A Line of Forgotten Blood Read online

  A LINE OF FORGOTTEN BLOOD

  ALSO BY MALCOLM MACKAY

  In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide

  A LINE OF FORGOTTEN BLOOD

  Malcolm Mackay

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Malcolm Mackay, 2019

  The moral right of Malcolm Mackay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Jacket design: Anna Green

  Jacket image: © Shutterstock

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  (HB): 9781786697134

  (ANZTPB): 9781786697141

  (E): 9781786697127

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  www.headofzeus.com

  Contents

  Also by Malcolm Mackay

  Welcome Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  There was a bang and her head jerked forward. The world fell into a blur, a feeling of movement and noise but nothing making sense, her brain swamped with shock. The world was slowing but vaguely she knew nothing was slowing fast enough. That was when she snapped back into real time, when her instincts scoffed at her sluggish brain and took back control.

  Freya Dempsey slammed her foot on the brake pedal and the car screeched to a stop. She took a few seconds to breathe deeply and consider where she was, what had happened and where she should direct her rising anger. She had pulled out on the corner of Siar Road and Kidd Street and some eyeless halfwit had gone straight into the side of her car. It had to be their fault because the shock commanding her system wasn’t willing to move over and make room for guilt. Some idiot had crashed into her and if they weren’t already in great pain she intended to do something about that. Traffic was stopping around her and somewhere in the background a committed moron was leaning on his horn as though it might help.

  Freya began to swear loudly and prodigiously in the car, as a woman from Whisper Hill would, and she toned it down to a feral hiss as she stepped out into public, as a woman living in Cnocaid should. Nothing felt painful as she stood up, although she was pretty sure she could whip it up into something chronic should the need to lay it on thick arise. She grimaced at the damage to her car and repeated the look when she spotted what had hit her. Now she could see how expensive it was she decided it was definitely their fault.

  A man in a dark blue suit and white shirt was getting out of a black car that would have been gliding luxuriously through the streets of Challaid until it crossed her path. Now the front right was tangled up in itself, the bumper pushed into the wheel arch, and the well-dressed driver was looking at her with the sort of anger that promised trouble before he opened his mouth.

  He shouted, ‘What the hell were you doing? Don’t you even look where you’re going, or are we all just supposed to play dodgems with you?’

  It occurred to her that she hadn’t looked carefully because a van had blocked her view, but she shouted back, ‘Of course I looked. You must have been rocketing up that road like you owned it, thinking you can drive however you want. You’re going to have to pay for the damage you’ve done.’

  His mouth hung open for a few seconds before he said, ‘Have you been on the glue or something? That was your fault, you’ll pay for that.’

  Before either of them could spin the argument round in another circle the back door of the heinously expensive saloon car opened and a man got out. He wore a dark grey suit and white shirt with yellow tie and a long black coat that was open. He had a trim goatee beard and was bald on top, hair shaved short at the sides and wearing gold-rimmed glasses. He couldn’t have been much past forty, Freya guessed, and from the second he stepped out of the car it was clear that he not only owned it, he also owned anything else that caught his fancy.

  He didn’t look angry as he walked over to the woman and young man, instead rather amused. Freya Dempsey was thirty-one and boldly attractive in a way that warned you in advance she was more than two handfuls, so whatever trouble you got into with her was your own fault. The owner of the car seemed to have worked all that out by the time he reached her, and he was still smiling.

  He said, ‘I am sorry about that, a terrible accident, no one’s fault.’

  Freya said, ‘Not mine anyway.’

  He laughed again, turned to his driver and said, ‘Will, see if you can get the cars off the road so we don’t block the traffic, and deal with the police when they finally bother to show up, their station’s only up the road. Oh, and if you see who’s been blowing their horn for the last few minutes see if you can stick their steering wheel up their backside and make them spin on it.’

  The driver was used to doing what he was told and scurried off, leaving Freya alone with his boss. They stepped onto the busy pavement, ignoring the pedestrians who had stopped to watch the pleasurable spectacle of a minor accident that inconvenienced others but not them.

  The smiling man said, ‘My name’s Harold Sutherland.’

  ‘Oh, wow, so you can afford the repairs.’

  The Sutherland family ran the Sutherland Bank, and it wouldn’t be a skip into hyperbole to say the Sutherland Bank had a controlling interest in the city of Challaid, and undue influence over the country of Scotland. The bank often seemed to have its hand on the tiller of the entire economy, and the family who founded it still very carefully controlled it. If you lived in Challaid and your name was Sutherland you had no excuse for not being wealthy, and if you sat on the board of the bank you were probably rich to the extent that counting the zeros on your bank account became a long snooze.

