THE FIRST step in a joint investigation was to share information. Darian told him everything he had been able to uncover so far, which was a short recap. Moses Guerra must have been attacked outside the building, not inside, and when he ran he picked a route that carefully avoided anyone else seeing him or his attacker.
Darian said, “Not much, is it?”
Sholto smiled and said, “Well, you’re young; I keep telling you you’re young. A big part of policing is hanging round long enough to know who to ask. The police think Moses was attacked outside the flat as well, chased to the alley and he was stabbed there multiple times, enough times that them clever psychologists might start to think there was a personal element involved, although it might just have been that it was dark and rushed and the attacker struggled with it. Suggestion of a personal element doesn’t help the pretty piece of work that was in here cooing to us about her innocence.”
“Could be someone he worked with before, knew where he lived but couldn’t get in. She would get in, surely, and how would she keep up with him if he decided to sprint? How would she knock him down?”
“Don’t you get caught up thinking the little woman couldn’t possibly attack the big man, that’s foolishness. If she has a blade and an inclination to use it and he has no willingness to fight back then she wins every single time. And if he still loved the girl, daft sod that he might have been, maybe he tried to talk her round.”
“So you think she could have kept up with him and then got him after a chase?”
“Maybe, maybe not. He was stabbed six times, and he covered some ground from the flat to the alley so the person who went after him was fast and determined, willing to stick with the chase in public for minutes instead of seconds. That might well be someone scared of the consequences of failure. We need to work out who he was working with; the people who might have put money into him and not gotten as much back as their imaginations expected, or just people who knew what he was handling, maybe carrying that night, and thought they could carve a slice for themselves with that knife.”
“How do we find out who they were?”
Sholto smiled and said, “Well, I took a little shortcut and found out all the names the police have on their list of known associates. He was a quiet sort of criminal, which is all too rare, someone who facilitated other people’s wrongdoing or tidied up after them. The anti-corruption guys put this shortlist together of all the crimes they believe he was involved in and the people he probably worked with on them. One of them, from the early days, died four or five years ago in a car crash, so unless this is The X-Files we can probably stroke him off our list. The rest of them? Murder’s not just out of their league, it’s playing a different sport, which is probably why he worked with them. That’s what the unit think and I agree with them. Crooks, not killers. Money does make people daft, though.”
“Maeve said there was no family.”
“Maeve, is it? Miss Campbell no longer. Aye, there’s no family in this country. Father long disappeared into the ether, no siblings, mother back living in Panama as of last year. It’s the work, that’s what killed the boy. Someone he worked with or against decided to put a stop to his mathematical gymnastics. There’s not much for us to grab a hold of, though. He hung around some bad folk, but so what? There’s a lot of people out there to label bad, depending on your definition, and none of us can avoid them all. The police investigation went round in a couple of circles and then fell down dizzy. No pressure from family or media to catch the killer, and they can tell the neighbors it was related to his criminal work and not anything they need to worry about so everyone’s happy.”
“Not everyone.”
“Well, no, not everyone. Now we’ve got Miss Maeve trying to clear her name and muddying the water.”
“She says she thinks she loved him because he was honest.”
“Honest? He might have been honest about being dishonest but that’s as honest as he got. You believe that’s why she was with him?”
“I don’t know, women are strange.”
“And getting stranger all the time. Now, Mrs. Douglas, she married me because I had a steady income and no visible scars, and I married her because I had a steady income and she had no visible scars, and we’ve rolled along just fine for a quarter of a century. These days people think a relationship should be like something out of a movie, or a dirty movie at least. It isn’t like that. And that’s the other thing I want you to think about. We’re taking a risk going up against the devil’s wee brother and we’re doing it with a job from Maeve Campbell as our paper-thin cover. When Corey tries to punch a hole in our defenses it’ll only take one swing of his claw, so how dedicated is she? Right now she’s angry and she’s sad and she wants to know who really did it, partly for Moses and mostly for herself, to clear her name. What happens if she stops caring? We get two weeks into this and she finds herself another boyfriend and doesn’t want to rock the boat with the new love so she tells us to stop. It happens. She finds some other lucky sod to bounce around on and we’re left with all the aggro and no way of finishing the investigation.”
Darian said nothing. He wanted to argue but he knew it might be true.
Sholto said, “See if our pal is still singing in the rain out there.”
Darian looked out of the window and saw Gallowglass, who hadn’t moved a half-inch. “He is.”
“Good. You’re going to go to the Murdoch warehouses and stare blankly at them for a while and I’m going to stay here. We’ll do what we normally do and see which one of us he thinks is more interesting. If we’re doing anything at all for Maeve Campbell, we’re doing it when wee George Smiley down there goes home for his tea and a sleep.”
Sholto was right, and Darian went to the warehouses to sit and watch nothing happening there, the place going through its boring routines, and no sign of Gallowglass having followed him. It was good to have Sholto on board. The bald man at his desk could seem like he’d dosed up on tranquilizers at breakfast, but when he had his tail up he still showed flashes of the talent he’d started his police career with.