I stood on the dock road with my phone in my hand and the Clyde behind me and the cranes standing in the fog like the skeletons of creatures that had died standing up. I typed five words:
Hook. Eight o’clock. Bring nothing you wouldn’t want me to see.
I sent it. I pocketed the phone. I looked at the Firth. The tide was going out – the water pulling back from the rock wall with the slow, inevitable patience of a system that operated on rhythms older than anything human and would continue operating on those rhythms long after every Syndicate and Gravedigger and dock foreman and man standing on a cliff path watching a woman walk away had ceased to exist.
I breathed. The cold air filled my lungs. I thought about Morven’s face when she’d saidsomething’s wrong, the directness of it, the trust implicit in the question – the trust that I would tell her the truth or a useful version of it. I thought about the room in my head with the open door.
Then I went to work.
CHAPTER 19
The Munchie Box
MORVEN
The penthouse was stunning – all industrial glazing and poured concrete and dockyard light. Ewan pulled a beanbag from a cupboard and threw it in the middle of the floor. “Right. We’re all of us sitting on this.”
Thirty minutes ago I’d been standing in my room at Crag Manor watching the tail lights of an unfamiliar car creep along the cliff road below my window. Twelve minutes ago Al had appeared in the kitchen doorway and said one word –Go– and the house had moved with the rapid, coordinated efficiency of an organism that had rehearsed this, a system responding to a threat it had planned for, and we’d driven through two miles of fog in Ewan’s Audi without headlights and nobody had spoken and I’d sat in the back seat with my bag on my knees and Al beside me and the warmth of him the only thing I was sure of.
Ewan’s Dockyard Lofts penthouse occupied the topfloor of a converted warehouse on the east side of the harbour. The lift was industrial – a cage, effectively, with a folding metal gate – and it opened directly into a space that was everything Crag Manor was not. Open plan, vast, the ceilings twelve feet high with exposed steel beams and galvanised ductwork. The far wall was all glass – warehouse glazing divided into panes by steel mullions, and through it the city spread out in a carpet of amber and white lights with the Clyde curving through the middle like a dark vein.
The furniture was minimal and expensive. A low grey sofa the length of a car. A kitchenette with a concrete counter. A record player on a shelf. And the beanbag – oversized, leather, the kind that cost seven hundred pounds and looked like a deflated cow, which was now sitting in the middle of the floor like a challenge to everyone’s dignity.
“That’s one beanbag,” Lachlan said.
“That’s one beanbag,” Ewan confirmed.
“For four people.”
“I’m a problem-solver, Lachlan. Not a furniture showroom.”
Al looked at the beanbag. The beanbag was, from his perspective, roughly the size of a dinner plate. He chose instead to sit on the floor, his back against the concrete counter, his legs stretched out in front of him, looking – somehow – more at ease on a poured-concrete floor than most men looked in armchairs.
The door buzzer went eighteen minutes later. Ewan took the stairs down and came back carrying a pizza box that contained no pizza. A munchie box. From the same chain that operated on Dock Road, ordered through a driver who Ewan clearly knew byname and had tipped generously, automatically, as though money were a thing that happened to get into his wallet and needed to be redistributed.
He placed it on the floor in the centre of the room, between the beanbag and the window. He opened the lid.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. And he meant it.
The box contained the same chaos as the Brew-Fest version – chips, donner meat, pakora, sauce tubs, the mysterious deep-fried object that might have been a spring roll in a previous life. Ewan sat on the beanbag. I sat on the opposite side of the box, on the floor, which put my shoulder approximately three inches from Lachlan’s arm, because Lachlan had chosen to sit on the floor beside the counter, and the floor was only so wide, and the munchie box was only so large, and the geography of four people eating from a single pizza box imposed a proximity that none of us had negotiated and all of us were aware of.
Lachlan picked up a chip. He looked at it with the expression of a man evaluating a piece of evidence. He dipped it in the curry sauce. He ate it.
His face was a study. The chip was – by any refined metric – a crime against nutrition. It was soggy, oversalted, and swimming in a curry sauce that had the approximate consistency and colour of traffic paint. Lachlan chewed. He swallowed. His expression compressed into something between professional distaste and the reluctant admission that the thing he’d eaten, despite everything, was not bad.
He ate another one.
I laughed.
Not the surprised laugh I’d produced at the Brew-Fest, not the controlled, rationed thing I doled out incareful portions when Ewan said something funny. This was a real, full, ungoverned laugh – the kind that comes from somewhere below the conscious mind and arrives without permission and sits in the room like a living thing. I laughed at Lachlan Drummond eating curry sauce chips on the floor of a converted warehouse with his sleeves rolled up and his glasses on and his face doing the thing where he was simultaneously disgusted and invested and couldn’t decide which to commit to.
He looked at me. The corner of his mouth moved. Not the guarded thing his mouth usually did – the full version, the one I’d never seen, the one that was an actual smile, or the beginning of one, or the ghost of the beginning of one, which for Lachlan was the equivalent of another man bursting into song. He looked at me and his mouth moved and something in his face opened, briefly, and the opening was worse than that guarded thing because it was real and it was warm and it was directed at me and my shoulder was touching his arm and I didn’t move away and he didn’t move away and Al was watching this from the opposite wall – absolutely still, absolutely patient, like he’d been waiting for it.
Ewan was oblivious. Or he wasn’t oblivious – Ewan was never oblivious – but he chose not to notice, which was its own form of generosity. He ate his donner meat with his fingers and produced a running commentary on the relative merits of Cairndhu’s three munchie box vendors and the time he’d nearly started a fistfight defending Mick’s honour at the Brew-Fest, and the commentary was warm and ridiculous and necessary, because it gave the rest of us permission to be in the room without addressing the fact that the room had changed.
Ewan’s phone buzzed. He wiped curry sauce off his fingers with a napkin and read:
“Niamh. She’s fine. Casino’s locked down. Declan’s on-site.” He put the phone face-down on the floor. “The scout didn’t get past the parking row. She’s efficient, that woman.”
