In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide

by Malcolm Mackay

  Sorely asked about their little sister before he left. ‘How’s Cat?’

  ‘Good, I saw her last week. She was saying the three of us should get together a lot more often, Sunday lunch or something like that, make it a regular thing.’

  ‘Yeah, she said something like that last time I saw her, last month. She came down to watch my camanachd team play the university side at Barr Park; she was full of big ideas that’ll never happen.’

  ‘You win?’

  ‘Against a bunch of middle-class university nerds? Hammered God’s green snot out of them.’

  ‘You wish she’d left the city, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m proud she’s at university, but I wish it was somewhere else. We should all have gotten out of Challaid first chance we got.’

  ‘Then we couldn’t help Da.’

  ‘We might not be able to help him from here, and spending our lives trying might be a bad idea.’

  Sorley left and Darian struggled to avoid crying. Sadness ran through him every time he talked to Sorley, his big brother who was so clever, so strong, and reduced to running second-rate scams with bit-part gangsters. He was a talented young man, but he lived a life wasted to give Darian and Cat what they had.

  14

  THERE WAS A narrow gap in the thick curtains when he woke, a dusty line of daylight filtered through a smudged window. Darian blinked and shut his eyes again. He was beginning to dislike the sun, his best work often done in the darkness and the day reserved for resting. He struggled out of bed twenty minutes later, looking at the clock beside his bed. It was half-eight and he was going to be late for work.

  He had a shower and got dressed, jeans and a warm sweater. He had to dress in a way that would allow him to pass unnoticed in the areas he was working and daylight hours meant watching the old warehouses at the marina. He took the time to shave, not bothered that it cost him more minutes and Sholto would whinge about it. No aftershave, because Darian didn’t like to drench himself in cheap smells and couldn’t afford expensive ones. Then he made himself a cup of tea and sat at the small table by the window in the living room, thinking about a different flat and another man.

  Moses Guerra had handled cash for dangerous people, which instantly made the always treacherous money the most likely motive for his murder. There was little chance the dead man would have tried to keep people’s share from them because he didn’t seem that stupid, but that didn’t matter. Moses could have honoured all his fellow thieves and one might still have got it into his numb skull to kill him. People got jealous or paranoid, convinced someone they’d trusted with their secrets knew too many of them. Darian had to find out what Moses had been involved in lately, and if any bad souls had been hunting stolen money. One crook steals from another and hides the money with Moses; when the money gets tracked down the person holding it is punished beyond the last inch of their life.

  Darian finished his tea, got up and went to wash his cup in the sink with cold water. He dried it and placed it on the worktop. He had one of everything: cup, spoon, knife, fork. Few people had been in his flat since he’d moved in and none had stayed the night, none had been given a drink or a meal. This is said not to make him sound pathetic but to point out the obsession he had with his work, and the damage it did to him. His relationships were as brief as he could make them, and that wasn’t healthy.

  He’d wanted to be a detective since he was a small boy watching his father going off to work in the morning. The dream of being a good cop, finding the worst people in a rough society and cleaning them off the streets. The uniform was pulled beyond his reach when his father was accused of murdering a petty crook who had helped him steal precious gems from the criminal gang illegally importing them into Challaid. Darian was fourteen when his father was arrested and charged, fifteen when he was sentenced to life. The son of the disgraced former DS Edmund Ross was never going to find a role within the force, so he had to focus his ambition somewhere else.

  The day his father was arrested he didn’t come home as usual; instead it was DC Sholto Douglas who came round with their aunt Ann-Margaret to try to explain what had happened. What Sholto said that evening remained true to Darian now; his father was innocent and it would eventually be proven. It was taking too long, but their determination as a family to show he was wrongfully convicted never dimmed.

  You might think Darian’s desire to be a cop would have died the day he saw the police lead his father into court to convict him of a crime he didn’t commit. Accused of working with a known thief to steal illegal items and then killing the thief to cover his tracks and take his share. The diamonds were never recovered and the evidence always seemed flimsy and carefully constructed.

