich people did, and few of the well-to-do liked seeing two big ugly brick buildings right beside their dock otherwise lined with sleek architectural show-offs. Those old buildings belonged up in Whisper Hill these days. Darian liked the dirty things for their defiance, for the way they summed up what the south docks had always meant to Challaid. That was why he made so little effort to watch them. The owners were doing nothing wrong that mattered, but the hope was that he or Sholto could spot a molehill that Glendan could spin into a mountain. It wasn’t work to be proud of.

  5

  IT WAS THE middle of the afternoon when Darian started to walk back to the office. The only things going in and out of the two warehouse buildings were the employees, only a handful and all of them Murdoch’s. They’d had a shipment the day before, and Darian was sure they had another two on Monday, but it was always small drips of the tide
of goods that washed into Challaid. There was a persuasive economic argument that they should sell the warehouses to Glendan and move up to Whisper Hill. It would be easier and cheaper for them to do business in the bigger docks and without a major property developer poking them in the side every day, but their bloody-mindedness was amusing.

  When he turned the corner onto Cage Street, Darian saw the man standing just outside the door to The Northern Song, eating one of Mr Yang’s spring rolls. Darian had never met the man in the suit and wannabe smart coat, but he recognised what he was from a distance and who he was when he got closer. DC Alasdair MacDuff, a young detective working in the anti-corruption unit at Cnocaid station, and where he went you could be certain DI Folan Corey was a few steps further ahead.

  It should tell you all you need to know about our city’s commitment to tackling corruption that the unit dedicated to the task had only a dozen or so officers and was led by a detective inspector instead of someone more senior, a man allowed to run the unit in whatever way pleased him and the people of influence in Challaid. There had been a time, back in the late nineties, after the Three O’clock killings, when the force made a very public effort to clean up its act, but that was a long time ago, and old habits had returned.

  Darian didn’t acknowledge DC MacDuff, a tall and plain man, light hair cut short and small features. He seemed awfully hungry, leaning against the wall by the restaurant doorway. He was waiting for someone. Darian went in the side door and ran up the stairs, stepping into the office to find Sholto behind his desk looking red-faced and angry, a man in his forties sitting across from him with wavy dark hair, beady eyes and an easy grin. The guest was DI Corey, now and always in control of his conversations.