In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide

by Malcolm Mackay

  Darian said, ‘But you don’t want the police involved.’

  ‘Ha, that’s a good one. You know what department handles this sort of crime? The anti-corruption unit.’

  Sholto looked at Darian and said, ‘So Moses was the first link, collecting it from the criminals. Him and Moira worked it through companies and banked it with Sutherland because they had people at the bank who wouldn’t ask any questions about it.’

  ‘Which reinforces the link with Moses.’

  They stood looking unusually thoughtful for a few seconds before Kotkell broke the silence. ‘Corey has money tied up in accounts with our Caledonian branches, most of them controlled exclusively by Moira Slight. I’ve dug around and found them. He wants control of the accounts from Slight and he’s been causing trouble to try to get it. A good system when things were going well, he was too distant from them to ever be caught, but now he wants them and she doesn’t want to let go. There’s about half a million there, hardly enough for this sort of mayhem.’

  Darian and Sholto looked at him like he’d grown a second head and Darian said, ‘Your son’s beating may tie in with other crimes, and I can’t guarantee that we can keep your involvement out of the story.’

  Kotkell was fighting to keep the bank’s reputation clean. Links to money laundering would blacken the name and cost him his job, and that was worth a good deal more than half a million pounds. ‘If you do, you will have a very valuable friend within the bank. We do a lot of investigations, and I could make sure some of that starts coming your way.’

  Sholto perked up but Darian didn’t look impressed by the offer of money for silence.

  Kotkell said, ‘He attacked my son. All I wanted was to force him to back off, leave my family alone. Picking a fight with me is business, but my family are not a part of that. The money my department handled for Slight, I knew nothing about it and when I found out I sacked everyone connected. It can never be proven that we knew where it had come from so it would be no good pointing the finger at us. We can make sure the bright lights of any investigations burn others instead of us. If you help me a little, I can help you a lot.’

  Darian said, ‘We’d better go; we have a lot still to do. We’ll be in touch.’

  Sholto wasn’t so enthusiastic about departing on these terms, but they left without committing to anything Kotkell wanted of them. They had what Darian needed – the truth about what had happened to Uisdean.

  As they got into the car Sholto said, ‘Moses got killed and that sent Corey running to get his dirty money from Slight and Kotkell. That’s what the Moses killing provoked, but it still doesn’t tell us who killed Moses. It’s a good spot to take our next step from, though.’

  Darian was thinking about it as they went back to the office. Corey was the fraying thread that ran through all of this, him and his hired thug Gallowglass. There was a man capable of violence, perhaps murder. If Corey had decided he wanted his money before Moses was killed, then the link could be stronger than Sholto realised.

  45

  THE REST OF that working day was spent putting together two separate reports on the Kotkell case. Sholto was writing one for Durell Kotkell to have, Darian was writing the other for their files. This wasn’t rare. There had been plenty of cases where Douglas Independent Research sent a different message into the world than the one they kept back for their own records. Kotkell’s report would be full of the things he wanted to read, it would reassure him. The one they kept in the office would be splattered with every unfortunate speck of truth.

  Sholto went home and told Darian to do the same. He said, ‘You’re having too many late nights. Don’t care how entertaining they are, if you want to be able to do the job then you need to be at least half-interested and two-thirds awake. Off you go home.’

  Darian nodded, almost a commitment to do what he was told but no words to implicate him should Sholto find out he had done differently. He was planning on going to Sgàil Drive to see Maeve again. He walked down the stairs and out onto Cage Street, pausing as he realised he was hungry. He walked into The Northern Song to grab some food he could take round to Maeve’s with him.

  It was busy, and he had to wait twenty minutes for his order. Chatted with Mr Yang for a while, then Mrs Yang emerged from the back with his food and passed it to him. She had a rather sly smile on her face, like a woman who knew the food for two wasn’t for Darian and Sholto because she’d seen Sholto go home already. She didn’t, thank goodness, say anything about it, because Darian wasn’t ready to have a running conversation about a relationship that was still learning to walk.

  She looked almost proud when she passed him the bag and his change and said, ‘Have a nice evening.’

  He was blushing when he left the restaurant. He walked down to the bottom of Cage Street and onto Dlùth Street where he’d parked the Skoda. The war between the air fresheners and the car’s natural smell was being lost, but the food helped to paper over the cracks of defeat for a little longer. Darian had just started the engine when his phone rang.

  No name, which made it a number that hadn’t called him before. He answered and said, ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s Vivienne Armstrong. You and I need to meet, right now. I have something to tell you.’

  She sounded harassed, like she wasn’t keen to share what she had to say. Darian said, ‘You can tell me now.’

  ‘No, no phones, I don’t know how safe yours is and I bet you don’t either. You need to come to me, I’m not going to you because I don’t trust anywhere you choose. You know the old multi-storey in Whisper Hill?’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Go in the old main entrance and there’s a blue door on the left that leads down steps to the underground level. Meet me there in half an hour or forget about it.’

  ‘I don’t know what I’ll have to forget about.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, of course you do. There’s only one thing you’ve been pestering me about in the last week. It’s starting to cause me a problem and you’re going to help me solve it.’

