In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide

by Malcolm Mackay

  As he was going Sholto said, ‘I get the impression you’re working hard at things that aren’t your work.’

  Darian tried to think of something to say that would defend him. ‘I’m working hard.’

  It was no defence at all, and he felt bad about letting Sholto down the way he was. He was abandoning the man who had given him a job for no reason other than he was his father’s son to work alone while Darian chased a case with Maeve. He deserved better, and Darian’s belief he was doing the right thing was zero consolation.

  He parked the Skoda on the next street and walked round the corner. There was no cop or ex-cop watching the house on Pagall Street now, so he took the opportunity to jog along the side of the house and wait in the back garden, out of sight of the road.

  It only took thirty minutes of standing around like a burglar with Alzheimer’s before he heard a car pulling up in the driveway, two doors thudding shut as the couple got out. He heard the front door close as they went inside and counted to ten before he knocked on the back door. It might alarm them, someone knocking on the back door when they knew their house was being watched, but he was working on the assumption they wouldn’t be so scared that they wouldn’t answer.

  The same man who had been at the front gate hours before stood in front of Darian when the door was opened. He had a pale and featureless face, eyes and mouth barely noticeable, like someone had poked some holes in a lump of mashed potatoes with their finger. He looked concerned and a little angry.

  ‘Yes? What do you want, hm?’

  ‘My name’s Darian Ross. I wanted to talk to you about the people who’ve been sitting outside your house recently.’

  The man’s first reaction was one of shock, then a look of horror, as though he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t. Then a different look, something that might have been a rush of relief. He said, ‘Come in, please, you need to speak to my wife.’

  The man led Darian through the house to the living room where a wary woman in her late forties was standing with her phone in her hand, the expression of a woman who’d pressed two nines and wanted to know if she needed to press a third. The man said, ‘This is my wife, Moira, it’s about her.’

  She looked puzzled and annoyed with her husband, so Darian jumped in and said, ‘My name’s Darian Ross, I’m working on a private investigation into Moses Guerra and it’s led me here.’

  She was a short woman, short brown hair neatly styled, and she looked older than she probably was. Her large glasses showed the lines around her eyes, her veiny hand around the phone showed a cluster of diamonds on a gold band. If you saw her selling cakes at a church bake sale you wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. Her face crumpled into resigned disappointment, a woman who had been expecting an unwelcome visit for some time but didn’t quite know what shape it would take. There were two possible approaches for Darian to take with her. He could try to find out exactly what this woman knew with careful questioning or he could accept the scale of his ignorance and try to fix that fast.

  Darian said, ‘I need to know why Gallowglass and MacDuff were outside your house last night, and that means I need to know your name, what connection you have to DI Corey, and why his people have been out there trying to scare you.’

  With a casual laugh she said, ‘Trying?’

  Her husband said, ‘Moira.’

  She looked at Darian with the smile of a woman in charge, throwing the phone onto the couch and sitting next to it, crossing her legs. ‘All right, okay. You want every little detail, Mr Ross, you can have them. My name is Moira Slight, born on 16 July 1965 in the King Robert VI Hospital...’

  Her sarcasm grated and he said, ‘I don’t think we have time for your whole life story.’

  ‘A dig at my age, how very ungallant. Fine, the bits you do care about then. I trained as an accountant and, not blowing my own horn here, I was rather good at it. My speciality was tax, which was every bit as thrilling as it sounds, but there’s good money in it because a lot of people are intimidated by Mr Taxman. He even scares the criminal class, but I don’t suppose I need to tell you that. I’ve worked for a bunch of them over the years, helping them tidy up the jumble of numbers their work created. I knew who they were and what they were doing but I was careful and, as I told you, I was bloody good at my job, so there’s no evidence to prove I did anything wrong and I’ll never admit it in front of anyone that actually matters, no offence intended. Am I going too fast for you, dear, would you like to sit down?’

  ‘Carry on.’