  Harold laughed at her bad manners and said, ‘I suppose so. Can I ask your name?’

  ‘F
reya Dempsey.’

  ‘Were you going somewhere important? Perhaps we could call a taxi for you.’

  ‘Nowhere important enough to make me leave my car. You?’

  ‘A meeting, but they’ll wait for me.’

  The driver had by now moved both cars to the side of the road so the traffic was moving again, crunching slowly over broken glass. He was tall and broad, still in his twenties but with the sort of downturned mouth that suggested he had a lot to frown about and lines on his forehead that gave an equally negative second opinion. He had a narrow face and thin eyebrows, all a little too angular to be attractive. He glared at Harold as he stalked across to Freya and handed her car keys to her without a word.

  He turned to Harold and said, ‘I’ve called another car; they’ll be here in a minute or two.’

  Before another word was said the police arrived and started asking questions of them all, looking to apply blame as quickly as possible. When they heard the Sutherland name the blame rushed with open arms towards Freya, and when an even more extravagant car arrived to help him complete his journey it was all they could do not to take off their jackets to cover the puddle Harold stepped over as he made his way to it. Freya stood on the pavement, abandoned by everyone, including the police who had independently decided not to care about her a millisecond after Harold Sutherland suggested she had done nothing wrong and they should leave her be. All she could do was stand on Kidd Street, shops and shoppers on either side of the road, and wait by her battered car for the tow truck to arrive.

  1

  It started, as other worthwhile stories have, with a phone call. Darian Ross was sitting at his desk by the window of the Douglas Independent Research office on the second floor of a building on Cage Street when his mobile rang. His boss, Sholto Douglas, was downstairs at The Northern Song, the Chinese restaurant on the ground floor, where he was buying them lunch, so Darian was alone. Leaning back with an elbow on the windowsill, looking down into the narrow pedestrianised lane, he picked the vibrating phone from his desk and saw the name on the screen: Vinny. PC Vincent Reno, a friend and police contact in the Whisper Hill district to the north-east of Challaid. They did each other favours, Vinny the cop on the toughest beat in the city and Darian the unregistered private detective pretending he was a humble researcher.

  He answered the phone and said, ‘Vinny, what flavour of favour are you after?’

  ‘A bitter one, Darian. I have this missing person thing, I think she’s missing anyway, and I was hoping you might be able to help me out with it.’

  The gregarious, barrel-chested copper sounded more sombre than usual, so Darian said, ‘Who’s the missing person?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the bitter pill, it’s Freya.’

  ‘As in your ex-wife Freya?’

  ‘There can be only one.’

  ‘Freya, the woman you’ve been hoping would go missing for the last five years?’

  ‘Well, we only split up five years ago, so I’ve been hoping she would go missing for a little longer than that, if we’re counting. Now she’s gone and I’m buzzing around all over the city like a blue-arsed fly trying to find her, this is just way out of her brutal character. Wee Finn is missing his mother something chronic and my weekends just aren’t the same without her verbal abuse to bookend them. Listen, can we talk about this, just the two of us to start with? I’ve got nothing against Sholto, but I’d rather start with your advice before you bring in the old man for wit and wisdom.’

  ‘Sure. Where and when?’

  ‘How about Misgearan, six tonight, when I knock off. We’ll get a room and have a drink and I’ll tell you what I know, which will take about half a glass.’

  Darian said he’d see him there and hung up, wondering if he’d ever been to Misgearan and not woken up the following morning with a jackhammer dismantling the inside of his skull. It was a tough little drinking den up on Long Walk Lane in Whisper Hill, a place that should and would have been shut down long ago if the local police didn’t also use it as their own little alcohol-sodden hideaway. It had long been a favourite of Vinny’s.

  Sholto Douglas returned with their lunch and they ate at their desks. Darian didn’t mention the call to the former detective because there was much they didn’t tell each other until circumstances prised their mouths open. That makes it sound like they didn’t get along, but they did, very well in fact; it was just that each respected the other enough to see his limitations.

  Sholto was a man hitting fifty who had been ecstatic to free himself from the Challaid Police Force and seek employment that better suited his stress-free aspirations. In the one-room office on the second floor of a modern grey building in the Bank district, right in the centre of Challaid, he had set up his private detective business and called it a research company so he wouldn’t be held to the legal restrictions of a proper agency. He hired the young son of his former colleague on the force and tried to teach Darian everything he knew about keeping your head down and staying out of trouble.

