“Back lane behind the High Street. Walking toward Harbour Street. Someone behind me.”
“How many.”
“One. On foot. He was in a car on Bridge Street.”
“Walk to the Hook. Don’t run. I’m coming out the front.”
I walked. The lane was cold and narrow and the footsteps behind me were steady and the steadiness was the worst part – not speeding up, not slowing down, just present, the sound of a man whose job was to follow and whose following was the message.We know where you walk. We know your routes. We know the shortcut you take behind the High Street and the twenty minutes you spend buying light bulbs because three blew in the east corridor.
The lane opened onto Harbour Street. The waterfront. The Clyde – grey, flat, indifferent. The Hook was ahead, two hundred yards, the sign swinging in the wind.
Al was in the doorway.
He stood the way Al stood – filling the frame, his shoulders level with the doorposts, his hands at his sides, his face carrying the absolute stillness of a man who had assessed the situation before I reached the pavement and had already decided what would happen next. He did not move toward me. He did not need to. He stood in the doorway and he was large and he was still and the geometry of his body in the frame was its own statement:you will not pass me, and she is passing me, and the difference between those two facts is the distance between what you are and what I am.
The footsteps behind me stopped.
I did not turn around. I walked to the Hook. I walked past Al, through the doorway, into the pub. Al stayed in the doorway for another ten seconds – I counted, from inside, with my back against the bar and my heart hammering – and then he stepped inside and closed the door.
“Dark saloon,” I said. “Bridge Street. Tinted windows.”
“I know the car,” Al said. “It was on the dock road last week.”
He looked at me. I looked at him. My hands were shaking. I put them on the bar and I pressed them flat against the wood until the shaking stopped.
“This isn’t surveillance anymore,” I said.
“No,” Al said. “It’s not.”
Rona walked back to Crag Manor that night. She told me she stopped once – at the news kiosk on the corner of the High Street, the one that sold the Cairndhu Gazette and the Glasgow Herald and lottery tickets and packets of chewing gum.
In the window, pinned beside a notice for a church jumble sale and a handwritten advertisement for a dog walker, was a planning permission notice. She read it twice. The first time quickly. The second time slowly, with her phone’s torch held close to the glass.
The applicant was a company she recognised: Ardmore Property Services (Cairndhu) Ltd.The development described: demolition of existing structure and construction of mixed-use commercial premises. The site address was one she knew.
The Rusty Hook.
She took a photograph of the notice with her phone. She stood at the kiosk for a long time – she told me she stood there for three minutes, reading it again, committing the company name and the application number and the proposed demolition date to memory. The cold was coming off the Clyde and the High Street was empty and the kiosk window glowed faintly in the streetlight and Rona stood in the cold with a photograph on her phone that was going to change Al’s morning.
She put the phone in her pocket. She walked home in the dark.
CHAPTER 13
The Rusty Hook Threat
ALASTAIR
The glass was on the pavement before I reached the door.
Six in the morning. Dark. The streetlight caught the fragments – green glass, brown glass, the curved shards of pint tumblers and the flat pieces of the front window spread across the flagstones in a pattern that told me, before I reached the threshold, exactly what had happened inside. The window was gone. The frame was standing, empty, the morning air moving through it into the building like a breath into a wound.
I stepped through the door.
The bar was destroyed.
Destroyed. With method, with purpose, with the deliberate hand of someone who understood that destruction was a language and the language needed to be legible. Every stool was overturned. The bottles behind the bar had been swept from the shelves – not thrown, swept, the arm moving in a single arc that sent sixty bottles crashing to the floor in a cascade of glass and whisky and gin and the sweet reek of spilled lager from the taps,which had been opened and left running. The dartboard was ripped from the wall. The photographs – fifteen years of Hook regulars, community events, fundraisers, the Cairndhu Regatta crew, the Syndicate’s unofficial archive in frames – were on the floor, the glass broken, the faces looking up from the wreckage.
My feet crunched on glass. The sound was loud in the empty building. The cold was coming through the broken window and the bar smelled of spilled alcohol and broken wood and the older, deeper smell of the building itself – the damp stone and salt air that no amount of damage could erase because the smell was in the walls, was the walls, was a hundred and forty years of standing on the waterfront.
