THE REST of that working day was spent putting together two separate reports on the Kotkell case. Sholto was writing one for Durell Kotkell to have, Darian was writing the other for their files. This wasn’t rare. There had been plenty of cases where Douglas Independent Research sent a different message into the world than the one they kept back for their own records. Kotkell’s report would be full of the things he wanted to read, it would reassure him. The one they kept in the office would be splattered with every unfortunate speck of truth.
Sholto went home and told Darian to do the same. He said, “You’re having too many late nights. Don’t care how entertaining they are, if you want to be able to do the job then you need to be at least half-interested and two-thirds awake. Off you go home.”
Darian nodded, almost a commitment to do what he was told but no words to implicate him should Sholto find out he had done differently. He was planning on going to Sgàil Drive to see Maeve again. He walked down the stairs and out onto Cage Street, pausing as he realized he was hungry. He walked into The Northern Song to grab some food he could take round to Maeve’s with him.
It was busy, and he had to wait twenty minutes for his order. Chatted with Mr. Yang for a while, then Mrs. Yang emerged from the back with his food and passed it to him. She had a rather sly smile on her face, like a woman who knew the food for two wasn’t for Darian and Sholto because she’d seen Sholto go home already. She didn’t, thank goodness, say anything about it, because Darian wasn’t ready to have a running conversation about a relationship that was still learning to walk.
She looked almost proud when she passed him the bag and his change and said, “Have a nice evening.”
He was blushing when he left the restaurant. He walked down to the bottom of Cage Street and onto Dlùth Street where he’d parked the Skoda. The war between the air fresheners and the car’s natural smell was being lost, but the food helped to paper over the cracks of defeat for a little longer. Darian had just started the engine when his phone rang.
No name, which made it a number that hadn’t called him before. He answered and said, “Hello?”
“It’s Vivienne Armstrong. You and I need to meet, right now. I have something to tell you.”
She sounded harassed, like she wasn’t keen to share what she had to say. Darian said, “You can tell me now.”
“No, no phones, I don’t know how safe yours is and I bet you don’t either. You need to come to me, I’m not going to you because I don’t trust anywhere you choose. You know the old multistory in Whisper Hill?”
“I know it.”
“Go in the old main entrance and there’s a blue door on the left that leads down steps to the underground level. Meet me there in half an hour or forget about it.”
“I don’t know what I’ll have to forget about.”
“Don’t be stupid, of course you do. There’s only one thing you’ve been pestering me about in the last week. It’s starting to cause me a problem and you’re going to help me solve it.”
Vivienne hung up. Darian sat in the Skoda and thought about the call, the danger of it. Meeting Vivienne Armstrong anywhere came with risk; meeting her in the basement level of an abandoned multistory car park was something few with a brain would consider wise. Darian considered it, started the car and drove quickly north.
The building, if we can still call it that, is on Letta Road in Whisper Hill, not too far from the Machaon Hospital. It had been four stories tall, with another parking level in the basement, and had been useful in an area with too few parking spaces. Then one of the floors had collapsed. About a year before Darian met Viv, the second-story floor had descended onto the first, injuring several people and wrecking a lot of cars. There had been fears the whole building was going to come down but it didn’t. Engineers had managed to make it safe for the time being. It should have been pulled down, but there had been a long delay because of the investigation into what had caused it, and the suspicion that it wasn’t as much of an accident as it had looked. That was why the owners hadn’t received the insurance payout they thought they were entitled to, why everything was in limbo and why Darian could meet Vivienne in the basement without fear of being seen.
He parked across the road and watched the entrance. Viv had told him to go in through the main door at the front, which was flimsily boarded up and easily entered through. The building had no defenses worthy of the name and had become a haunt of bored children, inquisitive dogs and desperate drug addicts. He didn’t want anyone but him and Viv to be there, and it wasn’t the kids, the dogs or the addicts showing up he was worried about.
Darian sat in the darkness and watched for fifteen minutes. Nobody came out and only one person went in. Vivienne walked across the street and down toward the car park from the opposite direction to Darian. She wouldn’t have been able to see him on a street whose lampposts were cheating a living. He gave it another couple of minutes, knowing he would be late but wanting to see if she was followed. Nobody showed. She wouldn’t leave if she was anything like as desperate as she had sounded on the phone. Whatever problem she had with the Cummins money, she wasn’t going to walk away from a potential solution because it showed up two minutes later than requested.
He got out of the car and locked it, for all the good that would do if someone in Whisper Hill decided they wanted to break in. He walked slowly up Letta Road, on the other side from the car park, and took in the scene. There are high buildings on either side of the road and only a few windows on the upper floors had lights visible that night. The concrete car park was squeezed unnaturally into what had been a gap between old, red-brick buildings. In the middle of a densely packed part of the city, and with occupied flats and offices all around it, the car park seemed remarkably isolated. He crossed the road and went in behind the boarding, enough of a gap for a person to squeeze through. The place was dark, silent and cold, and the blue door stood to his left, exactly where Viv had said it would be.