THEY SAT and they talked for a few hours. Moira liked to rattle through her sentences without ever giving away a word more than she wanted to; she was a woman with long experience of evasion. The only time she delved into any meaningful detail was when she was talking about Corey, having decided that on that subject some honesty would go a long way.
Darian asked, “You seem relaxed. Do you fear Corey?”
“Well, of course I do, I’m terrified of him. You’re either very brave, very stupid or both if you’re not afraid of him, Mr. Ross. I suppose we’ll very soon find out which it is. I’ll tell you, I may be more afraid of DI Corey than I am of any other criminal I’ve ever met, and I’ve had the pleasure of the company of many. You want to know why he scares me?”
“Go on.”
“Because every other criminal in this city has to at least pretend to fear the law.”
“So does Corey.”
“Oh, come on now, if Corey had to fear his colleagues he wouldn’t have earned a tenth of the money he has in the time I’ve known him. He really should be in a cell in The Ganntair along the corridor from a lot of the people he’s locked up. Not that he’d last a fortnight inside, by the way, and if I know it then so will he. I’ve heard people in the criminal world talk about him; they all hate the man to his bones. Just because he’s bent doesn’t mean his fellow crooks like him. They know he can’t be trusted and he’s locked some of them away for doing no more than mildly upsetting him in the past. People who thought they had his protection only for him to pull the rug away and send them falling into a cell because it suited him. I assume the fact he’s still a more effective cop than the honest ones is the reason he keeps dodging responsibility for the mountain of slime he sits on.”
“Shouldn’t matter how good he is if he’s crooked.”
“Ah, but it does, in this city it really does. I don’t know a lot about heady things like justice, but I know about gold. In business a person can be the biggest shit you ever met, a liar and a bully, corrupt to their blackened core, and all anyone will judge is whether that person makes a profit. That’s the attitude this city was built on.”
“Then maybe it’s time this city changed, and that happens by taking action against people like Corey.”
“Ha, that’s good, oh, I needed that laugh. Good grief, you are young, aren’t you? Let me tell you, as a woman with considerable experience of what a corrupt culture cultivated over a millennium looks like, it isn’t ready to change. Challaid ten years from now isn’t going to be radically different from Challaid ten years ago, or a hundred years ago. The cosmetics change, the faces are different and the buildings keep getting taller and shinier, but the spirit of the place has been unbendingly the same since day one. All the stuff that’s deep down in the black heart of this place, that won’t change because most people don’t really want it to. They much prefer a profit maker to an honest man.”
Darian didn’t argue because he didn’t want to go further down that badly lit road when only Moira had a map. She would have gone on for hours about the wicked ideals the city had been built on, but Darian didn’t want to hear it. Talk of a conspiracy of corruption being ingrained in a city was defeatist.
Nerves were rising and Moira had sent a couple of reassuring texts to her husband. It was coming up to eleven o’clock when she said, “Of course I might be the biggest fool of the lot of us for believing your charmingly naive talk about being an honest young man. You could be one of Corey’s boys for all I know, sitting there pretending you’re David looking for Goliath when really you’re the chains that keep me in place, stop me running with the money. I’m sure a man like Corey could tempt an idealistic little squirt like you to his side, flash a few glimpses of his dirty power your way.”
“You have nothing to be concerned about there.”
“Well, I do hope not. You’d have to be a very sadistic young man to be stringing me along like this, but you don’t have the shifty eye of the sadist.”
Every so often Moira would get up and take a look out of the window to see if anyone was outside, but the inconvenient bushes in her front garden didn’t give her much of a view of the road. They had the light on and the curtains open. At one point Darian sent Moira to the front step to make sure she would be seen.
“They could shoot me on the doorstep.”
“I think, having talked up his evil genius for the last few hours, you can credit Corey with more subtlety than that.”
Moira went out for a minute and came back in complaining of the cold and its effects on the joints of a woman her age. She hadn’t seen anyone, and seemed relaxed. Darian could see that somewhere in the back of her mind was the faint hope she had wriggled off Corey’s inescapable hook.
He said, “You can go upstairs, put on the bedroom light, make a show of looking out of the curtains, and then put the light off like you’ve gone to bed. Then come back down here.”
Moira did as she was told without complaint, taking a few minutes to replicate her usual bedtime routine before jogging back downstairs, nervous about being alone up there. They sat together in the now dark living room as the clock passed midnight. They weren’t waiting long.