49
HE HELD HER tight and she held him back, both afraid they might drop to the floor if they let go. The fear that had rushed through Darian when he saw Gallowglass move was a new intensity to him, but it was over now.
‘Ross.’
Darian turned around. The low grunt of his name had come from the man bleeding on the floor. Corey was standing over his protégé. Darian had expected to see the DI with his phone out, calling an ambulance, but instead he was standing still, looking down with disgust at a man he’d thought he’d known better. Gallowglass was ignoring him, focused on Darian.
‘Ross, I’m going to tell you.’
Corey said, ‘Shut up, Randulf. Don’t listen to him, Ross, he needs help, he’s raving. The man has a knife in his guts and a fever in his brain, for fuck’s sake.’
It was Corey’s tone, the desperation of it, that had Darian walking across the floor towards Gallowglass. If this was something the DI didn’t want Darian to hear then it was something he wouldn’t allow himself to miss. He stood over Gallowglass, letting the man’s fading eyes meet his.
Gallowglass said, ‘You need to know because you’re the only one that cares about it. Them... They don’t care. Since the night it happened they’ve been lying. Playing games. With you, and with me.’
He grimaced and stopped, looking down at the knife but still not daring to touch the thing that was trying to take his life. He was in pain and breathing fast, but his voice held rising strength and he seemed like he was going to make it. Darian felt comfortable letting him take the time to tell his story. Corey opened his mouth, but Darian spoke first.
He said to Gallowglass, ‘Go on.’
‘She, your girlfriend, she was supposed to be getting the gaffer, Corey... she was supposed to be getting him information about Guerra’s business. Incriminate people. Find out where the money was. He was scared. Lucas, others before him... Other stations are standing up... standing up to him now. He wanted money to get out. She helped him. Then they split up, Guerra, he chucked her... found out, I don’t know. She went after him. It was her. It was her that killed him. Went to his flat because there was more she had to get for Corey. He had... that night he had the papers on him. All of it. Got them from the bank. The gaffer’s money, Slight, all the details. The bank tipped the gaffer and he told her... told your girlfriend. Didn’t want him using them... Chased him and stabbed him. Then she got him in to clean it up for her. Him. Corey. Him and me went round. We took the body away to buy us time. He went... we went into the flat and took away all the stuff about his money. Anything dodgy. Protect the cash so Corey can get it. Then we put the body back... Back in the alley where it was before. The guy who found it, he was our guy, working for us. We controlled the whole thing. Everything. Made sure Corey was in charge of the investigation. It was all up to us, but he was so damn greedy... Wanted everything for himself.’
Gallowglass paused again because his breathing was rapid-fire. Darian looked at Corey, saw the expression on his face change from curious to sickened. He looked back over his shoulder at Maeve, standing by the window. She seemed fascinated, but not scared and not ready to step in and defend herself.
Gallowglass said, ‘She’s not right, Ross. She’s dangerous. Always was. Corey covered up for her because she helped him get the papers from Guerra, that was what he wanted. It told him everything. Everything. He knew where all the money was now... Not just his own, either. He’s been scared lately, scared. His contacts are getting picked off. He’s not getting away with it anymore. So he wanted to take all the money and run. Use Guerra’s papers. Needed to protect your girlfriend for that. Keeping a killer on the streets. A killer. That was when I knew he’d lost it.’
That was as much as Corey was willing to listen to. He shouted at Darian, ‘He’s talking shite and you’re stupid enough to listen to him. Maeve killing Moses? Give me a break. Me letting her get away with it? Not a chance, not a bloody chance. This is insane. The man’s losing his wits with his blood; you can see that, you can hear it.’
Darian didn’t pay any attention. He turned and looked at Maeve, the person who mattered most to him in that room. She smiled. A little curl of the lips at either side, cheeks dimpling sweetly, her eyes on Darian, judging him. She wanted to know what his reaction was going to be before she provoked it, so they held eye contact for five or six seconds while Corey shouted and she didn’t leap in to defend herself. Just smiled.
