‘Let’s meet. Just us.’
Silence. I can hear London behind him, traffic, a siren, the pitch of a city that never quite shuts up. Then: ‘When?’
The pub is halfway between Piccadilly and nowhere. Not the Northern Quarter. I chose this one deliberately. Neutral ground. Adequate beer for people not here for the beer. Sticky tables. Football on the telly that nobody’s watching.
Ron’s already there. Corner booth, pint untouched.
He looks wrong, this Ron is thinner. The jacket hangs differently, hollowed under the eyes. His hands wrapped around the pint glass with the grip of someone holding a railing on a high bridge.
Grief is eating him. Older than the reporting, older than the guilt.
I sit opposite. Don’t speak. Order a pint from the passing barmaid, who reads us correctly and doesn’t attempt small talk. Smart woman.
The pint arrives, and I take a sip. Ron takes a sip—the synchronised drinking of two Carricks who’d rather do anything than start.
‘You reported us.’
A fact, not a question or an accusation. Placed on the table between us like a card turned face-up.
The Carrick tells. ‘I thought I was protecting you.’
‘You nearly destroyed his career.’ Flat. ‘And my results.’
‘I know.’ He stares at his pint. The foam is settling. ‘And I’m sorry.’
Ron doesn’t do sorry. When he says it, he meansI have reviewed the evidence, and the conclusion costs me.
I believe him. Which is worse than not believing him, because if the sorry is real, then the reporting wasn’t malicious, and if it wasn’t malicious, then it was this: the thing I came here to confront, and it’s not what I expected.
‘Why?’
He looks up.
‘Not the reporting. Not the “I was protecting you” version. The real one.’ I lean forwards. My voice drops. ‘Why was it so intense for you, Ron? Vicious. Personal. The way you looked at him. The way you looked at us. That was something else.’
‘Don’t.’
‘That was a man watching something he couldn’t have.’
Ron looks away hard enough that it’s almost a flinch.
‘Ewan.’ His knuckles go white around the glass. ‘Don’t.’
I wait. The pub does its thing around us: the football, the chips, the couple at the bar arguing about whose round it is.
Ron drinks and puts the glass down. Picks it up, puts it down again. The repetition of a man trying to start a sentence that doesn’t have a beginning.
For a second I think he’s going to stand up and leave.
Instead he says: ‘There’s someone.’
Soft enough that I almost miss them under the television and the couple.
Silence holds me, stillness keeps me. The instinct sayspush, but the instinct is wrong. This Ewan waits.
Ron’s eyes are on the table. He does the thing with his thumb—the palm tic, the nervous circuit from October returning because naming it anything else would mean everything.
‘In that bar. The one in the Northern Quarter.’ His voice is flat. Controlled. The control of someone reciting information they’ve memorised from going over it too many times in the dark. ‘I keep thinking about—every time I came, they were there. Same table, same corner, writing. Always writing. Notebooks everywhere, this pencil between their teeth.’