  Sorley had needed money to support his siblings, so he went to work for people he should have body-swerved, the sort of monsters the hysterical media like to tell you have a grip on the whole east side of the city, Bakers Moor, Earmam and Whisper Hill. That’s a preposterous exaggeration, but those criminals are strong enough for a smart young man to make a living out of, and Sorley did. That gave people who didn’t like their father the chance to claim the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree, when in fact it had travelled miles.

  Darian left the flat and walked out into a morning as cold as his mood. Challaid has always been a city obsessed with itself, concerned that it needed to upgrade to keep pace with the rest of the world but stay the same to respect its identity. The isolation that was originally one of our greatest defences has evolved into insecurity, a fear of being forgotten in an interconnected world, and the city is always trying to wedge bits of the future into the few gaps the past has left. Rebuilding, rebranding and waving our oh-so-individual identity in people’s faces. But life for Darian was about his work, and, no matter the era, crime in Challaid has always revolved around booze, drugs, money, sex and power.

  15

  SHOLTO WAS UP on his feet the second Darian came through the door. ‘Where have you been? You’re late. Never mind, don’t distract me. I’ve got it, I’ve done it. Cracked the whole thing with a phone call on day one.’

  ‘Cracked it?’

  ‘Smashed the bastard to smithereens. I know who killed Guerra and I know why.’

  It came, as many of the best tip-offs do, from a barman, listed as contact #S-39. He worked in a pub called The Gold Saucer, not far from where Moses had lived and died, and Sholto had brought forward the usual monthly update he got from him in case there was something relevant to this investigation. There was, although Sholto didn’t tell him it mattered in case the contact decided he wanted to be paid more than his usual pittance.

  ‘My contact overheard a whispered conversation between two very drunk men, which means it wasn’t nearly as whispered as it should have been. The man we’re looking for is called Randle Cummins; he was the one doing the mouthing off. He was talking about his old pal Moses Guerra, and how he had gone round to Moses’s flat to get money from him because he knew Moses was holding a lot. Said things turned nasty but he got into the flat and got the cash.’

  Darian didn’t know where to go with that. ‘He just blurted this out in some pub?’

  ‘He was talking to his pal, lending him cash, didn’t know the barman could hear them. Drunk people, if they’re stupid to start with, well, they’ll let it all out. It works, though, doesn’t it? If Cummins knew Moses then he might know when he had money he was supposed to clean. Cummins goes round, there’s an argument and a chase, he stabs Moses, takes his key and goes back to the flat for the dosh. They didn’t find much cash in the flat of a man who handles money.’

  ‘Is this barman reliable?’

  ‘A hundred per cent, always has been, who can you trust if you can’t trust a barman? I’m more concerned that Cummins was just mouthing off, trying to sound like a big man. Wee men with the drink swirling inside them can get imaginative and macho when they want to be.’

  ‘Then we need an address.’

  Sholto smiled and said, ‘Got one al
ready, that’s why I’ve been so patient waiting for you. Our watcher on the wall, Gallowglass, he’s not out there, or he wasn’t. Stick your head out the window and make sure he didn’t turn up in your wake.’

  Darian went over and looked down into Cage Street, saw no sign of the former cop. ‘Looks clear.’

  ‘Good, we’ll drive round and see if we can wake up Mr Cummins. He doesn’t have a job, according to my barman, and he’ll know which of his regulars do and don’t work. If I had no job and a lot of someone else’s money I would be treating myself to a few lie-ins. If we’re lucky we’ll have him nailed to a jail cell by lunchtime.’

  They left the office and walked round the corner at the bottom of the lane onto Dlùth Street where Sholto always parked his six-year-old Fiat Punto. He drove them at his typical sleepy snail’s pace. You couldn’t get through a journey of more than ten minutes in the daytime with Sholto behind the wheel without hearing the sound of someone else’s horn. One of the benefits of his anti-speed policy was that it gave them the opportunity to talk.