  A smug smile and she said, ‘One day DI Corey came to me, a cop who knew a lot and was able to pile plenty of pressure onto my shoulders. He came to me with money, told me it was clean and that he wanted me to handle the tax side of it, filter it offshore. Of course I knew what dirty money looked like, even if it was in the hands of a cop, but I didn’t say a word. I made sure his money took a plane to Panama and snuck past the taxman in such a way that Corey would never be associated with it and when it came back across the Atlantic I tucked some of it safely away, nice and tight, for him to collect when needed. Now he wants his money, but he wants a lot more than that, he wants a lot of the money from other criminals that he knows I can get my hands on. I don’t know how he found out so much about the money I have in circulation right now, but he did and it’s why he has his pet thugs outside. I know you’re not here for me, Mr Ross, because you mentioned Moses Guerra and that means you’re here for Corey.’

  Darian had frowned through the monologue, hating every ounce of the confidence the swindler before him possessed. She had hidden any fear behind a wall dripping with sarcasm. He said, ‘Those men will only be outside your house for so long. If Corey wants something from you then it’s only a matter of time before they make their way in.’

  ‘Don’t I just know it. I had a phone call from Corey this very morning, telling me his men would be in the house tonight if I don’t come up with the money he craves by five o’clock. I’m trying to work out whether to give him his own money and hope it’ll stall him or take his dirty money and run like hell with it. One thing I will not do is steal other people’s money for him because he’s not the only scary bastard in Challaid that I can call a customer, I can assure you. I told him I wouldn’t be able to get him more than what he’d given me, and that I was going to the derby today with my husband. He did at least tell me to enjoy the match, so he’s not totally without manners.’

  ‘He said tonight?’

  ‘And he meant it. Corey isn’t mucking around. Not like him to grasp at cash like this. He has the terrors in him; a patient man turned desperate, whatever’s gotten into him all of a sudden.’

  ‘I’ll be here to find out. Someone will come here tonight and I think I know which of his men it’ll be. Your husband can go, stay with a friend or family or in a hotel tonight, no need for any more people to be here flailing their arms at fight time than necessary. You and I are going to stay and provide the welcoming party for your visitor.’

  ‘Oh, wonderful, you’re really selling it, young man. I’d rather a night in a hotel, if one’s on offer.’

  ‘I think we’re past the point where you get to do the things you’d like.’

  ‘Ha, been that way for a long time now. Don’t worry, I’m quite used to life’s disappointments.’

  Mr Slight left, albeit reluctantly, to go and stay in a nearby hotel. Darian and Moira settled in to wait.

  ‘You can tell me a few stories about your criminally minded pals to pass the time.’

  Moira Slight smiled easily and said, ‘I’d need to be very drunk for my loose tongue to invite that sort of danger.’

  ‘No drink.’

  ‘Well, you are a lot of fun, aren’t you?’

  39

  THEY SAT AND they talked for a few hours. Moira liked to rattle through her sentences without ever giving away a word more than she wanted to; she was a woman with long experience of evasion. The only time she delved into any meaningful detail was whe
n she was talking about Corey, having decided that on that subject some honesty would go a long way.

  Darian asked, ‘You seem relaxed. Do you fear Corey?’

  ‘Well, of course I do, I’m terrified of him. You’re either very brave, very stupid or both if you’re not afraid of him, Mr Ross. I suppose we’ll very soon find out which it is. I’ll tell you, I may be more afraid of DI Corey than I am of any other criminal I’ve ever met, and I’ve had the pleasure of the company of many. You want to know why he scares me?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Because every other criminal in this city has to at least pretend to fear the law.’

  ‘So does Corey.’

