SHOLTO WAS up on his feet the second Darian came through the door. “Where have you been? You’re late. Never mind, don’t distract me. I’ve got it, I’ve done it. Cracked the whole thing with a phone call on day one.”
“Cracked it?”
“Smashed the bastard to smithereens. I know who killed Guerra and I know why.”
It came, as many of the best tip-offs do, from a barman, listed as contact #S-39. He worked in a pub called The Gold Saucer, not far from where Moses had lived and died, and Sholto had brought forward the usual monthly update he got from him in case there was something relevant to this investigation. There was, although Sholto didn’t tell him it mattered in case the contact decided he wanted to be paid more than his usual pittance.
“My contact overheard a whispered conversation between two very drunk men, which means it wasn’t nearly as whispered as it should have been. The man we’re looking for is called Randle Cummins; he was the one doing the mouthing off. He was talking about his old pal Moses Guerra, and how he had gone round to Moses’s flat to get money from him because he knew Moses was holding a lot. Said things turned nasty but he got into the flat and got the cash.”
Darian didn’t know where to go with that. “He just blurted this out in some pub?”
“He was talking to his pal, lending him cash, didn’t know the barman could hear them. Drunk people, if they’re stupid to start with, well, they’ll let it all out. It works, though, doesn’t it? If Cummins knew Moses then he might know when he had money he was supposed to clean. Cummins goes round, there’s an argument and a chase, he stabs Moses, takes his key and goes back to the flat for the dosh. They didn’t find much cash in the flat of a man who handles money.”
“Is this barman reliable?”
“A hundred percent, always has been, who can you trust if you can’t trust a barman? I’m more concerned that Cummins was just mouthing off, trying to sound like a big man. Wee men with the drink swirling inside them can get imaginative and macho when they want to be.”
“Then we need an address.”
Sholto smiled and said, “Got one already, that’s why I’ve been so patient waiting for you. Our watcher on the wall, Gallowglass, he’s not out there, or he wasn’t. Stick your head out the window and make sure he didn’t turn up in your wake.”
Darian went over and looked down into Cage Street, saw no sign of the former cop. “Looks clear.”
“Good, we’ll drive round and see if we can wake up Mr. Cummins. He doesn’t have a job, according to my barman, and he’ll know which of his regulars do and don’t work. If I had no job and a lot of someone else’s money I would be treating myself to a few lie-ins. If we’re lucky we’ll have him nailed to a jail cell by lunchtime.”
They left the office and walked round the corner at the bottom of the lane onto Dlùth Street where Sholto always parked his six-year-old Fiat Punto. He drove them at his typical sleepy snail’s pace. You couldn’t get through a journey of more than ten minutes in the daytime with Sholto behind the wheel without hearing the sound of someone else’s horn. One of the benefits of his anti-speed policy was that it gave them the opportunity to talk.
Sholto said, “You don’t think this is our guy, do you?”
“I don’t want to talk it down, but this sounds like a drunk who read about the murder in the papers and decided he wanted to put himself in the middle of the scene. He wouldn’t be the first infamy whore in this city. And I’ve never heard of him, have you?”
“Well, no, but I’ve never heard of everybody at some point. No one starts famous.”
“But to go from some pal of a crook that we’d never heard of to killing that same pal for money? That’s a pole vault.”
Sholto went quiet and concentrated on his awful driving. They had to get to Jamieson Drive up on the northern edge of Bakers Moor, the old council houses where Cummins lived. Darian didn’t want to piss all over Sholto’s new shoes, he really didn’t, but the sort of man who whispered loudly in a pub about killing someone wasn’t typically the sort of man who avoided detection for over a month after the crime. Any lead was worth pursuing, and anyone who might have known about Moses and his work was worth the effort of chasing down, so Darian said nothing else to put Sholto off. It was rare enough to see the old man with this sort of enthusiasm.