  Sholto said, ‘You don’t think this is our guy, do you?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk it down, but this sounds like a drunk who read about the murder in the papers and decided he wanted to put himself in the middle of the scene. He wouldn’t be the first infamy whore in this city. And I’ve never heard of him, have you?’

  ‘Well, no, but I’ve never heard of everybody at some point. No one starts famous.’

  ‘But to go from some pal of a crook that we’d never heard of to killing that same pal for money? That’s a pole vault.’

  Sholto went quiet and concentrated on his awful driving. They had to get to Jamieson Drive up on the northern edge of Bakers Moor, the old council houses where Cummins lived. Darian didn’t want to piss all over Sholto’s new shoes, he really didn’t, but the sort of man who whispered loudly in a pub about killing someone wasn’t typically the sort of man who avoided detection for over a month after the crime. Any lead was worth pursuing, and anyone who might have known about Moses and his work was worth the effort of chasing down, so Darian said nothing else to put Sholto off. It was rare enough to see the old man with this sort of enthusiasm.

  16

  CUMMINS LIVED IN a semi-detached house that looked desperate to fall over. The street on both sides was in groups of four houses, all from the forties or fifties, many looking like a giant ruffian had given them a bit of a shake. None was in quite as much disrepair as Cummins’. Beside the front door there was a huge crack up and a small chunk out of the whitewashed wall, about a quarter of the slates seemed to be missing from the roof and the chimney pot had somehow been sheared in half. It wasn’t obvious how any of this had happened, but it must have taken a concerted effort. The small front garden was an overgrown obstacle course they traversed before they reached the door. They could hardly see the path for the weeds and the never-cut grass.

  Sholto said, ‘The state of this place. Wouldn’t want to be living next door. Someone should arrest him for this if nothing else.’

  He was nervous and sounded it, worried that this shambolic house was a reflection of its owner because when people were this broken down they became unpredictable.

  ‘Maybe he’s not in.’

  ‘Only one way to find out.’

  Darian knocked on the door and the two of them took a step back, waiting twenty seconds before it was slowly opened by a short and wiry man with a narrow face, blotchy skin pinching at the cheeks, dark hair all over the place, two chipped front teeth chewing on his cut bottom lip. He was wearing a baggy T-shirt that showed a handful of amateurish tattoos and tracksuit bottoms. He looked at them both through sleepy eyes and said, ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Mr Cummins? I’m Darian Ross, this is Sholto Douglas, we’re here to talk to you about...’

  ‘This about that old bitch next door, uh? The fuck did she call you about this time? She saying I’m the Lady in Grey, or The Taisgealach? Eh? She’ll have me trying to bump off King Alex next. What is it this time, you old cow?’

  Darian raised a hand to stop him shouting at the house next door. ‘We’re not the police; nobody called us to come here. We want to talk to you about Moses Guerra.’

  The anger slipped from his expression and confusion took its place. He said, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about that, do I?’

  ‘But you knew Moses.’

  ‘I suppose, sort of, yeah, I did. I knew him but I don’t know anything about what happened to him, nothing like that. Nothing I would tell you anyway.’

  Cummins sounded cocky now and Darian liked that, it would make him more likely to talk. Darian said, ‘We’re not cops, but we’re looking into what happened to Moses. Can we come in and talk to you about it? We’ll make it worth your while.’

  Cummins laughed and opened the door a little wider. He said, ‘Sure, aye, come in then.’

  The outside of the house was an ineffectual prologue for what lay inside. The mess of the exterior was a Herculean effort for an insignificant return, but the real blood, sweat and tears were splattered all over the inside. There were holes in walls, no carpets on the floors, broken furniture and every surface was a canvas of stains in an abstract style. Avoiding the ones that still looked damp was a game that might never end. A few of them looked like blood, a lot were drinks and food, and some were better left unidentified.

  Cummins led them into the living room where there was one chair, which he sat in. ‘You want to sit on the floor or something?’