All the talk of wanting to get justice for Moses, and now she stood there and smiled. The confusion was dizzying. It was Gallowglass that snapped him back to clarity, talking to Corey.
‘All that talk about doing the right thing, that was bullshit. You said we were going to help the city. You said I was going to still be doing police work. I was intimidating people for you to make money from them. I was covering up for a murderer. A murderer... You made a fool out of me. Well, I put a stop to it, didn’t I, gaffer? I put a stop to all your lies. That’s what a good cop does. Now you got to face the music. You and me together. I’ll tell them every damn thing.’
Corey said nothing. He stood looking down at the man he had trained and considered a worthy apprentice. This was betrayal, a failure of priorities the DI couldn’t comprehend.
Darian turned fully to face Maeve. She had been dumped by Moses when he found out she was feeding info to Corey. She waited outside the flat and she went for him, cut him. Moses ran but he was carrying the paperwork that shone a light on his work, so he tried to be careful, tried for escape without looking for help. She killed him and called Corey to cover it up. He covered up a murder because she got him into the flat to clean out the rest of the paperwork that would tell Corey where mountains of dirty money were. That trail of soiled wealth led him to Moira Slight and Durell Kotkell.
Darian looked at Maeve and said, ‘Why did you hire me? You could have been clear if you hadn’t brought me in.’
The smile spread. ‘I didn’t want to be clear. I told you, I wanted justice for Moses. You know what really surprised me? I went to his flat and I didn’t know what I was going to do, but when I did it, it was perfect. I’ve never felt anything like it. The excitement, Darian, there’s nothing in this world like it. The power of life in your hands, running on the edge of death. You’ll never experience the thrill of it, and I wanted to keep that going. It was fun. Don’t pretend you didn’t have fun with me, because I know you did. You loved it, and I loved it.’
He didn’t know when it had happened but the window behind her was wide open. It was uncharacteristically still out there, the curtain hardly moving. Maeve still smiled, looking Darian in the eye. This had always been her plan. Ride the thrill all the way to whatever ending it arrived at, and here it was.
Darian said quietly, ‘Don’t.’
She shook her head and laughed. Then she stepped backwards and perched on the windowsill. She dropped back into the dark Challaid night.
50
IT TOOK TWO steps for Darian to reach the window and lean out. She fell through the darkness, a shape twisting in the air. Darian could only see the movement, not the person. She hit the ground hard on her back with a crack. She landed in the small circle of light thrown out by a weak lamppost and Darian thought he saw a spray of red burst out of her mouth and fall back onto her. From above she looked like a broken picture, and he wanted to run to her. He stepped back from the window, awed by the moment. It was all instinct for the next few minutes, no considered thought. He turned and ran past Corey and Gallowglass, out into the corridor of Maeve’s flat. He heard someone shout after him but he couldn’t stop. The front door was still open and he ran, slow and unsteady. He couldn’t remember going down to her. He found a large bruise on his knee the following morning that he thought might have come from falling on the stairs, but he didn’t remember it happening. One second he was looking out the window at Maeve on the ground, the next he was on the pavement beside her.
If it wasn’t for the speckles of blood on her face a
nd the pool forming under her head it would have looked as though she had walked to the lamppost and lay happily down there. Her left arm was by her side, her right arm across her stomach, her legs together. Her eyes were half-shut, and that same smile was still on her lips. She looked like a woman who had achieved what she had set out to, who was content with the ending she had chosen.
Darian dropped to his knees beside her, careful not to touch the blood. Under the shock wasn’t a sense of grief but of embarrassment. Later he would be angry with himself for feeling that way as he knelt beside the body of a person he had been close to, but you can’t suppress your true feelings. He was humiliated. He had been so close to Maeve and she had fooled him absolutely. He wasn’t accustomed to being made to feel stupid, and this moment was crushing. It changed how he saw himself.
