THE DOWNSIDE of hiding his clandestine work from Sholto was that he had to spend all day on the Murdoch warehouse case. But working the Guerra case at night meant seeing the scene as it had been a month before, when Moses stumbled into it to his death. Darian started at the block of flats on Seachran Drive where Moses had lived. It’s a narrow and short road, made skinnier by the cars parked there, long rows of flats along both sides. It’s in Bakers Moor so we’re not talking about the heights of luxury here, but it’s a neat enough street, the four-story buildings relatively modern and well kept.
It was after ten o’clock, earlier than Moses had been killed but still dark and cold enough to make sure conditions matched. DC Draper had suggested Moses was jumped on the doorstep, probably getting out of his car, and had run for his life, not quite fast enough. Darian stood and looked at the door to the building Moses had called home and understood why he hadn’t gone that way. A gate leading to steps leading to a locked door, a man without a second to waste would have to go another way. From the flat where he had lived to the alley where he died was a five-minute walk, two minutes if you were running to try to keep up with the life that was seeping out of you. Darian tried to track the route a man with death at his heels would use.
He walked to the corner and across the road to confront the first conundrum. If Moses was just looking to create distance then he would go over the fences and round the backs of the houses there, cut across their gardens and save time. That meant running into unlit gardens, going where nobody would see him, where the potential killer would have no witnesses to his crime. Surely if he thought he was going to die he would stay in the bright areas where someone would spot them and help him. Darian shook his head; he needed to think like Moses, the career criminal. What was he carrying that night that he might want to hide?
Darian went through the gardens, trying to keep to the most logical route of a desperate runner, keeping his head down so the occupants wouldn’t realize a young man was skulking across their property and think they were about to be burgled. Now he was on Somerset Street, and the alley where Moses bled to death was in view, but so were better places to run. Again, Moses had chosen the one route where he could be sure he wouldn’t be seen, by the attacker and by other witnesses. He had passed many buildings on the way where he could have found help.
The alley was unremarkable but for the fact that a man had died there a month before. It’s a narrow stretch behind buildings, a shortcut from Somerset Street to Morti Road, but it was mostly a place to store bins, boxes, crates, filth and rats. It was a place to hide, not a place to run. Darian walked down to where the body had been found, far enough away from either end to have been missed by people walking or driving past on adjoining streets. Not so well hidden that someone standing in the alley could possibly miss it.
“I must have missed it.”
Darian and the waiter were standing in the alleyway. He was in his mid-twenties, dark skin and dark eyes, nervous about this conversation. He was wiry and his movements were all sharp and jerky. His name was Benigno Holguin and he was taking his ten-minute break to speak to Darian. It took five of those minutes for Darian to explain who he was.
“Are all the lights that are on now on at two o’clock in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“So if you stood here…”
“I did stand here, for my cigarette. I come out with bags for the bin, I put them in the bin, I stop here to have cigarette, two, three minutes, I go inside.”
“So if the body was there you would have seen it, you couldn’t have missed it.”
Holguin shrugged.
Darian said, “They think he may have been dead before two o’clock, so the body should have been there.”
“I said this to the policemen, the body was not there, it must have come just after, I don’t know. They must have their time wrong. I thought this was finished.”
Darian could guess why he was so worked up. “Where are you from?”
“El Roble, Costa Rica.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Ten months. I have two months to go, I said that to the detective, he said this was finished and it was okay.”
Holguin was two months away from a fast-track dual passport, Caledonian and Scottish. Anyone from two of the old colonies, Panama and Costa Rica, can get a dual passport after twelve months working in Scotland. Used to be you just had to live here for a year but some bored politicians with fear to spread got that changed to twelve months of legitimate employment.
That was going to change again soon enough, a clamor to keep people who wanted in out, blame them for things that couldn’t yet be their fault. It would go to two years of employment. It was already much harder if you came from Nicaragua, because we only ever had the south of it, it was the last colony we captured and the first we gave up and the people spent the entire time in between fighting for their freedom.
For every good-hearted soul we sent across there was a murderous thug like Gregor Kidd or a scheming conman like Joseph Gunn, dark stories too long to tell here. Knowing what Kidd did to the people of Sambu you might wonder why any immigrant would want to live in a city that named one of its largest streets after him. The way we treated people in Caledonia, many think they should all get a dual passport if they want them, but it’s more complicated than that. Once he had a Scottish passport Holguin could go anywhere in the EU, he didn’t have to stick around if he didn’t want to, so those tighter limits were on the way. He was two months from all of Europe opening its arms to him as a fellow citizen, and a man like DI Corey could put a stop to that.
Darian said, “You couldn’t have missed it, could you? Come out and looked the other way the whole time? It was near the wall so…”
“No, I don’t think…No, I am not blind. I would have seen it, but it wasn’t there. They say he died before then, I say no, he must have come here after. He was not here. Why is this not over?”
Darian tried again to reassure him, not wanting the waiter to go running for comfort to Corey or any other cop from the anti-corruption unit. The longer they were in the dark about Darian’s work the fatter his slim chance of success got. He said, “It is over, it is, I’m just trying to work out everything the police worked out. I don’t think there’s any chance of them wanting to speak to you again. Thank you, Benigno.”
“Okay.”
Darian let Benigno go back into the restaurant, working for less than minimum wage for a year because Challaid pretended he would be rewarded at the end of that time. Men like Corey were itching to use his vulnerability against him. His status as a Caledonian was a weakness. Challaid only existed so our boats could trade and raid with the Scandinavians and Irish, so they were our first immigrants, then the Caledonians and the Polish and anyone else we could make money from. They gave to our city and it mostly took from them.
Our past teaches us as many bad lessons as good ones. In this city we have a problem understanding what’s telling us to change and what’s telling us to stay the same. It comes, probably, from our desperate need to remain distinct, different from the Scotland of the Anglicized south and from the world beyond. We hang on to our language and our culture, our sense of difference, because we know these things to be good, but we allow that to spread to areas where cosmopolitan modernity is, frankly, a hell of a lot better. People in the south whinge incessantly about our Gaelic road signs, but it’s the old prejudices underneath that pose the real problem here. We don’t like outsiders unless we’re dominating and exploiting them.
Darian left the alleyway, hoping Holguin wouldn’t get caught up in any of this, but not sure. People like the waiter, a bystander who didn’t deserve to suffer, were the first to take a hit because they didn’t see it coming. Darian made the long walk down to Glendan Station and went home. He knew more about Moses Guerra’s death, but he didn’t know any better.