THERE ARE only three parks worthy of the name in Challaid and two of them are barely large enough to contain an exuberant frisbee thrower. It’s strange that we have so few green spaces in a city this size. It’s been said the reason there’s been no call for more is that if you stand on the street in the north-east of Challaid facing south you can look to your left and see Whisper Hill, Dùil Hill and Bakers Hill, look straight ahead and see Stac Voror and Gleann Fuilteach, and look to your right and see Loch Eriboll. You would have to suffer extreme long-sightedness to miss the mass of concrete and brick sprawled out between you and those landmarks, but there is a true sense that wherever you stand in the city of Challaid the wilderness is pawing at your peripheral vision.
The one park that lives up to the billing is Sutherland Park, right in the middle of the Bank district and the heart of the city. Major buildings surround it on all four sides, but within the ornate black railings that surround it there are trees and walkways, some rough heather and Loch Bheag, a small patch of water that had been the largest of five before the others were drained and concreted over, even Loch Bheag shrunk from its apparently larger original size. Nothing is allowed to inconvenience the expansion of the rich.
Darian went in through St. Andrew Gate, the large black metalwork made from the guns of the ship of the same name that had been on the original Caledonia expedition, directly opposite the Sutherland Bank headquarters on the east side of the park. He walked with the speed of a man who needed to warm up, getting to the white marble fountain dedicated to Isobel Barton where he had agreed to meet Vinny. The cop was there ahead of him, broad and bold, a man built for the rugged area he patrolled and not the genteel surrounds of the park. Here he looked like a brute just waiting for the right target to wander past so he could cheerfully mug them.
He nodded and said, “Darian, mate, what’s the news saying?”
“Maybe something not terrible. We’ve found out a couple of things that might help us track her down. Did you know she’d been in a minor car crash a couple of months ago?”
Vinny, wrapped in a thick coat, said, “Yeah, she moaned about something, getting shunted by another driver and it being their fault. Everything is someone else’s fault with Freya. She couldn’t pin the blame for that shit on me so she didn’t say anything else about it. Is it relevant?”
“It’s worth looking at. Her car was taken to a garage and broken up for parts a day after she went missing. It might be…did she tell you who she crashed into?”
“No, just that she was definitely a safer bloody driver than them.”
“Huh, that’s strange. The car she hit was owned by Harold Sutherland. It was his chauffeur behind the wheel but he was in the back at the time. Maybe she didn’t even see Sutherland, I don’t know, but her not telling you fits with a theory I have. She has a minor bump that’s Sutherland’s driver’s fault and realizes she can milk it. Instead of the small repairs the car needed Freya claims for a lot more and panics when they rumble her, gets rid of the car and goes into hiding. She doesn’t tell you because you’re a cop, and, well, she knows she won’t get much but laughter from you anyway.”
Throughout most of that Vinny had been shaking his head like it was caught in the wind. “No, Darian, no way. You don’t know her like I’m unlucky enough to. Freya can be sneaky when it suits her but there’s no way on God’s blue earth she would go in for scamming people like that, not a single bloody chance. And let’s say she did, which she wouldn’t, but we’ll play make-believe. You think she’d run away from someone challenging her on it? Come off it. You know her at least well enough to understand that if she was caught with bright red hands she would find a way of claiming they proved her innocence. That whole theory is a nonstarter.”
He said the last few words with the sympathetic tone of a cop who knew the feeling of seeing a perfectly good idea being hacked to death by other people’s logic. Darian shrugged and said, “That leaves us with the Sutherland connection. It might be nothing, but the car being destroyed is going to be an angle for the police, I’ve told DS MacNeith about it.”
“Yeah, she’ll dig into it, and I’d rather get my spade in the ground first because given half a chance she’ll smash my skull in with hers. Good job I’m the wisdom-spewing mentor of an actual human Sutherland.”
“Your twelve-year-old partner in crime prevention.”
“He’s not twelve, he just looks it. He’s twenty…something. Come on, we’ll take the train up to Whisper Hill and pay him a visit.”
