THE JOB was done, the case was closed, it was time for life to trudge on somewhere else. The police would charge Cummins with the murder of Moses Guerra and the case, and this story, was done. At the end of the working day Darian should have gone round to Maeve Campbell’s flat and told her the goodish news. That was what Sholto told him to do, but once again he chose to defy the orders of his chief. Darian went looking for his brother instead.
There were two places Darian could think of to find Sorley at that time of night. He went round to his flat on Freskin Road up in Earmam but there was no answer. It was a bit of a plod from there to The Continental café on the corner of Kellas Road and Parker Street. Presumably the intention for that café when it first opened was to be a normal, run-of-the-mill place, but it had become a hangout for Sorley and his mates, and they organized a lot of their dubious work from there. It had large windows facing the two sides that looked out to the streets; it was a single-story, flat-roofed place. The neighboring buildings were mostly divided into flats, so the dinky little café looked like it was in the wrong place. At night, when the café was lit up and you could see the bar and the tables by the windows, it seemed like stepping into a gruff, cheap plagiarism of Nighthawks.
Darian came along Parker Street and could see the lights from the window, the figures moving around inside. The usual suspects, looking ready for their usual night’s trouble. There were four motorbikes and three cars parked in front of The Continental, and one of the bikes was Sorley’s. If you’d walked past, looked in the window and seen the mob of hardy bastards within, you wouldn’t have gone anywhere near them. Darian, being a man of reasonable good sense, wouldn’t have either, not if Sorley wasn’t one of them.
He pushed open the glass door at the corner of the building and went in. The volume of the music playing in the background was low but he recognized it as local band The Overseen. That would have been Sorley’s choice, the man who paid the wages picking the tunes. There were empty and emptying beer bottles all along the counter, but nobody seemed drunk and the talk wasn’t boisterous. It was early in their night. They would still have work to do before they started really to enjoy themselves. As he let go of the door, a couple of the people closest stepped toward him. They wouldn’t have done it if they thought he was a random guy looking for a drink; they crowded him because they could see he was here on purpose, searching the faces for one that fitted. They were both exceedingly big. One was about six two and built like a professional wrestler, which he had tried to be, and the other was seven feet and built like a professional basketball player, which he had been.
The wrestler said, “You in the wrong place, pal?”
Darian opened his mouth to speak but someone else beat him to it. A voice from one of the tables at the side said, “Let him in. He’s my brother.”
The two men, Jake Cayden and Gorm MacGilling, stepped aside at their boss’s orders. Cayden, head shaved, thick-necked and with small features, had gone down to Glasgow to try to fight for SWF under the name The Last Man, but he lasted two months and came back up the road muttering about contractual issues. Sorley told Darian he’d heard Cayden had gone down there and belly-flopped, just wasn’t up to the job. They offered him coaching but he never took well to being told he needed help. That was when he decided the smartest thing to do was start a wrestling company in Challaid instead, fill a gap in the market. It had been a year and a half and he hadn’t started yet. The only thing that told you he had tried wrestling was his nickname, TLM. He said he was a born-again Christian, Sorley said he was a psychopath; it’s just possible he was both. MacGilling, with his long chin and protruding eye sockets, had actually been a basketball player for some team in America, he had the height but no talent to complement it, and his career looked over as well. He was working a very basic racket for Sorley.
The laundry scam was simple and small and one of many Sorley ran. They went and collected the laundry from the hotels for washing and ironing and took them to the same depot that had been doing the job before, only now they were doing it for 70 percent of the value while Sorley took the extra 30. The only cost to Sorley was sending Gorm MacGilling in the van to collect the goods instead of the employee the legit depot had sent.
He would go and pick up the laundry in the big van and be recognizable, be every inch the Sorley Ross employee. Darian would later suggest to his brother that the big man didn’t seem scary at all, and Sorley agreed.
He said, “He’s not tough, couldn’t handle himself in a fight with a toddler, but that’s not the point. Guy that size, he doesn’t get into fights at all. Nobody who isn’t seven foot tall ever picks a fight with someone who is.”
Sorley was sitting by himself in the café, at a table by one of the windows. He had a board and a few stacks of cards beside him. Darian recognized them; Sorley had been playing Gwent with someone. Darian sat down opposite him and saw the smile on Sorley’s face.
“Didn’t think this was your sort of place.”
Darian said, “I’m not here for the fun of it. I’m here to ask you a favor.”
“So you’re going to take the fun out of it for me, too. Go on.”
