She was always the little sister to him and Sorley, with her thick, red hair, wide smile, pale, freckled skin and slight frame they thought she needed all the protection they could give. That was complete nonsense, of course, and especially so by the time they arrived at the door of the university halls. She was twenty, already planning to be a journalist, and knew her way around the worries of the world without the need of a guiding hand.
Sholto smiled, shook her hand firmly and said, ‘Catriona, it’s lovely to see you. Goodness me, you have your mother’s look if ever I saw it.’
A lot of people who had known their mother said the same, and Cat never quite knew how to react to reminders of her. Death chips a small corner from you, leaves you a different shape than you were before, a less complete person.
Darian knew any mention of their parents would make things awkward so he said, ‘Thanks for helping us with this, Cat.’
‘I’m just getting you in and watching the show, it’s no big deal.’
She led them through the hall and across to the side. The security didn’t really kick in until you left the main hall and tried to go down one of the corridors to the rooms. That was where you needed a swipe card to enter, which was where Cat came in handy. She held the door open for them and led them along the wide corridor and round to room seventeen. She had checked the register to find out what room Oriol had.
She said, ‘Here we go. These are some of the better rooms; you usually have to be pretty well connected to land one down this end.’
Sholto knocked and the three of them waited. The door opened and a middle-aged woman looked back at them. Cat didn’t recognise her so she wasn’t a lecturer or member of staff, and it was a fair bet she was a parent. She didn’t look surprised. She was tall and blonde, bright red lipstick against pale skin, and she looked at them with the irritated expression Darian and Sholto were used to.
Sholto said, ‘Hello, love, my name’s Sholto Douglas, this is my colleague Darian Ross, and Catriona Ross. We’re from Douglas Independent Research and we’re needing to speak with Leandro Oriol. Is he at home?’
‘What is this about?’
‘Don’t worry now; he’s not in any bother at all. A friend of his was knocked about like a crisp packet in a tornado and we were hoping young Leandro might be able to tell us one or two things about the stormy night in question.’
She frowned more deeply still and said, ‘You’d better come in.’
She stood at the door and the three of them walked past her. It was obvious they were expected, and that, whoever she was, she was there to deal with them. The rooms were bigger and better than Cat’s, basically a small flat with large windows and nice views of the side gardens. Cat was two floors up in tiny rooms she shared with two other people and several patches of damp that had lived there a lot longer than them.
The room she led them into was the kind of living room that every student wanted but very few could afford. Gadgets galore, gaming consoles and a bookcase full of games, VR headsets and framed movie posters on the walls. There was a cabinet that had an assortment of bottles in it, many of them still full, which meant it must have been restocked often. They weren’t cheap bottles either. On the couch, which had remarkably few stains and no visible rips in it, sat an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old boy. He was darker than the woman, but there was a resemblance there. Where she had the pasty look of a local, the boy’s father was presumably Caledonian. Leandro was chubby and he needed a haircut because the long style he was aiming at wasn’t working for him. He had a double chin, a fuzzy attempt at facial hair and small glasses, and he was wearing the sort of jeans and hoodie combination that looked like a sarcastic impression of a working-class kid.
Sholto looked at the drinks cabinet and said, ‘Hoo, I could get half-drunk on a year’s salary on that lot, eh?’
Leandro didn’t smile and the woman just frowned again. She said, ‘Mm. My name’s Kellina Oriol, this is my son Leandro. I’m a lawyer, so if you don’t mind I’ll be sitting in on this interview.’
Sholto said, ‘Oh. Good. We’re not police, just so you know.’
‘I already do know. You’re a private investigator pretending to be something else, I’ve checked. So go ahead and ask your questions.’
She sat on the couch next to her son and Sholto and Darian sat on the second couch in the room, Sholto slumping back and saying, ‘Obh, obh.’
There was a spare dining chair against the wall by the door, presumably for when their gaming sessions got crowded, so Cat pulled that beside the second couch and sat on it.
