THERE WAS a narrow gap in the thick curtains when he woke, a dusty line of daylight filtered through a smudged window. Darian blinked and shut his eyes again. He was beginning to dislike the sun, his best work often done in the darkness and the day reserved for resting. He struggled out of bed twenty minutes later, looking at the clock beside his bed. It was half-eight and he was going to be late for work.
He had a shower and got dressed, jeans and a warm sweater. He had to dress in a way that would allow him to pass unnoticed in the areas he was working and daylight hours meant watching the old warehouses at the marina. He took the time to shave, not bothered that it cost him more minutes and Sholto would whinge about it. No aftershave, because Darian didn’t like to drench himself in cheap smells and couldn’t afford expensive ones. Then he made himself a cup of tea and sat at the small table by the window in the living room, thinking about a different flat and another man.
Moses Guerra had handled cash for dangerous people, which instantly made the always treacherous money the most likely motive for his murder. There was little chance the dead man would have tried to keep people’s share from them because he didn’t seem that stupid, but that didn’t matter. Moses could have honored all his fellow thieves and one might still have got it into his numb skull to kill him. People got jealous or paranoid, convinced someone they’d trusted with their secrets knew too many of them. Darian had to find out what Moses had been involved in lately, and if any bad souls had been hunting stolen money. One crook steals from another and hides the money with Moses; when the money gets tracked down the person holding it is punished beyond the last inch of their life.
Darian finished his tea, got up and went to wash his cup in the sink with cold water. He dried it and placed it on the worktop. He had one of everything: cup, spoon, knife, fork. Few people had been in his flat since he’d moved in and none had stayed the night, none had been given a drink or a meal. This is said not to make him sound pathetic but to point out the obsession he had with his work, and the damage it did to him. His relationships were as brief as he could make them, and that wasn’t healthy.
He’d wanted to be a detective since he was a small boy watching his father going off to work in the morning. The dream of being a good cop, finding the worst people in a rough society and cleaning them off the streets. The uniform was pulled beyond his reach when his father was accused of murdering a petty crook who had helped him steal precious gems from the criminal gang illegally importing them into Challaid. Darian was fourteen when his father was arrested and charged, fifteen when he was sentenced to life. The son of the disgraced former DS Edmund Ross was never going to find a role within the force, so he had to focus his ambition somewhere else.
The day his father was arrested he didn’t come home as usual; instead it was DC Sholto Douglas who came round with their aunt Ann-Margaret to try to explain what had happened. What Sholto said that evening remained true to Darian now; his father was innocent and it would eventually be proven. It was taking too long, but their determination as a family to show he was wrongfully convicted never dimmed.
You might think Darian’s desire to be a cop would have died the day he saw the police lead his father into court to convict him of a crime he didn’t commit. Accused of working with a known thief to steal illegal items and then killing the thief to cover his tracks and take his share. The diamonds were never recovered and the evidence always seemed flimsy and carefully constructed.
Sorley had needed money to support his siblings, so he went to work for people he should have body-swerved, the sort of monsters the hysterical media like to tell you have a grip on the whole east side of the city, Bakers Moor, Earmam and Whisper Hill. That’s a preposterous exaggeration, but those criminals are strong enough for a smart young man to make a living out of, and Sorley did. That gave people who didn’t like their father the chance to claim the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree, when in fact it had traveled miles.
Darian left the flat and walked out into a morning as cold as his mood. Challaid has always been a city obsessed with itself, concerned that it needed to upgrade to keep pace with the rest of the world but stay the same to respect its identity. The isolation that was originally one of our greatest defenses has evolved into insecurity, a fear of being forgotten in an interconnected world, and the city is always trying to wedge bits of the future into the few gaps the past has left. Rebuilding, rebranding and waving our oh-so-individual identity in people’s faces. But life for Darian was about his work, and, no matter the era, crime in Challaid has always revolved around booze, drugs, money, sex and power.