She told me later what she saw.
At the corner of the Merchant Villas, a car was parked outside Mackie’s offices. Dark saloon. Engine running. In the passenger seat: a woman. Dark hair. A profile that Rona recognised from Niamh’s description – the angular cheekbones, the sharpness that suggested both intelligence and endurance.
The window rolled up before Rona could see the face properly.
She stood at the corner. The car did not move. The woman did not look at her. The engine idled in the cold afternoon air and the exhaust made small white clouds against the grey sky.
Rona took out her phone. She photographed the car’s registration plate. She put the phone away. She walked home.
She did not tell anyone that night. She told me the following morning, in the kitchen, standing at the counter with her briefcase at her feet and her coat still on.
“I think I saw Catriona,” she said.
The kettle boiled. The morning came in through the window. I put my hands on the counter and I stood without moving and I thought about a woman in a car outside Mackie’s offices and what it meant that she was there.
The registration plate. Rona had photographed it. She would trace it. She would build the timeline – the car, the owner, the connection to Mackie, the connection to the woman Niamh had described eating chips in a shop on the High Street eighteen months ago. Rona would do what Rona did: she would turna sighting into data, and the data would tell a story, and the story would be one that changed everything we thought we understood about Catriona Alloway’s disappearance.
Because what it meant was clear. Catriona was not hiding from Mackie.
She was meeting with him.
I stood at the counter. The kitchen was cold. The morning was grey. And the woman who had askedIs he happy?about her brother was sitting in a car outside the offices of the man who was trying to destroy her brother’s world.
I would have to tell Ewan. And when I told him, his face would do the thing that Ewan’s face did when the charm was stripped away and the man beneath it was visible – a brother who had spent six years loving a sister he could not find, and who was about to learn that the sister had been findable all along, and that the finding would be worse than the searching.
CHAPTER 17
The Ghost in the City
EWAN
He has been fixing things for other people for long enough to know what his own avoidance looks like. It looks like charm. It looks like wit. It looks, right now, like a man in an empty flat with a corkboard and a cold coffee and no excuse for either.
The Dockyard Lofts. My flat. The one I keep for nights when the manor is too crowded with people who need me to be fine. I haven’t slept here in weeks. The air’s stale. The heating’s off. The mug on the table has a skin on it. I can’t remember when I stopped noticing. That’s the part. That’s the bit I should probably pay attention to – the not-noticing. Because I notice everything. That’s the job. That’s the whole point of being Ewan Alloway: you notice the room, you read the room, you fix the room. And here I am, failing to notice a cold cup of coffee in my own flat, which suggests I’ve been too busy performing functional to actually be it.
Right. The board.
Corkboard. Twelve quid from the High Street. I hung it three days ago and I’ve been pinning things to it at two, three in the morning – the hours that belong to Ewan and not to the Fixer, if there’s still a difference, which some nights I doubt.
Three data points. Three breadcrumbs left by a woman who changed her name but couldn’t quite change it enough.
GP registration. Catherine Holloway. Not Catriona Alloway. Close enough to be lazy. Close enough to be – what? Deliberate? A woman who wants to be found but only by someone paying attention? (The arrogance of that. The arrogance of assuming I would look. She was right. I never stopped looking.)
Credit application, denied. C. Halloway – one letter different. Glasgow address. Six months old. Small personal loan, denied for insufficient credit history. You don’t have credit history when you don’t exist. You don’t have credit history when you’ve spent six years being a different person every few months and each person dies before the bills arrive.
Dance programme. Two years old. C. Hallow. Contemporary ballet. Three nights in a community arts venue in Glasgow. Audience of forty. I found the listing in an online archive. The venue’s website is gone. The programme remains. The programme is the thing, because Cat could change her name and her address and her phone and her hair, but she could not – would not – stop choreographing. You can disappear from a family. You can’t disappear from the thing your body does when nobody is watching.
Three names. Three addresses. Three moments where my sister touched the system because she could not disappear entirely and the inability was either a weakness or a gift she left for me, and at two in the morning in a cold flat the distinction doesn’t matter. What matters: she’s alive. She was in Cairndhu. Fourteen months ago. Three streets from Al’s bar.
She chose not to find me.
I drank the cold coffee. It tasted like exactly what it was.
The hospice. Tuesday morning.
St.Jude’s was closed. Had been closed since Isobel’s diagnosis – the ballet studio dark, the door locked, a notice in the window that said CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE in handwritten capitals that were starting to yellow from the sun. Nobody had taken the notice down. The building had the heavy stillness of a place that was waiting for someone to come back, and the waiting had gone on long enough that the building had started to accept it might be permanent.
I did not go to St.Jude’s. I went to the hospice.
