DARIAN WAS standing in the office with Sholto, who was hovering somewhere between fury and giddy panic. It wasn’t the prospect of sniffing around a suspect that had him turning puce; it was the thought of being at a party filled with the rich and powerful.
“Not just a room full, not just a house full but a whole bloody island of them. How are we supposed to fit in there?”
Darian said, “I don’t know about you, but I plan to lie through my teeth.”
“I used to be a detective in the Challaid Police Force, Darian, I know how to keep a lie running, but how does anyone fit in among that lot? I don’t know what to wear, not a clue.”
Darian had called and told him about the party they were going to, so they had met at the office in the early evening, Sholto dressed in a suit that was a little tight but smarter than usual after Darian told him to tuck his shirt in at the back. Darian had on his one good suit with a blue shirt and no tie.
He said, “The dress code is smart casual.”
“What does that mean, Darian? Those two words cancel each other out and any sensible person knows it. I have a tie in one pocket and a bow tie in the other. Do I wear one or the other or neither or both?”
“Neither, and if we get there and everyone’s in ties you can slip it on.”
“It’s brown and yellow.”
“Brown and yellow? Why the hell do you have a brown and yellow tie?”
“It’s the only one I’ve got. Well, I have a black tie as well, for funerals, obviously, but this is the only one I’ve got for the living. If I wear the black one they’ll think I’m a waiter and I won’t have the confidence to correct them. I don’t want to be serving drinks all night.”
“What happened to all the ties you had when you were a cop?”
“Burned them in a wee metal bin in the back garden the day I retired, my way of celebrating. In hindsight it was a rash move, but the thing about hindsight is that you can only have it after the event.”
They left the office and drove up to Cruinn Pier in Sholto’s Fiat. The small car park on the pier was almost full with cars whose heated seats were worth more than Sholto’s entire vehicle. They parked at the back and walked toward the dock where the ferry would arrive in a few minutes. There were a handful of people waiting with them, most going to the party and all in good spirits. Someone made a joke about financial speculations and Sholto laughed much too hard, the way people do when they really wish they’d understood the punch line. Nobody asked who they were or what they did for a living so the lies they’d prepared could stay in their thin wrappers a little longer.
A loud man was defending the honor of the Sutherland Bank to a bored-looking woman. “I know a lot of people view us as some cynical company that seeks to hold back the progress of others but that isn’t at all the case. We’re as committed to social progress and equality as anyone, but we’ve always insisted that these things have to be sustainable, that we spend only what we have and go at a pace that ensures nothing is rushed and the foundations are well set. I would argue that this is the very opposite of the anti-progress attitude you’re accusing us of, wouldn’t you? We don’t just want progress, we want it to last. Isn’t that what you want, too?”
From where they stood they could see with relief the ferry pull away from the pier on the southern point of Eilean Seud and make the five-minute run across to join them. It was small and white but the deck they stood on was well covered and had hot air blasting from one end. It was well scrubbed and any seagull that even thought of taking a shit on it would probably have been blasted out of the sky before it could take aim. The ferry brought them quickly across the cold water and the island came more starkly into view, lit up and laden with hundred-and-fifty-year-old mansions of understated elegance and trees older still. Darian and Sholto hung back and made sure they were the last off the boat so they could walk to Harold’s house alone.
There was one narrow, cobbled road on Eilean Seud that ran from the pier in the south and curved up to the north of the long and thin island, each step carrying them further back in time to a fantasy land of old money. The Challaid rich had built mansions from banking money and merchant money and pirate money and slave ship money and whaling money, in a time when the city belonged to them and the outside world didn’t get a say, a time they wished had never passed and one they were trying to re-create in miniature.
There were houses on either side, thirty-two on the island, and each was pristine. Living on the island brought with it a responsibility to maintain aesthetic standards. Even the lampposts along the street looked like they would be powered by gas and lit every evening by a man with a thick mustache and wearing a hat. Alders stretched across from both sides of the tree-lined lane to touch in the middle in places, providing a picturesque canopy for the sunlight to filter through on good days and on bad ones a flimsy cover from the worst of the rain, which, when it did get through, fell in large, heavy blobs of collected water. It would have been fairy-tale pretty in the fading light of a Challaid night if it hadn’t been trying so desperately hard.
As they walked along the road Sholto said, “And to think, I used to be jealous of people who lived in Barton. I thought that was the pinnacle. How naive I was.”
“I don’t know, has a whiff of the gilded cage about it.”
“No, Simon Sutherland’s house reeked of it, but this is just gilded. Not everything attractive is a trap, Darian.”
At the gates to Harold Sutherland’s mansion a couple of smiling young women were asking people for their names and checking them against their list. Darian noticed that a pair who had been on the boat with them, who must have been regulars at these shindigs, had been allowed straight through without a check. Now it was time to test the false IDs in the face of a brief check.
Sholto smiled and said, “I’m Corvun Reed, this is Gito Conin.”