  ‘Oh, come on now, if Corey had to fear his colleagues he wouldn’t have earned a tenth of the money he has in the time I’ve known him. He really should be in a cell in The Ganntair along the corridor from a lot of the people he’s locked up. Not that he’d last a fortnight inside, by the way, and if I know it then so will he. I’ve heard people in the criminal world talk about him; they all hate the man to his bones. Just because he’s bent doesn’t mean his fellow crooks like him. They know he can’t be trusted and he’s locked some of them away for doing no more than mildly upsetting him in the past. People who thought they had his protection only for him to pull the rug away and send them falling into a cell because it suited him. I assume the fact he’s still a more effective cop than the honest ones is the reason he keeps dodging responsibility for the mountain of slime he sits on.’

  ‘Shouldn’t matter how good he is if he’s crooked.’

  ‘Ah, but it does, in this city it really does. I don’t know a lot about heady things like justice, but I know about gold. In business a person can be the biggest shit you ever met, a liar and a bully, corrupt to their blackened core, and all anyone will judge is whether that person makes a profit. That’s the attitude this city was built on.’

  ‘Then maybe it’s time this city changed, and that happens by taking action against people like Corey.’

  ‘Ha, that’s good, oh, I needed that laugh. Good grief, you are young, aren’t you? Let me tell you, as a woman with considerable experience of what a corrupt culture cultivated over a millennium looks like, it isn’t ready to change. Challaid ten years from now isn’t going to be radically different from Challaid ten years ago, or a hundred years ago. The cosmetics change, the faces are different and the buildings keep getting taller and shinier, but the spirit of the place has been unbendingly the same since day one. All the stuff that’s deep down in the black heart of this place, that won’t change because most people don’t really want it to. They much prefer a profit maker to an honest man.’

  Darian didn’t argue because he didn’t want to go further down that badly lit road when only Moira had a map. She would have gone on for hours about the wicked ideals the city had been built on, but Darian didn’t want to hear it. Talk of a conspiracy of corruption being ingrained in a city was defeatist.

  Nerves were rising and Moira had sent a couple of reassuring texts to her husband. It was coming up to eleven o’clock when she said, ‘Of course I might be the biggest fool of the lot of us for believing your charmingly naive talk about being an honest young man. You could be one of Corey’s boys for all I know, sitting there pretending you’re David looking for Goliath when really you’re the chains that keep me in place, stop me running with the money. I’m sure a man like Corey could tempt an idealistic little squirt like you to his side, flash a few glimpses of his dirty power your way.’

  ‘You have nothing to be concerned about there.’

  ‘Well, I do hope not. You’d have to be a very sadistic young man to be stringing me along like this, but you don’t have the shifty eye of the sadist.’

  Every so often Moira would get up and take a look out of the window to see if anyone was outside, but the inconvenient bushes in her front garden didn’t give her much of a view of the road. They had the light on and the curtains open. At one point Darian sent Moira to the front step to make sure she would be seen.

  ‘They could shoot me on the doorstep.’

  ‘I think, having talked up his evil genius for the last few hours, you can credit Corey with more subtlety than that.’

  Moira went out for a minute and came back in complaining of the cold and its effects on the joints of a woman her age. She hadn’t seen anyone, and seemed relaxed. Darian could see that somewhere in the back of her mind was the faint hope she had wriggled off Corey’s inescapable hook.

  He said, ‘You can go upstairs, put on the bedroom light, make a show of looking out of the curtains, and then put the light off like you’ve gone to bed. Then come back down here.’

  Moira did as she was told without complaint, taking a few minutes to replicate her usual bedtime routine before jogging back downstairs, nervous about being alone up there. They sat together in the now dark living room as the clock passed midnight. They weren’t waiting long.

  40

  MOIRA SAID, ‘What was that?’

  There was a sound at the back door, like someone trying to force it open. Darian said, ‘Is it locked?’

  ‘And bolted.’

  Darian smiled. Corey’s man, or men, had thought that beating the lock would be enough to get them in and now they were forcing the door, not willing to waste any more time announcing what was supposed to be a low-key arrival. There was a loud thud from the back of the house as a large man shoulder-slammed the door. Darian left the living room and went into the corridor. He whispered to Moira, ‘Stay there, don’t get involved.’

