CUMMINS LIVED in a semi-detached house that looked desperate to fall over. The street on both sides was in groups of four houses, all from the forties or fifties, many looking like a giant ruffian had given them a bit of a shake. None was in quite as much disrepair as Cummins’. Beside the front door there was a huge crack up and a small chunk out of the whitewashed wall, about a quarter of the slates seemed to be missing from the roof and the chimney pot had somehow been sheared in half. It wasn’t obvious how any of this had happened, but it must have taken a concerted effort. The small front garden was an overgrown obstacle course they traversed before they reached the door. They could hardly see the path for the weeds and the never-cut grass.
Sholto said, “The state of this place. Wouldn’t want to be living next door. Someone should arrest him for this if nothing else.”
He was nervous and sounded it, worried that this shambolic house was a reflection of its owner because when people were this broken down they became unpredictable.
“Maybe he’s not in.”
“Only one way to find out.”
Darian knocked on the door and the two of them took a step back, waiting twenty seconds before it was slowly opened by a short and wiry man with a narrow face, blotchy skin pinching at the cheeks, dark hair all over the place, two chipped front teeth chewing on his cut bottom lip. He was wearing a baggy T-shirt that showed a handful of amateurish tattoos and tracksuit bottoms. He looked at them both through sleepy eyes and said, “Yeah?”
“Mr. Cummins? I’m Darian Ross, this is Sholto Douglas, we’re here to talk to you about…”
“This about that old bitch next door, uh? The fuck did she call you about this time? She saying I’m the Lady in Gray, or The Taisgealach? Eh? She’ll have me trying to bump off King Alex next. What is it this time, you old cow?”
Darian raised a hand to stop him shouting at the house next door. “We’re not the police; nobody called us to come here. We want to talk to you about Moses Guerra.”
The anger slipped from his expression and confusion took its place. He said, “Well, I don’t know anything about that, do I?”
“But you knew Moses.”
“I suppose, sort of, yeah, I did. I knew him but I don’t know anything about what happened to him, nothing like that. Nothing I would tell you anyway.”
Cummins sounded cocky now and Darian liked that, it would make him more likely to talk. Darian said, “We’re not cops, but we’re looking into what happened to Moses. Can we come in and talk to you about it? We’ll make it worth your while.”
Cummins laughed and opened the door a little wider. He said, “Sure, aye, come in then.”
The outside of the house was an ineffectual prologue for what lay inside. The mess of the exterior was a Herculean effort for an insignificant return, but the real blood, sweat and tears were splattered all over the inside. There were holes in walls, no carpets on the floors, broken furniture and every surface was a canvas of stains in an abstract style. Avoiding the ones that still looked damp was a game that might never end. A few of them looked like blood, a lot were drinks and food, and some were better left unidentified.
Cummins led them into the living room where there was one chair, which he sat in. “You want to sit on the floor or something?”
Sholto said “Mm, nah.”
Darian took the first step in the questioning because he was more confident of his footing. “Moses was killed and there was no money in his flat. You knew him, does that seem strange to you?”
“I dunno. Maybe. I don’t know what he did with his money. Didn’t spend it anyway, fucking cheapskate.”
“You don’t know if he had cash stashed in the flat?”
“I suppose he had some. That was his work, wasn’t it, the dough.”
“What about you, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m not working.”
“You making ends meet?”
“Yeah, I’m all right. I pay my debts.”
“You had debts?”
Cummins shrugged.
“And you paid them off?”
Another shrug.
“Did you pay them off recently?”
Cummins looked up at him from the chair, the expression of a man who wished he had a gun in his hand to shut their mouths with. He had let them in because there had been mention of being paid. Now the talk had switched to his money, not theirs.
“How much debt did you pay off?”
“None of your business, that.”
“Who did you owe it to?”
Cummins said nothing, looking down at the floor.
Sholto said, “Did you owe money to the Creags?”
We’ll break away briefly for another detour to tell you who the Creag gang are, because they matter. The name has existed in Challaid, mostly working out of Earmam and Whisper Hill, for at least a century, a multigenerational concern. It started out as a group of low-income tough guys running protection rackets and the like, and with each generation it’s evolved, different people using the identity. Sometimes the Creags have been small-scale, a disparate bunch of gangs the police have identified under one badge for simplicity’s sake, but sometimes one person, or a small group of people, come along who are strong enough to morph it into a single, functioning unit. That’s what it was at the time Moses was killed, a small council running it. If you borrowed money from a lender on the east side of Challaid, whether you realized it or not you were borrowing from the Creags and if you valued the blood running through your veins, you’d better pay them back.
At the mention of the Creags, Cummins looked sharply at Sholto and back at the floor.
Darian said, “You owed the Creags, and they were leaning on you to pay back?”
“Hey, you want me to answer your questions you arrest me, okay. I got rights.”
“We’re not cops, I told you that already. You had the Creag gang leaning on you for money and you knew Moses had cash in his flat. You said you paid your debts, so you must have found money somewhere. Where were you the night Moses was killed?”
Cummins said nothing.
“Can anyone vouch for your whereabouts on the night Moses was killed?”
“I want a lawyer.”
“We know you told someone that you took the money from Moses around the time he died.”
“I want a fucking lawyer.”
Darian and Sholto went out into the corridor and whispered to each other while Cummins stayed sitting on the chair in the living room, looking miserable. He still hadn’t grasped that the people questioning him weren’t actually cops. If he had he might have tried to find a way to talk himself out of the sewers.
Sholto said, “It was him. We have to call it in now. It was him.”
Darian nodded, but he didn’t say anything.
“You’re disappointed, I understand. He’s pathetic and someone who took a life should never be that pitiful, but most of them are. This is it, Darian, we got it. A month Corey and his lot spent chasing this and they got nowhere, we’ve been on it a couple of days and we got it. They should give us a medal for this, or at least a certificate. We call it in.”
Darian nodded. “We call it in.”
It was ten minutes later when the two cars arrived. There were two uniformed cops in one and two detectives in the other. One detective was a young woman with short, dark hair and a frown that Darian didn’t recognize but Sholto said was one of Corey’s people, a DC Lovell, and the other was DC MacDuff. The uniformed officers took Cummins away, and MacDuff stood in the corridor with Sholto and Darian.
He said, “You shouldn’t be involved in this.”
It wasn’t the threat Corey would have delivered. It was a nervy, miserable warning. Sholto nodded and said, “We didn’t mean to, we just sort of fell arse backward into the whole thing, working for a client looking for lost money. Led us to this guy. We’re done with it now.”
MacDuff said, “Good, I hope so.”
Sholto drove Darian back to the office. They weren’t done yet, but very nearly. Darian would have to tell Maeve about it, and they could expect a huffy visit from the police to find out what else they knew about Cummins, questions that wouldn’t take long to answer. Essentially the work was done, and it was an anticlimax. Randle Cummins was a poor excuse for a killer, and paying off a debt he might have the shite kicked out of him for was a lame reason, but Sholto was right, that was how humanity worked. Sholto was buzzing with relief that it had turned out well, that he had proven himself as an investigator again. Darian sat looking out of the window, wondering where Gallowglass had gone.