DARIAN KNOCKED on the door of the posh house in Barton and the unseen dog started barking again. Sholto took a step back and then straightened his tie, wanting to look presentable for when the posh dog bit him. He said, “This is a bad idea.”
Darian said, “This is the only idea we’ve got.”
“I wish we were smarter.”
The door opened and Leala Kotkell looked back at them, her face falling into an expression designed to let them know there would be zero effort on her part to play the polite host, the bridge to her good books had already been burned. She said, “What do you two want now?”
Darian said, “We’d like to speak to your husband or your son or both.”
“They’re not in.”
“That so? Uisdean must be feeling a lot better if he’s gone from stifling headaches after one conversation to out and about already. What we’ll do then is we’ll wait while you call one or both of them and tell them we’re here. We can wait out on the street if you’d like.”
If looks were weapons she could have held the world to ransom with the one she gave Darian, but he just smiled back in response. She didn’t want them out on the street where the neighbors might see them so she reluctantly let them in, Sholto nodding apologetically as they went through to the same study they’d been in before.
Leala Kotkell stood in the doorway and said, “Stay there and don’t touch anything.”
Darian sat heavily but Sholto stayed standing, already sweating and looking around the room, glancing often at the doorway as if he was afraid the now silent dog might be planning to creep up on him. He said, “I bet she’s giving the dog our scent right now, telling it to chew us to pieces.”
“She might be telling her husband that, but I doubt she’s telling the dog. If she knew you were as scared of the dog as you are of the husband she might.”
“I’m not terrified of the whole dog, just its teeth.”
Darian thought, when they were quiet, that he could hear her voice from another room, trying to talk quietly but her volume rising in anger every few seconds and betraying her. He said, “She’s on the phone.”
“We shouldn’t have forced our way in like this, it’s just antagonizing them more.”
“It’s now or never.”
“And what if we’re wrong about this?”
“Then it’s never again.”
“Aye, well, the way my wee heart’s pumping away right now it might be never again for me anyway. When I started this business it was supposed to be police work without the pressure. No murderers or madmen to catch, just good old pilferers and runaways, simple follow the bread crumbs stuff. I could always do those. Maybe Corey was right about me, hiding from the serious stuff.”
“If he was right you wouldn’t be here.”
“Maybe he was right and I’m just too lazy to prove it.”
Leala had been silent for a couple of minutes and Sholto was still pacing when a figure emerged in the doorway. Uisdean Kotkell stood looking at them, not saying anything at first. Sholto sat down on the couch just as Darian stood up and said, “Come in, Uisdean, sit down. There’s just one question I want to ask you.”
Uisdean looked like he was considering the offer when they heard Leala’s voice from the other end of the long corridor, shouting to her son. “Uisdean, what are you doing?”
She appeared beside him in the doorway and Darian said, “Look who showed up. I really just need to ask him one question.”
“He’s not fit for it; he needs to be resting in his bed.”
“That’s a remarkable deterioration; a minute ago you said he was out and about.”
Leala glared at Darian, but Uisdean said, “If it’s just one question.”
He walked across to the opposite couch and sat on it, his mother sitting beside him. Darian sat back down beside Sholto and said, “Uisdean, when Randulf Gallowglass beat you up, what message did he give you for your father?”
Leala turned her head to the side and Uisdean stared straight at Darian for a second before he said, “He told me to tell my father that it was time to do what he was told, and that if he didn’t he’d come after me again.”
“And you told your father this?”
Leala put up a hand. “My husband is on his way, he won’t be more than another five minutes. You can ask him.”
Sholto said, “Five minutes? Bloody hell, what road is he driving on?”
His attempt to inject a little humor was met by steely looks from the Kotkell family opposite and his smile crumpled. Leala bundled Uisdean out of the room, wanting to protect him from any more outbursts of honesty. He already knew more than he should about his father’s work. It was four minutes later that a car stopped with a small squeak of tires outside and Durell Kotkell burst in.
“What’s going on now?”