The young woman, dressed in a trouser suit and with her dark hair tied back, looked at the list on her tablet. “Yes, McCourt Securities. Go straight in, the house is just ahead at the end of the drive. Drinks and food are in the main study and also the garden at the back. Enjoy the evening.”
“Thank you.”
It was always a strange thing to watch, the casual lies Sholto could tell when he was getting into a performance and his nerves settled. It was as fragile as a butterfly’s wings. One gust could blow him miles off course, but his acting was still, at its best, pretty good.
The drive was cobbled like the road and the long front garden was a colorful beauty parade that looked as if it had been lifted from a painting. The house was, as expected, large and imposing, and the main study the woman had mentioned was staring straight at them. It was two stories high and had large French doors and cathedral windows which flooded it with light. Even before they stepped inside they could see it stretched back to the rear of the building, with the same design to give a spectacular view of the loch at the end of the back garden. The room had plenty of couches and chairs and sitting in them were people well used to the luxury around them. The view didn’t awe them, nor did the paintings on the wall or the cost of the wine they were gulping down and would be pissing away in a few hours.
As they stood at the open French doors Sholto said, “We’ll sniff around but not too loudly. If you see the man himself, duck behind a millionaire, we don’t want to get kicked out. Even a classy pair like ourselves might struggle to restore our standing in elite society if we get rumbled here.”
Sholto hiked over to the side of the room where several waiters were milling around with trays, food always a relaxant for him. Darian walked slowly through the scenery, picking up snatches of conversations that sounded as though they were competing with each other in the world championship of sleep inducement. Politics and business were the prime subjects and the subtext of both was money. As Darian reached the end of the room he turned back and saw that Sholto was deep in conversation with a smiling woman who appeared to be trying to explain what all the available nibbles were.
Darian, with hands in pockets, stepped out into the back garden, stopped, and took a step back inside, out of view. Harold Sutherland was just outside, holding court before a gaggle of sycophants.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love Challaid FC, but only for what it can do for the city. There’s a poisonous pall over the sport in this country, so bitter and parochial, and the people underneath it are so busy looking down on others all the time that they haven’t noticed it up there. I was at the Motherwell game a few Fridays ago and the crowd loved Friday night football, but because it inconvenienced a small traveling support from the central belt it’s being shelved. No mention of what’s better for our fans, or that we had a Champions League match on the Tuesday, representing our country. People are more interested in establishing moral superiority than improving the actual football. Honestly, the only thing more tedious than actual politics is football politics. That’s why I’d like to do something in camanachd as well, if I could find a club in this city that knew how to listen to reason. Such a great sport and yet they’re proud of their amateurism. It’s absurd. I may have to set up a club of my own and get them into the league; if I do they’ll show the rest just what professionalism looks like.”
When he had finished his spiel there was some muttering of agreement from men pretending to be interested and some flirtatious cooing from the one woman whose husband was standing with his arm round her. Harold Sutherland was a charismatic man who found controlling a conversation easy and it was the simplest thing in the world to make a powerfully good impression on people. That, Darian thought bitterly, was something that could easily be abused and perhaps its rare failures could provoke a stern response. At the same time, though, this did not seem like a man who would need to throw a car at a woman in a crass attempt to win her over.
When Sutherland moved away from the patio outside the door and across to the side of the garden to speak to people there Darian stepped outside. He took a glass of wine from a passing waitress just so that he wouldn’t stand out so much and headed toward the end of the garden to check the view.
“Quite something, isn’t it?”
Darian turned to find a woman in her thirties with short hair, high cheekbones and skin dark enough to shine under the lights in the trees.
“It’s extraordinary, yes.”
“I’m Asteria Hobnil, everyone calls me Asti. I work for Duff Shipping. I handle our Asian accounts. I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.”
“Gito Conin, McCourt Securities, first-time visitor, long-time wisher I could afford to live here. I thought the Sutherlands and the Duffs didn’t get along.”
“Hate each other with a passion. If they didn’t love being rich so much they would have burned the city to the ground fighting one another centuries ago. The Sutherlands still think all the Duffs are boorish and the Duffs still think all the Sutherlands are stuck up and they might both be right, but at least the Duffs have fun and do some good. Harold keeps inviting people from the company because he’s trying to build bridges, metaphorically speaking of course, and Duff keeps sending us along to pretend we’re all pals now but really to spy on him.”
Darian chuckled unconvincingly at the mention of spying and said, “So what’s he like, Harold Sutherland? I’ve only met him once through work.”
“He’s determinedly likable, which is impressive at first, but I have a deep distrust of people who only behave one way, only have one setting. He never switches off.”
“Oh, I’ve seen him angry.”
“Really? The one time you met him and you managed to make him crack. You’ll have to tell me your secret. Every Duff in the city would love to know…Is that man looking for you?”
Darian turned to follow Asti’s gaze and saw Sholto, sweat glistening on his face under fairy lights, walking through the garden, staring to left and right. It looked very much like time to leave.