WHEN HE left the flat, he did so carefully. Darian had been looking into the street for hours, checking for Gallowglass and not seeing him. He went out the back, onto a large square of grass that served as the shared garden of the four L-shaped buildings that surrounded it. Every time he reached the corner to go onto a street he looked carefully first, worried about Gallowglass seeing him. He didn’t take the usual route to Bank Station, or use the usual entrance on Fomorian Road, but instead used the bridge to cross the tracks and onto Sloc Street to enter from the far side of the building. He hadn’t seen Gallowglass, and he’d tiptoed through the shadows with enough skill to be sure Gallowglass hadn’t spotted him.
Darian took the train up to Mormaer Station and got a taxi from there. It was already after eleven, late enough to be a nuisance, so the long walk to Maeve’s flat would have left him too late to be decent. The road was visible in the lamplight as the taxi pulled up, but the flats on either side of the road and the steep Dùil hill behind trapped the light between them, the tops of the buildings and the hill a collection of ominous shadows. On Sgàil Drive you could easily believe these buildings existed in a void, no world visible in the blackness beyond.
He knocked on her front door and it took a while before a response arrived. Maeve pulled the door open, looking sleepy and flustered, wearing just a T-shirt.
Darian said, “Oh, sorry, I should have called ahead first. Do you want me to go?”
“No, no, come in.”
They went through to the living room and Maeve stood in the doorway. It was cold, and Darian could see her nipples press against the thin T-shirt. She walked across to the record player and picked something up from beside it. When she bent down the T-shirt rode up and, although it was only a split second, Darian had the certainty of hope that the T-shirt really was all she had on. Maeve walked across with a small notepad and passed it to him.
She said, “You look through that while I put some clothes on. I didn’t expect to have to look respectable at this hour.”
“Sorry about that. I don’t always keep sociable hours.”
“Well, these hours can be very sociable with a little warning.”
She went to her bedroom to change and he opened the notebook. It was mostly a list of names and numbers, a couple of addresses and a few phone numbers. It was people she knew had worked with Moses and there were educated guesses at the amounts of money he had handled for them. It was mostly small numbers, and there were a few names of committedly mediocre criminals Darian recognized and immediately dismissed.
“You need to keep in mind that he didn’t handle big sums of money very often, not the size that a person would kill for.”
Darian looked up at Maeve. She had pulled on a pair of trousers and a raggedy jumper over the T-shirt that had seen many better days.
Darian said, “People have killed for tiny amounts of money before. Or for no money where they thought some would be. Or a lot of small amounts added together. Could the money he was handling have added up to the eighteen and a half grand Cummins paid his debt with?”
“It could, but he would have had to get his timing just right. Rare for Moses to have that sort of money in the flat, as far as I know. And if he had, Cummins wouldn’t have known. I don’t think any of his clients would have known and I don’t think any of them would have killed him for it.”
“Do you know them well enough to be sure?”
“No, but I knew Moses and I know the only people he handled small accounts for were people he knew and trusted, people he’d known his whole life, and the people with big accounts wouldn’t need to kill him for the cash.”
“So what exactly did he do for them?”
Maeve sat and said, “He would hide the money they shouldn’t have had in the first place. It wasn’t always in cash; it depended on who it was and how they were receiving it in the first place. If it was cash it would be in the flat, but not for long. If the person who killed him knew he had a lot of money then they must have known that it had either just been delivered or was about to be collected, so they could have found out from the previous or next link in the chain. He would put the money into businesses and they would put it into their books. It was like investing money, that’s what he used to say, sometimes more or less would come back than had gone in but what came back was always clean, and it now had a backstory to protect it after traveling through the business world.”
“So he must have had a bunch of businesses helping him?”
“Of course, but I have no idea who they were. Say what you want about Moses but he respected the privacy of the people he was breaking the law with.”
“If we could identify the businesses or the high-value clients then we might find our killer. One of them might have decided Moses was too well informed.”
The lights in the flat flickered and cut out for a few seconds before they came back on. Maeve said, “Ignore that, it happens a lot. The electricity cuts out a lot under the hill, they say they’re going to fix it but…”
“Okay, so, his clients.”
“I think the most likely candidates will be one of the people near the top of that list, the ones I know he handled decent money for.”
Darian looked at the names, some he recognized and some he didn’t. A couple of known criminals and a few businessmen of notable standing that Darian hadn’t known were dirty but really should have guessed. Neither of the criminals he’d heard of had been identified as working at a level where people died on their orders.
He said, “Do you know which of them worked with him most recently?”
“No, he didn’t give information like that away, I wasn’t even supposed to know this much and he didn’t realize I did. I overheard whispered conversations, caught a glimpse of receipts he was reading by hovering over his shoulder in passing.”
“We need to be very careful with this. The sort of people we’re dealing with won’t take kindly to being questioned about the killing of a man they knew, and I don’t just mean the criminal types either.”
“Please, just because some of them dress up in nice suits and sit in expensive offices in Bank or Cnocaid doesn’t make them less criminal.”
“You’re right, I know, and those people will go a long way to protect the image they’ve built. Lawyers, to start with, and they’re dangerous enough, but there could be more after. If one of these people did kill Moses then we have to consider that they might be prepared to silence anyone who shows the inclination to catch them.”
“I know the risk, but I’m going to give chase anyway. I can’t just move on from Moses being murdered, not until I’m sure the person who did it is in jail. It would be an insult to him, and I cared too much about him to let that insult pass. And you, Mr. not quite a private detective, you wouldn’t let an innocent man rot in jail for this, would you?”
“No.”
“So I need to do something. I’ll pick the lowest-risk person on that list and have a chat with them, see what falls out when I lean on them.”
“Okay, how about this. You pick someone on that list that didn’t give him huge money and knew him well, you see if you can find out from them who else he was working with lately. The bigger a picture we can build the better a chance we have.”
“I can do that, a casual chat with an old pal.”
“Good, because right now we don’t want anyone else knowing what we’re up to, so don’t interrogate anyone. Try to get the little things, details that often seem irrelevant but can provide a small answer to a big question. And keep your eyes open, because Corey isn’t going to like either of us working an investigation he’s twice decided the book is closed on. He’s had one of his pets, a guy called Gallowglass, following me for the last couple of days and I think it’s because of this.”
“Well, I didn’t tell anyone what I’m doing.”
“I’m not saying you did. I’m just saying, be wary, because if Corey’s coming after us he will eventually catch up, and we have to have the truth to defend ourselves with when he does.”
There was a pause for a few seconds before Maeve said, “Gallowglass, that’s not a common name. Is he the one who used to be a detective?”
“He is. Do you know him?”
“Know of him. He used to move in some grubby circles, back when he thought he could get away with it. A girl I knew went out with him just long enough to know she needed to run a mile. When she ran, I picked her up from his house. I can show you where it is, if you’d like. We can take my car.”
He so enjoyed being with her, both because she was beautiful and because they were going to catch a killer together. He couldn’t decide which reason thrilled him more. They left the flat together as the lights on the street flickered again.