“Good evening, Mackie,” I said.
“Good evening, Lachlan.”
I got in the car. The door closed. The cold settled around me. The seat was frozen. The windscreen had a fine layer of mist on the inside and I turned the heater on and sat in the car park for thirty seconds, alone, in the cold, processing.
The dinner had confirmed three things. First: Mackie’s network was deeper than Al’s surveillance had suggested. The harbour board connection, the council liaison, the police superintendent – these were not casual relationships. They were structural. Second: Mackie knew about the Ledger. He knew what it was. He knew what it did. He wanted access to it, and his method of obtaining access was not theft but integration – he intended to make himself so useful to the community structure that the Ledger would open to him voluntarily. Third: he knew about Rona. And knowledge of Rona implied knowledge of the house, which implied surveillance, which implied that Mackie’s intelligence operation was running in parallel to ours.
I started the engine. The restaurant receded in the rear-view mirror. Mackie’s figure in the doorway grew smaller and then disappeared as I turned onto the dock road.
I called Ewan from the car.
“He knows about Rona,” I said. “Which means he knew before we did.”
The line was quiet. Ewan’s breathing was audible – slow, controlled, the breathing of a man who was processing a piece of information that confirmed a fear he had been carrying quietly.
“How long before we did?” Ewan said.
“That’s the question.”
The line stayed open. Neither of us hung up. The dock road stretched ahead. The cranes stood in the dark, skeletal against the city’s light pollution. The Clyde moved below the sea wall.
“I’ll brief Morven in the morning,” I said.
“She’ll want to know about the partnership proposal.”
“She’ll want to know about the wordsupport.” I paused. “She’ll hear it the way I did.”
“Aye,” Ewan said. “She will.”
I ended the call. I drove the dock road home with the heater running and the cold retreating slowly from the car’s interior. The road was empty. The cranes stood in their rows. And in the rear-view mirror, the Merchant Villas’ lights glowed against the harbour water, warm and bright, the lights of a building where a man who was very good at winning had just demonstrated, across three courses and a glass of Speyside whisky, that he intended to win this too.
CHAPTER 10
The Handcuff Conversation
MORVEN
The file is three hundred pages. Ewan is reading it with his feet up on the coffee table, which Lachlan has objected to on at least four separate occasions. Lachlan is not here. My legs are across Ewan’s lap. I am reading a different section. This is, I think, a strange kind of domestic happiness.
The sitting room off the main corridor. Eleven at night. The fire was low in the grate and the curtains were drawn and the room smelled of coal smoke and the tea that Ewan had made half an hour ago and neither of us had finished. The file was Rona’s Mackie analysis, printed on Lachlan’s printer – the good one, the laser one – and divided into sections with the same colour-coded tabs she used for everything.
Lachlan was at the casino. The Mackie dinner had been last night and he had come home late, his face carrying the blankness it wore when he was processing a threat he found intellectually interesting and personally offensive. He had briefed us this morning – laid out Mackie’s “communityregister” reference, the partnership proposal, and the Rona revelation at the doorstep – and then he had gone to his study and closed the door, and we had not seen him until he left for the casino at nine.
The house was quiet. Al was at the Hook – he had been sleeping there more often this week, a pattern I was noticing without yet knowing how to address. Three nights this week. Three nights away from the manor, away from the house that had held its breath during his absence and exhaled when he returned, and now he was choosing distance. Not from me. From the arrangement. He had not said this yet. I could feel it in the careful way he said goodnight and the practical way he packed a bag for the Hook and the steadiness with which he kissed my forehead before leaving, every gesture carrying the weight of a man who was protecting people by removing himself from the thing that had put them at risk.
His ribs were still healing. I had seen him wince that morning reaching for a mug from the top shelf, the involuntary tightening across his left side, and he had covered it with the economy of a man who did not believe his pain was anyone else’s business. The Hook’s narrow cot was probably worse for his ribs than the bed at the manor. He was choosing discomfort over proximity, and I did not know whether that made his distance noble or infuriating.
This was the part nobody warned you about. Three men. Three sets of needs. Three versions of withdrawal that looked different and required different responses, and there were nights – this was one of them – when the logistics of loving three people felt less like a gift and more like a job I had not applied for and could not resign from. I had Ewan beside me and the warmth of him was real and good and I wanted it, and I also wanted Al’s weight on the other side of the bed and Lachlan’s hand in my hair at three in the morning, and the wanting-all-of-it was either the most honest thing about me or the most selfish, and I had not yet decided which.
Rona was in her room with the lock turned. Niamh was at the casino with Lachlan.
Just us. Ewan and me. The file and the fire and the quiet.
“Page seventy-two,” Ewan said. He was holding his section at arm’s length, the way a person does when they need reading glasses and refuse to admit it. “The harbour board connection. Mackie’s shell company has a directorship link to the board secretary. Not the harbour master – the secretary. The person who controls the meeting agendas.”
“Not the same as Al’s intel.”
“No.Al found the harbour master lunch connection. This is one step further in. Mackie isn’t just buying the harbour master’s co-operation – he’s structuring the board’s agenda to prioritise his planning applications.”
