“So is half of international banking. The difference is we live in the community we serve. If a fisherman defaults, I see his wife at the shops. The bank doesn’t.”
“That doesn’t make it legal.”
“No.It makes it functional. Legal and functional are not the same thing.”
Rona looked at her. Niamh looked at Rona. I had seen Niamh deploy this version of herself – the stripped-down, undecorated honesty that was more effective than any argument because it came from a woman who had no interest in convincing you and would be entirely fine if you disagreed.
Rona did not agree. I could see the disagreement in her posture – the professional rigidity of a forensic accountant whose entire career was built on the premise that rules existedfor reasons and breaking them was wrong. But she was listening. She was filing. She was doing what Rona did, which was absorb information before she evaluated it.
“The whisky model,” Niamh said. “Ask Ewan about it. The Syndicate’s whisky import operation runs at a loss. Deliberately. It subsidises three local businesses that would have closed during COVID. The Gilded Table’s house income covers the deficit. The casino profits fund a community welfare operation that outperforms the council’s by a factor of four.”
“And the debt collection?”
“Works on a system of voluntary compliance. Nobody has been threatened for non-payment in eight years. The last person who was – McInnis handled that, not us – was the reason Lachlan restructured the entire enforcement protocol.”
“So the Syndicate is a charity,” Rona said. Her voice was dry.
“The Syndicate is a structure,” Niamh said. “Structures can be used well or badly. The previous generation used it badly. We don’t. That’s not charity. That’s improvement.”
Rona absorbed this. I could see the forensic mind working behind her expression – the accountant’s instinct to categorise, to label, to place the information into a framework that her training had built. The framework said: criminal enterprise. The evidence said: functional community institution. The gap between the two was the space Rona was going to have to live in if she stayed.
At the main table, Morven won a fifth hand.
Forty minutes.
A man I did not recognise had been watching Morven from across the room for forty minutes. I had clocked him at the twelve-minute mark – a middle-aged man in a good suit, grey at the temples, standing near the far wall with a glass of sparkling water and the stillness of a person who was not here to play or drink or socialise. He was here to observe.
I knew the type. I had been the type. In my early years as Fixer, before the charm became the default setting, I had spent hundreds of hours in rooms like this, watching, cataloguing, building the mental maps that made my operational work possible. This man was doing the same work. His suit was Edinburgh-cut. His shoes were polished. His watch was the kind that cost four thousand pounds and looked like it cost four hundred – the calculation of a man who understood that understatement was its own form of statement.
I moved through the room. I positioned myself between the man’s sightline and the main table. He glanced at me. I glanced at him. Two men who understood that eye contact in a casino was a form of communication.
He did not flinch. He did not look away. He held the glance for three seconds, then looked back at Morven. He was not afraid of me. He was not surprised by my presence. He had already catalogued me, the way I had already catalogued him, and the mutual cataloguing was itself a kind of conversation:I see you. You see me. We both understand what is happening here.
At the forty-minute mark, Morven noticed him. Her eyes moved from the table to the far wall and she found him with the precision of a woman who had learned, in the months since the Wager, to track every gaze in a room. Their eyes met. He nodded once – a slow, deliberate nod, the kind that communicated acknowledgement. He was not threatening her. He was confirming her. Confirming what she was. The nod of aman who had been sent to verify a piece of intelligence and had verified it.
He left through the back exit. Efficiently. Without a word to anyone.
Morven looked at Lachlan. “Who was that?”
“Mackie’s representative,” Lachlan said. His voice was low. “He came to confirm what Mackie was told.”
Morven looked at the back exit. The door had already closed. She sat with the knowledge for a moment – the knowledge that Mackie’s reach extended into this room, into the Gilded Table itself, into the space where the Syndicate’s power was most visible.
“He stood in this room for forty minutes and nobody stopped him,” she said.
“He was a guest. He had an invitation. He came, he observed, he left. Everything legitimate. Everything polished.” Lachlan paused. “That is what makes Mackie dangerous. He does not break rules. He uses them.”
“How many more will there be?”
“As many as it takes for Mackie to feel he has a complete picture.”
She turned back to the table. She picked up her cards. She played the next hand with the same composure she had brought to the first five, and she won that one too.
The end of the evening. The casino emptying. The late crowd drifting towards the exits and the night air and the taxis waiting on the High Street. The chandelier dimming. The gaming floor staff clearing the tables.
I found Niamh in the back corridor. Or rather, I found Rona finding Niamh in the back corridor – I was coming from the floor manager’s office and they were standing at the junction of the service hallway, and Rona’s face had the expression it wore when she had assembled a piece of information and was about to use it.
“You knew a woman called Catriona Alloway,” Rona said.