Darian stood up and said, “Why did you hire us when you don’t have any desire to see the man who attacked your son being brought to justice? You don’t want Gallowglass put away; you don’t want Corey in the dock because you’d end up next to him.”
Kotkell straightened and held eye contact with Darian. Huffily, he said, “Well, shit, you’ve got the wrong end of the right stick. Took you long enough to get this far. I hired you because I knew it was Corey and I knew the police would never get off their backsides and do something about that man, no matter how much pressure I put on them. They close ranks. I do want Corey in the dock, but it’ll never happen, not with that one, but I want him to know he doesn’t get away scot-free. Attacking my son. My son. I wasn’t letting that go unchecked, so I brought you in to put some pressure on him.”
“Because he’s been using you to clean dirty money.”
Kotkell shook his head. “It’s a hell of a lot more complicated than that. He hasn’t been using me, but I run the department at the bank that handles Caledonian accounts, business accounts mostly, the majority in Panama. That bastard’s dirty money goes into a clean company that then runs it through us, it looks like Panamanian money so those are the tax rules we apply. An accountant called Moira Slight was the link, she took money that had been picked up here and banked it through us under the names of clean companies. We put the last sheen of respectability on it, but we were just at the end, I don’t know who was involved earlier in the chain. Hiding money is a lot harder than it used to be and a lot of the young banks run scared from it these days. When I found out it had been going through my department, well, shit, heads rolled, I’ll tell you that.”
Darian said, “But you don’t want the police involved.”
“Ha, that’s a good one. You know what department handles this sort of crime? The anti-corruption unit.”
Sholto looked at Darian and said, “So Moses was the first link, collecting it from the criminals. Him and Moira worked it through companies and banked it with Sutherland because they had people at the bank who wouldn’t ask any questions about it.”
“Which reinforces the link with Moses.”
They stood looking unusually thoughtful for a few seconds before Kotkell broke the silence. “Corey has money tied up in accounts with our Caledonian branches, most of them controlled exclusively by Moira Slight. I’ve dug around and found them. He wants control of the accounts from Slight and he’s been causing trouble to try to get it. A good system when things were going well, he was too distant from them to ever be caught, but now he wants them and she doesn’t want to let go. There’s about half a million there, hardly enough for this sort of mayhem.”
Darian and Sholto looked at him like he’d grown a second head and Darian said, “Your son’s beating may tie in with other crimes, and I can’t guarantee that we can keep your involvement out of the story.”
Kotkell was fighting to keep the bank’s reputation clean. Links to money laundering would blacken the name and cost him his job, and that was worth a good deal more than half a million pounds. “If you do, you will have a very valuable friend within the bank. We do a lot of investigations, and I could make sure some of that starts coming your way.”
Sholto perked up but Darian didn’t look impressed by the offer of money for silence.
Kotkell said, “He attacked my son. All I wanted was to force him to back off, leave my family alone. Picking a fight with me is business, but my family are not a part of that. The money my department handled for Slight, I knew nothing about it and when I found out I sacked everyone connected. It can never be proven that we knew where it had come from so it would be no good pointing the finger at us. We can make sure the bright lights of any investigations burn others instead of us. If you help me a little, I can help you a lot.”
Darian said, “We’d better go; we have a lot still to do. We’ll be in touch.”
Sholto wasn’t so enthusiastic about departing on these terms, but they left without committing to anything Kotkell wanted of them. They had what Darian needed—the truth about what had happened to Uisdean.
As they got into the car Sholto said, “Moses got killed and that sent Corey running to get his dirty money from Slight and Kotkell. That’s what the Moses killing provoked, but it still doesn’t tell us who killed Moses. It’s a good spot to take our next step from, though.”
Darian was thinking about it as they went back to the office. Corey was the fraying thread that ran through all of this, him and his hired thug Gallowglass. There was a man capable of violence, perhaps murder. If Corey had decided he wanted his money before Moses was killed, then the link could be stronger than Sholto realized.