  ‘Don’t you worry.’

  Darian moved along to the kitchen door and stopped without going in. He pressed himself back against the wall and waited. Someone was already inside the house, walking slowly in a belated attempt at stealth. It wasn’t one of Challaid’s intellectual giants in the kitchen then, tiptoeing around after battering down a door. Listening carefully, Darian worked out, to his relief, that it was a single stupid person.

  The large figure stepped out of the kitchen and into the unlit corridor, a foot away from Darian and not knowing it. Darian recognised him even in the dark, they were so close. Gallowglass, on the prowl again.

  Darian said, ‘You can stop there.’

  Gallowglass paused, stood where he was, the cogs turning slowly.

  Darian said, ‘This doesn’t have to be trouble, but breaking and entering is a very serious offence for a man who isn’t a cop anymore and you’re going to have to talk your way out of it very carefully. You can tell me what you’re up to, that would be a start.’

  Gallowglass turned slowly and looked at the silhouette talking to him. Seeing it was a single person, and smaller than him, was all the analysis he needed. Gallowglass bolted for the kitchen, trying to leave the way he had come in, only quicker. Darian leapt on the bigger man, locking him in a bear hug and pulling him backwards. Gallowglass threw his head back, catching Darian on the cheek and sending a snap of pain through him. He let Gallowglass go and the former cop tried to run again, back into the kitchen. He was close to escape, but Darian was never a quitter. He lunged into the darkness, through the doorway and onto the floor, managing to reach out a hand and trip Gallowglass up. They were both on the kitchen floor now, a graceless tangle, Darian diving on top of the bigger man. They grunted and rolled around a bit, both throwing punches with no force because they had no room to pull their arms back and a fear of punching the floor. The former detective was bigger and stronger and he was getting the upper hand until a shadow moved behind them and swung something solid into the back of Gallowglass’s head and he collapsed forward onto the floor beside Darian.

  The light was switched on and Moira stood there, looking down at Darian and Gallowglass with shock, and said, ‘Well, thank God I hit the right one of you.’

  Darian got unsteadily to his feet and looked down at Gallowglass and the broken lamp that was now on the floor beside him. He said to Moira, ‘I told you to stay out of it.’

  ‘And
miss a chance to clobber that bastard? Shame, though, I liked that lamp.’

  Gallowglass was conscious, but it was a thin thread supporting the weight of his awareness. Darian and Moira had to half drag him through to the living room and get him into one of the chairs there. Moira put the light on and they both stood over him, waiting for him to regain whatever wits he’d had at the beginning of the evening.

  When Gallowglass looked up at him with a frown Darian said, ‘I already asked you to tell me what you’re up to.’

  ‘She assaulted me.’

  ‘You broke into her house and assaulted me. Last time, what are you here for?’

  ‘Ask her.’

  ‘I already asked her. I want to see if your stories match.’

  ‘She’s a criminal.’

  ‘I already know that, and it’s not an answer to my question. Tell me what you and Corey are doing leaning on her, trying to rob money. You just hoovering up easy cash like a common crook now, that it?’

  Gallowglass scoffed and looked sideways. He had no fear of Darian, no fear of the situation, and there was nothing Darian could say to change that, although he tried.

  ‘You think Corey’s going to protect you from this? You think he’s all-powerful, capable of twisting every situation to fit his needs? You’re very wrong. Things have changed, Gallowglass, Corey’s on his way out, that’s why he’s chasing dirty money that doesn’t belong to him. Surely you can see that he’s finished and he’s planning to leave you a long way behind when he goes. All that money will buy a lot of miles between him and Challaid, but I’ll bet a finger it only buys a ticket for one. You’ll be sitting in your house in Heilam wondering where he is, and if I’m on a roll with my gambling I’ll say that your fingerprints will be on Corey’s crimes, not his. You have very little chance of getting out of this mess, and I’m the little chance you have.’