Sholto said, ‘You don’t mind if we take the weight off, do you, Leandro? No point wearing out our feet while our brains are working.’
He half nodded and then looked at his mother to see if he was giving the right answer. It was too late; bums had already hit the seats.
Sholto pushed on. ‘Now, Leandro, seeing as Uisdean’s already been in touch to tell you we were coming you can crack on and tell us what happened the other night outside Himinn and we can get out of your mother’s lovely hair.’
‘I don’t know what happened; I didn’t see any of it. I didn’t know it had happened until this morning.’
Leandro had a deep voice that sounded like it was coming from somewhere else, and his tone said he didn’t like having to use it in this company.
Sholto said, ‘Oh, we know that, but walk me through the things you do know. You weren’t so blootered you can’t remember, were you?’
Kellina Oriol tutted and Leandro said, ‘No, I remember. We went out for a few drinks, stopped in at Himinn and stayed for, I don’t know, a couple of hours. We left at the same time, but I went up the street because I was going to stay at my parents’ house, so I went up towards Ciad Station. I think he was coming back here so he went down the street to use the alley to get across to the taxi rank on Cala Street.’
All said in the clipped tone of an over-rehearsed performer scared of mistakes. Sholto nodded cheerfully along and said, ‘That was it? There was no one at the club trying to turn the dancing into something more physical, or even just keeping an eyeball on you?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘A nightclub in Challaid and there was no one there looking for a rumble? That seems unlikely.’
‘Nobody approached us, or spoke to us. We had no trouble at all.’
‘Uh-huh, uh-huh. And what sort of mood was Uisdean in?’
‘Mood? He was fine, normal.’
‘Good, right. So when you left the club I suppose there would have been some people out on Malairt Street, always busy out there in the festive hours. Did you notice anyone on their own, anyone taking an interest in you?’
‘I didn’t see anyone I can remember recognising. There were a few folk there, but just ordinary groups of people.’
‘So Uisdean, a good enough looking lad, money burning a hole in all his pockets, probably a wee heartbreaker, am I right? Got a tidy wee girl or three on the go, maybe picked one of them up from another lad who didn’t want to let go, something like that?’
‘No. That’s not Uisdean. I don’t think he has a girlfriend. I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know? You’re his mate.’
‘I don’t think he does.’
His mother said, ‘Really, Mr Douglas, they’re young men in college together, they’re not Siamese twins.’
‘I think they prefer to be called conjoined. So, Leandro, you probably don’t know him well enough to know of anyone who might have it in for him.’
‘No.’
‘No. The big N O. Nothing else springs to mind, nothing that might help us find out who tried to use your not-as-good-a-pal-as-we-thought-he-was as a piñata?’
‘No.’
Sholto glanced at Darian and they both stood up, so Cat did the same. She had come to see Darian at work but it was Sholto who had made an impression on her. He had always seemed so bumbling, her father’s former colleague who had become a byword for sloth. The way he handled that interv
iew, and the lawyer present, was far more impressive than she’d expected. If you wound him up, like Leandro’s mother had, he still had some life left in him to spit out. This was the moment Cat realised her brother was in good hands.
Sholto said, ‘We won’t take up any more of your expensive time, Mrs Oriol. Or yours, Leandro. This card here has my office number on it, just in case a flash of memory hits you and you need to get in touch about it.’
Cat led them back out and through the hall to the cavernous entrance. Darian said, ‘Well, that card will be in the bin by now.’
‘Aye, and I bet the bin cost more than Mrs Douglas’s weekly shop. Imagine a student having all that gear. A student. I could have gone swimming in his carpet. Did you feel it? The kind of people that go on skiing holidays and sail boats around the Mediterranean with no cargo to deliver, they are. Closest I’ve gotten to a foreign holiday in the last five years was chasing a debt dodger down to Carlisle.’
Cat said, ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out.’
