“And he knows you’re here.”
She looked at me. The composure held, but beneath it I could see the recalculation of a woman who had entered a game believing she knew the other players and was now learning that one of them had known her first.
The cliff path. Mid-morning.
I walked. Rona walked beside me. The wind was sharp off the Clyde and the path ran along the cliff edge above the water, narrow and unrailed, and the view was the full panorama of the Firth – grey water, distant hills, the industrial skyline of the south bank with its cranes and chimneys.
It was our first conversation outside the house. Inside, the walls listened. Inside, every room belonged to someone – the study to Lachlan, the kitchen to habit, the library now to Rona’s filing system. Outside was neutral territory.
“You want the same outcome we want,” I said. “You’re just arriving from a different direction.”
“I want exposure and prosecution,” Rona said. “You want him gone. Those aren’t identical.”
“They’re close enough for now.”
She looked at the water. The wind caught her hair and she tucked it behind her ear with one hand, the gesture automatic, not performative. Her face in profile was sharp and angular – a woman who had been beautiful once in a more conventional sense and had traded that for a harder kind of attractiveness, the attractiveness of clarity.
“The Ledger,” she said. “I need to understand it. Not to take it. To understand what it is.”
I considered this. The Ledger was the Syndicate’s spine. Its reason for existing. Its authority. Lachlan would have deflected this question. I chose not to.
“It’s a record of debts,” I said. “But not only debts. The people in it – they’re not all criminals. There’s a plumber who owes a favour from 1998 when the Syndicate paid his daughter’s hospital bill. A retired teacher who borrowed against her pension and couldn’t repay the bank and came to us. A police constable whose brother was in trouble and who needed the kind of help that doesn’t come with paperwork.”
Rona listened. Her face was doing the recalibration again – the professional assessment adjusting to accommodate information that did not fit the model.
“It’s a community register,” she said. “That’s what Mackie called it.”
“Mackie called it that?”
“In a meeting I attended. Two years ago. Before I knew what it was.” She paused. “He said it with admiration. That’s what concerns me.”
We walked in silence for a while. The cliff path curved around a headland and the view opened up – Cairndhu below us, the town spread along the waterfront, the dock cranes standing in their patient rows, and the Rusty Hook visible as a smudge of weathered timber on the harbourfront.
“The woman in red ink,” Rona said. “Before me. Who is she?”
“Someone important to one of us.”
“To which one?”
“The one you can’t read.”
She looked at me. The wind was pulling at both of us and the Clyde was grey and vast below the cliff edge and in the distance a container ship moved slowly upriver, enormous and indifferent.
“He has a sister,” Rona said. It was not a question. She had worked it out. Of course she had.
“He had a sister. She’s been gone six years.”
“And she’s in the Ledger.”
“Yes.”
Rona said nothing for a long time. We walked in silence. The wind pushed at our backs now – we had turned the headland and were walking east, towards the house, and the wind was carrying us.
“I was good at my job,” Rona said. The statement was quiet and it was not self-pity. It was a fact delivered in the register of a woman who had been stripped of her career and her accounts and her professional identity and had reconstructed herself from the rubble without once asking for sympathy. “I found discrepancies in McInnis’s accounts that would have resulted in prosecution. I built the case. I had the evidence. And he burned me before I could use it.”
“And then you built a new case.”
“I built a better one.”
