“He sent a man to Duncan’s door. With a message for me.”
“Yes.”
The study was cold. The fire was low. The Clyde moved below the window and the afternoon light was failing and the card sat on the desk between us – cream-coloured, heavy stock, a handwritten note from a man who was drawing lines around everything I loved.
“He wants me to know he can reach Duncan,” I said.
“He wants you to be afraid.”
I looked at the card. I looked at Lachlan.
“I’m not afraid,” I said. “I’m angry.”
Lachlan looked at me. The lamplight was warm on his face and the fraction was gone and what replaced it was the expression I had learned to read in the months since the Wager – the expression that said he was assessing me, not as a partner or a lover or a Queen, but as an operational asset. And the assessment was favourable.
“Good,” he said. “Anger is useful. Fear is not.”
CHAPTER 15
The Gilded Table in Daylight
LACHLAN
She requests a whiteboard. They bring her a whiteboard. She is pleased with this.
The casino in daylight is a different building. The chandelier is off. The bar lights are off. The gaming floor is empty – tables covered, chairs stacked, the felt surfaces dusted and brushed. The windows are uncovered, which they never are at night, and the daylight that comes through them is harsh and grey and shows every mark on the walls, every scuff on the floor, every place where the building’s age contradicts its evening performance.
The office level is above the gaming floor. Three rooms: my office, the accounts room, and what Niamh calls the war room – a conference space with a long table and a projector and, as of this morning, a whiteboard that Rona had requested at seven AM and received by eight because Cillian had one in storage and Cillian, when given a task with operational logic, completed it without discussion.
Rona stood before the whiteboard with a marker in her hand and five years of financial records stacked on the table behind her and the look of a woman who had been waiting for this moment since she arrived.
I had given her the access that morning. The casino’s legitimate financial records – five years, audited, filed with HMRC, clean in every respect that a cursory review would reveal. I gave them to her because she had earned the access and because the leak was in the money trail and Rona was the best person I had ever met at reading money trails.
“The leak will be in the details,” she said. “Payroll anomalies. Maintenance expenditure that doesn’t match actual work performed. Revenue discrepancies between the gaming floor count and the deposited total.”
“How long?”
She looked at the stack of records. She looked at the whiteboard. She looked at Cillian, who was standing at the far end of the table with his own set of files and the quiet, attentive posture of a man who recognised a peer.
“Three days,” she said.
It took her seven hours.
I mention this because the timeframe was itself a piece of information. Rona had overestimated because she had not yet understood the quality of the data. The casino’s records were clean – I had made certain of that. HMRC-compliant, professionally audited, filed correctly. The cleanliness was the point. If your legitimate records are immaculate, the illegitimate elements stand out like a bloodstain on white linen. Rona discovered this at the two-hour mark, when she stopped estimating and started finding.
Cillian assisted. They worked for seven hours. I watched them from my office – the door open, the war room visible from my desk – and what I observed was two people who had never worked together falling into a rhythm so efficient it looked rehearsed. They did not discuss their methods. They did not need to. By the third hour they were passing documents in silence, and the silence was the sound of two people who trusted each other’s accuracy completely.
“Here,” Rona said. Her marker stopped. She circled a number on the whiteboard – a figure in the casino’s maintenance budget, quarterly, recurring. “This expenditure has appeared in every Q3 filing for the last four years. Fifteen hundred pounds. Coded to ‘premises maintenance, electrical.’ There is no corresponding contractor invoice in any of the four years.”
Cillian was already pulling the contractor files.
“The casino uses three licensed electricians,” he said. “Bennett’s, Clyde Valley Electrical, and MacGregor & Sons. None of them have invoiced for a Q3 job in the last four years.”
“The expenditure is real – it’s been processed through the bank. The payments went somewhere. They just didn’t go to an electrician.” Rona wrote on the whiteboard:Ghost expenditure. Recipient unknown. Four years. £6,000 total.
She stepped back. She looked at it.
“Not enough to trigger an audit flag,” she said. “Small. Consistent. Hidden in a legitimate category. This is not a leak. This is a drip.”
