MALAIRT STREET early in the morning is not the same as Malairt Street late at night. At night it’s filled with middle-class students and an array of careful fun-seekers. The main party area in the city used to be over on the edge of Bakers Moor, a little closer to the working-class east side. Over the last twenty years or so party central has drifted west toward Cnocaid, where a safe night out can be had amid gentrified surroundings. During the day it was populated by quiet shoppers, and, on this morning, Darian and Sholto.
They were outside Himinn, Darian leading the way because Sholto was old enough to call a nightclub a discotheque and would rather have spent his morning in the McDonald’s next door. The doors to the club were open, but the interior was silent. They walked along the hall, ignoring the doors that led to the balcony stairs, and went into a small bar area tucked away from the main floor.
It was a gloomy little nook in which a heavily bearded man was kneeling beside the bar, cleaning the rail that ran along the front of it. The place seemed to be a slapdash approximation of the sort of pubs your grandfather might have drunk in. Darian could smell the brass polish and there was a box of rags and bottles of cleaning products on top of the bar. The whole place had a genteel air about it, which none of the Challaid pubs of your grandfather’s generation suffered from.
The man with the beard looked up at them and said, “You cops?”
Darian said, “No, we’re not.”
“Huh. So what do you want?”
“You in charge round here?”
“Maurice Gomez, bar manager for the time being. What do you want?”
“We want to ask you about an assault that happened in the alley at the side of the building a few nights ago. Uisdean Kotkell, was drinking here, went out, got taken apart. You hear about that?”
“Yeah, I heard about it.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I heard about it when it happened, but it was peaceful in here that night, like it is every other night. We don’t have trouble here.”
“Well, that’s super to hear but what do you know about the young man who was attacked?”
Gomez looked at them both and said, “You two ain’t cops?”
“No.”
“So I don’t have to talk to you at all?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Gomez went back to his cleaning, ignoring Darian and Sholto. Darian glanced at his colleague, sensing he had lost his chance to make a connection so now it was Sholto’s time to shine in the last-chance saloon.
Sholto said, “We’re working for the victim’s family, so you’d be doing them a favor. We can make it worth your while.”
“No, you can’t.”
Sholto looked at Darian and shrugged. They had tried to find what they could here, but it was a poor use of time to chip away at a brick wall. Darian hated to walk, especially when there was nowhere else to go. They left the nook and walked past the arches that led into the club proper, that place in darkness. On their way through the entrance hall they saw a young man coming down the stairs.
Darian said, “Ally, you working here now?”
Alfonso Bosco saw who was talking to him and his expression collapsed into that of a man who can hear a favor being called in. Nearly a year before, Darian had helped Ally out of a little jam when a former friend scammed a lot of angry people out of their money, laid a misleading trail to Ally’s door and skipped town. Ally wasn’t a man you crossed and stuck around. He was a bouncer of formidable renown, partly due to the eyepatch he wore. He had lost his right eye in a knife fight when he was nineteen and could have worn a glass eye with no discomfort, but he liked to be looked at. He was six-three and had a long goatee beard he tied in a ponytail with colorful bands, so he was tough to miss.
Ally said, “Aye, I do.”
“So you’ll know what was going on with Uisdean Kotkell when he was whomped round the back the other night.”
Ally puffed out his cheeks and said, “Come on next door and you can buy me breakfast. I talk better with a burger in each hand.”
The three of them sat in a booth away from the front windows of the McDonald’s next to the club and Ally did his talking in a full-mouthed near-whisper between bites.
“That kid was at the club quite a lot, him and his posh mates. There’s a bunch of them, little rich kids, I dunno. They drink somewhere else before they get to the club, I think they go on to their own little parties afterward. Richer stuff than I’ve ever been to. It wasn’t anything that happened in our club, I know that, we’d have spotted something. I told the cop that came to ask about it. MacDuff.”
“What was he asking about?”
“Nothing specific. Pissed off Gomez with a couple of questions, that’s all it ever takes with that grumpy sod. Then he asked me and a couple of other staff who were working that night about it, general stuff, did we see him that night, did we see anyone looking for him? We had nothing to tell. The thing I didn’t tell him, and I’ll tell you because it’s you, is about that boy’s ex.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. There was a while there when the Kotkell boy was coming in here with Dillan Howard. Now, Howard, he’s got a short fuse and likes playing with matches. The story I heard was that they had a big falling out, went their separate ways. Howard ain’t the sort to shrug it off if he thinks he’s been badly treated.”
As Sholto had the expression of a man watching an alien invasion unfold, it was Darian who said, “You know where we could find Howard?”
“Pretty sure he lives up in Earmam somewhere, but I don’t know where exactly.”
“That’s a good start, cheers, Ally.”
If Sholto hadn’t been there Darian would have slipped Ally some cash and added it to the client’s bill, but Sholto objected to that sort of thing. Keep the bills as low as possible or the client goes elsewhere, like Raven Investigators with their detailed expenses and special offers. It was a shame, because the bouncer at a club where young rich kids partied was a worthy contact. Darian would catch Ally up later and slip him a twenty, seal him as an ongoing contact. Darian and Sholto walked out of the burger joint and down the street to where Sholto had parked the Fiat.
He said, “Bloody hell.”
Darian said, “What?”
“The father didn’t mention the boy was gay.”
“So?”
“So what if the father doesn’t know? He’s not going to want to find out from one of my skillfully written reports, is he? I knew this case was bad news. Any case with young people is awkward because young people are terrible at life, keeping open secrets.”
“We can find Howard, talk to him.”
“Aye, and hope the whole bloody thing doesn’t blow up in our faces.”
The city of Challaid still has corners where Presbyterianism and Old Testament morals are extolled by influential people, like the Sutherland family who employed Kotkell, which made Sholto nervous. Any complication stood like a mountain before him, while the map in front of Darian showed a path to a possible solution.