HE MUST have taken the train to get up to Whisper Hill, although he couldn’t remember afterward. It was destructive instinct that led him there. A young man who didn’t know what else to do with his heavy misery so he tried to drown it. If you wanted to kill a few brain cells with a bottle, there was nowhere better than Misgearan.
Sandwiched between Fair Road and the train tracks there’s a narrow lane with a collection of shabby-looking buildings on either side. Number 13 is Misgearan, a drinking den with a reputation and a half. Long Walk Lane apparently got its name because so many drinking dens around the north docks were shut down during a crackdown in the fifties and the sailors had to walk or wobble over a mile to the lane for some booze. It’s well known for its drunken violence, but most of the crimes are never reported. The few the police hear about are because of the reputation that draws visitors and students to see if it’s as grim as the legends suggest, to test themselves against the sort of hard-core alcoholics to whom drinking the city dry is a serious aspiration, not a witticism. Innocent people don’t realize that you aren’t supposed to call the police. They also don’t realize that the police, particularly at Dockside station, use Misgearan as their own private club, and they’re not going to let the council shut it down, no matter how much our elected representatives on Sutherland Square would love to try.
Darian had been there a few times before, usually to meet Vinny. He knew he’d be let in when he knocked on the side door. There were people out in the lane, there were always a few shuffling around, waiting for trouble to join them. He could go in the front and sit at the bar, but that wasn’t the sort of drinking he wanted. Being among other people and their noise, the inevitable fights breaking out, getting jostled and questioned, someone putting an arm round him and trying to lead him in song or tell him a long-dead joke, that wasn’t for him. Darian wanted to sit alone, in silence. That meant a private room and that meant knocking on the side door.
He waited as a train clacked past loudly, invisible behind the corrugated fence. Darian knocked when he knew he would be heard, and the door opened within seconds. The woman looking back at him was short and in her sixties; Caillic Docherty had run the place for nearly twenty years. She had short brown hair that was thin enough to show scalp, deep frown lines and yellow teeth, glasses hanging from string around her neck. She remembered everyone, and who everyone drank with, so she would have known Darian was a friend of the police and wouldn’t have considered turning him away. She was a woman in possession of many secrets, and her job depended on her keeping them.
“You wanting in?”
“I am.”
She nodded and held the door open for him. Experience had brought with it both the knowledge of who people were and the understanding of what people wanted. She said, “You after a room?”
“Aye, and a half-bottle.”
Every private room was tiny, little more than a box you could stand up in. There was a small, round table and two chairs, never more than that. People used them to drink miserably, and they were designed to be too small to allow misery the company it needed to turn violent.
Docherty was back inside two minutes with a half-bottle of Uisge an Tuath, cheap whisky from a local distillery. Nobody went to Misgearan for the quality on offer. A night there tended to deliver an experience akin to being hit on the head with a shovel, and was only marginally more expensive. She put the bottle on the table; Darian passed her a twenty for that and the room and she left.
Darian drank steadily and with commitment until the bottle was empty. He hadn’t spent the time thinking about anything because thinking wasn’t part of the mission. He got up and shoved past the table, opening the door. He wasn’t steady, but he wasn’t quite ready to fall over. He got out into the lane and moved through the small crowd without bumping into anyone, which could easily have led to a fight he wouldn’t win and injuries he wouldn’t quickly recover from. He got out onto Fair Road and started walking, not thinking a damn about where he was going. The streets of Whisper Hill and Earmam were all familiar; he never had a sense that the darkness of the night could trick him into a dangerous wrong turn.
She opened the door and looked at him, at first uncertain of this man standing out in the corridor. Maeve took her time to compose herself before she said, “Darian. Can I help you?”
“I’d like to talk. We should talk. Can we?”
He sounded drunk, although the walk to her flat had taken some of the weight from his tongue. Maeve held her door open and let him in. Darian had to make an effort to walk straight in a confined space, and the effort of dodging the walls showed. He later convinced himself she was amused by him turning up at her flat in the early hours of the morning pissed out of his skull, although he couldn’t actually remember something as subtle as the expression on her face, and drunk people tend to incorrectly assume they’re hilarious. Maeve would be an unusual woman to have been thrilled by the evil o’clock arrival of a drunk man she barely knew. She let him in, though, and they went through to the living area.
Maeve said, “Take a seat.”
Darian sat and looked round the room, taking it all in. He was either too drunk to notice any changes from his last visit or sober enough to recognize that there were none. It might be telling that he didn’t remember what she was wearing when he went round to her flat at two in the morning.
He said, “They got someone. Randle Cummins. He knew Moses. They’re going to say he stabbed Moses and then stole money from the flat because he needed to clear a debt.”
“They told me. A cop came round a few hours ago to let me know. He said you and your colleague were the ones who identified Cummins and proved his guilt, even though I don’t think he enjoyed giving you the credit. You said you would get the man who killed Moses and you did.”
“Ha. Yeah. I said I would get him and I got someone. Wait, did I say I would get him? Did I not just say I would try?”
“Okay, you tried and you got him.”
“I went and I found him. We both did, me and Sholto. We talked to him and we tripped him up because he’s not clever, Cummins, not the sort who can talk his way out of bother. Can talk his way in and you lock the door behind him. He talked, but he never said he did it, not to us, and not to the cops either…I don’t think. Never said that.”
“The detective told me he definitely did it.”
“There is no definite, never is. There’s a chance, that’s all it ever is really. Your man was killed and Cummins had the motive to do it and he knew where Moses lived and he would know how to get at him. It might be that easy. Like dropping all the pieces of a jigsaw on the floor and they all land in the right place for you to see the whole picture. It could happen, but what are the odds?”
“Wait, do you think he didn’t do it?”
Just at the point Maeve got interested in his drunken ramble, Darian hit the wall. The more he talked the more his jaw wanted to stiffen into a yawn, but he said, “I’m saying nothing is definite. If everything’s in the first place you look for it then you’re either really lucky or you don’t know what you’re looking at.”
He had leaned back on the couch as he was speaking and tiredness was pushing his eyelids down. It was only when sleep wouldn’t take no for an answer that Darian realized how late it was, and that he must have got her out of her bed. He hadn’t intended to come here. It was unprofessional. It took a couple of seconds for him to realize his eyes were closed. He opened them sharply, and didn’t remember them closing again. He thought he heard Maeve saying goodnight.