  Darian, a handsome twenty-three-year-old with soft features and intense large brown eyes, looked across the room at his boss, short and chubby, bald on top and with hair at the sides that had won whatever battle they had recently fought with a comb. His white shirt was a size too small for him and the top button was open under his tie, his desk so shrouded in papers that the folders his phone, laptop and foil lunch tray rested on might have reached to the floor for all anyone knew. Sholto played the figure of bumbling innocence well, but he was fiercely loyal and there were sharp edges to his placid mind that cut through his well-constructed image from time to time. Darian wasn’t going to bring trouble to Sholto’s door; he had done so before and owed his employer better this time around.

  They spent the next couple of hours filing separate reports on a man they had been hired to find, a pension fund manager who had apparently fled Challaid with £45,000 of other people’s hard-earned cash. They worked out he had only made it as far as his teenage lover’s flat in Whisper Hill before she relieved him of the money and made it all the way to Costa Rica with it, one of the Caledonian countries. The only thing she’d left behind was the pension fund manager, and his employers weren’t paying to get him back.

  They did what they always did: wrote separate reports, one for the insurance company that had hired them which was full of what the customer wanted to hear, and one for their own files containing all the gory little truths and judgements that might prove useful in the future. Sholto always wrote for the client because he had the reserve and diplomacy of a man who wanted repeat clients, and Darian always wrote for their records because he had the bluntness of youth.

  At ten past five Sholto said, ‘Well, doesn’t look like the phone will ring with a lucrative job to rain riches upon us. I might as well go home and mourn the remains of the day with Mrs Douglas.’

  Sholto spent roughly forty-six per cent of his working life complaining about a lack of money and clients but the truth was they were doing okay, well-paid, petty jobs that kept them bumping along in the potholes of society. Their work for big companies wasn’t often dignified, and as the rich couldn’t stomach parting with money those paydays were infrequent, but their heads, necks and shoulders were above water.

  Darian said, ‘I’m nearly done as well. I’ll be off in ten minutes.’

  ‘Okay, lock up behind you, we wouldn’t want anyone coming in and stealing… well…’

  Sholto had his laptop and phone in his bag; all they left behind in the office overnight was paperwork they weren’t scared of others seeing. The good stuff was well hidden now and there was enough on those files to keep gossipmongers and curious coppers up reading all night. The security of those files was absolute and no one other than the two members of Douglas Independent Research staff got unfettered access to them.

  He waited in the office for twenty minutes, knowing Sholto wouldn’t go straight home; he’d be downstairs in The Northern Song, chatting to Mr Yang and collecting his dinner. Al
l of Sholto’s three square meals a day came from there, and they were responsible for his changing shape. Darian waited a few minutes after seeing his boss walk along Cage Street, laptop bag in one hand and white plastic bag with food in the other.

  With the door locked behind him as promised, he made his way down the stairs and out through the side door. The Chinese restaurant took up the entire ground floor, the Yang family flat and a talent agency office on the first and Douglas Independent Research, Challaid Data Services and an empty office on the top floor. Growing up, Darian had wanted to be a detective like his father, with all the bustle of a big station, but this was the next best thing. From Cage Street it was a well-worn twelve-minute walk to Glendan Station, he had no car of his own, and then the train up to Whisper Hill to meet Vinny.

  DOUGLAS INDEPENDENT RESEARCH

  Douglas Independent Research

  21 Cage Street

  Challaid CH3 4QA

  Tel: (01847) 041981

  Dear Mrs Gilbert,

  I’m writing to confirm that Douglas Independent Research has completed the first phase of our investigation into the disappearance of your employee, Mr Walter Reilly, at the same time as a significant amount of money from the pension fund of your company, PINE Insurance. You will know by now that we have managed to track down Mr Reilly.

  I have not included, at this time, a bill for our services as the question of recovering the missing money remains open. In our initial contact you stated that identifying Mr Reilly’s whereabouts would be our only role, but as his discovery did not yield the missing money I would prefer to give you time to consider whether our investigation should be extended. My updated report is enclosed with this letter. I await your reply.

  Yours Sincerely,

  Sholto Douglas

  Douglas Independent Research

  ***

  REPORT INTO FINANCIAL AFFAIRS OF WALTER REILLY

  By Sholto Douglas, Douglas Independent Research –