In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide

by Malcolm Mackay

  ‘Well, I didn’t tell anyone what I’m doing.’

  ‘I’m not saying you did. I’m just saying, be wary, because if Corey’s coming after us he will eventually catch up, and we have to have the truth to defend ourselves with when he does.’

  There was a pause for a few seconds before Maeve said, ‘Gallowglass, that’s not a common name. Is he the one who used to be a detective?’

  ‘He is. Do you know him?’

  ‘Know of him. He used to move in some grubby circles, back when he thought he could get away with it. A girl I knew went out with him just long enough to know she needed to run a mile. When she ran, I picked her up from his house. I can show you where it is, if you’d like. We can take my car.’

  He so enjoyed being with her, both because she was beautiful and because they were going to catch a killer together. He couldn’t decide which reason thrilled him more. They left the flat together as the lights on the street flickered again.

  Light Plays on the Sea

  The lighthouse keeper stood outside the door, wrapped up warm in his thick coat, bonnet pulled tight on his head. The wind was loud but he knew its tune and he could hear what lay underneath it. The cracks, the splintering, and the shouts. He was a man of experience, he had heard those sounds before, and he knew what his responsibility was now.

  The lighthouse keeper lived alone in the tall building, in his lighthouse north of Heilam. It showed the way for sailors coming into the sea loch, going to the port of Challaid. He was so close to the city, but he couldn’t go to it, his job demanding absolute commitment. For months he would sit alone and wonder if any in the world knew his name, if they spoke of him or thought of him. A name unspoken was not a name, a man unmentioned was nobody. His work made it possible for so many to safely arrive at and leave the city, but all of those people thought nothing of the one who helped them. Sometimes he was angry to think of it, but on other days it was to his benefit.

  The weather had been poor all day, a fog that was swept away by strong wind and heavy rain. There had been few boats coming into the loch. In the night he sat by the window and looked out to sea, watching the light of a boat rocking back and forth, rising and falling, moving slowly towards the lighthouse. The lighthouse keeper watched for a time as it got closer, able to identify the boat as a large cutter, making a run for shelter. The lighthouse keeper could see what was going to happen, knew the water and the weather, knew the rocks and knew the wrong light that shone.

  Now he stood outside the door to the lighthouse and listened to the noises underneath the wind. There was the sound of the wood breaking on rocks, of a mast cracking and falling into the water. The song of a boat breaking apart in the sea was one the lighthouse keeper had orchestrated often enough to know well. The cutter would be mostly underwater, none of its crew on board. They would be in the cold water, the swell pulling them under or pushing them onto the rocks. The sea always claimed its share.

  He had the musket tucked under his arm as he walked carefully to the edge of the cliff and picked his path down towards the small shingle beach. The lamp was still shining on the post by the cliff edge where he had placed it, a lying substitute for the lighthouse light. He knew the cliff and the beach; he knew every path and climbing route that could be used in this area. While a stranger would struggle to find their way up in good weather, there was no danger for him going down in the storm.

  His boots crunched across the shingle as he made his way to the rough water’s edge. The lighthouse keeper hadn’t heard a human shout for some minutes, but he heard one now. As the cold water rolled as far as the toe of his boot, the lighthouse keeper made out the figure of a man trying to stand, desperately crawling in the water as he made his way for shore. The man saw the lighthouse keeper, struggled forward until the water reached only his knees. He stumbled the last few feet and landed heavily beside the lighthouse keeper, looking up at him. ‘I am the only one,’ he said in shaking gasps. ‘The sea took the rest. It is only me.’ The lighthouse keeper smiled, aimed the musket and shot the man in the head.

  Over the following two hours the lighthouse keeper carefully moved all valuables that washed ashore to the small basement of the lighthouse. It was a good haul, interesting items he would examine carefully over the rest of the week. He took two hours and stopped, even knowing there were some boxes left on the beach. He switched off the lamp and put the lighthouse light back on. Enough time had passed for people to miss the cutter, so he began the long walk down to the north of Challaid to raise the alarm. The little-known lighthouse keeper, doing his sad duty.

  26

  IT WAS AN excuse to spend time with Maeve, nothing more than that. There was no benefit to Darian in seeing what hole Gallowglass slithered into of an evening; it was something he could have uncovered for himself if he’d cared. Doing it alone would have meant doing it without Maeve. The two of them together in a small, battered old car, trundling north through Whisper Hill. The heater was on but it seemed to be blowing cold air, and Maeve kept looking at the needle to check how much petrol she had.

  She said ‘We won’t run out... I don’t think.’

  They drove in the shadows of the hills until they reached Drummond Street at the north tip of the city and turned onto Heilam Road going north out of Challaid. They were leaving the bright lights of what could generously be called civilisation behind and going off into the moors towards the mouth of the loch. The day will come when the city sprawl will reach up there, too, you can be sure of that, but so far the landscape has held it back. There’s only a narrow passage between the steep hills and the loch at the very top of Whisper Hill, and the road north out of the city almost filled it. That stopped anyone developing up there, because everything had the ominous, or comforting if you like that sort of thing, sense of being cut off.