  Sholto said ‘Mm, nah.’

  Darian took the first step in the questioning because he was more confident of his footing. ‘Moses was killed and there was no money in his flat. You knew him, does that seem strange to you?’

  ‘I dunno. Maybe. I don’t know what he did with his money. Didn’t spend it anyway, fucking cheapskate.’

  ‘You don’t know if he had cash stashed in the flat?’

  ‘I suppose he had some. That was his work, wasn’t it, the dough.’

  ‘What about you, what do you do for a living?’

  ‘I’m not working.’

  ‘You making ends meet?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m all right. I pay my debts.’

  ‘You had debts?’

  Cummins shrugged.

  ‘And you paid them off?’

  Another shrug.

  ‘Did you pay them off recently?’

  Cummins looked up at him from the chair, the expression of a man who wished he had a gun in his hand to shut their mouths with. He had let them in because there had been mention of being paid. Now the talk had switched to his money, not theirs.

  ‘How much debt did you pay off?’

  ‘None of your business, that.’

  ‘Who did you owe it to?’

  Cummins said nothing, looking down at the floor.

  Sholto said, ‘Did you owe money to the Creags?’

  We’ll break away briefly for another detour to tell you who the Creag gang are, because they matter. The name has existed in Challaid, mostly working out of Earmam and Whisper Hill, for at least a century, a multi-generational concern. It started out as a group of low-income tough guys running protection rackets and the like, and with each generation it’s evolved, different people using the identity. Sometimes the Creags have been small-scale, a disparate bunch of gangs the police have identified under one badge for simplicity’s sake, but sometimes one person, or a small group of people, come along who are strong enough to morph it into a single, functioning unit. That’s what it was at the time Moses was killed, a small council running it. If you borrowed money from a lender on the east side of Challaid, whether you realised it or not you were borrowing from the Creags and if you valued the blood running through your veins, you’d better pay them back.

  At the mention of the Creags, Cummins looked sharply at Sholto and back at the floor.

  Darian said, ‘You owed the Creags, and they were leaning on you to pay back?’

  ‘Hey, you want me to answer your q
uestions you arrest me, okay. I got rights.’

  ‘We’re not cops, I told you that already. You had the Creag gang leaning on you for money and you knew Moses had cash in his flat. You said you paid your debts, so you must have found money somewhere. Where were you the night Moses was killed?’

  Cummins said nothing.

  ‘Can anyone vouch for your whereabouts on the night Moses was killed?’

  ‘I want a lawyer.’

  ‘We know you told someone that you took the money from Moses around the time he died.’

  ‘I want a fucking lawyer.’

  Darian and Sholto went out into the corridor and whispered to each other while Cummins stayed sitting on the chair in the living room, looking miserable. He still hadn’t grasped that the people questioning him weren’t actually cops. If he had he might have tried to find a way to talk himself out of the sewers.

  Sholto said, ‘It was him. We have to call it in now. It was him.’

  Darian nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

  ‘You’re disappointed, I understand. He’s pathetic and someone who took a life should never be that pitiful, but most of them are. This is it, Darian, we got it. A month Corey and his lot spent chasing this and they got nowhere, we’ve been on it a couple of days and we got it. They should give us a medal for this, or at least a certificate. We call it in.’

  Darian nodded. ‘We call it in.’

  It was ten minutes later when the two cars arrived. There were two uniformed cops in one and two detectives in the other. One detective was a young woman with short, dark hair and a frown that Darian didn’t recognise but Sholto said was one of Corey’s people, a DC Lovell, and the other was DC MacDuff. The uniformed officers took Cummins away, and MacDuff stood in the corridor with Sholto and Darian.

  He said, ‘You shouldn’t be involved in this.’

  It wasn’t the threat Corey would have delivered. It was a nervy, miserable warning. Sholto nodded and said, ‘We didn’t mean to, we just sort of fell arse backwards into the whole thing, working for a client looking for lost money. Led us to this guy. We’re done with it now.’