Lachlan sat across from me. He was wearing his glasses. He had a cup of espresso that he picked up, sipped once, and returned to its position on the table with the precision of a man aligning a chess piece. His face was the same face it always was – composed,attentive, revealing nothing except attentiveness. But something in the way he’d placed the paper told me this was not a House Rules amendment. This was something else.
I picked it up.
A transaction record. Bank statement format, printed, the account number partially redacted in the way that told me it had been pulled from a monitoring system rather than handed over voluntarily. £4,000. Credited three days ago. The source was listed as a company I didn’t recognise – Greenock Marine Services Ltd.
I didn’t need to recognise it. The amount and the timing were enough. My father hadn’t had £4,000 of legitimate income since before I’d left for Glasgow.
I read the document. I read it again. I put it flat on the table between us, exactly where he’d placed it.
I didn’t speak for a full minute. The kettle ticked. The steam dissipated. The morning continued its work of being morning, indifferent to what had just happened at the kitchen table.
“How long?” I said.
“At least three weeks.”
“The Brew-Fest. The man in the flat cap.”
“McInnis. Yes.”
I nodded. I folded the paper. I handed it back.
The motion was careful. It was the same motion I used to hand Al his newspaper clipping on the bench – precise, the controlled return of a document that has altered the shape of things. But the feeling underneath it was different. The clipping had devastated me. This barely registered. I had known. Not the specifics – not the £4,000, not the holding company, not the chain of shell accounts that Lachlanwould have traced with his clinical thoroughness. But I had known that Duncan was being reached. I had known the way you know the radiator in your childhood bedroom makes a noise at 3AM – through long familiarity, through the accumulation of small evidence that you process below the level of conscious thought.
My father was in contact with the Gravedigger’s network. My father was, once again, doing the thing my father always did: taking money from someone who would eventually require payment in a currency he didn’t have.
“You’re not surprised,” Lachlan said.
“No.”
“You suspected.”
“I suspected he wouldn’t be able to help himself.” I took the tea bag out of the mug. I squeezed it against the side with the spoon. I dropped it in the bin. “He never can. That’s not a weakness he can work on. It’s a missing piece. He doesn’t have the part of himself that saysthis will cost more than I can afford.”
Lachlan watched me. His glasses caught the window light. His hands were flat on the table – long fingers, spread, the posture of a man who was offering the surface of himself while keeping the depth entirely secured.
“You are not your father’s choices,” he said.
It came without inflection. Without warmth, without softness. It was not comfort. It was a diagnosis. He was telling me what he observed, the way he told me everything – as data, stripped of sentiment, offered on its own terms.
I looked at him for a long time.
“No,” I said. “But they’re the reason I’m here.”
The second conversation happened after lunch.
I was in the library – the room he’d designated as mine, with the shelves and the poetry and the empty space where the manila folder had been before I’d taken it to his desk. I was reading a Muriel Spark novel –The Driver’s Seat– and trying to concentrate on the prose instead of the steady hum of calculation running beneath it, which was my brain working through the Duncan situation with the relentless, unwelcome efficiency of a system that wouldn’t shut down.
The door opened. Lachlan.
He didn’t sit. He stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame, and I saw – for the first time – what he looked like when he was choosing his words. Not searching for them. Choosing. The difference was the difference between a man rummaging through a drawer and a man selecting from a display case.
“You’ve been using the library computer to access your personal email,” he said. “Outside the monitored device.”
I put the book down. I didn’t deny it. The email was nothing – a message to a friend in Glasgow, a former company member, a conversation about nothing that mattered. But the act of sending it outside the system he’d established was the thing he was addressing, and we both knew that.
“We discussed consequences,” he said.
I lifted my chin. “We did.”
