In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide

by Malcolm Mackay

  He nodded but that rattled his brain so he stopped. He had struggled to keep up with her comments. ‘I don’t know what got into me.’

  ‘Ha, I know exactly what got into you, I could smell it the second I opened the front door.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘You were right to come, although you won’t win any prizes for your timing. But, then, if you’d waited for daylight and sobriety, you probably wouldn’t have made the journey.’

  Maeve took a few steps and sat on the other couch opposite him. She was wearing a short skirt, her long hair down. She was amused by his discomfort, smiling her dimpled smile. Darian watched her cross her legs.

  He said, ‘I should go.’

  ‘You know, my neighbours already think I’m a classic example of the moral decay of this city. A young woman on her own, the man I was sleeping with murdered. Then you come banging on my door in the dark and leave a few hours later. You’re not helping me to make a good impression.’

  Darian looked across the small room at a woman who had never consciously tried to make a good impression in her life.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You can make it up to me by explaining what you said last night. If Cummins didn’t kill Moses then who did?’

  ‘I was havering; I was wrong, ignore me.’

  ‘No, you want me to ignore you now because you were right last night. All the people I’ve met since Moses was killed, all the people investigating it, there are only two I’ve seen prove they’re intelligent enough to listen to, you and Corey. If Corey told me aliens don’t exist I’d start looking out for little green men. You’re the only smart one I can trust. You were honest last night and I want you to shame the devil and be honest with me this morning as well.’

  There was no threat in her voice, but there was the demand of a woman who had a right to know. Darian had sacrificed his right to keep his opinion to himself at the same moment he had abandoned the policy of keeping his big mouth shut late the previous night.

  ‘I don’t know who killed Moses but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Cummins. That guy, he’s not capable of much, murder included. He’s the sort of guy who runs up a debt, not the sort that pays it off.’

  ‘So it’s a hunch?’

  ‘No, not a hunch, it deserves a bigger name than that. You get to understand people when you study them enough, get to know the types. Cummins is a loudmouth but he’s weak. If he had done it there’s no way he would have gone a month and dodged a large police investigation without it being known.’

  ‘When DC MacDuff came here yesterday he said there was more than enough evidence to confirm and convict.’

  ‘There’s evidence. All very neat and just enough of it to be sure Cummins gets a long sentence.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means all that evidence and a man with a brain like DI Corey didn’t spot it, but me and Sholto found it within two bloody days of looking. Not to talk our talent down, but I don’t find that convincing. They’ll put him in a court and they’ll get a conviction and that’ll be that.’

  ‘That’ll be that? If the person who killed Moses is still out there then you don’t get to stop looking for him just because Corey and his mob say so. I’m hiring you and I’m telling you to keep looking.’

  Darian looked at her, the magnetic fury on her face, and smiled. Someone willing to fight for the dead, long after the final bell had tolled. He said, ‘I’ll keep looking, but I don’t know how much I’ll be able to find.’

  ‘You’ll keep looking and you won’t do it alone because I’m going to help you. I know people that were close to Moses, the sort that might know who he was working with around the time he was murdered. A lot of them wouldn’t talk when there was a police investigation going on, didn’t want to be tangled up in that unpleasantness. They won’t talk to you either because they’ll see you as a cop without the credibility.’

  ‘Hold on, no, this is not okay, you would be putting yourself at risk.’

  ‘I’m going to do this, so talking me out of it is a waste of your boozy breath. If I do it without your help I’ll be less effective and at greater risk. So you’ll help me, won’t you?’

  When she smiled in triumph she was a woman Darian couldn’t say no to.

  He said, ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  SCOTTISH DAILY NEWS

  A LESS EXPENSIVE FAILURE

  Why Government Claims of Banking Success Hides an Alternative Flaw

  It happened again over the weekend, the Scottish government’s finance secretary telling a collection of business leaders that sidestepping the worst of the banking crisis that engulfed the world in 2008 was down to their policy and regulation. Its true policy and regulation were a major factor in the shallowness of our recession, but it wasn’t their policy and it wasn’t their regulation.

  No government in the modern history of Scotland has admitted it, but their dirty little secret is that the Sutherland Bank has dictated finance policy, from taxation to regulation, for more than a quarter of a millennium. Every major finance policy that has passed through parliament, from every major party, has been written to fit the austere philosophy of the Challaid-based bank that has dominated the Scottish financial sector since its inception in the seventeenth century.

  We don’t, in the south, think of Sutherland Bank that way, because we don’t think of Challaid that way. It’s the remote city, hidden on the north coast, barely accessible and culturally separate. They speak Gaelic, they keep themselves to themselves and the tentacles of their local businesses tend not to reach into our lives. Except for one, the bank that’s always been there, that’s always presented itself in the way we see the city it sprang from, distant. Talk to people who work in Challaid and they tell you a different story about the power that pulses out of the grand building by the park, not coincidentally next door to the equally grand council headquarters in the city.

