In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide

by Malcolm Mackay

  Our past teaches us as many bad lessons as good ones. In this city we have a problem understanding what’s telling us to change and what’s telling us to stay the same. It comes, probably, from our desperate need to remain distinct, different from the Scotland of the Anglicised south and from the world beyond. We hang on to our language and our culture, our sense of difference, because we know these things to be good, but we allow that to spread to areas where cosmopolitan modernity is, frankly, a hell of a lot better. People in the south whinge incessantly about our Gaelic road signs, but it’s the old prejudices underneath that pose the real problem here. We don’t like outsiders unless we’re dominating and exploiting them.

  Darian left the alleyway, hoping Holguin wouldn’t get caught up in any of this, but not sure. People like the waiter, a bystander who didn’t deserve to suffer, were the first to take a hit because they didn’t see it coming. Darian made the long walk down to Glendan Station and went home. He knew more about Moses Guerra’s death, but he didn’t know any better.

  10

  HE WAS LATE enough turning onto Cage Street the following morning to know Sholto would be there before him. It was wet and cold because this is Challaid and you can assume that any time the weather isn’t mentioned it was drizzly and there was a nip in the air. Darian could feel the water trickle down the back of his neck because he wasn’t dressed for it, which is a sign of stupidity in a city where the rain and wind stand beside death and taxes as life’s certainties.

  A man was standing across the lane, pushed back against the wall of the Superdrug store opposite The Northern Song. He had the last bite of one of Mr Yang’s breakfast dumplings from a foil tray and stayed where he was, staring ahead and pointedly not looking at Darian. Darian pointedly didn’t look back and went in through the door to the stairs and up to the office. Sholto was, as expected, there first.

  Darian walked across to his desk by the window, looked down into the lane and saw the man still there, seemingly nailed to the spot. He said, ‘There’s a man...’

  Sholto interrupted him. ‘I know there’s a man watching the building, and I know who he is and I know why he’s here.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘That’s Randulf Gallowglass, stupid bloody name, and he used to be DC Gallowglass along at Cnocaid station, one of the anti-corruption team. He left the force, I don’t know why but probably because he was the baddest egg in the carton, got elbowed out, and he’s now doing work for Corey, off the books. Right this very now he’s standing across the way because Corey will have told him to. That’s Corey’s old-fashioned version of a warning shot, Gallowglass the bullet that lets you know that he knows you’re working for Maeve Campbell and he wants you to stop.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Oh, aye.’

  Darian looked down at the man in his thirties, light brown hair and a square face, big ears sticking out the side of it, a tall and blocky frame. He said, ‘He does work for Corey?’

  Sholto sighed and said, ‘Yes, he does. Corey’s very loyal to any cop that works with him, anyone he considers a protégé. There’s a whole generation of them that he made sure he taught, and he keeps them all around, somewhere between apostles and bodyguards. They hero-worship him to a laughable degree. If he tripped up an old lady in the street they would hail him for inventing gravity. Just because a man like Gallowglass is outside the force doesn’t mean the string from the back of his head to the end of Corey’s finger has snapped. Never mind him, come away from the window and look at me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What do you mean what? You went wandering off after the Campbell girl, all googly eyes and bulging trousers, and you’re digging about in that Moses fellow’s bones.’

  ‘You knew I would.’

  Sholto shook his head and said, ‘I thought this time some of my good sense might have rubbed off on you. How many hundreds of times have I told you not to get involved with a client?’

  ‘It’s less than fifty so, to the nearest hundred, none.’

  Sholto huffed and said, ‘Well, that’s because I should only need to say it once, and even then you should have guessed it before I opened my mouth. We should be swerving around Corey like he’s poison, and that Campbell girl isn’t much healthier for you. You know they think she did it.’

  ‘Do you think she did it?’

  ‘I don’t know who did it, it could have been her. Recently split up with the man, knows where he keeps his money, bloody hell.’

  ‘Why would she be waiting for him out on the street, though?’

  Darian was getting excited and Sholto wanted to put a stop to it. ‘Never mind trying to talk yourself into believing her innocence. Never mind any of it. Could have been King Alex in his castle in Edinburgh that did it for all I care. Moses Guerra is dead and buried up in Heilam, it’s not our case and there’s every chance we’ll never know who killed him. I’ve seen enough investigations like that, too many suspects and too little evidence; they never amount to anything but wasted sweat. It’s not worth the dust up your nostrils that poking around in his background will get you.’

  Darian paused for a second and said, ‘How do you know he’s buried up in Heilam?’

  ‘Never mind what I know or how I know it, just assume I know best and tell me you’ll keep away from this thing.’

  Darian never wanted to pick a fight with Sholto. He liked and respected the man too much for that, but there was often fun and sometimes profit to be had in it. There were any number of places Moses Guerra could have been buried, or cremated, and while the graveyard in Heilam, just beyond the end of the urban grey in Whisper Hill, was by far the biggest, that didn’t mean you assumed he was there.

  Darian said, ‘You’ve been doing some digging of your own, haven’t you?’

