THE FIAT pulled into the parking place on Dlùth Street at the bottom of Cage Street that Sholto always used when at the office. Neither of them had said a word on the short drive from the station. Tiredness had hit them both in a heavy wave and was making smart choices difficult. They should have gone straight to their beds, but the night wasn’t done with them yet. They had to check on the office and they had to check on Mr. Yang. As they turned the corner they could see the whole Yang family out on the street, talking to cops. Challaid Police had finally turned up, but only because someone getting hit by a train had forced them to accelerate a process that typically moved at the speed of coastal erosion.
Sholto walked up to Mr. Yang and said, “You okay, pal?”
“I am, yes, we all are. We heard what happened; the police are here because of it. Are you okay too?”
“We’re all right. Saw some things our eyeballs would rather have avoided, but these pictures get placed in front of you in life now and then.”
A young detective from Bank Station came over and introduced herself as DC Sarah Lowell. She said, “I know we already have statements from you, but it would help us if you could check your office to see if anything was taken.”
They walked past the spot where Mr. Yang had been knocked over and Darian noted there was no sign of the meat cleaver now. Had the police seen it they would no doubt have wanted to talk sternly about Mr. Yang’s intentions, so Darian guessed that either he or his eminently more sensible wife had returned it to the kitchen where it belonged. No need to make the Yangs’ night any more awkward than it had already been.
As they were walking up the stairs to the second floor an only slightly familiar face appeared above them, waiting. He nodded when he saw them and said, “Mr. Douglas, Mr. Ross, I’m Warren from Challaid Data Services. I called you earlier on.”
He was a dashing man in his late thirties, sweeping black hair and large eyes, an expensive black coat and silver wedding ring. His local accent tilted toward the posh side of the loch, which typically meant it sounded a little more Anglo and a little less Gaelic, not so much spit in the pronunciation.
Sholto said, “We appreciated that, thank you, Warren.”
Warren ran his hand through his hair nervously and said, “What a night. I was talking to one of the cops when I got here, they told me what happened with the guy and the train. A hellish thing to be a part of, but I’m glad you’re both okay.”
He sounded like he meant it too, this man they hardly knew, which was unexpectedly nice of him. People were treating them as though they had been the ones hit by the train, and nobody seemed to have a lot of pity for Will Dent.
Warren continued, “I told the cop I wanted to come up and make sure our office was safe, but I figured it would be, it was yours he was targeting. I’m glad I bumped into you. We’ll need to talk about security for the building at some point, maybe try and get a meeting with the owner about it if we can find the guy.”
Darian nodded and said, “I didn’t know we had any security as it was.”
Standing in the dim light of the landing Warren said, “We put some in a few months ago. We got a contract with the council, handling some data for them, and part of the agreement was that we had to make sure everything was extremely secure because they’re paranoid about information being stolen or leaked, so we upped the security from nonexistent to minor. There’s a camera up there so we’ve got the landing covered and it sends alerts to my phone if there’s movement registered outside of working hours. I checked the feed and here was some guy making a hard job out of forcing your door.”
Darian and Sholto both looked up at the white plastic circle on the ceiling that he had pointed to as a camera. Sholto said, “I thought that was a smoke alarm.”
“No, no, that’s a camera.”
“So we still don’t have a smoke alarm.”
“I put a letter into your mailbox telling you about it when it was being put in, I thought you knew it was there. I got in touch with the owner, eventually. He said he was on holiday in Mexico, so I emailed him the details and he agreed to it. No one else in the building objected, although I never managed to make contact with the talent agency downstairs, if there’s anyone there to make contact with. I should have made the effort to come along the corridor and talk to you about it.”
“I don’t remember seeing that letter.”
Darian glanced through the open office door. The light was on now and he could see the piles of paper that had smothered Sholto’s desk now carpeting the floor. There could have been a letter from the king in there and it would have had a fifty-fifty chance of ever being read. Darian had always suspected that a lot of worthwhile offers and information got lost in those piles.
Darian said, “Well, thanks for the call.”
The two of them went into the office. It wasn’t hard to work out that Dent hadn’t taken anything with him because the only things of importance or value were still locked up in the now slightly damaged filing cabinet. They stood in the middle of a room that had never looked or felt smaller and scanned the damage he’d done trying to find something that in the end would have done him no good.
Sholto said, “What the hell did he think he was going to find in here?”
“I don’t know. He must have known where we were so he took his chance, but for what?”
“Unless he thought we were sitting on the evidence that proved his guilt and didn’t realize it.”
“Then how would he know we had it?”
“That I can’t tell you.”
They left the office in the hands of the police, no point giving them a key because the lock was broken on the door. Sholto drove Darian home for the second time that long night.