BEFORE EIGHT O’CLOCK the following morning a group of four men made their way up the steps and through the grand front door of the Sutherland Bank headquarters on East Sutherland Square. This was a family with a perverse obsession with projecting humility while at the same time slapping their name on every damn thing they owned, which was a lot. The group was led by someone who knew the way, PC Philip Sutherland, a man who should have spent his working life inside the building. Behind him were Darian, Vinny and Sholto, three men who lacked the confident air of their leader.
The hall of the Sutherland Bank was colossal, high and wide enough for a Harris’s hawk to get lost in and, it felt like, the Isle of Harris itself to just about fit in. As they walked across to the reception desk, staffed by six people, Sholto said, “I’m sweating like a bank robber here. I should have brought a towel, or a sponge. People are going to be falling and breaking their necks on the puddles I’m leaving, and I can’t afford to be sued by the sort of people who work here.”
There were two things that always made Sholto sweat: rich people and dogs. He was safe from the latter here but the former were unavoidable. People tended to think of the Sutherland building as a grand sort of place because it was big and old. The front half of it, which could pass for a cathedral, was built on the site of the bank’s previous headquarters in the early eighteenth century, with a huge extension going onto the back around a century later. The only part the public tended to see was that entrance hall, the towering room with balconies around the first- and second-floor levels, and the scale of it could deceive you into believing it was beautiful. The truth was that every part of it was plain. There was no hint of imagination in anything, as though the builders had finished their work and no one had thought to tell the decorators it was their turn. The hall was huge because when it was opened it was a functioning bank the public used so space was needed for them, whereas now it was the reception area for the headquarters of a corporate giant. The reception desk was dark brown and plain, the tiles beneath their feet dark gray and without design, the walls unadorned.
The other three hovered shiftily by the desk while Phil spoke to the woman behind it and told her they had an appointment with Harold Sutherland. He didn’t tell her he’d been able to get an appointment at such short notice because he was the man’s nephew. Darian looked to his left at the security. Two guards were sitting on chairs across the hall from them, tucked in at the side of the room. They were unobtrusive enough to make sure you didn’t feel intimidated, but watching just blatantly enough to make sure you realized that one dodgy move would see you rugby tackled across the tiles, out of the door, down the steps and into the middle of the road.
The receptionist had checked and confirmed they were all entitled to head deeper into the building. As she handed him a security pass she said to Phil, “If you take the main lifts past the security door up to the third floor and when you get there go straight ahead, eventually the corridor will turn into two open-plan spaces and you want the one on your right.”
Phil smiled, having been raised to be too polite to tell her he knew his way around the building because he had visited many times as a child, and said, “Thank you.”
They went through security and took the lift up, packed in with four other people as the bank began to fill up with its resident desperate money grabbers. A couple of them looked at Sholto and wondered just what exactly he was so nervous about, and the more he was watched the more erratic his facial expressions became.
Phil led them with the confidence of a man who needed no directions, along the corridor, through another security door and across to the open area he knew his uncle worked from. There were about a dozen desks in the open-plan office, all of them tidy with no personal touches, no pictures on the walls and nothing to suggest this was a fun place to work. Phil led them across to a desk outside an office door where a woman in her fifties was settling in to start a day’s work.
Phil said, “Good morning, Mrs. Robin, is my uncle in yet?”
She looked up at him and smiled with the warmth of someone who considered herself closer to family than staff and said, “Yes, he is, go right in.”
Harold Sutherland’s office kept the same glum tone as the rest of the building—no individual tokens and nothing that could be described as decorative or attractive. The closest thing to a luxury was the window with a view of the park, but that seemed accidental as one side of the bank inevitably had to face the nice scenery. Darian was surprised to note that a man who had been club chairman of Challaid FC for nearly a decade didn’t have any memorabilia or photos of their triumphs at his place of work.
Harold Sutherland got up from behind his desk and reached out a hand, saying, “It’s good to see you, Philip; it’s been too long since you were in the bank.”
“You say that every time I see you and I keep telling you it makes no sense for me to visit a place I don’t work at.”
Harold sighed with a smile on his face and obviously decided not to poke the touchy subject any harder. He had great affection for his nephew and no wish for an argument with him, certainly not when three strange strangers were filing into the room behind him. It took the best part of a minute for handshakes, introductions and everyone to get seated in front of the cheap-looking desk; time enough for Darian to realize that Harold sat with his back to the window so that he couldn’t even have that small pleasure distract him while he worked.
“I understand this is about the car crash a couple of months ago?”
Vinny said, “Yes, the woman involved is my ex-wife, Freya, and she’s gone missing since it happened. One notable thing is that her car was destroyed at a wrecker’s yard the day after she was last seen, so we’re working backward through its history to see if it might have something to do with all this. What do you remember about the accident?”
Harold nodded, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and said, “I do remember it well. I wouldn’t say it to her because she seemed, well, fiery, but I think it was probably her fault; she pulled out when she shouldn’t have. She was exceedingly insistent that she wasn’t to blame and I didn’t want a scene. It happened on Kidd Street so there were plenty of people around and I thought agreeing to pay for it would take the sting out of the tail. It all only took three or four minutes before a replacement car picked me up.”
Phil said, “And she made a claim?”
“Yes, she did. I remember signing off on it because it reminded me of the accident. It was, if I remember rightly, about six hundred pounds, but I can have someone dig out the receipt for an exact number.”
That ended any speculation she was trying to rip him off. People didn’t go on the run for the sake of fiddling six hundred quid, not even in Challaid.
Darian said, “Did you have any other contact with Freya?”
“No, I assume I must have given her my office contact details, or perhaps Will, my driver, did, so that she could put the claim in. But, no, that was it.”
“Could your driver have had any further contact with her?”
“Will? I don’t know, I don’t think so. He’s never mentioned her to me again although that doesn’t mean a lot. I don’t think he appreciated her blaming him for the accident. You could ask him. I can call across the road to Eideard’s Tower where the drivers wait. We don’t have room for them in here so they’re next door. This place wasn’t built with the modern needs of the company in mind, I’m afraid, and we have no room left to expand.”
“If it’s no trouble.”
He looked at Vinny as he said, “No trouble at all. I know you’ve been looking out for Philip while he’s been working with you and the family appreciates that. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
A quick phone call and some hurried handshakes and they were out of the office and back in the lift, Sholto beginning to breathe properly again, Vinny and Phil looking like they both understood this was going to be a waste of time and Darian trying to take in the whole robotic, unblinking, unfriendly atmosphere of the place.