With his voice lowered Darian said, “I need to find out if someone paid off a big debt to the Creag gang. I need to know who to talk to about that.”
“What’s it about? This isn’t still Moses Guerra, is it?”
“That case is closed, the police have arrested a guy me and Sholto led them to. This is about tracking money.”
“Moses Guerra’s money?”
“Fine, yes, Moses Guerra’s money. This isn’t a big deal, though, not to the Creags, it’s just to prove whether the person who killed him took his money or not.”
“Every little thing is a big deal to the Creag gang. They don’t like people talking about the money they lend. It would be too dangerous a conversation for you to have.”
“I’m not a little kid, Sorley. I’ve spoken to big, bad people before. I know how to talk to someone without threatening them. I’m not one of your pals.”
Sorley looked round at the others in the café, about twenty people, an even split of male and female, all young and all looking well acquainted with giving and receiving a fist to the mouth. He was growing his gang, and not to help gather evidence for their father’s release. This was Sorley being pulled deeper into a world he should have been trying to climb out of.
“I know who it is you need to talk to. You want to know, fine, I’ll play you for it.”
Darian said, “Great, we can play The Organization. I love that game.”
Sorley frowned at the mention of the card game based on a popular TV show about Glaswegian gangsters, which was a little too close to home. He said, “We’ll stick to Gwent.”
Darian picked one of the four Gwent decks on the table, Northern Realms it said, selected his hand of twenty-five cards and glanced at his older brother.
He said, “Not exactly Casino Royale, is it?”
Sorley laughed a proper laugh. That raised a few eyebrows along the counter. They all respected their boss, some of them probably liked him and a few feared him, but they all believed he had well earned the nickname Surly. None could remember laughter like this, but the spontaneous joy was the difference between knowing someone as a friend and knowing them as family. What Darian and Sorley had, and the relationship both had with their sister Cat, ran far deeper than anything these co-conspirators could develop with him, and with that depth came greater pain and joy than any of them could bring to Sorley.
The next ten minutes were spent in a tactical battle, a best of three rounds between Darian’s Northern Realms deck and Sorley’s Monster deck. Sorley loved these sorts of games and this was one of only two he could play with Darian because he knew his little brother would be familiar with it from the PS4 game it came from, The Witcher 3. You can be 100 percent sure Sorley would tell you it was luck, but Darian dominated their match. He won the first round with a lot of spies and doubled siege units, let Sorley win the second and waste some of his better cards in the process, and had more than enough in reserve, with the use of medic cards, to overwhelm in the third.
“Huh, I was hoping you wouldn’t have as good a grasp of the game as that. Fair enough, I’ll tell you what you need to know. You want to speak to Vivienne Armstrong.”
“A woman?”
“Yeah, an actual female woman. You’re not getting all misogynistic are you, Darian? Must be hanging around with old Sholto Blowhard that’s doing it. What would Cat say if she could hear you?”
“I’m just surprised, that’s all. Is this Vivienne Armstrong high up in the Creags?”
“Pretty near the top, one of the few that get to make decisions instead of follow orders. Viv keeps a crushing grip on the moneylending side of it, so she’ll know if your suspect has settled his debt or not. Not that she’ll want to tell you, won’t speak a word to you, but that’s a problem you’ll have to solve yourself. You can tell her I sent you, but I doubt it’ll help.”
“She a friend of yours?”
“Viv? Friend would be the wrong word. She doesn’t have anything as useless as friends. Our paths have crossed a few times, that’s all. Don’t get on the wrong side of her, Darian, she’s tough, treats people like shit because she can wipe them all out. If she says it’s midnight and the sun says it’s midday, you call the sun a liar.”
“So where do I find her?”
“Get out of your bed early, get to Sigurds pub on Caol Lane at eight o’clock.”
“Will it be…?”
“It’ll be open. They open early so she can get her morning whisky there, so it’ll just be her and the bleary-eyed barman. The drink is part of her mystique, people think she’s a mad fucking boozer but she just uses the pub to collect messages. She won’t thank you for gate-crashing, but she wouldn’t bother thanking you if you donated an organ to keep her alive, so…”
“Thanks for this, Sorley.”
“Uh, huh, just make sure this is the end of you and Moses bloody Guerra, all right? Time for you to go back to being someone I don’t have to worry about. Pick something nice and safe to spend your time on and save me the gray hairs.”
Darian smiled and said, “Sure, and good luck finding someone dumb enough to lose to you at Gwent.”
“Get out of here.”
Darian left the café smiling.