DARIAN ARRIVED at the office on Cage Street the following morning shortly after Sholto. He knew his boss was already there because he could smell his breakfast from the top of the stairs, picked up from The Northern Song on the ground floor as he made his way into work each morning.
As Darian closed the office door behind him Sholto, with a gob full of grub, said, “I have no idea what happened last night other than the fact that every time you go to a party someone ends up getting arrested. That’s why you and me will never socialize.”
“Yeah, well, this time he actually wanted to be.”
“Takes a special sort of fool to go looking for an arrest in this city. What got into him?”
Darian sat at his desk by the window. “I don’t know, but it was in there before he reached the club, so it must have been in there before he left work. He didn’t work that swanky do his boss was throwing, so he might have been in a huff about that. Maybe he feels like Sutherland set us on him, or maybe Sutherland gave him a bollocking for the evasive way he spoke to us.”
“Or maybe he spoke to Sutherland about her in the same evasive way and the big boss man thinks the driver might be a worthy suspect.”
“Have you heard anything back from DS MacNeith?”
Sholto piled more rice onto his fork and lifted it toward his gaping mouth, grains falling onto his desk, and said, “Not yet. If he was in the state you say he was then they would have let him sleep it off in the salubrious surrounds of the drunk tank. Let’s say they questioned him at Bakers Moor about the attack first thing this morning and then sent him across to Cnocaid. They might not have started talking at him yet.”
“Hopefully she’ll get some useful info out of him.”
Sholto nodded. “She might, but it might not be the info you’re looking for. How likely is it that a man who committed a perfect kidnap in near broad daylight would then go and get himself arrested for something as tedious as a drunken scrap outside Transistor?”
“You don’t think he’s involved?”
“If he is then he’s gone from criminal genius to colossal goof in the space of a week. That’s the sort of drop in standards that only a witch doctor could bring about and I don’t know any living this far north. I do think he’s up to something, but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s something we care about.”
Darian was about to say something he hoped would avoid decreasing the number of alternative suspects to just Vinny when his mobile rang. He looked at the screen and saw the code that told him it was JJ.
“JJ.”
“Hello, Darian, is it good to talk?”
“It is.”
“I thought I’d call you and tell you a funny wee story about what happened to me when I turned up at work this morning. I wasn’t even into my boiler suit when a car comes into the yard and these two spivs in fancy suits get out and tell me they’re working for an insurance company and they’re looking for Freya Dempsey’s Passat. I told them I didn’t know anything about it because I did know more about them than they realized. One of them was Alan Dudley, and unless he’s changed jobs in the last couple of months I know he works for Raven Investigators, not some insurance company. Isn’t that funny? Anyway, I’ll see you when you come back with the Focus, if it makes it back.”
Some people, Darian thought as he hung up, were very good at being informants. Like many who worked on the fringes of criminality JJ knew who the threats were, made sure he would recognize them if they showed up in his vicinity. Douglas Independent Research he saw as a potential friend because they weren’t official, but Raven were the biggest private investigators in the city, probably the country, and JJ viewed them with a level of suspicion usually reserved for the police.
Darian repeated the story to Sholto, who stopped scraping the bottom of the container with his fork to say, “Raven? Bloody Raven? Who are those pound store Pinkertons working for?”
“The obvious candidate would be Harold Sutherland. He knows about the car, realized his driver was a suspect and decided to dig a little deeper himself.”
If you asked Sholto about Raven Investigators you would likely be on the receiving end of a forty-minute diatribe about them, the highlights of which would be this. The private investigations industry had a good thing going in Scotland until Raven managed to cock it up for everyone. They had, at that point, four large offices in the country, in Challaid, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh, although they shut the one in Aberdeen a couple of years ago. They cultivated good relationships with the police and did a lot of their work for big businesses, so they were well insulated from the occasional act of stupidity they were prone to committing. They were, and these would be Sholto’s words, arrogant morons, reckless half-wits and a cretinous collection of corrupt clowns. It was their Edinburgh office that ran a little too wild and free, bumping shoulders with alarmed politicians and accelerating the formation of government policy to tighten controls on private investigators across Scotland. It was a policy so quickly thrown together it almost matched one in England word for word. Even though they had shrunk since then, Raven’s Challaid office remained the biggest investigator in the city, and on the list of things Sholto could bring himself to hate Raven were in with a bullet at number one.
Sholto said, “Well, if that lot are involved in this case we’re not having anything more to do with it. I don’t want to be anywhere near them…Or, no, wait, if they’re involved then we need to get all the information we can and get this solved. That’ll show them. Or…Murt mhòr, I don’t know, I hate them too much to make a decision.”
“If you can get in touch with MacNeith we might be able to get a small lead on them.”
Sholto shook his head. “If Sutherland hired them then he’ll know a lot more about what Dent said in the interviews than we will. But I’ll give her a ring anyway, see what she spits out at me. If we could get this wrapped up before that lot, oh, that would be sweet as three bags of sugar.”
Darian smiled and nodded. He leaned back in his chair and thought how sad it was that the investigation was a challenge to them, a process about finding a truth, while for Finn Reno it was about waiting for someone to tell him why his mother had disappeared. It wasn’t that Darian and Sholto didn’t care, it was just that for them Freya Dempsey was a part of their week, whereas for Finn she was a huge part of his life.