I looked at the section. Rona had cross-referenced the board minutes against the planning application timeline and the correlation was clean. Every session where a Mackie application was reviewed had been chaired by the same board member, and that board member’s meeting schedule had been set by the secretary, and the secretary was Mackie’s.
“She’s brilliant,” I said. I did not specify who. I did not need to.
“Annoyingly, yes.”
We read in silence for a while. Ewan turned to a new section – the one on Mackie’s charitable donations, which Rona had cross-referenced against the timing of his planning applications. The pattern was clean. Each donation preceded an application by approximately six weeks. The donations were to local causes – youth football, a food bank, the Cairndhu Heritage Trust. The amounts were large enough to be noticed and small enough tobe believed. The applications that followed were approved with minimal opposition.
“He’s buying goodwill,” Ewan said. “A football strip here, a heritage grant there. And then the planning committee looks at his application and thinks:This is the man who funded the under-twelves.”
“Rona calls it reputation laundering.”
“It’s smart. It’s also transparent if you know where to look.” He tapped the page. “But the committee doesn’t know where to look. They see a businessman who gives to charity. They don’t see the property acquisition timeline underneath.”
Ewan’s hand was on my ankle. His thumb moved in small, absent circles against the bone – the kind of touch that was about presence, the physical confirmation that someone was in the room with you and the room was safe.
“What do you want from this?” Ewan said.
He had put the file down. His feet were still on the coffee table. His face was turned towards me and the firelight was on the left side of it and in the firelight the Fixer’s mask was almost entirely absent. What remained was the face beneath – sharper, less handsome in the conventional sense, more real. The face of a man who had been performing charm for so long that showing the thing underneath it was its own kind of bravery.
“From what?” I said. “The Mackie situation?”
“From everything.” He gestured. A small movement – his hand indicating the room, the house, the file, the fire, us. “All of this. What do you want?”
“I want to stay,” I said. “I said that. I meant it.”
“And us? What are we?”
I looked at him. The question was simple and the answer was not and we both knew this – it was what we had been circling for months, the conversation we had been having in gestures and touches and late-night silences instead of words, because words required a precision that the reality did not yet have.
“I don’t know the word for what you are,” I said. “I don’t think it exists yet.”
His mouth moved. A smile that was not the Fixer’s smile – smaller, less controlled, the kind that escaped rather than was deployed.
“We could make one up,” he said.
“What would it be?”
He thought about this. The fire cracked. The coal shifted in the grate and a small shower of sparks went up the chimney and the room brightened for a moment.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it would have to be a word that means ‘the person who reads Mackie files with you at midnight and doesn’t get bored.’”
“That’s a sentence, not a word.”
“I’ll work on it.”
He produced the handcuffs from his jacket pocket.
He did it without drama. He reached into the inside pocket of the jacket he had been wearing all evening – the one thrown over the arm of the sofa – and brought out a pair of handcuffs and placed them on the coffee table between us. On top of the Mackie file. Chrome against paper.
I looked at them.
“When did you start carrying these?” I said.
“About three weeks ago.”
“And you waited until now?”
“I wanted to be asked.”