He didn’t know about time. He might have been on his knees beside her for ten seconds or ten minutes, he had no idea later. No cars came along Sgàil Drive, nobody approached on the pavement. He snapped back to the real world, and pulled his phone from his pocket. He dialled 999 and gave them the address, told them he needed an ambulance fast because a girl had fallen out of a window and a man had been stabbed. He gave little detail, and, even though they asked him to stay on the line, he hung up. That call served its purpose, making sure Corey couldn’t so completely control the aftermath of this situation in the way he had Moses’ murder.
Next he called Vinny, the first honest cop he could think of. It wasn’t his patch, but Darian couldn’t think of a cop in Earmam he knew and trusted like Vinny.
Vinny answered his phone and said, ‘Darian, mate, what colour of trouble have you got for me tonight?’
‘Vinny, I’m sorry, I really am, but you need to get to Sgàil Drive, under the hill in Earmam. A girl’s dead. Maeve Campbell. She jumped, and Corey is here and he’s involved up to his shifty eyes. He’s here, and Gallowglass has been stabbed. Corey’s here and he’ll try to get his cops involved in this to protect him and I need people I can trust.’
There was stunned silence before Vinny said, ‘Wait, what the hell are you talking about? Is this real?’
‘Please, Vinny, I need help here. Sgàil Drive.’
He hung up on his friend, because there was one more call to make. His hand was steady, he was feeling calm now, calling Sholto and expecting to have to wait for an answer. Sholto liked an early bed, and a late-night call would be met with a grumbling, sleepy, delayed answer. Not this time. This call was answered on the second ring and Sholto was talking before Darian had the chance to open his mouth.
‘Darian, good, I was about to call you. I’m at the docks, watching Murdoch Shipping. I’ve got them, Darian, I have. I got a hold of all the shipments they’re registered to receive this week and there’s an extra one being made right now. Something coming in without being registered. That alone is enough, but I bet what’s being...’
Darian interrupted him, saying, ‘Sholto, listen to me, you have to come to Sgàil Drive in Earmam. Maeve’s dead. It was her who killed Moses, and she’s stabbed Gallowglass and killed herself. Corey helped her cover it up, and now he’s here and he’s going to try to save himself again, I know it. I need you here.’
He hadn’t been frantic; his voice sounded calmer than it had when he’d spoken to Vinny. Still, Sholto understood that this was no joke because he didn’t pause before he said, ‘I’m on my way.’
Darian slipped the phone back into his pocket and looked at Maeve again. Seeing her happy and peaceful, a smile on a pretty face covered in blood. It was hard to look away from her, as it always had been. He forced himself. This long night wasn’t over just because Maeve had left, there was dark work lurking ahead.
51
HE RAN BACK upstairs, emotions packed away. All of what remained ahead involved Folan Corey, a man capable of slipping through gaps left by hotheads. Darian remembered going back up the stairs, his mind clear enough now to take in every detail. The front door of the flat still open, but no sound or sight of the neighbours. All that had gone on and nobody in the building had taken an interest, hiding until they understood the consequences.
He walked in and along the corridor to the living area and stopped in the doorway. Corey was on his knees beside Gallowglass, the reddened knife on the floor beside him. Blood was pulsing out of the wound and rolling thickly down his side, and Gallowglass was lying with his head slumped sideways, eyes shut. Darian took a step closer as Corey stood up and looked at him.
Corey said, ‘The knife fell out. Have you called an ambulance?’
It was only later that Darian thought how revealing it was that Corey hadn’t used the last few minutes to call an ambulance himself, relying instead on a man who wasn’t even in the building to do it for him. Instead, Darian was thinking about the knife, about how firmly planted in Gallowglass’s stomach it had been before Darian left. It had stood upright without being touched, Gallowglass lying back against the wall and letting it rest there, settled and waiting to be removed by a medical expert. He wouldn’t have pulled it out, and it couldn’t have worked itself loose.
Corey seemed to read his thoughts in his expression, and said, ‘It was his breathing. He was breathing faster, coughed a bit, and his stomach pushed out the knife. He’s losing a lot of blood. Have you called an ambulance?’
‘Yes, I called an ambulance.’
