IT STARTED, as other worthwhile stories have, with a phone call. Darian Ross was sitting at his desk by the window of the Douglas Independent Research office on the second floor of a building on Cage Street when his mobile rang. His boss, Sholto Douglas, was downstairs at The Northern Song, the Chinese restaurant on the ground floor, where he was buying them lunch, so Darian was alone. Leaning back with an elbow on the windowsill, looking down into the narrow pedestrianized lane, he picked the vibrating phone from his desk and saw the name on the screen: Vinny. PC Vincent Reno, a friend and police contact in the Whisper Hill district to the north-east of Challaid. They did each other favors, Vinny the cop on the toughest beat in the city and Darian the unregistered private detective pretending he was a humble researcher.
He answered the phone and said, “Vinny, what flavor of favor are you after?”
“A bitter one, Darian. I have this missing person thing, I think she’s missing anyway, and I was hoping you might be able to help me out with it.”
The gregarious, barrel-chested copper sounded more somber than usual, so Darian said, “Who’s the missing person?”
“Yeah, that’s the bitter pill, it’s Freya.”
“As in your ex-wife Freya?”
“There can be only one.”
“Freya, the woman you’ve been hoping would go missing for the last five years?”
“Well, we only split up five years ago, so I’ve been hoping she would go missing for a little longer than that, if we’re counting. Now she’s gone and I’m buzzing around all over the city like a blue-arsed fly trying to find her, this is just way out of her brutal character. Wee Finn is missing his mother something chronic and my weekends just aren’t the same without her verbal abuse to bookend them. Listen, can we talk about this, just the two of us to start with? I’ve got nothing against Sholto, but I’d rather start with your advice before you bring in the old man for wit and wisdom.”
“Sure. Where and when?”
“How about Misgearan, six tonight, when I knock off. We’ll get a room and have a drink and I’ll tell you what I know, which will take about half a glass.”
Darian said he’d see him there and hung up, wondering if he’d ever been to Misgearan and not woken up the following morning with a jackhammer dismantling the inside of his skull. It was a tough little drinking den up on Long Walk Lane in Whisper Hill, a place that should and would have been shut down long ago if the local police didn’t also use it as their own little alcohol-sodden hideaway. It had long been a favorite of Vinny’s.
Sholto Douglas returned with their lunch and they ate at their desks. Darian didn’t mention the call to the former detective because there was much they didn’t tell each other until circumstances prised their mouths open. That makes it sound like they didn’t get along, but they did, very well in fact; it was just that each respected the other enough to see his limitations.
Sholto was a man hitting fifty who had been ecstatic to free himself from the Challaid Police Force and seek employment that better suited his stress-free aspirations. In the one-room office on the second floor of a modern gray building in the Bank district, right in the center of Challaid, he had set up his private detective business and called it a research company so he wouldn’t be held to the legal restrictions of a proper agency. He hired the young son of his former colleague on the force and tried to teach Darian everything he knew about keeping your head down and staying out of trouble.
Darian, a handsome twenty-three-year-old with soft features and intense large brown eyes, looked across the room at his boss, short and chubby, bald on top and with hair at the sides that had won whatever battle they had recently fought with a comb. His white shirt was a size too small for him and the top button was open under his tie, his desk so shrouded in papers that the folders his phone, laptop and foil lunch tray rested on might have reached to the floor for all anyone knew. Sholto played the figure of bumbling innocence well, but he was fiercely loyal and there were sharp edges to his placid mind that cut through his well-constructed image from time to time. Darian wasn’t going to bring trouble to Sholto’s door; he had done so before and owed his employer better this time around.
They spent the next couple of hours filing separate reports on a man they had been hired to find, a pension fund manager who had apparently fled Challaid with £45,000 of other people’s hard-earned cash. They worked out he had only made it as far as his teenage lover’s flat in Whisper Hill before she relieved him of the money and made it all the way to Costa Rica with it, one of the Caledonian countries. The only thing she’d left behind was the pension fund manager, and his employers weren’t paying to get him back.
They did what they always did: wrote separate reports, one for the insurance company that had hired them which was full of what the customer wanted to hear, and one for their own files containing all the gory little truths and judgments that might prove useful in the future. Sholto always wrote for the client because he had the reserve and diplomacy of a man who wanted repeat clients, and Darian always wrote for their records because he had the bluntness of youth.
At ten past five Sholto said, “Well, doesn’t look like the phone will ring with a lucrative job to rain riches upon us. I might as well go home and mourn the remains of the day with Mrs. Douglas.”
Sholto spent roughly forty-six percent of his working life complaining about a lack of money and clients but the truth was they were doing okay, well-paid, petty jobs that kept them bumping along in the potholes of society. Their work for big companies wasn’t often dignified, and as the rich couldn’t stomach parting with money those paydays were infrequent, but their heads, necks and shoulders were above water.
Darian said, “I’m nearly done as well. I’ll be off in ten minutes.”
“Okay, lock up behind you, we wouldn’t want anyone coming in and stealing…well…”
Sholto had his laptop and phone in his bag; all they left behind in the office overnight was paperwork they weren’t scared of others seeing. The good stuff was well hidden now and there was enough on those files to keep gossipmongers and curious coppers up reading all night. The security of those files was absolute and no one other than the two members of Douglas Independent Research staff got unfettered access to them.
He waited in the office for twenty minutes, knowing Sholto wouldn’t go straight home; he’d be downstairs in The Northern Song, chatting to Mr. Yang and collecting his dinner. All of Sholto’s three square meals a day came from there, and they were responsible for his changing shape. Darian waited a few minutes after seeing his boss walk along Cage Street, laptop bag in one hand and white plastic bag with food in the other.
With the door locked behind him as promised, he made his way down the stairs and out through the side door. The Chinese restaurant took up the entire ground floor, the Yang family flat and a talent agency office on the first and Douglas Independent Research, Challaid Data Services and an empty office on the top floor. Growing up, Darian had wanted to be a detective like his father, with all the bustle of a big station, but this was the next best thing. From Cage Street it was a well-worn twelve-minute walk to Glendan Station, he had no car of his own, and then the train up to Whisper Hill to meet Vinny.