A FEW hours later Darian went looking for Maeve because he wanted to get at Corey. He lied to Sholto about it, sure, but that was a frequent part of their working relationship and Sholto would have been disappointed in him if he hadn’t. They lied to each other because the truth was the sort of whiny goody-two-shoes that got in the way of a useful arrangement. They were a generation apart but making money from working together, and whatever motivated one shouldn’t weigh overmuch on the conscience of the other. Darian lied about Maeve because lying was best for business. And let’s remember, when all this happened Darian was twenty-two, so while he may have been intelligent that didn’t mean he was at all wise.
Finding out where a person lives isn’t hard; there are so many companies and local government agencies that hold people’s addresses and however much they say they’ll protect people’s privacy, their defenses are only as good as the will of their lowest paid, most disgruntled employee. One call to a contact at the council and Darian had her details from the electoral register—Maeve Campbell, twenty-seven years old, living at 44–2 Sgàil Drive, Earmam, Challaid. Darian, thank goodness, had a knowledge of the city that would make a taxi driver’s jaw drop, every street and almost every building. A good memory and a nerdish dedication to studying the detail, that was why. He knew Earmam, the region on the east side of the loch full of low-cost housing, people packed upon people, and he knew Sgàil Drive, a street whose name had started as a joke among the builders putting up the flats there.
He got off the bus at the corner and walked down to her building, three blocks of flats on each side of the road, all in a cross shape that might have been part of the architect’s graveyard humor. Hers was on the left side of the road, directly under Dùil hill, too close to the incline to be able to see the standing stones, An Coimheadaiche, above. He went in through the red front door and up the cold staircase because the lifts had stopped trying. These were buildings thrown up in a hurry and on the cheap within living memory, using a slice of land that had previously been considered inappropriate for development and had since proven that initial judgment correct. He knocked on the door to number 44.
Maeve opened it and looked at him, no surprise in her expression. She had known Darian would come trailing after her when she left that office, whatever he had said and no matter how long it took him to find her.
She said, “Come in.”
Her flat was much more a home than Darian’s. It was cared for, and there was the ticklish sweet scent from a candle. The living room and kitchen were the same room, a living area some lying estate agent would describe it as, and there were two couches that were different shapes but had similar blankets tucked carefully over them. There was a small bookcase with a TV on top of it and a vinyl record player that was supposed to look old but had a USB slot on the front of it sitting on the floor under the window, a row of albums lined up beside it. The light was on already.
She said, “Excuse the darkness, the sun doesn’t climb the hill until late and then it comes all of a sudden before it runs away and disappears in the mid-afternoon. You get used to the dark, eventually. Can I get you a drink or something?”
Darian said, “No, thanks. You know why I’m here.”
Maeve smiled a little because her dimpled little smiles could go a long way. She was strikingly pretty and knew it. She had changed since she was at the office, now wearing black trousers and a gray jumper that seemed shapeless, but when she sat on one of the couches and crossed her legs it still sent a confident ripple round the room.
Darian sat opposite her and said, “I need to know everything you do about what happened to Moses Guerra.”
“Then I will tell you everything I know. He was stabbed outside his flat on Seachran Drive in Bakers Moor, chased from there to an alleyway between Somerset Street and Morti Road and killed. The police have found nobody they’re willing to call a real suspect and one they’ve decided to imply is a suspect because they’re lazy fucking liars. Moses helped people hide money, like I said at your office, so he spent time with plenty of law dodgers who had the ability to make a thing like this happen. He knew them and their secrets.”
“Do you have anything that would prove the sort of work he did, who he was working with at the time he was killed?”
“Come on, Detective…”
“I’m not a detective, I’m a researcher.”
“Fine. Come on, researcher, men like Moses don’t keep a paper trail for a jury to walk along, you should know that, whatever you say you do for a living. Once he’d read something that told him what he needed to know he would shred and chuck it. Only just stopped short of burning the shreds and eating the ashes. No phone messages, emails, anything of that sort about work, he was too paranoid about online security. You won’t find anything about his work which in itself should prove he was doing things worth hiding, but it’s why he was killed and it’s why the police did nothing. They’re protecting the people he worked for, and even if they weren’t, people with Moses’ reputation don’t get the same treatment. A second-generation Caledonian with his biography, there aren’t many who will pretend he mattered. Well, he mattered to me.”
“In which case he matters to me.”
Maeve looked at him skeptically. “I think you say things because you think you ought to, not because you mean them. It’s automatic, the way you say it.”
“I mean it. Moses might have been a criminal, but nobody deserves to spend their last seconds in fear, lying in an alley, knowing they’re a breath away from the end. I’ll try to find out who did it, not just because you asked and because you’re paying me but because the person who did it shouldn’t be out there thinking they can do it again. Even in this city a dead man deserves at least a scrap of justice.”
“Good.”
That helped convince the employer of his commitment, always good to nail down early on, so Darian shuffled back to the awkward questions. “His personal life?”
“He wasn’t on social media, didn’t send texts unless they were very ordinary things, and even then he shuddered when he sent them. He had a small group of friends and most of them were people who moved in the same narrow circles he did, so they’re not chatty sorts. The police have dug into it, I know they’ve tried to talk to anyone they thought would admit to being a friend of Moses, but they only got the minimum required by law in reply. Nobody wants to incriminate themselves, or others, which doesn’t leave them with much to say.”
“What sort of person was he?”
