Niamh drank her coffee. She held the mug in both hands and her face was doing the thing Rona had already learned to recognise – the undecorated honesty recalibrating, deciding how much to give. Niamh was not a person who withheld information out of strategy. She withheld it because she understood that certain truths were heavy and she had beencarrying this one alone for eighteen months and the carrying had worn a groove in her.
“Eighteen months ago,” Niamh said. “October. A Tuesday. She came into the chip shop downstairs. I was eating chips at the counter. She sat beside me.”
“You recognised her?”
“Not immediately. She was thinner. Her hair was different – shorter, darker. She was wearing clothes that cost money. Good coat, good shoes, the kind of watch a woman buys herself when she has access to funds. She looked like a professional. She did not look like the girl I knew from St.Jude’s.”
“When did you recognise her?”
“She said my name. My actual name – the one I used at St.Jude’s, before. Nobody else in Cairndhu knows that name.” Niamh paused. “She ordered chips and sat beside me and said my name and I looked at her and I saw Cat.”
Rona was building the timeline. Rona was always building the timeline. She had produced a small notebook from her coat pocket – not the blue one, a different one, older, with a worn cover – and she was writing in the dense, tiny script that was her version of thinking.
“She was alone?”
“Alone. No car – she came on foot. She was staying at the bed and breakfast on Marine Terrace, under a different name. She told me the name but asked me not to write it down. I didn’t.”
“How long did she stay?”
“One night. She left the next morning. She took the early bus to Glasgow.”
“Did she contact Ewan?”
Niamh looked at her coffee. “No.”
“Did she explain why not?”
“She said it wasn’t safe. She said the people watching her would follow any contact she made with family. She said stayingaway was the only way to keep him out of it.” Niamh’s voice was steady, but the steadiness was effortful – the composure of a woman who had rehearsed these facts in her own head for eighteen months and was now hearing them aloud for the first time and finding that the hearing was harder than the knowing. “She said she had been moving for four years. Different cities. Different names. She said she had money – she didn’t say where from. She said she was doing work that mattered and that the work was dangerous and that the danger was the reason she couldn’t come home.”
“What kind of work?”
“She didn’t say. I didn’t push. You learn, in the world I come from, not to ask questions that the other person has already decided not to answer.” Niamh paused. “She sat with me for two hours. We ate chips. We drank tea. She asked about the town – who had left, who had stayed, whether the Hook was still standing, whether the dock cranes were still operational. She asked about Isobel. I told her Isobel was ill.She went very quiet.”
“Did she ask about anyone else?”
“She asked about Lachlan. Whether he was managing. I said yes. She asked about the Ledger. Whether it was secure. I said it was.” Niamh looked at Rona. “And then she asked the question.”
The flat was quiet. The chip shop below was closed and the street outside was empty and the only sound was the central heating ticking in its pipes and the distant murmur of the Clyde at the end of the High Street.
“She asked me one question,” Niamh said. “She looked at me and she said: ‘Is he happy?’”
“And you said?”
“I said: ‘He’s getting there.’”
Rona wrote this down. The pen moved in small, careful strokes and her face was doing the recalculation that Rona’s face did when she encountered information that did not fit theprofessional model – the model that said people were systems and systems could be mapped and the mapping mattered more than anything else. Catriona Alloway did not fit the model. A woman who had been gone for six years, who had returned for one night, who had not contacted her brother, who had asked a single question about his happiness and left before dawn – that woman was not a system. She was a person, and Rona’s face showed the moment when the distinction became real.
“What are you actually here for?” Niamh said. She asked it plainly, because Niamh asked everything plainly.
Rona put her pen down. “I want to destroy the network that destroyed me.”
“Using us.”
“Alongside you. If you’ll let me.”
Niamh studied her. The studying lasted perhaps ten seconds – a long time to be assessed by a woman who had spent her adult life reading people in bars and back rooms and the cold corridors of a casino. Rona did not fidget. She did not fill the silence. She sat with her pen down and her notebook open and she let Niamh look.
“You’re good at this,” Niamh said. “The patience. The questions. The way you don’t push.”