  ‘Well, I knew you would so I thought I might as well do it properly just to show you how. A pretty girl comes looking for help; I knew what you’d do next. Lack of blood flow to the brain, that’s the problem around girls like her. And I’d bet Mrs Douglas’s finest jewellery, which isn’t up to much, I admit, that you’ve been round to see the lovely Miss Campbell at her flat, haven’t you?’

  ‘You’re throwing mud at me when you had your own spade out digging holes.’

  Darian was close to laughing and Sholto was close to blowing up. They both paused for ten seconds and drew breath. Sholto said, ‘You’ll never find out who killed him, you know that, don’t you? There are too many gaps that no one can fill without incriminating themselves. If this was to do with his work then it’s over because no one he worked with will talk. Sometimes you can’t clear the blur of a case and that’s the hardest thing for a young cop to learn.’

  ‘I’m not a cop.’

  ‘Neither am I anymore, but we still think like them. This is a job for the police, and it’s one they can’t finish either. Leave them to it.’

  ‘You looked at it because you thought you might be able to work it out.’

  ‘Doing anything that upsets Corey is a gamble with our own future, and I’m not a gambler, Darian, I never was. Corey, he’s... Ach, it makes me mad thinking about him, coming in here and talking down to me like he does every other cop, but I worked hard to get this company started and we do some good work. I don’t want that ended by him.’

  ‘If we were careful.’

  ‘We’re always bloody careful, and the whole world tiptoes around that man and it doesn’t help.’

  ‘If Maeve Campbell hired us because Moses Guerra owed her money, we would be entitled to examine his financial background to try to work out where all his money came from and where it went. We would be identifying cash that our client might be entitled to. If it just happens that his financial work was behind his killing and we stumbled across information that proved it, well, that would be a coincidence within our remit.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You went looking for information about Guerra, which means it might have been you that Corey found out about.’

&nbs
p; ‘Unlikely.’

  ‘But you do want to find out who killed Guerra. You want to get one over that bastard Corey.’

  ‘Language, and maybe.’

  That meant he did.

  11

  THE FIRST STEP in a joint investigation was to share information. Darian told him everything he had been able to uncover so far, which was a short recap. Moses Guerra must have been attacked outside the building, not inside, and when he ran he picked a route that carefully avoided anyone else seeing him or his attacker.

  Darian said, ‘Not much, is it?’

  Sholto smiled and said, ‘Well, you’re young; I keep telling you you’re young. A big part of policing is hanging round long enough to know who to ask. The police think Moses was attacked outside the flat as well, chased to the alley and he was stabbed there multiple times, enough times that them clever psychologists might start to think there was a personal element involved, although it might just have been that it was dark and rushed and the attacker struggled with it. Suggestion of a personal element doesn’t help the pretty piece of work that was in here cooing to us about her innocence.’

  ‘Could be someone he worked with before, knew where he lived but couldn’t get in. She would get in, surely, and how would she keep up with him if he decided to sprint? How would she knock him down?’

  ‘Don’t you get caught up thinking the little woman couldn’t possibly attack the big man, that’s foolishness. If she has a blade and an inclination to use it and he has no willingness to fight back then she wins every single time. And if he still loved the girl, daft sod that he might have been, maybe he tried to talk her round.’

  ‘So you think she could have kept up with him and then got him after a chase?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. He was stabbed six times, and he covered some ground from the flat to the alley so the person who went after him was fast and determined, willing to stick with the chase in public for minutes instead of seconds. That might well be someone scared of the consequences of failure. We need to work out who he was working with; the people who might have put money into him and not gotten as much back as their imaginations expected, or just people who knew what he was handling, maybe carrying that night, and thought they could carve a slice for themselves with that knife.’

  ‘How do we find out who they were?’

  Sholto smiled and said, ‘Well, I took a little shortcut and found out all the names the police have on their list of known associates. He was a quiet sort of criminal, which is all too rare, someone who facilitated other people’s wrongdoing or tidied up after them. The anti-corruption guys put this shortlist together of all the crimes they believe he was involved in and the people he probably worked with on them. One of them, from the early days, died four or five years ago in a car crash, so unless this is The X-Files we can probably stroke him off our list. The rest of them? Murder’s not just out of their league, it’s playing a different sport, which is probably why he worked with them. That’s what the unit think and I agree with them. Crooks, not killers. Money does make people daft, though.’

  ‘Maeve said there was no family.’

  ‘Maeve, is it? Miss Campbell no longer. Aye, there’s no family in this country. Father long disappeared into the ether, no siblings, mother back living in Panama as of last year. It’s the work, that’s what killed the boy. Someone he worked with or against decided to put a stop to his mathematical gymnastics. There’s not much for us to grab a hold of, though. He hung around some bad folk, but so what? There’s a lot of people out there to label bad, depending on your definition, and none of us can avoid them all. The police investigation went round in a couple of circles and then fell down dizzy. No pressure from family or media to catch the killer, and they can tell the neighbours it was related to his criminal work and not anything they need to worry about so everyone’s happy.’