  Vivienne hung up. Darian sat in the Skoda and thought about the call, the danger of it. Meeting Vivienne Armstrong anywhere came with risk; meeting her in the basement level of an abandoned multi-storey car park was something few with a brain would consider wise. Darian considered it, started the car and drove quickly north.

  The building, if we can still call it that, is on Letta Road in Whisper Hill, not too far from the Machaon Hospital. It had been four storeys tall, with another parking level in the basement, and had been useful in an area with too few parking spaces. Then one of the floors had collapsed. About a year before Darian met Viv, the second-storey floor had descended onto the first, injuring several people and wrecking a lot of cars. There had been fears the whole building was going to come down but it didn’t. Engineers had managed to make it safe for the time being. It should have been pulled down, but there had been a long delay because of the investigation into what had caused it, and the suspicion that it wasn’t as much of an accident as it had looked. That was why the owners hadn’t received the insurance pay-out they thought they were entitled to, why everything was in limbo and why Darian could meet Vivienne in the basement without fear of being seen.

  He parked across the road and watched the entrance. Viv had told him to go in through the main door at the front, which was flimsily boarded up and easily entered through. The building had no defences worthy of the name and had become a haunt of bored children, inquisitive dogs and desperate drug addicts. He didn’t want anyone but him and Viv to be there, and it wasn’t the kids, the dogs or the addicts showing up he was worried about.

  Darian sat in the darkness and watched for fifteen minutes. Nobody came out and only one person went in. Vivienne walked across the street and down towards the car park from the opposite direction to Darian. She wouldn’t have been able to see him on a street whose lampposts were cheating a living. He gave it another couple of minutes, knowing he would be late but wanting to s
ee if she was followed. Nobody showed. She wouldn’t leave if she was anything like as desperate as she had sounded on the phone. Whatever problem she had with the Cummins money, she wasn’t going to walk away from a potential solution because it showed up two minutes later than requested.

  He got out of the car and locked it, for all the good that would do if someone in Whisper Hill decided they wanted to break in. He walked slowly up Letta Road, on the other side from the car park, and took in the scene. There are high buildings on either side of the road and only a few windows on the upper floors had lights visible that night. The concrete car park was squeezed unnaturally into what had been a gap between old, red-brick buildings. In the middle of a densely packed part of the city, and with occupied flats and offices all around it, the car park seemed remarkably isolated. He crossed the road and went in behind the boarding, enough of a gap for a person to squeeze through. The place was dark, silent and cold, and the blue door stood to his left, exactly where Viv had said it would be.

  The Sea My Brother Drowned In

  Sorley opened his eyes slowly. He could feel her, asleep on his chest. He raised a hand and slowly tucked her hair back. He wanted to see her face. Asleep she looked peaceful, awake she never did. She frowned at the touch and the moment was gone. Vivienne scowled and opened her eyes, looked up at the man she was lying naked on top of.

  Sorley smiled and said, ‘Good morning.’

  Viv said nothing. She lay where she was, looking down at his chest. There was no happiness in her expression, instead a look of regret. She seemed almost guilty.

  ‘We’ve done nothing wrong,’ Sorley said quietly.

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ she told him, and rolled to lie beside him.

  They hadn’t planned to be there. They were, technically, competitors. Sorley and his group worked at a much lower level than Viv and hers, but even small scavengers are considered an enemy of the big predators. The Creag gang had long been the biggest in Challaid, and they maintained that position by crushing anyone who tried to make money from criminality in their city. It could be argued that the Creags did more to stop crime in the city than the local police because they stomped on even the smallest possible rivals. It could also be argued the reason the government plans to have a national police force fell through was because the Challaid force refused to be a part of it to protect their own criminality, but that’s not the story I’m telling here.

  They had met a couple of years ago, Sorley a rising star in the criminal world. An awkward man, not filled with the same enthusiasm as his contemporaries. He was the son of a cop. He was smart and tough, but they said he had only got into the business to make money for his siblings. Once they were old enough to live for themselves, he was stuck in an industry that traps any it likes. He built his own little group around him, a tough lot, and they worked small scams. Viv was going to destroy them like all the rest.

  The Creag gang doesn’t have any one leader. There’s a group at the top and Viv was a part of it. She handled moneylending, which meant she was in control of a lot of cash. Not the biggest earner of the senior group, but it was a good number. Others were jealous, and she knew it. Other people wanted what she had. People in that senior group. People who worked for her. Viv was always on the lookout for trouble, from inside the Creags as well as outside. Sorley Ross was the challenge on the outside, and she wasn’t aware of any trouble inside.

  Not until she met Sorley. Viv didn’t believe in going to war unless you had to. War is expensive. First she would try to scare the opposition off the battlefield. She sat in Sigurds pub and watched the young man sit opposite her. He had come alone, as instructed. Sorley smiled across the table at her.

  ‘Nice to finally meet you,’ he said. He sounded casual, which she didn’t like.

  ‘You need to retire,’ she said. ‘Get out of the business, go travel, buy a boat, sink it, whatever. You need to stop working in the business and you need to stop living in Challaid.’