  Things went bad fast in 2008, but Scotland’s recession was shorter and shallower than many. It was not, contrary to the PR nonsense of the politicians at the time, good planning and rigorous regulation that saved the day, it was a fluke born out of a different kind of corruption. Sutherland gets to decide how every other financial institution in the country operates, because they’ve been the lender of last resort to the Scottish government since the mid-eighteenth century. They’re a company with a long history, a patient and conservative bank that sees gambling as beneath them, so they drew up a set of rules that forced every other bank to operate the same way.

  It means that nobody else can ever grow enough to challenge them in their domestic market, and allows their influence to smother Scotland and reach out beyond. That legally enforced financial conservatism meant we didn’t get as high a boom as they had in London and elsewhere, and didn’t get the crushing bust either. Sure, our economy took a big hit, but not as bad as it could have been. It’s often reported that Sutherland actually profited from the wreckage of its rivals. One or two scallywags have even suggested they played a small part in making the crash happen, so they could look strong and pick over the carcasses of their former challengers.

  The real shame of it, though, is not a large bank controlling financial policy, that’s simply a more crystallised version of what happens in many countries. The shame is that this distant bank has had undue sway over social policy to boot. They have believed, throughout their history, that progress is made slowly, that risks are for the graceless and that a decent society is always tightly controlled. The progressive agenda in the south has been resisted, and the amount spent fighting poverty has been reduced, because of a banking corporation that won’t allow money to be spent on something as frivolous as tackling poverty and social injustice.

  At some point in the next few months a politician will address business leaders in Challaid or Edinburgh or Glasgow and they’ll call the Sutherland Bank one of the greatest success stories in Scottish history. One or more of the bank’s board, all members of
the founding family, will be in attendance, and they’ll nod politely, trying to look humble. They should. They have more to be humble about than the people they so powerfully influence would ever admit.

  22

  IT WAS TEMPTING to throw the rest of life overboard and sail wherever Maeve pointed the boat. Darian found himself thinking about her as he walked to the office on Cage Street after going home for a shower and change of clothes. Her strength, her boldness, pushing for difficult truth and willing to take the risks, even enjoying it. He couldn’t abandon every other case just to obsess about Maeve; he had to help Sholto pay the bills.

  Sholto was in the office ahead of him, the smell of Chinese food from the container on his desk that had held his greasy breakfast.

  ‘Good, you’re here.’

  Darian said, ‘I thought you were on a diet.’

  Sholto said, ‘Mrs Douglas is trying to get me onto a diet. She’s convinced that one day she’s going to see me in a news report about obesity. You know the ones where they film fat people on the street and you never see their faces, just wobbles in tight clothing. Got me worrying I’ll recognise my wobbles on TV.’

  Darian looked at the takeaway and said, ‘I applaud your discipline.’

  ‘It’s stress release, we’ve got something and I don’t know if I like it or not. Well, I don’t like it, I know I don’t, when I’m uncertain it always means bad news.’

  Darian sat at his desk by the window and said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘Some kid, eighteen or nineteen, got the holy smokes beaten out of him last night. He’s at the Bob, they kept him in overnight.’

  The King Robert VI Hospital is in Cnocaid, which meant he was beaten on the good side of town. It sounded, on the surface, like Sholto’s kind of case, easy and uncontroversial. Young man gets leathered on a night out and lands in the hospital, not likely to become a headscratcher. Just find the drunken kid that used the other drunken kid as a punch bag.

  ‘So what’s the bad news?’

  ‘Well, he got knocked about last night, he was found alone in the alley behind Himinn nightclub on Malairt Street. They called an ambulance, he told the police he saw nothing, they said they’d investigate. His father’s decided that’s not enough, that he doesn’t trust them to make a job of it, so he called me.’

  ‘So turn it down. It’s a police case.’

  ‘I would, I would, but the father, he, eh, he works for Sutherland Bank. He’s not a Sutherland, but he’s senior.’

  Sholto had a policy of not turning down anything that came from the bank. You do good work for those people and they use you a lot. With their wealth you can charge them eye-watering amounts without them complaining, so saying no was bad for business.

  ‘Who are they, the father and son?’

  ‘Father is Durell Kotkell, son is called Uisdean. The father, I Googled him while I was talking to him, he’s a senior executive with some control over their operations in Caledonia. Sort of guy with a big office at HQ and the ear of the family in the boardroom. If he recommends us to the company, we’re set.’

  ‘And if we stand on police toes we’re screwed into the ground.’

  ‘Well, yes, there is that. Come on, I’ll drive us to the hospital and we’ll talk to the boy while it’s fresh in his mashed-up head.’

  Sholto drove them to Cnocaid in his Fiat and complained ferociously at the price of parking. As he jabbed the coins into the machine Darian stood beside him.

  ‘I spoke to Maeve Campbell.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘Yeah, she still wants us to keep looking for the person who killed Moses.’

  ‘She wants us to keep looking for Randle Cummins? He’s in the bloody police station, we know where he is, and soon he’ll be in The Ganntair. Does she want a photo to prove it? She should be happy with how this worked out. Well, not happy, her man’s still dead after all and we’re not Jesus enough to bring him back, but she should let it rest. It’s finished, and we’re finished with it.’

