She did not phrase it as a question.
Niamh’s face changed. The change was small and it was fast and if I had not been standing four feet away I would have missed it entirely. The undecorated honesty flickered. Beneath it, for one second, was a woman who had been carrying a piece of knowledge that she had not shared, and the weight of it was visible in the way her jaw moved – a micro-tightening, a held breath.
“Where did you hear that name?” Niamh said. Her voice was level. Her eyes were not.
Rona did not answer. She held the silence. The service corridor was narrow and cold and smelled of cleaning products and the faint grease of the kitchen ventilation, and in the corridor two women stood with a name between them that was not supposed to be spoken here.
I stayed where I was. I did not intervene. The Fixer’s instinct was to manage, to smooth, to redirect – but this was not a Fixer moment. This was a moment between two women who had information the other needed, and the exchange was going to happen whether I managed it or not.
Niamh looked at Rona. Rona looked at Niamh. Neither of them spoke.
“Not here,” Niamh said. “Come with me.”
She turned and walked towards the service exit. Rona followed. The door closed behind them and the corridor was empty and the casino hummed its late-night hum – the sound ofa machine winding down, the bar lights dimming, the chandelier crystals settling.
I stood in the corridor alone. I knew what name had just been spoken. I knew what it meant. And I stood in the cold service hallway of the Gilded Table and I held the name in my chest like a stone I had been carrying for six years and I let the weight of it press against the inside of my ribs.
Cat.
The corridor was cold. The casino was closing. And my sister’s name was being carried out the back door by two women who were about to have a conversation I was not invited to.
I stayed. I let them go. I stood in the corridor and I breathed and I thought about a postcard in my desk drawer with a Glasgow postmark and five words and a photograph of a harbour I had grown up beside.
They’re watching me. Don’t look.
I had not looked. For two years, I had honoured that instruction. I had not searched. I had not contacted the Glasgow network. I had not asked Lachlan to deploy the Syndicate’s intelligence resources to find a woman who did not want to be found. I had obeyed the five words on the postcard because Cat had asked me to, and because the request of a sister carried more weight than the operational instincts of a Fixer, and because sometimes love was not rescue. Sometimes love was the discipline of staying still.
But Rona had spoken her name. And Niamh’s face had changed. And two women were walking into the Cairndhu night with a conversation about my sister that I could not hear and could not stop and could not control.
The corridor was cold. The casino was closing.
I breathed. I stayed.
CHAPTER 12
What Niamh Knows
MORVEN
The flat above the chip shop is not what I expected.
I was not there. I learned this later, from Rona, who told it to me in the kitchen at Crag Manor the following morning while the kettle boiled and the dawn came in through the window grey and cold. She told it the way she told everything – in order, without editorialising, with the precision of a woman who believed that facts were more persuasive than feelings.
She was different that morning. I noticed it before she started speaking – a quietness in her posture, a softening of the professional rigidity that she wore like body armour. Rona had been changed by what she heard. Changed at the foundation. The forensic accountant who categorised the world into data sets and compliance frameworks had encountered a piece of human information that refused to be filed.
This is what she told me.
Niamh’s flat was immaculate. Full of books. The shelves ran floor to ceiling on two walls and the books were organised by subject rather than author – history, economics, criminal law, three shelves of Scottish literature, and one shelf of romance novels with cracked spines and the covers worn smooth. The flat smelled of coffee and someone else’s cigarette smoke drifting up through the floorboards from the chip shop below. The windows were clean. The kitchen was small and the cups hung from hooks above the sink and there were two mugs on the counter already, which meant Niamh had been expecting company.
“Sit down,” Niamh said, and took the mugs from the counter. It was not entirely a request.
Rona sat. The kitchen table was a fold-out, pressed against the wall, large enough for two people if neither of them needed elbow room. Niamh made coffee – instant, strong, no milk – and placed the mug in front of Rona and sat across from her with her own mug and the two of them looked at each other in the warm, smoke-scented quiet of a flat above a chip shop at midnight.
“Catriona Alloway,” Rona said.
“I heard you the first time.”
“Tell me what you know.”
