HE WAS late enough turning onto Cage Street the following morning to know Sholto would be there before him. It was wet and cold because this is Challaid and you can assume that any time the weather isn’t mentioned it was drizzly and there was a nip in the air. Darian could feel the water trickle down the back of his neck because he wasn’t dressed for it, which is a sign of stupidity in a city where the rain and wind stand beside death and taxes as life’s certainties.
A man was standing across the lane, pushed back against the wall of the Superdrug store opposite The Northern Song. He had the last bite of one of Mr. Yang’s breakfast dumplings from a foil tray and stayed where he was, staring ahead and pointedly not looking at Darian. Darian pointedly didn’t look back and went in through the door to the stairs and up to the office. Sholto was, as expected, there first.
Darian walked across to his desk by the window, looked down into the lane and saw the man still there, seemingly nailed to the spot. He said, “There’s a man…”
Sholto interrupted him. “I know there’s a man watching the building, and I know who he is and I know why he’s here.”
“Who is he?”
“That’s Randulf Gallowglass, stupid bloody name, and he used to be DC Gallowglass along at Cnocaid station, one of the anti-corruption team. He left the force, I don’t know why but probably because he was the baddest egg in the carton, got elbowed out, and he’s now doing work for Corey, off the books. Right this very now he’s standing across the way because Corey will have told him to. That’s Corey’s old-fashioned version of a warning shot, Gallowglass the bullet that lets you know that he knows you’re working for Maeve Campbell and he wants you to stop.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, aye.”
Darian looked down at the man in his thirties, light brown hair and a square face, big ears sticking out the side of it, a tall and blocky frame. He said, “He does work for Corey?”
Sholto sighed and said, “Yes, he does. Corey’s very loyal to any cop that works with him, anyone he considers a protégé. There’s a whole generation of them that he made sure he taught, and he keeps them all around, somewhere between apostles and bodyguards. They hero-worship him to a laughable degree. If he tripped up an old lady in the street they would hail him for inventing gravity. Just because a man like Gallowglass is outside the force doesn’t mean the string from the back of his head to the end of Corey’s finger has snapped. Never mind him, come away from the window and look at me.”
“What?”
“What do you mean what? You went wandering off after the Campbell girl, all googly eyes and bulging trousers, and you’re digging about in that Moses fellow’s bones.”
“You knew I would.”
Sholto shook his head and said, “I thought this time some of my good sense might have rubbed off on you. How many hundreds of times have I told you not to get involved with a client?”
“It’s less than fifty so, to the nearest hundred, none.”
Sholto huffed and said, “Well, that’s because I should only need to say it once, and even then you should have guessed it before I opened my mouth. We should be swerving around Corey like he’s poison, and that Campbell girl isn’t much healthier for you. You know they think she did it.”
“Do you think she did it?”
“I don’t know who did it, it could have been her. Recently split up with the man, knows where he keeps his money, bloody hell.”
“Why would she be waiting for him out on the street, though?”
Darian was getting excited and Sholto wanted to put a stop to it. “Never mind trying to talk yourself into believing her innocence. Never mind any of it. Could have been King Alex in his castle in Edinburgh that did it for all I care. Moses Guerra is dead and buried up in Heilam, it’s not our case and there’s every chance we’ll never know who killed him. I’ve seen enough investigations like that, too many suspects and too little evidence; they never amount to anything but wasted sweat. It’s not worth the dust up your nostrils that poking around in his background will get you.”
Darian paused for a second and said, “How do you know he’s buried up in Heilam?”
“Never mind what I know or how I know it, just assume I know best and tell me you’ll keep away from this thing.”
Darian never wanted to pick a fight with Sholto. He liked and respected the man too much for that, but there was often fun and sometimes profit to be had in it. There were any number of places Moses Guerra could have been buried, or cremated, and while the graveyard in Heilam, just beyond the end of the urban gray in Whisper Hill, was by far the biggest, that didn’t mean you assumed he was there.
Darian said, “You’ve been doing some digging of your own, haven’t you?”
“Well, I knew you would so I thought I might as well do it properly just to show you how. A pretty girl comes looking for help; I knew what you’d do next. Lack of blood flow to the brain, that’s the problem around girls like her. And I’d bet Mrs. Douglas’s finest jewelry, which isn’t up to much, I admit, that you’ve been round to see the lovely Miss Campbell at her flat, haven’t you?”
“You’re throwing mud at me when you had your own spade out digging holes.”
Darian was close to laughing and Sholto was close to blowing up. They both paused for ten seconds and drew breath. Sholto said, “You’ll never find out who killed him, you know that, don’t you? There are too many gaps that no one can fill without incriminating themselves. If this was to do with his work then it’s over because no one he worked with will talk. Sometimes you can’t clear the blur of a case and that’s the hardest thing for a young cop to learn.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Neither am I anymore, but we still think like them. This is a job for the police, and it’s one they can’t finish either. Leave them to it.”
“You looked at it because you thought you might be able to work it out.”
“Doing anything that upsets Corey is a gamble with our own future, and I’m not a gambler, Darian, I never was. Corey, he’s…Ach, it makes me mad thinking about him, coming in here and talking down to me like he does every other cop, but I worked hard to get this company started and we do some good work. I don’t want that ended by him.”
“If we were careful.”
“We’re always bloody careful, and the whole world tiptoes around that man and it doesn’t help.”
“If Maeve Campbell hired us because Moses Guerra owed her money, we would be entitled to examine his financial background to try to work out where all his money came from and where it went. We would be identifying cash that our client might be entitled to. If it just happens that his financial work was behind his killing and we stumbled across information that proved it, well, that would be a coincidence within our remit.”
“Maybe.”
“You went looking for information about Guerra, which means it might have been you that Corey found out about.”
“Unlikely.”
“But you do want to find out who killed Guerra. You want to get one over that bastard Corey.”
“Language, and maybe.”
That meant he did.