DARIAN LEFT through the open front door and made his way to the stairs. He could see them ahead, both pulling on coats as they moved out of view, walking side by side, leaning against each other out of lust and a need for balance. The stairwell they skipped down was dark, streetlights coming through the full-length windows giving a dull orange tinge to the deep gray surroundings. Darian lurked at the top to play voyeur, listening to them go down together.
The girl said, “Hold on, I can’t see properly.”
A squeal followed as the man said, “Don’t you worry, I got you.”
She sounded too young to be playing this game. She started to giggle and that noise was smothered quickly by a kiss on the landing a floor below Darian. Thirty seconds passed before it turned back to movement, shoes clacking on bare concrete stairs as the couple moved further down. Darian kept up the stalk, making sure they couldn’t hear him, walking slowly on the balls of his feet. He only needed to be close for this early part of the journey, just until he was sure his guess was right.
He was on the first-floor landing when he heard the front door click shut behind them. Darian sauntered down, pushed it open and stepped out into the cold, clear night. They were, as we said, on Haugen Road, dirty lamplight showing the four-story flats on either side of the long street, their dark brown brickwork hugging the shadows tight, the road curving downhill toward Bakers Station. One man, he looked middle-aged, was walking up the street, and seemed to be struggling to keep his feet on a flat pavement inconsiderately not designed with the stumbling drunk in mind. The young couple had crossed the road and were walking down toward the station, the man with his arm tight around the girl. Darian stayed on the other side and walked more slowly than them.
It was a careful process, staying far enough behind to make sure his footsteps couldn’t be heard. He didn’t need to stay close now, but it was hard to walk down the hill to the station any slower than the lovey-dovey, hands-on couple were going without tying his feet together. They went into the brightly lit, century-old, gray stone station at the bottom of the road ahead of him, so now he could take his time, let them get ahead, let them disappear. They entered through the large arch to the concourse and Darian followed slowly, dragging his fingers along the bumpy surface of the stonework on the outside.
The couple used their travel cards to get through the barriers and hopped onto the next train heading north to Whisper Hill. Darian was, technically, working, so he went to the machine and bought a ticket with money he could claim back the cost of with a rare proof of expenses. The purchase killed four minutes; made sure he missed the train north they were on but got him to the platform in time for the next.
A short detour from the tale here, but anyone who’s ever been to Challaid will know the leading pastime of the populace is not football or camanachd or the theater or, unfortunately, books or any other noble pursuit, it’s complaining about the transport system. Ignore the stadiums and grand halls and libraries the other hobbies occupy, nothing can compete with the scale of people whinging about travel. This is a port city, founded over a thousand years ago as a fishing and trading town, or so your history teacher would have you believe, and centuries later boats remain the only vehicles we’re any good with. The roads are clogged because we’re a long but narrow city, U-shaped round the end of a sea loch, and because the rail system is a calamitous joke. We have no underground trains, and a single line running round the city above ground.
Look, we all know the reasons; a lot of people died when the original line was being built, probably more than was ever admitted because immigrant workers were never properly counted, and the companies involved were tone-deaf in their response. People protested against further development. It was dangerous back then, and by the time engineering skill caught up with public demand to make building an underground system safe it was prohibitively expensive. We’re a reasonably rich city, but there’s no appetite to spend the many billions something that big would now cost, so instead we complain. It’s cheaper. There had been a suggestion in recent years that a monorail should be built, running over buildings instead of trying to dig under them. Funnily enough this idea had met with little support from communities who would have trains rattling above their heads every ten minutes and the odds of it ever happening ranked somewhere alongside the chances of everyone in Challaid being provided with a jetpack.
Darian was on the next train up to Whisper Hill, the carriage a mix of people silently annoyed with the others who were drunkenly loud. He was content to let the couple get ahead of him. It took fourteen minutes before the train stopped at Three O’clock Station in Whisper Hill and Darian got off. He walked out through the eastern exit of the sprawling station, each expansion adding a new architectural twist to the last stop on the city line, a glass and steel frontage on old brickwork on the east side of the tracks, a long, thin, white-paneled extension on the west and the back end of the building twice the height of the front.