  He smiled at her. ‘I’m a little young and a little poor for retirement.’

  ‘There’s more than one way to stop living in a place,’ she said, almost bored by her own threat, she had made it so many times. ‘On your terms or mine, you’re going to stop.’

  Sorley smiled and reached into his pocket. Viv tensed and he smiled again, more broadly. ‘Just my phone,’ he said, and took it out of his pocket. He tapped the screen a couple of times and a recording began to play.

  ‘She’s going to come after you,’ a local accent said, a muffled voice. ‘She wants rid of you, I want rid of her. Easy-peasy, we work together. You get her in place and I’ll take care of the rest. Get her to the multi-storey that fell over, down in the basement, that’s a good spot.’

  Viv looked at the phone. She didn’t want to speak because she didn’t like being boxed into a corner.

  ‘You know that was MacPherson,’ Sorley told her. ‘He came to me, I didn’t go to him. He wants you out of the way because he thinks he can take your share, and he wants me to help him. Thing is, the offer he’s put on the table for me to help is not one I like. I don’t trust him. Once he’s done with you I become his next target, I know that. So my question is, what’s your offer?’

  ‘Why would I need to make you an offer? You’ve already told me that MacPherson is working against me, what else can you do?’

  ‘I can get him into the right position for you.’

  Someone stopped living in the city, but it wasn’t Sorley. It was the young man who had worked under Viv and hated her and her family. The young man who had been in a fight with her brother and had been blamed for it just because his punch bag was related to someone senior. He watched her get rich from his efforts and he wanted what she had. His plan to kill her hinged on someone else being the lure, and Sorley was the man he wanted for the role. Instead Sorley lured MacPherson into place and the young man disappeared while Viv grew stronger than ever.

  They had another meeting, a couple of nights later. She told him that the job had been a success and their deal would be honoured. He would be allowed to continue to work, and the Creags would break the habit of a lifetime and avoid stamping on him. There were conditions. He declared his loyalty to the Creags so that he couldn’t declare it to anyone else. Not that there was anyone else, but the Creags were always wary of outsiders coming in and getting help from people like Sorley. He wouldn’t have to kick a cut up to her, though, and she would let them continue to operate so long as he didn’t expand.

  ‘You stay the size you are now and work the places you work now, nothing more,’ she told him.

  ‘Deal.’

  They drank to it, and they drank some more. It was two in the morning when they left the bar and got into a taxi. Sorley’s memory of it was blurred, but it was his flat they woke up in. Viv naked on top of him, him tucking her hair back to see her peaceful face.

  She got out of bed and walked across the room to pick up her clothes. She started to dress, her face hard again. When she was finished she stood at the foot of the bed and looked down at him.

  ‘Remember what I told you. No expansion. If I think you’re building your own little gang, you will have violated our agreement and I will remove you from the city. Remember that.’

  She walked out of the flat.

  46

  DARIAN WENT THROUGH the blue door and down the dark concrete stairs to the basement. It was cold in there, and there wasn’t much light. He opened the door at the bottom and stepped out into what had been the underground level of the car park. It was a square of bare concrete, flat and empty, no cars allowed in since the collapse. There was one light on, an industrial spotlight that looked like it had been left behind by the engineering team that made the place safe and must have been stealing its electricity from one of the buildings next door.

  Viv stood in the circle the light made, dropping the cigarette she had been holding and crunching it under the heel of her boot.

  She said, ‘I’m glad you came, D
arian.’

  At the mention of his name there was movement. The blue door opened and shut behind him as a man stepped in, blocking his exit, leaning back against the door and crossing his arms. The ramp up to the ground floor was covered by the arrival of a young woman in shadow, something glinting in her hand. It looked like a screwdriver.

  It wouldn’t be a gun, possession of one carried a mandatory seven-year prison sentence so only morons, the desperate and the very professional dared carry. Being caught with a knife was a year in The Ganntair, not worth it when you could arm yourself with something else, like a workman’s tool. You could walk down the street with a screwdriver in your pocket and the police would have to prove you weren’t heading home for some DIY. It was a soon-to-be-closed loophole.

  The two new arrivals both looked like a fight with Darian would be a small piece of cake to them. And there was Viv, standing facing him in the circle of light, her expression unchanged.

  Darian said, ‘I’m not.’

  ‘No, I thought you might change your mind pretty quickly. You’ve been annoying more people than just me, it seems, and you were bloody annoying for me. Important people are angry with you, and do you know what happens when the VIPs get huffy?’

  He looked right and then back over his shoulder. The threats around him, none of them with even a hint of reluctance. It was a question of how far they would go, whether killing a man provided any of them cause for moral concern. It didn’t look awfully likely.

  He said, almost in a whisper, ‘Bad things.’

  ‘Yeah, bad things. It’s a shame, but it’s a shame that you brought on yourself.’

  Viv stood and stared at Darian, a long ten seconds of silence before she finally took a step forward. Her people tensed, the one on the right stepped forward and closed the circle around Darian. He looked quickly left and right, searching for an escape to run to. His chance of getting out was slim, but it was no chance at all if he stood where he was.