I looked at Fergus and he looked at me and we sat with the weight of what he had just said.
Someone inside. Someone who knew the vault. Someone who had been recruited by a man whose strategy was to make the Ledger worthless and then acquire it.
I put my coffee down. The mug made a small sound against the wooden table.
“Does Lachlan know?”
“You’re the first person I’ve told.”
I would tell Lachlan in the morning. Tonight I would sit in the Hook and think. The Hook smelled of old wood and cold beer and the salt air that came through the gaps in the window frames, and it was the closest thing to a home I had outside of Crag Manor, and now a man I had never met was drawing a line around it on a planning map.
My ribs ached. The bone, remembering.
CHAPTER 8
The Forensic Ally
MORVEN
Iwent to the library looking for a book on Scottish commercial law – Lachlan had suggested it, which meant it was not a suggestion – and found that Rona had reorganised the entire shelf again. This time by regulatory body rather than company structure. Small colour-coded tabs. Cross-references written in her tiny, dense handwriting on adhesive labels she must have brought in her briefcase because Crag Manor did not stock adhesive labels.
I stared at the shelf for a moment.
“You’ve done it again,” I said.
“The previous system was alphabetical by regulator,” Rona said, from the armchair behind me. She was sitting with her legs crossed, the blue notebook open on her knee, a pen in her hand and a cup of cold coffee on the side table. “It needed to be chronological within each regulatory category. Your Syndicate’s exposure changed significantly in 2019 when the financial conduct rules were updated.”
I turned to look at her. She was wearing a dark jumper and trousers and her hair was pinned back and she looked like a woman who had been working since five in the morning, which she had. I had heard her moving around the library at dawn, the quiet efficient footsteps of a person who did not waste motion.
“I need to show you my Mackie file,” she said.
This was not what I had expected her to say. I had expected another round of the debt argument, another set of legal precedents neatly tabbed in a folder. Instead she stood up, walked to the reading table, and opened a file that was not the briefcase file. This was new work. Work she had done here, in this house, in the six days since she arrived.
The Mackie file was terrifying.
She had built it in six days. Without asking anyone in this house a single question about the Syndicate’s operations. Using nothing but public records – company filings, council minutes, land registry data, the Cairndhu Gazette. And from those ordinary, available sources she had constructed a complete map of Struan Mackie’s commercial network that was more detailed than anything Al or Lachlan or I had assembled in months.
“He’s building a perimeter,” she said. She pointed to a diagram – neat boxes, clean lines. “If these three developments proceed, the Syndicate’s logistics routes are compromised within six months.”
I looked at the diagram. I looked at her.
“Al reached the same conclusion yesterday,” I said.
Her face did a small recalculation. “Your man arrived at this independently?”
“Al sees patterns. It’s what he does.”
She sat with this. I could see her filing it – the recalibration of a model that had underestimated someone. She had not expected the large, quiet man she could not read to be running the same analysis she was, from a different data set, arriving at the same answer.
“Then we’re aligned,” she said. “His operational intelligence and my financial forensics are pointing at the same structure. That’s not coincidence. That’s convergent evidence.”
“It’s also dangerous,” I said. “You’re inside a house that’s being surrounded by a man who used to hire you.”
Her face went rigid. “He didn’t hire me. McInnis hired me. Mackie was McInnis’s associate. He was in the room when the shell companies were discussed. He saw my file before McInnis buried it.”
“Which means he knows what you can do.”
“Yes.”
