Congratulations on the new addition to your team. I hear she’s excellent.
I read the card twice. The second reading was slower than the first. The words did not change between readings, but the temperature of the room did – the study, which had been warm from the fire, was suddenly a room that contained a card from a man who knew about Rona. Who knew she was here. Who knew she was working for us.
Mackie knew. Mackie knew because Boyd had told him, or because the harbour master had told him, or because one of the dozen tendrils of his intelligence network had carried the information from Cairndhu to wherever Mackie processed his data and made his plans. The method of discovery was immaterial. The card was the message:I see inside your house. I see who you bring. I see the woman you’ve hired to find my footprints, and I am not alarmed by her, and the not being alarmed is the thing you should find alarming.
I placed the bottle on my desk. I did not open it. I placed the card beside it. The bottle sat on the oak surface – dark glass, gold label, the extravagant gift of a man who understood that generosity and threat were the same gesture performed at different volumes.
The bottle would stay on my desk. Unopened. A reminder.
CHAPTER 16
The Host
MORVEN
Boyd Sillars looks like a man who works in a casino: just well-dressed enough that you would trust him with your drink. He does not, right now, look like a man who is comfortable.
The Rusty Hook. The back room. Ten in the morning. Boyd was sitting in the chair that Fergus had sat in when he came to Al with intelligence about Mackie’s insider, and I noted this – the same chair, the same room, the same smell of old carpet and stale lager – and I noted that the room had become a place where people sat when their positions had been discovered. A confessional. An interrogation room. Both, depending on who was asking the questions.
Al stood by the door. His arms were folded. His face was the face he wore when he was managing anger – not the explosive kind, the kind that compressed itself into stillness and precision. Al angry was the quietest version of Al, and the quiet was the part that made the room smaller.
Lachlan sat across from Boyd at the table. His posture was formal, his hands flat on the wood, his expression the controlled blankness that meant every word in the next conversation would be recorded and assessed and filed.
Rona and I were at the bar, six feet away. Observing. Rona had her notebook open. I had nothing in my hands. I did not need anything in my hands. My job was to watch.
Boyd told the truth immediately. This was not what any of us expected.
“I owe him money,” Boyd said. His voice was steady but his hands were not – they were clasped on the table, the knuckles white, the fingers interlocking and releasing in a pattern that was not quite a tremor. “Personal gambling debt. Not Syndicate-related. A card game in Edinburgh eighteen months ago. Private table. I lost more than I had.”
“How much?” Lachlan said.
“Twelve thousand.”
“And Mackie acquired the debt.”
“The host of the private game sold it to him. I didn’t know – I was making payments to the host, and then one month the payments were redirected to an Ardmore account, and then Mackie’s man came to see me.” Boyd swallowed. “He said the debt could be restructured. He said all he needed was information. Small things. Who came to the casino on Friday nights. How the VIP section was managed. The timing of the cash counts.”
“You provided this.”
“Yes.”
“For eighteen months.”
“Yes.” Boyd looked at his hands. His face did the thing that a face does when shame arrives after the fact – the tightening around the eyes, the downward pull of the mouth, a man who had made a series of small compromises and was now looking atthe sum total of them and finding it larger than he had permitted himself to believe.
“I didn’t know what he was doing with it,” Boyd said. “I didn’t know it would – I thought it was market research. Corporate intelligence. I thought he was mapping the business for a competitor analysis.”
“He was mapping the business,” Lachlan said. “The business you work for. The business that has employed you for eight years and paid you fairly and trusted you with access to our operational floor.”
Boyd’s hands tightened. The knuckles went white again. He was not a stupid man – I could see this. He was a man who had made a stupid decision under financial pressure and had continued making it because the continuation was easier than the confession. The momentum of dishonesty. Once you start, the energy required to stop is greater than the energy required to continue.
The room was quiet for a long time.
Al moved.
He uncrossed his arms. He walked from the door to the table – four steps, each one measured, each one carrying sixteen stone of a man who had stopped being disappointed and had arrived at something else. He put both hands flat on the table. He leaned over Boyd. The leaning was the threat – his shoulders above Boyd’s head, his arms on either side of Boyd’s clasped hands, the geometry of a man who understood exactly how much space to remove before the removal became a sentence.
“The cash count,” Al said. His voice had dropped. Not louder – quieter. A register I had never heard from him. The quiet of a man who had decided that volume was unnecessary because proximity would do the work. “You gave him the cash count timing.”