Darian said, ‘It wasn’t worthless. Leandro’s obviously holding back, he knows something about what happened to Uisdean. His friend and his mother both told him what to say and he picked the best-sounding answers from their short list of options.’
Sholto said, ‘Aye, a couple of well-brought-up liars, that pair. That’s the thing about posh people, the rest of us tend to think they stick to the law better, don’t duck under it for a quick buck, but they’re actually worse because they think they deserve to get away with it.’
Cat said, ‘As long as it’s keeping you busy.’
‘Oh aye. We caught a killer this week, did Darian tell you that?’
‘No.’
Darian said, ‘It’s complicated; I’ll tell you in proper detail some time.’
‘I look forward to it. Say hello to Sorley if you see him before me.’
They parted, and Darian and Sholto walked back to Sholto’s car. Darian said, ‘Will we hit Himinn then, see what they have to say there?’
Sholto looked at his watch. It was half-four in the afternoon. ‘Nah, better to leave it to tomorrow morning. We’ve done enough work for one day so I’ll drop you back at home if you want. You take my advice, don’t become a workaholic, it’s one of the worst aholics you can be; it can be the end of you. Nearly happened to me.’
‘Did it?’
‘Oh yeah, when I was your age I worked all the hours they would pay me for. You get wiser as you get older.’
Darian said nothing to that, but he was thankful for the lift home. It meant he would dodge Bank Station, where Gallowglass would be waiting.
25
WHEN HE LEFT the flat, he did so carefully. Darian had been looking into the street for hours, checking for Gallowglass and not seeing him. He went out the back, onto a large square of grass that served as the shared garden of the four L-shaped buildings that surrounded it. Every time he reached the corner to go onto a street he looked carefully first, worried about Gallowglass seeing him. He didn’t take the usual route to Bank Station, or use the usual entrance on Fomorian Road, but instead used the bridge to cross the tracks and onto Sloc Street to enter from the far side of the building. He hadn’t seen Gallowglass, and he’d tiptoed through the shadows with enough skill to be sure Gallowglass hadn’t spotted him.
Darian took the train up to Mormaer Station and got a taxi from there. It was already after eleven, late enough to be a nuisance, so the long walk to Maeve’s flat would have left him too late to be decent. The road was visible in the lamplight as the taxi pulled up, but the flats on either side of the road and the steep Dùil hill behind trapped the light between them, the tops of the buildings and the hill a collection of ominous shadows. On Sgàil Drive you could easily believe these buildings existed in a void, no world visible in the blackness beyond.
He knocked on her front door and it took a while before a response arrived. Maeve pulled the door open, looking sleepy and flustered, wearing just a T-shirt.
Darian said, ‘Oh, sorry, I should have called ahead first. Do you want me to go?’
‘No, no, come in.’
They went through to the living room and Maeve stood in the doorway. It was cold, and Darian could see her nipples press against the thin T-shirt. She walked across to the record player and picked something up from beside it. When she bent down the T-shirt rode up and, although it was only a split second, Darian had the certainty of hope that the T-shirt really was all she had on. Maeve walked across with a small notepad and passed it to him.
She said, ‘You look through that while I put some clothes on. I didn’t expect to have to look respectable at this hour.’
‘Sorry about that. I don’t always keep sociable hours.’
‘Well, these hours can be very sociable with a little warning.’
She went to her bedroom to change and he opened the notebook. It was mostly a list of names and numbers, a couple of addresses and a few phone numbers. It was people she knew had worked with Moses and there were educated guesses at the amounts of money he had handled for them. It was mostly small numbers, and there were a few names of committedly mediocre criminals Darian recognised and immediately dismissed.
‘You need to keep in mind that he didn’t handle big sums of money very often, not the size that a person would kill for.’
Darian looked up at Maeve. She had pulled on a pair of trousers and a raggedy jumper over the T-shirt that had seen many better days.