There was a time, probably, when Whisper Hill would have been attractive. The hills, the narrow stretch of moor and then Loch Eriboll; who wouldn’t find that pretty on a rare day of summer, midges the only pollution? Now this area of the city was dominated by the large industrial docks built in the thirties around an inlet, and the “engineering marvel” of Challaid International Airport built on top of Whisper Hill itself, the hilltop mostly leveled to accommodate it. No one in the last century has put the eyesore area on a postcard.
The lights up the steep hill shone bright, and Darian walked that way. Along Drummond Street, the long road that ran from the docks to the airport, the first half flat and the second a steep climb out of the tangle of concrete and up the heather-clad hillside. Darian turned right before he reached the bottom of the hill to walk down Gemmell Road, a narrow street with ugly brown three-story flats on each side. This was low-cost housing built for people working the docks in the thirties and forties. Short-term housing for temporary residents. It was the sort of area, buildings tightly packed together, a squash of inhabitants with a high turnover of tenants, in which a person with secrets could live a life unnoticed.
Darian knew he was looking for the second building on the left; he had spent time on Gemmell Road already, and went in through the front door and up the stairs to the first floor. There was no need to creep around now; they would have been inside the man’s flat for more than five minutes.
Darian pictured them, kissing intensely, hurried, all that energy bottled up since meeting at the party cracking the glass with its intensity now.
Tension racing wild as soon as it was let off the chain.
Clothes being pulled off as they moved into the bedroom, onto the bed.
The girl underneath, that was the pattern.
The man licking and then biting, the girl getting scared as he forced her to roll over.
She would try to push him off, slap him, and he would ignore her.
When she moved too much for him, made his mouth’s work too difficult, that was when he would reach for the knife, that’s when he would want blood.
Darian stood outside the front door, eyes closed, trying to calculate the time that pattern would take to play out. There was a scream from inside, quickly muffled. Darian took a step back and kicked, aiming for the lock of the front door, knowing how cheap and feeble such fixtures were. It was the smash-and-grab burglar routine; kick, damage, repeat, the same methodical impact taking three kicks before the door cracked open. Darian was into the corridor and pushed open a door to find a bathroom, pushed open the next one to find his target.
A lamp was on beside the bed, showing the walls painted a dark blue, the bedside cabinet and a wardrobe opposite, no other furniture. The girl with the black bob was sitting up on the pillows, her eyes wide, a single drop of blood tickling down her left breast. The man, Darian knew his real name was Ash Lucas, whatever he was telling the girls, was standing at the foot of the bed, naked and excited. He had a large silver knife with a serrated edge in his hand and he spun to face the door when Darian walked in.
It took a glance for him to see it all, to understand that the pattern was indeed being repeated. Not pausing because delay gave the knife an advantage, Darian took a step toward Lucas and swung hard with his right fist, aiming accurately for the bridge of the nose. He hit the smaller man hard but he didn’t hear the crack he was hoping for. The tactic was to hurt the bastard, and fast. Lucas stumbled backward, gripped the knife harder and reeled forward to his front foot to try to make a thrust at Darian. A second punch caught Lucas around the left eye, Darian’s longer arm jabbing over the knife before he danced a step away.
That punch hurt both of them, Darian’s index finger cracking, but he didn’t show it, didn’t react to pain in a fight. Lucas dropped sideways onto the bed. Darian took aim, his boot this time, the girl shouting as Darian stamped down on what we’ll chastely call the man’s excitement, scuffing down the skin. Lucas opened his mouth and instead of screaming he gasped loudly for breath as his eyes bulged, dropping the knife onto the floor. Darian picked it up and pointed it at Lucas.
He said quietly, “Got you, you piece of shit.”
He was about to say something reassuring to the girl when she bolted across the bed and out of the room, scooping up enough of her clothes in a bundle to cover herself as she ran down the hallway, struggling to dress as she hopped and stumbled out through the broken front door.
Darian shouted, “Hey.”
She didn’t come back and he didn’t chase, couldn’t leave Lucas unguarded. Another punch, this one to make sure Lucas didn’t kid himself by thinking he had the same freedom to run his victim did. Unlikely that he could have moved fast anyway, hunched over and crying quietly as he was, hissing through his teeth. Darian took his mobile from his pocket and scrolled down through his contacts. He knew the nearest station was Dockside, and he called his contact there.