THE FIRST step to uncovering what had happened to the missing car was to go and speak to someone with an extensive knowledge of under-the-radar vehicles. In the spirit of using a thief to catch a thief they drove over to Bakers Moor and onto Tuit Road, an ugly reminder that not all squalor in the city lived in Earmam and Whisper Hill. These were industrial buildings where the industry was mostly carried out at night when the police were less likely to have their eyes open. It was tucked back against Bakers Hill on the east side, buried in shadows and as cold as the welcome most occupants would give a stranger. It might seem like an odd place for a car hire firm to base itself, but JJ’s car hire was a specialist lender to the underfunded, the secretly industrious and the legally unfussy.
As they turned onto the patch of waste ground where the cars were parked they both spotted JJ talking to a rightly nervous young customer. Sholto parked beside a small office building in such disrepair that a solid head-butt could have sent the whole thing tumbling. It was short and flat and as they got out Sholto thought he could see a gap between the window frame and the wall.
Darian said, “We’d better wait for him. He won’t be happy if we interrupt his swindling.”
Sholto took a wander over to the nearest cars, those parked closest to the gate because they looked the most roadworthy. He ran his hand along the top of one and, as he looked at the cardboard sign on the windscreen, said, “This one looks okay, how do you suppose it’s only eight hundred quid?”
Darian shrugged and said, “Probably various bits of different cars welded together. A lot of them are.”
It was at this moment that JJ arrived, round-faced, jaundiced, like someone had stuffed too much mince into a yellow stocking, with a long scraggly goatee beard that looked like a kid had pinned the tail on entirely the wrong donkey. Every time he spoke he sounded as though he was halfway through swallowing his teeth and determined to finish. He had an optimistic look in his beady eyes as he saw Sholto touch up a banger and said, “You interested in that one?”
Sholto said, “Do you have an actual whole car, like the manufacturers and safety testers intended?”
JJ looked hurt as he wiped his oil-stained hands on his oil-stained blue overalls and said, “I’m sorry, we’re just not that sort of company.”
Before they lost him to unethical outrage Darian stepped in and said, “We need a bit of help from you, mate, some information about a car we can’t find. It hasn’t left the city, but it isn’t on the road and we’ve got some money that says you can’t find it.”
JJ, like many avowedly dishonest people, didn’t like helping those who were almost police, but a bet with some roguish private detective was just a bit of harmless fun he could profit from. “I’ve got two hundred that says I can.”
Sholto grimaced at having to pay two hundred for the information but he stayed miserably silent as Darian said, “You’re on. A light blue VW Passat, twenty fifteen, number CX41 VMT. How long do you think you’ll take?”
“Give me a day or two. I’ll call you.”
They drove back to the office unsure of their progress. Sholto parked on Dlùth Street at the bottom of Cage Street and they went in through the side door and up the stairs to the office. They sat at their respective desks and tried to find some work to kill the day with. There were often empty periods with little to do and they tried to fill them by doing the things they assumed professionals did.
Darian said, “Even if we find the car there’s a good chance we don’t find Freya with it.”
“Or who’s behind her disappearance. There are a hundred ways of getting rid of a car in this city that don’t leave a spot behind. It’ll be the next step on the path and we have to walk it.”
“There is a chance the journey ends with us finding out Freya did a runner because she was sick of this place. We hear she was a great mother and would never leave the boy, but we don’t know what was inside her head. She might be shacked up with some lover boy as we speak.”
Sholto nodded. “Could be, but you heard what DS MacNeith said about women going missing. I’ve seen cases of men going walkabout because they thought they’d found a better option than carrying on with the life they had here, but women often take a more sensible approach. We should all be braced for bad news here.”
“The odds of her being picked off the street by a total stranger after leaving Vinny’s place?”
“Similar to my odds of waking up tomorrow with Miss Challaid next to me and a winning lottery ticket clutched in my sweaty hand.”
“You don’t play the lottery.”
“Exactly right. If Freya was picked off a public street then it was almost certainly by someone who had been following her and targeted her specifically, almost certainly someone she knew.”
There was a warning in his tone and Darian thought again about Vinny. He was a mate and had been for a couple of years, one of the most helpful cops he had ever met. Somewhere deep inside Darian’s head there remained the vision of the police force he had carried as a child, the tough group of men and women motivated by a desire to make hard lives better in the unfair city of Challaid. A lot had happened in his life to chip away at that belief in the force, but nothing had been able to destroy it yet and that was because of people like Vinny. He represented all that was good about the local police, the ideals a young Darian had aspired to, and he couldn’t be guilty of this. Another thing the passing of time had taught Darian was that Challaid had a smaller percentage of good and honest citizens than he had originally thought, and more who were potential targets for their investigative work.