  Sholto had stopped at the machine to rant and a woman was standing behind him, waiting to pay for the luxury of switching off her car to visit a sick relative. She cleared her throat and he started, nearly dropping the hard-earned coins in his hand. They didn’t speak about the case again as he got the ticket and went back to put it on the dashboard of the car. They went into the large, L-shaped building. Its many facelifts didn’t hide its age, and some would suggest the attempts to make it look less nineteenth century only damaged it. There are a lot of buildings like that in Challaid, patched up in the name of modernity because we instinctively don’t like rebuilding and they would have been better off left alone.

  The boy’s family were round his bed in a private room on the second floor. His injuries didn’t warrant a room of their own, but his father’s status did. His influence had also pulled a bored-looking uniformed officer into its orbit in the room and kept him there for no good reason.

  ‘Hello, I’m Sholto Douglas; this is my colleague Darian Ross.’

  The father stood up from his bedside seat. He was short and thin with dark, receding hair and the expression of a man who didn’t have to work hard for respect. All the action in his face was around the small eyes, thick eyebrows in a V to show his anger and the deep lines cutting his tan showing that this was his usual expression, a small mole above his right eye. His suit was stylish, and no doubt expensive, but he wore it like an obligation, not a pleasure.

  ‘Finally. I’m Durell Kotkell. It’s about time we got some proper investigators here; we’ve been waiting for hours with just this clueless wonder for company.’

  The young officer rolled his eyes but said nothing.

  Kotkell said to him, ‘You can wait outside, there’s nothing for you to add here and I’d like to speak to these gentlemen in private.’

  That was an idea the cop liked, and he left quickly. Leala Kotkell was sitting at her son’s bedside looked uncomfortable, a darkly tan Caledonian, straight dark hair tied back out of her way, too-thin eyebrows and a button nose. Darian noticed the expensive rings on her fingers. The boy in the bed looked bruised and embarrassed. He was boyishly handsome, a mop of brown hair that needed a brush put through it, small eyes that were the opposite of his father’s in their innocence, the beauty spoiled slightly by a line of spots along his poorly defined jawline. The few visible injuries suggested it had been by no means the worst pasting handed out in Challaid that night.

  Sholto said, ‘So, Uisdean, why don’t you take us through what happened.’

  Before the boy could open his cut lips his father said, ‘My son was brutally attacked is what happened. Unprovoked, followed out of a nightclub and battered senseless for no reason. The police have done nothing of any use; they’ve made it perfectly clear they don’t think it matters much. That’s not good enough, so you’re going to find out who did it.’

  Darian realised that Sholto had already committed to playing the obsequious yes-man so he spoke for the first time. ‘We’ll need to hear it from your son so we can have as clear a picture to work from as possible.’

  Durell Kotkell frowned like a man trying to decide how best to win a fight no one else realised had started. Sholto shuffled, cleared his throat for no reason and said to Uisdean in the bed, ‘Can you run us through what happened last night, as much detail as you can remember?’

  The boy, and he looked younger than eighteen, spoke like it hurt. His accent was the epitome of posh Challaid, the phlegmy style of a working-class accent designed for Gaelic replaced with silky care, less roll on the r’s, a lighter touch on the l’s and less spittle all round. ‘I honestly don’t know what happened. I was having a night out with some friends, we were at Himinn, had a few drinks and we left. I went to use the alley to cut across to Cala Street and get a taxi home from the rank there. I remember going into the alley, I could see the lights from the buildings on Cala Street, and that was it. They must have attacked me from behind because I didn’t see anyone waiting there.’
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  ‘Uh, huh, and you didn’t hear anything or see anyone on Malairt Street when you came out of the club that looked like trouble?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘There was no bother in the club last night, no arguments or funny looks?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Durell had been silent quite long enough for his tastes and, still standing, said, ‘Of course there was no trouble; if there had been then even the clowns masquerading as policemen in this city would have known where to look. You need to find out who did this.’

  Sholto said, ‘Of course, of course. Was anything taken from you, money or your phone?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Do you know if they went through your pockets looking for anything?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Were you wearing a watch, Uisdean?’

  ‘Uh, yes.’

  Sholto leaned towards the bed and said, ‘Is that it there, the one on the bedside cabinet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No scratches on your wrist or anything where they tried to take it off?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And there was no one you’ve fallen out with, even ages ago, and you didn’t think it was a big deal at the time? There’s no one who might have been half-cut, outside the club, saw you come out and thought they’d try to settle a score you forgot they were keeping?’

  ‘No, no one.’

  ‘Right, good. Can you give us the names of the people you were with at the club?’

  He looked reluctant but one glance at his father set his tongue running. ‘Leandro was there, Leandro Oriol. He’s at the university with me, lives in the accommodation there. Others came and went but it was him I went to the club with.’

  Darian had stayed silent since his first intervention, letting Sholto show that his years of ducking real work hadn’t blunted his talents completely. He’d asked the right questions politely enough to keep the father from raging again. They each shook hands with Durell and Uisdean, nodded to Leala on the other side of the bed, and walked back down to the car.