WHEN DARIAN woke it was to a distant noise and a certain sense that he hadn’t had enough sleep. He rolled over and opened his eyes. What had it been? Something familiar, he thought, and through the fog of his half-sleeping brain came the memory. His phone.
He reached across and picked it up from the bedside table. None of his furniture had cost anything. The Ross siblings had kept very little of what had been in their parents’ house and what hadn’t been worth selling had been shared between the three of them, which didn’t leave much each. Most of the rest of Darian’s belongings had come from charity shops and secondhand places, some of it not built to last much longer.
It was three fifty, according to his phone when he looked at it, confirming the reason for his tiredness. The number was new, no name to identify it, and his mind raced ahead of the finger reaching out to drag the answer icon. It could have been anyone, including some time waster with a scam to run. More likely it was someone from the police or from Raven or Sutherland Bank’s security department. The timing was more important than the number because that told him it was an emergency. Only the drunk and the urgent call you at three fifty in the morning.
He answered and said, “Hello.”
“You have to come to my house, please. Someone is in here.”
It was said in a whisper, a desperate hiss from a man filled with so much fear he couldn’t stop it snaking out his mouth when he opened it. Two seconds into the plea Darian realized he was talking to Simon Sutherland, panicked and alone with a stranger in his house.
“Call the police, Simon, and I’ll be right round.”
“I will, I will. You have to hurry.”
There was a second after hanging up during which Darian paused and tried to understand the feeling creeping up on him. There was some excitement there, the feeling that this could be it, the vital moment. Someone had broken into the house before to plant Ruby-Mae’s bra and implicate Simon and now the same person was trying again. This could have been an attempt to repeat the trick and implicate him in Freya’s disappearance. A person who thought they could get in and out unseen and unheard, or a person who didn’t care because they were sure Simon had no one to call for help. A person who didn’t know he had Darian’s number and perhaps didn’t understand that the last few days had changed Simon, just a little. People had been in his house, strangers he had allowed in and spoken to, and he had been dragged out to the police station. He had Darian’s number and was willing to call it, to call the police, too.
Darian scrambled out of bed and began to pull on clothes that should have gone into the wash basket ahead of the next time he was close enough to running out of clothing that he was compelled to switch the washing machine on.
A thought pricked at him, the underlying part of that feeling he hadn’t been able to identify before. If Simon Sutherland had killed Ruby-Mae and Freya then this could be part of his plan. He feared that Darian and Sholto were getting too close so he lured Darian to the house to get rid of him. If Dent had been working for him then he died trying to find out just how close they were and that had sent Simon into a panic. It made only a fraction of sense, which was a little more than most alternatives.
Darian called Sholto, waiting a frustratingly long time for an answer. Sholto typically woke up in stages and the first two were long and groggy and usually a few hours away. Eventually the phone was answered with a croaky “Sholto Douglas.”
“It’s me, Darian. I just got a call from Simon Sutherland saying someone is in his house and he wants me to go up there. He said he’ll call the police as well. I’m going to go up in a taxi and see what’s going on.”
In a split second Sholto skipped to the wide-awake phase and said, “No, you will not. That could be a trap; you don’t know what’s going on here, Simon calling you up in the dying hours. Stay at the flat and I’ll pick you up, we’ll go up together and we’ll tip off our friends in the police before we go anywhere as well.”
He hung up before Darian could argue back. The risk of a trap was low because Simon was smart enough to understand that Darian would call for backup, and the police, himself. If it was a genuine emergency then he couldn’t wait for Sholto to trundle his way through the city to get there.
He pulled on his shoes and tied his laces and on the way to the door of the flat he called Vinny. Through to voicemail. Vinny would either be fast asleep or out on a shift, so Darian left a message.
“Vinny, it’s Darian. I just got a call from Simon Sutherland saying that someone’s in his house and me and Sholto are on our way up there. You might want to swing up and join us if you get the chance.”
Darian slipped the phone into his pocket and went downstairs to the front door of the building. He stood out on the street, shivering in the cold, waiting for what he knew would be an interminable length of time for Sholto to get there. These hours, so late or so early depending on which way round you look at a clock, are the moments when Challaid is at its most beautiful, the sun threatening to take the world back and the gray of the moon across the still loch, clinging to the surface. It’s quiet, and it feels like a city with no evil, just a place any person would want to live their life. Those are the least honest hours of the day. Darian waited, edgy.