PC Philip Sutherland was twenty-four and a cop at Dockside station in Whisper Hill, traditionally the hardest beat to walk in Challaid. It was said his mega-rich parents had objected to him joining the police force instead of going into the family business of hoarding other people’s money and had pulled strings to get him placed in the worst situation possible, thinking he would soon come running back into their welcoming arms. Most often paired with Vinny, he had turned out to be an excellent cop and embraced not only Dockside station but the whole frenetic, absurd, dangerous Whisper Hill experience.
He lived on Chester Street, a short, straight road with four-story flats on either side that looked like the ugly arse ends of more appealing buildings. It was hard to believe an architect had conceived them to look this way, but somewhere in the council building there would be 1960s designs for them that someone must have shamefacedly signed. Because the city is relatively narrow and was expanded with the sort of gleeful lack of forethought we’ve turned into an art form we have a lot of short streets, another issue that makes getting around quickly a near impossibility. This one felt like a street designed for bleak experiences and yet nothing was damaged or out of place. When they went into the building it was clean and the hall looked like it had been recently painted a fresh shade of beige.
Darian said, “Did we stumble through the back of a wardrobe or something because this doesn’t feel like a Whisper Hill block of flats.”
Vinny said, “You noticed that, huh? He doesn’t talk about it, wee Phil, but I reckon the almighty family send people round to keep the place spick-and-span and free from the sort of everyday human grime that interacting with working-class bastards like me might bring. I don’t think he likes them doing it, but then he hasn’t moved somewhere else, has he?”
Phil was on the top floor and he was expecting them, Vinny having called from the train not to ask him if they could come but to tell him. His flat was small like all the others, two bedrooms, one bathroom and a living area, but there were little hints that this occupant was sitting atop a trust fund that would one day make him incalculably rich. Small luxuries, and the occasional style over substance choice, but nothing too obvious, and nothing worth going out of your way to rob the place for.
In the living area they sat at the small, round dining table and Philip Sutherland, skinny and baby-faced, probably fed up with being called cute, perfect teeth and carefully styled hair, said, “So what happened with my uncle Harold?”
“Right, well, you know my heartache has gone missing and I’m on the hunt for her, and it turns out she managed to drive her car into your uncle’s wagon a couple of months ago. What we hear is that your uncle accepted it was his chauffeur’s fault and paid out, and then the next thing that happened to Freya’s car is that it was ripped to bits at a wrecker’s yard the day after she disappeared. I doubt very much there’s a connection because the only way there would be is if she was pulling a scam and that’s beneath her highness, but, shit, I have to check everything here. DS MacNeith will go calling on your illustrious family about it so I want to go, too. Do you think they’ll have any record of what your uncle paid Freya?”
“Bloody hell, yes, they have records for every penny any member of the family or the bank spends. Literally every penny. If a family member threw a coin down a well someone would abseil down with a torch to find out how much it was worth. Pretty sure they have a file somewhere listing every penny of pocket money my father gave me. My mother gave me more because she’s the Sutherland.”
Vinny said, “Listen to this, Darian. Your parents are still married, Phil, so how come you have her surname?”
He didn’t enjoy his family traditions being prodded for Vinny’s amusement but he said, “That’s how we do it. My father keeps his name but the kids are always Sutherlands. If you don’t carry the family name you won’t get shares in the bank.”
Darian said, “Well, you sure screwed up their plans for you. You ever think of switching to your father’s name?”
“No, I’m a Sutherland, I’m not ashamed of that. We might be poison but we’re still a family and I still get on well with most of them.”
“So why become a cop?”
“I could spend years sitting in boardrooms listening to people moan about pension fund deficits and South East Asian liquidity, or I could have drunken sailors try to punch my lights out and drug dealers try to run me down with their gaudy cars. It really wasn’t a difficult choice at all.”
“So could you find out about any payment to Freya?”
“I can, yeah, and I can do better than that for you, Vinny. If you want I can get you a face-to-face with Uncle Harold. He’s a good sort; he’ll help if he can.”
“Great, let’s do it.”
This was the first time Darian had heard Phil speak and he was surprised by how normal he was. He had expected every Sutherland to speak as if he had a bunch of grapes wedged in the back of his throat. Yeah, he had a posh accent, less phlegmy and softer on the vowels than his working-class colleague, but this offspring of the elite was likable and friendly and he was going to get them a meeting with someone from the very highest branch of the mighty family tree.