“Not the sort of person to jump into a hole without knowing there was an exit route at the bottom, or to pick a fight with anyone, not even one he could be a hundred percent sure of winning. He was passive. We met at a party, we had mutual friends who introduced us, and I liked him. He didn’t ever wear a mask. All the actors you get in this city, trying to pretend they’re tougher than they are or smarter than they are or more dignified than they are. So full of shit. He was open.”
“Were your mutual friends criminal types as well?”
“I know a lot of people and some of them are on the shifty side of the tracks. If you know a lot of people in this city then you’ll have friends your minister wouldn’t love, but it doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“How long were you and him together?”
“Six, seven months. Long enough for it to matter.”
“But you weren’t living together.”
“Are you in a relationship?”
“No, I’m not.”
“I’m sure you’ve been in a relationship where having your own space was as important as sharing it with the other person. Just because you like being on top of someone doesn’t mean you want to live there. I liked him a lot, might even have loved him. I think I did, and I’m fairly sure he loved me back, but it wasn’t the sort of relationship that made you rush for a marriage license. Moses understood that, although he didn’t always agree with how hard we should press the accelerator. He wanted me to live with him and I wasn’t ready. It was one of the reasons we had a falling out.”
“He was older than you?”
“He was, but not much and I don’t think that’s why he was in more of a hurry. He spent his life around people who thought might was right, thought they could be tough and dominant and everyone else would fall into line. It wasn’t his natural way, but it was still hard for him to shake it off, even in a relationship where it wasn’t needed. He didn’t like pushing things along, but he thought he had to, thought that was how it worked.”
“What do you know about his family?”
“Very little. He was second-generation; his father came from Caledonia in the mid-seventies, got married, had a kid, got divorced and didn’t see his son again. I think his mother’s alive somewhere, but I couldn’t point her out for you if she stood right in front of me. He was an only child as far as I know, although I suppose his father might have created a half-sibling or two. He had left his family behind and didn’t want to look back, not even to see his parents, forward all the way.”
“Sounds a bit brutal.”
“No, brutal would be the wrong word for him, he was sure. Moses decided that you had to live life moving in one direction and I liked that, the certainty of it. He was always honest about it, that he would never let the past put up a barrier around tomorrow. It was one of the things I thought I loved about him, his honesty. It was a positive thing, I thought.”
“You thought?”
“Perhaps he was denying himself too much, but that was his choice. He didn’t like any of his past so he wanted to pretend it wasn’t there anymore. Maybe it’s the equivalent of a child closing their eyes and thinking the world has disappeared.”
“You said you loved his honesty.”
“Said it and meant it.”
“When you came to our office you called him a crook, but he can’t have been much of one if he suffered from honesty.”
“I’ve known a lot of people in my life that weren’t honest. Some were just built to be liars from the ground up, others were like you, honest in bits while trying to hide a lot of the truth as they went along. Did you tell your boss, Mr. Douglas, that you were dropping in to visit me at home? Did you get my home address from an above-board source, because I didn’t give it to you? There are different kinds of honesty. Moses was genuine. I called him a crook because he was, but he never lied to me or to himself about it. You’re lucky if you don’t realize how rare that sort of honesty is.”
“I know how rare it is.”
“Then I’m not sure why I’m sitting here trying to explain it to you.”
Darian paused, realized her tone had grown a steel spine and decided that if he was in for a penny he was in for a pound. “Was he rich when you started your relationship?”
“I was actually under the impression he was a lot poorer than he turned out to be. Is this your strategy, to come in here and try to coax something juicy out of me with petty insults, rile me up until I spill my guts? DI Corey tried the same thing, with a lot more skill I might add, and got nothing, because I have nothing to give.”
“Are you looking to hire me to clear your name or to catch who killed him?”
“Both. Catching the killer will clear my name.”
“It could be expensive.”
“You tell me when the cost starts to hurt and I’ll tell you when to stop.”
“It could take a while.”
“I have some money, and I want to know.”
Darian had heard that sort of thing before, an investigation started while the raw emotion of loss pained someone into desperate action, but the hurt dulled and people began to move on with their lives. No matter how much a person meant to them, a life can’t be lived standing still waiting for justice to be done. People wanted to know more about a dead relative, their financial affairs, their relationship with a woman who shouldn’t have been in the will. People could be passionate with grief, but that’s rarely a long-term motivation, and clients often grew out of the investigation they’d started and canceled the contract early. They wanted the battles of their past in the history books, not raging alongside them. Sholto called it the distance clause, the dead becoming less important the smaller they got in the rearview mirror.
He said, “How long will you be mourning him?”
“Just as long as he would have wanted me to. No looking back, remember. I won’t be wearing black into my thirties, but I won’t forget him either, which is why I won’t let you walk away from this when the going gets tough. You’re going to find the person responsible; I’ll make sure of that.”
She gave him the names of some of Moses’ friends and the few people she knew worked with him. It was an unimpressive mob, some of whom were familiar to Darian and most could be safely ruled out straight away. Petty conmen that had found their way into Douglas Independent Research’s files, low rate and nonviolent, the only money they were interested in was the easy kind. Killing a man did not make for easy cash. That left him with a shortlist to investigate. Armed with that, Darian walked to the front door. Maeve opened it for him, the two of them standing face to face, holding eye contact.
She said, “I wonder why you wanted to know when I would stop mourning.”
Darian walked out of the flat.