DARIAN WOKE with the sort of sore muscles and dull headache that overexertion caused. Sleep had been fitful and he was up early, the scenes behind his eyelids grimmer than anything he was likely to see in daylight. He shaved and forced himself to eat a bowl of cereal with milk as suspicious as anyone he had met in the last few days. Normally he would have ditched it and gotten his breakfast from The Northern Song, but he wasn’t sure Mr. Yang would be open this morning.
The trip to Cage Street was bleaker than before, Darian looking at the floor of the train instead of at the people, not interested in how the good and more often bad of Challaid were conducting themselves that morning. The line was open again, the disruption now behind everyone else. As he walked through Glendan Station he looked around for any sign that something tragic had happened, that a man had lost his life just a few hundred yards down the track, but there was none. The death of Will Dent had caused only temporary inconvenience.
Walking down Cage Street he could see a strand of blue and white police tape tied to a drainpipe on the Superdrug store opposite that had presumably stretched across to the other side of the street but had been ripped away hours ago. That was the only admission this had been a crime scene. How quickly a place moved on from the events that occurred there. To his surprise, The Northern Song was open as usual and people were going in to collect their food. Darian went in the side door and up to the office, surprised to find Sholto ahead of him.
Sholto said, “You sleep as badly as I did?”
“Yeah, sleep didn’t want me to begin with and when it came around I didn’t much like the look of it.”
“Bad pictures playing?”
“The same one, over and over. I just don’t understand why he didn’t step out of the way.”
“We’ll never know. Maybe a person gets to the point that they realize the game is up, that their guilt is about to be proven, and the choice between a lifetime in prison and a quick death is a decision we wouldn’t all agree on. People like to say the survival instinct keeps them fighting, but that’s not always true.”
Sholto was trying to convince them both that Will Dent was guilty of killing Ruby-Mae Short and possibly Freya Dempsey as well, because believing he had been evil was the one thing that extracted some of the poison from the trauma that surrounded them. He had to be guilty.
Neither of them got any work done. They sat at their desks and stared into space, unsure what they were supposed to do now anyway. They were looking for Freya but if Dent was guilty then the police were likely to find some trace of her before they could. Darian kept checking his phone to see if there had been a message he had missed, but no one was calling. It was a strange relief to hear footsteps on the stairs and a knock on the door because it meant something was about to happen to break the chilly grip of nothingness.
Sholto let DC Vicario in and she looked at them both sympathetically. “Well, you two have a habit of keeping me up all night with nothing happy to show for it.”
Sholto said, “Nothing to show? What did you find out about Dent?”
“A few things, but not enough. We know he showed a lot of interest in Ruby’s murder right after it happened, but we haven’t found anything that clearly says he was involved and nothing to say he had ever heard of her before her death was reported in the media. We still have to check his phone, it was in his pocket and it’s…broken. That might have more on it, more web searches; we’re hoping it’ll help.”
Darian said, “It says something that he had any interest in it.”
“It says he had an interest, it doesn’t say why and we can’t just guess.”
“What about Freya?”
“Nothing. The only indication he had ever heard of her came from searches made after you questioned him the first time, which is a reasonable time for him to get interested in her case. There were other things, though. He had cash and a bag packed to run with, so there was either guilt or fear there. There was one particularly interesting thing. When Bakers Moor raided his flat they found the second page of a two-page note from Raven Investigators that mentioned you and your work, suggested that you thought Dent was involved in Freya’s case and might have evidence to prove it. It had your address on it. We’ve talked to Raven and they say it was days old and part of a security update to the Sutherland Bank, not even to Harold Sutherland specifically, just the security department.”