  ‘Not everyone.’

  ‘Well, no, not everyone. Now we’ve got Miss Maeve trying to clear her name and muddying the water.’

  ‘She says she thinks she loved him because he was honest.’

  ‘Honest? He might have been honest about being dishonest but that’s as honest as he got. You believe that’s why she was with him?’

  ‘I don’t know, women are strange.’

  ‘And getting stranger all the time. Now, Mrs Douglas, she married me because I had a steady income and no visible scars, and I married her because I had a steady income and she had no visible scars, and we’ve rolled along just fine for a quarter of a century. These days people think a relationship should be like something out of a movie, or a dirty movie at least. It isn’t like that. And that’s the other thing I want you to think about. We’re taking a risk going up against the devil’s wee brother and we’re doing it with a job from Maeve Campbell as our paper-thin cover. When Corey tries to punch a hole in our defences it’ll only take one swing of his claw, so how dedicated is she? Right now she’s angry and she’s sad and she wants to know who really did it, partly for Moses and mostly for herself, to clear her name. What happens if she stops caring? We get two weeks into this and she finds herself another boyfriend and doesn’t want to rock the boat with the new love so she tells us to stop. It happens. She finds some other lucky sod to bounce around on and we’re left with all the aggro and no way of finishing the investigation.’

  Darian said nothing. He wanted to argue but he knew it might be true.

  Sholto said, ‘See if our pal is still singing in the rain out there.’

  Darian looked out of the window and saw Gallowglass, who hadn’t moved a half-inch. ‘He is.’

  ‘Good. You’re going to go to the Murdoch warehouses and stare blankly at them for a while and I’m going to stay here. We’ll do what we normally do and see which one of us he thinks is more interesting. If we’re doing anything at all for Maeve Campbell, we’re doing it when wee George Smiley down there goes home for his tea and a sleep.’

  Sholto was right, and Darian went to the warehouses to sit and watch nothing happening there, the place going through its boring routines, and no sign of Gallowglass having followed him. It was good to have Sholto on board. The bald man at his desk could seem like he’d dosed up on tranquilisers at breakfast, but when he had his tail up he still showed flashes of the talent he’d started his police career with.

  From the Smoke

  It was built in a U shape and it was seven storeys tall. The intentions had been better than the budget and the flats had ended up small and the building thrown up quickly with cheap materials. The cobbled courtyard was left bare of the once-planned furniture. The only stairs were in the centre of the U so more space was saved to cram people in. The large storeroom had been placed on the ground floor on the left side of the courtyard inside the U.

  The janitor’s tools took up the shelves around the door and most of the rest of the space was usually given over to the sacks of coal that were distributed round the building to those who could afford to pay. The coal delivery had been due the following morning so there were no more than a score of sacks stacked against the back wall at the time.

  They were fighting the fire on the right side of the building with a chain of men passing wooden buckets back and forth in the early evening. More men were at the stairs trying to get people out, with a few venturing into the burning building to search for anyone who might be trapped. They were risking their own lives to do so. It was chaotic in the courtyard. There was water splashing onto the cobbles and making them slippery as men bellowed deafeningly along the line. Smoke poured out the upper-floor windows where flames had broken the thin glass on the fourth and fifth floors and drifted down in the still night to blanket the courtyard. It was unlikely that anyone still on the upper floors of the building would find an escape.

  He was the only one who saw her. He was standing in the middle of the line passing a bucket forward, and as he let it go to the next man something made him turn his head. He saw just a glimpse of her. She wore grey clothes and had grey hair and
was moving through the smoke of the courtyard before disappearing in through the door to the storeroom.

  He broke from the line and started to walk across the courtyard. Someone called his name but he waved a hand behind him and kept walking. Nobody would follow him on this night when there was so much to fight for. Many had died in the other fires that struck buildings in this area so every man and woman knew the urgency of this one. The others went back to fighting the fire while he moved into the smoke and out of their view.

  The door to the storeroom was ajar and he entered knowing what it should look like inside. It was always dark in there as the row of small windows at the top of the wall were filthy with coal dust. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust and when they did he saw her.

  She was sitting on a wooden chair he didn’t remember being there before in the middle of the floor. She was watching him and waiting. Her mouth wasn’t smiling but her eyes were. She was trying to seem serious. The woman was trying to pretend that this wasn’t a game for her. He took two steps towards her and paused as he was reluctant to be further from the door. The air was already heavy in the storeroom and he knew it wouldn’t get better. He was breathing heavily with the mixture of nerves and smoke. He stood looking into her eyes for what seemed only a few seconds and then took a few more steps forward.

  ‘She’s here!’ he shouted.

  He turned and looked at the high windows behind him as though expecting to see some reaction. It was dark still but there were dancing lines of light visible from the fire. As he looked at a window a flicker turned to a burst of flame as a fireball exploded from the other side of the building and into the courtyard. The roar of fire covered the shouts of men to begin with but when the flames settled the men didn’t. They were still shouting in the courtyard as they battled fire and fear with volume.