THE FOLLOWING morning was spent hunting down as much information about Freya Dempsey as possible, which was not an awful lot. Darian had met with Vinny to get some more details about who her friends and family were and then made his way back to Cage Street, bumping into Sholto coming out of The Northern Song with their lunch.
As they walked up the stairs to the office together Sholto said, “The problem with Freya Dempsey is that she is terribly normal.”
Darian already knew what his boss meant, but this was Sholto venturing to spread some of his many years of gathered knowledge around and Darian knew it was best to let him get it out lest the weight of it crush him. “Vinny would say she was normally terrible.”
“That may also be true, but there was nothing remarkable about her. We’re used to chasing after criminals, Darian, people who have gone missing because they have something to run away from. This is different. A woman like Dempsey, the hard part is working out where the start line is, not the finish.”
Sholto stopped to unlock the office door, putting the bag of food down and glancing along the corridor as he did. He was looking at the door of Challaid Data Services, the only other company on the top floor, and he had just opened his mouth to say something about them when he heard the phone ringing in the office. Sholto didn’t enjoy hurrying and held pressure in great distaste so the need to rush caused the key to wriggle out of his fingers and drop into the carrier bag of Chinese food.
As he fumbled in the bag the phone stopped ringing and he said, “If it was important they’ll ring back.”
“Or ring Raven.”
Sholto pushed open the door at last and said, “Now, Darian, you might think that sort of thing is funny but if you can’t hear anyone else laughing you’ve botched the joke and I’m not hearing so much as a chuckle right now.”
Raven Investigators was a company in the south end of Bank who actually admitted to being a private detective agency. They were the biggest in Challaid and the bane of Sholto’s life. A company headquartered in Edinburgh with a big budget, lots of employees, many ex-cops, and who had a reputation for playing by the rules and so got a lot of juicy contracts Sholto would have easily fallen in love with. Joking about them was considered to be in very poor taste. No message had been left on the office phone; few ever were because people didn’t want to leave recordings of their business with Douglas Independent Research lying around.
“This number is on the private contact list.”
Darian went across and looked at it, not recognizing the number. He returned to his desk and switched on his laptop, finding the number on his private file as he tucked into the first of his two hoisin wraps. The phone number belonged to contact #D-09, better known to the rest of the world as JJ. They each had their own contact list, secret from the other, and Sholto’s all began with S and Darian’s with D. He picked up the phone and, his mouth stuffed with food, called.
“Yeah?”
“JJ, it’s Darian Ross, sorry I missed you just now.”
“You sound like you’re talking to me from under a duvet.”
Ignoring the irony of JJ complaining about someone else being unintelligible Darian said, “I wish. Sorry, let me just swallow this. Right, what’s your news?”
“You still ready to pay for that bet on the Passat?”
“Of course. You found it?”
“Bits of it. The thing was broken up for parts a few days ago, some of it was sent for scrap. Wasn’t an old car, so the people breaking it knew something was going on but they were far too smart to ask questions. It was MacAskill’s garage up in Earmam that handled the dismantling, sent parts to a few places. Only thing he could tell me was that it was a man who brought it in to be broken, late twenties, early thirties.”
“No description?”
“He was being paid to look the other way. He probably took that literally.”
Sholto had stopped eating to listen to Darian’s half of the conversation, and Darian knew he needed a bit more detail. He said, “There couldn’t be any clean reason they wanted the car broken apart, could there, JJ?”
“Clean? Well, there’s impress-your-minister clean and there’s Challaid clean, if you know what I mean. There’s no honest to God reason for it, not a car that new. There are reasons that aren’t virgin pure but round here are common enough, this is Challaid we’re talking about. Someone gets in a crash and decides to take the insurance company for a ride, getting some extra dough and a nice new car, pretend the old one was wrecked. That happens plenty. A lot of garages play along, diddle the insurers because they’ve got it coming to them for having such high prices. That’s the Challaid way, dozens of scams like that. Don’t listen to the politicians, Darian; we’re the same city we always were.”
“Okay, thanks, JJ. I’ll be round in the next few days for a cup of tea.”
That cup of tea would cost Darian two hundred quid. He put the phone down and looked across at Sholto, who said, “The car was broken up?”
“Taken to MacAskill’s in Earmam by a man in his late twenties or early thirties.”
“No sighting of Freya?”
“No.”
Sholto chewed furiously on a prawn and said, “If she was picked up outside or near Vinny’s flat then let’s assume that was someone who got into her car. They wouldn’t leave the car behind and take her on their own, that would be too much of a risk for a sensible psycho. Are we really saying that someone carjacked her in Challaid? Got into her own car and did her harm there, meaning they had to get rid of the motor?”
Darian didn’t like the direction this was racing in when he said, “What else are we saying?”
“The police will say, because they prefer to start with the obvious and climb down the ladder from there, it would make a lot more sense to say she didn’t disappear outside Vinny’s flat but inside it, which meant he could swipe the keys from her pocket and get rid of the car so he could pretend she had left the place. Their second suggestion would be that she was working with some lover boy on an insurance scam gone too far, but they’ll start with Vinny.”
While Sholto dipped another prawn in sauce and shoveled the whole thing into his face Darian turned in his chair and looked out of the window, not hungry anymore. Knowing what had happened to the missing car was a step forward, but they were still walking in mud.