  There was a dark gap through the moor before you saw the few lights of Heilam. It wasn’t much to look at, a council estate in the open that was supposed to be the first step in developing the area and turning Heilam into the seventh region of Challaid. Another of the council’s grand plans that went awry, started by one party with big dreams and a big budget and ended by the next. The houses, all white roughcast, had gone up in the early seventies when Labour led the council, the expansion stopped when the Democratic Party took over and talked about without effect now the Liberal Party was in power. It was probably only because they were out of sight and out of mind that these houses hadn’t been pulled down.

  Late at night was the best time to visit Heilam. With the moon on the loch lighting the view out to sea, and with the hills rising darkly on the other side, the brooding graveyard behind you, you could almost believe it was beautiful. It was the sort of scene in which a songwriter would set their folk tale of heartbreak. It was the smudge of old council houses in the middle of it all that spoiled the picture. Remember that we’re talking about a village whose biggest selling point was the large number of bodies buried on its outskirts. You could make a sturdy argument that the dead had better accommodation than the living. The only building of any age was the old lighthouse at the north end of Heilam and no one lived there anymore.

  Maeve said, ‘It was along here somewhere.’

  She turned onto a short street with houses in blocks of two on either side of the road. They all had small front gardens and they all looked cold, huddled together against the weather on the moor like lost sheep. Maeve stopped the car across the street.

  She nodded across at two houses and said, ‘It was either one of those two. My friend texted and told me to come and get her from here, she was standing outside that gate when I arrived. From what she told me, Gallowglass is hooked on madness. He was always looking for trouble and creating some if there was none around. Maybe he’s calmed down now he doesn’t have the police shield to hide behind, but he doesn’t seem like the sort who would. He’ll keep pushing his luck until life pushes back.’

  ‘If the protection of the force let him run wild then he still h
as Corey looking after him now.’

  They sat and watched in darkness. After half an hour a car pulled up and stopped, a little too close for comfort. Gallowglass got out of the driver’s seat and went into his house, not bothering to look around as he went. From where they sat he looked very ordinary. Mediocrity, when wrapped in the right kind of skin, can travel a long way before anyone thinks to challenge it. He slammed his front door shut with a bang that would wake the neighbours.

  Maeve said, ‘Looks like someone didn’t find what they were looking for in the great city tonight.’

  ‘It’s nice to be missed. Come on; let’s get out of here, bad enough he’s following me without him thinking to get on your tail as well.’

  Maeve started the car and drove Darian back south. They chatted as she drove, a journey shorter than Darian would have liked. He hadn’t had a girlfriend for a while, too wrapped up in being a pretend private detective to have a relationship, and Maeve was reminding him how pleasant the sensation could be. Not because she was beautiful or sexy, although she was both, but because she was someone to talk and laugh with, to share time with away from work. She dropped him outside Three O’clock Station and he took the train home.

  27

  MALAIRT STREET EARLY in the morning is not the same as Malairt Street late at night. At night it’s filled with middle-class students and an array of careful fun-seekers. The main party area in the city used to be over on the edge of Bakers Moor, a little closer to the working-class east side. Over the last twenty years or so party central has drifted west towards Cnocaid, where a safe night out can be had amid gentrified surroundings. During the day it was populated by quiet shoppers, and, on this morning, Darian and Sholto.

  They were outside Himinn, Darian leading the way because Sholto was old enough to call a nightclub a discotheque and would rather have spent his morning in the McDonald’s next door. The doors to the club were open, but the interior was silent. They walked along the hall, ignoring the doors that led to the balcony stairs, and went into a small bar area tucked away from the main floor.

  It was a gloomy little nook in which a heavily bearded man was kneeling beside the bar, cleaning the rail that ran along the front of it. The place seemed to be a slapdash approximation of the sort of pubs your grandfather might have drunk in. Darian could smell the brass polish and there was a box of rags and bottles of cleaning products on top of the bar. The whole place had a genteel air about it, which none of the Challaid pubs of your grandfather’s generation suffered from.

  The man with the beard looked up at them and said, ‘You cops?’

  Darian said, ‘No, we’re not.’

  ‘Huh. So what do you want?’

  ‘You in charge round here?’

  ‘Maurice Gomez, bar manager for the time being. What do you want?’

  ‘We want to ask you about an assault that happened in the alley at the side of the building a few nights ago. Uisdean Kotkell, was drinking here, went out, got taken apart. You hear about that?’

  ‘Yeah, I heard about it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. I heard about it when it happened, but it was peaceful in here that night, like it is every other night. We don’t have trouble here.’

  ‘Well, that’s super to hear but what do you know about the young man who was attacked?’

  Gomez looked at them both and said, ‘You two ain’t cops?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So I don’t have to talk to you at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’

  Gomez went back to his cleaning, ignoring Darian and Sholto. Darian glanced at his colleague, sensing he had lost his chance to make a connection so now it was Sholto’s time to shine in the last-chance saloon.

  Sholto said, ‘We’re working for the victim’s family, so you’d be doing them a favour. We can make it worth your while.’

  ‘No, you can’t.’

