IT WAS dark by the time he got to Sgàil Drive, but it always seemed to be dark on Sgàil Drive. This time Maeve was ready for him, fully dressed and armed with information.
She opened the door, smiled, and said, “Come in.”
He walked through to the living area and sat on the same couch he’d been on last time. He watched her walk out of the room and come back thirty seconds later with her notebook and a bottle of cheap wine clutched in one hand and two glasses in the other. She filled the glasses quickly and passed one to him. He took a sip and was careful not to wince.
“I got my bill from your boss today. You’re not cheap for a day’s work, you two.”
“He said he sent it. He might round up the expenses now and then, but he’s not a cheat, that’s the going rate. I take it the report told you nothing you didn’t already know.”
“Not a damn thing. He wrote about it being an investigation into financial affairs and then talked about the murder without saying anything much.”
“He’s always careful with that. Doesn’t like the client knowing too much, especially when the client is you. He told me to call you and tell you I’m finished helping you. We had Corey in the office today, warning us about this, and other things.”
“Shit. Corey. So are you finished helping me?”
“I didn’t call, did I?”
Maeve smiled and said, “Have you found out anything?”
“No.”
“Right, so here’s what I’ve got. The first thing I did was go and find out who the best friend of Moses from the list was. None of the big-money people, but I thought about which one he talked about most and I went to see him. I don’t think now that he was that big a mate of Moses, but he was willing to speak to me. His name’s Nick Palazzo. Have you heard of him?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, apart from being on the list.”
“If you’d ever met him you would remember. He dresses to be seen from space and I’m pretty sure he’s crazy enough to be locked up as a precaution. He’ll burn the world down one day. So far his criminal life is just working for other people, so he’s probably under the radar and he was just using Moses to clean up the small amounts of cash he got occasionally paid. There’s no way Nick was involved, he knew nothing about it and he rabbited on for ages about Moses and how good a guy he was. Sometimes, the way he bangs on like that, I think it was sarcastic, but he was surprised by what happened, that much was true. I wrote down all the little things he said, like you suggested, but I can’t see much to help us.”
Maeve held up the notebook for him to see the scribbled writing across two pages. She was excited and her movements were jerky, caught up in the thrill of the chase. It made Darian smile, remembering that he had been the same way when he started out, not that long ago, Sholto always telling him to damp down the fire.
“So we can scratch Captain Crazy off the list?”
“Yeah, we can. But I had time to go to someone else on the list, Frang Hunter. Now, I know he’s a proper criminal type, so you’ve probably heard of him.”
“Yeah, I have, and he’s exactly the sort of person that you shouldn’t be talking to on your own. He’s a violent criminal and he’s sent people to Heilam for less than digging around in his financial affairs.”
“Oh please, Frang was fine. You need to stop thinking that every criminal is a terrible threat to every decent person they meet, that’s naïve. And you need to stop thinking that a woman on her own can’t go and have a conversation with someone without being in terrible peril. I didn’t need rescuing and I didn’t need you there to hold my hand. If I’d turned up with a private detective in tow then I might have needed rescuing, but so would you.”
“I’m not a private detective, I’m an investigative researcher, but point taken.”
Maeve smiled at his sulking tone and said, “So I went round and met him and his wife, Brenda, who was there as well, and they both told me how sad they were about what had happened to Moses. I asked Frang what he thought about the killing and he sort of clammed up, used the whole ‘they’ve got someone for it so that must be who did it’ argument. I said I wasn’t sure, and Brenda, she gave him a nudge and then he admitted he wasn’t sure either. The way he saw it, Cummins couldn’t have killed Moses even if he’d wanted to because he didn’t have the guts or the muscle. Moses wasn’t big, but he could handle someone like that. And there were much better candidates that might have used Cummins and his debt as a shield. When he started talking he was going on about the kind of people who did business with Moses, how he didn’t know who many of them were but some of them had to be serious. Then he said the people with the money to use Cummins as a shield, pay off his debt in exchange for him taking the spotlight for a while, weren’t just the people that used Moses, they were the people that Moses used.”
“Meaning?”
“The businesses that Moses cleaned the money through and the people who ran them. According to Frang, a lot of those people weren’t just small-business owners looking for a quick buck on the side; some of them were major companies who want a slice of the dirty market. He thinks some might have been major companies working with criminals who use the legitimate to cover their criminal earnings, especially when it goes offshore to Caledonia and back.”
“I thought of them, but, I don’t know, the way it happened didn’t seem professional.”
“Maybe the person they sent botched it, or deliberately made it look amateurish. It makes some sense, doesn’t it, that we’ve been pointing in the wrong direction with this? We’ve been looking at the people who used Moses instead the people Moses used.”
“It does make sense, yeah.”
Darian took another sip of wine, which reminded him how appalling it was. He looked across at Maeve and saw how excited she was by the progress they had made, her face flushed. She was looking down at her notebook with an intense expression, and then looked up at Darian.
She said, “What?”
He shook his head a little and said, “It’s good to make some progress, but we have to remember that the chances of us getting where we want to go are slim. We have to find proof, real proof, that we can put in front of a judge.”
“I know that, it needs to be something that can stand on its own two feet without us propping it up, but I think you and me can do it. I think you and me make a hell of an us.”
“Yeah, I think we do, too.”
He finished the glass of wine out of iron-stomached politeness and refused a top-up. Darian was tired; he needed some rest, so he got up to go. At the door Maeve gave him a brief hug of thanks. Her body pressed against his felt good.