Declan had a contact – a woman on the Merchant Villas planning committee, a civil servant who owed a favour to the Hook and paid her debts in information. She had told Declan, in a phone call that lasted less than two minutes, that Mackie’s representative had attended the last three planning committee sessions.
Not Mackie himself. A lawyer. A commercial property specialist from an Edinburgh firm that handled large-scale urban development. The lawyer had presented each of the three planning applications in person, with supporting documentation, community impact assessments, and a letter of support from the chamber of commerce.
The planning committee had approved all three applications provisionally.
“He’s not just buying buildings,” I said. “He’s buying the process.”
“The committee’s next full session is in two weeks,” Declan said. “If the provisional approvals go through, the construction starts in spring. Once construction starts, the routes are disrupted. Deliveries, foot traffic, vehicle access – all of it changes.”
I looked at the map. The three red dots formed a triangle. Inside the triangle: the Rusty Hook, the dock road, and the approach to Crag Manor.
He had drawn a line around everything that mattered.
I went to the dock road at dusk.
This was not wise. I knew it was not wise as I locked the Hook’s back door and walked along the waterfront with my jacket collar turned up and the cold coming off the Clyde in flat grey sheets. But the map was in my head and the three red dots were in my head and I needed to see the warehouses with my own eyes because I did not trust information I had not verified with my body. This was the way I worked. This was the way I had always worked. Al Rae’s intelligence method: go and stand where the problem is and let the building tell you what the paper cannot.
The dock road warehouses were three hundred yards past the container yard. Two corrugated steel buildings, recently re-roofed – I could see the new sheeting from the road, the metal bright against the rusted walls. The third warehouse was older, stone-built, set back from the road behind a chain-link fence that was new. Everything new was Mackie’s. The newness was the signature.
I stayed on the harbour side. I walked slowly. I watched.
The stone warehouse had a loading bay. The loading bay had a camera – small, dome-shaped, mounted on the lintel. The camera was pointed at the approach road. I noted this. I moved along the harbour wall, keeping to the shadow of the container stacks, and I got close enough to see the warehouse’s side entrance. A steel door. A keypad. A second camera.
I got too close.
The security guard came around the corner of the container stack at a pace that said he had been watching me for longer than I had been watching the warehouse. He was large – not my size, but close – and he was wearing the dark jacket and earpiece of a man who was professionally employed to be in this exact place at this exact time. He did not shout. He did not speak. He walked directly at me and his hand was reaching for my arm.
I moved.
The ribs objected. The ribs objected with a white-hot line of pain that ran from my left side to my spine and I moved anyway because the alternative was standing still while a man with an earpiece put his hands on me and asked questions I could not answer. I went left – between the containers, the gap narrow enough that my shoulders brushed both sides, the corrugated steel cold against my jacket. Behind me, boots on concrete. He was following.
I ran. The running was bad. Every stride sent the pain through my side like a blade turning, and I could feel the ribs– the cracked ones, the ones the doctor had said would take six weeks and it had been four – grinding against each other with the deep agony of bone that has not finished healing being asked to do the work of bone that has. I ran along the container row, turned right at the end, and hit the sea wall.
The sea wall was four feet high. I went over it without thinking – hands on the wet stone, the vault of my body over the edge, the drop to the harbour path below. The landing sent the pain through me in a single bright wave and something tore – not the ribs, the skin. My forearm caught the wall’s edge on the way over. The stone was rough, barnacled, and it opened a gash from my elbow to my wrist that I felt as heat before I felt as pain.
I kept moving. The harbour path ran along the waterfront back to the Hook. Three hundred yards. I covered them at a pace that was not running and was not walking and was the compromised gait of a man whose body was sending him urgent messages about the inadvisability of what he was doing, and I ignored every message because the alternative was worse.
The Hook’s kitchen door. I got through it. I locked it behind me. I stood in the dark kitchen with my hand on the counter and my ribs shrieking and blood running down my right forearm onto the floor.
I pressed a bar towel against the cut. The towel was white. It turned red.
Morven found me twenty minutes later. She came in through the front – she had a key, she had always had a key – and she found me sitting on a bar stool in the dark with the bloody towel pressed against my arm and the map still spread on the bar and my breathing doing the controlled thing it did when I would not let it do the uncontrolled thing.
She did not speak. She looked at the towel. She looked at my face. She crossed to the bar, took the first aid kit from the shelfwhere it had lived for fifteen years, and she opened it on the bar beside the map and she began to clean the wound.
Her hands were steady. Dancer’s hands. The hands of a woman who controlled every muscle in her body as a matter of professional discipline, applied now to the task of cleaning gravel out of a gash in a man’s forearm while he sat on a bar stool and breathed through his teeth.
“You need stitches,” she said.
“No hospital.”
“Al–”
“No hospital. Hospital means questions. Questions mean records. Records mean a man with an earpiece can find out that Alastair Rae was on the dock road tonight and connect that to the Syndicate’s interest in the warehouses.”
She looked at me. The looking was not agreement. It was the assessment of a woman deciding whether to override a man’s decision about his own body. She decided not to. She cleaned the wound. She closed it with butterfly strips from the kit – four of them, precise, the white adhesive bright against the blood – and she wrapped it in gauze and she taped the gauze and she did all of this without speaking because the silence was its own conversation:I am angry. I am here. I am not going to say the thing I want to say because saying it will not change what you did and will only make us both feel worse.
“How many?” she said.