Darian said, ‘People have killed for tiny amounts of money before. Or for no money where they thought some would be. Or a lot of small amounts added together. Could the money he was handling have added up to the eighteen and a half grand Cummins paid his debt with?’
‘It could, but he would have had to get his timing just right. Rare for Moses to have that sort of money in the flat, as far as I know. And if he had, Cummins wouldn’t have known. I don’t think any of his clients would have known and I don’t think any of them would have killed him for it.’
‘Do you know them well enough to be sure?’
‘No, but I knew Moses and I know the only people he handled small accounts for were people he knew and trusted, people he’d known his whole life, and the people with big accounts wouldn’t need to kill him for the cash.’
‘So what exactly did he do for them?’
Maeve sat and said, ‘He would hide the money they shouldn’t have had in the first place. It wasn’t always in cash; it depended on who it was and how they were receiving it in the first place. If it was cash it would be in the flat, but not for long. If the person who killed him knew he had a lot of money then they must have known that it had either just been delivered or was about to be collected, so they could have found out from the previous or next link in the chain. He would put the money into businesses and they would put it into their books. It was like investing money, that’s what he used to say, sometimes more or less would come back than had gone in but what came back was always clean, and it now had a backstory to protect it after travelling through the business world.’
‘So he must have had a bunch of businesses helping him?’
‘Of course, but I have no idea who they were. Say what you want about Moses but he respected the privacy of the people he was breaking the law with.’
‘If we could identify the businesses or the high-value clients then we might find our killer. One of them might have decided Moses was too well informed.’
The lights in the flat flickered and cut out for a few seconds before they came back on. Maeve said, ‘Ignore that, it happens a lot. The electricity cuts out a lot under the hill, they say they’re going to fix it but...’
‘Okay, so, his clients.’
‘I think the most likely candidates will be one of the people near the top of that list, the ones I know he handled decent money for.’
Darian looked at the names, some he recognised and some he didn’t. A couple of known criminals and a few businessmen of notable standing that Darian hadn�
�t known were dirty but really should have guessed. Neither of the criminals he’d heard of had been identified as working at a level where people died on their orders.
He said, ‘Do you know which of them worked with him most recently?’
‘No, he didn’t give information like that away, I wasn’t even supposed to know this much and he didn’t realise I did. I overheard whispered conversations, caught a glimpse of receipts he was reading by hovering over his shoulder in passing.’
‘We need to be very careful with this. The sort of people we’re dealing with won’t take kindly to being questioned about the killing of a man they knew, and I don’t just mean the criminal types either.’
‘Please, just because some of them dress up in nice suits and sit in expensive offices in Bank or Cnocaid doesn’t make them less criminal.’
‘You’re right, I know, and those people will go a long way to protect the image they’ve built. Lawyers, to start with, and they’re dangerous enough, but there could be more after. If one of these people did kill Moses then we have to consider that they might be prepared to silence anyone who shows the inclination to catch them.’
‘I know the risk, but I’m going to give chase anyway. I can’t just move on from Moses being murdered, not until I’m sure the person who did it is in jail. It would be an insult to him, and I cared too much about him to let that insult pass. And you, Mr not quite a private detective, you wouldn’t let an innocent man rot in jail for this, would you?’
‘No.’
‘So I need to do something. I’ll pick the lowest-risk person on that list and have a chat with them, see what falls out when I lean on them.’
‘Okay, how about this. You pick someone on that list that didn’t give him huge money and knew him well, you see if you can find out from them who else he was working with lately. The bigger a picture we can build the better a chance we have.’
‘I can do that, a casual chat with an old pal.’
‘Good, because right now we don’t want anyone else knowing what we’re up to, so don’t interrogate anyone. Try to get the little things, details that often seem irrelevant but can provide a small answer to a big question. And keep your eyes open, because Corey isn’t going to like either of us working an investigation he’s twice decided the book is closed on. He’s had one of his pets, a guy called Gallowglass, following me for the last couple of days and I think it’s because of this.’
In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide Page 14