In the corridor, on my way back to the gym floor, I passed her.
Morven was coming from somewhere inside the manor – she must have walked the cliff path across, or taken the car with Ewan. She had Duncan’s coat over her arm, carrying it the way you carry something that weighs more than it should. She didn’t see me. Or she did see me and chose not to acknowledge it, which was becoming its own kind of conversation.
She’d mentioned her father on the walk yesterday. Offhand, the way she mentioned everything that mattered – sideways, without looking at it directly. Something about the council. A grant form. Someone had come by the flat. She wasn’t sure Duncan had asked for it.
I filed this. I filed everything. I had a system for the things I noticed – a mental architecture of categories and sub-categories that sorted information by threat level, relevance, and the gut-level itch that told me when something wasn’t wrong yet but was going to be. The grant form sat in a category that didn’t have a name. It sat beside the Clyde Holdings letter and the Ace of Spades and the bruises on Duncan’s face and the £10,000debt and all the other small pieces that weren’t adding up to anything coherent because the picture was still being assembled by someone I couldn’t see.
As she walked down the corridor, I thought – just for a second – that I saw her catch herself. Not favour the leg. Not limp. Catch herself. Like a dancer correcting an impulse. A correction so small that only someone who understood bodies – who had spent fifteen years reading the physics of a body under stress – would catch it.
I didn’t act on it. I filed it. It went into a different box. One I kept locked.
Tam pulled me aside at the training yard gate.
Tam was Shadow Union – one of the old dockworkers, sixty-two. He’d loaded shipyard steel for thirty years and wore the evidence of it in his back and his knuckles and the way he stood with his weight always slightly forward, ready for something heavy. He was reliable. He didn’t waste breath.
“Crate in the lower dock. Bay fourteen. The Grave-Watcher mark.”
I didn’t react. My face gave nothing. This was not practised – it was structural, the same way my bones were structural. My stillness was not the absence of response but the containment of it.
“Fresh?”
“Forty-eight hours, maybe less. The spray paint was still tacky when Dougal found it.”
“Which crate?”
Tam told me the registration. I recognised the nameon the manifest immediately. It belonged to a man in the Shadow Union’s inner circle – a dock foreman named Hendry who had been reliably on the Syndicate’s side for six years. Either Hendry had turned, or someone wanted it to look like he had.
“Right.”
One word. Tam nodded and left. He knew whatrightmeant when I said it. It meant: I have it, don’t touch it, don’t tell anyone else.
I walked to the lower docks alone. The mist had thickened – the mid-morning fog that rolled in off the Clyde and sat on the water like a held breath. The cranes stood motionless against it, and the gulls wheeled overhead with their usual predatory shrieking, and the dock road was empty and slick with salt water and the perpetual smell of iron and diesel.
I found bay fourteen. I found the crate. The Grave-Watcher mark was sprayed on the side panel in flat black – a stylised shovel crossed with a thistle, crude but deliberate. The paint was fresh enough that the edges hadn’t bled into the rust. I stood and looked at it for ninety seconds, counting in my head – not for any practical reason, but because counting was how I kept the rest of my mind quiet while the important part worked.
I took the photograph. One shot. Clean, well-lit despite the fog. I looked at it on my phone screen and thought about Lachlan.
Lachlan would turn this into a plan. Lachlan turned everything into a plan – that was his function, his genius, his disease. He would build a threat model and a timeline and a response framework and it would be precise and correct and it would miss the one thing that my gut was already telling me: that this mark wasnot about Hendry, and it was not about the crate, and it was not about the docks.
It was about timing. Someone wanted the Syndicate to find this. Someone wanted them looking at the docks while the real move happened somewhere else.
I sent the photograph. Not to Lachlan. Not yet. To a number I kept in my phone under a name that wasn’t a name, because I needed to know what the plan already was before Lachlan built a new one on top of it.
I slipped the phone into my pocket. I stood in the fog and the iron-scented rain and I breathed, and I thought about the woman in the corridor carrying her father’s coat like it weighed more than the world.
The feeling was old. Much older than the Ledger, older than the debt, older than the night in the basement when she’d walked in and my whole system had rearranged itself around the fact of her. I had examined it with the clinical attention I applied to everything and I knew what it wasn’t: possessiveness. I didn’t want to own her. I didn’t want to keep her. I wanted her to be untouchable. I wanted the world to understand that this woman was not available for damage, and I wanted this with a certainty so deep and so old that it felt less like desire and more like architecture – something my bones had been built around before I’d given it a name.
The box in my head where I kept her got a little harder to keep closed.
The gulls screamed. The mist pressed in.
I went back to the gym.
CHAPTER 7
The Fixer
EWAN