Darian looked at her and said, “Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know, it looked like it was written to point someone in your direction. I hear Bran Kennedy is a good liar. We couldn’t get any more out of him but maybe someone else could. Would help to know how Dent got his hands on a letter sent to the security department of the bank. If he stole it then he looks like a desperate man trying to cover his tracks. If someone gave it to him…”
Having rolled her grenade into their morning DC Vicario announced she was going home to get some sleep and left the office. Darian and Sholto both grabbed their coats and left the office just a minute behind her, down to Dlùth Street and the Fiat. They drove straight to Alexander Street in the south of Bank and the Challaid office of Raven Investigators.
The building, on a pleasant curved street, was four stories of brick with plenty of tall windows to let in the little light that beat its way through the clouds and the shadow of Stac Voror. They had to park a way down the road and walk back up. In the reception area inside the front door they saw that Raven had the top floor, so they trudged up the stairs and found themselves in a hallway where a secretary behind her desk was the only person in view. To get to the Raven offices they had to get through the double doors beyond the smiling woman looking up at them.
She said, “Hello, welcome to Raven Investigators, how can I help?”
Sholto said, “We’d like to speak with Bran Kennedy.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“We’ve got something better than that. We’ve got a boiling hot pan of trouble to throw over him.”
“Eh, can I ask who you are?”
“I’m Sholto Douglas, this is Darian Ross.”
“Oh, well, I’m afraid Mr. Kennedy isn’t in his office at the moment…”
Sholto laughed and said, “Isn’t it funny how the mention of our names reminded you of that. You’re a good secretary; we could use someone like you. Couldn’t afford you, though.”
Sholto, in a rare moment of damned bad manners, turned and pulled open the double doors, wandering into the offices uninvited, Darian scurrying to keep up. There was an open floor, maybe seven or eight desks, only three of them currently occupied and Darian recognized Alan Dudley at one. At the back of the large room was an office on its own, and Sholto was already moving toward it with the certainty of a man who had complained here before. He pushed open the door, ignoring the staff closing in on them from behind, and found the man he was looking for.
Bran Kennedy stood up from behind his desk and said, “Douglas, what the hell are you doing in a proper investigator’s office?”
“I’ve come to ask you a series of very awkward questions.”
Sholto and Kennedy stood opposite each other and glared waves of wary hate across the room, like a washed-up bullfighter who’d forgotten to bring his sword and a malnourished bull with no heart, facing off in the arena after the crowd had gone home and the lights had been turned off.
The three employees who had been at their desks, two men and a woman, surrounded Darian in the doorway, one of them grabbing his arm before Kennedy said, “Leave him, lads; let’s hear what Oopsy the clown and the boy blunder have to say before we chuck them out. Go on, Sholto, tell the nice people what’s gotten your blood pressure all riled up? I never saw you this red in the face when you were a cop except out of embarrassment.”
“I’m just here to tell you what you already know.”
“Well, that is a huge surprise, I’d better sit down before I faint.”
One of the men behind Darian sniggered but Sholto ignored him and said, “You know that a letter you wrote was found in the possession of William Dent, and that it provided him with the reason, no, the advice, to target us, which in turn led him to his death. I know you’ve claimed it was a general update to the security department of the bank, but you also know as well as I do that the police aren’t buying that. A case like this, Sutherland’s being questioned about it, no way your updates just went to the security chief. The police are coming after you, Bran. Me and Darian, we’ll be after you too and I suppose you think you can handle us, but the police, Bran, the whole vicious, seething lot of them, you know what it means when they smell blood. That letter painted a bloody great big target on your back, and a lot of people with good aim are ready to take a shot. I hope you’ve got a good shield to hide behind. So, who did you deliver the letter to?”
Kennedy had grown angrier the longer Sholto went on, but he took his time before he answered. In a voice that seemed too small for his large, ugly, totally bald head he said, “I gave it to the security officer, as I always do. I would never lie to the police about something like that. Now, lads, if you’d like to escort these trespassers out of the building.”
The three employees shoved them all the way down to the front door and out into the street with practiced precision and glee. They walked back to the car and Sholto said, “He’s nervous about the police, which means he’ll run for the cover of whichever Sutherland is paying him the big bucks. Let’s see which one moves first.”