Darian dropped down beside Gallowglass and put his finger to his neck, trying to feel for a pulse. There was nothing, but his own nerves could have been causing him to miss the target. He jumped up and ran to the kitchen area, coming back with a towel. Corey was still standing in the same spot. Darian dropped down and pressed the towel against the wound, trying to stop bleeding that had finished its escape, trying to keep a dead man alive.
Corey said, ‘It’s too late, he’s gone.’
He was right. Darian left the towel where it was but he stopped pressing it, stopped fighting a battle that had passed by without him. Death always walks a little faster than life. He stood up and glared at Corey. ‘Why didn’t you try to stop the bleeding? Why didn’t you help him?’
‘I did help him. Jesus, I’ve been helping him his whole working life, long past the point where he deserved it. I’ve carried his deadweight longer than any man should and as long as I could. I did nothing but my best for him. It was too late, Ross. It’s over.’
They were both silent for a few seconds, staring over the body at each other. Corey almost smiled when he said, ‘I take it your flying girlfriend landed hard. Is she dead?’
It was an attempt to bring mindless anger into a conversation that Corey didn’t want to be mindful. Darian said, ‘She is.’
‘Probably just as well, a trial would have been embarrassing for you. An evil woman like her, getting you under her thumb and into her bed. Tricking you like that, tut tut. No, this is the best thing that could have happened for you. A truly evil woman.’
Darian could see where this was going already, and he thought he knew where it had come from. ‘He said you were going to set him up, make him the scapegoat. He had sussed you out, Corey. He knew you were only in it for yourself. If he didn’t know it before Moira Slight’s house then he knew it after. That’s why you pulled the knife out. Making sure he couldn’t repeat what he told me.’
‘The only people left who heard him are you and me. You, the son of a murderer and employee of an unregistered private detective agency who appears to have been in a seedy sexual relationship with a double killer. Murder seems to hang around your family like a noose. And me, the decorated DI, head of the anti-corruption unit whose protégé died trying to stop that evil woman. He was like a son to me.’
The smile on his face as he spoke said as much as the bloody knife on the floor beside Gallowglass. Darian wanted to lash out because he knew Corey was right and knew he was going to get away with it. There might be consequences for him, but they would be no more than a single drop of the bottle of poison he deserved. It was a stark reminder of th
e futility of truth.
Before Darian could say something in response he heard the first distant scream of a siren in a hurry. Things began to happen more quickly now. From the still of death to the energy of life racing to confront it. It could have been an ambulance or a police car; it didn’t matter to Darian which; he just wanted to be the first to meet them. He ran out of a flat that contained no one he could help, and back down the stairs. He was standing next to Maeve when an ambulance careered round the corner, the driver enthusiastic about the freedom his siren gave him.
Darian told the medics what had happened, both to Maeve and to Gallowglass. He repeated the story again thirty seconds later when a police car screeched to a halt, half on the pavement, and Vinny spilled out of it. He had PC Sutherland with him, but the young cop stayed pale and silent in the background. Darian told Vinny everything quickly, and Vinny wrote it all down.
In seconds the place was throbbing with people, cars and ambulances choking the narrow road, all the neighbours rushing out to form a gawping crowd now authority had shrilly announced its arrival. At one point Darian was sure he spotted DC Vicario talking to Vinny, reading from his notebook on the pavement near where Maeve had fallen. She was from Whisper Hill station, this shouldn’t have been her patch either, but Vinny must have called her. Then Sholto was there, a hand on Darian’s shoulder, trying to comfort him.
He watched them cover Maeve and her dead smile with a blanket. He watched the police debating among themselves who should speak to who. Corey left with a detective Darian didn’t recognise, but was later told was Lee Kenyon from the anti-corruption unit, and MacDuff. Sholto made sure Darian was left alone for a while by marshalling former colleagues away from him. After half an hour of empty movement and light, Sholto drove him to Earmam police station. Above them, on the crest of Dùil Hill and lit by moonlight, the Neolithic standing stones, An Coimheadaiche, looked down on human folly. It’s a cruel moon that shows you all the night can hold.
In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide Page 25