  Sholto looked at Darian and shrugged. They had tried to find what they could here, but it was a poor use of time to chip away at a brick wall. Darian hated to walk, especially when there was nowhere else to go. They left the nook and walked past the arches that led into the club proper, that place in darkness. On their way through the entrance hall they saw a young man coming down the stairs.

  Darian said, ‘Ally, you working here now?’

  Alfonso Bosco saw who was talking to him and his expression collapsed into that of a man who can hear a favour being called in. Nearly a year before, Darian had helped Ally out of a little jam when a former friend scammed a lot of angry people out of their money, laid a misleading trail to Ally’s door and skipped town. Ally wasn’t a man you crossed and stuck around. He was a bouncer of formidable renown, partly due to the eyepatch he wore. He had lost his right eye in a knife fight when he was nineteen and could have worn a glass eye with no discomfort, but he liked to be looked at. He was six-three and had a long goatee beard he tied in a ponytail with colourful bands, so he was tough to miss.

  Ally said, ‘Aye, I do.’

  ‘So you’ll know what was going on with Uisdean Kotkell when he was whomped round the back the other night.’

  Ally puffed out his cheeks and said, ‘Come on next door and you can buy me breakfast. I talk better with a burger in each hand.’

  The three of them sat in a booth away from the front windows of the McDonald’s next to the club and Ally did his talking in a full-mouthed near-whisper between bites.

  ‘That kid was at the club quite a lot, him and his posh mates. There’s a bunch of them, little rich kids, I dunno. They drink somewhere else before they get to the club, I think they go on to their own little parties afterward. Richer stuff than I’ve ever been to. It wasn’t anything that happened in our club, I know that, we’d have spotted something. I told the cop that came to ask about it. MacDuff.’

  ‘What was he asking about?’

  ‘Nothing specific. Pissed off Gomez with a couple of questions, that’s all it ever takes with that grumpy sod. Then he asked me and a couple of other staff who were working that night about it, general stuff, did we see him that night, did we see anyone looking for him? We had nothing to tell. The thing I didn’t tell him, and I’ll tell you because it’s you, is about that boy’s ex.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yeah. There was a while there when the Kotkell boy was coming in here with Dillan Howard. Now, Howard, he’s got a short fuse and likes playing with matches. The story I heard was that they had a big falling out, went their separate ways. Howard ain’t the sort to shrug it off if he thinks he’s been badly treated.’

  As Sholto had the expression of a man watching an alien invasion unfold, it was Darian who said, ‘You know where we could find Howard?’

  ‘Pretty sure he lives up in Earmam somewhere, but I don’t know where exactly.’

  ‘That’s a good start, cheers, Ally.’

  If Sholto hadn’t been there Darian would have slipped Ally some cash and added it to the client’s bill, but Sholto objected to that sort of thing. Keep the bills as low as possible or the client goes elsewhere, like Raven Investigators with their detailed expenses and special offers. It was a shame, because the bouncer at a club where young rich kids partied was a worthy contact. Darian would catch Ally up later and slip him a twenty, seal him as an ongoing contact. Darian and Sholto walked out of the burger joint and down the street to where Sholto had parked the Fiat.

  He said, ‘Bloody hell.’

  Darian said, ‘What?’

  ‘The father didn’t mention the boy was gay.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what if the father doesn’t know? He’s not going to want to find out from one of my skilfully written reports, is he? I knew this case was bad news. Any case with young people is awkward because young people are terrible at life, keeping open secrets.’

  ‘We can find Howard, talk to him.’

  ‘Aye, and hope the whole bloody thing doesn’t blow up in our faces.’

  The city
of Challaid still has corners where Presbyterianism and Old Testament morals are extolled by influential people, like the Sutherland family who employed Kotkell, which made Sholto nervous. Any complication stood like a mountain before him, while the map in front of Darian showed a path to a possible solution.

  28

  THERE ARE A few streets in Earmam shabbier than Mòine Road, but the list is short. The whole area had once been dominated by factories, built in the nineteenth century and spewing out dirt nonstop until the post-war period. Then they became useless and unnecessary and were mostly pulled down to make way for cheap housing, like the flats Dillan Howard lived in. A few streets away, closer to the loch side, there were old factory buildings that had been converted and actually looked rather good, classic buildings allowed to age. These post-war shortcuts were ugly, and even the reasonable effort the occupants made to keep the area neat made no dent in the unsightliness.

  It had taken them two hours to find Dillan Howard’s address. Sholto parked the car across the road from the entrance to the flats, set back from the road. The council had laid some grass down where the floors of the sprawling factories would once have been. All sorts of stuff had been handled there back in the day: tobacco, whale oil, textiles and anything else the city could lay its grasping hands on.

  Darian looked at Sholto and said, ‘You want me to handle this one?’

  ‘No, no, I can do it. Better I do, try to make sure none of this gets back to Kotkell. A Sutherland executive getting upset with us. Can you imagine what that’ll do for business?’

  They got out of the car and went across the road to Howard’s flat. It was on the ground floor, and Sholto knocked. The door was opened by a young man, tall and handsome, dark brown hair, and not nearly as unhinged looking as Ally had led them to expect. He had light stubble over the sort of face you could tell would age well, only early twenties now.